One Sentence

“Not the office,” he said. “The gym.”

The woman from the Corporation looked at him. She was standing in the corridor of the old building with the long black case in one hand and her pass in the other, which Mr Obi had looked at for a long time and handed back, and she had walked across the car park beside him and the Private Secretary half running, talking the whole way into a telephone at her ear in fast Spanish, and she had stopped talking now.

“The gym, Majesty?”

“Where the examination was.”

She looked at the Private Secretary. The Private Secretary looked at the noticeboard with the swimming gala on it.

“His Majesty would like the gym,” said the Private Secretary.

---

The doors were open.

Both of them, back against the walls, hooked open, so that from the corridor you could see straight down the long aisle to the stage. The desks were still in their rows. They would be there for eight days; the Board’s papers went on until the following Thursday, and Mr Kaminski would not have his gym back until then. Ninety small wooden desks, each with a white card taped to its corner, each empty now, in nine rows of ten, in the long bars of sun from the high windows that had moved round since nine and lay now across the aisles instead of the desks.

At the front, at the table with the green cloth, Mr Lumsden was putting the ten brown envelopes into a canvas bag.

He was doing it one at a time, in order, A to J, and looking at the number on the back of each before it went in, and when the last one was in he drew the bag’s cord tight and knotted it and put a small lead seal on the knot with a pair of pliers from his jacket pocket, and squeezed the seal, and looked at it.

The grey steel box beside him was open and empty. The padlock lay beside it on the green cloth, unlocked.

He looked up.

He looked at the woman from the Corporation in the doorway with her case. He looked at the Private Secretary, and at Castellanos, and at Frederick. He did not look at any of them for longer than he had looked at their photographs at a quarter to nine.

“The examination is concluded, madam,” said Mr Lumsden to the woman, “and the room is the school’s until nine o’clock tomorrow, when it is the Board’s again.”

He picked up the canvas bag by its handles and the padlock from the cloth, and put the padlock in his pocket, and came down the long aisle between the empty desks at his one speed, with the bag in his left hand, and his right at his side.

At the door, as he passed Frederick, he did not stop.

“Good afternoon, Mr Hanover,” said Mr Lumsden.

And went out along the corridor towards the front doors, past the trophy case where there were still three lemons in a row, his shoes making no sound on the boards at all, not even on the eleven that creaked.

---

The woman’s name was Paula Etchegaray, and she was the Corporation’s correspondent in New Westminster, and she had been in the Realm for four years and had never once, she said, while she unpacked the case on the desk at 4D, been inside an American school.

“It’s very like ours,” she said, in Spanish, unwinding a cable. “It smells the same. Floor polish and children.” She looked up at the high windows. “Ours have the windows lower.”

He had chosen 4D.

He had walked down the aisle from the doors without thinking about it, between the empty desks of the first three rows, and stopped at the fourth row and stood beside his own desk, 4D. 4471. on the card at the corner in the Board’s type, taped at its slight angle, and she had looked at him, and at the desk, and put the case down on it.

He had not explained. He did not think he could. It was the desk at which, for three hours, he had been the one person in the fourteen realms whom nobody could reach.

She set up a small black microphone on a short stand, and a box the size of a book with lights on it, and a pair of headphones, which she put round her own neck, and a laptop, which she opened on 4E, Theo’s desk, and turned so that he could see it. On it, the square. The same picture from the same rooftop. The twelve vehicles. The sixty in front of the arch. The white line at the north side.

“The line goes to the Corporation’s building in the city,” she said, “and the Corporation puts it out on the radio and the television at once, all channels. And the Casa Rosada has asked for it as well.” She plugged something into the box and a green light came on. “The Viceroy’s office rang my producer twenty minutes ago and asked for the feed to be sent to the Casa Rosada. They have loudspeakers on the balcony over the arch, from the old days. For proclamations.” She put one side of the headphones to her ear and listened. “They’ll put it through those. Into the square.”

He looked at the laptop, at the balcony over the arch, which he could see, a long stone balcony with a railing, empty.

“Do they work?”

“My producer says they tested them at ten past one,” said Paula Etchegaray. “With the national anthem. He says everybody in the square stood up, including the men on the armoured cars, and then sat down again, and looked embarrassed.”

---

Castellanos had stopped at the doors.

He stood just inside them, against the wall, where the old library chair had been brought from; it was gone now, back to the fire door, or wherever the Private Secretary had sat on it. And beside him, against the other wall, there was Theo.

Frederick had not heard him come. Theo stood against the wall by the doors with his blazer over his arm and his telephone in his hand and his biology book under his other arm, not gone home, not revising, and when Frederick looked at him he did not move, and did not come any nearer, and did not say anything at all.

He was on duty. He had his face on.

It was not one of his three duties, and he was on duty anyway.

His mother was not there. He had looked for her at the top of the steps when they came back across the car park, and she had gone in. He did not know where she was. Somewhere in the building, not in the gym, because it was the Plate’s and she had no standing in the Plate, and she would not stand in a room where the Plate’s business was being done unless she was asked, and he had not asked.

He would have liked her to be there. He did not ask.

---

“Two o’clock in Buenos Aires,” said Paula Etchegaray. “The top of the hour. They’ll go to you straight after the time signal. No introduction. My producer says the director says the King doesn’t need an introduction in the Plate, he needs a microphone.” She looked at him. “I’ll count you in from five, on my fingers, so you don’t hear it in your head. When I get to one, it’s you. When you’ve finished, look at me, and I’ll close it.”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to sit down?”

He looked at the chair at 4D. The plain wooden one, the same as all the others, that he had sat on for three hours.

“Yes,” he said.

He sat down at his desk.

The microphone was in front of him, on its stand, about where the paper had been. The bars of sun had moved; his desk was in shadow now, and the next desk forward, 3D, was bright. In his blazer pocket the cards, and the lemon, and his pass. Through the third high window above him, the sky, and the far end of the car park, and the gate, rolled shut again now, and Mr Obi’s hut, and on the pavement outside it, in the sun, an empty kitchen chair.

He did not have anything written down. He did not need it. Five words.

Paula Etchegaray held up her hand, with the headphones at one ear, and listened.

In the headphones, very small, so small that he could only just hear it in the silent gym, there was the sound of a time signal. Six short pips and a long one. Two o’clock in Buenos Aires.

She looked at him. She held up five fingers.

Four.

Three.

He thought of the man at the window that did not open.

Two.

He thought of nothing at all.

One.

---

“El Rey está con su Virrey.”

He said it at the volume he would have used across a table. Not loudly. He did not need to say it loudly; it would come out of a balcony over an arch nine thousand kilometres away, through loudspeakers from the old days, into a square. He said it the way the Viceroy said things, dry and even, without going up or down, so that nobody could tell until the last word which way it would go.

Then he stopped.

He did not say anything else. There was nothing else to say. He had been advised to say that, and nothing after it, and he did not want to say anything after it. He sat at 4D with his hands flat on the desk on either side of the microphone, and the silence went on, and he let it.

It went on for perhaps four seconds. In the headphones round Paula Etchegaray’s neck he could hear, very faint, a hiss: the open line, the Corporation’s studio, a city on the other side of the world, waiting to see if there was more.

There was not.

He looked at her.

She looked back at him for a moment longer than she needed to, with an expression he did not understand, and then she reached out and touched something on the box, and the green light went off.

---

Nobody in the gym said anything.

Castellanos by the door did not move. Theo did not move. The Private Secretary, standing in the aisle by 5D, June’s desk, with the pale blue folder under his arm, looked at the floor.

Paula Etchegaray had the headphones on properly now, both ears, and her eyes were on the laptop on Theo’s desk, and Frederick looked at it too.

The square.

For a moment nothing in it had changed. The twelve vehicles across the stones with their guns at the sky. The sixty in front of the arch. The people at the edges. It was a picture, and nothing moved in it, and he thought for one bad moment that the loudspeakers had not worked, or that the line had gone, or that five words were not enough and had never been going to be.

Then the people moved.

Not much. At the north side, behind the white line, the dark band of people behind the barrier moved, all at once, the way a field of grass moves when the wind comes across it, and on the laptop, with the sound off, he could not hear anything. Paula Etchegaray could. He saw her face change. He saw her shut her eyes.

He reached across to Theo’s desk and turned the sound on.

It came out of the laptop’s small speaker, tinny, far off, and filled the gym anyway. It was not a cheer. He had thought it would be a cheer. It was lower than a cheer and much bigger, a long rising sound like a wave coming in over shingle, from thousands of people at once, not shouting any word, only making the sound people make when a thing they have been holding for four hours is let go of. It came up out of the square and went on, and on, and did not stop.

And in the middle of it, very faint, from somewhere near the front of the picture, from one of the vehicles, a man’s voice, shouting one word, over and over, which Frederick could not make out, and then could.

Rey. Rey. Rey.

---

At the near end of the line of vehicles, the one where the two men had been sharing water, a man stood up on top of it.

He stood with his helmet in his hand. He looked at the Casa Rosada, at the balcony over the arch, for a long time. Then he put his helmet on, and dropped down through the hatch, and was gone.

The turret of the vehicle turned.

Slowly. The gun that had pointed all morning at the sky over the pink house came down, and round, away from the building, away from the arch and the sixty and the window at the corner, until it was pointing back along the square towards the Avenida de Mayo, and the north side, and the far end where the roadblock was, and Palermo beyond it.

A puff of grey smoke from the back of it. The engine.

The vehicle pulled out of the line.

It went across the square at walking pace, with the people at the north side drawing back from the barrier to let it through, and somebody, a soldier at the roadblock, dragging the barrier aside, and it went out of the square into the Avenida, between the old women in white headscarves, who did not move back at all, and who stood on either side of it as it passed, very close, looking up at it, and it went on up the Avenida and out of the picture.

Nobody cheered it. The sound from the square did not change. It went on, the long wave, the same.

The second vehicle’s engine started.

---

He found that he was standing up. He did not know when he had stood.

Paula Etchegaray had taken the headphones off and was holding them in her lap, and her face was wet, and she was not doing anything about it. She looked up at him.

“It’s on every channel,” she said. “In the whole country. It went out on every channel at once.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand. “I’ve been a journalist for eleven years, Majesty. I’ve never closed a line on five words.” She looked at the laptop. “I’m sorry. I’m very unprofessional. My grandmother was one of them. In 1977. In the square. She died in 2019, and she walked every Thursday until she couldn’t.” She looked at the white line at the north side, at the edge of the picture. “I think one of them might be her friend. Marta. In the second…” She stopped. “I can’t see.”

He did not say anything. He did not know what to say. He was sixteen, and it was twenty past one in a gym, and he had just said five words, and a vehicle was going up the Avenida de Mayo between two rows of old women.

He stood beside his desk at 4D and watched the second vehicle pull out of the line.

At the door, against the wall, Theo had his telephone held up, not filming, just holding it, with the screen towards himself, and Frederick saw on it, small, from across the gym, the same picture, the same square, on a different channel, and Theo’s face over it, white, and his mouth pressed tight shut, and his eyes not.