Twenty-Two

She rang at six, because in Sweden you are woken on your birthday by people singing at the end of your bed, and she had woken him that way on every second of May of his life, at the end of the bed or at the end of a telephone, wherever either of them was.

He took it on the step under the narrow window, on the landing, in his socks, under the thermometer, which said seventy-nine.

She did not say hello. She began.

She sang it in her low unhurried voice, in Swedish, the whole of it, the first verse and the second, at her own pace; and he sat on the step with his eyes shut and listened to the song, and only to the song, as he had last year for the first time, and found that it was easier the second time, and that he had been afraid it would not be.

At the end of it, from somewhere close to her, a little below, his father did the cheers.

Frederick held his breath for them. He had not meant to. He sat on the step and heard the first come, round and loud, the way it had always come; and the second; and then a space, a little longer than there should have been, the length of a man going along a corridor in his own house to a room he knew, and opening the door; and then the third, and the fourth, as round as the first.

“Grattis, Fredde,” said his mother. “Twenty-two.”

“He did four.”

“He did four.” She sounded pleased with herself, and with somebody else. “He has been doing them to Brannigan since Sunday, with the coffee. Brannigan does not know the Swedish, so he says hooray, and your father corrects him.” A pause. “Stockholm had the guns at noon. Three o’clock in the morning, for you. The Marshal of the Realm held the telephone out of the window again, and I listened, and your father listened, and at the end of it he said a word I am not going to repeat to the King of Sweden on his birthday.”

“Which word?”

“Loud,” said his mother. “In English. He was quite right.” She was quiet for a moment. “Is Alexander there?”

“He’s in the room. He’s been up since a quarter to six.”

“Tell him to make you eat breakfast,” said his mother. “Puss.”

---

The red box came anyway.

Sam brought it up the forty-five steps at six fifty-three in the grey backpack with the broken zip, as on every other morning, and put it on the desk under the poster of the federal tax brackets, and turned the key the right way for Frederick’s hand; and it was light.

It had one paper in it.

“Malaya,” said Sam.

Frederick looked at it. It was a short paper, two pages, from the government of the Federation, about the appointment of a judge; and it had come across the road at a quarter to seven on King’s Day because Malaya, alone of the fourteen, did not keep the day, and kept its own King’s birthday instead, in its own month, and was at work.

He read it to the end, including the parts in small type, and initialled it, small, in pencil, in the top right-hand corner, and laid the pencil down beside it parallel to the edge.

“Happy birthday, sir,” said Sam.

“Fred.”

“Happy birthday, Fred.” Sam took out his notebook, and wrote something in it, and showed him. It said 2.V.35. 1 paper. Malaya. in a column under a great many other numbers. “Lowest ever,” said Sam. “I’ve got a column.”

---

The ABC came at half past seven: the same producer from Phoenix in a linen shirt with a headset round her neck, the same sound engineer with his case, and a new cameraman, young, with one camera in a padded bag over his shoulder, which he did not carry up the forty-five steps, because the producer told him to leave it in the van until they had seen the landing and signed the form.

The lift had broken on Saturday. Doug’s sign on it said SORRY FOLKS.

The producer stood on the landing between the second floor and the third and looked at it: at the step, at the maroon rail, at the narrow window with its concrete fin, at the thermometer, at the fire notice on the opposite wall.

“Again,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You’re sure.”

“It’s where I take my calls,” said Frederick. “Still.”

The producer looked at him for a moment, and then at the step, and nodded, and did not say anything about the ballroom at Old Main, which the university had offered again in February, in a letter with the seal on it.

Then Callum came down the stairs from the third floor with the form.

He read it to her. He read all of it, standing on the landing in his lanyard, including section nine of the handbook on filming in stairwells and the paragraph after it, and the line at the bottom where it said Designated officer of public safety, and the single letter on the line, in black pen, small and upright; and the producer listened to all of it, with her arms folded, the way a woman listens to a thing she has been told by her station she must listen to, and at the end of it she looked at the letter.

“K,” she said.

“It’s her whole name,” said Callum. “In this building.”

---

At twenty to nine the cameraman went down to the van for the camera.

The van was in the car park, by the four palo verdes, in the full sun, where it had been parked at half past seven when the car park said eighty-eight; and it was ninety-one now, and the van had been shut, and the camera had been in it, in its padded bag, for an hour and ten minutes.

The cameraman brought it up the forty-five steps and set it on its legs on the half-landing below, looking up, where it had stood last year, so that it would have the step and the window and the light and not the fire notice; and switched it on.

It came on. It showed a small red light, and a picture, very briefly, of the step; and then a box came up across the middle of the picture with a symbol in it like a thermometer, and some words, and the picture went black, and the small red light went out.

The cameraman switched it off and on again.

The box came up again.

“It’s cooked,” said the cameraman.

“It’s what?”

“It’s been in the van.” He put his hand flat on the top of the camera and took it away quickly, as from a stove. “It’s protecting itself. It shuts down till it’s cool. It’ll come back.” He looked at his watch. “Forty minutes. Maybe thirty.”

The producer looked at her own watch.

“We’re live at nine,” she said. “It’s eight forty-four.”

Nobody on the landing said anything for a moment. On the step above, Rhys looked at the ceiling. Sam, at the bottom of the next flight, did not move at all. Alexander, who had come down from 312 at eight forty exactly, because the programme said 08.40. Landing, stood by the maroon rail with his hands at his sides and looked at the camera with an expression of close professional interest.

The producer put her hand to her headset.

“Phoenix,” she said. “We’ve lost the camera. Heat.” She listened. “No. On a staircase. It’s been in the van.” She listened again, and her face changed. “A phone? Can we?” A pause. “We do it for correspondents. Okay. Okay.” She took the headset off one ear and looked at the landing. “They can take a phone,” she said. “Any phone with a decent camera. There’s an app. Phoenix sends a link. It goes straight to the gallery and out.” She looked at the engineer. “I need mine for talkback. You need both hands for sound.”

“I need both hands for sound,” said the engineer.

“So somebody holds a phone.” She looked round the landing. “Level. Dead level. Not moving. For six minutes.”

Rhys took his telephone out of his pocket, and looked at it, and put it back.

“Service phone,” said Rhys. “It can’t transmit anything, ma’am. It’s a rule.” He looked at Sam. Sam shook his head, once. “Neither can his.”

The producer looked at Frederick.

“He’s in the shot,” said Sam.

There was a short silence on the landing between the second floor and the third, in seventy-nine degrees, with the thermometer on the wall and a camera on the half-landing below that had been cooked in a van.

“Mine is an ordinary telephone,” said Alexander.

He took it out of the inside pocket of his linen jacket and held it up. It was an ordinary telephone, black, with a plain black case.

From the stairs below the half-landing, where nobody had been standing, Kessler said:

“It is a student telephone.”

The producer turned round, and looked down the stairwell at a man in a dark suit with a face like the end of a wardrobe, whom she had not seen arrive; and then back at Alexander, in the linen jacket, buttoned, with the telephone held up.

“Who are you?” she said.

“Hohenzollern,” said Alexander. “A first-year.”

The producer looked at him for about a second and a half. Frederick watched her face go through four things, slowly, like pages being turned, and stop on the fourth.

“Oh,” she said.

---

“Is that allowed?” said Frederick.

Alexander considered it, by the rail, with the telephone in his hand.

“It is not a constitutional act,” he said. “It is a telephone.” He looked at it. “I have read nothing that forbids it. I have been looking since eight forty-four.” He looked at Frederick. “It is your address. It is your decision.”

The producer was back on the headset. “Phoenix wants the Household,” she said. “New Westminster. Somebody has to say yes.” She held out her own telephone, where there was a number already ringing, and Frederick took it, and a man in New Westminster where it was a quarter to twelve on King’s Day answered it, the deputy press secretary, whom Frederick had known since he was eleven, and said sir, and listened, for about twenty seconds, and then was quiet for about five.

“Whose telephone, sir?” said the deputy press secretary.

“A student’s.”

There was another silence from New Westminster.

“Is the student,” said the deputy press secretary, very carefully, “the student I think it is?”

“Yes.”

“Then, sir,” said the deputy press secretary, after a moment, “I think that’s entirely a matter for you.”

“Yes,” said Frederick.

He gave the telephone back to the producer. It was eight forty-eight. She sent the link. Alexander opened it, and the picture came up on his screen, the step and the window and the light, and the producer looked at it over his shoulder and said, “Lower. Lower. Stop. There,” and Alexander stopped; and then she said, “Can you hold it like that for six minutes?” and Alexander said, “Yes,” in the voice in which he said everything that was simply true.

He went down to the half-landing, where the camera had stood. He stood where it had stood, with his back to the wall and his feet a little apart, and held the telephone up in front of him in both hands, at the height of the step, with his elbows in against his sides; and he did not move.

Sam came and stood on the stair beside him, with his own telephone in his hand, and an earphone in one ear, and the other earphone held out to nobody.

“I’ll count,” said Sam.

---

At nine, which was noon in New Westminster, Sam lifted one finger.

Frederick heard them. He heard them very faint, out of the earphone in Sam’s ear, from the old battery above the river on Charter Hill, two thousand miles away, the way he had heard them last year out of Jack’s.

Boom.

Sam’s lips moved. One.

Boom.

He sat on the step under the narrow window with the light on his face and his hands on his knees and listened to them come, one every five seconds, faint and round and far off; and on the half-landing below, with his back to the wall, the German Emperor held a telephone in both hands at the height of the step and did not move at all, not his hands, not his elbows, not his face, while beside him an accountant from Detroit counted to twenty-one under his breath; and on the twenty-first Sam took the earphone out and looked up the flight and nodded once.

The producer, behind Alexander, pointed at Frederick.

On the screen of the telephone, at the top, very small, a red word came up. LIVE.

“Good afternoon,” said Frederick.

---

He did it quietly.

He did it at the volume of a man on a staircase in a building where people were revising, because it was finals week and quiet hours and there was a sign on the fire door that said THIS MEANS EVERYBODY, with a section of the handbook after it; and the Realm heard that, and so did the thirteen others, all at once, for six minutes, a little out of step with one another, through every radio and screen that was turned to it.

He said that it was nine in the morning where he was, and that he was in Tempe, at the University of the March, on the same staircase as last year, in his second year, in finals week, and that he was grateful again to the whole of the personal union for the day off, because so was everybody he lived with, and there was an examination tomorrow in Organic Chemistry on the fourth floor. He said that his father, who had been ill in January, was well, and had done the cheers that morning, all four, and that he hoped everybody listening who had somebody to ring would ring them. He said what the King says on King’s Day, which was thank you, to each of the fourteen by name, because it was the one morning in the year when all fourteen heard the same voice at once, and each of them listened for its own.

At the fourth minute he looked at the telephone.

He did not mean to. He had been looking at the light in the window, past it, the way he had been taught to look at a camera, which is through it; and at the fourth minute, between the West Indies and New Albion, his eyes came down off the light and onto the half-landing, and onto the hands holding the telephone.

They were quite steady.

They had been steady for four minutes. They were holding the telephone at the height of the step, level, the thumbs at the edges of the case and the fingers flat behind it, exactly, the way they held a pencil before they put it down parallel to the edge of a desk; and in November, at three in the morning, Frederick had looked across 312 in the dark and seen the same hands lying folded on a blanket, quite still, on a man who was not asleep.

He knew where the unless was.

It was there. It was the length of a sentence, and he could feel the shape of it, the way you can feel a step in the dark before your foot reaches it; and he knew exactly what it would say, and to whom, and that fourteen realms would hear it at once and none of them would know what it meant, and one man on a half-landing would.

He kept to the text.

He said New Albion, and thank you, and went on to the next, and the next, to the end; and there was no unless in the morning anywhere. And at the end he said happy King’s Day, because it was, and on the screen of the telephone the small red word went out.

---

Alexander lowered the telephone.

He did it slowly, the way a man puts down something he has been carrying a long way, and looked at the screen, and then at the step, and then at Frederick on it.

“Six minutes and eleven seconds,” he said.

“Was it level?”

“It was level.”

The producer came round from behind him and looked at the telephone in his hands, and at his hands, and at him.

“That,” she said, “was the steadiest shot the ABC has ever put out from a staircase.”

“It is the only shot the ABC has ever put out from a staircase,” said Alexander. “Except last year’s.”

“Last year’s moved,” said the producer. “The cameraman sneezed.” She took off her headset. “My mother’s going to call me in about a minute.” She looked at Alexander a moment longer. “She’s going to ask who was holding it.”

“Please tell her,” said Alexander, “that it was a first-year.”

On the half-landing below, the camera, on its legs, made a small sound, and its red light came on, and it showed a picture of the step, perfectly, with nobody on it.

“Oh, now,” said the cameraman.

---

His mother rang at ten past nine, which was ten past five in London, and did not say anything for a moment.

“You spoke very quietly,” she said. “Your father turned it up.” A pause. “The picture did not move.”

“It was a telephone.”

“Whose?”

“Alexander’s.”

There was a silence from London, of the length she used for things she was deciding whether to say; and then she did not say it, and he heard the telephone go across a table.

“Pappa.”

“Fredde.” A breath. Not looking; he did not go back along the corridor. “Text.”

“Yes.”

“Kept.”

Frederick sat on the step under the narrow window and could not say anything for a moment.

“Was there an unless?” he said. “Pappa. Did you hear one?”

There was a pause on the line from London, and it was the looking kind; and then it was not, because his father had found it, and it was short.

“Near,” said his father.

---

Jack rang at a quarter past, by video, from behind the bar of the New Inn at a quarter past five in the afternoon, with the pumps behind him and the photograph of the trough on the wall and, beside it, between the trough and the A, a paper sun that said FRED; and behind Jack, along the bar, Purvis and Gaz, with pints, and over their heads the television, still on the ABC, with the sound down.

“HANOVER,” said Jack. “You absolute lemon. Happy birthday.”

“Thank you.”

“Twenty-two. Purvis says it’s a terrible age. He says he was twenty-two in nineteen seventy-something and it rained the whole year.” Jack leaned towards the screen. “Listen. Listen to me. Was that Alex? Holding it?”

“How do you know it was held?”

“Because it was level,” said Jack. “Because Purvis put his spirit level on the telly. On the top. He’s got one in his van. He put it on the telly at two minutes past five to see if it was you or the ABC, because last year it wobbled at the end, and the bubble didn’t move. Six minutes. Not once.” He turned round. “Did it, Purvis?”

“Bubble never moved,” said Purvis, along the bar, with deep respect.

“Nobody holds a camera that still,” said Jack. “Nobody human. So I said to Mum, it’s either a machine or it’s Alex.” He looked past Frederick, at the half-landing, where Alexander was standing by the rail with the telephone back in his inside pocket. “Alex.”

“Good afternoon, Jack,” said Alexander.

“Was that bloody you?”

“Yes.”

Jack looked at him out of the telephone, from behind a bar in Gloucestershire, for a long moment, with his face going the colour it went in the sun.

“You’re getting a pint,” said Jack. “When you come. I’m pulling it myself. Nobody touches it.” He turned round to the bar. “Purvis. Nobody touches it.”

---

Theo rang from New Westminster at twenty past, from the medical school library, where it was twenty past twelve, whispering, with Desmond’s scarf round his own neck, and said quietest thing I’ve ever heard, again, Desmond says the same, don’t let Jack buy you a drink, and then, quieter, who held the camera, Freddie, because it didn’t move, and Frederick told him, and Theo did not say anything for a while, and then said okay, and then, good.

Lukas rang from Hamburg at half past, where it was half past six in the evening, by video, from a desk in a room with books on every wall, and said nothing. He had said his one thing for the year in March, on the rim of the Canyon, in German, to Alexander; and he looked at Frederick out of the screen, and then at Alexander, who had come and stood behind Frederick’s shoulder on the landing, and then he held up his hand with three fingers crooked, the way the first-years held them up at the Wright, correctly; and Alexander, behind Frederick’s shoulder, held up his own, correctly, back.

Then Lukas rang off.

Tyler was asleep through the whole of it, in Ironwood Hall, across campus, and woke at two, and wrote happy birthday fred. did i miss it, and then, a minute later, i missed it. same as last year. its tradition now.

---

Mr Luna had come on at ten.

He was at the desk under the lamp in the cardigan, with the ball game on low and the clipboard and the butterscotch and the paper sun on the front of the desk that said IGNACIO, gone over again at the edges in silver pen; and he looked at them over his glasses as they came down the stairs, the two of them, at ten past, for some time.

“Twenty-two, son.”

“Yes.”

Mr Luna nodded slowly, and looked at the grey box on the wall, and wrote 10 p.m. 79 on the clipboard, and laid the pen across the crossword.

“Call your mother?”

“She sang.”

“Still counts,” said Mr Luna.

He looked at Alexander, in the linen jacket, buttoned, with no hat.

“Amá watched it,” he said. “At my sister’s. On the big television. She watches it every year. Ninety-two.” He considered. “She said the picture didn’t move. Not once. She said in fifty years of watching that thing she never saw it hold still like that.” He looked at Alexander over the glasses a moment longer. “Lupe said it was a machine. Amá said no. She said a machine doesn’t hold still like that. She said that’s somebody holding on.”

Alexander did not say anything.

“That you, son?”

“Yes,” said Alexander.

Mr Luna looked at him for some time with no expression whatsoever. Then he reached out, and pushed the jar of butterscotch an inch across the desk.

“She says thank you,” said Mr Luna. “And she says you need a hat.”