The Paper

He woke because the snoring stopped.

Grey light, flat and cool, with no shadows in it. The galaxy gone. The sky over the lawn the colour of a pigeon, the hill a dark shape with the white dome on top. On the far side of the lawn a generator coughed twice and caught.

There was a second blanket over him that had not been there when he went to sleep, rough and grey, over both of them, tucked in on the fountain side the way a nurse tucks a bed.

Theo was awake beside him, looking at the sky.

“Kimura. At about four. I pretended I was asleep.” A pause. “She stood there for ages afterwards, just looking at you. Then she went back to the crate.”

He lay under the two blankets and did not want to get up, ever. It was Saturday. The paper came at seven. The class was going home.

---

A child crying in a tent. A radio. A woman saying shh, a man saying something in Korean. Flaps going back all along the rows, and people coming out in yesterday’s clothes and standing on the grass looking round at the house, the hill, each other. The old man with the guitar already on the rim of the fountain, guitar across his knees, not playing. The two old men setting up the draughts again on their crate on the porch.

And a long clean rushing from the corner by the wall. The tap at the foot of the Army’s tank was open, the water coming out in a thick bright rope, a line already formed with bottles and pans and a kettle. At its head, wrench in one hand and mug in the other, Staff Sergeant Duarte, who had not been to bed.

“Valve’s fixed, sir. Two this morning. Seal had gone. We made one out of an inner tube. It’ll hold till they get the mains back. Might hold till Christmas.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank the inner tube.” She looked at Theo’s T-shirt, FORT IRWIN, down nearly to his knees. “That fits you good.”

“It’s enormous.”

“That’s what I said.” She drank her coffee and made a face at it and drank some more.

At the end of the line he washed in the cold water with his hands: face, neck, arms to the elbow. The water ran off onto the grass grey, then brown, then, after a long time, clear. The cut stung, and he let it. His hands clean now, knuckles skinned, the nails broken, a cut across the back of the left one he had not known about.

---

At ten to seven the black car came up the drive from the gate, slowly, between people walking with their pans. The Governor got out of the front in the same jacket. A young woman got out of the back.

Twenty-eight perhaps, in a grey suit slept in on an aircraft, flat shoes, hair tied back very tight, a flat dark-red leather case with a lock held against her chest in both arms the way Señora Ruiz held the folder. She looked up at the empty windows and the crack beside the door and the porch full of people. Then she saw him at the top of the steps, and came up and stopped two steps below him and bowed her head.

“Sir. Clare Kerridge, from the Prime Minister’s office. Assistant private secretary.” She held the case out a little way. “I’ve brought the paper.”

“You came on the aircraft.”

“It left New Westminster at nine last night, our time, and landed at Riverside Field at half past four. It’s the aircraft that’s taking you home, sir. There’s a crew of six and they’ve all asked if they can be the one to tell you that.” A pause. “I’ve been told not to tell you that.”

“Who told you not to?”

“The crew, sir.”

At the foot of the steps the Governor made a small noise that might have been a laugh.

---

Mrs Okada opened the study door. The desk, the lantern, the pile of paper with the crown, the chair where he had written the names at half past midnight. He stood in the doorway and did not want to go in.

“Could we do it outside?”

Clare Kerridge looked at the Governor.

“There’s no rule that I know of,” said the Governor. “Is there a rule?”

“There’s a form,” said Clare Kerridge slowly. “It has to say where it’s given, at the bottom. Given at.” She thought. “It doesn’t say which room.”

Two of Duarte’s engineers carried a trestle table from the soup round to the grass by the dry fountain. Mrs Okada wiped it down and dried it, looked at it, and covered it with a clean white tablecloth, ironed, from some cupboard the earthquake had not reached. A chair from the hall with a crown carved in the back. Clare Kerridge set the case on the cloth, unlocked it with a small key on a chain round her neck, laid the paper in front of the chair with a fountain pen beside it, and stepped back.

He sat.

The people nearest the fountain stopped what they were doing and watched, and the people behind them saw them watching and stopped too. Nobody came closer. It was quieter than the porch on Friday, the way people stop on a pavement to watch somebody doing something careful in a shop window. The old man on the rim of the fountain did not move at all.

Theo was a yard behind the chair on the left, hands behind his back, in the enormous T-shirt. Nobody had asked him to be.

“Read it twice,” said the Governor quietly. “I said.”

“I know.”

---

One sheet, thick and cream, a small black crown printed at the top over a line of capitals.

GEORGE THE FIFTH, by the Grace of God, King of the United Kingdom of America, Supreme Governor of the Church of America.

To all to whom these Presents shall come, greeting.

Whereas on the thirty-first day of May and the first day of June in this year great earthquakes have struck the Commonwealth of California, and a great many of Our people there have lost their homes;

And whereas Our Governor of California has opened the house and grounds of Government House at Los Angeles to such persons, and it is right that what she has done in Our name should be done by Us;

Now therefore, on the advice of Our Prime Minister, We direct that Government House at Los Angeles, with its grounds, and those lands of the Royal American Parks System within the Commonwealth of California which the Royal Parks Service shall find fit for the purpose, be opened forthwith to all persons made homeless by these earthquakes, as shelters and as camps, with water; and that they be kept open until Our Governor of California shall certify that they are no longer needed

The type stopped there, mid-line. In the blank, in ink, in a small upright hand that was not a clerk’s, five words:

by any person upon them;

In the margin beside them, very small: C. W.

Then the type again. And this shall be sufficient warrant for all whom it may concern. Given at Los Angeles this second day of June in the year two thousand and twenty-nine, and in the first year of Our reign. At the foot, already signed, square and black and leaning slightly forward, the way the man leaned forward on a call: Whitlock. At the top on the left, above the first word, a space.

He read it from the first word to the last. Then from the top again, slowly, and on the second reading he stopped where the type stopped, and put his finger on the tablecloth beside the five words.

“Miss Kerridge. Who wrote this?”

She came round and looked.

“The Prime Minister himself, sir. At about three this morning, our time. The draft came from the Cabinet Office at midnight and stopped at needed. He sent for it back and wrote that on it and initialled it. He said if it was retyped it would miss the aircraft, and he’d rather it went as it was.” Then, in the voice of somebody passing on a message exactly: “He said to tell you he had it written down from Friday morning. What you said about 1988. He said you’d know why he’d added it.”

By any person upon them. Not until the Governor thought they were not needed. Not until the streets were cleared, or the money had come, or somebody wanted the land back. Until the last person on this lawn, and on every other piece of the Crown’s ground in California, had somewhere else to go.

A plastic chair in the principal’s office, sun on the books on the floor. Once, and he had thought that was the end of it.

“I know why.”

---

Clare Kerridge held out the fountain pen. Black and gold, heavy, the kind that came in dark red cases from New Westminster for exactly this.

He did not take it.

He felt in the pocket of the jeans he had been wearing since Thursday, under the permission slip, and found it. A cheap blue ballpoint with the end chewed and ELLICOTT HIGH SCHOOL down the side in white capitals nearly worn off. Señora Ruiz’s, from the folder, borrowed on Friday for nine sentences, never given back.

Across the lawn Señora Ruiz was on the porch steps with the folder on her knee, watching. She saw what was in his hand. She did not nod or smile. She put her hand flat on the folder and kept it there.

“With this, if that’s all right.”

Something went across Clare Kerridge’s face that on another morning might have become an objection about the form. It got no further.

“It’s your signature, sir. Not the pen’s.”

He signed at the top on the left, in blue ballpoint, in the hand like a fence in a wind, at four minutes past seven, with the guitar four feet away and the generator running and the water running in the corner, and somewhere down the hill the first car he had heard moving in Los Angeles since Friday. George. Then R.

The pen stopped on the paper.

Last night, on the list, the I, because the Raj had sent a thousand tents and it seemed wrong to leave anybody out of a thank you. This was not a thank you. King of the United Kingdom of America, from the first line: no Raj in it, no Hanover, no Sweden, and the ground it opened was the Realm’s, held in trust for the Realm’s people.

He lifted the pen.

George R.

---

Nobody clapped. Clare Kerridge came round and looked at the signature a long moment, and blotted it carefully with a sheet from the case, though ballpoint did not need blotting, because the form said blot. Into the case, locked, held against her chest.

The old man on the rim of the fountain began, very quietly, to play. The same thing as on Friday evening when the porch sat down: slow, in a minor key, a little turn in the middle of each line like somebody looking back over his shoulder. He played it with his eyes shut, to the grass, and the people near the fountain went slowly back to their bottles and pans and children, and the lawn closed round the trestle table like water round a stone.

The Governor had not moved.

“That’s the gate. In writing.”

“It was already open.”

“It was. Now nobody can shut it on me.” She looked at the empty white cloth. “By any person upon them. Nine months in this job. Forty-eight years in this state. I’ve never once seen anybody in New Westminster write that on anything.” She looked up. “You did that.”

“The Prime Minister did.”

“Because somebody said 1988 to him on a telephone in a principal’s office. I was on the call, sir. I heard you.” A pause. “I’ve been waiting forty years for somebody to say 1988 out loud to a Prime Minister.”

Mr Paredes on the wet grass in Pomona. Forty years for anybody on the radio to get a train time right. He did not say it.

---

“One more thing, sir,” said Clare Kerridge, at the open back door of the car, while the Governor was on the radio at the front and the class came round the side of the house in its pairs with nothing to carry. Mr Abernathy at the front with the list. Kimura at the back.

“The envelope from last night came in on the two o’clock aircraft, and the Prime Minister had it opened at five, our time, and rang the aircraft on the ground. Two things. The committee will have it on Monday, all of it, the cartons too. He won’t have them copied. He’s read every one.”

“And the second?”

She decided to say it exactly. “Tell the King that the I is not strictly the form on a paper to a committee of the Realm. And tell him that I would not change a letter of it.”

“Thank you, Miss Kerridge.”

“Sir.” And in her other voice: “Four years in the office. I’ve carried a great many papers. I’ve never carried one back with a chewed pen on it.” She looked down at the case. “I’m going to keep that to myself, I think. For a bit.”

---

The same two yellow buses at the foot of the drive. Mr Abernathy at the door of the first, counting them on aloud. Fifty-one. Fifty-two.

The porch had stood up again, because the class was going and people had come out to see them go, and when you have come out to see somebody go you stand. The man with the child. The woman in the apron who had taught him slower and from lower down. The two old men. Mrs Okada in the doorway with no glass. Duarte at the corner of the house with her wrench.

At the bottom of the steps he turned and looked at it. Long and low and white, no glass, the crack beside the door. The Realm’s flag moving on the roof. The tents. The trestle table by the fountain with its white cloth still on it. Through the open gate with the crowns, the cardboard on the railings. OPEN. WATER. TENTS. EVERYONE.

“Leave the sign. Please.”

“It stays until the last tent comes down. Your paper says so.” The Governor looked at him. “Come back when the glass is in, sir. See your father’s portrait hung straight, and yours beside it. Mrs Okada says she’ll keep the cutting in a drawer when it comes. She says it did the job for seven months and it’s owed a drawer.”

“I’ll come back.”

“Don’t promise. Just come.” She shook his hand and held on a moment longer than people did, her other hand on top, the way Señora Ruelas had held on under the house.

From the deckchair by the door, put back that morning with a cup of tea and a blanket over her knees, the old woman leaned forward and looked down the steps at him, all the way down.

“Well. Don’t leave it so long next time.”

The porch laughed, all of it, and at the bus windows the class laughed without knowing why, and he stood at the foot of the steps with his clean hands and skinned knuckles and a chewed blue pen in his pocket and found that he was smiling, and that it did not hurt.

“No, ma’am. I won’t.”

“Fifty-seven,” said Mr Abernathy at the door of the first bus, and looked up over his glasses across the drive. “Hanover.”

“Here,” said Frederick, and went.