Pressure

The tent was the Army’s, green and square with a pole in the middle, four boys on four Army blankets on a groundsheet, smelling of canvas and dust and soup.

Marcus on his back by the door with his mouth open and an arm over his face. Felix curled on his side with his knees under his chin. Theo at the back by the pole, face in the crook of his elbow, snoring: a long slow rasp in and a long slow whistle out, like a saw through wet wood.

Frederick lay down on the fourth blanket between Theo and the canvas and looked at the roof.

Sixty degrees, Kimura had said at midnight, reading the little thermometer on her jacket zip; fifty-five by four. But four of them in a space for two, and the canvas held the day in, and the blanket smelled of somebody else. Every time he shut his eyes he was under the house on Twenty-Second Street with his arm in the gap. Every time he opened them he was not.

He listened to the snore. He knew where it caught on the in-breath and where it went up at the end.

It stopped, all at once, mid-breath, like a key turned.

“You’ve been gone an hour and five minutes,” said Theo, into his elbow.

“You were asleep.”

“I was counting.” Theo’s face came out of his elbow, a shape in the dark with its eyes open. “I learned it off you. I got to three thousand nine hundred. I lost my place twice because of Marcus.”

From the door, without waking, Marcus said something that might have been not.

“I was in the study. With the citations.”

“Castellanos came to the flap and said you were writing and I was to go to sleep. So I went to sleep. And I counted.”

---

Felix kicked in his sleep, twice, and the second time got Frederick in the back of the knee, and Theo said right and took his blanket and stepped over Marcus and went out. Frederick followed.

Kimura was across the flap, on an upturned crate from the water tank, jacket zipped to her chin. She looked at the blankets and did not get up.

“Ten yards, sir.”

“Ten yards.”

“Sergeant Castellanos has taken the envelope to the Governor’s car. He’ll be back by two.” To Theo: “Mr Hartigan. If he isn’t asleep by three, I’m holding you responsible.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

They went round the dry fountain with its cracked basin, where Lucía had sat an hour before, and lay down on the far side of it, nine yards from the crate, between the fountain and a tent with a family in it.

Then neither of them said anything, because of the sky.

---

He had seen it from the deck of a ship off Maine at eleven, and from a garden in Dalarna in August with no lights for twenty miles.

Never over a city.

The Army had turned off the last of the bulbs at one to save the generator for the pump. The house behind them was dark. The hill was dark, the cracked dome of the observatory catching nothing now that the half moon had gone behind it. Beyond the gate and the wall the whole of Los Angeles was dark. Every tower downtown stood up black with not one window lit. The basin that on Tuesday night from the hotel window had been a carpet of orange and white to the edge of the world was gone, except, very far off to the west and low down, one dull red smudge where something still burned by the harbour.

And over it, from the hill to the far edge of the basin, the galaxy. A long pale river, thick in the middle and frayed at the edges, with dark lanes in it like the gaps between the planks of a pier, and round it so many stars that the sky was grey with them. The shapes his father had taught him from the terrace at Columbia Palace were lost among the rest.

In the tent beside them a small boy said, very quietly, “Mama. Is that smoke?”

“I don’t know, mijo. Go to sleep.”

“Is it from the fire?”

“I don’t know. Go to sleep.”

He could have said it through the canvas. The woman had lost something, or she would not have been on this lawn, and did not want to be told anything at one in the morning. He kept quiet.

Theo said it, quite loudly, hands behind his head, to the sky. “It’s the Milky Way, buddy. It’s not smoke. It’s always there. You just can’t see it with the lights on.”

A silence in the tent.

“Oh,” said the small boy.

“Thank you,” said the woman, in English, to the canvas, and then something low in Spanish, and the tent went quiet.

“There’s about a million people with no lights,” said Theo, “and I’m doing astronomy.”

“Two million. The ABC said, at eleven.”

“Don’t count it.” A pause. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

“You did. It’s all right. I’m trying not to. It’s what I do when I’m frightened.”

“I know. I’ve known you four years.”

---

A long time later, when Frederick had thought he was asleep, Theo said flatly, “I lost the hat.”

“I know. I saw it.”

“You didn’t. You were on the floor of the car.”

“So were you.”

“I was on the floor of the car with my head up at the window. The little one at the top of the door. It came open on the second swing. You had your arm round the bench, you didn’t see.” He was quiet. “The hat came off on the first swing, like on the loop at Valencia, only I didn’t catch it this time. It went out of the window and I watched it go. All the way down. The water was going out and coming in at the same time under the pier, everything white, and I watched this hat go down turning over like a leaf, and go in. And I thought, that’s eleven pounds.” He stopped. “And I didn’t think anything else for about a minute. With the wheel going and the noise and the pier coming apart under us. Eleven pounds.”

“You said you were going to wear it till you died.”

“Well. I didn’t die. So it’s the hat’s fault really.”

Frederick laughed. It came out of him in a long helpless gust that hurt his ribs, which had hit the gym floor at two, and Theo shook beside him trying not to wake the tent, and from her crate Kimura said without turning round, “Three o’clock, Mr Hartigan,” and that made it worse.

---

He had not asked about the field. Not on the wall by the roses, not on the bus, not at the soup. He had not wanted to hear what it had been like for the people who did not know where he was. He asked now because it was dark and he could not see Theo’s face.

“What happened on the field?”

Theo took a while.

“Kimura got hold of my arm and said front, just front, and I looked at you, and you were going the other way with Castellanos, and I thought, he’s with Castellanos, he’s all right. So I went. We got out onto the field with hundreds of people from the gym, and the ground was still going a bit, and you could hear the high windows coming out, and Abernathy was by the flagpole with the carton doing the list.”

“I know.”

“He got to Hanover, and nobody said here. He said it four times. Then Kimura came running out of the front doors and said something to him, quietly, and he didn’t make a mark. He left a gap. And he said right, and started again at the top, as if he’d got it wrong. Abara. Bennett. Castillo. All the way down. As if you’d turn up if he did it properly.” Theo stopped. “He did it six times in an hour and a quarter.”

The stars.

“Kimura went back in for you twice. Brannigan went round the back. Castellanos wasn’t answering his radio. That was the bad bit. Not that you weren’t there. That he wasn’t. Because I thought, if he’s not answering it’s because he’s with you. And then I thought, or it’s because he’s not.” Quiet. “Everybody wanted to go and look. Kimura said nobody moves. She said the worst thing that can happen now is that I lose two of you. So I didn’t go.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

“I know you are. That’s why I didn’t.”

---

“There was a man,” said Theo, lower.

“On the field, about ten yards from us. Fifties, white painter’s overalls. He’d been on the bench outside the gym under the high windows when the six point four came, and the glass came down on his left arm. Here.” Theo held his own left arm up in the dark and drew a slow line across the inside of it, below the elbow. “It was bad, Freddie. It wasn’t running. It was coming out. In pushes. He was sitting on the grass holding it with his other hand, looking at it like it was a long way off, and people were round him and nobody was doing anything, because nobody knew what to do, and somebody was shouting for a doctor and there wasn’t one.”

Frederick was not looking at the stars any more.

“So I did it.”

“Did what?”

“Pressure. Both hands, hard. You don’t take them off to look. You don’t lift to see if it’s stopped. You press and keep pressing and get the arm up above the heart, and if it comes through what you’ve got you put more on top and you don’t take the first lot off. It’s in the red book. I’ve had it since I was thirteen.” A pause. “I took my T-shirt off and folded it and put it on and put both hands on top and pressed. I got a woman to hold his arm up. And I pressed.”

“For how long?”

“Thirty-eight minutes.”

Frederick turned his head.

“I know. Of course I counted. In German. Mum counts in German when she’s doing compressions; she says English numbers are the wrong shape. Eins, zwei, drei. Sixty, and start again, and the minutes in my head because I didn’t have a hand free. It came through the T-shirt at about ten and the woman gave me her scarf and I put it on top. At about twenty it stopped coming through.” Quiet. “He talked to me the whole time. His daughter’s in Fresno. He paints houses. He was painting one on Fourteenth Street on Thursday and it fell down with the ladder still on it. He said that was funny. It wasn’t, but he said it was.”

“And then?”

“Two paramedics from the hospital, in a truck with no lights because the battery was going. The woman knelt down next to me and looked at my hands and the T-shirt and the scarf and the arm up, and said, good. Just that. Good. Don’t move. Keep your hands there. She did a band above the elbow, tight, and said okay, now let go, and I couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t?”

“My hands wouldn’t. They’d been doing it for thirty-eight minutes. She had to take them off. Her hands on top of mine, like taking somebody’s hands off a railing.” A long pause. “I had no shirt on and his blood up my arms to the elbow, and she said, who taught you that, and I said, nobody, a book, and she said, what book, and I told her, and she laughed. Not at me. She’s got the same one, since she was fourteen.”

Frederick said nothing.

“She said come and find her when I’m eighteen. She told me her name, and the hospital. She said there’s a course.” He stopped. “Then about half an hour later Kimura’s radio went, and it was Castellanos saying Twenty-Second Street, I have him, he’s alive, and I don’t remember anything after that until I was on the heap.”

---

“The T-shirt,” said Frederick, after a while.

“Somebody on the field gave me a jacket. Then one of Duarte’s lot gave me this, at the soup.” Theo plucked at it. “Army. Enormous. Says FORT IRWIN. I’m going to wear it till I die.”

“You said that about the hat.”

“I’m going to be more careful with this one.”

The envelope going east from Riverside Field at two. Eleven cartons and Theo’s folded on top, and half a page in his own hand. The girl with the cool box. The lifeguard. The boy with the crowbar. The woman in the apron. Duarte. Ray.

Not a boy on a field with his shirt off and both hands on a stranger’s arm, counting in German. He had not seen it. He had been under a house holding somebody else’s hand. This list is only the people who happened to be near a King.

“I’m going to write it down.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Theo.”

“No.” Perfectly calm, to the sky. “You didn’t see it. You told Abernathy a man doesn’t write his own citation, so somebody else has to. Well, you didn’t see it, so you can’t write it. That’s the rule. You made it. And I didn’t tell you so you’d write it. I told you because you asked.”

“Kimura saw it.”

“Kimura was looking for you.”

“The paramedic saw it.”

“The paramedic has about ten thousand people to look after and doesn’t need a letter from the King about the one with the red book.” Theo turned his head on the blanket, and Frederick could see his eyes with the stars faint in them. “Freddie. I want to do it properly. Get my exams, get on the course, like anybody does. I don’t want to get on it because I’m on a list in New Westminster. I’ve only got one thing that’s mine. Don’t put a crown on it.”

Frederick looked at him a long time.

“All right.”

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

“Properly.”

“I promise properly. No list.”

“Good,” said Theo, the way the paramedic must have said it, and turned back to the sky.

---

“I signed it with the I,” said Frederick, after a while.

“Signed what?”

“The list. On the Crown’s paper. George R. I. I’ve never done the I before. Castellanos noticed.”

“What’s the I?”

“Imperator. Raj. The Raj sent a thousand tents.”

Theo thought about it.

“That is the most showing-off thing you’ve ever done in your life. And you once corrected Mr Ferrante about a date in front of the whole class.”

“That’s what Papa would have said. About the I.”

“Your dad would have said it and then done it himself. He did it on everything. You showed me, the letters in the cabinet in the library at the palace. Every one with the I on the end, big.” An enormous yawn. “It’s fine, Freddie. You can have an I for a thousand tents.”

---

At ten past two he heard the walk on the gravel, not fast, not slow, and the shape came round the end of the porch and across the lawn between the dark tents and stopped by Kimura’s crate. Something low. Kimura got up and went towards the house, and Castellanos sat on the crate in her place, his back to the tent, the galaxy over him.

Without turning round: “It’s gone, sir. The Governor’s man drove it out himself.”

“Thank you.”

“Mr Hartigan.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Sergeant Kimura says three o’clock.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

Castellanos sat with his arms folded and looked out at the dark city. Frederick looked at the back of his head against the stars. The collar in that hand on the heap. The head down on the arms on the boards. He did not say anything about it.

Theo’s breathing went long and even. Frederick waited for the catch, the way you wait for a train you know the time of.

“Freddie,” said Theo, nearly gone.

“Yes.”

“You’re still too thin.”

“Everybody says that.”

“Because it’s true,” said Theo, and the breath caught on the in, exactly where it always caught, and went up on the out, and he was asleep.

The red smudge by the harbour. The boy in the tent who knew now that it was not smoke. A house painter somewhere in a hospital with a band above his elbow. Frederick did not count anything. He lay on the lawn and listened to the saw going through wet wood, and some time before three he was asleep too.