Revision

The heat came back on the last day of April, between one o’clock and two in the afternoon, as though somebody had told it the date.

By Monday it had moved in. It lay on the mall at ten in the morning like a dog on a step, and the students went round it under the arcades, from shade to shade, with their books held up against their faces. The Abernathy box outside Old Main said 79 in red under a strip of paper that said THRESHOLD 82, and a boy in a maroon cap was standing in front of it photographing it, the way people in other places photograph a comet.

On the fire door at the end of the third floor of Palo Verde Hall there was a new sign, in Priya’s handwriting, in black marker on maroon card.

QUIET HOURS 24/7 UNTIL FRIDAY. THIS MEANS YOU.

And under it, smaller, in a different pen, added later:

THIS MEANS EVERYBODY. I AM NOT JOKING. I HAVE A PHARMACOLOGY FINAL. P.

Somebody had drawn a small sun in the corner, with a face. The face was crying.

---

“Article Two, section four,” said Rhys.

He had two hundred and twelve cards. He had written them in March and April at the desk in 316, in five colours, one for each part of the course, with the question on the front in capitals and the answer on the back in a hand so small and even that it looked printed, and he held them in a block in his left hand like a dealer and turned them over one at a time with his right.

Frederick was at Sam’s desk, under the poster of the federal tax brackets, where he did the red box every morning. He had sat Geology at eight, ninety minutes on the rocks of the Valley in a room in the basement of the Life Sciences building, and the music was at one, and in between Rhys had him. The box had gone back across the road. The desk still smelled faintly of it, of leather and the inside of locks.

“And upon no other advice,” he said.

“Good. Meaning?”

“That everybody in the world gives the King advice and none of it counts.”

Rhys lowered the card.

“That’s Brennan’s joke.”

“It’s what it means.”

“It’s what it means in week nine.” Rhys turned the card over and read from the back of it, in the voice in which he read everything from the backs of cards, which was the voice of a man reading a warrant. “The Sovereign acts in the Realm only on the advice of ministers responsible to the Parliament of the Realm, and the clause excludes the advice of any other person, including the ministers of the Sovereign’s other realms.” He looked up. “That’s six marks, sir.”

“Fred.”

“Six marks, Fred.”

“That’s what I said.”

“You said everybody in the world.” Rhys put the card at the back of the block. “Everybody in the world isn’t on the mark scheme.”

On the bed under the window Sam lay on his back with Intermediate Financial Accounting open face down on his chest, his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and his eyes shut. He had been like that for twenty minutes. Nobody in 316 believed he was asleep.

“Who holds the reserve powers?” said Rhys, faster, the way they must have done it at the Service college, Frederick supposed, to see if a man would flinch.

“The Governor-General.”

“Where are they written down?”

“Nowhere.”

“Wrong.”

“They’re not written down anywhere, Rhys. I asked. I asked the Governor-General, in a corridor.”

“I know you asked in a corridor. You put it in your essay. You got a C.” Rhys tapped the card on the edge of the desk. “Commentary of the Clerk. Chapter nine. Paragraphs four to eleven. Say it.”

Frederick looked at him.

“Commentary of the Clerk,” he said. “Chapter nine. Paragraphs four to eleven.”

“Thank you.”

“He’ll get a B,” said Sam, from the bed, without opening his eyes.

Rhys turned round on the chair.

“He’s not getting a B. I’ve made two hundred and twelve cards. He’s getting an A.”

“He’ll get a B,” said Sam. He lifted the textbook an inch off his chest, looked at the ceiling under it, and put it back. “He knows it better than the Clerk. That’s always a B.”

---

Tyler’s final examination in Introduction to Programming was not an examination.

It was a program, to be handed in by midnight on Wednesday, which had to contain, the assignment said, at least one loop, at least one condition, and a user. Tyler had begun it at eleven on Sunday night and had not, as far as Frederick could tell, been to bed since. When Frederick came back along the corridor at a quarter past twelve it was on the left-hand screen in a small black window in the corner, beside the forest where it was still snowing and the thirty-four still stood round their fire.

It was a fire.

It was about the size of a stamp, made of orange squares that changed places with one another, flickering, at the bottom of the black window. Under it, in white letters, it said WOOD: 3. Tyler clicked something. WOOD: 2. The squares went up, a little, and stood taller, and then very slowly began to come down again.

“That’s it?” said Frederick.

“That’s the loop.” Tyler spoke loudly into the room, to hear himself over the headphones. “If you don’t feed it, it goes out. That’s the condition. You’re the user.”

“What happens when it goes out?”

“It says GAME OVER.”

Frederick watched the small fire come down.

“Nobody dies?”

“There’s nobody in it.” Tyler clicked. WOOD: 1. “I didn’t have time for people. People are like a whole other assignment.” He looked at the small fire with the one expression Frederick had ever seen on him that looked like worry. “It’s just a fire,” said Tyler.

---

ON THE TRAM, said Jack, at five to four.

DONT COME

REVISE

I KNOW THE WAY

And then a photograph out of the tram window of the river, flat and brown and shining, and under it:

HANOVER ITS HOT

ITS ACTUALLY HOT

He went down anyway, with Sam behind him, and stood in the shade of the arcade by the end pillar, where the heat came in from the car park like water under a door.

Jack came along the pavement from the tram stop at nine minutes past four.

He was in the red sweatshirt, which he had put on in fifty-four degrees in Gloucestershire and not taken off, with his rucksack on one shoulder and a carrier bag held out in front of him in both hands, very level, like a man carrying soup; and his face was purple, and he was beaming.

He stopped in the full sun in the middle of the car park, put the carrier bag down carefully on the bonnet of a white car, and lifted both arms out from his sides.

“There it is,” said Jack.

“It’s ninety-six.”

“I know. Look at me. I’m dying.” He turned a full circle, slowly, with his arms out, the way a man turns in the first warm sea of the year. “Six months you’ve been promising me this. Your face comes off, you said. And I come in November and it’s the fete. I come in March and it’s ninety and everybody keeps telling me how mild it is. And today I step off the tram and it gets me, bang, right in the face, like opening the oven for the Yorkshires.” He lowered his arms. “I nearly cried. A woman asked if I was all right.”

“Are you?”

“Never better in my life.” He picked up the bag again, level. “Hello, Hanover.”

“Hello.”

He put the bag down a second time, on the gravel, and put one arm round Frederick, quick and hard, with his hand flat on his back, and held on for exactly as long as two men hold on in a car park, and then a second longer, which he had not done before, and let go.

By the end pillar Sam was studying the palo verde with close attention.

---

The carrier bag had a tin in it, a large square one of the kind that sweets come in at Christmas, with a coach and horses in the snow on the lid, taped shut three times in three kinds of tape, the last of them yellow and saying INSPECTED every four inches.

“Don’t,” said Jack.

“I haven’t done anything.”

“You’re looking at it. It’s for tomorrow.” He moved the bag behind his legs. “A woman at Heathrow put it through the machine three times and then opened it and put a little stick in it. And a man at Phoenix, at the passports, with a dog, asked me if it had any fruit in it, because of the oranges. They’ve got a law.”

“What did you say?”

“I said it was mostly fruit. He said what kind. I said the dead kind.” Jack considered the tin with respect. “He had a look in it. The dog had a look in it. Then he taped it up again and gave it back and said, sir, that is not fruit, and let me through.” He picked the bag up. “I think he was frightened of it.”

“Jack.”

“It’s not a cake,” said Jack. “Don’t ask.”

---

The day porter, the sophomore with her hair up in a pencil, turned the clipboard round on the desk before they reached it.

“You again,” she said.

“Me again.”

“Overnight Guest Registration. Three nights maximum.”

“Two,” said Jack, and signed, and showed his passport, and she looked at the passport and at the sweatshirt and said, without looking up, “You know it’s ninety-six?”

“I know,” said Jack happily. “I’ve been waiting all year.”

He counted the stairs under his breath, as he had in November, and at the top he stopped and looked back down the flight and said “Forty-five,” with the air of a man conceding a point in a long argument.

“There’s a little one.”

“I’ve come round to the little one. I’ve decided it’s for the porter.” He went on along the corridor. “It’s where you put your foot when you stop to say goodnight.”

On the door of 312 there were two paper suns. One said TYLER. The other was in Priya’s hand, quite fresh, with the tape still clear at the corners, and said FRED.

“New?” said Jack.

“Thursday.”

“How many’s that?”

“I’ve stopped counting,” said Frederick. “Sam hasn’t.”

Tyler was at the desk under the window with the headphones on and the small fire in the corner of the left screen and the large one in the forest beside it. He did not turn round. Frederick held the clipboard over his shoulder and Tyler took the pen without looking and signed where it said ROOMMATE, on the desk, by the keyboard; gave the pen back; and then lifted one side of the headphones an inch and looked round.

“Hey, Pubs.”

“All right, Tyler?”

“You want a Glacier?”

“God, yes,” said Jack.

Tyler leaned down and opened the little white refrigerator. There were seven bottles left in the corner of it, and he took one out and looked at it, and at the six, before he held it out across the gap.

“It’s the end of the year,” said Tyler. “They have to last.”

Jack drank, and took the bottle away from his mouth, and looked at it as he had in November, at the colour of it.

“Still the bluest thing,” said Jack.

“It’s electrolytes,” said Tyler, and the headphones went back on.

In the corridor, with the door shut, Jack leaned on the wall beside the two suns.

“He knows now,” said Jack. “Doesn’t he. Since January.”

“Since January.”

“And?”

“He asked me what the King does.”

“Again?”

“On the ninth. That night. He took his headphones off and put them on the desk and said he was listening, for real.” Frederick looked at the door. “I got as far as Sweden. He’d been asleep since the Governor-General.”

Jack put his hand over his eyes, as he had in November, and stood against the breeze-block in the red sweatshirt with his shoulders going.

“I love him,” said Jack, through his hand. “I’m going to love him till I die.”

---

The camp bed came out from under the bed by the door with a long sigh.

It had not been back in its bag since March, when it had refused on the first day back after spring break as it had in November, and been folded in three and pushed under the bed, where it had lived since, faintly and permanently inflated, like something that had lain down to sleep and not quite managed it. Rhys said that the kit list could say lost.

“It’s still breathing,” said Jack.

He knelt on it. It went down under his knee and came up at the far end by the wardrobe, very slowly, the way a thing comes up in a pond; and he took a foot pump out of his rucksack, his own, brought from Coln, in case, and fitted it to the valve, and began.

---

They walked to the Avenue at nine, when it was ninety.

It was the hour the town came out. The heat had stopped coming down from above and come up instead out of the pavements, and the Avenue under the lamps was full of people walking slowly in it as in a warm bath, with ice in cups, past the open doors of the bars with the cold coming out of them in a slab. The bunting was up. It had gone up along the lamp posts on Saturday, in the March’s colours, for the holiday, in long loops the length of the Avenue, moving a little in the warm air.

Jack looked up at it.

“Is that for you?”

“It’s for tomorrow.”

“That’s what I said,” said Jack, and walked under it with his chin up, the way Mrs Haverfield sat by the fire.

The trough was full, along the kerb in front of the bar with the cactus in a hat, under the black rail, and a small brown dog was drinking from it, standing on its back legs with its front feet on the galvanised edge.

“Mum’s got it behind the bar,” said Jack, watching the dog. “The photo. Next to the A. Purvis asked what it was. She said it was the law in America. He said it ought to be the law in Coln, and she said it is the law in Coln, Mr Purvis, I’m the one who enforces it.” The dog got down and shook its ears. “He’s had water with every pint since. He says it’s American.”

The man on the door of the bar sat on a stool, large and calm, in a black T-shirt, with a small torch that he shone on the cards people held out to him; and on his wrist, on a ring, there was a bundle of orange paper bands.

Jack looked at the bands, and at Frederick.

“Tomorrow,” said Jack.

“I know.”

“Your own country. Twenty years. And the last time you went in there he put one of those on you, like Alex, and you had a lemonade at a little table.” He said lemonade as though it were a diagnosis. “Theo says it was eleven months on lemonade at Eight Bars as well. Pulling pints for a Cabinet minister.” He shook his head in the lamplight. “Tomorrow I’m taking you in there, and I’m going to watch that man look at your card and not reach for his wrist. That’s all I want.”

“What will he do?”

“He’ll look at the card,” said Jack, “and then he’ll look at you. And then he won’t care.” He looked at the door a moment longer. “And I’m not buying you a drink.”

Frederick looked at him.

“You said,” said Jack, quite quietly, to the trough. “On the Kreuzberg. You want to be the one nobody buys a drink for.” He put his hands in the pocket of the sweatshirt. “So I’m not.”

---

“How is she?” said Jack, by the canal.

He said it as he always said it, without warning, in the middle of walking, to the path.

“She walks.”

“How far?”

“She did the stairs on Saturday. All of them.” Frederick watched the dark water. “She sent a photograph of the chair on the landing, with nobody in it.”

“Did your dad take it?”

“She took it. From the top. He’s in it, on the step below the chair, on his cushion, looking up at her.” He stopped on the path. “She’d gone past him.”

Jack stopped as well. Somewhere a long way off along the water a bicycle bell rang, twice, and Jack did not turn his head at it this time. He only smiled, at nothing, at the path.

“Good,” said Jack.

---

Mr Luna had come on at ten.

He was at the desk under the lamp in the cardigan, with the ball game on low and the clipboard and the butterscotch and the paper sun on the front of the desk that said IGNACIO, gone a little pale now at the edges of its rays, and he looked at them over his glasses as they came in, at Frederick and at the red sweatshirt, for some time.

“Gloucestershire,” said Mr Luna.

Jack opened his mouth.

Mr Luna lifted the clipboard. Under it, flat on the desk, was a sheet of paper that had been folded in four and unfolded so often that the folds had gone soft and white, like a map in a glove box. It was a map, printed in black and white on the library’s printer: the south and west of England, and the sea, and a coast. Somebody had drawn on it in pen, in a small neat hand, a ring round a county in the middle, and an arrow from the ring to the left, across a line, to a word.

WALES.

“I looked it up,” said Mr Luna. “In November.”

Jack did not say anything.

“You were right, son.” Mr Luna put the clipboard back on top of the map. “It’s near Wales.”

Jack stood in the lobby in his red sweatshirt and looked at the clipboard for long enough that the man on the radio struck out and the crowd made the sound crowds make; and his face had gone the colour it went in the sun, though they were indoors.

“Nobody’s ever looked it up,” said Jack.

“Well,” said Mr Luna. “Now somebody has.” He pushed the jar of butterscotch an inch across the desk. “Drink water. Call your mother.”

“It’s six in the morning there.”

“Then she’s up,” said Mr Luna, and went back to the crossword.

---

At midnight Frederick was at the desk by the door, with the lamp, and the Charter open, and Rhys’s cards in a block beside it with a rubber band round them, and the Commentary of the Clerk, chapter nine, paragraphs four to eleven, which he had now read three times and which said, at more length and with more footnotes, what the Governor-General had said to him in a corridor.

Jack was on the camp bed with his hands behind his head, in a T-shirt at last, with the red sweatshirt folded under his head for a pillow. On the left-hand screen the forest went on snowing, and in the corner the small fire went up and came down, and Tyler clicked it every so often without looking, as a man touches his pocket for his keys.

Jack’s phone lit up on his chest. He looked at it, and turned his head on the sweatshirt.

“It’s the second,” said Jack.

“Is it?”

“It’s been the second at home for eight hours.” He turned the phone round. It was a photograph sent from the New Inn at eight in the morning, of the bar, empty, with the chairs up on the tables and the sun on the pumps, and on the bar in the sun a single pint of bitter, poured, with a head on it you could have stood a coin on, and nobody drinking it. Under it Sue Fennell had written, without capitals or punctuation, because she wrote the way Jack shouted, thats yours love have it tonight.

“She pulled you one,” said Jack. “She’ll leave it there all day. She’ll make Purvis guard it.” He put the phone face down on his chest. “Happy birthday, Hanover.”

“Thank you.”

“Twenty-one. No band.” Jack shut his eyes with deep satisfaction. “You can go in a bar.”

From the desk under the window, without turning round, without taking off the headphones, loudly, to hear himself, Tyler said:

“Happy birthday, Fred.”

Frederick turned round in the chair. Jack’s eyes had come open.

The back of Tyler’s head did not move. The small fire went up and came down.

“How do you know?” said Frederick.

“It’s on your page.” Tyler clicked. WOOD: 2. “Like, online. You’ve got a page. It’s got your birthday. And your height.” He considered something on the screen. “And a list of all your countries. It goes on for a while.”

There was a silence in 312.

“I looked you up,” said Tyler. “In January.” He clicked the small fire again. “It’s a long page.”

“Tyler,” said Jack, from the floor. “It’s King’s Day.”

“What’s King’s Day?”

“Tomorrow. It’s a holiday. The whole country. That’s why there’s no exams.” Jack lifted his head off the sweatshirt. “There’s bunting on the Avenue. There’s going to be guns.”

Tyler considered this, with his back to them, for some time.

“That’s for him?”

“That’s for him.”

“Huh,” said Tyler. WOOD: 1. “I thought it was, like, a finals thing.”

He did not say anything else, and he did not turn round. After a while Jack shut his eyes again, and Frederick turned back to the Clerk and read paragraph four for the fourth time without taking in a word of it; and after a minute, from down by the floor, a hand came up over the edge of the chair and found his elbow, and stayed there.