The Clipboard

Sergeant Castellanos had driven the route to Ellicott High School eleven times without anybody in the back of the car, and he said so at a quarter past seven, at the north wing door, before Frederick had got in.

“Eleven, sir,” he said. “At this hour, on weekdays, in August. Twice at the wrong hour, to see what it does. Once in the rain.” He held the door. “It does nothing in the rain except slow down at the bridge.”

“Thank you,” said Frederick.

He got in. The car was dark blue and smelt of the stuff they cleaned it with, and the seat was too big for him in the way that all the back seats of all the cars at Columbia Palace had always been too big for him, so that if he sat back his feet did not quite reach the floor and if he sat forward he looked as if he were about to get out. He sat forward. He had his bag on his knees. It was a new bag, dark grey, with nothing written on it, and inside it there were four exercise books, a pencil case, a ruler, a calculator, a packed lunch, a bottle of water, a clean handkerchief, a timetable he had been sent in August and had learned by heart, and eleven pens.

He had not packed the pens. Bridget had packed the pens. He had come down to the kitchen at half past six and found her at the table by the range with his bag open in front of her, putting pens into it one at a time out of a box, as though they were going to be needed for a siege.

“Eleven,” he had said.

“You’ll lend them,” Bridget had said, not looking up. “Boys never have a pen. You’ll lend one and never see it again, and then you’ll lend another one. I’ve known boys.” She had put in the eleventh. “And you’ll eat the sandwich, Frederick, not give it to somebody.”

“I won’t give it to anybody.”

“You will if they look hungry. You always do.” She had done up the bag and pushed it across the table to him. “Eat your egg.”

Castellanos got in at the front and put his seat belt on and looked at Frederick in the mirror.

He was a large man with a large brown face and short grey hair, and he had been on the detail since the first of August, which meant he had been to Öland and back, and to the lake and back, and had stood on a great many docks and gravel drives and at the ends of a great many corridors, and had said in five weeks perhaps two hundred words, of which Frederick had counted about forty addressed to him. He had been a policeman in Arizona, in Tucson, before he was a policeman here. He took stairs one at a time, slowly, as if each step had to be checked, and he was always at the top first, and Frederick had not yet worked out how.

“Seat belt, sir.”

Frederick put on his seat belt.

“The arrangement,” said Castellanos, to the mirror, starting the engine, “is the side gate. By the custodian’s bins, at the back of the gym. The custodian opens it at seven. I’ll stop by the bins, and you’ll get out, and walk round the back of the gym to the main building, and come into the yard from that side. I’ll walk behind you as far as the corner of the gym and stop. That’s where I’ll be. The corner of the gym. All day.”

“All day?”

“Until half past three, sir. When your mother comes.”

“Where do you sit?”

Castellanos considered this. It was clearly not a question anybody had put to him in a planning meeting.

“I don’t, sir,” he said, and pulled out from the north wing door onto the gravel, very slowly, as if the gravel had to be checked too.

---

His mother had come to the door to see him go.

She had not said anything about it the night before, and she had not been at breakfast, because breakfast was the kitchen and Bridget and the egg, and she never came into Bridget’s kitchen in the mornings, by an arrangement nobody had ever explained to him. But when he came along the passage at a quarter past seven with his bag she had been standing at the north wing door in her dressing gown, with her coffee, and her hair not done, which nobody ever saw, and she had looked at him from his shoes to his hair as though she were checking a list.

“Har du allt?” she had said. Have you got everything.

“Elva pennor.”

“Eleven?”

“Bridget.”

“Ah.” She had put her hand on his hair and flattened a piece of it that Mr Lorimer had cut on Friday and that had not, in her view, settled. “I’m collecting you. Half past three. Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

“I know.”

“I know you know. I am telling you so that I have said it.” She had taken her hand away. “Lycka till, älskling.”

And then she had gone back into the north wing with her coffee, quickly, the way she went out of rooms when she did not want to be seen being whatever she was being, and the door had shut behind her, and he had stood on the step looking at the door, and Castellanos had said sir very quietly from beside the car.

---

He wore what the meeting had decided.

There had been a meeting. It had been in July, before Sweden, in the small dining room, and it had been attended by his mother, Dame Margaret Roper, a lady from his mother’s Court called Ebba Lindqvist who did not usually come to meetings about him, and Bridget, who had been asked to come because she was the only person present who had ever bought a child’s clothes in a shop, and it had lasted fifty minutes and had been about what an ordinary boy wore to school.

He had not been at the meeting. He had heard about it from Bridget, who had described it, at the range, at some length.

“Your mother wanted a jacket,” Bridget had said. “Dame M said nobody wears a jacket. Miss Lindqvist said in Stockholm they wear a jacket. Dame M said this is not Stockholm, with respect, and Miss Lindqvist said she was aware of that, with respect. And then they both looked at me.” She had stirred something. “And I said grey trousers and a blue shirt and a jumper, because that’s what every boy in this city wears who hasn’t been told what to wear, and they wrote it down.”

So he wore grey trousers and a blue shirt and a navy jumper, all new, all from a shop that had sent three men to the Palace in August with everything in four sizes. He had looked at himself in the long glass in his room that morning and thought that he looked exactly like a boy in the picture on the box that a boy’s clothes came in.

He looked out of the window of the car. The Axis went by, very wide and very empty at this hour, with the sprinklers going on the grass along the middle of it and the white buildings at the far end with the sun on them, and then the river, and the bridge, where nothing happened except that the car slowed down, and then streets he did not know, with shops in them, and people in the shops putting things out on the pavements, and a bus, red and cream, with its doors folding open at a stop and people getting on.

He watched the people get on the bus until the car went round a corner and he could not see it any more.

---

The custodian’s bins were large and green and there were seven of them, against a chain-link fence, and the side gate was a gate in the fence, standing open, with a padlock hanging open on its chain.

The car stopped by the bins. Castellanos got out and looked at the gate, and at the gym, which was a long brick building with high windows, and at the corner of the gym, and at the sky, and then he opened Frederick’s door.

“Sir.”

Frederick got out with his bag. He stood on the tarmac by the bins.

He had been to school before. He had been at Brookside for seven years. But Brookside had been small, and he had gone in at the front door every morning past a lady at a desk who said Good morning, Frederick in exactly the same voice every day for seven years, as though she had been wound up, and he had known every single person in the building and every single person in the building had known him, and most of them had been told about him by their parents before they were old enough to understand what they had been told. Brookside had been a room he had grown up in. This was a gym and seven bins and a fence.

“Ten yards, sir,” said Castellanos. “I’ll be ten yards behind.”

“Yes.”

He walked through the gate. He walked along the back of the gym, on a strip of cracked concrete between the brick wall and a bank of grass with litter in it, and he could hear, from somewhere in front of him, round the end of the building, the noise of a great many people who were all a little younger or a little older than he was, all talking at once, the noise of a swimming bath or a station. He could hear Castellanos behind him. Ten yards. He did not look round.

At the corner of the gym the footsteps behind him stopped.

He went on round the corner on his own.

---

The yard was very big and full of people.

It was a wide space of tarmac with white lines painted on it for games he did not know, and the main building on the far side, three storeys of brick with tall windows and a flight of steps up to double doors, and a flagpole, and on the near side, along the end of the gym, a row of bike racks with a few bikes in them, and in front of the bike racks a low brick wall, about knee high, with a flat stone top.

And everywhere, people. Hundreds. In clumps. The older ones by the steps, tall, loud, with their hands in their pockets. The younger ones nearer, smaller, newer, in clothes that had very obviously been bought in August, standing in twos and threes and looking at each other and at the building and at their own shoes. Seventh grade. His year. He could tell them because they were standing the way he was standing, as though somebody might at any moment tell them to move.

Some of them saw him.

He watched it happen. He had watched it happen all his life, and he knew exactly what it looked like, the way a doctor knows what a rash looks like. A boy in a red sweatshirt looked at him and looked away and looked back and said something to the boy beside him without moving his mouth very much, and the second boy looked, and a girl with them looked, and then the looking went outwards from them in a ring, the way a stone goes into a pond, until there were perhaps twenty people within forty feet of him who were not talking any more.

He stood at the corner of the gym with his bag and let them look. There was nothing else to do. You let them look, and after a while they had looked, and they started talking again, about you, and then after a longer while about something else. His mother had told him that when he was five. They look, and then they have looked.

He looked at the bike racks instead.

There was a boy on the wall.

He was sitting on the low wall in front of the bike racks, at the end nearest the gym, with his bag on the ground between his feet, and he was eating an apple. He was about Frederick’s age, and smaller, with brown hair that stood up at the back as if he had slept on it and nobody had told him, and a grey sweatshirt with a hole at the cuff, and trainers that had been white once, and he was eating the apple with enormous concentration. He was not looking at anything else. He was looking at the apple. He turned it in his hand and looked at it, and found the place he wanted, and bit it, and chewed, looking at the bitten place as if it had told him something he needed to think about, and turned it again.

He was the only person in the yard within forty feet who was not looking at Frederick.

Frederick found that he was looking at him. He did not know why. He watched the boy eat the apple right round, carefully, in a spiral, the way you would if somebody had told you that there was a correct way to eat an apple and you had believed them, until there was nothing left but the core, and then the boy held the core up and looked at it, critically, and ate the bottom of it too.

Then he looked at the core for a while, and put it in his pocket.

---

At eight o’clock a bell went, a long flat electric bell from somewhere inside the building, and a woman came out of the double doors at the top of the steps with a clipboard.

She was a small woman in a cardigan, with spectacles on a chain round her neck and her grey hair pinned up in a way that had been decided many years ago and not reviewed, and she stood at the top of the steps with the clipboard against her chest and waited, and did not ring anything or shout or clap, and the yard, all of it, the tall ones by the steps and the new ones by the gym, went quiet.

Frederick was impressed. He had seen Dame Margaret Roper do that to a room. He had not known that anybody else could.

“Seventh grade,” said the woman with the clipboard. She had a voice that did not need to be loud. “My name is Mrs Lockyer. I am the registrar. I am going to read you your homerooms. When I read your name you will come and stand at the bottom of these steps in the line for your homeroom teacher, who will be standing there with a card, and you will stay in that line, in that order, and you will go in with your teacher, in that order, and you will sit where your teacher puts you, in that order, for the year.” She put her spectacles on. “In that order. It is alphabetical. It is not personal. Nobody has chosen anything. Nobody is going to change anything. If you wish to sit by your friend, you should have been born with a different surname.” She looked at the clipboard. “Mr Abernathy’s homeroom.”

A man came out of the doors behind her and down the steps and stood at the bottom of them with a white card that said ABERNATHY in black capitals. He was tall and thin and not young, with a long face and a brown jacket, and he held the card in his right hand, and Frederick saw that his left hand, which hung at his side, had a scar across the back of it, white and old, from the knuckles to the wrist.

“Abrams,” said Mrs Lockyer.

A girl went down. She stood behind the man with the card.

“Bello.”

A boy.

“Diaz. Eckhardt. Feeney.”

They went. Frederick stood at the corner of the gym and waited. He had known since August which homeroom he was in. He had been sent a letter, addressed to Frederick Hanover, with the timetable in it, and the letter had said Homeroom: Mr M. Abernathy, Room 14, and he had looked at the envelope for a long time, because he had never in his life had a letter addressed to that name. Nobody had. Nobody in the family had ever been called Hanover by anybody, except in books, and in the books it was not a name, it was a house, the way a family in a story might be called the Smiths and a dynasty is called the House of. The Household had needed something to put on a school form. Dame M had said, at the time, at breakfast, in May, that there had been a short discussion and that Hanover had been felt to be the least untrue of the options.

He had not been told what the other options were. He had thought about asking and had decided he did not want to know.

“Gallagher. Grant.”

Two more.

“Hanover.”

Nothing happened.

That was the thing he noticed. Nothing happened at all. Mrs Lockyer said it in exactly the voice she had said Gallagher in, and Grant, flat and clear and not personal, and looked down at the clipboard for the next one before he had even moved, and for a second he stood there at the corner of the gym, not moving, because he had not expected it to be like that; he had expected, he realised, something, a pause, a change in the voice, a look. And there was nothing. She was already reading the next name.

He walked down to the steps.

He felt the yard watch him walk. The ring of looking moved with him across the tarmac like a light. He got to the bottom of the steps and went to the end of the line, behind a boy called Grant who had very large ears and who turned round and saw who it was and turned back again so quickly that his ears went red, and he stood there.

“Hartigan,” said Mrs Lockyer.

Behind him, by the bike racks, the boy on the wall stood up, and picked up his bag, and came across the yard, not hurrying, with the apple core still in his pocket and his bag over one shoulder, and stood in the line behind Frederick, and yawned.

---

Room 14 was on the first floor at the end of a long corridor that smelt of floor polish and something underneath the floor polish that was older than the floor polish, and it had been a chemistry room, or still was one, since there were taps along one wall and a fume cupboard in the corner with a sign on it that said DO NOT, and the rest of the sign had come off. But there were desks in rows instead of benches, and tall windows along the far side with the morning coming in through them, and under each window a radiator, cream-painted, old, the kind with ribs.

The radiators were banging.

It was the second of September and seventy-eight degrees outside, and every radiator in the room was banging, irregularly, like somebody hitting a pipe with a spanner on the floor below, one and then another and then two together, and none of them was warm.

“They bang,” said Mr Abernathy, from the front, as the line came in. “They have banged since before I came to this room, which was in 1994. In January they will bang and two of them will not be warm, and the other four will be very warm, and you will want to be near the four. In September they bang and none of them is warm, and nobody knows why, and the custodian has given up and so have I.” He put the card down on the desk at the front. “Sit in the order you came in. From the door. Along the rows. Back to front. Miss Abrams, there, by the door, front. Mr Bello, behind her.”

They went in order. Frederick watched the order fill the room, one name to a desk, from the door to the windows, row by row, and he counted ahead without meaning to, because he always counted ahead, and he saw where he was going to be before he got there: the row by the windows, three from the back.

He sat down at it. It was a wooden desk with a lid and a great many initials cut into the lid, and a groove at the top for pens, and a hole for an inkwell that had not had an inkwell in it for fifty years. The window was beside him. Through it he could see the yard, and the bike racks, and the end of the gym, and, at the corner of the gym, very small, in a grey suit, Castellanos, standing with his hands folded in front of him, looking at nothing.

The radiator under the window banged twice, very close to his knee.

The boy from the wall sat down at the desk beside him. Not in front. Beside. The row by the windows had two desks to each line, side by side, with a gap between them about the width of an arm, and the boy sat down in the one on the aisle side and put his bag on the floor and looked at the radiator and then at the window and then, for the first time, at Frederick.

He had grey eyes, or green, Frederick could not tell, and a face that looked as though it was about to say something funny and had decided to wait.

“Does it do that all the time?” said the boy.

“He said since 1994.”

“Huh.” The boy looked at the radiator with deep respect. “That’s a long time to bang.”

---

Mr Abernathy had a roll book. It was a long thin book in a blue cloth cover, and he took it out of the desk at the front and opened it, and took a pen out of the inside pocket of the brown jacket, and then, before he started, he turned round and began to write on the board behind him, slowly, in large plain capitals, ROOM 14, and under that MR ABERNATHY, and under that HOMEROOM 8.15 TO 8.30, and under that CHEMISTRY, TUESDAYS AND FRIDAYS, NOT YET.

While he was writing, the boy beside Frederick leaned across the gap between the desks.

He leaned right over, with one elbow on Frederick’s desk, so that his head was quite close, and he said, in a whisper, in the tone of somebody asking a fair question about the weather:

“Are you any relation of the Hanovers in the history book?”

Frederick looked at him.

Nobody had ever asked him that.

He had been asked a great many things. He had been asked by journalists, at the age of six, through railings, whether he liked his new puppy, which he had not had. He had been asked by a bishop, at the age of eight, whether he said his prayers, and by an admiral whether he wanted to be a sailor, and by the President of a country he had been told to be polite about whether he liked America, which was where he lived. He had been asked by children at Brookside, once each, in the first year, what it was like, and he had not known what to say, because he did not know what anything else was like to compare it to. He had been asked by an old lady at a garden party whether he was going to be a good King, and his mother had answered for him, We hope so, and moved him on with a hand on his back.

He had never been asked whether he was any relation.

He looked at the boy, who was waiting, quite patiently, with his elbow on the desk and the radiator banging behind him, and he understood, quite suddenly and very clearly, the way you understand that a step is not where you thought it was, that the boy did not know. He did not know who Frederick was. He had heard a name read off a clipboard, Hanover, and he had thought of a chapter in a book, with pictures in it of men in wigs, and he had thought: huh. And he was asking. That was all. He was asking the way you would ask a boy called Lincoln whether he was any relation of the one on the money.

He thought about the question.

He thought about it carefully, because it was a question, and he had been brought up to answer questions properly, and by the person who had brought him up to do that, who had a rule, which was that you answered the question you had been asked and not the question you thought you had been asked, and not the question you would rather have been asked.

The Hanovers in the history book. He knew which history book; there was only one, in the seventh grade, in the Realm; he had seen it on the list in August, and he had read it, all of it, in the library at the Palace, in a week, because he had wanted to know what they were going to say. They were in Chapter Six and Chapter Nine and Chapter Fourteen. Victoria, very small, on a horse, who had been shot at twenty-one. Ernest the First, in a uniform, looking at a map. The third Ernest, with the moustache. The fourth, in a photograph, at a microphone. They were all in it. They were all, every one of them, exactly what the boy had said: relations. He was descended from nearly all of them in a straight line, rung by rung, like a ladder, and the nearest of them in the book was his grandfather, whom he had never met, and the furthest, the one who had first come over the sea from Hanover, was so many greats ago that you would have to count them on paper.

So he was a relation. That was true.

And they were in a history book. Which meant they were dead, and had been for a long time, and were a chapter. And he was not in the history book, and nor was his father, who was not dead and not a chapter, but in London, at a desk, at this moment, with a box. The history book stopped in 1972, with his grandfather’s funeral. He had checked.

So it was a long way. In time. A long, long way, ladder after ladder, from the men in wigs to a boy at a desk with a banging radiator. That was also true.

He looked at the boy.

“Distant,” he said.

The boy nodded, slowly, as though that was about what he had expected.

“Huh,” he said. “We’re from Cork. Originally. Hartigans.” He took his elbow off the desk. “Distant.”

He leaned back into his own desk and looked at the front, where Mr Abernathy had finished writing and was turning round, and Frederick sat by the window with the radiator banging against his knee and his face very carefully still and something in his chest that he did not have a name for, that felt like the thing just before you laugh in church.

It was perfectly true. He had not said one word that was not true.

He had never in his life said anything that was perfectly true and that somebody had believed for a completely different reason.

---

“Abrams,” said Mr Abernathy.

“Here.”

“Bello.”

“Here.”

Mr Abernathy said every name in the same voice, and after every name he left a small pause, about the length of a breath, before he looked up, as though he were giving the person time to arrive at it. Frederick listened to him do it. Diaz. Eckhardt. Feeney. The same pause after each, the same voice, the same pen moving down the column.

“Gallagher.”

“Here.”

“Grant.”

“Here.”

“Hanover.”

The same voice. The same pause, the length of a breath. Mr Abernathy did not look up during it.

“Here,” said Frederick.

Mr Abernathy made a mark, and looked up, at him, briefly, the way he had looked up at Grant and Gallagher, and looked down.

“Hartigan.”

“Yeah,” said the boy beside him.

“Here will do, Mr Hartigan.”

“Here.”

“Thank you.”

The radiator banged. Mr Abernathy went on down the column. Frederick sat with his hands flat on the lid of the desk, on top of the initials, and looked out of the window at the corner of the gym, where Castellanos was standing with his hands folded, and found that he was having to think, quite hard, about something else, in order not to smile.

---

The seating followed the form list.

He found that out in second period, and in third, and in fourth, and by lunch he understood that it was going to be like this all day and all week and all year: that every teacher at Ellicott had been sent the same list by Mrs Lockyer, and every teacher sat the room in the order of the list, because Mrs Lockyer had said so, and nobody at Ellicott argued with Mrs Lockyer, and so in every room, in every subject, wherever the H’s fell, Hanover fell, and one desk along from it, every time, fell Hartigan.

In mathematics they were by the door. In English they were in the middle. Spanish was the only exception. Spanish was in a hut at the back of the yard that smelt of hot carpet, and the boy from the wall did not do Spanish, he did French, in the main building, for reasons he described as Mum, so in Spanish the H’s closed up without him and Frederick sat at the front beside the girl with the long black plait, directly under the desk of a Señora Ruiz who did not start until Thursday, and they were given a supply teacher instead, who read them a list of rules and went. In history, Mr Ferrante, who was young, and had a beard that he was not yet good at, and a red pen, said that he did not care what they thought so long as they could prove it, and then went down the list, and came to Hanover, and said it, and his eye went over Frederick and on, carefully, the way you step over a step you know is loose, and came to Hartigan, and stopped.

“Hartigan,” said Mr Ferrante. “Like the bridge?”

“What bridge?”

“There’s a Hartigan Bridge. In Pittsburgh. Over the river.”

“Never been,” said the boy. “We’re from Milwaukee.”

“Then you’re not like the bridge,” said Mr Ferrante, and wrote something with the red pen, and went on.

The boy borrowed a pen in history. He did it without asking, in the way that it was clear he did most things: he looked in his bag, and then in his pocket, where there was a pencil with no point and the apple core, and then he looked at Frederick’s desk, where there were two pens in the groove at the top, and took one.

“I’ll give it back,” he said.

“I’ve got eleven,” said Frederick.

The boy stopped writing and looked at him.

“Eleven?”

“Bridget packed them.”

“Who’s Bridget?”

Frederick opened his mouth to say the cook, and found that it was not the right word, because Bridget was not a cook, there was a chef, and two cooks, and a pastry kitchen; Bridget was the person who had made his breakfast every morning at the table by the range since he was four and who had once sat up with him all night when he had a temperature of a hundred and three and the doctors had gone to bed. He did not know what you called that. He had never had to call it anything.

“She does breakfast,” he said.

“Huh.” The boy looked at the pen. “My mum’d kill for eleven pens. We lose about one a day. There’s a hole somewhere in the flat they go down.” He went back to writing. “I’ll give it back.”

He did not give it back.

---

The lunch hall was in the basement of the main building, under the yard, with windows high up at pavement level so that you could see people’s feet going past, and it was hot and loud and smelt of chips, and at the end of it, behind a counter, a large woman in an apron was serving from a row of metal trays with a radio on the shelf behind her, playing country music, not loudly but not quietly either, and nobody had told her to turn it off, and Frederick could see from the set of her shoulders that nobody was going to.

He had a packed lunch. He did not need to queue. He stood by the door with it and looked at the hall.

The tables were long, with benches, and most of them were already taken by people who had arrived together and sat together and had clearly known each other for years, from whatever school they had come from before. The older ones had the tables by the windows. In the middle the new ones had the tables nobody else wanted. And at the far end, by a radiator, a large old cream radiator like the ones in Room 14 but even more ribbed, which was not banging and not warm either, there was a table that was not a long one but a round one, by itself, with nine chairs round it, not benches, chairs, as though it had come from somewhere else and been left.

There were four people at it. Grant was one of them, with the ears. A girl with a long black plait and a very straight back whose name, he knew from homeroom, was Ibrahim. A girl from the front row of history, small, with freckles, who was eating crisps one at a time and looking at them first. And the boy from the wall, who had a tray, with something brown on it and a carton of milk, and who was eating with the same enormous concentration he had brought to the apple.

They had come, Frederick understood, in the order of the list. Grant. Hartigan. Ibrahim. They had come out of the same rooms all morning in the same order and down the same stairs and in at the same door and sat at the nearest table with chairs that was free, together, because they did not yet know anybody else, and the list was the only thing they knew.

He was in the list.

He walked down the hall. He felt it watch him. It was a different kind of looking from the yard: less of a ring, more of a turning, table after table, heads turning as he passed and turning back, and a noise that went with him, lower than the noise in front of him and the noise behind. He got to the table by the radiator. There were five empty chairs.

Grant saw him and went red to the ears. The girl with the plait looked at him and then at her lunch, with a very straight back. The girl with the freckles stopped with a crisp halfway to her mouth.

The boy from the wall looked up.

“Pen,” he said, and moved his tray along, about four inches, to make room, which was not necessary, since there were five empty chairs, and went back to the brown thing.

Frederick sat down. He opened his packed lunch. Bridget had made him a sandwich with ham and mustard and cut it into four triangles with the crusts off, and put in an apple, and a piece of cake wrapped in greaseproof paper, and a note, folded small, that said in her round blue writing EAT THE SANDWICH.

He ate the sandwich.

Over by the counter, the woman in the apron turned the radio up, very slightly, the width of a fingernail. He did not know why. He thought perhaps she liked the song.

---

At half past three his mother was in the car by the bins.

He could see her before he got there, through the back window, sitting very upright in the back seat with her handbag on her knees, in a grey coat although it was still seventy-eight degrees, and Castellanos was standing at the corner of the gym where he had been at eight o’clock, as though he had not moved all day, which Frederick suspected he had not, and when he saw Frederick come out of the main building and across the yard he turned and walked back along the gym towards the gate, ten yards in front, and Frederick followed him, past a man in a fluorescent vest at the gate with a clipboard and a lanyard, who looked at Frederick, and at the car, and made a mark on the clipboard with a pen on a string, very neatly, and said nothing.

He got into the car. His mother looked at him.

She did not say anything. She waited until Castellanos had shut the door and walked round and got in at the front and started the engine and pulled away from the bins, very slowly, and they were on the street, and then she said, in Swedish, in her ordinary voice, looking out of her window and not at him:

“Nå?”

Well?

He thought about it. There was a great deal. There were the radiators, and Mrs Lockyer, and Mr Ferrante’s eye, and the hut that smelt of carpet, and a man with a scar on his hand who left a pause after every name. There was a round table with nine chairs. There was the yard, looking. There was a woman in an apron who had turned the radio up.

“There’s a boy,” he said, in Swedish, “who sits next to me. In everything. Because of the alphabet.”

“Ah.” His mother looked out of her window. “What is he like?”

“He’s from Milwaukee.” He considered. “He eats an apple all the way round. In a spiral. And then the bottom of the core.”

His mother turned her head and looked at him.

“And he asked me,” said Frederick, “in homeroom, before the register, whether I was any relation of the Hanovers in the history book.”

There was a pause. The car stopped at a light. A bus pulled up beside them, red and cream, and through its window, a foot away, Frederick could see an old man reading a newspaper, who did not look up.

“And what,” said his mother, very carefully, “did you say?”

“I said distant.”

His mother looked at him for a long moment, at his face, in the light from the bus window, and then she put her hand up to her mouth, and he saw her shoulders move, and then she was laughing. Properly. Not the laugh she did at dinners, which was short and correct and stopped exactly when it ought to, but another one, which he had heard perhaps five times in his life, which went on, and got away from her, so that she had to take her handkerchief out of her handbag and press it to her eyes, in the back of the car, at a red light, beside a bus.

In the front, Castellanos looked straight ahead through the windscreen and did not move a single muscle of his face.

“Distant,” said his mother, at last, into the handkerchief. “Oh, älskling. Oh, your father.” She took the handkerchief away and looked at him with her eyes wet. “Is it true?”

“It’s true,” said Frederick. “It’s a long way. In time.”

“It is a very long way in time.” She folded the handkerchief. “And is he nice? This boy from Milwaukee?”

The light changed. The bus pulled away beside them, and the car pulled away more slowly, and the bus got ahead, and turned off, and was gone.

Frederick thought about the boy on the wall, turning the apple in his hand, looking for the place he wanted.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “He took one of my pens.”

“Will he give it back?”

“No,” said Frederick, and found that he did not mind at all, and did not know why, and looked out of the window at the city all the way home.