The Ruling

He woke at six.

He had been asleep for about three hours, on the sofa, under the hospital sheets that Kate had pulled back up and tucked in for him at three, the hospital way, hard, without a word, and the dark blue blanket that had gone to the General round Mr Hartigan and come back in the grey car round Kate’s shoulders, and the crocheted one from Milwaukee, and the spring, through a towel folded in four.

He woke at six anyway. He always would. He lay there with his eyes open and the low ceiling there with the water stain shaped like a man in a hat, and the yellow light from the depot window going grey, and for a moment he did not know what day it was, or where he was, or why his arms ached, and then he remembered all of it at once: the bathroom floor, and stone, and in, and the lift, and the man in the cheese hat with the broken nose, and Depot. Lasko.

The rabbit was not on his chest.

He turned his head. The box marked TEXTBOOKS was on the rug in front of the television with the lid on, and the rabbit was in it, and Kate’s door at the end of the passage was shut.

Through the wall, no snoring. The bedroom on the other side of the wall was empty.

---

At five past six he heard a car in the street.

Not the dark blue one. Not the grey one. He knew the sound of both now. A different engine, older, with a rattle in it, and it stopped below, outside the street door of the block, and a door opened, and shut, and another, and a voice he knew said something in the street, low, and another voice answered.

He got up and went to the window over the sink.

Below, in the street, under the lamps, in the grey half light, a car with a sign on the roof that said DISTRICT CABS, and beside it, with the back door open, Mr Haddad, in his green shirt from the Bowl with a jacket over it, at the end of his night shift, holding the door. And getting out of the back of the cab, slowly, one foot and then the other and then a hand on the top of the door, in his grey coat with his green and gold shirt under it and a hospital band on his wrist, Mr Hartigan.

Mrs Hartigan got out of the other side in her blue dressing gown with Kate’s school coat over it.

Mr Haddad shut the door. He did not take any money. Frederick saw Mrs Hartigan hold out her hand with something in it, and Mr Haddad look at it, and shake his head, once, and get back into his cab, and drive away towards the depot gates without looking back.

---

Mr Hartigan came up the stairs on his own feet.

Frederick heard him. He went out onto the landing in his pyjamas and stood at the head of the stairs, by the light switch, and pressed it, and the light came on below, and he heard them coming: slowly, very slowly, two sets of feet, one of them heavy and careful, stopping at every landing. He did not go down. He knew, without being told, that if he went down Mr Hartigan would want to come up faster, and that Mr Hartigan was not to be made to come up faster by anybody.

He held the light.

Fourteen, and a stop. Fourteen, and a stop. On the second landing, Mrs Okonjo’s door opened, and her voice said Peter and his said Ngozi and the door stayed open. On the third, a small voice behind a door said is that Mr Hartigan and a larger one said hush, he’s been in the hospital. On the first, he realised, there had been no sound at all from Mr Dabrowski’s door, and he understood after a moment that Mr Dabrowski was standing behind it, listening, and would not open it, because Peter Hartigan was coming up his own stairs on his own feet and did not need to be looked at doing it.

Fourteen.

Mr Hartigan came round the last turn of the stairwell with his hand on the rail and his wife a step below him, and looked up, and saw the King of fourteen realms at the top of the fourth flight in his pyjamas with his finger on the light switch.

He stopped.

“Lasko,” said Mr Hartigan.

“I rang him. At one. From the General. On the card in your wallet.”

Mr Hartigan looked at him for a long moment, with his hand on the rail.

“I know,” said Mr Hartigan. “He rang the ward at two to say so.” He came up the last four steps. “He said a boy on the fourth floor with a spring rang him and said a friend of the family.” He stopped at the top. “He said he knew who it was.”

---

He gave Mr Hartigan the sofa.

He did not ask. He went in ahead of them and pulled the hospital sheets off it and folded them, and the dark blue blanket, and put them on the chair by the radiator in the corner that was his until Monday, and put the crocheted blanket from Milwaukee back over the arm, and his pillow on top of the folded sheets, and stood back.

Mr Hartigan looked at the sofa.

“It’s your sofa,” said Frederick.

“It’s in the bet,” said Mr Hartigan.

“The bet doesn’t say anything about you.”

Mr Hartigan considered this, standing in the doorway in his grey coat with his hand on the frame. Then he took his coat off, slowly, and hung it on the hook behind the door, and crossed the room, and sat down on the brown corduroy sofa, in the middle, carefully, and then, more carefully, lay down along it, on his right side, with his head on the arm at the window end and his feet on the arm at the other, because he was six feet tall and the sofa was about six feet long and he did not have the extra inch.

Mrs Hartigan put the crocheted blanket over him.

He lay with his eyes open, looking at the ceiling, at the water stain shaped like a man in a hat.

“Left,” said Mr Hartigan.

“It’s under your hip,” said Frederick. “I know. There’s a towel.”

---

At sixteen minutes past six, through the window over the sink, from the depot yard, came the sound of a bus engine starting.

Mr Hartigan’s head came up off the arm of the sofa.

They all heard it. A big diesel engine, turning over, catching, settling to a rumble, and then the hiss of air brakes letting go. And then the engine note changing as the bus began to move, and a gearchange, first into second, slow, heavy, with a pause in the middle of it longer than it needed to be, and a small grinding at the end.

Mr Hartigan listened to the gearchange with his head up off the arm of the sofa and his eyes on the ceiling.

“That’s Lasko,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“He double-declutches,” said Mr Hartigan. “Nobody’s double-declutched since 1990. That box doesn’t need it. He does it anyway.” He lay back down. “It’s how he learned.”

Frederick went to the window.

Below, in the grey light, a red and cream bus was going slowly out of the depot gates, with its lights on and its destination blind lit up over the windscreen, 22 BOATHOUSES VIA BLADEN ST & THE AXIS, and in the driver’s seat, very small, in a dark jacket, with grey hair, both hands on the wheel, an old man. It turned left out of the gates onto the street, past the corner where the cross on Castellanos’s map had been, past the grey car parked there with Kimura in it, and went away along the street towards the avenue and Bladen Street, where at ten past six there would be people at the stop in the dark who worked at the bakery and the hospital and the Home Office, and who would have a bus.

“Six sixteen,” said Mr Hartigan, from the sofa, with his eyes shut. “He’s a minute late.” A pause. “He’s never been late in his life.”

---

At half past six they sat at the table.

All five. Theo in his school shirt, with his tie not done up, and his blazer on the back of his chair. Kate in her college jumper. Mrs Hartigan at the end by the stove in her blue dressing gown, still, with a cup of coffee in both hands and her hair still loose, at the end of a night without sleep, looking exactly as she always looked, which was as if she had slept. Frederick in his Monday school shirt, from his list, the first of two, with his own tie in his pocket. And Mr Hartigan, not at the table, but on the sofa, on his side, under the crocheted blanket, with his eyes open, watching.

On the table, between the sugar hen and the bread board, square, on the oilcloth with the lemons, the napkin.

Theo had taken it out of the inside pocket of his blazer, from behind the button, from beside the eleven pounds, and unfolded it, and smoothed it flat, and turned it round so that it was the right way up for his mother, and she had not turned it back.

THE BET. Five rules in blue capitals. One struck out in green. Not needed. Nobody ever has. A.H. There is a spring. The left side. And homework first. Saturday morning. Chemistry. Before the boxes. The stake. ANYTHING. Witnessed. P. I. Castañeda. Witnessed. He won’t last. Ratified. Anneliese Hartigan. P.H.

And in the middle, in larger capitals than the rest:

3. NO HOUSEHOLD UPSTAIRS.

---

“I’m putting the case,” said Theo.

He said it to his mother. He did not look at Frederick.

“Rule three,” said Theo. “No Household upstairs. Castellanos stays in the car. Kimura stays in the car. Nobody from the Palace comes up.” He put his finger on it. “At twenty past eleven last night Castellanos came up. And Kimura. Both. Fifty-six steps. Through the door.” He took his finger away. “He sent for them. I saw him. I said the bet and he said shut up, Theo and he pressed send.” He looked at the napkin. “That’s the case.”

“Is there a defence?” said his mother.

Everybody looked at Frederick.

“No,” said Frederick.

“No defence?”

“I sent for them,” said Frederick. “Theo’s right. I knew what it was. I read rule three before I pressed it.” He looked at the napkin. “I lost.”

Mrs Hartigan looked at him for a long moment over her coffee.

“You lost,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You’ll wear the shirt.”

“Yes.” He thought about it. Green and gold, with a G on it, in homeroom, in front of Mr Abernathy, and a telephone somewhere, and by lunch the radio, and by Tuesday a question in the House about whether the Crown had claimed a club, and Dame M across the small dining room over her folder for a very long time without saying anything at all. And a box on her desk that had come on Friday, that she had not opened, that would go to Kimura at a quarter to seven. “Yes,” he said again.

From the sofa, under the crocheted blanket, Mr Hartigan made a sound.

---

Mrs Hartigan put her coffee cup down on the oilcloth.

She did it slowly, square, the way her husband put down a fork he meant to come back to, and she looked at the napkin, at rule three, upside down for the last time, and then the right way up.

“Upstairs,” said Mrs Hartigan, “is this side of that door.”

“We know,” said Theo. “You ruled that on Friday. With the hamper.”

“I did. And on Friday I ruled that the landing is everybody’s. And on Saturday I put a chair on it for a man with two red boxes and gave him a biscuit.” She looked at the napkin. “Rule three doesn’t say nobody comes through the door. Rule three says no Household upstairs. And on Wednesday afternoon, when you came in from school and asked me to ratify it, before he came up the stairs, you told me what you meant by it, Theodore, and I wrote down what you said, in my head, the way I write down everything anybody says at the foot of a bed. You said so that he can’t be King at our table.”

Theo opened his mouth.

“The Household,” said Mrs Hartigan, “is the people who come for the King. Who carry his boxes and bring his cake and ring him on the hour and fly a flag where he is. That’s what you wrote it for. So that he’d be here on his own, at our table, with nobody coming for him.” She put her finger on the napkin, on the 3. “Nobody came for him.”

“Castellanos…”

“Castellanos stood on that landing at twenty past eleven,” said Mrs Hartigan, “one pace back from the door, with his chest going, and his hands empty, and did not come in. He waited. Because he’d read your napkin, and he knew whose line it was. And then I said in. Me. At my own door. To a man who had come up four flights at a run.” She took her finger away. “I didn’t say it for the King. I said it for Peter.”

The room was very quiet.

“And the King,” said Mrs Hartigan, “didn’t send for them for himself. He was standing at that window in his pyjamas with his telephone, and he read rule three, and he sent for two police sergeants to carry my husband down four flights in a kitchen chair, because the ambulance was an hour and Peter was grey on the bathroom floor.” She looked at Frederick. “He didn’t send for the Household. He sent for help. For Peter. In my house anybody can send for help for Peter. That’s not a rule. That’s the house.”

She picked up her coffee cup again.

“Nobody came up for the King,” said Mrs Hartigan. “Two people came up for my husband, because I asked them in. The bet stands.” She drank. “He hasn’t lost.”

---

Nobody said anything.

Theo was looking at his mother with his mouth slightly open. Kate was looking at the napkin. Frederick was looking at his hands on the oilcloth.

From the sofa, under the crocheted blanket, on his right side, with his head on the arm at the window end, with a hospital band on his wrist and five millimetres of something still somewhere in him, Mr Hartigan spoke.

“He stays,” said Mr Hartigan.

They all turned round.

Mr Hartigan was looking at the ceiling, at the water stain shaped like a man in a hat.

“He stays,” he said again. “He won.” He shut his eyes. “And he rang Lasko.”

Kate held up both hands, all ten fingers, and then, slowly, put them down on the table, because she had run out, and because nobody was counting any more.

---

Theo looked at the napkin for a long time.

Then he folded it. In half, and in half again, and put it back in the inside pocket of his blazer, on the left, behind the button, beside the eleven pounds, and buttoned the pocket over both, and put his hand flat over the pocket for a moment, the way his father put his hand on the crossword when he had finished it.

“Fine,” said Theo.

He looked across the table at Frederick. His ears had gone red. Not from the tips down. All at once.

“Fine,” he said again. “I lost. I said anything. I’ll wear anything.” He stood up. He picked up his plate from breakfast, which he had not eaten, and took it to the sink, and put it there, and Frederick stood up and took his own plate to the sink and put it beside Theo’s, because the two boys cleared their plates to the sink, because they always had. “What is it?” said Theo, at the sink, with his back to the room. “What am I wearing?”

Frederick looked at the clock on the cooker.

Six forty-one.

“It’s coming at a quarter to seven,” he said, “to Kimura, at the street door. In a box.” He picked up his school coat off the back of his chair. “I’ll go and get it.”

Theo turned round from the sink.

“In a box,” said Theo. “You ordered it. You ordered it before. You didn’t know if you’d…” He stared at him. “When did you order it?”

“Yesterday,” said Frederick. “At eight. After breakfast.” He put his coat on. “After the pancakes.”

He saw Theo think back. He saw him go back through Sunday, to the pancakes, to the table, to the jar of peanut butter in the middle of it with the red lid, and his own voice, with his eyes shut and the spoon in his mouth, saying I’ll wear anything, and except.

He saw Theo’s face arrive.

Behind Theo, at the sink, Kate had put both hands over her mouth.

“No,” said Theo.

Frederick went to the door, and stepped into his shoes without undoing them, the way Theo did, and opened it, and went out onto the landing, past the kitchen chair with the wobble that was back against the wall where it lived now, and down the fifty-six steps, at a quarter to seven, on a Monday, in February, to the street.