Franklin

They walked inland at a quarter to three.

A man from the city in an orange vest had come along the park with a clipboard at half past two and told Kimura there was a shelter open at a middle school a mile inland, on high ground, with a roof an engineer had passed, and that the park would be cleared before dark because nobody knew whether the edge of the bluff would hold through the night. Kimura said it once, quietly, to Mr Abernathy and Señora Ruiz and Castellanos, and then turned to the class and said it again in exactly the same words. The school. Now. In a line, in pairs. Nobody was to let go of their pair.

“Who’s my pair?” said Frederick.

Kimura looked at him.

“Who do you think, sir,” she said, and Theo was already standing beside him.

---

They walked up a wide street with trees down the middle, away from the sea, in a long line of pairs: fifty-seven sophomores and the King and two teachers and three officers and Marisol with her clipboard, who had asked whether she could come because her bus home no longer existed, and Mr Abernathy had said yes before she finished asking.

The city had stopped.

At nine forty it had been going, the cars and the buses and the people and the music out of café doors, and at nine forty-one it had stopped like the clock on the green post and not started again. Cars stood in the road at angles where they had been, doors open, nobody in them. The traffic lights were dark. A bus at a stop with its doors open and its engine off and a newspaper lying open on one seat. A café with its chairs out round little metal tables and the cups on them full, and nobody, and a cat drinking out of one.

Every window was out, shops and houses and cars, the glass in glittering heaps on the pavements, so that fifty-eight people walking up the street under the trees sounded like a crowd on gravel.

Most of the buildings were standing. He had not expected that. Windows out, cracks across their fronts, chimneys in the gardens, but standing. And then, every so often, one that was not. A big old church of yellow stone at a corner with its tower lying across the road in a long heap like a giant’s spilled bricks, and the bell in the middle of it, whole, on its side, enormous. A block of flats, three storeys, older than its neighbours, with its whole front lying in its own car park and the rooms behind open to the air: a kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom with a towel still on its rail. People at every one, on it, round it, digging with their hands and spades and a car jack, and firemen in yellow coats, and at the flats a dog sitting very upright on the pavement in front of the heap, not barking, watching the people dig, as though waiting for somebody to come out.

He looked at the dog for as long as the line let him.

“It’s the old ones,” said Theo, very quietly. “The ones that fell. They’re all old.”

“Yes.”

“It’s the code. Like Mr Ferrante said on the coach. The new ones are allowed to move.”

“Yes,” said Frederick. A promise made by people who were frightened to people who have not been born yet.

---

The school was called Franklin: a long low building of pale brick with a flat roof on a rise at the top of the street, a playing field beside it, a car park in front, a flagpole. The flag at the top was the Realm’s, moving in the wind off the sea. He saw it from the bottom of the rise and stopped, and Theo pulled him on by the sleeve.

The car park was full of cars and people, the playing field full of small bright camping tents. Inside the doors of the gym, out of the white afternoon, it was dim and cool and full of people too, and it smelled of floor polish and the insides of trainers and, faintly, the hot dust of the heaters in the roof. Exactly the gym at Ellicott on the morning of the assembly. It went through him like the first shake.

Perhaps two hundred people, mostly on the floor on blankets and coats and sleeping bags, in families, in groups, alone. Old people on folding chairs along the walls. Children asleep on piles of coats. A woman feeding a baby under the climbing frames. A man in a wheelchair by the door with an oxygen tank on its back, talking to nobody. Under the scoreboard a row of folding tables with people in orange vests behind them, and taped to the bricks above them sheets of paper, a great many, with names in marker in two languages.

FOUND, said the top of one. Names. LOOKING FOR, said the next. More names, and numbers, and descriptions. Mother, 70s, grey hair, blue coat, last seen 4th Street 9:30. My son Marco, 9, red T-shirt, school bag. Anybody from the Seaview Apartments on Ocean Park.

He read all of them.

“Freddie,” said Theo. “Come on. Abernathy’s got us a corner.”

---

He had got it by standing in front of one of the tables in his brown jacket, with the T-shirt round his hand, and saying something very quietly for thirty seconds, and the woman behind it had looked at him and at the fifty-eight in the doorway and walked across the gym and pointed at the far corner under the second basketball hoop, by the stage, and said there.

So they had a corner, in a clump, as on the grass of the park. The three officers along its edge. Señora Ruiz in the middle with the folder. Marisol against the wall, very upright, knees together, writing.

He had been sitting there five minutes with his back to the wall when somebody stopped in front of him.

The nurse from the stairs. The one with the little girl on her hip on the fourth landing. In an orange vest now over a T-shirt, a stethoscope round her neck and a box under her arm, looking down at him with exactly the face she had had on the stairs.

“You’re the one with the blood.”

“Yes.”

“Let me see.”

She crouched and took his chin quite firmly, the way Mrs Hartigan took Theo’s when he came home from the river with something in his eye, and turned his face to the light from the high windows. Along the wall Castellanos came up onto one knee. She did not look at him.

“It’s nothing,” said Frederick.

“I’ll decide that, honey.” She opened the box and tore a packet open with her teeth and cleaned the cut, which stung so much that he made a noise, and she said I know, I know, and put two thin strips of tape across it, and sat back on her heels. “There. It’s nothing. You were right. You can tell people a nurse from Santa Monica patched you up.”

“Thank you.” And because it had been in his head since the fourth landing: “Where’s the little girl?”

“With her grandma, by the climbing frames. Asleep. She was asleep before we got up the stairs.” She picked up the box. “She’s not mine. Somebody put her in my arms on the beach and said take her and went back for somebody else. We’ve found the grandma. We haven’t found the somebody.” She stood up. “We’ll find them.”

She went to the next person, a man sitting on the floor holding his own wrist, and crouched, and took his chin.

Castellanos sat back down.

---

The water came at four, in a big white truck with the city’s name on it, backing up to the gym doors with a long beeping, full of plastic-wrapped packs of bottles, and the whole gym got up at once and went towards it, and the women behind the tables said in a line, please, there’s enough for everybody, and there was.

Castellanos looked at him when the truck came, and he looked back, and got in the line behind Theo and Marcus and a woman with two small children and a man with his arm in a sling. At the front a boy of about his age in an orange vest handed him a bottle without looking, and then looked, and stopped with his hand still out, and said oh, and Frederick said thank you and went.

It was the coldest thing he had ever drunk.

“That was quick,” said Theo. “I thought it’d be days.”

“Yes.”

“Somebody must have thought of it.”

“Yes,” said Frederick.

---

The telephones came at six.

At half past five a grey van with no name on it pulled into the car park, and two women and a man carried in long flat black cases and a folding table and a great many cables and set up under the scoreboard. In the cases were ten big heavy telephones with thick stubby aerials, like the one in Castellanos’s pocket, and they plugged them into a box with a light on it, and one of the women stood on a chair and said, in a voice that carried to every corner without being a shout, first in English and then in Spanish:

“These are satellite telephones. They work. You can call anywhere in the Realm. One call per family, sixty seconds each, and I’m sorry, I know sixty seconds isn’t enough, but there are two hundred of you and ten of these and we’re doing as many shelters tonight as we can. Write the number down before you get to the front. Say you’re alive. Say where you are. Say it again. Then let the next person have it.” She looked round the gym. “The Governor’s office sent us. They said this was the first thing on the list.”

Nobody moved for a second.

Then the whole gym went towards the table, and it was not like the water. People were crying, running. An old man fell and two people picked him up and he did not stop moving towards the table while they did it. The women in orange vests came out with their arms out, the way Kimura had moved the class off the pier, and made a line of it, round the gym and out of the door and into the car park.

Frederick sat on the floor in the corner by the stage with his bottle and watched it.

The Governor’s office sent us. They said this was the first thing on the list.

His eyes had gone hot. He looked at the floor, at the painted lines of the court going away under the feet of the people in the line, the sideline and the arc and the edge of the key, the same lines as the floor at Ellicott, until they stopped.

Theo was looking at him.

“Freddie. On the phone. Under the tree. With the Governor.” A pause. “You told her. About the phones.”

“I told her three things. Water and phones and the sea going out. Anybody would have.”

“Nobody would have,” said Theo. “Nobody else was asked.” And he got up and joined the line.

---

Mr Abernathy sent the class through it in fours, in alphabetical order, from a list he had written out again from memory on the back of a flattened water carton, and crossed each four off when they came back.

Some got through and some did not. Priya got through to her grandmother and talked sixty seconds in Tamil and came back and said nothing for twenty minutes. Marcus came back bright red and said to the whole corner, she asked if I was still in the King’s row, and everybody laughed, and so did Marcus, and then he put his face on his knees. Devon did not get through. Lucía tried Pomona and it rang and rang and nobody answered, and she came back with her face very still and sat beside Señora Ruiz, who put an arm round her without looking and went on writing in the folder.

Theo got through.

From the corner Frederick saw him take the heavy telephone from the man behind the table and put it to his ear and wait, and saw his whole body change. Faintly, over the noise: Mum, and Mum, it’s me, I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m in a school, we’re all okay, Freddie’s okay, very fast, and then he stopped and listened, and his face did something else. Then: Katie. Then nothing for a long time, and Frederick could see his shoulders, and the man behind the table looked at his watch and then at Theo’s shoulders and let it go to ninety seconds, and then a hundred.

Theo came back with his face wet and sat down against the wall beside him.

“Mum says hello. Mum says she knew you’d be all right because she’s never once seen you do anything stupid in four years, and Dad says that’s not true and he’s going to tell you about the time with the canoe.” He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “Kate says you owe her a lizard.”

“A lizard?”

“I don’t know. She said you’d know.” He looked at his hands. “She was crying. She’d been watching the television all day on the set in the back room at work, because Mum was on a shift and Dad was on his route and nobody was at the flat, and they showed the pier, Freddie, from a helicopter, the wheel standing in the sea, and she knew we were going to the pier today because I told her, and nobody could tell her if we were on it. For nine hours. She rang Mum on the ward every twenty minutes. Mum said Kate hasn’t cried in front of her since she was twelve, and she cried on the phone to the ward.” He stopped. “She said next time you go on a trip she’s coming, so she can make sure. She said she’s eighteen and she’s allowed.”

---

He did not go through the line.

All evening he watched it go round the gym and out into the car park, people putting the heavy telephones to their ears and saying I’m alive, I’m at Franklin, I’m alive, the man in the wheelchair with the oxygen tank an hour and a half in it and still only halfway. His mother had known since a quarter to ten. Castellanos had told her in four words nineteen times.

At about seven Castellanos looked at him across the corner, and Frederick shook his head very slightly, and Castellanos nodded very slightly.

---

The cots came at eight in another truck, green canvas on metal legs, hundreds of them, and everybody who could stand put them up in rows across the gym from the stage to the doors, under the scoreboard and the hoops and the climbing frames, with the painted lines of the court showing between them. The generator roared in the car park. A few of the lights in the roof came on, yellow. The dark came down outside the high windows.

Ellicott had two rows along the wall by the stage. Frederick’s cot was at the end of the first, by the wall, Theo on one side and Marcus on the other. Castellanos’s was not a cot but the floor at the end of the row, between Frederick and the rest of the gym, where he sat with his back to the wall and his legs out and did not lie down.

At a quarter past eight Mr Abernathy stood up at the end of the two rows by the stage, in the brown jacket, with the T-shirt round his left hand and the water carton in his right, and said nothing, and waited, until the two rows noticed him one at a time and went quiet the way homeroom went quiet in the mornings. People on the cots round them noticed too, families and old people and the man in the wheelchair, who had got to the front of the line at half past seven and talked to somebody for sixty seconds and then sat with his eyes shut. Some of them sat up to watch.

A quarter past eight. The time he called the roll at Ellicott every school day.

He called it.

“Abara.”

“Here.”

“Bennett.”

“Here.”

All the way through, in order, in the voice that had not changed at the foot of the wheel with the blood running off his fingers. Every answer from the green cots in the yellow light under the scoreboard, here, here, here. Two hundred people who were not from Ellicott listened to a homeroom teacher from New Westminster call the roll of a sophomore class in a middle-school gym in Santa Monica on the night of the earthquake, and nobody laughed.

“Hanover.”

“Here,” said Frederick.

“Hartigan.”

“Here,” said Theo.

To the end. Then he looked at the two rows the way he looked at homeroom when the roll was done, and said, in exactly the same voice, as though it were a Tuesday:

“Thank you. That’s all. Lights out at ten.”

And sat down on the end of a cot and put his face in his good hand, and nobody went near him.