The Roll

He woke at ten past seven.

He lay on his back and looked at the ceiling, at the crack in the corner, with the June light already full in the room and a blackbird on the railings and somewhere a long way off a bus, and did not understand for a moment what was wrong.

Then he did.

Ten past seven. Not six.

Six in New Westminster was three in Los Angeles. Since the second of June last year, every morning, without an alarm, some part of him that he could not reach had woken him at that city’s hours, in case it was needed. For a year and twelve days.

This morning it had not.

He lay and thought about it. He did not know why today. He did not think there was a why. He thought that whatever had been keeping that city’s hours had looked, at some point in the night, at a photograph of a wheel turning with nobody on it, and a sign rolled up on a kitchen table, and a statute with fourteen words in it, and a man’s arm with a white line across it, and had decided, without telling him, that it could stop.

He got up.

---

Bridget had the eggs on the table. The second piece of toast at his elbow.

“You’re late,” said Bridget, to the range.

“I overslept.”

Bridget turned round, which she did not do, and looked at him with the spatula in her hand.

“Well,” she said. “About time.” And turned back.

---

Castellanos drove. The dark blue car with no flag on its wing, down the Axis under the trees in full leaf, the Monument white in the middle, the tourists already at the railings behind them looking up at the Standard. The lights on Tenth Street.

“Monday,” said Castellanos.

“Yes.”

“Nine o’clock.”

“I know.”

At the gates of Ellicott he stopped the car and did not say sir.

“One more year,” said Castellanos.

Frederick looked at him.

“Senior year, sir. And then June.” Castellanos looked straight ahead through the windscreen at the gate. “I wanted to say it on the last day of this one. So that it was said.”

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

“Have a good last day, sir.”

“You too.”

Something happened at the corner of Castellanos’s mouth, and Frederick got out.

---

Theo was on the low wall by the bike racks with his bag between his feet and an envelope in his hand.

He did not hold it out. He held it on his knee, with both hands, the way Señora Ruiz held the folder, and looked at Frederick coming across the pavement, and his face was doing something it had never done in five years, which was trying to look ordinary and failing completely.

Frederick stopped in front of him.

“What,” said Theo.

“What’s that?”

Theo looked at the envelope.

“It came yesterday,” he said. “To the flat. Kate opened it because it said Hartigan on it and she said she didn’t look at the first name, which is a lie.” He turned it over. “Mum read it twice. Dad read it four times and then went down to the depot and told Mr Lasko.”

He held it out.

A long white envelope, opened, with a crest on it Frederick had seen on the sides of ambulances in New Westminster all his life: a red cross on a white star. NEW WESTMINSTER AMBULANCE SERVICE.

Inside, one sheet.

Dear Mr Hartigan,

We are pleased to offer you a place on the Service’s Summer Cadet Course for 2030, for candidates of seventeen, which begins on Monday 1 July and runs for six weeks at the Training Centre on River Street.

Your application, your examination results in the sciences, and the reference from your teacher of chemistry were considered alongside those of two hundred and eleven other candidates for twenty-four places.

Please report at seven-thirty on the first morning with a pen and a packed lunch.

He read it twice.

He looked up.

Theo was looking at the bike racks.

“You applied,” said Frederick.

“In February.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“No,” said Theo. He looked at the bike racks very hard. “I didn’t tell anybody. Not Mum. Not Kate. Mrs Okonedo, because she had to write the reference. I asked her after chemistry. After your fifty-four.” He turned his head at last. “On my own name. My own marks. Eighty-four in chemistry. Ninety in biology. Nobody’s list.” A pause. “Two hundred and eleven of them, Freddie. Twenty-four places.”

“I saw you at her desk.”

“I know you did. You didn’t ask.”

“It was yours.”

“I know,” said Theo. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. So it’d stay mine. Till it was done.” He looked at the envelope in Frederick’s hands. “It’s done.”

Frederick gave him the envelope back.

He wanted to say a great many things. He did not say any of them. They were all about him: I’m glad, I’m proud, you didn’t need to keep it from me, I’d never have. Every one of them would have put something on it.

“Pen and a packed lunch,” said Frederick.

Theo looked at him.

Then he laughed. Out loud, on the low wall by the bike racks, in the sun, on the last day of junior year, with the envelope in both hands, helplessly, the way he had laughed at a hat on a lawn under the galaxy, and Frederick laughed too, and people going past through the gate looked at them, and did not know why, and did not need to.

“Mum’s going to make the lunch,” said Theo, when he could. “Every day. For six weeks. I’m going to turn up at the Training Centre on River Street with a lunch box with my name on it.” He wiped his eyes. “Kate’s going to put the letter on her wall. Next to the lizard and the breeches.”

“And Professor.”

“Professor’s going to eat it,” said Theo, and stood up, and put the envelope in the zipped pocket of his bag, beside the chemistry paper and a letter about an arm, and zipped it. “Come on. Last roll.”

---

The homeroom at the end of the east corridor on the first floor. The long windows over the playing field. The two cream radiators under them that had never worked. The desks in their rows. His by the window, three from the back. Theo’s beside it.

Thirty-one.

Mr Abernathy came in at a quarter past eight in the brown jacket, and sat down, and opened the roll book, and took out his pen.

He did not look at anybody.

He looked at the roll book for a moment longer than usual. Perhaps a second. Then:

“Abrams.”

“Here.”

“Bello.”

“Here.”

“Castañeda.”

“Here,” said Inés, from the desk by the door, and did not look round, and her hand was not flat on the desk this time. It was in her lap.

“Diaz.”

“Here.”

Eckhardt. Feeney. Gallagher. Grant. The same speed. The same small pause after every name, for everybody, to give them time.

“Hanover.”

“Here,” said Frederick.

The pause after it was exactly the same as after every other name.

“Hartigan.”

“Here.”

Ibrahim. Jansen. Kowalski. Moreno. Novak. All the way down. All thirty-one. Nobody missing. Nobody late. Nobody’s name said four times or six into a playing field with a gap at the bottom.

Mr Abernathy closed the roll book.

He put the pen back in the inside pocket of the brown jacket. He looked up, over his glasses, at the room, at all thirty-one of them, for perhaps two seconds, which was twice as long as usual. Then out of the long windows at the playing field, green, in the sun, with nobody on it, and the bleachers at the far end.

“Radiators are fixed,” said Mr Abernathy. “Don’t touch them.”

He stood up, and picked up the roll book, and went to the door, and stopped there, with his hand on the frame, and did not turn round.

“The end,” said Mr Abernathy. “Of junior year.”

He went out.

---

The rest of the day went past the way last days do.

Desks cleared. Lockers emptied into bags. A yearbook passed along a row and signed by everybody in it; Marcus wrote see you in the King’s row across a whole page and was not allowed to forget it. Señora Ruiz in the corridor with no folder at all, which was the first time, saying feliz verano to everybody who passed and Majestad to him, with her hands folded at her waist. Mr Ferrante at the top of the west stairs with his hands in his pockets, not saying anything, watching them go down, and as Frederick passed, without looking at him, see you at 1988. Lucía on the steps with a bag of lemons, a new one, from Pomona, giving them to everybody, and one to Inés, who took it and put it in her blazer pocket and said I’ve still got the first one, and Lucía stopped on the step and looked at her.

At ten past three, the last bell.

He came out onto the top step with Theo into the afternoon, into the heat, coming up off the stone, the first real heat of the summer, and stood there and looked at it: the yard, the bike racks, the low wall, the gate, the dark blue car at the kerb beyond it with Castellanos at the wheel looking straight ahead, and people going home. Ordinary people. Going home from an ordinary last day of school.

“Four o’clock?” said Theo.

“Four o’clock.”

“Tell your dad about the letter.”

“You said not to.”

“I said tell him it’s mine,” said Theo. “Tell him that. And tell him,” and he stopped, on the step, with his bag on his shoulder, and thought about it. “Tell him thanks. For well done. You told me on Tuesday. He said it in one go.” He looked at the gate. “Tell him I heard it.”

He went off down the steps towards the number fourteen, taller than he had been in September, with his blazer short in the sleeves, and did not look back.

---

At four o’clock he sat in the plastic chair with the wooden arms at the corner of the kitchen table, where it had been since December, with the blue book in front of him, the summer one, valid from Monday the twentieth of May.

His father at the end of the table in the chair with the brake on, in a jacket, with a cup of tea he lifted with one hand now. Bridget at the sink. The radio on the dresser beside the cake tin and the green tin and the straw goat from Stockholm, which nobody had put away, very low. The window open over the garden. The blackbird.

The clock over the range said twelve minutes to four, which meant eight.

He told his father about the last day. The roll. Of junior year. Señora Ruiz with no folder. Marcus’s page in the yearbook. Lucía’s lemons, and Inés, and the first one, still.

He told him about Theo’s letter. That it was Theo’s. That he had applied in February on his own name and his own marks, and told nobody, and got in, twenty-four out of two hundred and eleven, and was to report on the first of July with a pen and a packed lunch.

“He says thank you,” said Frederick. “For well done. He says to tell you he heard it.”

His father nodded, slowly.

“Good,” said his father. “Boy.”

---

Then they were quiet for a while.

The radio. The tap, off. The blackbird. His father looking at the window over the garden, and the light on the wall, and the far side of the wall, where the Axis was, and the people at the railings, and the Standard on the roof, flying, because the King was in the building.

Frederick looked at his hands on the table.

“Papa.”

His father looked at him.

“In November. In the abbey. Behind the screen.” He did not know he was going to say it until he was saying it. “I haven’t told anybody. Not Mamma. Not Theo. I decided inside it. Before it came down.” He looked at the table. “But I’d like to tell you.”

His father put his cup down. He waited.

He did not help. He did not hurry. He had never once hurried him.

“It was small,” said Frederick. “Smaller than I thought. Gold, all round. Dark. Close. And the oil was cold, on my hands, the way you said. And then on my head, and then his hand stayed. The whole hand. On my head. Not pressing. Just there.” He looked at his own hands. “And I’d been somewhere like it before. Under a house. On Twenty-Second Street. In the dark, with the timbers over my back, and a hand that turned over and took hold of mine and didn’t let go.” He swallowed. “And the oil wasn’t cold any more. I didn’t notice it change. It just wasn’t.”

He looked up.

“Then not alone,” said Frederick. “You said that. In October. When I read you the order of service.”

His father was looking at him. The long look. The reading one.

“Was it like that for you?”

His father did not answer at once. He looked at the window. At the light on the wall. At the clock over the range, four minutes slow, which nobody was going to put right.

Then back at his son.

He did not take a breath first.

“It was exactly like that,” said his father.

All of it. In one piece. The third time.

“Same,” said his father, after a moment, with the breath again, as though to put a full stop on it, the old way. “Hand.”

Frederick could not say anything.

His father reached across the corner of the table, slowly, and put his own hand, the right one, flat, on the back of Frederick’s, where it lay on the scrubbed pine, and left it there.

---

At a quarter to five, by the clock over the range, which meant eleven minutes to, his father lifted his hand off Frederick’s and pointed, with one finger, very slowly, at the blue book.

The last quarter of an hour.

Frederick opened it at tomorrow. Saturday. The fifteenth of June. The first day of the summer.

He began, in the voice from the tannoy at Union Station, level and slow and carrying, the way he had read it on the sixth floor of New Westminster General on a great many afternoons, and at the end of a kitchen table since December, and would read it, he supposed, for a long time yet, because that was the arrangement, and his father liked the arrangement, and so did he.

“Tomorrow. Saturday. Six fifty-two. The Capitol. From Chicago. Via Pittsburgh.”

His father marked it. The small movement of the head. Less than a nod. The way you mark a thing on a list.

“Seven forty. The Crown Limited. From Boston.”

The mark.

At the sink, with her back to them, Bridget turned on the tap, very quietly, and turned it off again, and stood with her hands on the edge of the sink, listening.

Outside on the Axis, under the trees, a bus went by. A number fourteen. He did not look to see who was driving it.

He turned the page, and went on.