Pet

Five in the back of a car built for three. His mother by the left window with the trip form flat on her knee under both hands. Anneliese Hartigan by the right with her handbag on her knee and her eyes on Theo. Kate in the middle, because she had got in first. Theo and Frederick on the fold-down seats facing backwards, knees against knees. Peter Hartigan in front beside the driver, very upright, jacket buttoned to the neck, watching the road as though he would have driven it better.

North through the woods in the last of the light. Headlights coming the other way, every car moving. Every sign lit from inside. A lamp in every window of every house in the woods. A petrol station, open, a man filling a car under the white lights as though it were an ordinary Saturday, which it was.

“You’re doing it again,” said Theo.

“Doing what?”

“Looking at the lights.”

“They’re on.”

“They’re always on.”

“I know. I didn’t know that was a thing you could notice.”

Kate looked at him, and at Theo, and out at the lights for a long time, and her hand in her lap found her mother’s.

---

Nine floors of brown brick in a street of brown brick north-east of the Axis, where nobody had ever looked at a car with a flag on its wing and thought it was for them. Through the glass of the lobby door the lift stood open on the ground floor with its light on, because it worked.

Nobody moved.

“Right,” said Peter Hartigan, to the windscreen.

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Anneliese Hartigan, and opened her door.

“Thank you for letting me ask,” said his mother. And then something short in English he did not catch. Anneliese stopped with one foot on the pavement and looked back in at her, two women of about the same age, a nurse and a Queen, and nodded once, and got out.

Kate climbed out over Frederick’s knees without asking, and bent back down to the open door.

“Lizard.”

“I know.”

“I’m going to keep saying it.”

“I know, Kate.”

Theo sat on a moment longer, knees against the Queen’s.

“Tomorrow. Four o’clock. The hospital.”

“Yes.”

“Ring me after. Not before. Ring the flat. Kate’ll answer. Tell her about the lizard so she’ll give me the phone.”

“All right.”

“And Freddie.” Halfway out, one hand on the door. “It’s going to be really quiet in your room tonight. There’s not going to be anybody snoring. I thought somebody should warn you.”

He shut the door.

Across the pavement under the street lamp, into the lit box of the lift with his mother and sister, his father after, the four of them close together, the doors closing. The light over the doors counting. Two. Three. Four.

It stopped at four.

---

You could see the staff from a long way off coming up the Axis. A mile of it straight under the trees, lamps all the way, the Monument floodlit white in the middle, and at the far end the Palace low and pale with its portico lit and, on the roof, the one flagstaff in a floodlight of its own.

Bare. Since half past five on Tuesday morning, when he had walked out of the north wing door with a bag and a boarding pass that said HANOVER/F, and somebody had lowered the Standard behind him, because he was not in the building.

Twenty or thirty people at the railings. Waist-high, no gate, no guardhouse, nothing between the Axis and the east front but a strip of grass and the gravel sweep, the way it had been since the 1790s. A couple with a dog. A man on a bicycle with one foot down. Two women in hospital scrubs with coats over them, walking home from a shift. An old man in a cap. Looking up at the bare staff, the way people wait on a platform for a train they are not catching but have heard is coming in.

The car went round to the north wing door, where nobody waited.

He got out onto the gravel in the dark, and from high above heard a small dry quick metallic sound he had heard all his life and never listened to. The halyard, running on its pulley.

In the floodlight the Standard was going up, a folded bundle jerking up in short pulls, and at the top somebody he could not see gave a turn and the bundle broke and it came out all at once into the wind off the river. Red and gold and blue, the 1841 arms, enormous in the light, moving.

Because he was in the building.

From round the corner, from the Axis, faint: not a cheer. Too small for that. The sound a platform makes when the train comes round the bend.

“They’ve been there since six,” said Dame M, at the north wing door. “Since the news said Sceptre had left Riverside.” She looked up at the Standard, and at him, and did not open the folder under her arm. “Good evening, sir. Welcome home.”

---

He could see the corners of what was in the folder: three boxes’ worth of paper, letters, the Prime Minister’s Thursday that had become Friday and then nothing, a list of people who wished to see him. She did not open it. She stood under the lamp in the stone corridor, sixty, very upright, and looked at all of him, the dust and the cut and the shirt and the knuckles, and made a note without opening the folder, which was how she made all her notes.

“The boxes will keep until Monday, sir. I’ve told them so.”

“Who?”

“Everybody.”

“Thank you.”

“The Prime Minister rang at eight. He asked me to say only that he had nothing to say tonight that would not keep. He said you’d understand that was the message.” A pause. “Miss Aird asks me to tell you the newspapers have agreed to use one photograph from the apron, taken from the fence at three hundred yards, of the rope on the ground and the families crossing the concrete. You are not in it, or not so anybody could tell. She says she thinks it’s the best photograph of you anybody has ever taken.”

He looked at her.

“She said you’d know why.”

He did.

“Your bath has been run since half past eight, sir. Three times. It will be run a fourth. There are clean clothes on the bed.” She looked at the ones he had on. “Bridget has been in the kitchen since five. She was told at nine she might go home. She has not gone home.”

---

His mother touched his arm at the foot of the back stairs and said eat something in Swedish, and went up to telephone the hospital and Stockholm.

The kitchen was the same. The long scrubbed table, the end nearest the range where he sat. The range, black and enormous and older than the Realm’s railways, with a pot on it. The dresser with the plates and the cake tin, and beside the cake tin the small brown radio, on, very low. The clock over the range saying twelve minutes past ten, which meant sixteen past, because it had been four minutes slow all his life and nobody was allowed to put it right.

Bridget was at the range with her back to him. A small square woman of about sixty-five, grey hair cut short, sleeves rolled up, an apron that went twice round her. She did not turn round when he came in, or when he sat down at the end of the table in Thursday’s clothes. She stirred the pot. Then she took a bowl from the dresser and the ladle from its hook, and filled the bowl, and put it in front of him with a spoon and a slice of buttered bread on a plate, and went back to the range.

The leek and potato. Pale green and white and thick, steaming, a little pool of butter going slowly round on top.

“It’s the same soup as always,” said Bridget, to the range.

He ate it slowly. A hundred and twelve bowls on a lawn, and he had not once thought what it was like to eat one. It was hot and very good and exactly what it always was.

He put the spoon in the empty bowl.

Bridget turned round then, for the first time, and came and picked up the bowl and looked at it, and at him: the torn shirt, the cut, the dust in his hair, the skinned knuckles and broken nails and the cut across the back of the left hand.

She looked at him a long time.

“You’re too thin, pet.”

---

He laughed.

It came up out of him all at once from somewhere underneath, the way it had on the lawn at it’s the hat’s fault really, a long helpless gust that hurt his ribs where they had hit the gym floor. He sat at the end of the table with his hands flat on the wood and his head down and laughed, and Bridget stood over him with the empty bowl and stared.

“What. What’s funny.”

“Everybody.” He could hardly get it out. “Everybody’s said it.”

“Said what?”

“You’re too thin.” He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Mrs Paredes, on Wednesday at supper at the hotel, before anything happened. She said they weren’t feeding me in this palace. Señora Ruelas on Friday, under her kitchen table, under a house, when I was the only one who could fit in the gap. She was eighty-one with a beam a foot over her head and she held my hand for twenty-two minutes and she said you’re too thin.” Another gust. “Theo, last night, on a lawn under the galaxy, the last thing he said before he went to sleep. And you. Everybody in the Realm who’s fed me this week has said it.”

Bridget did not laugh. Something went across her face that in sixteen years she had always turned her back at the sink so he would not see.

“Well,” said Bridget, quite fiercely. “Then it’s true, isn’t it.”

She filled the bowl again right to the top and put it down in front of him harder than she needed to, so the soup moved, and went to the sink and turned her back and stood with both hands on its edge, not running the tap, shoulders very straight.

He ate the second bowl.

The radio by the cake tin murmured: the coast, Ventura, a road reopened somewhere, the search goes on.

“Bridget.”

She did not turn.

“There was a woman on the lawn of Government House in Los Angeles. In a white apron, from the kitchens. She’d been making soup since Thursday at four in pots the size of dustbins for everybody who came through the gate. I stood next to her and served it. A hundred and twelve bowls. She told me I was doing it wrong. She said slower, and from lower down.” He looked at the empty bowl. “I thought, that’s what Bridget would say.”

A while.

“Was she right?” said Bridget, to the window over the sink.

“Yes.”

“Slower and from lower down. That’s right.” And then, very quietly, still not turning, in a voice he had heard perhaps three times in his life: “Go and have your bath, pet. It’s been run three times.”

---

Dame M would send the clothes away. He emptied his pockets onto the desk under the lamp first, one thing at a time, in a row.

A permission slip, crushed, torn at a corner, folded along a crease nearly worn through. On the back, in Señora Ruiz’s pen, nine sentences, three in Spanish, and the last one finished on paper and never out loud. El seis cero dos volvió al noveno día, y volverá otra vez.

A strip of pale-blue cloth with a torn seam and the button still on it.

A cheap blue ballpoint with the end chewed. ELLICOTT HIGH SCHOOL. It had signed something.

A plain black Air Force watch on a canvas strap, set to Eastern. Not his. Lieutenant Yeboah’s, lent at Riverside to save him the sum, and the lieutenant had not asked for it back, and the aircraft would be somewhere else by now. He put it to one side. Dame M would know how you returned a watch to a lieutenant of the Air Force. He would write the letter himself.

And a green-edged page torn carefully along a spine, folded in half. He did not unfold it.

He put it on top of the permission slip, square to the edge of the desk, for tomorrow at four.

Five days. A slip and a strip of cloth and a pen and somebody else’s watch and a page. The bag was in a hotel on Ocean Avenue behind yellow tape with the boarding pass in it, HANOVER/F, GROUP B. He did not mind about the boarding pass. Then he did, a little. Then he did not.

---

The bath had been run a fourth time. The water went grey, the way the water from the inner tube had gone grey on the lawn, and brown at the edges, and he let it out and ran it again, and it stayed clear.

Bruises he had not seen until now, in the light. His left ribs, from the gym floor. His shins, from the heap. And round his upper arm, four small round ones in a row. He looked at them a while before he knew them: Theo’s fingers, at the top of the wheel, at nine forty-one on Thursday, holding on.

Clean clothes on the bed, a T-shirt and pyjama trousers he had forgotten he owned, smelling of the cedar cupboard in the north wing, which was the smell of being twelve.

He got into bed.

Theo had been right.

---

The clock by the bed said twenty past one. The ceiling was white and plain with the crack in one corner that had been there since 2016.

No snore. No Marcus saying not in his sleep. No Felix kicking. No canvas creaking, no generator, no small boy asking about smoke, no guitar. No Castellanos on a crate nine yards off. No tower in a headset. No engines. A house of pale stone from the 1790s, very solid, very still, in a capital where nothing had moved, and him in it, alone, for the first time since half past five on Tuesday morning.

Nothing to count.

He got up.

---

His window looked east down the Axis. He had chosen the room at three, when they first brought him from Stockholm, because from the window you could see the whole of the capital in a line, and at three he had wanted to see the whole of something.

He stood at it in the dark with the curtains open.

The Axis going away under its lamps, a mile, two long gold lines between the black trees to Parliament House at the far end with its front lit and its flag over it. Halfway down, the Monument, floodlit from the foot, so bright it hurt. And on both sides and beyond, everywhere, the city. Every street. Every window. Every traffic light down every avenue changing red and green and amber at one in the morning for nobody. The bridges lit. The towers in the old commercial streets with red aircraft lights blinking slowly on their roofs.

He looked up for the rest of it.

Four or five stars, the bright ones his father had taught him from the terrace downstairs, the ones you could see from anywhere. The rest a dull flat grey-orange lid over the capital, lit from underneath.

It was there. The long pale river with dark lanes in it like the gaps between the planks of a pier, the same one that had been over the lawn last night because two million people had no lights. It was over New Westminster now, exactly the same, and he could not see a star of it, because the lights were on.

That’s what the lights cost.

That’s what the lights are for.

He stood with his hands on the sill and his forehead nearly on the glass, as at the round window in the hold, and both were true, and nobody was going to tell him which mattered more.

---

He took the duvet and the pillow off the bed and put them on the carpet under the window, the way the Army blankets had been on the groundsheet, and lay down on his back with the window over him, the orange lid and the four or five stars in it, and the Standard somewhere above him on the roof, moving in the floodlight in the wind off the river.

The floor was hard. That was better.

The page on the desk. All stations. Four o’clock, the sixth floor, the chair by the bed. His father’s hand flat on his chest on the apron, and the breath, and the hold, and the lips trying the shape, and nothing coming. Y volverá. He had not finished saying it because the floor had moved. Tomorrow at four he would finish it. Not for California. For his father.

Far off in the old town a church clock struck two. A real clock, and right.

He was asleep before it finished.

---

Something woke him, a little, at the edge of it. Grey light at the window. A blanket coming down over him, the one from the end of the bed, and being tucked in at the side, the way a nurse tucks a bed. A tray set down on the desk beside the row of things without touching any of them.

He kept his eyes shut. Through the lashes, a small square back in an apron going out of the door, and the door closing very quietly.