The Wall

“Last day, sir,” said Castellanos, at the bins.

He said it to the windscreen, with the engine running, at seventeen minutes to eight, the way he had said we’re here, sir on the second of September and every school morning since; and then he turned the engine off, which he did not usually do until Frederick had gone, and sat with his hands on the wheel.

“Yes,” said Frederick.

“Half past twelve, sir. Last day. By the bins.” Castellanos looked at the side gate, and the custodian’s bins, and the path round the back of the gym, in the early sun. “I’ll be in Mr Pavlik’s. He says there’s a cake.”

“Whose cake?”

“Nobody’s, sir. He says there’s a cake on the last day. Every year. Since 1988. Nobody knows who brings it.” Castellanos considered the bins. “He says it’s not for anybody. It’s just there.”

Frederick looked at the back of his head.

“Like a pothole,” he said.

Castellanos did not say anything for a moment. Then the corner of his mouth, which Frederick could see in the mirror, did something it had done perhaps four times since September, and stopped.

“Like a pothole, sir,” he said.

---

He went through the side gate, past the bins, and along the back of the gym, the way he had gone every morning since the second of September, so that he arrived like anybody off the bus; and round the corner of the gym; and into the yard.

It was the same yard. The same tarmac, gone soft at the edges in the heat. The same bike racks, with seven bikes in them, because it was the last day and people had come in on bikes who never did, to ride home on them with their arms out. The same stop by the bike racks, with the timetable on the post, in small grey print, every stop and every time. The same low wall.

He came round the corner of the gym, and across the clear patch, which was not a clear patch any more, and had not been since December; and nobody stopped talking when he came; and nobody looked; except one person.

Theo was on the wall.

He was sitting at the end nearest the gym, with his bag between his feet, in the grey sweatshirt with the hole at the cuff, although it was eighty degrees, because it was the grey sweatshirt and it was the last day; eating an apple. With enormous concentration. Turning it in his hand, and looking at it, and finding the place he wanted, and biting, and chewing, and looking at the bitten place as though it had told him something he needed to think about. The way he had been eating one on the second of September, at a quarter to eight, when a boy in a new navy jumper, on a day of seventy-eight degrees, had come round the corner of the gym and stopped.

He did not look up.

Frederick sat down beside him on the wall.

Theo went on eating the apple. He ate it right round, in a spiral, slowly, the way he did; and then he reached down into his bag, without looking, and took out another one, and held it out sideways, along the wall, at about the height of Frederick’s hand.

Frederick looked at it.

It was small, and lopsided, with a brown mark on one side and a leaf still on the stalk. It was not a shop apple. It had not been to a palace. It had come out of a paper bag in the canteen of a bus depot on Dunmore Street, from the man whose brother had trees.

“Last of the store ones,” said Theo, with his mouth full. “He says. From the shed. Since October.” He held it out. “He says the new ones are August.”

Frederick took it.

He held it in his hand, and turned it over, and looked at it; and found the place he wanted, which was the side without the brown mark; and bit.

It was soft, and sharp, and a little floury, from eight months in a shed; and it tasted of nothing he had ever eaten at a table with a cloth on it.

“It’s not a bad apple,” he said. “For a depot one.”

Theo did not look at him. But his mouth did something at the corner, and went on doing it, and he let it.

---

They ate the apples.

The yard went on round them, loudly, the way a yard goes on on the last day: people running who did not usually run, and people shouting who did not usually shout, and Grant and Gallagher throwing a tennis ball against the wall of the gym and missing it, and Lucía going past with June, arguing, about the cello, and Devon Price going past on his own and lifting his hand to them, just his hand, at the height of his shoulder, the way you wave at somebody, and not bowing at all. In the window of Mr Pavlik’s office, eighteen inches up, Castellanos was sitting with his coffee on the sill, looking at nothing, which meant he was looking at the wall.

Theo finished his apple. He ate the bottom of the core. He put the stalk in his pocket.

Then he reached down into his bag again, and unzipped the front pocket, the one where he kept his bus pass and his library card and nothing else, and took out the envelope.

It was the cream one from Mr Dabrowski’s box, from 1979, not quite as cream as it had been, with green writing on the front in his mother’s steady hand: His Majesty the King. Columbia Palace. New Westminster. The flap was tucked, not sealed. There was a stamp on it already, in the corner, first class, with the King’s head on it, looking left.

“Dad bought it,” said Theo, looking at the stamp. “Tuesday. At the counter. While Mum was signing.” He turned the envelope over. “Sixty-two pence. Out of his own pocket. He said a man pays for his own stamp.”

He untucked the flap. He took out the letters inside; his mother’s two green pages, folded in three; and behind them a single sheet, folded once, of cream laid paper, with a smaller sheet folded inside it and a smaller one inside that. He took out the single sheet and put the rest back. He unfolded it on his knee, on the grey sweatshirt, with the writing facing down, so that only the back of it showed; the blank back of a sheet of cream laid paper, with the faint lines in it like a field from a train.

Then he turned it over, on his knee, and bent over it, with his arm round it, the way you do in a test when the person next to you is a cheat.

Frederick looked at the yard.

He looked at it very hard. He looked at Grant and Gallagher and the tennis ball, and the bikes in the racks, and the timetable on the post by the stop, and the window of Mr Pavlik’s office, and Castellanos in it; and at the end of the bike racks, by the stop, the post box. A blue one. The Post Office’s colour, with the eagle on it without a crown, and a slot with a lip over it against the rain, and a small enamel plate below the slot that said, in white, NEXT COLLECTION 8.30. He had walked past it every morning for nine months, on his way across the yard from the corner of the gym to the wall. He had never once seen anybody use it.

He looked at it now, so that he would not look at anything else.

Beside him, on the wall, Theo held out his hand, palm up, sideways, without looking, at about the height of the pens in Frederick’s shirt pocket.

“Freddie,” he said. “Pen.”

---

Frederick gave him a pen.

He took it out of his shirt pocket, where there were three, because Bridget packed eleven every morning and he had long ago stopped taking more than three out of the bag; and he put it in Theo’s hand, without looking, the way you pass somebody the salt.

Theo said “Ta.”

And bent over the sheet on his knee, with his arm round it.

Frederick looked at the post box. He heard the pen. Not much of it. A short sound, on the paper, on the knee, over the grey sweatshirt: a word, perhaps; perhaps two; with a stop in the middle of it, as though somebody had begun one thing and decided on another. Then nothing. Then, very short, one more stroke.

Then the pen stopped.

Theo sat up.

He looked at what he had written, on his knee, for about three seconds; steadily; with interest, without alarm; checking. Then he folded the sheet, once, along its crease, and put it back in the envelope, behind his mother’s green pages, and tucked the smaller sheets in with it, and held the envelope on his knee with both hands.

“Theo,” he said.

Frederick looked at him.

“That’s what I put,” said Theo. He was not looking at Frederick. He was looking at the envelope. “At the bottom. Just Theo. Not T. Hartigan, and not obedient servant, and not yours sincerely, and not love, as a joke.” He turned the envelope over. “He said it like that. In the corridor. Hello, Theo. Not Master Hartigan, like Dame M. Not young man. Just Theo. Like he’d always said it.” He looked at the stamp. “So I put it like that back.”

Frederick did not say anything.

He did not know what to say. He knew, as exactly as he knew the timetable of the 22, that his father would read the letter on the left-hand side of the tray, at the desk with the top worn pale where his wrists went, with his glasses on, slowly, every word, the way Mr Hartigan read the crossword; and that he would get to the bottom of the page, to the one word on its own at the bottom with no surname after it; and that his face would do whatever it had done in the corridor that Frederick had no heading for at all; and that nobody would see it.

He knew it. He did not say it. It was not his to say.

“Good,” he said.

Theo looked at him then, for about three seconds.

“Yes,” he said. “I thought so.”

He held the pen out. Frederick took it back, and put it in his shirt pocket, with the other two.

---

Theo sealed the envelope.

He did it the way his father did everything, slowly, properly, as though it were the last thing he would do that day: ran his tongue along the flap, which made him shut his eyes; and folded the flap down; and pressed it, along its whole length, with his thumb, from one end to the other, twice.

Then he looked at the stamp.

He looked at it for some time. The King’s head, very small, in the corner of the cream envelope, in profile, looking left.

“Sorry,” said Theo, to the stamp.

Frederick looked at him.

“I licked the flap,” said Theo. “Right next to him.” He considered the stamp. “It seemed rude not to say something.”

Frederick bit the inside of his cheek, on the left, hard, the way Guardsman Bevan had said.

---

The bell went at five past eight. Not the bell for homeroom; the first bell, the one that meant ten minutes, which nobody had ever paid any attention to in the history of Ellicott and which went anyway, every morning, because it always had.

Theo stood up.

He put his bag on his shoulder. He did not put the envelope in it. He held it in his right hand, by the edge, the way you hold something wet, and he looked across the yard, past Grant and Gallagher and the tennis ball, past the bikes, to the end of the bike racks and the stop and the blue post box with the eagle on it and NEXT COLLECTION 8.30.

He looked at Frederick.

“Come on, then,” he said.

---

They walked across the yard to the post box.

It was eleven paces from the wall to the end of the bike racks. Frederick counted, because he always counted. Nobody looked at them. Two boys walking across a schoolyard on the last day of seventh grade, at seven minutes past eight, one in a grey sweatshirt with a hole at the cuff and one in a blue shirt done up to the top, with an envelope; and nobody in the yard of Ellicott High School looked twice, because there was nothing to look at; because it had stopped being interesting by the end of the first week, and had stayed stopped.

They stopped at the post box.

It was taller than Frederick had thought, from the wall: about the height of his shoulder. Blue, and newly painted, with the paint a little thick where it had been done over the old paint without anybody scraping it first. The eagle without a crown, in relief, on the front, with its wings half open. The slot, with its lip. The enamel plate, NEXT COLLECTION 8.30, and under it, smaller, MON TO FRI, and under that, smaller still, POSTED HERE BEFORE 8.30 FOR DELIVERY IN THE DISTRICT NEXT WORKING DAY.

Saturday, Frederick thought. Second post. Columbia Palace. He did the sum before he could stop himself. Collected at half past eight. Sorted at the depot on Fourteenth Street by noon. Out on Saturday morning, on the round that went up the Axis, in a sack, with everybody else’s; into the Household’s post room, which was in the basement by the kitchens, at about ten; into a tray; up the back stairs; onto a desk.

Theo held the envelope up to the slot.

He held it there, with the edge of it just inside the lip, under the eagle, and did not let go.

He did not say anything. He stood at the post box at the end of the bike racks by the stop for the 22, holding a cream envelope from 1979 at the slot with two fingers, in the sun, looking at it; for about three seconds; and then a little longer; and Frederick, beside him, did not say anything either, and did not help.

“Huh,” said Theo, quietly. To the post box.

He let go.

The envelope went in. Frederick heard it go: a soft sound, and a short one, of something light falling a short way onto other things in the dark; and then nothing.

They stood there.

They stood at the post box for a while, the two of them, side by side, not looking at each other, with their hands in their pockets, listening to the inside of a post box, in which there was nothing now to hear; the way people stand at a platform after a train has gone. On the stop beside them, the timetable on the post said, in small grey print, every stop and every time, from the first bus out of the depot at five fifty-two in the morning to the last one back at eleven forty at night. In the window of Mr Pavlik’s office, across the yard, eighteen inches up, Castellanos had put down his coffee.

“That’s that, then,” said Theo.

“Yes.”

Theo took his hand out of his pocket. He put it, flat, on the top of the post box, for a moment; the way his mother put her hand on a table; the way Frederick had watched Castellanos, from his window, under the lamps, put his hand on another blue post box at the corner of the Axis at midnight nine days ago, with a different cream envelope gone into it. Theo did not know that. He could not possibly have known it. He put his hand on the top of the post box, flat, because it was the kind of thing you did, apparently, if you were the kind of person who had just posted that kind of letter; and then he took it off.

“Homeroom,” he said.

---

Mr Abernathy read the register at a quarter past eight, for the last time that year.

He read it the way he had read it every morning for nine months: from the long thin book in the blue cloth cover, with the pen from the inside pocket of the brown jacket, in the same voice, flat and clear and not personal; 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 name time to arrive.

“Abrams.”

“Here.”

“Bello.”

“Here.”

The radiators said nothing. The window beside Frederick, three from the back, was open at the top, because it was eighty degrees, and through it he could hear the yard emptying, and a bus somewhere, and the gulls from the river. Through it, if he turned his head, he could see the end of the bike racks; and the stop; and the blue post box.

He did not turn his head.

“Gallagher.”

“Here.”

“Grant.”

“Here.”

“Gupta.”

“Here.”

And at twenty-eight minutes past eight, as Mr Abernathy said “Hanover,” a small van came into the road outside the yard.

Frederick heard it before he saw it. A diesel, small, and the sound of it slowing, and stopping, with its engine running, by the stop for the 22, at the end of the bike racks. He turned his head. He could not help it. And beside him, on the aisle side, across the gap the width of an arm, he felt Theo turn his.

It was blue. The Post Office’s colour, with the eagle on the side without a crown. A man got out of it, in a blue shirt with short sleeves and a bag over his shoulder, and walked to the post box, not hurrying, the way a man walks to a post box he walks to every morning; and took a key from a chain on his belt, and opened the front of the post box, the whole front, with the eagle on it, like a door; and reached in.

“Here,” said Frederick, to the window.

Mr Abernathy did not say the next name.

Frederick heard him not say it. He heard the pause after Hanover, the small pause, the length of a breath, go on; and go on; and not stop. He heard the room hear it too. Twenty-seven people, at their desks, in the order of the list, from the door to the windows, back to front, sitting in a silence that had gone on longer than a breath, longer than any pause Mr Abernathy had ever left after any name in nine months; and nobody said anything.

Out in the road, the man in the blue shirt took the letters out of the post box. All of them; a handful; a few white ones, and a brown one, and in the middle of them, Frederick could see, from the desk by the window, three from the back, across the yard and the bike racks and the road, a cream one. He put them in the bag over his shoulder. He shut the front of the post box, with the eagle on it. He turned the key. He walked back to the van, not hurrying, and got in, and shut the door; and the van pulled away from the stop, slowly, and went off up the road towards Fourteenth Street and the sorting office; and round the corner; and was gone.

Frederick turned his head back from the window.

Mr Abernathy was standing at the front of Room 14, behind his desk, with the blue cloth book open in one hand and the pen in the other, and he was looking out of the window too. Past Frederick. Past Theo. At the road, where the van had been. He went on looking at it for a moment more, at the empty road and the stop and the blue post box at the end of the bike racks, with the long face that never told you anything and the scar very white on the back of his left hand; and then he looked down at the book.

“Hartigan,” said Mr Abernathy.

“Here,” said Theo.

---

When he had read the last name, and left the last pause, and closed the blue cloth book, Mr Abernathy did not stand up.

He sat at the desk at the front with the closed book under his hand and looked at the room; all of it, the rows, from the door to the windows, back to front; the way he had looked at it on the second of September, when the line had come in and he had said sit in the order you came in.

“That is the last time I shall read that list,” he said.

Nobody said anything.

“In September,” said Mr Abernathy, “I shall read another. It will be the same list, with one more name on it.” He paused. “You will sit in the same places.” He paused again, the length of a breath. “All of you.”

He stood up. He put the blue cloth book in the drawer of the desk, and the pen in the inside pocket of the brown jacket.

“Go,” he said. “Have a summer. Do not set fire to anything.”

---

Ellicott finished at half past twelve on the last day, by a rule older than anybody.

The morning went the way the last morning of a year goes, in pieces, with everything in them. Mr Ferrante finished the book about the ship, out loud, in history, with the beard, and closed it, and did not say anything for a long time, and then said well, and let them go early. Ms Varga, in a paint smock that had never been washed, gave everybody back their portfolios, and gave Frederick back his, and said that his bowl of fruit in September had looked like a set of instructions for assembling a bowl of fruit, and that his last drawing, of the stop by the bike racks, in May, looked like a set of instructions for missing a bus, which was, she said, progress. At the table of nine by the radiator there was no lunch, because there was no lunchtime, and they sat there anyway, at eleven, all nine of them, in the chairs nobody had moved since the first day, and did not eat anything, and Lucía cried, for no reason, and June said that was not a reason, and Lucía said it was the last day, and June said that’s not a reason either, and put her arm round her.

At twenty-five past twelve he was at the bike racks.

Theo was at the stop.

He was standing at the back of the queue for the 22, with his bag on his shoulder, between a woman with shopping and a boy from the eighth grade with a bike he was not going to be allowed to take on the bus; looking at the timetable on the post, in small grey print; and Frederick stood at the end of the bike racks, beside the blue post box, which was empty, and looked at him.

“Twelve thirty-one,” said Theo, to the timetable.

“Twelve thirty-one,” said Frederick.

“It’s Dad,” said Theo. “Driving. He swapped. With Doug. For the last day.” He looked up the road, towards Fourteenth Street. “Doug’s having his Easter.”

---

The 22 came at twelve thirty-three.

Two minutes late, from Fourteenth Street, with 22 DEPOT on the front; slowly, with a sigh, to the stop by the bike racks; and the doors opened; and at the wheel, in the blue shirt of the transit authority with the crest on the pocket, with his glasses on and a pencil behind his ear, was Mr Hartigan.

He did not look at the queue. He looked through the windscreen at the road, the way he always did; and the woman with the shopping got on, and showed her pass, and said Peter, and he said Maureen, as a statement of fact; and the boy from the eighth grade was told about the bike, and got off again; and Theo got on.

He showed his pass. His father looked at it, through his glasses, for about three seconds, as though he had never seen it before and had to check it.

“Theo,” said Mr Hartigan.

“Dad,” said Theo.

And went down the bus.

He did not sit by the aisle. He went past the seats by the aisle, all of them, to a seat halfway down on the left, on the side facing the bike racks; and sat by the window. And Frederick, standing at the end of the bike racks by the blue post box, saw him sit down, and put his bag on his knee, and look out through the glass; at the yard, and the gym, and the wall, and the bike racks, and the post box, and at him.

The doors closed.

Then the little window at the top of the big window, the one that slid, slid open, with a bang; and Theo’s face came up into the gap, sideways, pressed against the frame.

“Freddie,” he shouted.

It went across the stop, and the bike racks, and the yard, and came back off the wall of the gym. People at the bike racks turned round. In the window of Mr Pavlik’s office, across the yard, Castellanos stood up.

“What?” said Frederick.

Theo looked at him through the gap at the top of the window, for about three seconds; steadily; with interest, without alarm; checking.

“Twentieth,” he said.

“Twentieth,” said Frederick.

“Bring a jersey.”

“You bring a jersey.”

“I’ve got two,” said Theo, and the window slid shut, with another bang, and he sat back in his seat by the window and folded his arms and looked straight ahead, at the back of the seat in front, with his face doing nothing at all, and the corner of his mouth going.

---

The bus did not move.

It stood at the stop by the bike racks, with its engine running and its doors shut, for a moment longer than it needed to, while the driver, who was a bus driver from Milwaukee with a commercial licence and a pencil behind his ear and ten months on the 22, looked through the windscreen at the road ahead, and then, slowly, at the boy standing by the blue post box at the end of the bike racks, in a blue shirt done up to the top, on the last day of seventh grade, at twenty-five to one.

He looked at him for about three seconds. Steadily. The way he looked at the road.

And Frederick, without deciding to, the way he had found himself walking to the custodian’s office and lying down in the back of a car, took his right hand out of his pocket, and let it hang at his side; and lifted one finger. About an inch. The way it was done at the depot. The way it had been done to him, and past him, and over his head, from steering wheels and windowsills and the bottom step of a bus, every morning for nine months.

He had never done it before. He did not know whether he was doing it right.

At the wheel of the 22, Mr Hartigan lifted one finger off the wheel, about an inch, and put it back.

And the bus pulled out from the stop by the bike racks, two minutes late, with a sigh, and a boy at the window halfway down on the left who did not look round; and went off down the road, towards the lamppost where the lady with the dog was, and the market, and Canal Street, and the depot on Dunmore Street, and home.

Frederick stood by the post box and watched it go, until it went round the corner, and was gone.

Then he put his hand back in his pocket, and turned round, and went back across the yard, past the wall, and round the end of the gym, where a large man in a grey suit was standing outside the door of the custodian’s office with a paper plate in his hand, and on the paper plate, a slice of cake that was not for anybody; and Castellanos looked at him, and at the corner of the gym behind him where the bus had gone, and held out the plate.

“Cake, sir,” he said.

Frederick took it.

“Thank you,” he said.

They went out through the side gate, past the bins, to the car, with the cake; and Castellanos opened the back door, and Frederick got in, and sat with the paper plate on his knee and the smell of the depot apple still on his fingers; and Castellanos got in at the front, and started the engine, and looked at him in the mirror.

“Home, sir?”

Frederick looked out of the window, at the back of the gym, and the bins, and the path round the side where he had gone every morning for nine months so that he would arrive like anybody; and thought about a cream envelope in a sack at the sorting office on Fourteenth Street, with one word at the bottom of the letter inside it that he had not seen and did not need to; and about the twentieth.

“Home,” said Freddie.