The Pier

They went down the stairs at five to nine, all fifty-eight of them in a long line, Mr Abernathy at the front and Mr Ferrante at the back and Señora Ruiz in the middle with the plastic folder of forms, which she had brought in case, and nobody asked in case of what.

He had told himself at breakfast that he would not count them. At the blue sign with the wave and the arrow his feet started on their own. Sixteen. A landing. Sixteen. A landing and a turn and the sea coming round into view again on the left, very bright, the sun high behind them. Sixteen.

Ninety-eight. Two of the flights had seventeen. He had been wrong by two.

“You’re counting,” said Theo, behind him.

“No.”

“You’re moving your lips.”

“I’m breathing,” said Frederick, and went down the last flight to the footbridge, with six lanes of cars going by underneath fast and the noise coming up through the concrete into his feet. On the far side a shorter staircase went down to the sand. Eleven. He did not tell anybody.

---

The beach was wide and pale and nearly empty, the sand cool on top and warm underneath. A woman doing exercises on a mat. Two men with surfboards walking down to the water. A lifeguard in a little blue hut on legs, sitting in its doorway with binoculars and a coffee. And gulls, a great many, standing about on the wet sand in groups, all facing into the wind, like people waiting for a bus.

The pier went out on their left, longer than it had looked from the bluff, over the beach and then over the sea on hundreds of dark wooden piles with the waves washing round them, flat and wide on top like a street, with low painted buildings along it. At the far end, against the sky, the wheel: not turning yet, white and red, its cars hanging from it like beads, yellow and red and blue, and the sea all round.

They went up a ramp onto the boards. Grey, worn, warm already, with narrow gaps between them, so that you could look down between your feet at green water moving a long way below. Marcus looked down once and did not look down again all morning.

---

In the morning the pier belonged to the men who fished off it.

Twenty of them, perhaps, along both rails, old men mostly, with folding chairs and buckets and long rods leaning out over the water, and radios playing different stations: one in Spanish, one in what he thought was Vietnamese, one the ABC’s Pacific service, a man reading the shipping forecast like a prayer. None of them looked round. As Frederick went past, a very old man in a cap pulled up a small silver fish, flapping and flashing, took it off the hook with great care, dropped it back over the rail without looking at it, baited again and cast.

“Why’d he throw it back?” said Theo.

“Too small.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. But he didn’t even look at it. So it must have been.”

Halfway along, through open doors, a carousel stood still under a roof in the half dark, white and gold horses on their poles with their mouths open as though stopped in the middle of saying something, an organ silent at the back. OPENS 11. An arcade, shut. A shell shop with a woman in a sun hat rolling up the shutter. A coffee place with a queue, which Mr Ferrante went into and came out of some time later with a coffee in each hand, and gave one to Señora Ruiz without a word, and she took it without a word.

“That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen,” said Theo.

“It’s coffee,” said Priya.

“It’s two coffees. It’s two.”

And a clock, by the arcade: black, four faces, on top of a cast-iron column painted green. Twenty-five past nine. He checked his watch. Right to the minute, which was more than the clock over the range at Columbia Palace could say.

---

The wheel did not usually open until eleven. Mr Abernathy had arranged it in April, by telephone, with somebody he would not name, and the man who worked it was waiting at the gate at its foot, tall and thin with a grey ponytail and a great many keys on a ring at his belt, looking like somebody who had agreed to a favour and was now wondering why.

“Two at a time. Once round, slowly, a stop at the top for the view, and down. That’s the deal.” He looked at the fifty-eight of them. “That’s going to take a while.”

“We have until eleven,” said Mr Abernathy.

“You have until ten, because at ten I’ve got a boat.”

He did not explain about the boat.

The first car was yellow, and Marcus and Felix were in it. Marcus had spent the walk along the pier saying he was not going on the wheel, that yesterday had been enough rides for a lifetime, that the wheel was over the sea, which was a whole additional level of no. Then the man said first two and Felix stepped forward, and Marcus, beside him, stepped forward at the same moment, the way you do when somebody calls a name that is nearly yours, and then they were both in the yellow car and the little door was locked, and Marcus looked out of its window at the rest of them with total, hopeless betrayal.

“I didn’t mean to,” said Marcus through the glass.

“You’ll be fine,” said Priya.

“I’m going to die. Over the sea. Tell my mother I was in the King’s row.”

The yellow car went up, swinging, with Felix waving, and the red one came down to the gate, and Devon and June got in.

“Freddie,” said Theo.

“No.”

“You said you’d see.”

“I’ve seen.”

“Your mother said. On the phone. This morning. Castellanos told me.” Theo looked at him sideways from under the terrible hat. “She said go on the wheel.”

“How did you,” said Frederick, and looked round. Castellanos was at the rail thirty feet away with his back to the sea, watching the pier and the land and not them, with no expression at all.

“Later. When everybody else has been. When it’s quiet.”

“Deal. Last car. You and me. Before the boat.” Theo held his hand out, and they shook on it very solemnly at the foot of the wheel, the way Theo’s father and uncle shook on a bet about the baseball, and Priya said oh my God and went and stood somewhere else.

---

He walked out to the very end of the pier while they waited.

A few yards past the wheel the boards stopped at a heavy white railing, peeling, at the height of his chest, and beyond it there was only the sea. He put his hands on it.

Very calm. Pale clear blue near the pier, darker further out, with the light lying on it in one long bright sheet, and nothing on it, not a boat, not a bird, only the slow swell coming in underneath, so that he felt the pier lean, very slightly, under his feet and come back, like a ship at anchor, and heard the water going in among the piles, hollow, slapping, like somebody clapping in a big room.

To the right the coast went away north in a long curve, brown and gold mountains coming right down to the sea, white houses on the slopes, a road along the bottom, haze. Up there, too far to see: Malibu, then Ventura, then Santa Barbara. There was a railway along that coast too. He had never been on it.

Behind him, the whole city came down to the beach: the bluff, the park, the white hotel with its tower among the palm trees, roofs and trees and tall buildings going back into the haze, and beyond them, faint and blue, the San Gabriels.

There was nothing between him and Hawaii but water, and after Hawaii more of it, to Japan. Behind him, three thousand miles back, across the mountains and the desert and the squares of Kansas and the green of the Ohio, his mother was in the study, and his father was on the sixth floor, looking at the window.

Go on the wheel.

His father in Vienna, holding his mother’s hand the whole way round and pretending it was for her. His father would not go on a wheel again. Tomorrow at six he would have to tell him something, and it should not be trains.

His watch said twenty-five to ten.

He walked back to the foot of the wheel, where Theo was standing by the gate in the terrible hat, watching the blue car come down.

“Now,” said Frederick.

“What?”

“Now. Not last. Before I change my mind.” He looked at the gate, not up. “If I wait till everybody’s been, I’ll have watched it go round forty times and I’ll know exactly how high it is.”

Theo said nothing at all. He turned to the man with the ponytail and said, “Can we have that one? The blue one? Him and me?”

---

The yellow car had come down. Marcus got out of it very slowly, holding the side, the way Brannigan had got off the rollercoaster, and stood with his eyes shut, and opened them.

“It’s fine,” he said, in deep surprise. “It’s actually fine. It’s slow. You can see everything.” He swallowed. “Don’t look at the gaps in the floor of the pier on the way up. That’s the only bad part. Once you’re up you can’t see them.”

“Thank you, Marcus.”

“I’m serious. That’s the first real advice I’ve ever given anybody in my life.”

The blue car came down to the gate and stopped, swinging gently, its little door open.

Castellanos was beside the man with the ponytail. Frederick had not seen him cross the boards. He said something low, and the man looked at him, and at Frederick, and at the wheel, and shrugged. “Your money, mister.”

“I’ll take the next one,” Castellanos said to Frederick. “The green one. By myself. One car behind you the whole way round.” He looked at Theo. “Mr Hartigan. Sit opposite him. Not beside him. If he looks like he’s going to be sick, talk to him about trains.”

“I’m not going to be sick,” said Frederick.

“No, sir. But Mr Hartigan doesn’t know that.”

Frederick got in. Theo sat opposite, knees nearly touching his. The door was locked. It was very small inside and smelled of paint and salt and a great many years of other people.

The wheel moved.

The car went up backwards, swinging, with a soft creak from the hinge above. The pier dropped away, and the boards, and the gaps, which he did not look at, and the faces looking up, Priya and Lucía and Marcus and Devon, getting smaller, Mr Ferrante with his coffee, Señora Ruiz with the folder, the man with the ponytail at the gate with his keys. One car below them came the green car with Castellanos in it alone, very upright on the bench in his grey suit, hands on his knees, not looking at the view at all. Looking up at them.

“He’s going round on a Ferris wheel by himself,” said Theo. “In a suit. He’s going to be in the photographs.”

“There aren’t any photographs.”

“There’s always photographs. Somebody’s mom on the beach right now. Look, honey, a man in a suit on the Ferris wheel all by himself.” Theo looked at him. “How are you doing?”

“Fine.”

“You’re holding the bench.”

“I’m sitting on the bench.”

“You’re holding it underneath. With both hands. Where nobody can see. Like at the assembly.” Theo leaned back. “Look out. Not down. Look at the hills.”

He looked out.

---

At the top, the wheel stopped for the view, with a small jolt and a long gentle swing, and the blue car hung at the highest point of anything, and he forgot to hold the bench.

The whole bay, the coast curving away north towards Malibu with the mountains coming down to it and the cars on the coast road glinting, very small. The beach, its whole length, the lifeguard’s hut on its legs, the two surfers out past the breakers now, sitting on their boards, waiting. The yellow bluff with its ice plant, and the zigzag of the stairs, ninety-eight, and the blue sign at the top too small to read, and the white hotel and the window on the fourth floor at the end that was his. The city going back into the haze, and behind the haze, only if he did not look at it straight, the mountains, blue.

And the sea. From up here not a sheet but a floor, the biggest floor in the world, pale blue and darker blue and a line of silver at the very edge, with the light on it and nothing else.

“Okay,” said Theo, very quietly. “That’s good. That’s worth it.”

“Yes.”

“Is it worth it?”

“Yes. Tell my mother it was worth it.”

“Tell her yourself.”

“I will. Tomorrow. And my father.” He did not take his eyes off the sea. “I’m going to tell him I went on the wheel and I didn’t hold anybody’s hand.”

“You held the bench.”

“The bench doesn’t count.”

Down on the beach, to the right, all the gulls went up.

All of them at once, the whole beach, every group on the wet sand, together, in a great white sheet, as if somebody had shaken out a tablecloth. He watched them go up below him, white against the pale sand, and out over the water, and wheel, and not come down. On the pier far below one of the old men fishing looked up from the tip of his rod, and frowned. In the green car Castellanos turned his head sharply and looked at the gulls too.

“What’s that?” said Theo.

“I don’t know.”

On the green post in the middle of the pier, small as a coin, the clock said twenty to ten.

Then it said nine forty-one.