The Plaque

At half past six in the morning it was ninety-one degrees, and the superintendent of the North Gateway Water Treatment Works apologised for it, as though it were a fault in the plant.

“It’ll be worse by nine, sir,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” said Frederick.

“No, sir,” said the superintendent, a tall, sunburnt, careful man called Herrera, in a white hard hat with SUPT on the front in black tape. He did not look convinced. He had the look of a man who had been in charge of a great many things for a great many years and had come to feel responsible for all of them, including the sun.

They were standing in the car park. It was a very large car park, newly laid, black, with white lines on it so fresh they still smelled, and beyond it the works: long low buildings the colour of sand, and great round concrete tanks set into the ground in rows, and pipes, and a tower, and a fence, and beyond the fence, in every direction, the desert, going away flat and pale and scattered with creosote bushes to a line of brown mountains that the sun, coming up behind them, was turning red at the edges one ridge at a time.

There was nobody else there. That was the point. The Household had asked for a walk-through at half past six, before the heat, before the city, before the cameras, so that the King would know where to stand. Frederick had known where to stand at things since he was four. He had come anyway, because the people who arranged these things needed to have shown him, and because it was easier to come than to explain that he knew.

Theo stood two paces back and one to the left.

He was in his good suit, the dark one, with no badge on it, because a Page of Honour has three duties and none of them is a water works, and he had his hands behind his back and his face doing nothing, and he had not said a word since the car. Nor had anybody else. Nobody in the car had said it. Nobody at the hotel had said it, not at the lift, not in the lobby, not the man on the door who had said good morning, sir to Frederick and good morning to Theo. Kimura had not said it. Frederick had not said it.

Frederick had not said it on purpose.

He had a plan. It had several parts. The first part was not saying it.

“The curtain, sir,” said Superintendent Herrera, and led them across the car park to the front of the main building, where there was a sort of low wall of polished brown stone, newly built, at about the height of a man’s chest, and set into it, under a square of dark red velvet hung from a little brass rail, the plaque.

“You pull the cord,” said Herrera. “This one, the gold one. Firmly but not hard. It runs on the rail. The curtain goes to the left.” He took hold of the cord, firmly but not hard, and pulled it, and the red velvet ran smoothly along its little brass rail to the left, with a small, expensive sound, and revealed a square of bronze with writing on it, and he let go, and pulled the other cord, and it ran back, and covered it again.

“Like that, sir.”

“Like that,” said Frederick.

“I’d ask you not to try it now, sir. It’s set.”

“I won’t.”

“Thank you, sir.” Herrera looked at the velvet with something like love. “My wife sewed it,” he said. “The city’s one came in green. She said a King couldn’t open a water works with a green curtain. So she sewed this one.” He paused. “Out of a dress.”

“It’s very good,” said Frederick, who meant it.

“I’ll tell her, sir.”

---

At nine it was 104.

There were perhaps three hundred people on folding chairs in the car park under a long white awning, with fans on poles blowing hot air at them from both ends, and misters along the edge of the awning that hissed and put out a fine cool spray that evaporated before it reached anybody. There were engineers in hard hats and the city’s councillors in suits and children from a school in the north of the city in orange T-shirts that said I’M A WATER SAVER, who had been brought on a bus and given a bottle of water each and told to sit still, and were not sitting still. There were cameras on a little platform at the back. There was a band, from the same school, which had played the Realm’s anthem with great feeling and a trombone that had come in a bar early and decided to stay there.

In the front row, nearest the stone wall, sat the Lord Mayor of Phoenix, Kate Gallego, with her speech on her knee, and beside her the High Steward of Arizona, Esperanza Villalobos, who had driven up from Tucson before dawn and who was, the Household’s briefing note said, accustomed to heat. She was small and grey-haired and sat with her handbag upright on her lap, and she was the only person under the awning who was not fanning herself with anything.

Jack was in the back row of the dignitaries, at the end, beside a man from the Salt River Project called Jeff.

He was in a suit of Frederick’s that Theo had taken in at the waist on Monday night with safety pins, and a pair of sunglasses he had bought at Sky Harbor, and he had been in the sun for eleven minutes. Frederick had timed it. At the beginning of the eleven minutes Jack’s face had been the colour of milk. At the end of them it was the colour of a strawberry, and Jack had put his hand up to it, very carefully, and looked at his hand, as though he expected to find something on it.

Kate Gallego spoke for nine minutes. She spoke about the heat count, and the new works, and what it meant for the north of the city, and the Hohokam, and the price of water, which she said she was not going to talk about and then did, briefly, to applause from the engineers. Frederick listened to all of it. He found, as he always did, that if you listened to a speech properly it was interesting; it was the not listening that made them long.

Then it was his turn.

He spoke for four minutes. He had written it himself on Monday on the aeroplane and had it on two cards, and he did not look at the cards. He said that the first people who had lived in this valley had dug a thousand miles of canals with sticks and baskets, and that the city’s engineers still followed some of their lines because they had got the gradient right the first time, and that a valley which had already lost one civilisation to the question of water had every reason to be serious about it, and that the people who had built this works were serious about it, and that he had been shown round it at half past six that morning by a man who apologised for the weather. He said that he was very glad to be in Phoenix. He said, which was true, that he had never been anywhere so hot, and that he had been to Santa Monica.

Three hundred people laughed, in the heat, under the awning, and the misters hissed, and the trombone, by itself, played one note, and stopped.

Then the plaque.

He went to the wall. The cameras turned. Theo came with him, two paces back and one to the left, and stopped. The superintendent stood beside the wall with his hands clasped in front of him and his face completely still, the face of a man whose wife’s dress is about to be on the evening news. Frederick took hold of the gold cord, firmly but not hard, and pulled it.

Nothing happened.

He pulled it again, a little harder. The velvet moved an inch to the left along its brass rail and stopped. It made a small, expensive sound, and then a small, cheap one.

He looked at the rail.

The brass had been in the sun since six. It was, he realised, very hot. Hot enough that somewhere in the little brass runners something had swollen, or softened, or simply given up, and the curtain was now fixed to the rail as firmly as if it had been welded there, one inch open, with the corner of a bronze letter showing in the gap.

Three hundred people waited.

He pulled the cord a third time, firmly, and quite hard, and the gold cord came away from the curtain entirely and lay in his hand.

He looked at it.

There was a sound from under the awning that was not quite a laugh, the sound of three hundred people in 104 degrees deciding together whether they were allowed to laugh, and then a child in an orange T-shirt said, quite clearly, “He broke it,” and they were allowed, and they did.

Frederick looked at the superintendent.

The superintendent’s face had gone, by careful stages, through every colour available to a sunburnt man, and arrived at grey.

“It’s very well guarded,” said Frederick, to the plaque, and the awning laughed again, warmly, and he thought, it is all right, it is all right, they are on your side, and looked at the curtain, and had no idea at all what to do next.

Theo stepped forward.

He did not say anything. He took two paces, past Frederick’s shoulder, to the wall, and took hold of the red velvet at the bottom corner, gently, the way his mother handled a dressing, and lifted it. He lifted it up and over the brass rail, the whole square of it, carefully, so that it would not tear, and folded it back over the top of the wall like a towel over a rail, and stepped back, two paces, and one to the left, and put his hands behind his back.

The plaque was open.

THIS WORKS WAS OPENED BY HIS MAJESTY KING GEORGE THE FIFTH, it said, in bronze, ON THE NINETEENTH OF AUGUST 2031.

There was a pause under the awning. Then somebody began to clap, one of the engineers, and then all of them, and the children in orange stood up on their chairs, and the trombone played something that might have been anything, and the cameras did what cameras do, and Frederick stood beside a plaque with a gold cord in his hand and looked at the date on it for rather longer than was necessary.

He did not look round at Theo. He did not need to. He knew exactly where Theo was.

The Lord Mayor was the first to reach him. She came across from the front row with a bottle of water in each hand, cold, beaded, from a cool box that somebody had been guarding under her chair since half past eight, and gave one to him and the other to Theo, without asking, the way anybody in that car park would have given anybody water.

“Phoenix rule, sir,” she said. “Nobody stands in the sun without one. We teach it to the children first.”

“Thank you,” said Frederick.

“And that,” said Kate Gallego, with a nod at the velvet folded over the wall like a towel, “is going in the minutes as the best opening the city has ever had.” She looked past him. “Thank you, too.”

Theo said, “Ma’am,” and went red to the ears.

Behind her the High Steward looked at the plaque, and at the curtain, and at the gold cord still hanging from the King’s hand, for some time.

“In Tucson,” said Esperanza Villalobos, “we’d have used a zip.”

Afterwards, as they moved away along the front of the building, Superintendent Herrera came up beside him, grey, with his hard hat in his hands.

“Sir,” he said. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Tell your wife it was the best curtain I’ve ever opened,” said Frederick, “and that it was the rail.”

“It was the rail, sir,” said Herrera, with enormous feeling. “It was the rail.”

---

At ten it was 108.

The tour took them along the edge of the great round tanks, on a metal walkway with a rail, in hard hats. Frederick’s hard hat did not fit. It was the largest they had, a white one with VISITOR on it, and it sat on the top of his head like a bowl balanced on a post, and every time he looked down into a tank it slid forward, and every time he looked up it slid back, and the man explaining the tanks, a young engineer called Ortiz who had clearly practised his explanation many times in front of a mirror, watched it slide forward and back with a face of growing anguish and did not mention it, because nobody in the history of the world has ever told a King that his hat does not fit.

“This is the flocculation basin, sir,” said Ortiz. “The particles bind together and settle.”

“Like people,” said Frederick.

Ortiz stared at him. Then, after a moment, he wrote it down.

The water in the tanks was very still and a sort of dull green-brown and smelled of nothing at all. Above it the air shimmered. The walkway was so hot that Frederick could feel it through the soles of his good shoes, and the rail was so hot that nobody touched it, and Kimura, walking behind him at her usual distance, had put on a pair of thin cotton gloves at a quarter to ten without comment and was now touching the rail whenever she pleased.

Jack walked at the back of the group with Jeff from the Salt River Project. Frederick could hear them.

“Is it always like this?” Jack was saying.

“In August?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s August,” said Jeff, in the tone of a man stating a law.

“What’s that in proper degrees?”

“Proper degrees?”

“Celsius.”

Jeff thought about it. “About forty-two,” he said.

There was a long silence at the back of the group.

“In Gloucestershire,” said Jack, at last, in a voice of great quiet, “August is twenty-two and a shower.”

“Huh,” said Jeff from the Salt River Project, who had clearly never heard of Gloucestershire, and was now never going to forget it.

At about eleven, at the end of the walkway, by a tower full of pumps that thundered, a woman in a white coat with a lanyard came up to Frederick out of nowhere, put a small paper packet into his hand, closed his fingers over it with both of hers, and said, “Salt. In case you feel faint. You eat it,” and went away again before anybody could stop her. Kimura watched her go with the expression of somebody adding a name to a list. Frederick put the packet of salt in his jacket pocket. He did not know what else to do with it. Nobody had ever given him anything to eat on a walkway before.

Theo walked two paces back and one to the left, all the way round, in his good suit, with the sun on the back of his neck, and said nothing to anybody about anything, and was, Frederick could tell from the back of his own neck, waiting.

Not for anything in particular. Just waiting. The way you wait, on a birthday, when it has got to eleven in the morning and nobody has said it, and you have decided that you do not mind, and you mind.

Frederick did not turn round.

The second part of the plan was not turning round.

---

Lunch was in the works canteen, with the engineers.

It had been on the programme as luncheon with the Council, and the Council had been very willing, and Frederick had asked on Monday, on the aeroplane, whether instead it could be lunch in the canteen with the people who had built it, and the private office had looked at him for a long moment and then rung Phoenix. So the Council was having luncheon at a hotel, and the King was having lunch in a long low room with strip lights and a hatch and a refrigerated cabinet of yoghurts, with thirty-one engineers and technicians and two women from the laboratory and Superintendent Herrera, who had recovered most of his colour, and Ortiz, who had his notebook, and a cook called Bea who had made enchiladas and said so, at the hatch, to each person in turn, as a warning.

Frederick asked about pressure. He asked about the pumps, and the power for the pumps, and what happened to the plant if the power went, and how much of the city’s water came out of this valley’s rivers and how much came three hundred miles down the canal from the Colorado, and what they would do if the Colorado gave less, which everyone in the room seemed to think it would. He asked because he wanted to know. He had found, years ago, that if you asked people about the thing they actually did, and listened, they forgot within about four minutes who you were and started to argue with each other, and that the argument was always the best part.

The engineers argued about the Colorado for twenty minutes. The women from the laboratory won.

Jack ate three enchiladas and went quiet, and then went a different colour, under the sunburn, and went outside.

Theo sat at the end of the table and ate one enchilada, slowly, and answered when people asked him things, and the man beside him, one of the technicians, an older man with grey in his moustache, asked him what he did, and Theo said, “I’m with him,” and nodded down the table at Frederick, and the man said, “What, like his friend?” and Theo said, “Yeah,” and the man said, “Huh. Must be something,” and Theo said, “It’s all right,” and that was all. Frederick heard every word of it, from the other end of the table, through an argument about the Colorado, and did not turn round.

At a quarter to two, as they stood up to go, Bea came out from behind the hatch with a paper plate with a piece of cake on it, and a white plastic fork stuck upright in the cake, and came down the length of the room, and put it on the table in front of Frederick, and stood back.

“For the King,” said Bea. “Tres leches. I made it last night. It’s not much.”

The room went quiet.

Frederick looked at the cake. It was a square of pale sponge, soaked and soft, with cream on top and a single strawberry, and it was, he could see, the best thing anybody had made anywhere in the Valley that day.

He picked up the plate.

“Thank you,” he said. “Can I give it to somebody?”

Bea blinked. “It’s yours, sir,” she said. “You do what you like with it.”

He turned round.

He had not turned round all day, and he turned round now, and walked the length of the canteen, past thirty-one engineers and two women from the laboratory and a superintendent and an engineer with a notebook, to the end of the table, where Theo was standing up with his hands behind his back and his face doing nothing at all, and held out the plate.

“Here,” said Frederick.

Theo looked at the cake.

Then he looked at Frederick, for a long moment, in the strip light, with his face still doing nothing, except at the very corner of the mouth, where it did something small and private that Frederick had known since they were twelve.

“It’s a cake,” said Theo.

“It’s a cake.”

“Why’s it a cake?”

“No reason,” said Frederick. “It was spare.”

Theo took the plate. He took the plastic fork out of it and looked at it and put it back.

“Thanks,” he said.

“That’s all right.”

Behind them, at the hatch, Bea said, “Oh,” very quietly, to nobody, having understood something, and put her hand flat on her chest, and the man with the grey moustache said, “Huh,” and in the corner by the yoghurt cabinet Kimura, who had been standing by the wall all through lunch with her hands folded and her face doing nothing, looked at the ceiling.

They went out into the heat at two.

It was 109. The cars were waiting. The afternoon had three more things on it.

The third part of the plan, which was the part that mattered, he had not worked out at all.