Whose Birthday?

On Monday Theo came round the end of the bike racks at a quarter to eight with two apples.

He sat on the wall. He gave Frederick one, the smaller and more lopsided of the two, with a leaf. He looked across the yard at the window of Mr Pavlik’s office, eighteen inches up, and waved, and the finger came up off the cup. He got out the other apple and looked at it, and did not bite it.

“Right,” he said.

Frederick sat very still.

He knew some of it. He knew the end of it, which was a car across a forecourt at two minutes past two; and he knew the middle of it, because Dame M had read it off a sheet from the switchboard pad at a quarter past nine on Saturday night in a dark blue jersey with her hair coming down: we only found out at half past six. He did not know the beginning. He had sat by the fire in the north wing all Saturday evening knowing that somewhere four floors up over a bus depot there was a beginning happening, and he had not been there, and he had not been told; and on Sunday, at the door, and in the kitchen, and by the pond, Theo had not said one word about it, not one, and Frederick had not asked, because it had been his half-birthday and he had not wanted it to stop being that.

“Saturday,” said Theo. “Supper. Half past six. It’s the four of us. Dad’s in from his shift at three because he’s on earlies, so he’s done the shopping and had a sleep and now he’s in his chair by the window with the crossword folded on his knee and the pencil behind his ear, waiting for his supper. Mum’s off. So she’s cooking, at the stove, with the tea towel over her shoulder. The Wisconsin one. Kate’s at the table doing her homework with her headphones in, except she’s not, she’s on her phone under the table, and Mum knows, and Mum’s going to say something in a minute, and Kate knows Mum’s going to say something in a minute, and they’re both waiting.” He paused. “And Kringle’s on the windowsill. Watching the buses come in.”

“Was he?”

“He’s always on the windowsill. It was Saturday night. The buses were coming in.” Theo looked at the apple. “And I’m laying the table. And I’ve got the cards in my sweatshirt. Both of them. In the envelope. They’d been in my sweatshirt since Wednesday the week before. I’d been sleeping with them under the pillow, in case Kate found them.” He held up the apple. “So I’m putting out the forks. One. Two. Three. And I get to Dad’s. And I put down Dad’s fork, and I say, in passing, like it’s nothing, the way I’d practised in the bathroom with the door locked for nine days:

“I’ve been asked to a birthday. Tomorrow. I’ll need a lift.”

He bit the apple at last.

“And Mum,” he said, chewing, “says, from the stove, without turning round: Yes, all right. Whose?”

Frederick looked at him.

“She said yes,” he said.

“Before she’d looked up.” Theo nodded slowly, with enormous satisfaction, like a man looking at a bridge he has built that has not fallen down. “Before she knew what. Yes, all right, whose. I’d got it. And Mum doesn’t take back a yes. Ever. It’s a rule.” He chewed. “The plan worked, Freddie. It worked exactly. For about four seconds.”

---

“And then Dad,” said Theo, “doesn’t look up.”

He did it. Frederick watched him do it. He sat on the wall and became his father, which Frederick had never seen anybody do until yesterday, when he had seen the father himself, at the bottom of the step, and now could see exactly how good it was; the shoulders came forward and the head went down over an imaginary newspaper on an imaginary knee, and the hand went up to the ear for an imaginary pencil, and the face went very calm, and very slightly sad, the face of a man who has been driving a bus since six in the morning and has seventeen across left and does not know it.

“Whose birthday?” said Theo, in his father’s voice, which was lower than his, and slower, and had Milwaukee in it all the way through, like a stick of rock.

“And I say, Freddie’s.”

He was himself again.

“And Dad says, Who’s Freddie?” He was his father. “Not looking up. Still on seventeen across.” He was himself. “And before I can say anything, Kate says, from the table, without taking her headphones out…” His voice went up and became a girl’s, sharp, bored, fifteen. “The one with the eleven pens.”

Frederick looked at him.

“You told them,” he said. “About the pens.”

“Course I told them. I tell them everything. Every day. At supper.” Theo looked at him as though he had asked whether Theo ate supper. “You’re the most interesting thing that happens, Freddie. Nothing happens at school except you. And the frog. And I didn’t tell them about the frog.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Everything.” Theo began counting on his fingers. “The eleven pens. Bridget. That she writes notes on your sandwiches. Eat the sandwich. That you said distant. That you’re rubbish at gym and I told Grant where to pick you. That you ate a depot apple wrong. That you’ve got a man who stood at the corner of the gym all day, and that it was turkey, with a pickle he doesn’t like, that his wife puts in. That the man’s got a room now, eighteen inches up, because I asked Mr Pavlik. That you drew a bowl of fruit and Ms Varga said it was instructions.” He ran out of fingers on one hand and started on the other. “That you know all the trains. That you’ve got a mum who picks you up Tuesdays and Thursdays and says things in a language. That your dad rings on Sundays and you play a game about laws. That nobody’s allowed to call you Freddie except me.” He stopped. “Nine weeks. Every night. At supper. Freddie said. Freddie did. Freddie’s got eleven pens.”

He took another bite.

“And nobody asked who you were,” he said, chewing. “Not once. In nine weeks. They thought you were just a boy.”

Frederick sat on the wall with the depot apple in his hand.

He had known that, in a way, since yesterday. Since a woman in a navy coat had stood at the bottom of the step and looked at him from his shoes to his hair and said you’re Freddie, as if she had been saying it every evening for nine weeks, at a stove. But he had not known it like this. He had not known that it had been every night. That at a table four floors up over a bus depot, while he was at the end of the long table by the fire in the north wing, or in the small sitting room with the cream telephone, or in his room under the wall map, a family he had never met had been sitting round a supper and laughing and asking what Freddie had done today; and that it had not known anything about him at all. It had just thought he was a boy.

He had never been just a boy in a room he was not in.

“Go on,” he said.

---

“So Kate says, the one with the eleven pens,” said Theo, “and Dad says, oh, him.” He was his father again, briefly, on seventeen across. “Him with the turkey man. And he says, where’s he live, then? For the lift?”

“And I say, near the Axis.”

“And Dad says, near the Axis where?”

“And I say, at the end.”

Theo stopped. He looked at the apple.

“And Dad doesn’t say anything for a bit,” he said. “He’s still got the pencil. He’s still looking at the paper. But he’s not reading it. I can tell, because he’s stopped doing the thing with his mouth he does when he’s reading. And Mum’s stopped stirring. She’s still holding the spoon, but it’s not going round.” Theo considered. “And Kate’s taken out one headphone.”

“And then Dad says…” His father’s voice again, very slow, very level, a man reading a timetable. “The end of the Axis is the Palace.”

“And I say, yes.”

There was a pause on the wall. In the window of Mr Pavlik’s office Castellanos drank his coffee.

“And Dad puts the pencil down,” said Theo.

He did it, on the wall, with an invisible pencil: put it down, carefully, on an invisible knee, the way Frederick’s father put down his fountain pen in London when what came next did not need writing.

“He never puts the pencil down. Not in the middle of a crossword. Not if the depot’s on fire. He put it down once when Kate broke her arm and he picked it up again in the car.” Theo looked at the invisible pencil. “He put it down. And he looked at me. Over the top of his glasses. And he said, Theo.”

“And Mum said, Theo,” said Theo, in a different voice, higher, sharper, with a great deal of German in it underneath. “Theo. Who is this boy.”

“And I got the cards out,” said Theo.

---

“I got the kit one out first,” said Theo, “because I thought that would be easier.”

“Was it?”

“It was brilliant.” Theo’s shoulders started to go. “Mum took it. She looked at it. She read it out loud. Theo, it’s yes. Sunday 2nd November. At mine. You have to come to the side. And she got to the bit about your mum saying that’s what parents do, the same in Milwaukee, and she sort of stopped, and looked at it, and her face went funny. And then she got to the cake.” He put his hand over his mouth. “And she looked at the cake. And she said, what is this. And I said, it’s a cake. And she said, it says insert.” He took his hand away. “And she laughed. Mum. She laughed so much she had to sit down. At the table. With the spoon. And Dad was still looking at me over his glasses with no pencil and Kate had both headphones out now and Mum’s sitting there with the spoon laughing at half B until she cried, and she says, wiping her eyes, oh, I like him. I like him. Who is he?”

“And I gave her the other one.”

Frederick shut his eyes.

“She stopped laughing,” said Theo.

“I know.”

“She held it the way your lady held it. By the edges. And she read it.” Theo’s voice went quiet, and German, and careful. “His Royal Highness the Prince of Columbia requests the pleasure of the company of Master Theodore Hartigan.” He stopped. “And she got to Theodore and she sort of put her hand on the table. Flat. Like this.” He put his hand flat on the wall, on the cold stone, the way Dame M put her hand on the folder. “And she read the rest. All of it. Out loud. At Columbia Palace. On Sunday the second of November. At two o’clock. Informal.” He paused. “R.S.V.P. The Master of the Household.” He paused again. “And then she looked at the date. And she looked at the calendar on the wall by the fridge. And she looked at me.”

“And she said,” said Theo, in his mother’s voice, very quietly, “Theodore Hartigan. That’s tomorrow.”

“And Kate screamed,” said Theo.

“Screamed?”

“Screamed. Properly. A real one. She said, THE PRINCE, like that, all in capitals, and Kringle fell off the windowsill.” Theo looked at Frederick with deep satisfaction. “Kringle’s never fallen off the windowsill. In ten years. He’s sat through two moves and a fire alarm and Dad singing. Kate screamed THE PRINCE and he went straight off it, backwards, into the dish rack.”

Frederick opened his eyes.

“Is he all right?”

“He’s fine. He’s furious. He went under the sofa and he’s still there.” Theo bit the apple. “That’s not the good bit.”

---

“The good bit,” said Theo, “is Dad.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Dad doesn’t say anything,” he said. “For ages. Mum’s holding the card and saying tomorrow and Kate’s screaming and the cat’s in the dish rack and Dad’s just sitting there in his chair by the window with no pencil, looking at me over his glasses. And then he looks at the card in Mum’s hand. And then he looks out of the window. Towards the Axis. You can’t see it from our window, there’s the depot in the way, and the flats on Canal Street. But he looks that way. Like he can.”

“And then he says,” said Theo, and became his father again, very slowly, the shoulders, the head, the stick of rock.

“The one who said distant.”

Frederick looked at him.

“He’s the one who said distant?” said Theo, in his father’s voice. “When you asked him if he was any relation?”

“And I say yes.”

“And Dad says…” Theo stopped. His face, being his father’s face, did something extraordinary: it went entirely, completely still, the stillness of a man taking in a fact; and then, from somewhere very deep down, it began to come apart. “And we laughed.” His father’s voice cracked. “Nine weeks. We’ve been laughing about that boy at this table for nine weeks. I told it at the depot. I told the lads. I said, there’s a lad at our Theo’s school, Theo asks him if he’s any relation of the Hanovers, and he says distant, quick as you like, and I said, that’s a lad with a future, that is, I said, that’s comedy, that is.” Theo’s voice, as his father, was shaking. “I told it at the DEPOT.”

And Theo, on the wall, being his father, put his head in his hands.

And then he was Theo again, and was laughing, with his head in his hands, on the wall, so much that he nearly dropped the apple; and Frederick sat beside him and found that he was laughing too, helplessly, the way he had laughed in history when Theo whispered distant back to him, out of his nose, and then not out of his nose at all, out loud, on the wall by the bike racks at five to eight on a Monday morning, in front of the whole yard, which turned round and looked at them; and the three tall boys on the steps looked; and in the window of Mr Pavlik’s office, eighteen inches up, Castellanos put down his coffee.

“He told it at the depot,” said Frederick, when he could.

“He told it to everybody.” Theo wiped his eyes with the cuff of his sweatshirt, the one with the hole in it. “He told it to the man whose brother’s got trees. He told it to the man on the bins. He told it to Mr Dabrowski. He told it to the lady on Canal Street with the dog.” He stopped. “He’s going to have to tell them all again now. With the ending.”

“Did he say anything else?”

Theo stopped laughing. He looked at the apple for a moment.

“He said one more thing,” he said. “After. When Kate had stopped screaming and Mum had stopped saying tomorrow. He picked the pencil up again. And he looked at the crossword. And he said, to the crossword, not to anybody, in his ordinary voice…” Theo did not do the voice this time. He just said it, in his own. “Well. Is he nice?”

“And I said yes.”

“And Dad said, then that’s all right, and went back to seventeen across.”

---

The bell went. They did not move.

“What about the lift?” said Frederick.

“Oh. Yeah.” Theo picked up his bag but did not stand up. “So when Dad’s gone back to seventeen across, Mum says, well, he needs a lift. Because she’s Mum. That’s what she’d say if the house was on fire, she’d say, well, somebody’ll need a coat. And Dad says, we haven’t got a car, without looking up. And Mum says, Mr Dabrowski’s got a car.”

“The brown one.”

“The brown one. A 1991 estate. In the garages round the back. He goes down every Sunday and starts it and lets it run for ten minutes and turns it off again, so the battery doesn’t go.” Theo stood up. “So Dad goes downstairs. In his slippers. To ask Mr Dabrowski for the car. At a quarter past seven on a Saturday night. And he’s gone twenty-five minutes.”

“Twenty-five minutes?”

“Mr Dabrowski wanted to know why,” said Theo. “So Dad told him. And then Mr Dabrowski wanted to hear the distant one again, with the ending. And then he had to sit down. And then he got out a bottle of something from Poland that he keeps for weddings, and they had one each, in the kitchen, out of egg cups, because Mr Dabrowski doesn’t have glasses any more, he broke them all in 1998 and never got any more.” They went towards the steps. “And then Mr Dabrowski said Dad could have the car. On one condition.”

“That he came too.”

“That he came too. To see the Palace from the car. Forty-six years and never once to the end of the Axis.” Theo went up the steps. “He got the camera out last night. The yellow one. He’s taking it to the chemist’s on Canal Street this morning. He says he’s getting two prints of every one. One for him and one for Dad’s depot.”

“For the depot?”

“For the noticeboard,” said Theo. “In the canteen. Next to the rota.” He held the door. “You’re going to be on the noticeboard at the depot, Freddie. Well. Your house is. With the flag.”

---

They went in through the double doors at the top of the steps, into the corridor that smelt of floor polish and something older underneath it, in the order of the list, behind Grant.

“And then,” said Theo, on the stairs, low, “it all happened at once.”

“What did?”

“Everything. Because it was tomorrow.” He went up the stairs. “Mum went to the drawer and got out my good shirt, the one from my nan’s funeral, and it didn’t fit, so she got out Dad’s iron and did my school one instead, at nine o’clock at night, on the table, on a towel. And she kept saying tomorrow under her breath in German. Every time she turned the shirt over. Morgen. Morgen.” He got to the top of the stairs. “And she said it said R.S.V.P. and that meant you had to reply, it was rude not to. And Dad said it was a palace, they wouldn’t notice. And Mum said, Peter, they asked, and when people ask, you answer, I don’t care if it’s the Pope. So she wrote back. At the counter. Standing up. In green pen. She always writes in green pen. Nobody knows why. She says it’s so she can find her own handwriting in a pile.” They went along the corridor towards Room 14. “And then she said, and how are we supposed to get it to them, tomorrow’s Sunday, there’s no post. And Dad said, you’ll have to take it, then. And that’s when Mum decided she was coming.”

“And Kate.”

“Kate said if Mum was going she was going. She came and stood in the door of our room at ten o’clock and said, I’m coming tomorrow and if you say one word I’ll tell everybody at my school about the frog, and went out again.” Theo stopped outside Room 14. “And then at eleven she came back and held her hand out for your present without saying anything and wrapped it. On the floor. In the comics. Without speaking to me. And gave it back. And went to bed.” He considered. “She’s still not speaking to me. It’s day three. It’s a record.”

“She knows about the frog?”

“Course she knows about the frog,” said Theo. “She’s Kate.”

“And your dad rang.”

Theo looked at him.

“How d’you know?”

“Dame Margaret took it,” said Frederick. “She came and told us. At a quarter past nine. She read it out. She’d written it down.”

Theo looked at the door of Room 14 for a moment.

“I heard him,” he said. “From the corridor. In the flat. I was meant to be in bed.” He put his hand on the door. “He said he’d have to ring. Because they’d want to know what car. Mum said how do you know. And Dad said, because if a car I didn’t know turned up at my depot with a boy in it, I’d want to know.” He pushed the door a little way open. “So he rang directory enquiries. And they gave him a number. And he rang it. And somebody answered, and he said I’m ringing about a lift, and then he waited a long time, and then he said it all again, slower, to somebody else, who must’ve been your lady.” He paused. “And she said something. And Dad said, yes, ma’am. And she said something else. And Dad said…” He did the voice, briefly, low, slow, with Milwaukee in it. “I can’t promise anything, ma’am. I’ve met him.”

Frederick put his hand over his mouth.

“He said that,” said Theo, “about the pond.” And went into Room 14.

---

“What was the cake?” said Lucía, at lunch.

She said it before Theo had sat down. She was standing up at the round table by the radiator with her fork in her hand and her black hair in her eyes, and she did not move it, and the whole of the round table was looking at Theo: Grant, already going red; Amira Ibrahim, with a very straight back; Priya, with a crisp halfway; June, with her yoghurt; Gallagher; and Devon Price, behind his tray, with an expression of such anxious and devoted interest that Frederick thought he might have been waiting since Friday.

“You said Monday,” said Lucía. “On Wednesday the week before. You said you have to tell us on Monday, everything. Well, it’s Monday.” She sat down. “What was the cake?”

Theo sat down. He put his tray on the table. It was something grey with a crust.

“Chocolate,” he said.

“And?”

“It was in two halves.” Theo picked up his fork. “Half A and Half B. And on Half A there was a candle. One. And on the board, in white icing, in tiny writing, it said Candle, one, and Half A, and Half B. And there was an arrow. From the candle into the cake.” He began to eat. “And next to the arrow it said insert.”

There was a silence at the round table.

Then Amira Ibrahim, with her very straight back, made a sound Frederick had never heard her make, high and sudden, like a kettle; and put both hands over her face; and June put her yoghurt down and stared at Frederick across the table with her mouth open; and Gallagher said “Insert?” and then said it again, louder, “INSERT?”, and laughed so hard he banged his head on the radiator, which did not bang; and Grant went a red that Frederick had not known a person could go; and Lucía looked at Theo, and then at Frederick, and then at Theo, and said, “No,” in a voice of the deepest betrayal, “no, you said a kit, you said there was going to be a kit, and I thought you meant…” and could not finish.

“I told you,” said Theo, eating. “A kit.”

“What else?” said Lucía, when she could. “What did you do? What’s it like? Is there a ghost? Did you see the Queen? Did you go in the big rooms? Is it true there’s a…?”

“There’s a lift for food,” said Theo.

Lucía stopped.

“A what?”

“A lift. For food. In the kitchen. In the wall. You put a thing on a shelf and pull a rope and it goes up two floors to the dining room.” Theo ate. “I sent a piece of cake up it. To his mum.”

“You sent cake to the Queen?”

“In a lift for food,” said Theo. “With a note.”

“What did the note say?”

Theo looked at Frederick. Frederick looked at the radiator.

“That’s private,” said Theo.

Lucía looked at him. She opened her mouth. And Frederick watched her see, in Theo’s face, the same thing he had seen on Sunday in the north wing when Theo stood in front of the wall map for three seconds and did not ask what the marks were; watched her see that this was a door, and that it was shut, and that the person who had shut it was not going to open it, not for Lucía, not for anybody, not ever, however many questions she walked up to him with.

“What else?” she said, more quietly.

“That’s all,” said Theo. “Cake. A lift for food. We went in the garden and didn’t go in the pond.” He looked at his tray. “That’s all you’re getting. It’s his house.”

There was a pause at the round table.

“That’s a principle,” said June, slowly.

“Yeah,” said Theo. “It is.”

June looked at him for a long time across the table with her very serious face. Then she nodded, once, as though stamping something, and picked up her yoghurt, and said to Lucía, without looking at her, “Eat your lunch.”

And Lucía, after a moment, did.

At the counter at the end of the hall, Mrs Tolliver, with her ladle, looked across at the round table by the radiator, at nine people round it, eight of them eating and one of them looking at his sandwich with an expression he did not know he had; and reached up behind her without looking, and turned the radio up, by about the width of a fingernail.

---

At six that evening Dame M knocked on the door of the small sitting room in the north wing, where Frederick was at the table under the window, and came in with the folder under her arm and the green envelope in her hand.

She had given it to him on Sunday night, at the door of the small dining room, after the car had gone. He had read it then, in green, in the quick strong sloping hand, standing up, and given it back to her, because it was hers; it was addressed to her. It said:

Mr and Mrs Hartigan thank His Royal Highness for his kind invitation to Theo, which he is very pleased to accept. We will bring him at two o’clock and collect him at six. We are sorry this is so late. We were told about it at half past six this evening.

And underneath, after the name, A. Hartigan:

P.S. Thank you also for the other card. We have put it on the fridge.

“Sir,” said Dame M. “I thought you would want to answer it.”

“It’s to you.”

“It is addressed to me. It is not to me.” She held it out. “Nobody has ever put anything the Household sent them on a fridge before, sir. I think the reply should come from the person who drew it.”

He got out a plain card from the drawer in his room, and his father’s pen, and sat at the table under the window in the small sitting room, and wrote, in Mrs Forsythe’s loops, all the same height, to a woman who wrote in green so that she could find her own hand in a pile, and who had looked at him from his shoes to his hair on a step and told him two pieces of cake:

Dear Mrs Hartigan,

Thank you for bringing Theo. He had two pieces. He said please and thank you. He didn’t break anything, except that he made my mother laugh for about ten minutes, which isn’t breaking.

Nobody fell in the pond.

I’m sorry about the cat.

Frederick

He looked at it for a long time. Then he added, underneath, very small, because it was true:

P.S. Thank you for putting it on the fridge.

Dame M took it at the door. She did not read it. She put it in an envelope, a plain one, and wrote on the front in her own hand, Mrs A. Hartigan, 40 Dunmore Street, Flat 16, and then stopped.

“First class, sir?” she said. “Or second?”

Frederick thought about it.

“Theo says his mum says if I write, she’ll have to write back,” he said. “And then I’ll have to write back. And we’ll be at it till Christmas.”

“That is the usual consequence of correspondence, sir.”

“So second,” said Frederick. “Then she gets an extra day before she has to.”

Dame M looked at him for a moment, over the envelope, with an expression he had seen perhaps four times in his life now, and which he was nearly sure was the one she used when she was trying very hard not to laugh.

“Second it is, sir,” she said, and went out, and shut the door behind her quietly; and he heard her go along the corridor, not at her usual pace, the pace of somebody crossing a deck, but rather faster, and then, at the corner, he was almost certain, stop.