Five to Five

The alarm came through the wall at twenty to five.

It was not loud. It did not need to be. It was the kind of alarm a man has had for twenty years and no longer needs, because he is awake a minute before it goes, and lets it go anyway, once, out of loyalty: three short electronic notes, beep beep beep, and then a hand, and silence.

Frederick was awake for the first note.

He had not been asleep long. He did not know how long. He lay on his back in the dark with the rabbit still on his chest, folded into its loaf shape on the crocheted blanket, warm, heavy, breathing very fast and very lightly the way rabbits breathe, and he did not move, because he had been told that rabbits did not like to be moved and because he did not want to.

Through the wall, the sounds of a man getting up in the dark without turning the light on. Feet finding slippers. A wardrobe door. A drawer. Then the door at the end of the passage, and the light in the passage, a line under the door to the room, and the bathroom door, and water.

At five to five the door at the end of the room opened.

---

Mr Hartigan came in, in his socks, in the dark, carrying his shoes.

He was dressed for work: the grey trousers, the pale blue shirt with the transit authority’s badge on the pocket, a dark tie already knotted, and he came across the room between the table and the chairs without turning on the light, without looking, the way a man crosses a room he has crossed at five to five every working morning for three years, to the hook behind the door where his jacket was.

He put his shoes down by the door. He took the jacket off the hook.

Then he turned round, and saw the sofa.

He stood there in the half dark with the jacket in his hand. In the yellow light from the depot window Frederick could see his face, just. A broad, quiet, tired face, with the stubble on it already, because he shaved at night, Theo said, to save the four minutes in the morning. He was looking at the sofa. At the King of fourteen realms on his back on the brown corduroy in a pair of old pyjamas, with the hospital sheets pulled out at one corner and the crocheted blanket from Milwaukee over him, and on top of the crocheted blanket, on his chest, folded up like a loaf of rye, asleep, a large grey rabbit called Professor.

Frederick shut his eyes. Not all the way.

Mr Hartigan looked for some time.

Then he put his jacket down over the back of his own chair by the window, and came across to the sofa in his socks, and bent, and took the corner of the dark blue blanket, which had come off at the bottom and was hanging down on the floor, and lifted it, and tucked it in again, under the cushion, over Frederick’s feet, which were sticking out over the arm, carefully, without hurrying, the way you would tuck in a blanket on a bus seat for somebody who had fallen asleep on the last run.

He straightened up.

He looked at the rabbit.

“Morgen,” said Mr Hartigan, very quietly, to nobody, or to the rabbit, and went and put his jacket on, and picked up his shoes, and opened the door, and went out onto the landing in his socks, and shut the door behind him with no more sound than a page turning.

Frederick heard him sit down on the top stair, outside, and put his shoes on there, on the landing, so as not to make a noise on the floor of the flat.

Then the stairs. Fifty-six of them. Getting further away.

Five, he thought. That was five.

---

He woke at six.

He always woke at six. He had woken at six every morning since the thirty-first of May, in the gym at Santa Monica and on Sceptre and in London and in the room in the north wing with the crack in the corner of the ceiling, and he woke at six now, on the sofa, all at once, with his eyes open and the ceiling there.

It was a different ceiling. Lower. With a water stain on it in one corner shaped like a man in a hat. The yellow light from the depot had gone grey; it was getting light outside, or getting less dark, the way February does it, slowly and without much conviction. The rabbit was gone from his chest. He turned his head and saw it on the rug in front of the television, sitting upright, washing one ear with both front paws, with great seriousness.

Twenty minutes, Mrs Hartigan had said. Lie there for twenty minutes and think about what you’ve let yourself in for.

He lay there.

He thought about the Standard. About the man on the Axis who walked past every Friday at half past seven. About Bridget humming. About the beetroot, which was in some sense still with him. About Mr Hartigan putting his shoes on on the top stair. About the shape in the car at the corner turning off the interior light.

At twenty past six he got up and took his washing things and one of the two towels, the one that was not under the cushion, and went through the door at the end into the passage.

---

The bathroom was the size of a lift.

He had been in it before, at the end of forty-eight suppers, to wash his hands. He had never been in it in the morning, and it was a different room in the morning. It was warm and damp, with Mr Hartigan’s steam still on the mirror, and it smelled of Mr Hartigan’s shaving soap, which was the same kind his own father had used in London, the kind in a wooden bowl, and of something flowery that was Kate’s, and of the green bar of soap on the side of the bath that was everybody’s.

There was a bath with a shower over it and a curtain with fish on it. There was a basin with a mirror over it and a glass shelf under the mirror with a great many things on it. There was a mug on the shelf, white, with the name of a hospital on it, and in the mug there were five toothbrushes: a blue one, a red one, a green one, a yellow one, and a white one with a bent head that he supposed was a spare.

He took his own out of his washing bag. It was dark grey. He had chosen it himself, on Thursday, in the chemist on the avenue near Ellicott, with Castellanos standing at the end of the aisle pretending to read the label on a box of plasters, because he had realised on Thursday morning that he had never once in his life bought a toothbrush.

He put it in the mug with the others. Six.

It looked, he thought, quite at home.

---

At seven Theo came out of the bedroom with the partition in a green jacket with ST JOHN on the back in white letters, a cadet’s jacket, slightly too big, and stood in the kitchen half with a slice of rye bread in each hand, eating them both, alternately, and looked at Frederick, who was at the table in his Saturday shirt with a cup of coffee that Mrs Hartigan had put in front of him at twenty to seven without asking whether he wanted coffee.

“You slept,” said Theo, through rye.

“About three hours.”

“The radiator?”

“At two. Properly.”

“Told you.” Theo ate. “Professor?”

“On my chest. From about two. Till about six.”

Theo stopped eating.

He looked across at the rug, where the rabbit was now sitting in front of the box with its back to the room, looking at the television, which was still off, and then back at Frederick, and his ears went red.

“Don’t tell Kate,” said Theo.

“Why not?”

“Because she’s slept with that rabbit on her pillow every night since September at college,” said Theo, “and he’s never once got on her.” He put the last of the rye in his mouth. “I’ve got to go. St John. Half seven at the hall on Canal Street, till four. There’s a match at the community stadium and they want cadets for the first-aid post.” He went to the door and stepped into his shoes without undoing them. “I’ll be back at half four. Don’t lose before I’m back.”

“I won’t lose.”

“You’ve got a whole day,” said Theo. “Without me. With them.” He jerked his head at the room, at his mother at the sink and the closed door of the bathroom, where Kate was. “You don’t know what Saturdays are like.”

“What are Saturdays like?”

“Jobs,” said Theo darkly, and went out, and Frederick heard him go down the fifty-six steps two at a time, not loudly, but fast.

---

The telephone on the wall rang at seven exactly.

Mrs Hartigan, at the sink, did not turn round.

“The Navy,” she said. “You get it. I’m not answering the Navy before I’ve had a second cup.”

He got it. Dame M said good morning, and asked whether the King had slept, and he said yes, and she said I see, in a tone that meant that she had already been told how long he had slept by somebody in a car at a corner. She said that there was nothing further on the Standard; that the Private Secretary would be at the door at nine with the boxes; that it was raining slightly on the Axis and might snow by Monday; and that she would ring at eight.

“Dame M.”

“Sir.”

“You don’t have to ring at eight.”

“I know, sir,” said Dame M, and rang off.

---

At twenty to eight Kate was still in the bathroom.

At a quarter to eight Mrs Hartigan dried her hands on the tea towel with the map of Wisconsin on it, and went to the door at the end of the room, and opened it, and stood in the passage, and knocked on the bathroom door, once, and said, in English, clearly, in the voice she used for his name:

“Katharina. Seven forty.”

There was a pause.

“It’s not seven forty,” said Kate’s voice, through the door, over the shower. “It’s seven forty-five.”

“Then you are five minutes over,” said Mrs Hartigan. “It’s on the fridge.”

“Nobody’s waiting!”

“I am waiting,” said Mrs Hartigan. “I am waiting for it to be seven forty.” She came back into the room and picked up her cup of coffee and drank some of it. “She has done this since she was eleven,” she said to Frederick. “She will do it until she’s forty. And when she has her own daughter, her own daughter will do it to her, and I’ll be very old and I’ll come and stay and stand in her passage and laugh.”

The shower went off. Kate came out at eight minutes to eight in a cloud of flowery steam with a towel round her hair, and looked at Frederick at the table, and at the rabbit on the rug, and at Frederick again.

“Did he sleep on you?”

Frederick looked at his coffee.

“He did,” said Kate. “He did.” She stood in the doorway with the towel coming down over one eye. “That’s… That’s not fair.”

“I didn’t ask him to.”

“Nobody asks him to,” said Kate bitterly, and went back down the passage, and shut the door of the bedroom with the partition harder than she needed to.

---

“Homework,” said Mrs Hartigan at eight.

She put her coffee cup down on the oilcloth with the lemons and sat down at the end of the table nearest the stove, opposite him, and put her elbows on the table, and held out her hand.

He gave her Mrs Okonedo’s sheet on equilibria, and the chemistry paper, the one with fifty-four on it in blue and Equilibria. Again. See me if you wish.

She read the paper upside down. All of it. Page three, where he had stopped understanding, took her longest. She put her finger on it, on the place.

“This,” said Mrs Hartigan. “Here. You’ve stopped here. You’ve written down the rule and then you’ve written down what the rule says happens, and you don’t believe it.”

“I don’t understand why it happens.”

“No.” She turned the paper round, the right way up, for him, for the first time, and pushed it across the oilcloth. “Breathe out.”

He looked at her.

“Breathe out,” said Mrs Hartigan. “All of it. Go on.”

He breathed out.

“What did you just get rid of?”

“Air.”

“What’s in it that wasn’t in it when it went in?”

He thought. “Carbon dioxide.”

“Carbon dioxide. Which is in your blood. Which is an acid, in the blood, more or less, and the blood is a system, and it is an equilibrium, and it has been an equilibrium every second you’ve been alive.” She tapped the table. “I spend my nights on the acute ward watching that equilibrium in people whose bodies have forgotten how to keep it, and I can tell you what’s happening in them from a number on a machine. When you breathe too fast, you blow off too much of it, and the system shifts to make more. When you can’t breathe out enough, it builds up, and the system shifts the other way.” She looked at him. “That’s Le Chatelier. That’s all it is. Change the conditions, and the system moves to undo the change. It’s not a rule in a book. It’s what your blood is doing right now so that you don’t die at my kitchen table.”

He looked at page three.

“That’s what Lucía’s grandfather said,” he said slowly. “About the trains. Every passenger on every train.”

“Then Lucía’s grandfather understands chemistry better than whoever set this paper,” said Mrs Hartigan. She stood up and took her cup to the sink. “Do the three questions on the sheet. Then do them again. Then you can do your boxes.”

He did the three questions on the sheet.

He did them again.

The second time, for the first time since September, he did not write down what the rule said would happen in the hope that it would turn into understanding. He wrote down what would happen, and why, and it was the same thing, and he sat at the kitchen table four floors over the depot with the pencil in his hand and looked at it.

At nine o’clock exactly, there was a knock at the door.

Not two polite knocks. Three. Measured. The knock of a man who has climbed fifty-six steps with a red box in each hand and has had time, on every one of the fifty-six, to decide precisely how to knock.