Departures

The camp bed would not go back into its bag.

It had come out of a green nylon bag the size of a loaf, on Friday, and in the space of two nights it had become something that no bag on earth could hold. They let the air out. It sighed for four minutes, like a cow lying down. They folded it in half and it unfolded itself. They folded it in eight, the way Rhys said it had come, and knelt on it, Jack at one end and Frederick at the other, and rolled it towards the valve, and it rolled up into a fat green cylinder the length of a man and stopped, and would go no smaller.

“It’s breathing,” said Jack. “It’s still breathing. There’s air in it somewhere that won’t come out.”

“Sit on it.”

Jack sat on it. It sighed again, a little, and stayed exactly the size it was.

On the bed by the window Tyler took his headphones off, and looked at the two of them kneeling on either side of a green cylinder on the floor of the room, and got off the bed, and came across in his socks, and without saying anything lay down on the cylinder full length, face down, with his arms out, like a man on a raft.

There was a long, low, final sound.

“Ohio,” said Tyler, into the carpet, by way of explanation, and stayed there while they put the bag over his feet.

---

Jack would not go up the butte.

They walked to the foot of it at eleven, through the old town, in the sun, at seventy-four, with Rhys a long way behind and Sam further behind than that, and stood at the bottom of the stepped path where it went up between two boulders from a little gate, with a sign on the gate about the hours and a water fountain beside it, and Jack looked up the face of the hill, at the path going up in its zigzag, at the people on it, small, and at the A, and at the top, where there were aerials against the sky.

“No,” said Jack.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were going to.” Jack had his grandfather’s hat pulled down low. “It’s three hundred feet. I counted it from the tram. I’m not going up three hundred feet of anything, Hanover. I did Camelback. I did Camelback holding on to a German. I’m not doing another one.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Good.”

“We can just sit.”

Jack looked at the path. Then he went through the gate and up it, deliberately, one step at a time, not looking at anything but the step in front of him, and Frederick counted, without meaning to, the way Theo counted stairs, eleven, twelve, and on the twelfth Jack turned round and sat down on it, quite suddenly, facing outwards, with his back to the hill and both hands flat on the rock on either side of him.

“This is high enough,” said Jack.

Frederick sat down on the step beside him.

It was about fifteen feet. Below them was the gate and the fountain and the road, and beyond the road the roofs of the old town and the palms, and to the right the long brown flank of the campus, and the stadium down in its hollow by the lake where they had been yesterday, empty now, enormous, with a man on a little cart going round the edge of the field.

“There’s the bench,” said Jack. “Where we were. You can see it.”

“You can’t see the bench.”

“I can see where it is,” said Jack, and held on to the rock.

---

An old man came down the path while they were sitting there.

He came down slowly, at the pace of a man who had come down it a great many times and saw no reason to hurry now, in a white cap and a white short-sleeved shirt, with a thermos under his arm; and when he got to the twelfth step, where they were sitting, he stopped, and looked down at Frederick, and at Jack, and at Jack’s hands on the rock.

“November,” said the old man.

“Yes.”

“Told you.”

“You told everybody,” said Frederick.

“I tell everybody,” the old man agreed. “Everybody stops by October.” He looked out over the town for a moment, at the stadium and the lake and the long brown country going away to the mountains. “I come up any time now. Eleven. Two in the afternoon. It’s nice.” He shifted the thermos. “That’s the trouble with it.”

He nodded at Frederick, once, the way one man nods to another at a bus stop, and went on down past them, and through the gate, and away along the road without looking back.

Jack watched him go.

“Who was that?”

“I don’t know. He’s at the top. He was at the top the first morning. He’s always at the top.”

“And he said you’d stop.”

“He said everybody stops.”

Jack thought about it, holding on to the rock.

“He’s like Purvis,” said Jack. “Every village has one. He sits in the same place for sixty years and tells you what you’re going to do, and he’s right, and he’s never once told you how he knew.” He looked up the hill behind them, at the path going up. “Are you going to go back up? Ever?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should.”

“Why?”

Jack did not answer that. He looked out at the town instead, and Frederick could see him decide not to say something, and then decide to say something else, which was a thing that happened on Jack’s face in the open, like weather on the wold.

---

“Tyler,” said Jack.

“I know.”

“Yesterday.”

“I know.”

“I’ve been thinking about it all night. On the camp bed. I was awake till three.” Jack took one hand off the rock and looked at it, as if he were surprised to find it there, and put it back. “You know what I keep thinking? He’s the first one who just saw. Nobody told him. Nobody had to sit him down. He looked at a screen and worked it out.” He shook his head. “And he doesn’t even know who you are.”

“That’s why he saw.”

Jack looked at him.

“Everybody else looks at me,” said Frederick. “So they don’t see who’s standing next to me. Tyler doesn’t know there’s anybody to look at. So he just looked.”

Jack was quiet for a long time.

“That’s very sad, Hanover,” he said at last.

“Is it?”

“No. It’s brilliant. It’s also very sad.” He took his hat off and turned it round in his hands. “Both. Like Alex says. Good. It covers both.”

They sat on the twelfth step in the sun.

“When Mum had her back done,” said Jack, to the hat.

“I know.”

“No, listen. When Mum had her back done, I had the place at Durham. History. Everybody at school went mad. And she was in the hospital in Cheltenham for a week and home for six and couldn’t lift a glass, and I said I’d stay and do the cellar for a year. And she went on at me. Every day. She had the forms out on the bar. Go to Durham, Jack. I’ve got Gaz. I’ve got your dad. Go to Durham.” He turned the hat. “And I didn’t.”

“I know.”

“And she was right, and I was right, and she still thinks she was right, and she was, a bit.” Jack put the hat back on. “That’s all. I’m not saying anything.”

“You are.”

“I’m not. I’m saying about Durham. It’s a fact about Durham.” He looked out at the stadium. “I’m saying I’d have been no use at Durham. I’d have been sitting in a library in Durham thinking about her on the stairs at the New Inn with a crate.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“Are you going home for Christmas?” said Jack.

“I suppose so.”

“Good,” said Jack, and held on to the rock, and did not say anything else.

---

The flight was at twenty to seven, and at half past three they took the tram.

At Terminal Four they walked him to the gate, as everybody at Sky Harbor walks everybody to the gate, along the concourse past the long windows full of mountains, and Jack stood in the queue for boarding with his rucksack and his carrier bag, which was now full of things for his mother: a postcard of the trough, three bottles of Glacier from Tyler’s refrigerator, the strip of turf from the north end of Sun Devil Stadium wrapped in a page of the Arizona Gazette, and a maroon T-shirt that said BOOBY PRIZE across the front, which a girl on the Avenue had been selling from a table and which Jack had bought two of, one for his mother and one for Gaz, who would wear it to the pub every Friday until it fell apart and never once ask what it meant.

Sam had gone to look at the departures board again. It was the only thing at airports Sam ever seemed to look at.

The queue moved. Jack did not move with it.

He took off his grandfather’s hat.

He held it out.

Frederick looked at it. It was very old and very white and soft at the brim from being in a drawer since 1997, and there was a dark line round the inside of the band where a man’s forehead had been for a great many summers on a boundary somewhere in Gloucestershire.

“No,” said Frederick.

“Take it.”

“It’s your grandfather’s.”

“He’d want it to go up a hill. He went up every hill in the county. He’d be appalled.” Jack pushed it at him. “Thirty-four out of fourteen hundred. Sam told me. He’s got it to two decimal places. Two point three three per cent, Hanover. My grandad would have died. He’d have come back to die again.”

“Jack.”

“It’s for the summer. When you go back up. It’s August there in May, Milwaukee says. You’ll want a hat.” He held it out, and his face had gone the colour it went in the sun, though they were indoors. “Take the bloody hat.”

Frederick took the hat.

“You did this at Terminal Five,” he said.

“I know.”

“With the cap. Two years ago. At Heathrow. You just held it out and didn’t say anything.”

“I’m saying something this time,” said Jack. “I’ve learned. It’s called growth.” He picked up his bag. The queue had gone on without him and a woman behind was waiting with the patience of somebody who has seen two men at an airport before. “Right. Right.” He did not move. “Right.”

He put one arm round Frederick, quickly and hard, with his hand flat on the middle of his back, for exactly as long as two men hold on at an airport, and let go, and went.

He gave his boarding pass to the woman at the desk, and she scanned it and handed it back, and he dropped it, and picked it up off the carpet, and held it in his teeth while he put his phone in his pocket and the carrier bag over his wrist, and then he went past her, with the boots that had been in the Furnace and on the butte and across the whole of the Avenue, to the door of the jet bridge.

Then he turned round.

He turned round in the door of the jet bridge at Terminal Four at Phoenix Sky Harbor, with three hundred people in the gate lounge behind Frederick, the rest of his flight and most of the next one, and filled his chest, and shouted, in the voice that had called last orders across Berlin and told twelve thousand people in the Furnace that they were the booby prize:

“GET UP YOUR BLOODY HILL, HANOVER!”

Three hundred people turned round.

They looked at Jack, in his red sweatshirt, which he had put back on to fly in, and then followed his pointing arm back across the lounge, past the desk, to a tall fair young man standing by a pillar at the far side of it, holding a white cricket hat in both hands; and Frederick watched the lounge do the sum, all three hundred of them at once, Hanover and tall and fair and the face from the coins; and at the moment they got there, Jack, who knew exactly what he had done and had known before he did it, put both hands in the pockets of the red sweatshirt and walked away down the jet bridge, whistling, and was gone.

Sam came back from the departures board.

He looked at the three hundred people. He looked at Frederick by the pillar with the hat.

“Shall we go, sir,” said Sam.

---

The camp bed was on Rhys’s bed when they got back, in its bag, which Rhys had got it into in four minutes by a method he would not explain.

Tyler was on the bed by the window. The snow was falling on the dark forest, and the blind was down, and the room was the room it had been before Friday, with the floor back.

He lifted one side of the headphones when Frederick came in.

“He go?”

“Yes.”

“Is he coming back?”

“In March.”

“Cool.” Tyler looked at the floor where the camp bed had been, for a moment, with his hands still on the keyboard. “He was really bad at the chants.”

“He was.”

“Like, the worst I’ve ever seen.”

“Yes.”

Tyler considered this. On the screen behind him something moved in the trees, and he did not look round at it.

“I liked him,” said Tyler, and put the headphones back on.

Frederick put the white hat on the shelf over his desk, next to the jumper.

---

Theo rang at eight, which was ten in New Westminster, exactly, now that the clocks had gone back there and not here.

“You were on the news,” said Theo.

“Was I?”

“The ABC. The highlights. Third quarter, a timeout, they go to the crowd, and there you are, four seconds, between six men spelling a word and a dog.” Frederick could hear the fan in Theo’s room, and somebody in the corridor outside laughing, and very faintly something hollow and wooden knocking against something else, which would be Desmond, on his stand, by the window, in the draught. “I watched it in the common room. On the big television. There were nine of us. Nobody said anything. A man from Oregon who’s doing renal said is that, and I said no, and he said it looks like, and I said a lot of people say that.”

“Thank you.”

“I enjoyed it,” said Theo. “I enjoyed it more than anything since the donor.” A pause. “Jack wasn’t in it.”

“No.”

“He moved.”

“Yes.”

“He always moves,” said Theo. “I’ve watched him do it for three years. He does it at the gate of the pub. He did it in Berlin in a beer hall and I don’t think he knew he had.” Another pause. “I never said anything.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t think it was mine to say.”

Frederick looked at the gap at the edge of the blind, which was dark now.

“Tyler said it,” he said.

There was a silence on the line from New Westminster.

“Said what?”

“After the game. On the bench. He came back over the wall with a piece of grass and looked at us and asked if we were together. Just asked. Like asking the time.”

The silence went on. He could hear Desmond knocking, very gently, in the draught.

“What did you say?” said Theo.

“Yes.”

He heard Theo breathe out.

“Good,” said Theo. “Good, Freddie.” And then, because Theo was Theo and could not help it, in the old voice, rising: “Tyler. Of course it was Tyler. Of course it was the one man in the Realm who doesn’t know who you are.” He began to laugh, helplessly, on the long rising note, and Frederick heard the telephone go down on the desk and come up again. “I still want Tyler for Christmas. I want him more than ever. I want him in a box.”

“He’s going to Ohio.”

“Then I’ll go to Ohio.” Theo stopped laughing, slowly. “How’s Jack?”

“He gave me his grandfather’s hat.”

“At the airport?”

“Yes.”

“Of course he did,” said Theo. “He does that. It’s what he does at airports instead of crying.” A pause. “Did he shout?”

“Across the whole of the gate.”

“What?”

“Get up your bloody hill, Hanover.”

Theo did not laugh at that. He was quiet for a moment.

“Well,” said Theo, “he’s not wrong.”

---

They talked about the game, and about the catch in the corner, which Theo had watched four times on his laptop in the library and been told to be quiet by a woman doing paediatrics; and about Desmond, who had lost a finger to a first-year from another group and had it glued back on the wrong hand; and about the cadaver, whose name Theo would still not say.

Then Theo said, “How is she?”

“She rang on Thursday. In the afternoon.”

“In the afternoon?”

“Somebody told her it was Thanksgiving. She doesn’t know what Thanksgiving is. She rang to ask.” He smiled at the dark. “She wanted to know if she was supposed to give thanks for something in particular, or in general, and whether it had to be to God or could be to a person.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Either.”

“Good.” Theo did not laugh. “How did she sound?”

He had known it was coming. It came every Sunday, at about this point, in exactly this voice, the one Theo used now for things he had read in a book and was not yet allowed to say to anyone.

“She was on the chair.”

“The green one.”

“The green one.”

“For how long?”

Frederick looked at the telephone.

“What?”

“While you talked. How long was she on the chair?”

He thought about it. He thought about the call on Thursday, which had been forty minutes, which was long, for her, and about the clock he had heard below her in the house, striking, twice, at the half hours; and about the stick on the stairs, which had not gone down this time, because his father had sat on the step below her for the whole of it and said, near the end, one word, turkey, and been very pleased with it.

“The whole call,” he said.

Theo did not say anything.

“And at eleven?” said Theo. “When you ring her.”

“She’s always up. She says she’s had her coffee.”

“Has she?”

“I don’t know,” said Frederick. “Theo.”

“Are you going home for Christmas?” said Theo.

“I suppose so. We haven’t talked about it.”

“Talk about it.” It was not the book voice. It was the other one, the one from the Hartigans’ kitchen, okay, Freddie, eat your dinner, except that it was not okay and he was not being told to eat anything. “Go home for Christmas.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s Christmas.”

“Theo.”

“Because it’s Christmas, Freddie,” said Theo. “And she’d like you there.” A pause, and in it the fan, and the corridor, and Desmond knocking very softly in the draught. “So would I. If I were her.”

Frederick sat on the bed by the door in the dark, with the telephone, and looked at the white hat on the shelf, and the jumper.

“Sunday,” said Theo.

“Sunday.”

---

At ten he went down the forty-five steps for water.

Mr Luna was at the desk in the cardigan, just come on, with a new page on the clipboard and 10 p.m. 71 at the top of it, and the radio low, and a western open face down on the crossword. He looked at Frederick over his glasses.

“Your friend go?”

“This afternoon.”

“Gloucestershire,” said Mr Luna, with satisfaction, as though it were a word he had been practising. “Near Wales.” He pushed the jar of butterscotch an inch across the desk. “Good kid. Knows when to put the water down.”

Frederick took a butterscotch.

“Call your mother?” said Mr Luna.

“At eleven.”

Mr Luna looked at the clock over the doors, which said four minutes past ten, and then at him, over the glasses, with no expression whatsoever, the way he had looked at him on the first Sunday and every Sunday since.

“Her morning,” said Frederick.

“Somebody told you that.”

“A friend.”

“Hm,” said Mr Luna, and picked up his western. “Good friend.”