The Post Office

“I look like I’ve done a murder,” said Theo.

He held the photographs out on the flat of his hand, on the wall, at ten to eight on Tuesday morning, with the apple in his other hand; and Frederick, sitting beside him, with his bag between his feet, looked at them.

There were four, in a strip, on shiny paper, a little curled. Theo’s face, four times, from the front, against a white background, looking straight into the camera without any expression at all. Not smiling. Not not smiling. Just looking, the way he looked at a timetable when somebody told him the times had changed: steadily, with interest, without alarm, checking. It was, Frederick thought, exactly what Theo looked like, and nothing like him at all.

“You don’t look like you’ve done a murder.”

“I look like I’m thinking about one.” Theo bit the apple. “Kate did them. Sunday. Against the bathroom door, because it’s white. With her phone. She stood in the bath.” He chewed. “And printed them at the library on Monday, on the good printer, the one you have to ask for. Forty pence.” He looked at them with satisfaction. “The machine at the chemist’s is six pounds. Mum says six pounds for four photographs of a face you can see for nothing is robbery.”

Frederick looked at the photographs.

They were very good. The background was white, and even. The face was square to the camera, and in the middle, and the right size. The eyes were open. The mouth was shut. And in the bottom left-hand corner of each of the four, very small, against the white of the bathroom door, there was a curve. An orange one. About the size of a fingernail, in the photograph; a soft orange curve, coming in from the edge and going out again, with a darker ring on it, near the end.

He looked at it for a long time.

He did not know the rules about passport photographs. He had had one passport photograph taken in his life, in 2019, in a room in the north wing, by a man from the Household with a tripod and a grey sheet, while Miss Lindqvist held his chin; and he did not know what the rules were, except that there had been a great many of them and the man had read them out. But he thought that there was probably one about cats.

He opened his mouth.

“Don’t,” said Theo.

Frederick looked at him.

“Don’t help,” said Theo. He put the photographs back in the envelope they had come in, a brown one from the library, and put the envelope in the front pocket of his bag, the one with the zip, beside a cream envelope from 1979 with green writing on the front that Frederick could see the top of; and zipped it. “Mum said. You’re not to help with the passport either. She said it on Saturday, after you’d gone. She said, and that goes for the Post Office.” He bit the apple. “You’re not even to come.”

“I’m not coming.”

“Good.”

“I’m going home by Canal Street,” said Frederick.

Theo stopped chewing.

He looked at Frederick, on the wall, for about three seconds; steadily; with the apple halfway to his mouth.

“That’s not coming,” said Frederick. “That’s going home.”

Theo looked at him a moment longer. Then he looked across the yard, at the window of Mr Pavlik’s office, eighteen inches up, where Castellanos was sitting with his coffee on the sill; and back at Frederick.

“It’s a long way round,” he said.

“It’s eleven minutes longer,” said Frederick. “I asked.”

---

He had asked on Saturday, in the car, at the lights on the Axis, after I’d know.

“Sergeant,” he had said. “On Tuesday. After school. Could we go home by Canal Street?”

Castellanos had looked at him in the mirror.

“We can go home by anywhere, sir,” he had said. “That’s the job.” The lights had changed. “Is there anything on Canal Street, sir?”

“A Post Office.”

Castellanos had driven for a while.

“Designated office, sir,” he had said. “Passports. Opens nine till half past five. The queue’s worst at lunchtime and at the end of the day.” He indicated. “We’d want to be parked by twenty to four. Opposite. There’s a space outside the bakery, if there’s not a van in it.” He looked at the road. “There’ll be a van in it.”

“How do you know?”

“I asked, sir,” Castellanos had said. “On Thursday. When the letter came.” He turned in at the Palace. “I thought somebody might want to know.”

Tuesday was his mother’s. He had asked her for it on Sunday, at supper in the north wing; and she had looked at him over her glass for a long time, and said, in Swedish, that a Queen’s car parked outside a Post Office on Canal Street at four o’clock on a Tuesday would be in a newspaper by six, and the boy in the queue would be in it by seven; and that she would have him on Wednesday instead; and that he was to tell her all of it, on Wednesday, in order.

---

The day went the way the last days of a year go, in pieces, with nothing in them.

The examinations were done and the teachers had given up. Señora Ruiz played them a film with subtitles and went to sleep with her eyes open. Mr Ferrante gave back the history papers, with the red pen all over everybody’s but Theo’s, which had one word on the bottom in red, Ha, which nobody could explain and Theo would not. Mrs Tolliver had the radio on in the dinner queue, and it was the weather, and the weather was hot. At the table of nine by the radiator, which was off, and had been off since April, and was the only radiator in the building that anybody had ever been grateful to, Lucía said that she had heard from her cousin that Theo was going to Canada; and June put down her yoghurt with a click and said it’s not Canada; and Lucía said what’s the difference; and everybody at the table looked at Frederick, and Frederick looked at his tray, and Theo said there isn’t one, if you’re not going, and ate his pudding, and that was the end of it.

At a quarter past three the bell went. At the bike racks, Theo did up a shoelace that did not need doing up.

“Don’t come,” he said, to the shoelace.

“I’m not coming.”

“Good.” He stood up. He picked up his bag. He looked at the stop by the bike racks, where his father was standing, in his checked shirt, at the back of the queue for the 22, with his hands in his pockets, off an early, looking at the timetable on the post as though he had not written half of it. “Three thirty-one,” said Theo.

“Three thirty-one,” said Frederick. “Canal Street three forty-two.”

Theo looked at him.

“You’re not coming,” he said, and went to the stop.

---

There was a van in the space outside the bakery.

Castellanos stopped behind it with the engine running and looked at it, a white van with a picture of a loaf on the side, with the back doors open, and a man in an apron carrying trays out of it into the bakery, one at a time, slowly, the way men carry trays when they are paid by the hour. And the man in the apron came out for another tray, and looked at the dark blue car stopped behind his van with the engine running, and at the large man at the wheel of it, who was looking back at him without any expression; and went in with the tray, and came out again without one, and shut the back doors of the van, and got into it, and drove away.

Castellanos pulled into the space. He turned off the engine.

“Twenty to four, sir,” he said.

Frederick looked out of the window.

Across Canal Street, between the launderette and a shop that sold wool, there was the Post Office. A low building of yellow brick, older than anything on either side of it, with a flat roof, and a flagpole on the roof with nothing on it, and over the door, carved in the stone, the eagle without the crown, with its wings half open, the way it was on the post boxes. And under the eagle, in brass letters that had been polished so often that the edges had gone soft, POST OFFICE. And beside the door, a big window, very clean, with a notice in it in the Post Office’s blue, PASSPORTS. PENSIONS. SAVINGS. MONEY ORDERS., and behind the window, inside, in the light, the queue.

He could see all of it. That was the thing about the window; it was very big, and very clean, and the light inside was on, though it was June, and he could see through it from the back seat of the car on the other side of the road the way you see into an aquarium. A long room, with a wooden floor. A counter at the far end, with a glass screen along the top of it, and three windows in the glass, and a woman behind one of them, and nobody behind the other two. A rope on brass posts, in a zigzag, between the door and the counter, to keep the queue in order. And the queue in it, standing, in the order it had arrived in, going back and forth along the zigzag, eleven people.

He counted them. Eleven.

“Four minutes a customer, sir,” said Castellanos, to the windscreen. “On average. Parcels five. Pensions three.” He looked at the window. “Passports, I don’t know.”

“How do you know the others?”

“I sat here on Friday, sir,” said Castellanos, “for my lunch.”

---

The 22 came at three forty-four.

It came down Canal Street from the direction of the market, slowly, with 22 DEPOT on the front, two minutes late, which Frederick had known it would be from the moment he saw it, because it would have stopped at the lamppost where the lady with the dog was, and the lady with the dog was never quick. It stopped at the stop outside the launderette, with a sigh. The doors opened.

Mr Hartigan got off, in his checked shirt. He turned round at the bottom of the step and said something to the driver, who was a woman with grey hair in a plait, who said something back and laughed; and Mr Hartigan lifted one finger at her, and she lifted one back.

Theo got off behind him, with his bag.

And behind Theo, slowly, with a stick in one hand and a lead in the other, a very small old woman in a headscarf; and at the end of the lead, a dog. A very small, very old dog, white, with a brown patch over one eye, in a tartan coat, though it was June, who came down the step of the 22 one step at a time, sideways, and stood on the pavement and looked up Canal Street and down it with an expression of an animal that has bitten better men than anybody on it.

Theo, on the pavement, turned round, and looked straight across the road at the dark blue car outside the bakery.

He did not wave. He did not lift a finger. He pointed, very discreetly, at the dog, with one finger held low by his side. Then he pointed at his own ankle.

Bruno, said his mouth.

---

Mrs Hartigan was already there.

She was standing outside the door of the Post Office, under the eagle, in her coat, though it was June, with her handbag over her arm and a brown envelope held against her chest with both hands; and she looked, Frederick thought, even from across the road, like a woman who had come off a night shift at eight that morning and gone to bed at nine and got up at three to stand outside a Post Office, and was going back on another at half past seven, and had views on all of it.

She looked at her husband and her son coming along the pavement from the stop. She looked at her watch.

Then she looked across the road at the dark blue car.

She looked at it for a long time. Frederick, in the back seat, did not move. Then she turned round, and opened the door of the Post Office, and held it for her husband and her son and Mrs Szymanska and Bruno, all four of them, one at a time, Bruno last and slowest, sideways over the step; and went in after them.

They joined the queue at three forty-seven. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Mrs Szymanska and Bruno, fifteen.

“Eleven ahead, sir,” said Castellanos. “Forty-four minutes.”

“One window,” said Frederick.

“One window,” said Castellanos. “Forty-four minutes.”

---

It was the longest forty-four minutes of Frederick’s life, and he had stood at the chain at the Tomb on the eleventh of November in front of a crowd, and in the hall in Brooklyn on the first of May while his father apologised.

He watched the queue.

He watched it move along the zigzag, one person at a time, every four minutes, approximately; a man with seven parcels in a stack, who took eleven; a young woman with a baby on her front, who took two; an old man in a cap who bought one stamp and paid for it in pennies, counted out onto the counter one at a time, and took six. He watched the woman behind the glass, who had grey hair and glasses on a chain round her neck, put the glasses on for every customer and take them off between, every time, as though they were a part of the procedure. He watched the Hartigans move along the rope, three people and a space, turning at the end of each row of the zigzag and coming back, so that sometimes they were facing the window and sometimes they had their backs to it.

When they faced the window, Theo looked at the car.

He did not do anything. He did not wave, or point, or make a face. He looked at it, across the road, through the big clean window and the windscreen, steadily, every time he came round the end of a row; and then turned at the next post, and had his back to it, and Frederick could see the back of his head and his father’s checked shirt and his mother’s coat, standing very straight, holding the brown envelope against her chest with both hands, as though somebody might try to take it.

At four o’clock Bruno bit somebody.

It was a man in a suit, in the row in front, who had stepped back without looking; and Bruno, at the end of the lead, at ankle height, in the tartan coat, did what Bruno did; and the man in the suit said something, which Frederick could not hear, and which made the young woman with the baby put her hands over its ears; and Mrs Szymanska said something back, which made the man in the suit go red; and Mr Hartigan, in the row behind, without saying anything at all, stepped across, very slowly, and stood between Bruno and everybody, the way a man stands at a door he is not going to open.

Castellanos made a small sound in his throat.

“Sir,” he said.

“I know,” said Frederick. “Bruno has bitten somebody else.”

Castellanos did not ask what that meant. He looked at the window for a moment longer, at the large man in the checked shirt standing between a dog and a Post Office.

“Good positioning, that,” he said, to the windscreen.

---

They reached the counter at eighteen minutes past four.

Frederick sat forward on the back seat.

He saw the woman with the glasses on the chain put the glasses on. He saw Mrs Hartigan step up to the window in the glass, and put the brown envelope down on the counter, and open it, and take things out of it, one at a time, and pass them under the glass, through the gap at the bottom, the way you pass things to somebody in a bank, or a prison. A form, several pages, folded. A piece of paper with a seal on it in a plastic sleeve, which was a birth certificate from St Joseph’s Hospital, Milwaukee. And a small brown envelope from the library, which was four photographs.

He saw the woman behind the glass take the form out and unfold it and read it, line by line, with her glasses on, the way Mrs Hartigan read a recipe. He saw her take the birth certificate out of its sleeve and hold it up to the light, and look at the seal, and put it down. He saw her look up from the birth certificate, through the glass, at Theo, standing beside his mother; for about three seconds; steadily; checking.

He saw her open the small brown envelope and take the strip of four photographs out of it and look at them.

And then he saw her stop.

He saw her look at the photographs, and then at Theo, and then at the photographs. He saw her hold the strip up, close to her glasses, and turn it slightly towards the light. And then he saw her put one finger on it; at the bottom; at the left-hand corner; on each of the four, one after another, very precisely, tap, tap, tap, tap.

And say something, through the glass.

Mrs Hartigan looked at the strip.

Mr Hartigan looked at the strip, over her shoulder, with his glasses on.

Theo looked at the strip.

And then Theo turned round, slowly, in the Post Office on Canal Street, at the counter, with the whole queue behind him, and looked straight out of the big clean window, across the road, at the dark blue car outside the bakery; at the back seat of it; at Frederick; with an expression that Frederick could read from forty feet away, through two panes of glass, without any difficulty at all, and which said, quite clearly, you knew.

Frederick looked back at him.

You said don’t, he said, without any sound, very slowly, so that it could be read.

Theo looked at him a moment longer.

Then his face did something, at the corner of the mouth, and stopped doing it, with an effort; and he turned back round to the counter.

---

“Problem, sir?” said Castellanos.

“There’s a cat in it,” said Frederick.

Castellanos did not say anything.

“In the photographs,” said Frederick. “In the corner. His tail. Kate took them against the bathroom door and Kringle was on the side of the bath.” He looked at the window. “I saw it. This morning. On the wall.”

“And didn’t say, sir.”

“I wasn’t to help.”

Castellanos was quiet for a moment.

“No, sir,” he said.

---

There was a booth in the corner.

Frederick had seen it from the car without knowing what it was: a tall grey box at the end of the counter, by the wall, with an orange curtain across the front of it and a slot in the side and a picture on the outside of a smiling woman, who was not, Frederick thought, going to get a passport. The woman with the glasses on the chain pointed at it, through the glass. And Mrs Hartigan looked at it, and at her husband; and Mr Hartigan took out of the back pocket of his trousers a wallet, a brown leather one, worn pale at the fold, and opened it, and looked inside it, and closed it, and went to the booth.

Frederick watched him feed it.

Six pound coins, one at a time, into the slot in the side, each one going in with a small sound that Frederick could not hear and could imagine exactly. He had never seen a pound coin go into a machine. He had four of his own, in a sock, in the drawer of the desk in his room, and had never put them into anything. He watched his friend’s father feed a machine six pounds, which Mrs Hartigan said was robbery, because there had been a cat on the side of a bath.

Theo went into the booth. The orange curtain fell shut behind him.

There was a pause.

And then a flash. White, through the orange curtain, so that the whole booth glowed for an instant like a lamp. And another. And another. And another.

Four.

Theo came out. They waited, the three of them, by the booth, beside the slot, not looking at each other; and after about a minute the slot made a sound and put out a strip of paper, and Mrs Hartigan took it, and looked at it.

And shook her head.

She held it out to her husband. He looked at it. He took the wallet out of his back pocket again.

“What’s wrong with it?” said Frederick.

He said it to the window. Castellanos did not answer, because Castellanos could not see the strip any more than Frederick could; but Frederick watched Mrs Hartigan’s face as she held it, and Mr Hartigan’s as he fed the slot again, six more coins, and Theo’s as he went back in behind the orange curtain; and he knew.

Flash.

Flash.

Flash.

Flash.

The strip came out of the slot. Mrs Hartigan looked at it. She put one hand over her eyes.

Theo came out of the booth. He did not look at his mother. He did not look at the strip. He turned round, very slowly, in the corner of the Post Office on Canal Street, by the booth with the orange curtain, and looked straight out of the window at the car; and his face, which had been the face in Kate’s four photographs, the face of somebody thinking about a murder, did the thing at the corner of the mouth, and went on doing it, and could not stop; and he put his hand over his own mouth and turned away and his shoulders went.

He had been smiling, Frederick understood. In all eight. Because he knew who was watching.

---

Frederick lay down.

He did it without deciding to. He slid down the back seat of the dark blue car, sideways, onto his elbow and then onto his back, along the seat, with his knees up and his head by the far door and his school shoes against the other one, until there was nothing of him at the window at all; and lay there, on the leather, looking at the roof lining of the car, which was grey, and had a small mark on it shaped like Florida.

There was a silence in the front seat.

“Sir?” said Castellanos.

“He can’t do it if I’m watching,” said Frederick, to the roof.

Castellanos did not say anything for some time.

Then Frederick heard him move, in the driver’s seat; and saw, upside down, over the back of the seat, the top of the Sergeant’s head turn, and the side of his face, which was looking across Canal Street, through the windscreen, at the Post Office.

“He’s looking for you, sir,” said Castellanos. “At the window.”

“Is he?”

“He’s looking at the back seat. He can’t see you. He’s looking at me.” A pause. “I’m not doing anything, sir.”

“Good.”

“He’s going back in the booth,” said Castellanos. “Mr Hartigan’s paying again. That’s eighteen pound forty, sir, with the library.” A pause. “Curtain’s shut.”

Frederick lay on the back seat and looked at Florida.

“Flash,” said Castellanos, quietly, to the windscreen.

“Flash.”

“Flash.”

“Flash.”

There was a long pause.

“He’s out,” said Castellanos. “Mrs Hartigan’s got the strip.” A pause. “She’s looking at it.” A longer one. “She’s showing Mr Hartigan.” A pause. “Mr Hartigan’s putting his wallet away, sir.”

Frederick shut his eyes.

“Can I get up?”

“Not yet, sir,” said Castellanos. “They’re going back to the counter. Lady’s waving them back up to the front. Nobody in the queue’s saying anything.” A pause. “Dog’s saying something.”

---

He lay on the back seat for eleven more minutes while Castellanos told him what the counter did, in the voice he used for the radio, low and level, to the windscreen, without any expression, the way a man calls a race he has no money on.

That the woman with the glasses on the chain had put her glasses on, and taken the new strip, and looked at it, and at Theo, and at it, and had not tapped anything. That she had taken a pair of scissors and cut two photographs off the strip, and clipped them to the form, and given the other two back under the glass. That she had asked Theo something, through the glass, and Theo had answered, and she had asked him something else, and he had answered that, and she had looked at him a moment longer and nodded.

“What did she ask?”

“Couldn’t say, sir,” said Castellanos. “Short. Two questions. Two answers.” A pause. “He stood up straight for it.”

That she had turned the form round and pushed it under the glass and Mrs Hartigan had signed it, in black, not in green, and Mr Hartigan had signed it under her; and that the woman had signed it herself, on the other side of the glass, and taken a stamp from a rack, a rubber one, on a wooden handle, and inked it on a pad, and brought it down on the form, once, hard, with her whole arm, as though it were the only stamp she would bring down all year.

“She’s taking the money, sir,” said Castellanos. “Mr Hartigan’s paying. Notes. He’s counting.” A pause. “He’s got it exact.” A longer pause. “She’s giving him a receipt. He’s reading it. He’s putting it in his wallet. He’s putting his wallet away.”

A pause.

“She’s put it in a tray, sir,” said Castellanos. “The form. And the birth certificate, and the photograph. Grey tray. On the shelf behind her. With the others.” He was quiet for a moment. “That’s it gone, sir. To whoever decides.”

Frederick lay on the back seat of the car and looked at the roof.

He thought about the tray. A grey tray on a shelf behind a counter in a yellow brick building on Canal Street, with an eagle over the door without a crown, with a form in it, and a seal from Milwaukee, and two photographs of a boy who was not smiling, because the person he would have smiled at was lying down in a car; going on, tomorrow, from the tray to somebody else, and from them to somebody else, who would look at it, and decide, and had no idea who it was for, or where it was going, or why; and did not need to; because that was the whole point of it.

His own passport was in a drawer in the Household office. He had seen it twice. He did not know who had decided it.

“Can I get up?”

“You can get up, sir,” said Castellanos. “They’re coming out.”

---

He sat up.

They were on the pavement under the eagle, the three of them, in the sun. Mrs Hartigan with her handbag and the brown envelope, empty now, folded small in her hand. Mr Hartigan putting his wallet in his back pocket. And Theo, between them, in the grey sweatshirt with the hole at the cuff, holding two strips of photographs, one in each hand, by the corners, the way you hold something wet.

Behind them, through the big clean window, the queue had closed up, and Mrs Szymanska was at the counter with Bruno, and the man in the suit was standing a long way from both of them.

Theo said something to his mother.

His mother looked at him; and then across the road, at the car; and said something back, short, which Frederick could not hear. And Mr Hartigan said something, shorter. And Theo looked both ways, up Canal Street and down it, twice, carefully, the way his father had taught him, the way a man who drives a bus teaches his son to cross a road; and crossed it, between a van and a 9 that was late, to the dark blue car outside the bakery.

Frederick put the window down.

Theo stood on the pavement by the back door of the car and looked in at him. He was a little out of breath. His face was doing nothing in particular.

“Three weeks,” said Theo. “She said. About.”

“Good.”

“She asked if I was me,” said Theo. “And I said I was. And then she asked if I was going anywhere soon, and I said yes. And she said good for you.” He considered. “That’s all. That’s the whole thing. That’s a passport.”

“Yes.”

“You hid,” said Theo.

“Yes.”

Theo looked at him a moment longer through the open window.

Then he held out the two strips of photographs.

“These are no good,” he said. “Mum says they’re no good to anybody and she’s not having them in the house, because they cost twelve pounds and every time she looks at them she’ll think of the twelve pounds.” He held them out further. “You can have them.”

Frederick took them.

Eight photographs, on two strips, against a pale grey curtain. Theo’s face, eight times, from the front, square to the camera, in the middle, the right size, with the eyes open. And smiling. In every one. Not the smile in the school photographs on the wall of the flat, or the one the photographer in October had made everybody do. The real one, the one Frederick saw across the yard at ten to eight, and at the round table, and on the wall in the snow, and at the end of an apple; coming up through the face from somewhere underneath, in the first one, and getting worse in the second, and in the third and fourth not even trying to stop. And in the second strip, worse; and in the last one, the eighth, with his eyes shut and his hand coming up towards his mouth, too late, laughing.

Frederick looked at them.

“Kate’s keeping the cat ones,” said Theo. “She says they’re the best photographs anybody’s ever taken of Kringle.” He stepped back from the car. He looked across the road at his parents, under the eagle, waiting, his mother with her watch, his father with his hands in his pockets. “I’ve got to go. Mum’s on at half seven. She has to have her tea.”

“Theo.”

Theo looked back.

Frederick did not know what he had been going to say. He looked at the boy on the pavement on Canal Street, in the sun, in front of a bakery, with the front pocket of his bag zipped shut over a cream envelope with green writing on it, and nothing on the bottom of the letter inside yet, and three weeks to wait for a passport, and ten to wait for a lake.

“The 9’s late,” he said.

Theo looked at him. Then he looked up Canal Street, where the 9 had stopped at the stop outside the launderette, with its doors open, four minutes after the 22 that was behind it.

“Nobody knows why,” said Theo.

And he went back across the road, looking both ways, twice, to the eagle.

---

They did not drive off until the Hartigans had gone.

Castellanos sat with his hands on the wheel and the engine off and watched them walk along Canal Street towards Dunmore Street, the three of them, on the pavement, in the sun, past the launderette and the shop that sold wool and the stop; Mrs Hartigan in her coat, with her watch, walking quickly, because she had to have her tea; Mr Hartigan beside her, slowly, with his hands in his pockets, as though he were not going to hurry for anybody; Theo between them, with his bag, a little behind, walking the way he walked, as though he had all the time in the world and knew where all of it was.

At the corner, Mr Hartigan turned round.

He looked back along Canal Street, at the dark blue car outside the bakery, for about three seconds; steadily; the way he looked at the road through the windscreen of the 22.

He lifted one finger, about an inch, at his side.

Castellanos lifted one off the wheel.

And they went round the corner, and were gone.

Castellanos started the engine.

“Home, sir,” he said. It was not a question.

“Home,” said Frederick.

They pulled out from outside the bakery. Frederick sat in the back seat with the two strips of photographs in his hands, on his knees, and looked at them, all the way down Canal Street, and over the bridge, and along the river, and up the Axis; at the eighth one, mostly, the one with the eyes shut and the hand coming up too late.

“Good ones, sir?” said Castellanos, at the lights, to the windscreen.

“They’re no good,” said Frederick. “They’re smiling.”

“Ah,” said Castellanos.

The lights changed.

“Shame, that,” he said, and drove on.