Book Eight: Santa Monica Part Four: Home Characters
Chapter Twenty-nine
Otra Vez
Frederick. New Westminster. Sunday, 3 June 2029.
In the last quarter of an hour he reads aloud the next day's arrivals at Union Station from the railway timetable, "so he knows what's coming".
There were flowers on the railings.
There had been since the night of the twenty-ninth of September, when somebody tied a bunch of chrysanthemums to the railings by the main doors with a shoelace. Holly in December. In February nothing but one bunch of paper roses that somebody renewed every week and nobody ever saw them do it.
Today they were fresh, all along the railings from the corner to the steps, in the sun. Roses, carnations, stocks, a great many he did not know the names of, and cards tied on with string. As the car went past, one in a child’s green felt pen: WELCOME HOME KING GEORGE. Another in an old person’s careful capitals: THANK YOU FOR GOING BACK.
He did not know which thing that meant. Perhaps all of them.
Niamh was at the desk on the sixth floor when the lift doors opened. Tall, about thirty, a long dark plait down her back, senior nurse’s blue. She did not work Sundays. It was Sunday.
“I swapped with Joanne. She said she’d have swapped for less.” She came round the desk and looked at the single neat strip somebody at the Palace had put across his eye that morning, and at his hands. “He’s been awake since two. He made me turn the chair at three to face the door. He’s been looking at the door for fifty minutes.”
“Is he all right?”
“He’s tired. Forty minutes in the car with the window down and an hour on that apron. The doctor wasn’t happy and he went anyway.” She looked at him. “He hasn’t been out of this building since September, sir. He went out for you.”
“I know.”
“I know you know. I’m saying it anyway, because he can’t.”
The same corridor. Pale green walls, the handrail, the long window at the end over the river, the trolley by the linen cupboard. The door at the end with no name on it and a police officer on a chair outside, who stood up.
At the door Niamh stopped.
“I time things on this floor, sir. Drips and doses and how long people sleep and how long between the bell and somebody answering it. I write it all down. It’s a habit. My mother was the same.” She hesitated. “I’ll be at the desk. I won’t come in unless he rings.”
“Thank you, Niamh.”
He opened the door.
The corner room with two windows, one over the river and one over the roofs of the old town. The bed raised with the rails up. The machines on their stand, quiet now, most of them. And his chair, the plastic one with wooden arms on the river side, where he had sat every afternoon since September from four to five: homework on his knee for three quarters of an hour, the blue book for the last.
His father on three pillows in pyjamas, the newspaper folded on the blanket where his mother had left it at lunchtime, turned very slightly to face the door.
The long reading look, from his hair to his shoes.
His father’s hand moved an inch on the blanket, towards the chair.
He sat.
No homework. Nobody set homework on a trip. The timetable was for the last quarter of an hour, and it was ten to four, and that was the arrangement.
His hands did not know what to do. The arms of the chair. His knees. So he talked.
The airport. The great white room with the wings, the queue, Dolores and hon, the boarding pass, HANOVER/F, the room that drove across the airfield on legs, the window Theo gave him. Kansas, Priya, Manhattan. The March, red, and the straight line. The light in Los Angeles, a different colour. The bluff and the sign. Valencia and the terrible hat and the first rollercoaster. Mr and Mrs Paredes at the corner table with the two ties, and the six-oh-two on the ninth day. The lobby at six in the morning and the nineteen stations, and his father’s breath went in sharply at that.
“Yes, Papa. Sea. You said sea.”
The hand moved on the blanket a little, and was still.
He went round the wheel. The pier, the men fishing, the carousel, the clock on its green post, the gate of the wheel with Theo in the hat. There he stopped. He could not go on from there in order, not yet. His father, who had had every newspaper since Thursday read to him, did not ask.
At twenty past four:
“Papa. On Friday, on the telephone, at six in the morning. I told you I went on the wheel with Theo, and I didn’t hold anybody’s hand. Not once. Not even Theo’s. I said I held the bench.” He looked at his hands on his knees. “That was true on Friday morning.”
His father waited. In sixteen years he had never once hurried him.
“It’s not true now.”
He told him. Not in order; as it came. The street after the six point four and his own voice coming out of radios in every garden, ¡Agárrense! The girl with the cool box, you look like you need two. The man with the car he would not get into. The wooden house on Twenty-Second Street that had stood on Thursday and gone on Friday at two. The heap. The man in the vest with his head down in the hollow, and three taps from inside every five minutes, very faint. The gap, and the size of it, and the man in the vest saying no, and then slowly. Lying on his front on the boards. The dark, and the smell of it, plaster and gas and coffee and roses. His arm going in past the table leg, and then.
A hand.
“Her name was Esperanza Ruelas. She was eighty-one. She’d lived in the house fifty-two years. She got under the kitchen table at two o’clock because she heard me on the radio say get down, and the house came down on the table, and the table held.” He looked at the river window. “And I found her hand. In the dark. And she held on.”
His father’s breath went in.
“Twenty-two minutes, Papa, while they jacked the beams. I couldn’t see anything. I just had her hand. I didn’t know what to say to her, so I told her about trains. The Pomona line, the five-car sets, the bridge over the Santa Ana that sings, the six-oh-two. The nineteen stations. I told her about you and the wheel in Vienna, and she said you were a liar.” He stopped. “And she said I was too thin. Under the table, with a beam a foot over her head.”
He looked down.
“So I did hold somebody’s hand. In the end. The whole time. I didn’t let go once.” His voice went, and he let it. “Theo says the bench counts. I still say it doesn’t. But I think that counts.”
He did not see his father’s hand move. He felt it.
Across the blanket, slowly, an inch and then another, over the folded newspaper and the white of the sheet to the edge of the bed by the rail. It turned over. Palm up, open on the blanket, the way you hold out a hand to somebody under a table.
He put his own in it.
The weakest grip in the world. An old man of eighty-two who had been lost at sea and found in a raft and slept three weeks and woken without most of his words. It closed on Frederick’s hand slowly, a finger at a time, the way fingers close in the dark when they have found what they were looking for, and held on.
Neither of them said anything.
The sun went round from the river window to the window over the roofs. The machines were quiet. Outside the door the officer on his chair. The river going by. A church clock somewhere striking the half hour, and much later the three quarters.
He did not count.
At a quarter to five his father let go, the fingers first, then the hand, back across the blanket. He looked at Frederick’s knee, where the blue book should have been.
“I haven’t got the book. I’m sorry. It’s at the Palace. But I know tomorrow’s. I’ll do them from memory.”
In order, first in the morning to last at night, time and train and where from and how, in the voice he kept for it, which was the voice of the man on the tannoy at Union Station, level and slow and carrying. Six fifty-eight. The Capitol, from Chicago. Via Pittsburgh. The Crown Limited from Boston. The locals from the Maryland side and the Virginia side, every one, coming in. His father lay with his eyes half shut and listened with his whole face, and at each one his head moved very slightly. Less than a nod. The way you mark a thing on a list.
Eleven forty-two. The local, from Alexandria. All stations.
His father’s eyes opened.
“There’s one more. It’s not tomorrow’s. It’s yesterday’s. I wrote it down.”
The green-edged page from Airman Soto’s notebook. He unfolded it on his knee and smoothed it, his own writing in a loadmaster’s pencil, in columns, and read it in the tannoy voice.
“Arriving. Saturday, the second of June. Seven thirty-five p.m. Sceptre. From Riverside. Via the March, Kansas, Louisville.” A pause. “All stations.” And smaller, as it was written: “Fifty-eight.”
His father was looking at the page. Not at him. At the green edge and the pencil and the columns, a long time, the way he had read boxes for fifty-six years, every word, because a thing in his name was a thing in his name.
Then at Frederick.
His head moved once. Less than a nod.
“There’s one more thing.”
He had not known he was going to. The permission slip, crushed, torn at a corner, folded nearly through. He opened it on top of the green page and turned it to the back: nine sentences in Señora Ruiz’s blue pen.
“This is what I said on Friday on the radio. In the gym at Franklin. Mamma said Niamh had it on in here.”
His father’s eyes went to the slip.
“I’m not going to read you all of it. You’ve heard it. It’s nine sentences on the back of a form.” He smoothed it. “But I didn’t finish the last one. The floor moved in the middle of a word. It’s about Mr Paredes, who drove the Pomona line for thirty-one years. In November, on the ninth day, at six in the morning, he was in his yard and heard the six-oh-two go by, the first train, going west, and he sat down on the grass and cried, because somebody was driving it.” He looked up. “I wanted the last thing to be that. Not we don’t know. Not it’s going to be all right. Just that a train came back once, on the ninth day, and somebody was driving it. In Spanish, because it was his.”
His father had been King of the River Plate for fifty-six years. He had once told Frederick that a King who could not say thank you in the language of the person in front of him should not be on the coin.
Frederick read it slowly, in Spanish, with the sun on the floor.
“El seis cero dos volvió al noveno día, y volverá”
He stopped.
Exactly where he had stopped on Friday, and for a moment he did not know why. Then he did. It will come back again. It was a promise. He did not know that it would. Not the six-oh-two. Not Señora Ruelas’s house. Not the pier, or the wheel, or the blue car, or Bruno’s roof in Oxnard. Not the people on no list because nobody had happened to be near a King. Not his father’s words. He had been allowed to warn once. He had not been allowed to promise.
He sat with the slip on his knee and his mouth open on the end of a word, and could not finish it.
His father breathed in.
The breath, and the hold. Longer than he had ever heard it, longer than Vienna, longer than Sceptre. His father was looking at him, not the slip, the grey eyes wet at the rims, the lips trying the shape, like trying a door to see if it is locked, once, and again, and again.
He waited. He did not help.
Beyond the window, on the far bank, very small, a local went along the embankment towards Union Station, coming in, on time.
“Otra,” said his father.
He stopped. The breath went out of him and came back and held, and Frederick could see it was costing him something he did not have, and that he was spending it anyway, the way he had spent forty minutes in a car and an hour on an apron.
“Vez,” said his father.
Otra vez. Again.
He had written it once before. On Wednesday, at the bottom of Theo’s map in the park at Valencia, very small, in pencil, in the queue for the last ride, when Theo held it out and told him to write something. Again. Because it had been the best day of his life.
The tears were running down his face, and he did not wipe them.
His father could not make a promise now. Not one. He had made it anyway, because somebody had to finish the sentence.
“Yes, Papa,” said Frederick. “Otra vez.”
His father shut his eyes, and his hand moved an inch on the blanket towards the chair, palm up, and Frederick put his own in it again. They sat like that until a knock at five, the first time in eight months Niamh had knocked.
“Sir, it’s five,” through the door, very quietly. And after a pause, unasked: “The first time, sir, he held on for twenty-two minutes. I’m sorry. I timed it. I don’t know why.”
He did not mind. He was glad somebody had.
It was the same number.