The Most Ordinary Town

Mr Vollmer had brought a pointer.

It was the old kind, the kind Frederick had only seen in photographs of classrooms, a long thin stick of pale wood with a rubber tip, and Mr Vollmer carried it under his arm into the King’s sitting room at ten o’clock on Tuesday morning like a man carrying a sword into a cathedral, and laid it on the low table in front of the fireplace with great care, beside forty pages bound in blue card.

He was small and round and perhaps sixty, in a grey suit that had been pressed for the occasion so thoroughly that it shone at the knees, with a bow tie, dark red, and spectacles on a chain, and he was the Deputy Registrar of the Census, and he had been at the Census Office for thirty-one years, and he had never been inside a palace before. Frederick could tell. Mr Vollmer looked at the sitting room as he came in, at the books and the fireplace and the long windows over the lawn, the way Theo looked at a cake.

“Your Majesty,” said Mr Vollmer, and bowed, very low, from the waist, the bow somebody had shown him how to do in a corridor ten minutes before. “Thank you. Thank you. I want to say before anything else, sir, that this is the most important day of my professional life.”

“Please sit down,” said Frederick.

Mr Vollmer did not sit down. He looked at the chair, and at the blue report on the table, and at the pointer, and at Frederick, and took a breath.

“I would rather stand, sir, if I may,” he said. “I have prepared it standing.”

---

There were three other people in the sitting room, and they had been there since half past nine, and they had been told nothing.

Theo was on the window seat with his long legs up and his back against the shutter, eating an apple from the bowl, in the posture of a boy who has been in this room a hundred times and still finds it slightly funny. Marcus was on the sofa with his hands between his knees, very upright, in a clean shirt his mother had ironed that morning and almost certainly photographed. Felix was beside him, with one hand on the arm of the sofa between them, the way he kept a hand near Marcus in any room with more than two doors.

They had been asked to come at half past nine by a letter. An actual letter, on paper, in an envelope, from the Household, which had arrived at two flats and a house in New Westminster on Saturday morning by hand and said only that the King would be glad of their company on Tuesday at half past nine regarding a matter of the summer. Marcus’s mother had rung Felix’s mother, and Felix’s mother had rung Mrs Hartigan, and Mrs Hartigan had rung the Household and asked whether her son was in trouble, and the Household had said not yet, Mrs Hartigan, which Theo said was the best thing anybody at the Palace had ever said to his mother.

“What’s the pointer for?” said Theo, from the window seat.

“Shh,” said Felix.

Mr Vollmer opened the blue report.

---

“His Majesty’s request,” said Mr Vollmer, “came to the Census Office at a quarter past eleven on Friday morning, by telephone, from the Private Secretary. I took the call. I wrote it down.” He put on his spectacles and read from a card. “The King asks the Census Office to identify the most ordinary place in the Realm, and to show its working.”

He took the spectacles off.

“Sir,” he said, “nobody has ever asked the Census Office that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, sir. No. I mean it as the highest… the Census Office counts. That is what it is for. Every ten years we count everybody, and in between we count everything else, and we publish the counts, and the counts are used by the departments and the polities and the universities to decide where to put a school, or a hospital, or a road. And in thirty-one years nobody has ever once asked us what the counts mean.” He looked at the pointer. “Taken all together. What the Realm is. In the middle. Where the middle is.”

Theo had stopped eating the apple.

“So we built it,” said Mr Vollmer. “Over the weekend. Myself and two colleagues who should have been at home.” He picked up the pointer. “Thirty-seven measures.”

There was an easel by the fireplace that a footman had brought in at a quarter to ten without being told why, and on it there was a large sheet of card, face to the wall. Mr Vollmer turned it round.

It was a table. Thirty-seven rows. The rows had names.

Median age. Household size. Distance to the nearest hospital. Distance to the nearest body of water larger than a pond. Churches per thousand residents. Proportion of residents born in the polity. Proportion of residents who have moved house in the last five years. Median rainfall. Median July temperature. Number of public telephones. Number of motor vehicles per household. Proportion employed in agriculture. Proportion employed in services. Proportion over sixty-five. Proportion under eighteen. Distance to the nearest motorway junction. Distance to the nearest railway station with a passenger service…

“For every one of the Realm’s towns and villages,” said Mr Vollmer, “we calculated how far it lies from the national median on each measure, and then we combined the thirty-seven distances by the method of…”

“Please don’t explain the method,” said Theo, faintly.

“…and arrived,” said Mr Vollmer, not hearing him, “at a single figure for every settlement in the Realm. Its distance from the middle. Its extraordinariness, if you like, though we have called it the deviation index in the report, because the Director prefers it.” He turned the page of the blue report. “The town with the lowest deviation index is the most ordinary place in the Realm.”

He looked at Frederick over the top of the blue report. He had a look Frederick had seen on Mr Ferrante’s face once, at the start of a lesson on the Peace of Boston, the look of a man about to say the best thing he knows.

“It is,” said Mr Vollmer, “to three decimal places, Ketchum.”

---

Nobody said anything.

“Ketchum,” said Theo, at last.

“K, e, t, c, h, u, m. In the State of Oklahoma-Sequoyah.” Mr Vollmer turned the card on the easel round. On the back of it there was a map, a real one, a large-scale survey map of a piece of country, with a lake on it, a big crooked lake with arms going off it in every direction like the fingers of a glove, and on the shore of one of the arms, very small, a grid of half a dozen streets, and a name. “Population four hundred and seventy-one at the last census. In the counties of Craig and Mayes, in the north-east of the State, on Highway 85, fourteen miles from the county seat, which is Vinita. On an arm of Grand Lake, which is a reservoir, made by a dam built between 1938 and 1940. Within the reservation of the Cherokee Nation, which the Census does not count as a deviation, since it is the ordinary condition of that part of the State.”

He put the tip of the pointer on the little grid of streets.

“It is not the most ordinary place on any single measure,” he said. “There is no such place. That is the first thing the exercise teaches. Every town in the Realm is extraordinary on something. Ketchum’s median age is a little high. Its distance to the nearest hospital is a little long. But it is a little high and a little long on everything, and on nothing very much, and when you put the thirty-seven together, sir, it is nearer the middle of the Realm than anywhere else at all.”

“What’s there?” said Marcus.

He had not said anything since he sat down, and he said it to the map, quite quietly, as if he had not meant to say it out loud.

Mr Vollmer looked delighted.

“A school,” he said. “Two churches, Methodist and Baptist. A fire station, volunteer. A post office. A café on the highway. Marinas, on the cove, for the lake. A small airstrip, regional, mainly for the lake people in the summer. A great many boats. The town is named for James Ketchum, who was a Delaware, and a Methodist minister, and came to the Indian Territory in 1867 from Kansas.” He turned a page. “And it is the second town of that name. The first was on the river. When they built the dam the water came up over it. The town that is there now was laid out in 1912 when the railway came, and the railway has gone, and the town has not.”

Frederick looked at the map. At the little grid of streets on the shore of one finger of the lake, and the blue going away from it in every direction.

“The first town is under the lake,” he said.

“Under about forty feet of it, sir, by the survey.” Mr Vollmer looked at it fondly. “It is the only unusual thing about Ketchum, and the Census does not measure it, because nobody lives there.”

---

“I’ve never heard of it,” said Felix.

“Nobody has heard of it, sir,” said Mr Vollmer, to Felix, with enormous warmth. “That is measure thirty-one. Mentions in the national press in the last ten years. Ketchum has had two. One was a boat. One was a pie.”

“What happened to the pie?” said Theo.

“It won something,” said Mr Vollmer. “At the county fair. I did not pursue it.”

Frederick got up.

He went to the easel and stood in front of the map, close, the way you stand in front of a painting in a gallery when nobody is watching, and looked at it. Grand Lake. The fingers of the glove. The cove. Highway 85, a thin red line along the shore. The grid of streets, six, seven of them, and the school marked with a flag and the churches with crosses and the airstrip with a little aeroplane, and all round it, on every side, the survey’s pale green for woods and white for fields and blue for water, and nothing else, for miles.

He thought about the Programme. The crossing at Harrisburg. The combine harvester. Ordinary families at an ordinary lake, underlined in pencil, possibly in despair.

“There’s a lake,” said Theo, beside him. He had come over from the window seat without Frederick hearing him. “In the Programme. Day three of the heartland. Ordinary families at an ordinary lake.”

“I know.”

“This is a lake.”

“I know.”

“And these are ordinary families.” Theo looked at the map. “Four hundred and seventy-one of them. Well. Two hundred, I suppose. Households.”

“Two hundred households,” said Mr Vollmer, behind them, very softly, as if he could not help it. “Exactly two hundred.”

Theo turned round and looked at him with deep respect.

---

It took the rest of the day.

It took the Private Secretary, who came in at eleven and stood by the door and listened to Mr Vollmer do it again, from the beginning, with the pointer, and at the end said only thank you, Mr Vollmer, that is exactly what His Majesty asked for, in a voice that made Mr Vollmer go pink to the top of his head. It took Dame M, who came at noon and made a note without opening her folder. It took three telephones in the Equerries’ Room and three sets of parents.

Mrs Hartigan said yes after asking eleven questions, one of which was whether there was a hospital and how far, and the answer was not one Mr Vollmer had been proud of, and she said yes anyway, and then she asked to speak to Theo and spoke to him for a long time in Wisconsindeutsch, and Theo said ja, Mama fourteen times and nein, Mama once and went red at the nein.

Felix’s parents said yes in four minutes. Felix’s father said, on the speaker in the Equerries’ Room, that Felix had been asking to go somewhere without his little sisters since he was nine and that he did not care if it was the moon.

Marcus’s mother came in person.

She came at three, on the bus, in a yellow dress, with the camera, and she was small and round, exactly as Marcus was going to be one day, and she stood in the Equerries’ Room and listened to the Private Secretary explain about the farmhouse and the detail and the boxes and the seven weeks, and she did not say anything at all until he had finished. Then she looked at Marcus.

“Do you want to go?” she said.

Marcus looked at the floor. Then he looked at Felix, and at Theo, and at Frederick by the door; and then he looked at his mother.

“Yes,” he said.

His mother looked at him for a long time.

“Then take the trombone,” she said. “And ring me every night. And if anything happens, anything at all, you tell me before you tell anybody else.” She lifted the camera, and took one photograph of the four of them standing in the Equerries’ Room in a row, in front of the Private Secretary, who did not move out of the way in time and was in it too, slightly blurred, looking at the ceiling. “There,” said Marcus’s mother. “Now I have the before.”

---

They wrote the list at six, at the low table in the sitting room, on the back of page fourteen.

Frederick had brought the Programme up from the study. The second copy, the one Ms Fenner had left. He turned it over on the table and turned to the end, past the garden party, and there it was, the back of page fourteen, cream, blank, the good thick paper of a document that somebody clever and tired had cared about.

“On that?” said Theo.

“It’s the best paper in the building.”

“It’s the Prime Minister’s paper.”

“It’s mine now. She left it.”

Theo looked at it for a moment. Then he took the pen out of Frederick’s hand.

“Right,” he said. “Things you’ve never done. Ordinary things. That everybody’s done. That you haven’t.” He wrote 1. at the top, in his big slanting hand. “Take the bus.”

“I’ve been on a bus.”

“You’ve been on a bus with the class. On a trip. With Mr Abernathy counting. And six people behind you in a car.” Theo looked at him. “You’ve never got on a bus on your own, and paid, and sat down, and gone somewhere, and got off.”

Frederick thought about it.

“No,” he said.

Theo wrote Take the bus.

He passed the pen to Frederick.

Frederick looked at the paper for a while. Then he wrote, in his own hand, smaller, under Theo’s: 2. Buy a bike with my own money.

“You haven’t got any money,” said Felix.

“That’s why it’s two things.”

Felix took the pen. He wrote 3. Swim at the pool. In the queue. He underlined in the queue. “Everybody’s been in the queue,” he said. “At the public pool. With the wet floor and the man with the whistle and the lockers that take a coin and keep it. You’ve only ever been in pools that were yours.”

“I’ve swum in the sea.”

“With a boat behind you,” said Felix. “That’s worse.”

Theo took the pen back. 4. Get a job. And under it, smaller: a real one, with a form.

Marcus did not take the pen. He sat on the sofa with his hands between his knees and looked at the list, and then, when Theo held the pen out to him, he shook his head, and then he took it anyway.

5. Eat at a counter and pay.

“At a counter,” said Marcus, very quietly. “On a stool. Where the person cooks it in front of you. And you pay at the end, at the till, and they give you change, and you leave some.” He looked at Frederick. “My uncle in Oakland took me. You sit at the counter. It’s the best thing in the world.”

He wrote, under it, before anybody could say anything: 6. Go out at night. To something with lights.

Then he put the pen down on the table and sat back and looked at the ceiling, very red.

---

They did the rest more slowly.

7. Get a library card, Frederick wrote, because he had never had one; libraries came to him, in boxes, with a librarian. 8. Catch a fish, Felix wrote, because there was a lake. 9. Get my hair cut by somebody who doesn’t know, Theo wrote, because the King’s hair was cut once a month by a man called Mr Lorimer who had cut his father’s, in the King’s bathroom, with a sheet, and Mr Lorimer knew.

And then they stopped, and looked at it, nine things in four hands on the back of page fourteen of the Proposed Summer Programme, and there was still room at the bottom.

“Ten,” said Theo. “Lists have ten.”

Nobody said anything.

Frederick took the pen.

He did not know what he was going to write until he wrote it. He thought about the reception, and the Programme, and the diary on the Private Secretary’s desk with seven empty weeks in it, and the road going away in front of him with nothing written on it; and he wrote, at the bottom, under the nine, in his own small hand, the thing he had asked Ms Fenner for in the small dining room.

10. Do nothing all day.

Theo looked at it for a long time.

“That’s the hardest one,” he said.

“It’s the easiest one.”

“It’s the hardest one,” said Theo. “You’ve never done it. Not once. Not one day in your life.” He picked up the Programme and looked at the back of page fourteen with the ten things on it in four hands, the way Mr Vollmer had looked at the map. “You’ll do the other nine before you do that.”

“We’ll see.”

“We’ll see,” agreed Theo, and put the list in the envelope that the Programme had come in, and wrote on the front of the envelope, in capitals, KETCHUM, and underlined it twice.

Behind them, at the door, where nobody had heard her come in, Dame M was standing with her folder. She looked at the envelope in Theo’s hand, and at the four of them round the low table, and at the blue report on the easel that Mr Vollmer had forgotten to take with him.

She opened the folder and made a note.