The Gym

The line went from the double doors of the gym all the way back along the corridor past the trophy case to the door of the front office, and it was quiet in the way a line is quiet when ninety people have agreed not to talk and are all talking anyway, very low, in pairs, with their heads down over cards.

Theo was about two-thirds of the way along, against the wall, under the noticeboard with the swimming gala on it. He had his cards in both hands, thirty-three of them, held with two rubber bands crossed, and he was going through them with his lips moving and not looking at anything else.

Frederick stood beside him against the wall.

“Morning.”

“Don’t talk to me. I’m on 1955.”

“All right.”

Theo turned a card over. He read the back. He shut his eyes and said something to himself, and opened them, and read the back again, and made a small furious noise.

“Constitutional emergency,” said Theo. “I keep putting constitutional crisis. It’s not a crisis. It’s an emergency. Why is it an emergency and not a crisis?”

“Because he declared it. A crisis is a thing that happens to you. An emergency’s a thing you say.”

Theo looked at him.

“Did Ferrante say that?”

“No. I did. Just now.”

“Well, I’m writing it on the paper,” said Theo, “and if it’s wrong, it’s your fault,” and turned over to 1976.

---

His hands were not quite steady.

Frederick noticed it because Theo’s hands were always steady. Theo’s hands had been steady at the top of a Ferris wheel at Santa Monica at nine forty-one in the morning when the wheel had stopped and his hat had gone, and they had been steady on a playing field afterwards with a first-aid kit open on the grass, because Theo had done the St John’s first-aid course twice and been top both times and did not intend, he said, to be top of anything else in his life until he was a paramedic. They were not steady now. The cards shook very slightly, the way a sheet of paper shakes on a table when a lorry goes past outside.

“What do you need?” said Frederick.

“A B.”

“In history.”

“In history. A B in history and a B in biology and a C in everything else, and then I can go on the cadet scheme in the summer, and do the course at seventeen, and then they let you on the ambulances.” Theo turned a card. “And I’ve got biology on Thursday, which I’ll get, because it’s bodies, and I know bodies. And I’ve got this, which is Kings.” He looked at the card. “I don’t know Kings.”

“You know one.”

“That’s not the same as knowing Kings, that’s knowing you, and you’re not on the paper.” Theo looked down the line towards the doors, and Frederick saw his jaw go tight. “This year’s been, Freddie. You know. October. And the Page thing. And the coat with the facings, and the Eleventh. And California.” He did not say anything about California. “Ferrante says I’ve done all right considering. I don’t want to have done all right considering. I want a B.”

“You’ll get a B.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” said Frederick. “But I’d bet the eleven pounds.”

Theo looked at him, outraged, and put his hand over the inside pocket of his blazer, where the envelope was, buttoned in.

“You’re not having the eleven pounds.”

“I’m not having it. I’m betting it.”

“It’s mine to bet,” said Theo, “and I’m not betting it either, and it’s a terrible thing to say to somebody in a queue,” and went back to 1976, and his hands were a little steadier.

---

Priya was two places ahead of them with nothing in her hands at all.

Priya did not revise in queues. She said it was like trying to fill a bath with the plug out. She stood against the wall with her bag at her feet and her arms folded, looking at the opposite wall, where there was a photograph of the school in 1931 with everybody in it wearing hats, and when June, beside her, held out a card and said test me, Priya said no in a perfectly friendly voice and went on looking at the hats.

“Priya,” said June. “Please. One. Just 1930.”

“1930,” said Priya, to the photograph. “September. Uriburu marches on the Casa Rosada. The Viceroy says no. The garrison won’t move. Over in two days.” She looked at June. “That’s not a test. That’s me saying it.”

“Say it again.”

“No.”

June wrote something on her card very fast and stuck it in her bag.

Felix was in front of June, in a white shirt and an orange tie, because the Board said dress as for school and Felix had decided that this meant he could wear the tie with the green ducks on it, and then at home in front of the mirror at seven o’clock had lost his nerve and changed it for a plain orange one, and was regretting it.

“It’s not the same,” said Felix, to nobody, plucking at it. “I feel undressed.”

“You’re wearing a tie,” said June.

“It’s the wrong tie.”

Marcus was behind them, without his trombone, which made him look like a man who had come out without his trousers. He was humming. He was humming the school song, under his breath, very slightly ahead of where he would have been if anybody else had been humming it with him, and when Devon, behind him, said Marcus, please, he stopped for nearly a minute and then started again from the second verse.

Devon had his telephone in his hand and was holding it as if it were an animal that might bite.

“They take them,” said Devon. “Did you know they take them? They put them in a box. A steel box. With a lock. My cousin did the Board last year and he said they put them in a box and padlock it and put the box on the table at the front where you can see it all the time and can’t get at it, and he said it was the worst three hours of his life, and he’s done a parachute jump.”

“Turn it off, Devon,” said June.

“I’ve turned it off. I’ve turned it off three times. I keep turning it back on to make sure it’s off.”

---

Lucía came along the corridor at twenty to nine, late, half running, with her bag bumping and her hair coming out of its band, and stopped beside Frederick and held something out to him without a word.

A lemon.

Enormous, and very yellow, the yellowest thing in the corridor, in the dusty June light from the windows over the doors.

“From Grandpa,” said Lucía, getting her breath. “He sent a box on Saturday. After the train. He said one each for the history exam, for the H’s and the P’s. He said lemons are lucky. He said that’s not a superstition, it’s a fact, because he’s never once been in an accident with a lemon in his pocket.”

“Has he ever had a lemon in his pocket?”

“He says always,” said Lucía. “He says he’s had a lemon in his pocket every day since 1971.” She gave Theo one, and Priya one, and stood holding the last, which was hers. “You can’t take them in. I asked. I rang the Board yesterday from the kitchen and a woman said a lemon, and I said yes, and she said no.” She looked at the lemon. “So you have to hold it now. In the queue. That counts. Grandpa said it counts if you hold it before.”

Frederick held it.

It was warm from the bag, and heavy, and it smelled of the yard in Pomona that he had never seen, and of a kitchen with a tap running, and of six-oh-two on a Saturday morning, and he held it in both hands for a moment against his chest and did not say anything, and Lucía watched him do it and looked satisfied.

“Okay,” she said. “Now give it back. I’m going to put them on the trophy case, all in a row, and they can wait for us.”

---

Mr Ferrante came down the corridor at a quarter to nine, slowly, with the stick.

He had had the stick since California. He did not use it in class, where he propped it against the radiator under the window and forgot about it and walked about the room on the leg with a very small hitch that you only saw if you knew to look. But in corridors he used it, and he came down the corridor now past the line with the stick going tock on the polished floor every second step, and the line straightened as he passed it, the way a line straightens for a teacher it likes.

He was not allowed in. The Board did not let a subject teacher into the room for his own subject’s paper, in case, the Board said, of communication. He had told them so on the last day of classes, at the door, with the list in his hand. I’ll be outside till you go in and then I’ll go away, because if I stay outside I’ll only stand there trying to hear you think.

He stopped by the trophy case, where Lucía had just put the lemons in a row along the top, four of them, very yellow, between the swimming cup of 2004 and the photograph of Mr Abernathy with a moustache.

Mr Ferrante looked at the lemons for some time.

“Paredes,” he said.

“They’re for luck, sir.”

“I assumed they weren’t for the trophy case.” He leaned on the stick and looked down the line, along all of them, at the cards and the hands and Felix’s tie and Devon’s telephone, and Frederick saw his eyes pass over the H’s and not stop, the way they had passed over the H’s every lesson for nine months.

“I’m going to say one thing,” said Mr Ferrante. “I said it on the sheet. I’ll say it again, because it’s the only thing worth saying, and then I’m going to go and sit in the staff room and not drink coffee for three hours.” He paused. “Whatever they ask you, the question underneath it is the same. Not what happened. Why did it happen in that room and not another one. Who was in the room. Who wasn’t. What it cost the ones who were.” He looked at the floor. “That’s all. That’s history. The rest is dates.”

Nobody said anything.

“Good luck,” said Mr Ferrante, to the line in general, and turned on the stick and went back along the corridor the way he had come, tock, and at the corner by the front office he stopped, and did not look round, and said, to the wall in front of him:

“Hanover. Hartigan. Fourth row. Desks D and E. I asked.”

And went round the corner.

---

Mr Kaminski was at the far end of the corridor by the fire door, in his tracksuit, with his whistle round his neck and his arms folded, looking at the double doors of his gym with the face of a man watching his house being burgled by the police.

“Sir,” said Theo, as they passed him to look through the glass.

“Hartigan.”

“It’s only three hours, sir.”

“It’s three hours a day for eight days,” said Mr Kaminski, “in which nobody in this building does a single push-up,” and did not unfold his arms.

At the end of the corridor, opposite the doors, against the wall, by the fire door, there was a wooden chair, one of the old ones from the library with the curved backs. Nobody was sitting on it yet. Frederick looked at it, and Mr Kaminski saw him look at it, and looked at it too.

“Your parent’s,” said Mr Kaminski. “He moved it there himself on Friday. Asked me if I minded.” He considered the chair. “I said I didn’t mind. I said I’d never had anybody ask me if I minded about a chair.”

---

Through the glass panel in the left-hand door he could see into the gym.

It did not look like the gym. The gym was a big echoing hall with lines on the floor in four colours and baskets at each end and the climbing bars folded up against the wall, and it smelled of rubber and feet. This was a room he had never been in. The baskets had been winched up to the ceiling. The bars were behind a long blue curtain. And across the whole of the floor, over the four colours of lines, in exact rows, there were desks.

Small wooden desks, all the same, ninety of them, in nine rows of ten, each a yard from the next, each with a white card taped to the top right-hand corner with a number on it, and a paper on it face down, and a pen-sized groove at the top that nobody would use. The light came down on them from the high windows on the car park side, eleven tall windows with wire in the glass, and lay across the desks in long bright stripes with the shadows of the window frames in them, so that every desk was half in the sun and half not.

Over the doors, on the wall above him, out of sight from here, the clock. He could see its reflection in the glass of the furthest window, very small and backwards, inside its cage.

At the front of the room, where the stage was, below the stage, there was a table. It had a green cloth on it. On the cloth, in the very middle, by itself, there was a grey steel box the size of a bread bin, with its lid open.

And behind the table, sitting very upright on a gym bench with a sheaf of papers on his knee, there was a man.

He was thin and grey and dressed in a grey suit, with a grey tie and grey hair and a pair of half-moon glasses on a cord round his neck, and he was reading the papers on his knee with a pencil, one line at a time, the way a man reads a timetable he has written himself and suspects somebody of having altered. He did not look up at the glass. He did not look at the door at all.

Then he took out a watch, a pocket watch, on a chain, and looked at it, and looked up at the clock over the doors, and frowned at the clock, and made a note.

“That’s him,” said Devon, behind them, in a whisper. “That’s the Board.”

The man stood up. He put the sheaf of papers on the table beside the steel box, square to its edge, and came down the long aisle between the desks towards the doors, at a steady pace, not fast, not slow, his shoes making no sound on the floor at all.

At the door he stopped, on the other side of the glass, a foot from Frederick’s face, and looked at him for a moment through the panel without any expression whatever, the way you look at a door you are about to open.

Then he opened it.

“Candidates,” he said.