Race Day

The river was brown and high from the rain, and it was moving.

He could hear it before he could see it, coming down past the boathouses in the dark, a long low pull against the pilings of the landing stage, a sound like breathing through the teeth. The lights on the boathouse fronts made their yellow smears on it, and the current took the smears and stretched them downstream and could not quite carry them off. It was twenty past six. It was cold, a wet, heavy cold that came up off the water and got into your sleeves, and the sky over Virginia was black.

There were nine of them on the landing stage, in leggings and old jumpers and hats, stamping. Eight to row and Nadia to cox.

He had wondered, in the car, what they would do.

He had wondered it the way he had wondered about Castellanos at the car door on the thirty-first, and Mr Obi at the gate, and Mr Abernathy at the roll book, and he had thought that he had stopped needing to wonder, because every one of them had done the same thing, which was nothing, carefully. But the river was different. The river was the one place he had ever been a person who was there not to be clever but to push, and he did not think he could bear it if the river was careful with him.

Nadia was standing at the end of the stage with her hands in her armpits and her megaphone hanging from its cord round her neck, a head shorter than anybody, looking at the nine of them as though they were a delivery she had not ordered.

She looked at him. It was the same look she gave everybody. It went over him and on to Sam Ellison and on to the stroke without stopping.

“Race day,” said Nadia.

“Race day,” said the crew, all together, flat, the way they said it every time, because it was never race day.

And that was all. That was the whole of it. Nobody looked at him. Nobody said anything. Sam Ellison, beside him, in the grey jumper with the hole in the elbow, blew on his hands and said, “It’s freezing,” to nobody, and the bow said, “It’s November, Sam,” and the stroke said, “Is the river supposed to be that colour,” and Nadia said, “The river is the colour I say it is. Hands on.”

They lifted the boat off the rack, eight of them, and walked it down the stage over their heads, and rolled it into the brown water.

---

The launch was already out, muttering at the stern, with Mr Odum in it and Castellanos beside him in the long green scarf, looking at the far bank with an expression of terrible patience. The river was faster than Frederick had ever seen it. The launch was having to work just to sit still beside the stage, its little engine pushing against the current, and Castellanos had one hand on the gunwale and the other flat on his knee, and was not looking at the water at all.

“Numbers,” said Nadia.

“Bow.” “Two.” “Three.” “Four.”

“Five,” said Frederick.

“Six.” “Seven.” “Stroke.”

“Good,” said Nadia. “Nobody’s died. Five, you were nearly late.”

“I wasn’t late.”

“I said nearly,” said Nadia. “Nearly is a kind of late. Let’s go.”

He nearly laughed, and did not, because she would have shouted at him for it, and then he understood that he wanted her to shout at him for it, very much, and laughed anyway, and she did.

“Five! Something funny?”

“No.”

“Then row,” said Nadia, and they rowed.

---

It was hard. The current was against them going up and it was like rowing through syrup, every stroke a long dragging pull that seemed to get the boat nowhere, the blades going in and catching and the water heavy and thick on them, and the boathouse lights sliding back past them so slowly that for the first ten minutes he thought they were not moving at all. His hands were cold through the handle. The water off the blade ran down his wrist inside his sleeve every few strokes, brown and icy, and he did not mind.

He watched the back in front of him.

That was the whole of rowing at five. You watched the back of the person in front, which was Sam Ellison’s back, in the grey jumper with the hole in the elbow, and you did what it did, a fraction after, and you listened to Nadia, and you did not look at the water, and you did not look at the sky, and you did not think about anything. Your legs went down and your back swung and your arms came in, and the blade came out and went back and went in again, and the boat ran on under you between the strokes, and you did it again.

“Square early,” said Nadia. “Two, you’re late. Five, you’re late. Five, what is the matter with you. Keep up with Sam. Sam is not difficult to keep up with. Sam is a wardrobe.”

“Thanks, Nadia,” said Sam Ellison, without turning round.

“You’re welcome, Sam.”

He kept up with Sam.

“Better,” said Nadia. “Five, better. Build in two. This is the start of the Head and the river’s against us and we’re four lengths down on Georgetown, who are not here, and Philadelphia, who don’t exist, and the Navy, who are asleep. In two. One. Two. Up.”

They went up.

It was not like the last time. The last time, on the twenty-seventh, the boat had lifted and run up the black river faster than it had any right to go, and the bubbles off the blades had gone past in rows. Today the river would not let them. They went up and the boat went up a little and the river held it there, pushing back, and they pushed harder, and it pushed harder, and Nadia’s voice went up and up through the megaphone, calling the rate, calling the catches, calling Georgetown, calling the Navy, calling a crew from Baltimore she had made up in the car that morning and named after a dentist, and the boat went up the Potomac in the dark against the brown water by inches, by feet, by a stroke at a time, racing nobody, eight people and a girl with a megaphone, and he did not know anything at all for the whole length of the piece except Sam Ellison’s back and the next stroke and the next and the next.

“Easy,” said Nadia. “Easy there. Hold water.”

They stopped. The river took them at once and began to carry them back down, and the bow and the stroke had to hold the boat against it with their blades, and everybody breathed. His breath went up white in the light from the launch. He was grinning at nothing again, like an idiot, in the cold, and so, he saw, was Sam Ellison, who had turned round on his seat, which you were not supposed to do.

“We’d have come last,” said Nadia.

“Out of how many?” said the stroke.

“One,” said Nadia. “We’d have come last out of one. The river beat us.” She looked down the boat at them, all eight, with her megaphone on her knee. “Well done. You were terrible. Five was the worst.”

“Thank you,” said Frederick.

“Don’t thank me,” said Nadia. “Row better.”

Across the water, in the launch, Mr Odum shook his head, and Castellanos went on looking at the far bank, and Frederick understood, sitting in the boat with the handle against his chest and the brown water going past under the hull, that nothing had changed, that every one of the eight of them and Nadia had decided, separately, without asking him and without telling each other, that nothing was going to change, and that they were doing it on purpose, the way the room in the math wing had looked at its books on purpose, and that it was the best thing anybody had given him all week, and that if he ever said so Nadia would make him row to Maryland.

For an hour and ten minutes he was a person who rowed at five. Last night it had been a decision, on Dame M’s telephone, before midnight. This morning it was only the river.

---

At breakfast his mother was at the end of the table with the newspapers and her coffee. The papers had Los Angeles on the front still, but lower down now, under the fold in two of them, and the photograph on the third was of a man in San Bernardino carrying a cat out of a house that was still standing, which was, Bridget said, the first time in a week that a newspaper had made her laugh.

“Mamma.”

“Mm.”

“Can I have the pile nobody has to read?”

She lowered the newspaper. She looked, for a moment, genuinely surprised, which he had seen perhaps four times in his life.

“Which pile?”

“There’s always one,” said Frederick. “At the bottom of a box. Or in a folder that says for information only. The things they put in so that you’ll know, and don’t ask you about.” He buttered his toast. “I’d like to see it. Not to do anything. Just to read.”

His mother looked at him over the top of the newspaper for a long time.

“Somebody,” she said, in Swedish, “has been giving you advice.”

“Lots of people give me advice.”

“Good advice,” said his mother, and raised the newspaper again. “I’ll see what there is.”

---

In homeroom Mr Abernathy said Hanover, and Frederick said Here. It was the sixth school day of the reign, and it was the same voice, and he thought, listening to it come down the alphabet towards him, Gallagher, Grant, that it might be the kindest thing anybody had done for him, and that Mr Abernathy would be appalled to be told so, and that he was never going to tell him.

At lunch, in the line for the counter, Marcus was in front of him with a tray.

Frederick had not spoken to Marcus alone since the morning after the thirty-first, the Wednesday, in the corridor outside the science block, when Marcus had seen him coming and stopped dead in the middle of the corridor and swept him a bow, a huge one, the kind you do in a play, with one arm out and one leg back, and everybody had laughed, and Frederick had not known what to do with his face. And Theo had said, Marcus, you’ve dropped something, and Marcus had looked down, and there was nothing there, and everybody had laughed at Marcus instead, and that was the end of it. Marcus had not looked at him since. Not once. Not at the long table, not in geometry, not in the hall. He had looked very hard at everything else.

Alexander had said to choose one person in each room, deliberately, as though it were perfectly ordinary, and say something boring to them.

“Marcus.”

Marcus jumped. He nearly dropped his tray.

“Have you done the geometry?”

Marcus looked at him. His face went through several things.

“No,” said Marcus. “Has anybody?”

“Nobody’s done it.”

“I don’t get it,” said Marcus. “The semicircle one. She drew it about forty times. I still don’t get why it’s always ninety.” He looked at his tray. “I mean, I get that it is. I don’t get why.”

So Frederick told him. In the line, with a tray, between the salad and the place where they kept the spoons, with his hand: here’s the diameter, here’s the point, anywhere, join it up, now draw the line from the middle, and now you’ve got two triangles, and both of them have two sides that are the same, because they’re both the radius, so. And Marcus watched his hand, and frowned, and said so the bottom angles are the same, and Frederick said yes, and Marcus said and then you add them up, and the line moved, and they moved with it, and by the time they got to the till Marcus had stopped with his tray in his hands and was staring at nothing.

“Oh,” said Marcus.

“Yes.”

“Oh, that’s stupid,” said Marcus. “That’s really stupid. It’s just the triangles.”

“It’s just the triangles.”

“Why didn’t she say.”

“She said it forty times.”

“She didn’t say it like that,” said Marcus, and paid for his lunch, and then turned round, at the end of the till, with his tray, and looked at Frederick properly, for the first time since the corridor, and said, “Thanks, Hanover,” and went off to the long table, and sat down, and said something to Devon, and Devon laughed.

Five minutes, in a lunch queue, about the angle in a semicircle. He thought that they were friends now, sort of, in the way you can be with somebody you have only talked to about homework.

---

The window was black by a quarter to five.

He had read the trains. All of them that he could fit into the hour, from the six-fourteen from Richmond to the middle of the afternoon, and his father had listened with his eyes shut, and the black glass behind the bed had held the two of them, small and yellow, the boy on the end of the bed with the timetable and the man on the pillows, with the railway lights coming up through them from below.

He shut the timetable.

“Papa.”

His father opened his eyes.

“I had a letter,” said Frederick. “From Alexander. In the bag. Another one.” He looked at the black window and not at his father, because it was easier, and because in the window he could see his father’s face anyway, small and yellow, looking at him. “He told me something. About the Tiergarten. About what you said to him. In February, after the drawers and the desk.” He stopped. “He said you said something else. Just before the cars. He said you said, when it’s Frederick’s turn, write to him.”

In the black glass his father did not move.

“Did you?” said Frederick. “Did you tell him to write to me?”

His father looked at him for a long time.

He did that now, before he said anything. He did it more than he had last week. It was as though he had to go to the back of a long room to fetch the word, past a great many things that were not the word, and bring it out, and the room was longer some days than others. Frederick had learned to watch him go. He watched him go now, in the window and out of it, and did not help, and did not fill it up.

“Yes,” said his father.

Frederick held very still.

His father’s eyes stayed on him. He was not finished. Frederick could see that he was not finished, that he had gone back into the long room for something else, and he waited, and outside the window the long train from the north came in under the hospital in the dark, a line of lit windows sliding past underneath the two of them in the glass, and his father’s mouth moved, and found it.

“Good,” said his father.

That was all. Yes. And then Good.

Frederick did not know whether his father meant good that I asked him, or good that he did it. He thought, sitting on the end of the bed with the timetable on his knee and the train going by underneath them in the black window, that it was both. He thought that Good was what his father had left of all the long sentences he used to say, all the Sunday sentences, all the careful, exact, fourteen-capacity sentences that took a document apart clause by clause and put it back together, and that he put the whole of every one of them into it now, every time, and that it was enough.

“Good,” said Frederick.

His father shut his eyes.

---

There was a folder on his desk when he got home.

It was a plain buff folder, quite thick, with a white label on the front that said, in Dame M’s square hand, For information only. Nothing else. No note. He opened it.

It was the letters. Not the letters themselves; a count of them. Somebody in the post room had been counting, since September, every letter that had come to Columbia Palace for him, and writing it down by where it came from: by polity, for the Realm, and for the other realms by realm. Pages of it. Columns of numbers in small type. Nobody had to read it. It had no question in it and wanted nothing signed, and he understood, turning the pages, that it was exactly the pile Alexander meant, the dull one, at the bottom, which somebody had put together carefully and expected nobody to look at.

He read all of it.

Then he got a calculator out of his desk, and the atlas, and worked out which places had written the most for their size, by dividing the letters by the number of people who lived there, which nobody had done, because nobody had been asked to.

It took him forty minutes. At the end of it Newfoundland was at the top. Newfoundland, which was in New Albion and not in the Realm at all, had written more letters to him for its size than anywhere else in any of his realms. And Bay Bulls, on its own, a single village on the coast south of St John’s, which the post room had counted on its own because it was the only village in New Albion anybody had thought to count, had sent more letters than some of the Realm’s polities.

He sat and looked at the number for a while. He thought about Ciaran Power, aged nine, and his Nan, and the frame in the front room that nobody was allowed to touch.

He thought that Alexander was right. The bottom of the pile was where the Crown lived.

---

Theo came over after supper. The detail let them go up onto the leads.

The leads were the flat part of the roof above the north wing, between the chimneys, where they kept the aerials and a great many pigeons. You got to them through a small door at the top of the servants’ stair that was always locked, and the sergeant on the night detail unlocked it for them and lent them his binoculars, a big heavy black pair in a leather case, and said that they were to give them back with nobody’s fingerprints on the lenses, and stood in the doorway behind them in the cold looking, Frederick noticed, not at the sky and not at the ceiling, because there was no ceiling, but at the chimneys.

“Where is it?” said Theo.

“Near the W. Cassiopeia. He said it’s very high, in November, at eleven at night.”

“It’s not eleven. It’s half past seven.”

“It’ll be somewhere,” said Frederick. “It doesn’t go anywhere. It’s a galaxy.”

They found Cassiopeia. It took a while, because the whole sky over New Westminster was orange, lit from underneath by the city, by the streetlights and the avenue and the Charter Axis and, most of all, by the palace forecourt directly below them, which was lit like a stage every night on the principle that power was supposed to stand in daylight. But the W was bright enough to come through. Theo found it first, and pointed, and they both looked, and there it was, five stars in a crooked line, very faint, high over the garden.

Then they looked near it, where Alexander had said, for the smudge. A grey smudge, a little longer than it is wide.

There was nothing there.

They took it in turns with the binoculars. They looked for a long time. They looked until their necks hurt and their hands were cold and the sergeant in the doorway had shifted his weight three times, and there was nothing, only the orange, and the five faint stars of the W, and here and there, if you looked hard, one more star, and then not.

“It’s the forecourt,” said Frederick. “It’s too bright. You can’t see anything in daylight, and the forecourt’s daylight.”

Theo lowered the binoculars.

“That’s fine,” he said. “I believe him.”

“You’ve never met him.”

“I don’t need to meet him. He looked. He says it’s there.” Theo handed the binoculars back. “I’ll take his word for a galaxy,” said Theo, “the way I take yours for a timetable.”

Frederick did not say anything for a moment.

Then he read Theo Lukas’s line, from the back of the page about the Hanseatic League, which he had copied out because Alexander had copied it out exactly and he felt he ought to do the same. That Andromeda was coming towards them at a hundred and ten kilometres a second and would hit them in about four and a half billion years.

Theo thought about it.

“Four and a half billion years is fine,” he said. “I’m busy that week.”

And then Frederick read him the other thing, the message for Theo, page to page. The knees are right. Also: never look at the face of the person you are standing behind. Look at the back of their head. If you look at their face you will laugh, and so will they, and then you will both be in the newspapers. The back of the head is the whole secret. I have not yet managed it. L.

Theo was quiet for a long time, on the leads, in the cold, with the orange sky over him and the pigeons shifting along the parapet.

“I want to reply,” he said. “Page to page. Write it down. Exactly.”

Frederick got out his pencil.

“Thank you,” said Theo, slowly. “The back of the head is a good idea. I have been looking at the back of his head in French for three years because the alphabet put him in front of me, so I have had practice.” He stopped. “But what do you do about the ears. T.”

“About the ears?”

“His ears,” said Theo. “Your ears. From behind. They stick out. If I’m looking at the back of your head for twenty paces at the Tomb on Saturday I’m going to be looking at your ears, Freddie, and I’m going to think about lunch, and if I think about your ears I’m going to laugh.” He folded his arms. “It’s a serious question. I want an answer before Saturday.”

“I’ll tell him it’s serious.”

“Tell him it’s the most serious question in the Realm,” said Theo, and the sergeant in the doorway made a small noise into his collar that might have been a cough.

---

His mother was in her study when he came down. He put his head round the door.

“Mamma. Can we be at Solliden for Christmas?”

She looked up from her folders.

“Why Solliden?”

“Because it’s dark there,” said Frederick. “Properly dark. In the winter. You can see things.”

His mother looked at him over her glasses for a long moment.

“I’ll think about it,” she said. She said it in Swedish. In Swedish, I’ll think about it, from his mother, meant yes, and in English it meant no, and she knew that he knew that, and she had said it in Swedish.

“Thank you,” said Frederick.

“Bed,” said his mother. “You rowed.”

---

He did not go to bed. He sat at his desk with Alexander’s letter, the second one, the one from Potsdam, open in front of him, and the green exercise book, and the folder that said For information only, and a pad of the palace paper with the crown at the top like a cake, and at about a quarter to eleven he took his own pen out of his pocket, not the palace pen in the stand, and wrote at the top of the first sheet, in his sloping hand like a fence in a wind,

Dear Alexander,

I do not concede the hat.

And then he stopped, and laughed, by himself, at the desk, and went on.