Red Pen

The semi-final was against the Lamplighter’s A team, who were not the Ninth Ward Rovers.

The Rovers were the Lamplighter’s B team. The A team were the Lamplighter’s best, five men and a woman who had won the Cup three times in the last decade and had, Mr Delgado said, with deep respect, no sense of humour whatsoever. Their captain was Mrs Pruszynski’s younger brother, a tall silent man called Mr Pruszynski, who threw like his sister and had heard about Wait, and had come, Kimura reported from her stool, having trained for it. He had trained for three weeks. He had practised standing at the oche while his teammates stood behind him and did not throw for a full minute, and then two, and then three. He had, the Lamplighter’s barman told Mrs Merriweather on the telephone, made himself immune.

“Good,” said the Duke, when this was reported to him, at the dartboard, on Tuesday. “Interesting.”

---

At a quarter past eight on Thursday the fifteenth of April, Mr Abernathy came in.

He came in at the speed he always came in, in the brown jacket, and the semi-final had been going for three-quarters of an hour, and Eight Bars was full, as it was always full on a Cup night now, and the stool, the third from the window, was empty, because it was always empty at a quarter past eight. He sat on it. He took out the red pen. Frederick pulled him a bitter, at forty-five degrees, a finger of head, and put it on a mat in front of him, and Mr Abernathy drank about a quarter of it, and put it down exactly on the mat, and moved the glass two inches to the left, and uncapped the pen, and wrote.

It had become, in seven months, one of the fixed points of the week. Frederick did not look at the mat until he went past with a tray, and then he did. He had a shoebox under the bar now, as the Duke had, of every mat Mr Abernathy had ever marked for him, two hundred and twelve of them, and he had begun, in March, to see something in them that he had not expected, which was that the marks were going up. Slowly. A C plus in September, every week, for six weeks. A B minus in November. A B in January, twice. In March, on the night after Dublin, a B plus, and under it, in small red letters, better than your father on the stout, which he cannot do.

He went past with a tray at twenty past eight, and looked.

The mat said B.

It said B, in red, in Mr Abernathy’s small square hand. And under it, where there was always a line, Head: adequate, or Angle: held, there was a line. But it did not say anything. It started to. It started Hea, the H and the e and the a, and then it went on, and the letters were the right size and the right shape, but they were not going along the line any more. They were going down. Each one was a little lower than the one before, as though the line were a slope and the pen were rolling down it, Headddd, four d’s, and then a long red stroke, going down and off the edge of the mat onto the bar, where it stopped.

Frederick looked at it.

He looked at Mr Abernathy.

Mr Abernathy was sitting on his stool with the red pen in his right hand, resting on the bar, at the end of the red line. He was looking at the beer mat. He was looking at it the way he looked at a lab report that had gone wrong, a small frown, the expression of a man trying to work out where an error had come in. He did not seem to be distressed. He seemed to be puzzled.

“Sir,” said Frederick.

Mr Abernathy looked up at him.

“Mr Hanover,” he said. Or he began to. It came out Mr Han, and then something else, a soft sound, not a word, and Mr Abernathy stopped, and the frown deepened, and he looked at the beer mat again, as though the error might be there.

Frederick put down the tray.

He did not know what was happening. He knew that something was. He stood behind the bar of Eight Bars with two hundred people round him and a darts semi-final going on at the back and Mr Pruszynski standing immune at the oche, and he looked at Mr Abernathy, and he could not think of anything to do, and then, from the other end of the bar, past the till, past Mrs Merriweather, past the two jars, he heard a crash, which was Theo dropping a tray of glasses, all of them, on purpose, so as to have both hands free.

---

Theo came down the bar in about four seconds.

He came behind it, not round it, because behind it was faster, and stopped in front of Mr Abernathy, on the other side of the bar, and put both his hands flat on the counter, and leaned in, and looked at him, very close, very calm, in the Cranwell apron, the way he had looked at the vicar in the cake tent in May and the judge on the steps in Bloemfontein.

“Mr Abernathy,” he said. “It’s Theo Hartigan. From homeroom. Can you smile for me?”

Mr Abernathy looked at him.

Then, slowly, because he was a man who did what he was asked when it was reasonable, he smiled.

The right side of his face smiled. The left side did not. It stayed where it was, a little lower than it should have been, as though it had been left behind.

“Can you lift both your arms,” said Theo. “Straight out. Like this.” He held his own out, over the bar.

Mr Abernathy lifted his arms. The right one came up straight. The left one came up, and stopped, and then, slowly, while they both watched, drifted down.

“Can you say the sky is blue in New Westminster?”

Mr Abernathy opened his mouth.

What came out was not the sky is blue in New Westminster. It was the right length, and it had the right music, the rise and fall of a sentence, but the words in it were not words, or not the right ones, and Mr Abernathy heard them come out and stopped, and the frown on the right side of his face went very deep, and his eyes, which were perfectly clear, looked at Theo with something in them that Frederick had seen before, in a hospital in September three years ago, in his father’s eyes, when the words had gone.

Theo did not look away.

“That’s all right,” he said. “That’s all right, sir. You’re all right. I know what this is.” He turned his head, very slightly, without taking his eyes off Mr Abernathy, and said, quietly, to the bar, in a voice that went straight through two hundred people: “Kimura. Ambulance. Stroke. Tell them the time is eight twenty-one. Tell them eight twenty-one.”

Kimura was already on the telephone.

---

He had never seen Theo like that.

He had seen Theo do first aid. He had seen him in the cake tent and in Bloemfontein and, a long time ago, on a heap on Twenty-Second Street, running. But he had never seen him like this, and he understood, standing behind the bar of Eight Bars with his hands useless at his sides, that he was seeing six weeks of medical school and four thousand hours on a plastic dummy and three years of watching a man find his words again, in a hospital and a north wing kitchen and on the platform at Kemble, all at once, all of it, put to use.

“What can I do?” he said.

“Clear the bar,” said Theo, without looking round. “Get everybody back. Get the door open. Get the ambulance in. Don’t let him drink anything. Don’t let anybody give him anything.” He took Mr Abernathy’s right hand, which was still resting on the bar with the red pen in it, and held it. “And find Mrs Abernathy.”

“How?”

“I don’t know,” said Theo. “You’re the King. Find her.”

---

He found her. Or rather, Mrs Merriweather found her, because Mrs Merriweather had her telephone number, because she had everybody’s telephone number, and Mrs Abernathy arrived at Eight Bars at eight thirty-four in a coat over her nightdress in a taxi that had been told by the King of fourteen countries on the telephone to drive faster than was legal, which was itself possibly a constitutional question, and she came in through the door into a bar that had been cleared to the walls and was completely silent, and found her husband sitting on his stool, perfectly upright, with a Page of Honour in an apron holding his hand across the counter, and the King behind the bar, and two paramedics coming in through the back.

She went to him. She did not say anything. She put her hand on his face, the left side, the side that had stayed behind.

Mr Abernathy looked at her.

He tried to say something. It did not come out. But his eyes did, and she looked into them and nodded, as though he had said it perfectly, and perhaps to her he had.

“Forty-one years,” said Mrs Abernathy, to nobody. “I waited forty-one years for him to retire. He promised me Italy.” She did not take her hand away. “He’s not getting out of Italy.”

The paramedics took him at eight thirty-eight.

Theo went with them. He walked beside the stretcher out of the back door into the yard where the kegs went and into the ambulance, still in the Cranwell apron, talking to the paramedics in a low voice, very fast, in words that Frederick did not know, and one of the paramedics, a woman of about forty, looked at him and said you’re the one from the bus, meaning the Thirty-Two, meaning his father, and Theo said yes, and she said get in, and he got in.

---

He was at the hospital until four in the morning.

Frederick did not go. That had been decided, without discussion, by Kimura, at the back door, as the ambulance pulled out, in four words, sir, you’ll make it worse, which was true, because the King arriving at an emergency department would have filled it with people who wanted to see the King arriving at an emergency department, and the people who needed it would have had to wait. So he stayed at Eight Bars. He stayed behind the bar, in the empty room, with the chairs on the tables, with Mrs Merriweather and Marcus and Kimura and the Duke, who had been at the board when it happened and had not moved from it, and who now sat at the end of the bar on Mr Abernathy’s stool, very straight, with his hands folded, and did not say anything for two hours.

At half past ten the semi-final resumed.

It was Mr Pruszynski’s idea. He came to the bar at ten, the tall silent captain of the Lamplighter’s A team, and stood in front of the Duke, and said, in a voice like his sister’s, that the Lamplighter would of course concede, if Eight Bars wished, in the circumstances, and that nobody would think less of them.

The Duke looked at him for a long time.

“No,” he said. And then, finding it, slowly, the whole sentence, the way it came when it mattered: “He’d want. The score. Recorded.”

So they played it. Mr Abernathy’s leg was forfeited, as it had to be, and recorded on the scorer’s clipboard as w/o, and Mr Delgado wrote under it in pencil at the hospital, and they played the other legs in an empty bar, with the door locked and the chairs on the tables and nobody watching but Mrs Merriweather and the King and Kimura, and Eight Bars won the semi-final four legs to three on the Duke’s last dart.

He did not say Wait.

He stood on the line and threw three darts, one after the other, without any pause at all, into the treble twenty, the treble nineteen and the double eighteen, and then he turned round, and went back to Mr Abernathy’s stool, and sat on it, and folded his hands.

Mr Pruszynski shook his hand. He did not say anything. He had trained for three weeks to be immune to the Duke’s waiting, and the Duke had not waited, and he had lost, and he stood in front of the Duke for a moment with the expression of a man who has understood something, and then went home.

---

At four in the morning, Theo came back on the first Thirty-Two of the day, which his father was driving, because his father had come in early, without being asked, and had been waiting at the stop outside the hospital when Theo came out.

He came up the back stairs and into the flat and sat down at the kitchen table, on the chair that wobbled, still in the Cranwell apron, and put his head in his hands.

Frederick was at the table. He had not been to bed. He had a cup of coffee in front of him in the white Monday cup, which it was not, because it was Friday.

“He’s all right,” said Theo, through his hands.

Frederick did not say anything.

“He’s going to be all right. They got it in time. It was a clot. They gave him the drug, the one that breaks it up. You’ve got four and a half hours. From when it starts. They gave it to him at nine oh six.” Theo took his hands away from his face. He looked very tired, and very young, and about forty. “Forty-five minutes. From the beer mat. The doctor said that’s the fastest she’s seen in two years.” He looked at the table. “She said most people don’t notice. She said most people think they’re drunk, or tired, or being funny, and they wait, and by the time somebody calls it’s been three hours, and then it’s too late for the drug.” He stopped. “She asked how I knew.”

“What did you say?”

“I said his handwriting went downhill,” said Theo. “I said I saw it from across the bar. On a beer mat. And I knew, because I’d watched your dad for three years. Learning to write again. Every Tuesday and Thursday at the kitchen table. And it went downhill like that at the start, before it came back. Every letter a bit lower than the one before.” He looked at the coffee cup. “She didn’t say anything for a bit. Then she said, well, that’s not in the textbook.”

---

A week later, on Thursday the twenty-second of April, at a quarter past eight, Mr Abernathy came in.

He came in slowly. He came in with a stick, and Mrs Abernathy on his arm, and his left foot dragging very slightly on the tiles, the way the Duke’s had dragged a year before, and Eight Bars, which was full, went silent, and parted, and he walked down the length of it to the stool, the third from the window, which had been kept empty since six, and which the Duke, who had been sitting on it every evening that week, got up from as he came, and stood beside, and held the back of, until Mr Abernathy was on it.

Mr Abernathy sat.

Frederick pulled him a bitter. Forty-five degrees. The side, not the bottom. Straighten as it fills. A finger of head. He put it on a mat in front of him.

Mr Abernathy looked at it.

Then he took the red pen out of the inside pocket of the brown jacket, with his right hand, which worked, and uncapped it, and moved the glass two inches to the left, and wrote, slowly, very slowly, while the whole of Eight Bars watched and did not breathe.

He capped the pen.

He moved the glass back.

He did not say anything. He could, the doctors said, say a good deal now, more every day, and would, they thought, say nearly everything by the summer, but he did not say anything, because Mr Abernathy had never said anything when a beer mat would do.

Frederick looked.

On the beer mat, in red, in letters that were a little shaky but went straight along the line, every one of them, from the first to the last, it said:

A. Head: adequate. Theo Hartigan: see me.