Coach House

There were no lights.

Theo stood on the pavement on Indian School Road at a quarter to one in the morning with his phone in his hand, open at a photograph of Coach House in December, and looked from the photograph to Coach House and back again.

In the photograph Coach House was a building made of light. Every edge of it, every line of the roof, every window and post and the sign and the fence and something that might once have been a tree, done in strings of coloured bulbs, thousands of them, red and green and gold and white, so that the whole low building sat on its corner like a present somebody had left out for the street.

In front of him Coach House was a building.

It was a nice building. It was low and old and plain, older than anything near it, with a sign and a door and the sound of people inside, and Theo had nothing against it at all, as a building. It was just not made of light.

“It’s August,” said Alexander, beside him, gently, as if breaking news of a death.

“I know it’s August.”

“The lights go up for Christmas,” said Alexander. “It says so. Under the photograph. You showed us.”

“I know.” Theo looked at the photograph. “I just thought. On my birthday. You know.” He put his phone away. “I don’t know what I thought. I thought they’d have a few up. A string. One string. For the people who come in August.”

“Nobody comes in August,” said Jack, who was standing a little way off on the pavement in the heat with his face turned up to the dark and his shirt stuck to him from the neck down. “Look at it. It’s a hundred degrees at one in the morning. Nobody comes to Arizona in August. It’s just us and the lizards.”

“I’ve been personally offended,” said Theo, “by a building.”

“Happens to all of us,” said Freddie, and held the door.

---

Inside it was small and low and full, and cold, and loud in the way a bar is loud at one in the morning when everybody in it has decided not to go home yet, and Theo stood just inside the door with the cold air coming down on him and felt his whole body sigh.

The bar was along one side. Behind it was a woman of about forty with her hair tied up and her sleeves pushed back, working fast, and when they came to the bar she looked at the five of them in one look, the way his mother looked at a ward when she came on shift, and said “ID, gentlemen,” before anybody had opened his mouth.

Theo put his licence on the bar.

He had done it four times now and it had not got old. He had a feeling it would not get old for about a year. HARTIGAN, THEODORE JAMES. 19 AUG 2013. He watched her read it, and look at the date, and look at the clock behind her, and do the sum.

“Happy birthday,” she said. She looked at the clock again. “Yesterday.”

“It doesn’t count till I’ve been to sleep,” said Theo. “That’s the rule. It’s been going since six this morning, in a car park at a water works, and I haven’t been to sleep, so it’s still going.” He nodded. “Whatever’s on draught. Please.”

Jack put his passport down. The Germans put their passports down, side by side, open, like two ambassadors presenting letters, and the woman looked at them, and at the eagles, and at the dates, and at the two straight-backed boys behind them, and said “Lemonade,” and Alexander said “Thank you,” with the same grave courtesy he had used at every bar since eight o’clock, as if each lemonade were the Order of the Black Eagle.

And then she looked at Freddie.

Theo watched it happen. He had watched it happen at Castaways and at Boondocks and at DJ’s, and it was the best thing he had ever seen in his life, and he had been at a coronation.

“ID?” she said.

“I haven’t got any,” said Freddie.

“None?”

“None at all.”

She looked at him. Tall, fair, a white shirt that had been through a lot, and a face that was on every news in the March tonight, and she looked at it the way they all had, as if it reminded her of somebody she could not quite place, a cousin’s boyfriend, a man from an advertisement.

“Lemonade,” she said.

“Thank you,” said Freddie.

“That’s six,” said Theo, to nobody.

“Six what?” said the woman.

“Lemonades. He’s had six. He’s eighteen. He’s been eighteen since May. He’s just never been issued anything.” Theo looked at her. “It’s a whole thing.”

“I bet,” said the woman, who did not believe a word of it and did not mind, and poured.

---

They got a corner by the wall, and they put their drinks on a table that was too small for five people and stood round it, because there were not five chairs, and it did not matter.

Theo looked it up again on his phone, to be sure.

“It’s been here since 1959,” he said. “It’s the oldest bar in Scottsdale. That’s older than my dad.”

“That’s older than my father would have been,” said Alexander.

There was a short pause at the table.

“Sorry,” said Alexander. “I don’t know why I said that. It was a fact. Lukas says facts don’t count.”

“They count a bit,” said Lukas.

Theo looked at Alexander, who was standing very straight in the corner with his lemonade in both hands, underneath, by the bottom of the glass, with two fingers, the way Freddie had said he held everything, and he thought that he had been told about that, and had not believed it, and that it was true.

“To your dad,” said Theo, and held up his glass.

Alexander looked at him.

“To my dad,” said Alexander, after a moment, and touched his lemonade to it.

Nobody else said anything. That was right. Theo had worked out a long time ago, in a cemetery at Arlington with a box on his knees, that most of the important things you could do for people were done by not saying anything after them.

---

The woman behind the bar came past with a cloth at five to one and stopped, because Theo was looking at her with his face doing what his mother called his question face.

“The lights,” said Theo.

“November,” said the woman.

“When in November?”

“Early. They start the day after Halloween, some years. Takes a while. Every inch. They’ve been doing it for years. You can see it from space, they say.” She wiped the table. “You can’t. But they say it.”

“I’m going to be in medical school in November,” said Theo.

“Then come back at Christmas.”

“I’ll be in New Westminster at Christmas. It’s two thousand miles.”

“Then come back next August,” said the woman, “and be disappointed again. It’s a tradition. You’d be amazed how many people come in in August and look at the ceiling like you just did.” She went on with her cloth. “You’re not the first person to be personally offended by this building.”

“I said that,” said Theo, delighted. “I said personally offended. Did you hear me?”

“No,” said the woman. “Everybody says it.”

---

At one o’clock Freddie put his hand inside his shirt pocket.

Theo saw him do it. He had seen him do it about forty times since six o’clock that morning, in three different shirts. In the car to the water works. On the folding chair in the sun. In the hard hat. At lunch, under the table. On the lawn at the Biltmore. On the bus. In Ahwatukee. Every time, Freddie had put his hand to the pocket and felt something there and taken his hand away again, and Theo had thought it was the phone, until Freddie had found out on the bus that the phone was on a bed four miles away. After that, Theo had not known what it was.

Freddie took out a small box.

It was a dark red cardboard box, about the size of a matchbox, a bit squashed at one corner from a day in three shirt pockets in a hundred and eight degrees, and he put it on the too-small table among the glasses, in front of Theo, and took his hand away.

“Happy birthday,” said Freddie.

Theo looked at it.

“I thought,” said Theo, “we said no presents.”

“You said no presents.”

“I said it because you’d get me something stupid. Something with a crest on. A cufflink. You’d get me a cufflink, Freddie, and I’d have to keep it in a drawer for sixty years with a crest on it because you can’t sell a King’s cufflink, it’d be in the paper.”

“It hasn’t got a crest on it.”

Theo opened the box.

It was a watch. Not a wristwatch. A small round silver watch on a short silver chain with a pin at the end of it, the kind his mother had worn pinned to the front of her uniform every working day of his life. The kind that hung upside down, with the face upside down on it, so that when it was pinned on your chest and you lifted it you could read it without turning it round. So you could count a pulse with it. So you could count anything.

It was not new. The silver had a soft shine that only came from somebody’s thumb, for years.

Theo did not say anything.

“It’s second-hand,” said Freddie. “I found it on a stall in Cirencester. In the market. In March. I asked your mum which kind, on the telephone. She said that one. She said the face has to be upside down, or it’s no good, it’s just a watch.” He looked at the table. “It goes. I had it cleaned. The man said it’ll go for another hundred years if you wind it.”

“Mum knew,” said Theo.

“Since March.”

“She didn’t say anything.”

“She’s very good at not saying anything,” said Freddie. “She said that’s most of nursing.”

Theo turned it over.

On the back, on the silver, in small plain capitals, somebody had engraved three words, and under them a date.

EAT YOUR DINNER.

19.8.31

Theo looked at it for a long time.

He was fifteen. He was at the kitchen table on the fourth floor after the washing-up, with the accordion on the radio and a bag of the bad sour sweets between them, and it was the twenty-fourth of October and there was a boy across the table from him who had just told him his father was going to ask what it would take to stop being King, and who was turning a sweet over and over on the table and not eating it, because he could not. And Theo had looked at him across the table, at fifteen, not knowing anything, not knowing what you were supposed to say, and had said the only thing he could think of, which was the thing his mother said, which was the thing you said.

“You remembered that,” said Theo.

“I remember everything you’ve ever said to me,” said Freddie. “It’s a problem. I can’t stop.”

At the table nobody said anything. Jack had his hand flat on Freddie’s back, between the shoulder blades, not moving. Lukas was looking at the watch with the expression of a boy who knows exactly what an upside-down face is for and approves of it as a piece of engineering. Alexander was looking at Theo, and then he looked away, at the wall, politely, so that Theo could have his face to himself.

Theo pinned it on.

He pinned it to the front of his shirt, on the left, where his mother wore hers, and it hung there upside down on its little chain, and he lifted it, and looked at it, and the second hand went round, and he could read it.

1:04.

“It’s right,” he said.

“I set it at six this morning.”

“It’s right,” said Theo again, and found that his eyes were doing something, and let them.

---

At ten past one he stood up.

He did not plan it. He had four pints in him and an upside-down watch on his chest and he was eighteen and it was Coach House, which had been there since 1959, older than his dad, and had no lights, and he found he was standing, with his glass in his hand, at a table too small for five, and that the four of them were looking up at him.

“I’m going to say something,” said Theo. “Once. Because I’m eighteen now and I’m allowed one.”

“Go on,” said Jack.

“In September 2025,” said Theo, “a woman with a clipboard put us in alphabetical order.”

He looked at Freddie.

“Hanover,” said Theo. “Hartigan. That’s all it was. H, A, N. H, A, R. Nobody chose it. Nobody checked it. Nobody vetted it for suitability or proposed it to a council. Nobody’s ever been able to take it back, and believe me, Freddie, there were people who tried.” He held up his glass. “So that’s what I want to say. Six years ago a woman with a clipboard did the most important thing that ever happened to me, and she didn’t even know, and I don’t know her name.” He stopped. “To the alphabet.”

“To the alphabet,” said Freddie.

“To the alphabet,” said Jack, and Lukas, and Alexander, and five glasses went up over the little table, two pints and three lemonades.

And at the next table, which was four women on what was clearly a very long birthday of their own, and at the bar, where two men in work shirts had turned round on their stools, and behind the bar, where the woman with the cloth had stopped with a glass in her hand, half a dozen strangers who had no idea what they were drinking to lifted whatever they had in front of them, because it was one in the morning in a bar and somebody had stood up and said to something, and that was what you did.

“To the alphabet,” said one of the women at the next table, warmly, to Theo, and drank.

Theo sat down.

“Was that all right?” he said.

“That was the best speech I’ve ever heard,” said Freddie, “and I heard the Lord Mayor of Phoenix this morning, and she was very good.”

---

At a quarter past one Jack came back from the bar with the receipt and put it on the table and said, “Where now?”

Jack had paid. Freddie had tried to. He had gone up with him and put his coins on the bar, five of them, all he had left, in a stack, and Jack had pushed them back across the wood with one finger and given the woman his card, and Freddie had counted the five again on the corner of the table, twice, and put them back in his pocket, and said he was keeping them, in case. He would not say in case of what.

Theo turned the receipt over and took the pen Jack had brought back from the bar and wrote on the back of it, in capitals, the way he made lists for his mother on the fridge.

BOONDOCKS? (REMATCH)

“Lukas wants his rematch,” said Theo.

“I do not want a rematch,” said Lukas. “The man in the cap wants a rematch. I have nothing to prove at cornhole.” He took the pen out of Theo’s hand and underlined BOONDOCKS twice, firmly. “But he should not be denied one.”

“Is Boondocks even still open?” said Jack.

Nobody knew.

Underneath, Theo wrote GILIGIN’S (TILL 3).

“Giligin’s is open till three,” he said. “Every night. It’s got a wheel. You spin it and you get whatever it lands on. Four pounds.” He looked at Freddie. “And you can’t have anything off it, because you haven’t got ID, so you’ll have to watch us.”

“I’ll watch you,” said Freddie.

“Giligin’s,” said Alexander, who had said very little since the toast and had been looking at the receipt upside down from across the table. “It is closer. It is open. And there is no cornhole.” He looked at Lukas. “There will be no rematch.”

“There is never a rematch,” said Lukas, with dignity. “That is the point of winning.”

Theo put the pen down. He put the receipt down on the table under the edge of his empty glass, with the list on the back of it facing up, BOONDOCKS? (REMATCH) underlined twice and GILIGIN’S (TILL 3) not underlined at all, and forgot about it at once and for ever, because Jack was pulling him up by the arm, and the four women at the next table were waving, and the door was open onto the heat, and behind them the room went on without them under its ordinary lights, the plain ones, which at Coach House in August were the only lights there were.

In the doorway Theo looked back, because the women were still waving, and waved. Behind the bar the woman with the cloth had stopped again with a glass in her hand, the way she had stopped for the toast. She was looking at the little table they had left, and her lips were moving, slowly, the way you read a name off a list to yourself to see if it is the one you think it is. H, A, N.

Then she looked up at the door.

Jack pulled, and the door shut.

---

Outside on Indian School Road, at twenty past one, it was ninety-three degrees.

Across the road, against the far kerb, a big dark people carrier sat with its engine running and its lights off, the way it had sat outside DJ’s, and outside Boondocks, and on a street in Ahwatukee where nobody had any business having a car with its engine running at half past ten at night.

“Kessler,” said Alexander, without turning his head.

“Does he want to come in?” said Theo.

“He does not drink on duty.”

“He’s not on duty. He told everybody you’ve gone to bed.”

“Then he does not drink,” said Alexander, “while lying,” and walked on, with his hands behind his back, towards the lights of Old Town, which were all still on, and were none of them Christmas, and which, as they came round the corner, turned out to have the whole of Scottsdale in them.