The Night Before

He woke at six, and there was nothing.

He lay on his back in the grey and did not know, for a moment, where he was. Then he knew. The crack in the corner of the ceiling. The long window, with the curtains drawn, and the grey coming round the edges of them. The bed, which was wide, and cool, and did not creak. The air conditioning, somewhere in the wall, which he had never heard before in his life, and heard now, a faint steady breath, like the trailer’s through the blind.

And nothing else.

No insects. That was what he was listening for, and it was not there. No dry great breathing in the trees, rising and falling across the whole dark country, from one side of the yard to the other and back. No frogs down at the water plucking at their strings. No whip-poor-will in the oak, saying its name. No box fan roaring at the top of the stairs. No Theo, in the other bed, breathing, with his arm flung out. No screen door. No tin roof, dented all over like the moon.

He lay in the quiet and listened to it.

It was the quietest place he had ever been. He had not known that. He had lived in it since he was five, and he had not known, until he had lived for six weeks somewhere else, that it was quiet; that the walls were thick, and the windows were double, and the garden outside them was large and empty and walled, and the city beyond the wall was a long way off, and that nothing came in. He thought that he had grown up in the quietest room in New Westminster and had thought it was what rooms were like.

He lay and looked at the crack in the ceiling for a long time.

Then he got up, and opened the curtains, and the window, both halves of it, and the air came in. Warm. Wet. Smelling of cut grass and the river and the city. And far off, very faint, over the wall, a bus, changing gear.

---

Breakfast was at a quarter past seven at the end of the long kitchen table nearest the range, as it had been since he was four.

Bridget put down eggs and toast and a glass of milk, and at his elbow, on its own plate, a second piece of toast, buttered; and looked at him, over the plate, for a moment longer than she usually did, at his hair, and his arm, and his face, which had gone brown; and did not say anything; and went back to the range.

His mother came down at twenty past with her coffee and the folded newspaper and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair.

She had come back from Solliden on Saturday. He had known she would; she always came back at the end of August, the summer kept in Sweden as she had always kept it, and the autumn in New Westminster. She had been in the north wing hall last night at half past nine when the car came up the drive, in a cardigan, with her arms folded, waiting; and she had looked at him get out of the car, and come up the steps, with his bag and his bandage and his brown face; and she had not said anything at all, in either language, for a long time. Then she had said well?, in Swedish, and he had said ten, and she had laughed, in the hall, at half past nine at night, and put her arms round him, and smelled of the sea.

She sat down now at the end of the table with her coffee and looked at him.

“Vem klippte dig?” she said. Who cut your hair?

“Earl.”

“Who is Earl?”

“He drives a van,” said Frederick. “The county van. For the old people, to the doctor. You ring the day before.” He ate his toast. “He cuts hair on his back porch on Saturdays. For the old men. Three pounds. The way his father did.” He thought. “It’s called the regular.”

His mother looked at his hair for a long time over the top of her coffee cup. At the back, and the sides, short, and the top, a little longer, combed, with a parting, the way it had been done on a kitchen chair on a back porch at Big Cabin with a mirror nailed to a post.

“It is very good,” she said, at last, quite seriously. “It is the best your hair has ever been.” She drank her coffee. “Mr Lorimer will be devastated.”

“I know.”

“Does Earl know?”

“No,” said Frederick. “Earl doesn’t know. Earl’s the only man in Craig County who doesn’t know.” He looked at his plate. “He thinks I’m called Hanover. He asked if I was any relation.”

His mother put her cup down.

“Fredde,” she said, and her voice had the smile in it, the one that changed the shape of her Swedish. “What did you say?”

“Distant,” said Frederick.

He ate the second piece of toast.

---

At nine o’clock there were two white cups at the north wing door.

He had not known whether there would be. He went down the back stairs at five to nine, the way he went on Mondays, and along the corridor to the north wing door, and opened it; and the step was there, the stone one, warm already in the sun; and the chair beside it, the hard chair, the kind that stands in corridors, which had been by the north wing door for four years; and on the step, on a small tray, two white cups.

Castellanos was in the chair.

He was in his jacket. The sports jacket, and the dark trousers with the creases, and the black shoes, the new ones, which had stopped creaking; and he was sitting in the hard chair by the north wing door with his hands on his knees and his cup on the tray beside his foot, looking at the garden. The way he had looked at it every Monday at nine since the fourth of June. The way he had looked at the yard from the top step of the porch at two in the morning.

Frederick sat down on the step.

He picked up his cup. It was coffee, real coffee, from the Palace kitchen, hot, and good, and nothing like Darlene’s at all; and he held it in both hands, and drank some, and looked at the garden too.

They did not say anything for a while. Sometimes they talked. Sometimes not.

“Monday,” said Castellanos, at last.

“Monday.”

“The first since July.”

“I know.” Frederick looked at the garden. “We missed six.”

“We didn’t miss them, sir,” said Castellanos. He drank his coffee. “We were somewhere else.”

The garden was very green, and very large, and very empty, and walled, with the lawn going away from the north wing door between two long beds of something tall to the trees at the far end, and the wall, and beyond the wall the city, which you could not see, except that you could, because there was a haze over it, gold, in the morning sun. A blackbird was on the lawn, pulling at something. There was nobody else in the whole of it.

“Sir,” said Castellanos.

“Yes?”

“I’m keeping the T-shirt.”

Frederick looked at him.

Castellanos did not look round. He sat in the hard chair by the north wing door in his sports jacket with his cup in his hand and looked at the blackbird on the lawn with no expression at all.

“The blue one,” he said. “From the resort. With the boat on it. And the fish. And the mended shoulder.” He drank his coffee. “I’m keeping it.”

“What will you do with it?”

Castellanos thought about it, honestly, the way Theo thought about things, as if nobody had ever asked him before.

“I don’t know, sir,” he said. “Have it, probably.”

He finished his coffee and put the cup on the tray. He looked at the lawn a moment longer.

“Sergeant Kimura asked me to tell you,” he said, “that she saw a bluebird this morning. At seven. In the garden. On the wall by the kitchen gate.” A pause. “She looked it up. In her book. She says it was definitely a bluebird.” Another pause. “She says she’s never seen one here before.” He stood up. “She says she’s never looked.”

---

The box came at ten, and there were things in it again.

The Private Secretary brought it himself, up the main stairs and along the corridor to the small study, at ten exactly, in his dark suit, with the red box in one hand and nothing in the other; and stood in the door of the small study and looked at Frederick at the desk, at his hair, and his arm in its bandage, and his brown face; and his own face, which had been the same for four years, every day, at ten, in the door, did something, very slightly, that Frederick had heard in his voice on the telephone twice that summer and had never once seen.

“Good morning, sir,” said the Private Secretary. “Welcome back.”

“Good morning.”

He put the box on the desk. Frederick unlocked it, with the two small keys on the ring that went everywhere he went. Letters. A list. Two Acts of the Landtag of Hanover, with the white horse on their seals. A note from Dame Margaret, two lines, about the coronation, which was the seventeenth of November, and the Abbey, and a fitting. A letter from the Prime Minister, in the long white envelope with Charter House on the flap, in the big loose sloping hand that went uphill, which he put aside to read last. The Private Secretary’s note on the top, in its cream envelope, with the initials. Nothing pressing, sir.

Things. A box with things in it, the way it had been every day of his life since the second of May, and before that for years, every day there were boxes, which was every day.

He found that he did not mind. He found that he was glad of it.

“Sir,” said the Private Secretary, in the door. “There is one other thing. Not in the box.”

“Yes?”

“The Royal Archives have written.” The Private Secretary looked at a point on the wall above the desk. “The Archivist understands that there is a document. A list, I am told, sir. On the back of page fourteen of a Proposed Summer Programme prepared by the Prime Minister’s office. In four hands.” A pause. “The Archivist asks whether the King would wish it to be deposited. With the Programme. For the record.”

Frederick looked at him.

He thought about the basement under the west wing. The rooms of it, where the Household kept everything. Every letter. Every photograph. Every list of everybody who had ever come to dinner. His own first shoes, in a box, with a number. The crayon of Ernest the Fourth. He thought about a moth on its back on a saucer, which he had put out on Mrs Sixkiller’s porch boards in the dark instead, where the others were; and C. W. Mayfield of Bluejacket, and his whole life in a cattle trailer, at three pounds a box; and June Mayfield’s star, which her daughter had kept, and brought to the fair, and hung from the rafters where the whole county would walk under it.

He thought about keeping. He thought he understood it, a little, now. Not all of it. A little.

“No,” he said.

The Private Secretary did not say anything.

“It’s not for the archive,” said Frederick. “It’s not for having, either. It isn’t anything. It’s a list. We wrote it, and we did it, and it’s done.” He looked at the drawer of his desk, the top one, on the right, where he had put the envelope last night, the long cream envelope from the Household that the Programme had come in, with KETCHUM on the front in Theo’s capitals, underlined twice; with the list inside it, and the Programme, all fourteen pages, and Bonnie Tackett’s letter, and a pink ticket. “It’s in there. It can stay in there.”

The Private Secretary looked at the drawer for a moment.

“Very good, sir,” he said. “I shall tell the Archivist.” A pause. “There is nothing against it.”

“Is there anything for it?”

“No, sir,” said the Private Secretary. He turned to go. Then he stopped, in the doorway, with his hand on the frame, and did not turn round. “Sir. If I may. The Archivist will ask me whether I have seen it.”

“Have you?”

“No, sir,” said the Private Secretary. “I have only been told about it. By Sergeant Kimura.” A very small pause. “She said it had ten ticks.”

He went out, and shut the door.

---

He read the Prime Minister’s letter last, the way he had meant to.

Sir,

Welcome back. I hope you had the summer. I believe you did. I am told by a man called Earl, at second hand, that you did.

There is very little for you this week. The House is not sitting. I am in New Westminster and will be throughout, and I shall come on Thursday at a quarter to six, as usual, to the small study, and I shall walk, because I have found that I like walking, since the bus.

The bridge is ahead of schedule. I enclose a photograph from the Vinita paper, which my private office cut out and put on my desk on Saturday morning without a word, and which I have pinned to the wall beside the map of the Realm, where Ms Fenner can see it.

I have the honour to be, Sir, Your Majesty’s humble and obedient servant,

Whitlock.

And under the signature, smaller, squeezed in at the bottom, uphill:

P.S. I read the sign, all of it. Will you tell the lifeguard, if you write to her? I meant it. It is the best piece of legislation I have seen this year.

Frederick took out the photograph. It was small, cut out of a newspaper with a pair of scissors, not quite straight. The bridge, grey, concrete, with a crane beside it, yellow, with its arm over the creek; and twelve men in hard hats in a row in front of it; and the commissioner in the middle, in jeans, with his hands in his pockets, not smiling.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he opened the top drawer on the right, and took out the long cream envelope with KETCHUM on it, and put the photograph inside, with the list, and the Programme, and the letter, and the pink ticket; and put the envelope back, and shut the drawer.

---

He went to the bookshop at three.

Castellanos walked with him. He had asked, at the north wing door, after the coffee, and Castellanos had looked at the garden for a long time and said on foot, sir?, and he had said on foot, and Castellanos had looked at the garden a while longer and said it’s a public holiday, sir, the Axis will be quiet, which meant yes. So at three they went out of the north gate, the small one, the one the gardeners used, and along the edge of the Axis under the trees, in the heat, which was not Oklahoma heat, which was wetter and heavier and smelled of the river, but was heat; and up the side streets towards Charter Hill, with the dome white above the roofs at the end of every street; and nobody looked at them.

That was not true. People looked. A woman with a pushchair on the Axis looked, and stopped, and looked again, and her face did the four seconds, and did not decide anything; it went on being astonished, the way Shawna Proctor’s had in the cellar. Two men coming out of a café looked. A boy on a bicycle looked so hard that he nearly rode into a tree. It was not Ketchum. It was the capital, and he was who he was in it, and everybody knew, and nobody had agreed together not to.

He found that he did not mind that either. Not today. He walked up the side street towards Charter Hill with Castellanos a pace behind him in the jacket and let them look, and was looked at, and looked back, and went on.

The bookshop was on a corner, two streets below Charter Hill, with a green front and its name in gold over the window and books in the window in stacks, and a bench outside it, and a bell over the door; and it was open, on a public holiday, because, the card in the window said, books do not take holidays and neither do we.

He went in. The bell rang.

It was cool inside, and dim, and smelled of paper and floor polish, like the library at Vinita; and it was very small, and very full, shelves to the ceiling, and a ladder on a rail, and a table in the middle with books on it in piles; and at the back, behind a counter, by a till, an old till, grey, with keys, there was a woman of sixty in a cardigan with her glasses on a chain, reading.

She looked up.

She looked at him over her glasses for a long time. Then she looked at the bandage on his arm, and at his hair, and at Castellanos, in the doorway, in his jacket; and something happened to her face that he had not seen happen to a face in New Westminster before. It did the four seconds. And then, at the end of them, it decided.

“Good afternoon,” she said. “Can I help you with anything, or are you looking?”

“Looking,” said Frederick. “Thank you.”

“Take your time,” said the woman, and went back to her book.

---

He found it on a shelf near the back, under Fiction, in its alphabet, between two books he had never heard of; the novel. The one he had borrowed from the library at Vinita on the eighth of August with card four-four-seven-one, and read on the porch at night by the light of Theo’s telephone, all of it, and taken back on the day it was due, and not bought, because he had been going, and everybody was going, because that was what summer was.

He took it to the counter.

The woman looked at it. She turned it over and looked at the price on the back.

“Twelve ninety-nine,” she said.

He took out the brown wallet. He unzipped it. In the little window for the photograph, the library card, HANOVER, F., and behind it the pink ticket and the yellow card from Earl’s van, RURAL TRANSIT - ONE RIDE, with a hole punched in it; and in the long pocket for notes, what was left of five brown envelopes, which was most of them. He took out a twenty, soft and grey and used, with a corner torn off, and held it out.

The woman took it.

She opened the till. The drawer shot out and hit her in the stomach, which she did not seem to notice, the way you do not notice a thing that has happened to you every day for thirty years. She took out the change. And then she held out her hand, palm down, over the counter, waiting, until he understood, and put his own out, palm up, under hers.

“Twelve ninety-nine,” said the woman. She put a penny in his palm. “Thirteen.” A coin. “Fifteen.” A note. “Twenty.”

He looked at the change in his hand.

“Thank you,” he said.

“He used to do that,” said the woman, putting the book in a paper bag. “A young man who worked here. Saturdays and three evenings, for two years.” She folded the top of the bag over. “He always counted it into their hands. He said it was so that nobody had to argue.” She held out the bag. “He doesn’t work here any more.”

“I know,” said Frederick.

The woman looked at him over her glasses for a moment longer.

“Yes,” she said. “I expect you do.”

---

Mr Abernathy was on the step.

He was coming in as Frederick was going out. He had a paper bag of his own under his arm, from somewhere else, and he was in the brown jacket, the one from homeroom, in the heat, on a public holiday, with his glasses; and he stopped on the step outside the door, under the bell, and looked at Frederick, coming out of the bookshop with a paper bag and a bandage on his arm and Castellanos a pace behind.

He looked at him for about one second. The same length of time he looked at everybody, along a row, before he took the roll.

Then he nodded.

“Hanover,” said Mr Abernathy.

And walked on, past him, in through the door of the bookshop, with his paper bag under his arm; and the bell rang over the door behind him.

Frederick stood on the step in the sun.

He did not turn round. He did not need to. He stood on the step outside the bookshop two streets below Charter Hill, with his own book in a paper bag in his hand, paid for out of his own wages, and his change counted into his palm, and the bell still ringing faintly behind him over the door; and he thought that he had been looked at all summer, by Darlene and Royce Pettit and Mrs Sixkiller and Earl and Kaylee and a whole county, and had been decided about, one way, again and again, every day; and that Mr Abernathy had been deciding it that way since the seventh grade, every morning, in the same voice, along a row, without anybody asking him to, and he had never once noticed.

Hanover. Here.

Tomorrow, in homeroom. Between Grant and Hartigan.

“Sir?” said Castellanos, behind him.

“Coming,” said Frederick, and went down the step.

---

He laid it all out in the evening, on the desk in his room, with the window open.

The blazer, first. On its hanger, on the back of the door, navy, with the school’s badge on the pocket; which he had not worn since the fourteenth of June, and which had been cleaned, and pressed, by somebody, and hung there, while he was away. He took it down and looked at it, and put it on, over his T-shirt, and stood in front of the long glass in the corner of the room and looked at himself in it: the blazer, and the bandage coming out of the right sleeve at the wrist, and the face, brown, and the regular, short at the back and the sides.

He took it off and hung it up again.

He put the bait-shop pen in the inside pocket. GRAND LAKE BAIT & TACKLE - LIVE MINNOWS - CRICKETS - ICE, nearly worn off down the side. He held it in his fist for a moment, to warm it, out of habit, and then put it in the pocket, against where his chest would be, so that it would be warm in the morning.

Then the rest. On the desk. In a row.

The brown wallet, with a zip on the side, that Felix had bought him in a shop on the square at Vinita for seven pounds ninety-nine, because you could not have money if you did not have anywhere to put it. The library card, HANOVER, F., CARD NO. 4471, which did not expire. The yellow ride card with the hole punched in it. A receipt, 1 BICYCLE (BLUE). £45.00. PAID CASH. R. PETTIT. A slip of green paper with 27.40 on it in pencil. And two badges, white plastic, with pins on the back, side by side: one with six letters on it, a little crooked, NEW GUY, which Kaylee said everybody kept; and one with nine letters on it, very long, going over both edges and a little beyond, FREDERICK.

He looked at them for a long time.

He thought that the Archivist would have liked all of them. He thought that they were not for the Archivist. He put them in the top drawer on the right, with the long cream envelope with KETCHUM on it, all of them, except the wallet, which he put in the pocket of his school trousers, on the chair, for the morning; and shut the drawer.

---

At ten o’clock he thought about ringing Theo.

He sat on the end of his bed with the telephone in his hand, the ordinary one, not the one that did nothing else, and looked at it.

He thought about the flat. The room that was kitchen and sitting room at once, four floors up, with the window looking down onto the yard of the bus depot; and the second bedroom, with the partition in it that Peter Hartigan had built in 2026, and on one side of the partition, tonight, Theo’s bed, and Theo in it, with his camera on the floor beside him and Kaylee’s whistle on top of it, orange; and on the other side of the partition, tonight, for the first time, nothing. Kate had gone today. The third. The day before school. To the residence at the college on the river, in the van from the depot, with the good lamp, and the lizard.

Theo had the whole room.

He thought about Theo lying in the dark on his side of the partition with nobody on the other side of it talking at midnight about lizards; and about the hot room under the tin roof at Mrs Sixkiller’s, and the two beds, and Theo falling asleep in the other one all at once every night for six weeks, with his arm flung out, so that his hand was a few inches from Frederick’s head.

He thought that Theo would be awake.

He thought that he should ring.

He sat with the telephone in his hand for a long time; and then he put it down on the table by the bed, and did not ring. It was Theo’s first night with the whole room. It was Theo’s. You did not take a thing like that off somebody, any more than they took the pig off you. He would see him tomorrow. At ten to eight, on the low wall by the bike racks, with his bag between his feet, where he had been on the first day of seventh grade, when they were twelve and the boy next to him in the H’s was a boy from Milwaukee with an apple, and nothing else yet.

Tuesday, Theo had said, in the car, under the light, with the door open. I’ll be on the wall.

---

At eleven he turned off the light, and lay down on top of the sheet, by the open window, and listened.

The city came in. He had not heard it, all the years he had lived here, behind the double glass, with the window shut and the air conditioning breathing in the wall. He heard it now. A bus, a long way off, changing gear on the Axis. A siren, very faint, going somewhere across the river, an ordinary siren, an ambulance, not the one that meant come in. Somebody laughing in a street beyond the wall. A train, on the bridge, going over, the sound of it rolling across the water and coming back. And under all of it, very low, so low that he did not hear it until he had been listening for a long time, the sound of the city itself: a million people, in their rooms and their kitchens and their streets, all at once, breathing, rising and falling, across the whole of the dark, like the insects in the trees.

And then, in the garden, under the window, close, in the dark, one cricket.

Just one. In the long bed of something tall below the north wing, somewhere, in the warm wet dark, saying the same thing over and over, small and dry and steady, the way the whip-poor-will had said its name in the oak; and he lay on top of the sheet by the open window in his room in Columbia Palace and listened to it, and it was the only one, and it did not stop.

He thought about the list in the drawer. Ten things, in four hands, on the back of page fourteen, with ten ticks down the side, and a second, very small, for keeping it.

He thought: I don’t need a list.

He thought that he did not know what he would do next summer, or whether he would go back, or whether Cecil Rowe would be on the dock at six in the morning with his coffee, or whether the blue bicycle would still be in the barn against the bench under the tools in the shapes of themselves, or whether Darlene would rub HANOVER +3 off the slate one day without thinking, or would leave it. He thought that he did not know any of it, and that he did not need to, tonight; and that tomorrow was Tuesday, and the first day of junior year, and Mr Abernathy at the front in the brown jacket, and the radiators, and the roll; and Theo on the wall at ten to eight.

He found he was looking forward to it.

The cricket in the garden said its one thing, and said it again.

He slept. All at once, the way Theo did, as if a light had been turned out.