Two Minutes on a Friday

The poppies had come out on Monday.

They came out every year in the second week of November, at Ellicott as everywhere, paper ones on pins from the Legion’s tray in the front office, a dollar or whatever you had, and by Friday morning the whole school was wearing them, on coats and on sweaters and on the straps of bags, and one boy in the seventh grade had pinned his to the front of his baseball cap and been told to take the cap off and had pinned the poppy to his hair instead. Mr Abernathy wore his on the lapel of the brown jacket, in the same place, Theo said, as in the photograph from 1998.

“He’s worn the same poppy since 1998,” said Theo, in homeroom, under his breath.

“He can’t have.”

“It’s the same pin. Look at it. It’s gone brown.”

Frederick looked. It had gone, very slightly, brown.

“Abrams,” said Mr Abernathy.

“Here.”

The roll went down the alphabet in the voice. Hanover. Here. It had been ten days. It was the same on the tenth day as it had been on the first, and on the first as it had been every day for three years, and Frederick had stopped holding the edge of the desk at Grant some time around Tuesday without noticing that he had stopped.

At the end Mr Abernathy closed the roll book.

“There will be an announcement at eleven,” he said, to the room, over his glasses. “The Eleventh is tomorrow and is a Saturday, and the district has decided that we will keep the silence today, at the same hour, in whatever room we happen to be in. Dr Brooks will tell us when. I will tell you now that I don’t want to hear a pencil.” He put his pen back in the brown jacket. “Go to class.”

---

At eleven he was in chemistry.

It was the same room, the lab on the second floor with the high benches and the gas taps and the long window, and Mr Abernathy was at the board doing the mole again, because the class had not got it and he had decided, Theo said, to keep doing it until they did or until one of them died. He had written a number on the board with a great many zeros after it and was explaining what it meant, in the voice, with the chalk, and the class was copying it down, and nobody was looking at the clock.

Frederick was looking at the clock.

He had looked at a clock in a classroom ten days ago at a minute to two, and it had made no sound and nothing had happened, and eight days ago in history at seventeen minutes past eleven nobody had been looking at any clock at all, and the phones had gone, and he had found since that he looked at classroom clocks differently, the way you look at a step you once fell down. The clock in the lab was the office kind, right to the second. It said a minute to eleven.

At ten seconds to, Mr Abernathy stopped talking.

He did not look at the clock. He put the chalk down in the tray, in the middle of a sentence about Avogadro, and dusted his fingers on the brown jacket, and walked out from behind the bench to the front of the room, and stood there with his hands behind his back, quite straight, with his feet a little apart, and looked at nothing, at the back wall, over all their heads.

The class put its pencils down.

Nobody had told them to. They looked at Mr Abernathy and put their pencils down, one after another, carefully, so as not to make a sound, and one of them rolled, Felix’s, and Felix put his hand flat on it, and the room was still.

Click.

“It is eleven o’clock,” said Dr Brooks, from the grey box above the door.

That was all she said. Then nothing. The loudspeaker stayed on; he could hear it, a faint hum in the corner of the ceiling, and behind the hum, very faintly, the sound of the whole building being quiet at once, which was not the same as the sound of a building with nobody in it. It was fuller than that. It was eleven hundred people not moving.

He stood.

He did not know he was going to. Mr Abernathy was standing, at the front, with his hands behind his back, and Frederick had been taught since he could walk that for the silence you stood, at the cathedral, on the grass at the Tomb, every Eleventh he could remember, and he found that he was on his feet beside the bench before he had thought about it. And then he heard a stool scrape behind him, and another, and he did not turn round, and the whole class stood up behind him, in ones and twos and then all of them, Theo beside him last, quietly, with his hands at his sides.

They stood.

It was a long time, two minutes. He had always known it was, and had always forgotten between one year and the next. The first thirty seconds were easy and the next thirty were not, and after a minute he became aware of everything at once: the hum of the loudspeaker, and the gas tap on the bench in front of him that dripped, once every few seconds, into the sink, and somebody’s stomach at the back, and the light on the long window, and his own breath. He looked at the back of Mr Abernathy’s head, at the grey hair over the collar of the brown jacket, the way Lukas had told Theo to look at the back of the head and not the face, and thought about nothing, and then about his father, and then about the crest tomorrow, and the chain, and twenty paces, and then about nothing again.

The radiator under the window banged once.

It was very loud. It went through the room like a door slamming, bang, the old pipe knocking in the wall, and every person in the room jumped, and nobody laughed, nobody made a sound at all, and the silence closed back over it like water, and went on.

Click.

“Thank you,” said Dr Brooks.

They sat down. Mr Abernathy stood for a moment longer at the front, with his hands behind his back, looking at the back wall. Then he walked back behind the bench and picked up the chalk.

“Six point oh two,” he said, in the voice, “times ten to the twenty-third. Where were we.”

“Avogadro,” said Priya.

“Avogadro,” said Mr Abernathy, and went on, and did not look at the radiator, and did not look at Frederick, and wrote the number again, all of it, very neatly, to the last zero.

---

At lunch the table of nine talked about the radiator.

“It’s haunted,” said Felix.

“It’s not haunted. It’s air in the pipe.”

“It banged at the exact moment.”

“It bangs every day. It banged in homeroom. It banged when you came in.”

“But it banged in the silence,” said Felix. “In the middle. That’s haunted. That’s somebody in the pipe saying they’re there.”

There was a short pause at the table. Felix went red.

“I didn’t mean,” he said.

“No,” said June. “I think that’s nice. Somebody saying they’re there.” She looked at her lunch. “My great-grandfather’s in the Book. My mum looked him up. He’s on page four hundred and something. He drove a truck.” She looked up at Frederick, quickly, and down again. “I put his name on my poppy. For the wreath. In the art room.”

“Everybody did,” said Devon. “You had to. Ms Varga said.”

“You didn’t have to,” said Priya. “She said you could. If you had somebody.”

“I didn’t have anybody,” said Marcus, from the end. “So I put my trombone teacher’s. He’s not dead. He was in the Navy. Ms Varga said that was allowed.” He considered. “I think she said it was allowed. She was laughing.”

Theo said nothing at all. He was eating his sandwich with great concentration and looking at the window, and Frederick, beside him, knew why, and did not look at him, and passed him the salt.

---

The wreath came at half past five.

It came in a cardboard box, a big flat one that had held a pizza oven, by the look of the printing on the side, in the back of the custodian’s van, and it was Mr Obi who drove it, in his fluorescent vest, with the lanyard round his neck, who pulled up at the side door of Columbia Palace and got out and stood by the van with the box held flat in both arms and asked the duty officer, with great courtesy, to whom he should give it.

They sent for Dame M. Dame M sent for Frederick.

He came down the back stairs and along the stone passage and Mr Obi was standing in the doorway, with the box, not coming in, in the light from the passage, and when he saw Frederick he did not look surprised and did not bow and did not change his voice at all.

“Evening, young man,” said Mr Obi.

“Mr Obi.”

“Ms Varga asked me to bring this.” He held the box out, flat. “From the art room. She’d have come herself but she’s got a migraine from the glue. She says it’s finished and nobody’s to touch the poppies, they’re still a bit soft.” He looked at the box. “It’s for tomorrow. For the Hartigan boy to carry. She says you’ll know.”

“I know.”

Frederick took the box. It was lighter than he expected.

“Thank you for bringing it.”

“It’s on my way,” said Mr Obi, which it was not, Frederick knew, because Mr Obi lived on the other side of the river in Alexandria and had told him so once, at the gate, in the rain. Mr Obi looked at him for a moment longer in the light of the passage, and then nodded, and got back in the van, and drove away round the side of the palace, and the duty officer shut the door.

---

They opened it on the kitchen table.

Dame M stood at one side and Bridget at the other with her hands in her apron, and Frederick lifted the lid of the box very carefully, because of the poppies, and folded back a sheet of tissue paper that had been put over the top, and there it was.

It was a ring of green, about as wide as his two arms could make a circle, made of some kind of evergreen that smelled of Christmas and of the schoolyard, wired onto a frame, and all over it, so close together that you could hardly see the green, were poppies. Paper poppies. Red card, cut out by hand, in petals, four petals each, and a black paper centre in the middle of each one, and they were not all the same, because they had been made by eleven hundred different people with eleven hundred pairs of scissors. Some of them were perfect. Some of them were lopsided. One near the bottom had five petals, and one had been cut out of a different red, almost orange, and one was very small, the size of a coin, as though somebody very young had made it with great care and not had enough card.

Across the bottom of the ring, on a strip of white ribbon, somebody with very good handwriting had written in black ink:

ELLICOTT HIGH SCHOOL

From every grade, seventh to twelfth

There was a card tucked in at the side, in an envelope. It said, in a looser hand, a teacher’s hand, Every poppy has a name on the back, if the student had one to give. We have not read them. Please don’t lift them until tomorrow; the glue is soft. With love from the art room. R. Varga.

Bridget made a small noise and put her hand over her mouth and turned round to the range.

Dame M did not make any noise at all. She stood at the side of the table with her hands folded in front of her, the way she had stood at the side door on the thirty-first, and looked at the wreath for a long time.

“In the Navy, sir,” she said at last, “we laid ours at sea. Off the stern. They went down slowly.” She looked at the small poppy, the one the size of a coin. “I have never seen a better one.”

He did not lift the poppies. He wanted to, very much, to see the names, and he did not, because the card said not to and because the names were not his. He put the tissue paper back over the top, the way it had been, and the lid on the box, and Dame M said that it would go in the cold room off the flower room overnight, where the flowers for the State Rooms were kept, and that she would take it there herself, and that it would go to the crest in the morning in the car with the Hartigan boy, on his knees, and nobody else would touch it.

“He’ll be nervous,” said Frederick.

“Yes, sir,” said Dame M. “So were you, the first time. You were twelve. You carried it as though it were full of water.”

“Was I all right?”

“You were perfectly all right, sir,” said Dame M. “You were twelve.”

---

At the hospital at four he told his father about tomorrow.

His father was in the chair by the window, in the grey cardigan, with the blanket. The light outside was going early now, in November, and the railway below was already lit, and the long train from the north would come in at a quarter to five in the dark.

“Tomorrow’s the Eleventh,” said Frederick. “It’s Saturday. I’ll come at four, the same. After.”

His father looked at him.

“I’m laying it,” said Frederick. “The Crown’s. Not the Governor-General. Me.” He had said it to his mother, and to Dame M, and to Theo, and it had not sounded strange to any of them, and it sounded strange to him, here. “The first time since you. In 2021. I was eight. I was there. You didn’t say anything.”

His father’s mouth moved.

It moved and did not find it. It moved again, and still did not, and Frederick saw his father’s face change, saw the anger come into it, the new thing, the thing that had never been in his father’s face in fifteen years and was in it now, some days, when a word would not come: a tightening, a darkness, his right hand closing on the blanket into a fist and opening and closing again. His father looked at the window. He looked at the floor. He shut his eyes and opened them and his mouth worked and nothing came, and Frederick sat on the end of the bed and did not help, and did not look away, because looking away would have been worse, and waited.

“Cold,” said his father. It came out hard, like something thrown.

Frederick did not understand.

“Cold,” said his father again, and the fist on the blanket opened and his hand lifted an inch, two inches, towards Frederick’s school coat, which was over the back of the other chair, the thin one, the one he wore every day because it was the one he had. “Cold. Up. There.”

He understood.

“The crest,” he said. “It’s cold on the crest. You mean wear a coat.”

His father shut his eyes. It was the yes.

“I will,” said Frederick. “I’ll wear the big one. Mamma’s already said. Dame Margaret’s had it pressed.” He swallowed. “I’ll wear a coat, Papa.”

His father’s hand lay on the blanket, open, and after a while the anger went out of his face, slowly, the way it always did, and left it tired, and his own.

At a quarter to five Frederick read him Saturday’s trains, which were thinner than the weekday ones, and his father listened with his eyes shut, and at five the nurse came, and he went.

---

The Last Post was at half past seven.

The ABC carried it every year, from the crest, live, the only thing on the evening of the tenth, and every year in the palace kitchen Bridget turned her radio up for it, and every year, for as long as Frederick could remember, whoever was in the kitchen stood.

This year there were four of them. Bridget, by the range, with a tea towel over her shoulder. Dame M, by the dresser, very straight. His mother, at the end of the long table where she always sat, who had come home from the hospital early for it and had not taken her coat off. And Frederick, at the other end, where he had written the statement on the twenty-fifth, in the place he always sat.

The clock above the range said twenty-six minutes past seven, which meant half past.

On the radio there was the sound of the crest at night, which he knew from every other year and had never been to hear: wind, mostly, in the microphone, a low roaring like the sea, and under it a long murmuring hush, the sound of a great many people standing in the dark on a hill without speaking. A man’s voice said, very quietly, that the Watch was at the Tomb, and that the Regiment of Virginia was lining the crest and the path from the gate, and that the bugler had come forward to the chain. Then the man stopped talking.

They stood up.

Bridget put the tea towel down. Dame M brought her heels together. His mother stood, in her coat, with her hands on the back of her chair.

The bugle began.

It came out of the little radio on the dresser thin and clear and very far away, across the river, from the crest, from the chain, a single long note and then the climbing ones, the ones that went up and up as if they were looking for something, and then the long falling ones that came down slowly, one after another, like somebody going down a great many stairs in the dark. Frederick had heard it every year of his life. He had heard it at the cathedral and at the Tomb itself, on the grass, at the chain, with his father’s hand on his shoulder in 2021, when he was eight. He had never heard it in a kitchen. It sounded different in a kitchen. It sounded as if it were being played for the people in the kitchen, and for nobody else.

Across the table, his mother was looking at him.

She did not look away when he looked back. She stood at the end of the long table with her hands on the back of her chair and her coat on and looked at him the whole length of the kitchen while the bugle went down its stairs, and her face was quite still, and her eyes were very bright, and he understood that she was not thinking about the dead of any war. She was thinking about tomorrow, and a boy of fifteen in a big coat at a chain, and twenty paces, alone.

The last note went on for a long time, and then stopped.

Nobody moved. The wind went on in the microphone, the hush of the crowd on the hill under it. Then the man on the radio said, very quietly, the Last Post, and nothing else, and the ABC let the wind go on for a full minute before it went back to the studio, which it did every year, and which Frederick had always thought was the best thing the ABC did.

Bridget turned the radio down.

Dame M unclasped her hands, and inclined her head an inch, to nobody, to the radio, and went out of the kitchen very fast, the way she had gone out of the passage on the thirty-first, and did not come back.

His mother sat down.

“Tomorrow,” she said, in Swedish.

“I know.”

“Twenty paces. From the chain. Alone.” She took her gloves off, one finger at a time. “Do you know where you’ll look?”

He did. He had known since Thursday night, since the rehearsal, since he had walked the twenty paces on the dark crest in the low light of the single lamp, with the sergeant-major counting under his breath and Theo two paces behind him trying not to laugh. He had known since he had seen it in the lamplight, on the lid, running across the white marble from one side to the other, thin and grey and very old.

“The crack,” he said. “In the lid. It’s been there since the sixties. They decided not to mend it, because mending it would have been replacing it.” He looked at the clock above the range, four minutes slow. “I’ll look at the crack.”

His mother looked at him for a long moment.

“Your cousin looked at a clock,” she said. “At his coronation. Over the west door. Charlotte told me.”

“I know,” said Frederick. “He told me too.”

His mother very nearly smiled, and did not ask how, and put her gloves on the table, square to the edge.

“Bed early,” she said. “It’s cold on the crest.”

“Papa said that.”

She looked up.

“Today,” said Frederick. “At four. He said cold. He said it three times, till I got it. He meant wear a coat.”

His mother sat very still at the end of the long table in her coat.

“Then wear a coat,” she said, after a while, in English, and her voice did something on the last word, and she picked up the gloves again for no reason, and put them down.