Snooze

He gave up the butte on a Thursday, at twenty to six in the morning, with his thumb.

It was not a decision. He had made decisions, a few, on hills, out loud, with the sun coming up and people listening, and he knew what they felt like. This was not one. This was the bottom of a staircase he had been going down for a week without noticing that it was a staircase, and the last step was a thumb.

---

On the Saturday they had got to the top at nineteen minutes to seven, twenty-three minutes after the sun.

“It’s up,” said Rhys, at the summit, with his hands on his knees.

“I know.”

“It came up while we were on the stairs.”

“I know, Rhys.”

“I’m only saying,” said Rhys, “for the record,” and looked down the stepped path at the campus with the light all over it, as though somebody had told him there would be a sunrise at the top and there had not been one, and he would be raising it with the management.

On the Sunday it was eight minutes to seven, and on the Monday they got to the first bend.

The first bend was about a third of the way up, where the path turned back on itself under a shoulder of brown rock and there was a step a little wider than the others, and Frederick sat down on it. He had not meant to. His legs had sat down and he had gone with them. Rhys stood on the step below for some time, and then sat down too, two steps lower, with his back to the rock and his elbows on his knees, and the two of them sat there in the grey light with the Valley going on below them, the planes coming down into Sky Harbor one after another with their lights on, and the lake, and the trams beginning.

“We could go up,” said Rhys, in the voice of a man who very much hoped not.

“In a minute.”

They sat for twenty. The sun came up while they sat, somewhere behind the butte, so that they were in its shadow the whole time and watched the light arrive on everything else: on the towers of Phoenix to the west, first, very far off, gold at the tops, and then on the roofs of the campus, and the palms on the mall, and the bowl of the stadium by the water, until the whole of the Valley was lit and the only thing in it still in shadow was the hill they were sitting on.

“That’s quite nice, actually,” said Rhys.

On the Tuesday they got to the foot of the path.

Frederick stood at the bottom of the steps in his running things with Rhys behind him and looked up them. They went up the face of the butte in their zigzags to the top, pale in the half light, every one of them, and at the top, small against the sky, there was the old man in the white cap, who had told him on the first morning in August that he would stop by October, standing on the east side of the summit with his thermos.

“Sir?” said Rhys.

“I’m looking at it.”

“Right.”

They looked at it. The old man looked down at them for a while from the top, and then turned round and looked east instead, at the sunrise, which was coming, and which he had come for.

“Breakfast?” said Rhys.

“Breakfast,” said Frederick.

On the Wednesday it was the door.

The alarm went at twenty to six, as it had gone every morning since the twenty-first of August, with BUTTE across the top of the screen in capitals, and he put his thumb on it and it gave him nine minutes, and at the end of the nine minutes there was a knock, soft, two knuckles, the knock Rhys had knocked at twenty to six every morning for seven weeks, and he got up and opened the door, and Rhys was in the corridor in his running kit with his water bottle and his face arranged.

“Morning,” said Rhys. “Sir. Fred. Sir.”

“Not today.”

There was a very short pause.

“Right you are,” said Rhys, with tremendous sorrow, in the voice of a man who has just been told on the telephone that his dentist has had to cancel and is so very sorry and will be in touch. He nodded, gravely. He turned and walked away down the corridor to three hundred and sixteen with his water bottle, at the pace of a man walking behind a coffin; and when he got to his own door he went in and shut it behind him, and through it, quite distinctly, down the length of the sleeping corridor, Frederick heard the sound of a man punching the air.

---

The Solar System met on Wednesdays at eleven in the planetarium.

It was the course he had chosen because it was the furthest thing on the list from anything he would ever be asked to do, and because it was in the dark. The planetarium was a round room under a white dome, with the seats tilted back so far that you lay rather than sat, and the lecturer stood at a little lit desk in the middle like a man at the wheel of a ship and moved the sky about with a dial.

On Wednesday he took them to Mars.

The dome went red. It went the colour of a flowerpot, from one edge to the other, a red plain under a pale sky with rocks on it and a low ridge in the distance, and the lecturer turned the dial and the sky over the red plain began very slowly to change.

“This is the sunrise on Mars,” said the lecturer, in the dark. “From a lander. Real pictures. Speeded up.” The dial clicked. “The daytime sky on Mars is the colour of butterscotch. It’s the dust. But at sunrise and sunset, right round the sun, it goes blue. Nobody expected that. It’s the same dust doing the opposite.” Click. “Watch the edge.”

Frederick watched the edge.

He was lying back in the tilted seat in the dark with a hundred people breathing round him, and the ridge on the far side of the red plain was black against the pale sky, and the pale was beginning, at one place on the ridge, to go blue, a faint cold blue like the inside of a shell, and he thought, I’ll see this one, and he thought it very clearly, and he was asleep.

“You missed Mars,” said the girl in the next seat, at ten to twelve, with the lights up, quite kindly.

“Was it good?”

“It was blue,” said the girl, and went.

---

At ten past three on Thursday morning he was lying on his back in the dark looking at the ceiling.

He had been looking at it since a quarter to one. He knew it quite well by now. There was a crack in it running from the light fitting to the corner over the door, which in the light from Tyler’s screens, when Tyler’s screens were on, looked like a river on a map, and in the dark looked like nothing. Tyler’s screens were off. Tyler was asleep, or was lying very still on the bed by the window with his face to the wall and his headphones on, which in Tyler came to the same thing, and the keyboard was quiet.

It was ten past eleven in the morning in London. He had rung her at lunch, as she had told him to, at her eight in the evening, and they had talked about nothing for nine minutes, the weather and the plane tree and a word his father had found in the crossword, and she had sounded like herself.

He picked up the phone and looked at the Uppsala page again, which he had found at one o’clock and had looked at four times since. There was the castle on its hill, pink, enormous, with a green lawn going down from it and two cannon. There was the bell in its little wooden tower, which rang at six in the morning and nine at night, a photograph of it with snow on the roof. There was the page for Kalmar nation, which had a photograph of thirty students in white caps standing on some steps in the sun, laughing at whoever was holding the camera, and a list of its clubs, which included rowing and a choir and a society for the appreciation of the herring.

He put the phone face down on his chest.

Having regard to Her Majesty’s health. Four times. Like a watermark.

He picked the phone up again and wrote to Jack. One word.

awake

---

It rang in his hand before he had put it down.

He took it out of the room, past Tyler’s back, into the corridor, and down the forty-five steps in his socks, and through the dim lobby, where Mr Luna looked up from the western over his glasses and said nothing and looked down again, which at three in the morning was a kindness; and down the last flight to the basement and the laundry room, and shut the door.

“Hanover,” said Jack. “Why are you awake?”

“How do you know I’m awake?”

“Because you just sent me a text that says awake.” There was a great hollow clang behind him, iron on stone, and a voice swearing that was also Jack’s. “Sorry. Barrel. Mum’s got the brewery coming at twelve and the cellar looks like somebody’s been shelling it. It’s three in the morning there. I can do sums, Hanover. I’ve been doing them since you went.”

“It’s ten past.”

“Oh, well, ten past,” said Jack.

Frederick sat down on the floor against the washing machine. It was not warm. Nothing had been washed in it since the afternoon. In the corner the dryer that had gone round all night on the Friday with a single red sock in it was still and dark, and on top of it, folded into a small exact square, there was the sock, and propped against the sock, on a corner torn from a page of squared paper, in a small square hand, a note.

Yours? S.

He looked at it for a long time.

“Are you there?” said Jack.

“Yes. Sorry. There’s a sock.”

“There’s a what?”

“It doesn’t matter.” He leaned his head back against the machine. “The Court wants me to go to Uppsala.”

There was a silence in the cellar of the New Inn.

“Where’s that?”

“Sweden. North of Stockholm. An hour on the train.”

“When?”

“January.”

“For how long?”

“Four years. Sort of. Two there and then the rest of it. The navy. A town in the north.”

There was another clang, smaller, and the sound of something being rolled across stone on its rim, slowly, the way you roll a barrel, a long low rumbling that came down the line from Gloucestershire and filled the laundry room in Tempe.

“Is it cold?” said Jack.

“Yes.”

“Is there a hill?”

“There’s a castle on a hill. And a bell.”

“Course there is,” said Jack. “Course there’s a bloody bell.” The rolling stopped. “Is that why you’re awake?”

“Partly.”

“What’s the other part?”

Frederick looked at the sock.

“The letter says having regard to Her Majesty’s health,” he said. “Four times. On every page.”

The cellar was quiet for a long time. He could hear it being quiet. He could hear a tap dripping somewhere in it, five thousand miles away, and the hum of a cooler, and Jack breathing, and Jack not saying anything, which was not a thing Jack did, ever, which was the most frightening thing he had heard all night.

“Right,” said Jack. In a different voice. “Right.”

“She says it’s the same. She says it’s a valve and it’s doing what valves do.”

“Do you believe her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Right,” said Jack again.

Then, after a while, in a voice that was trying very hard to be the ordinary one, with the cellar round it:

“Uppsala’s two hours from Heathrow.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“I looked it up,” said Jack. “Just now. While you were looking at your sock. Two hours ten. There’s one at seven in the morning. You could be in the New Inn for Sunday lunch and back for a Monday.” A pause. “I’m not saying anything.”

“You just said two hours ten.”

“I’m saying it’s two hours ten. I’m not saying anything.” The barrel rolled again, a little way, and stopped. “It’s eleven to Phoenix. With Iceland. I’ve looked that up as well. I looked that up in January.” Another pause. “I’m not saying anything about that either.”

“Jack.”

“I’m a landlady’s son, Hanover. I can hold a thing behind the bar all night and not put it on the counter.” He breathed out. “That’s what I’m doing. I’m holding it. You decide. You’re good at deciding. You decided on a monument.”

“I’m not good at it. I took a year and a half.”

“You took a year and a half and got it right,” said Jack. “Most people take five minutes and get it wrong. That’s what Mum says about husbands.” Something heavy went down on the stone. “Go to bed.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Then go to bed and don’t sleep. I’ll stay on. I’ve got eleven barrels to stack and I talk to them anyway, I might as well talk to you.” A pause. “You don’t have to say anything. Just lie there and listen to me being disgusted with a barrel of best.”

So he went back up.

He went up the basement stairs and through the lobby, where Mr Luna did not look up, and up the forty-five steps, with the telephone at his ear and Jack in it, telling a barrel in a cellar in Gloucestershire exactly what he thought of it; and into the room past Tyler’s back, and into bed, and lay with the telephone on the pillow by his ear, and listened.

“You,” said Jack, to a barrel, “are a disgrace. You’ve been dropped. Look at you. You’ve got a dent in you like a Morris Minor. I’m putting you at the back, with the cider, where nobody has to look at you.” A pause. “Are you asleep?”

“No.”

“I’m putting him at the back,” said Jack. “With the cider.”

At four minutes to five, for the first time in a week, he was.

---

The alarm went at twenty to six.

He knew it was twenty to six without opening his eyes, because of the sound, which he had heard every morning for seven weeks and could have picked out of a crowd. The telephone was still on the pillow by his ear. It was hot against his cheek. When he opened his eyes it said, under the alarm, under BUTTE, in small grey letters, that a call had ended at 5.17, after two hours and four minutes, and he understood that Jack had stayed on for twenty-one minutes after he had gone to sleep, stacking barrels, talking to nobody, before he hung up.

He lay and looked at BUTTE.

He put his thumb on it. Not on the word. Beside the word, where there was a small switch, green, that he had set on the twentieth of August and had never once touched since; and he moved it to the left, and it went grey.

He did not delete it. He looked at the place where you deleted it, and did not.

There was a knock at the door. Soft. Two knuckles.

He got up and opened it. Rhys was in the corridor in his running kit with his water bottle and his face arranged, as he had been every morning for seven weeks, at twenty to six.

“Morning,” said Rhys. “Sir. Fred.”

“I’ve turned it off.”

Rhys looked at him.

“The alarm?”

“The butte.”

There was a silence in the corridor of the third floor of Palo Verde Hall. Rhys looked at Frederick, and at the telephone in his hand with the grey switch on it, and at Frederick again, and his face did nothing at all, with an effort that could be seen from the door.

“For today?” said Rhys carefully.

“I don’t think so.”

Rhys nodded slowly.

“He said October,” he said. “The old man. On the first morning.”

“I know.”

“It’s the sixth.”

“I know, Rhys.”

“I’m only saying,” said Rhys, “for the record.” He looked down at his running shoes. “I’ll miss it.”

“No, you won’t.”

“No,” Rhys agreed. “I won’t.” He thought about it. “I’ll miss the old man.”

---

Sam had it in the notebook.

He had it at breakfast, in the dining hall, at a quarter past eight, on the table between the trays, among the cost of the eggs. He turned the notebook round without saying anything and pushed it across, and there it was, on a page of its own, in pencil, in Sam’s small square hand, in a column, as though it were an account.

Thu 29. Summit 6.37. R.

Fri 30. No. (Telephone.)

Sat 1. Summit 6.41. Sun 6.18. R.

Sun 2. Summit 6.52. R.

Mon 3. First bend. Sat down. R. sat down.

Tue 4. Foot of path. Looked at it. R.

Wed 5. Door. R. (in kit).

Thu 6. Alarm off.

Under the column Sam had drawn a line, and under the line he had written a number.

34.

“Thirty-four what?” said Frederick, although he knew.

“Mornings,” said Sam. “To the top. Since the twenty-first of August.” He took the notebook back and looked at the number over his glasses. “Of one thousand four hundred and sixty-one.” He picked up his pencil and wrote something, small, beside the thirty-four. “Two point three three per cent.” He capped the pencil. “On course for thirty-four.”

Rhys, beside him, with his mouth full of toast, nodded at the figure with something like pride.

“That’s not bad,” said Rhys.

“It’s not good,” said Sam.

“For a first year.”

“It’s not good for a first year either,” said Sam, and underlined it.

Rhys’s phone went on the table. He looked at it, and swallowed his toast, and looked at it again with the expression he kept for the flat across the road.

“Sarge,” he said. “She wants to know if the butte’s off. For the roster. She’s got it in every morning at half past five, one up and one at the bottom, and she wants to know if it’s suspended or cancelled.”

Frederick looked out of the window of the dining hall. From where he sat, over the palms of the mall and the red roofs, he could see the top of it, a mile off, small and brown against the white morning sky, with the shape of the path on its face.

“Suspended,” he said.

Rhys wrote it, with his thumbs. They waited. Sam ate an egg.

The phone went again.

“She says,” said Rhys, “she’s put it in pencil.”

---

He walked to Water in the West at a quarter to eleven by the long way, along the arcade on the north side of the mall, because from the end of it, where the arcade stopped and the grass began, there was a gap between two buildings through which you could see the whole of the butte.

He stopped in the gap and looked at it.

It was ninety-one degrees. The sun was high and white and the butte stood in it with no shadow at all now, brown and bare and ordinary, a hill in a town, three hundred feet of rock with a letter on its side going pink in the heat and a path up the front of it; and on the path, very small, he could see people. Not many. Three or four. A woman in a visor going down, and two figures going up together, slowly, at a quarter to eleven in the full sun, and at the very top, he was nearly sure, a white cap.

None of them was looking at him. None of them knew that there was a person standing in a gap between two buildings on the campus a mile away, looking at them, who had chosen a university on the far side of the world, in the snow, at sunrise, in front of the German Emperor, because of this hill, and who had climbed it thirty-four times, and who had switched it off that morning and not deleted it.

He had wanted a hill where nobody would care.

He stood in the gap and looked at it for some time. The old man in the white cap, at the top, turned round in the sun to look at something in the other direction, and stood there, and did not turn back.

It did not care in the slightest.