Halloween

At twenty to nine there was a knock at the door of his sitting room in the north wing, and it was Dame M again, for the second time in one evening, which had never happened, and she stood just inside the door without a tray.

“Sir,” said Dame M. “There is a Mr Hartigan at the side door. And a Miss Hartigan.” She paused, very slightly. “They have brought masks.”

---

They were standing in the stone passage by the side door, under the light, where Dame M had stood at half past four to say the two words, and they were both wearing coats, and Kate had a plastic carrier bag from the drugstore on Canal Street, and Theo had his hands in his pockets and was looking at the ceiling, the way Castellanos looked at the ceiling, with enormous innocence.

“You said night,” said Frederick. “At seven. You texted night.”

“I said night,” said Theo. “I didn’t say goodnight. They’re different. Night is a time of day.”

Kate held up the carrier bag.

“It’s Halloween,” she said.

He looked at her.

“It’s been Halloween all day,” said Kate. “Since midnight. I’ve been at work since half past eight and nobody in the whole insurance office has said the word once, not one person, not even Doreen, who comes in as a witch every year and didn’t. There’s a bowl of sweets on reception that nobody’s touched. The radio’s had nothing on it since nine this morning but Parliament and the Clerk of the Council.” She shook the bag. “It’s Halloween in New Westminster and nobody has mentioned it. Somebody has to.”

“So we’re mentioning it,” said Theo.

Kate opened the bag. There were two masks in it, the cheap plastic kind with an elastic band at the back, from the rack by the till where the drugstore kept them in October, and they had both been reduced to a dollar, because it was the evening of the thirty-first and nobody was going to buy them tomorrow. One was a wolf, grey, with a red tongue. The other was a skeleton.

“There’s an old jacket of Dad’s in the bottom,” said Kate. “From the depot. It’s got the transit badge on the arm. Nobody looks at anybody in a transit jacket. Dad says it’s the most invisible thing in the city.” She held the wolf out to him. “It was my idea. Not his. I wanted you to know that, in case you think he talked me into it. I talked him into it.”

“She did,” said Theo. “I said you’d be busy. I said you’d have a Council.”

“He’s had a Council,” said Kate. “It was on the radio. It finished at twenty past six.” She looked at Frederick. “I used to take him round the block when he was small. Every year, from the year we came, till he said he was too old. I’m eighteen, and I’ve got a car outside that’s fourteen years old, and I’m going to take the two of you round the block in the north-east for an hour, and the people on the block are going to give you sweets, and nobody is going to know who you are, and then I’m going to bring you back.” She paused. “That’s all. If you want to. If you don’t, we’ll go home, and it doesn’t matter.”

He looked at the wolf.

“I’ll have to ask,” he said.

“I know,” said Kate. “That’s why we came to the door, and didn’t climb the railings.”

---

His mother was in her study, with the lamp on and the folders, and her glasses on, and she looked up when he knocked, and looked at the wolf mask in his hand, and took her glasses off.

He told her. He told her the way he told her things, plainly, in Swedish, all of it, Kate and the carrier bag and the insurance office and Doreen who had not come as a witch, and the transit jacket, and the hour, and the block in the north-east, and that it had been Kate’s idea and not Theo’s, and that if she said no he would go and tell them, and it wouldn’t matter.

His mother looked at him for a long time.

“Kate’s idea,” she said.

“She said so.”

His mother looked at the wolf. Then she looked at the window, at the dark garden, and past it, at the orange sky over the city, where somewhere on the far side of the avenue a firework went up, a small cheap one, green, and burst, and fell.

“On the first Tuesday in October,” she said, “I asked that girl’s mother to keep you for an evening, from a hospital corridor, and she said you were already peeling potatoes. And I have not once, in five weeks, asked that family for anything since that they did not give before I had finished asking.” She put the glasses down. “And last year we put the girl’s brother’s name in a press release without asking any of them, and men found her at a bus stop outside her school.” She turned back to him. “Kate Hartigan has come to my door and asked. She is the first person all day who has asked me for something for you and not for the King.”

“Is that yes?”

“That is yes,” said his mother. “With Mr Castellanos. Twenty yards behind you, and you don’t look round for him, and he doesn’t come closer unless he has to, and you do not take the mask off in the street. And you’re back in this house by half past ten.” She picked up her glasses. “And you say thank you on every doorstep. In English. Properly.”

“I always say thank you.”

“I know,” said his mother. “That’s how they’d know it was you.” She almost smiled. “Mumble it.”

---

Castellanos had not gone off at eight after all. He was in the duty room by the side door with his coat on, as though he had known, and perhaps he had, and he looked at the wolf mask and the transit jacket and Kate Hartigan’s car keys and said nothing at all, and went out and got into the passenger seat of a fourteen-year-old car with a dent in the rear door, which was not in any procedure, and which he would explain to somebody in the morning, and put his seat belt on, and looked at the roof.

“Mr Castellanos,” said Kate, starting the engine, which took two goes. “Have you ever been trick-or-treating?”

“In Tucson, miss,” said Castellanos. “Every year. As a cowboy.”

“Every year?”

“My mother had one costume,” said Castellanos, “and three sons.”

They went out by the side gate onto the avenue. The forecourt was still half full, beyond the railings, people standing in the lamplight with their candles going out one by one, and nobody looked at a small grey car with a dent in it coming out of the gate where the bins went, and Kate drove north-east, towards the depot, through a city that had been saying God save the King on the radio since half past six, and was now, he saw, out of the car window, block after block, wearing masks.

He had not noticed it in the afternoon. He had seen the small witch on Canal Street eating a biscuit and the man on the ladder taking down the skeleton, and thought it was the end of something. It was not the end. It had only been waiting. Now it was dark, and the children were out, everywhere, on every corner, in twos and threes and long trailing lines holding hands, ghosts in sheets with eyeholes and pirates and princesses and three separate small boys dressed as the same astronaut, and parents behind them with torches and buckets and phones, and on the steps of the row houses on Ninth Street the pumpkins were lit, dozens of them, grinning, guttering, and a man on a porch in a cape was handing out sweets from a mixing bowl with the radio on behind him in his front room, and as they stopped at the lights Frederick heard it through the car window, very faintly, the replay of the Clerk on the steps, do now proclaim him George the Fifth, and the man in the cape gave a small Viking two sweets and said happy Halloween, and the lights changed.

---

Kate parked at the end of the Hartigans’ street, by the depot fence, under a lamp.

“Masks,” she said.

He put it on. The elastic caught in his hair and Theo untangled it, and then the wolf was on his face, and the world went small and close and smelled of new plastic, and he could see out of two eyeholes and breathe out of a slot under the nose, and his own breath came back to him warm off the inside of the mask, and nobody in the world could see his face.

Theo put the skeleton on. It was slightly too small for him, and his ears stuck out at the sides of it.

“How do I look?” said Theo.

“Like a skeleton with ears.”

“You look like a wolf in a bus jacket,” said Theo. “Which is the most invisible thing in the city. Dad says.”

Kate got out and locked the car, which took two goes as well. Castellanos got out of the other side, and stood under the lamp by the depot fence, in his coat, and looked at the sky, which had a firework in it, red, and then nothing.

“Twenty yards,” said Kate to Castellanos.

“Yes, miss.”

“Don’t come closer unless you have to.”

“No, miss.”

“Have you got a bag?”

Castellanos looked at her.

“Never mind,” said Kate, and gave him the carrier bag from the drugstore, empty, and he took it, and held it, and looked at it as though somebody had handed him something that might go off.

---

The first door was a house at the end of the row, beyond the flats, a narrow brick house with a porch and a pumpkin with a crooked mouth, and Kate stood on the pavement, at the bottom of the steps, with her hands in her coat pockets, the way she had stood every year from the year they came, and said, “Go on, then,” and Theo went up the steps first, and knocked, and Frederick went up after him.

A woman opened the door. She was about his mother’s age, in a cardigan, with a toddler on her hip dressed as a pea pod, and a bowl in her other hand.

“Trick or treat,” said Theo.

Frederick said it too, a beat behind, into the inside of the mask. It came out muffled and strange. He had never said it before. He had been brought up for twelve years in a house with more rooms in it than he had ever counted, and not one of them had a door that anybody knocked on in October, and he had never once, in his life, stood on a step in a mask and said trick or treat to a stranger.

“Well,” said the woman, looking at them. “A skeleton. And a,” she peered, “a wolf. In a bus jacket.”

“He’s a wolf who drives a bus,” said Theo.

“Is he.” The woman looked at Frederick, through the eyeholes, for a moment, the way people look at children in masks, kindly and without curiosity, and held out the bowl. “Go on. Two each. Don’t tell the others.”

He took two. They were the small chocolate ones in red wrappers.

“Thank you,” he said, into the mask, and remembered, and mumbled it.

“You’re welcome, love,” said the woman, and the pea pod waved at him with a fat hand, and the door shut.

He stood on the step.

“Freddie,” said Theo. “You have to come down the steps. That’s how it works. You can’t just stand there.”

He came down the steps. At the bottom, on the pavement, Kate looked at him, at the wolf, and he could not see her face properly through the eyeholes, but he could see that she was smiling, which she had not done at him since 2027.

“Well?” said Kate.

“She gave me two,” said Frederick. “She said not to tell the others.”

“She says that to everybody,” said Kate. “She’s said it every year since we came. Next door.”

---

They did the whole block.

They did both sides of the Hartigans’ street and round the corner into the next one and back along the depot fence, and it took an hour, and it was, he thought afterwards, at eleven o’clock, on the stairs down to his mother’s study with the wolf mask in his coat pocket, the most ordinary hour he had spent since the twenty-fifth of September, and possibly in his life.

Nobody knew him. That was the whole of it. Nobody knew him at all. He went up thirty steps, perhaps, and knocked on thirty doors, and said trick or treat thirty times into the inside of a plastic wolf, and was given sweets by a retired fireman with a beard and a woman in a nurse’s uniform just off a shift and a family of five who all came to the door at once and argued about which sweets to give, and a very old man in a dressing gown who gave each of them an apple, a real one, and said that in his day that was what you got and you were glad of it. A girl of about ten, dressed as a ghost, told him that his costume was the worst costume she had ever seen, because what was a wolf doing in a bus jacket, that wasn’t a costume, that was two costumes, and he agreed with her, and she seemed satisfied. A man on a porch two doors down from the Hartigans’ block, sitting in a deckchair with a bowl on his knee and a radio on the step beside him, said trick or treat yourself, and then, as they went, to nobody, to the radio, to the street, hell of a day, eh, and Frederick said, yes, into the mask, and the man said, you’re telling me, son, and turned the radio up.

The radio was on in half the houses. He heard it through doors, through windows, over porches, all round the block, the same voices, Naomi Barrow and Grace Ebanks and the Clerk on the steps, round and round, the statements read out, I am going to try to be good at this, his own four lines, in Grace Ebanks’s voice, coming out of a kitchen window on the corner while a woman in a witch’s hat leaned out of the front door and gave him a lollipop. He stood on her step with the lollipop in his hand and listened to his own statement coming out of her kitchen window in somebody else’s voice, and the woman in the witch’s hat said, “Isn’t it sad? About his father. And him only fifteen,” and Frederick said, “Yes,” and she said, “Well, he sounds like a nice boy,” and gave him another lollipop, and shut the door.

Theo had to sit down on the kerb for a while after that one.

---

On the second floor of the Hartigans’ block, Mrs Okonjo opened her door before they had knocked, because she had been waiting by it with a tray, and she looked at Theo’s ears sticking out of the skeleton and said, “Theodore Hartigan, I would know those ears in the dark,” and then looked at the wolf, and her face did something, very slowly, from the eyebrows downwards.

She did not say anything.

She looked at the wolf for a long moment, at the eyeholes, at whatever she could see through them, and at the transit jacket, and at the way he was standing, and then at Kate at the bottom of the stairs, and Kate looked back at her, very steadily, and said nothing either.

Then Mrs Okonjo held out the tray. It was home-made, small sweet fried things in paper cases, dusted with sugar, still warm.

“Take two,” she said to the wolf. “They’re better than the shop ones.” She waited while he took two. “Thank you for coming to my door.”

“Thank you,” said Frederick, and forgot to mumble it.

Mrs Okonjo looked at him a moment longer.

“You’re very welcome,” she said, quite clearly, in a voice that was meant for him and for nobody else on the landing, “young man,” and shut the door very gently, the way you shut a door on somebody who is asleep.

On the stairs going down, under the light that gave you a minute and a half, Theo said, “She knew.”

“I know she knew.”

“She won’t say.”

“I know she won’t.”

“She didn’t say to Mum, last year, either,” said Theo. “When the photographers were here. She went down every morning and told them they were blocking the bins.” He was quiet for a step. “She’s all right, Mrs Okonjo.”

---

At the bottom of the stairs, on the landing by the street door, Castellanos was standing in his coat with the drugstore carrier bag.

There was something in it.

Frederick looked at the bag. Castellanos looked at the ceiling.

“Mr Castellanos,” said Kate, “what’s in the bag?”

“A lady on the corner, miss,” said Castellanos, to the ceiling, “came out to me on the pavement. She said I looked cold. And she said that a grown man standing on a corner holding an empty carrier bag on Halloween was the saddest thing she had ever seen.” He paused. “She gave me four.”

Theo had to sit down on the bottom step.

Kate laughed. She laughed out loud on the landing by the street door, under the light, with her hand over her face, the way she had laughed on the floor over Schafkopf the first year, before any of it, and it went up the stairwell and came back down off the concrete, all four floors, and somebody on the third floor opened a door to see, and shut it again.

Castellanos held the bag out to Frederick.

“I think these are yours, sir,” he said.

“They gave them to you.”

“They gave them to the man who was with you, sir,” said Castellanos. “It’s my job to carry things.” And then, after a moment, still to the ceiling, very quietly: “Happy Halloween, sir.”

“Happy Halloween, Mr Castellanos.”

---

Kate drove them back. Theo came too, in the back, with his skeleton mask on his knee and a bag of sweets on top of it, and Kate said she would drop him home after, and that their mother would be counting the minutes on the kitchen clock, which was right.

At the side gate of the palace she stopped the car, and turned round in her seat, and looked at Frederick in the back, who had taken the wolf off, as he had promised, only once they were through the gate.

“Thank you,” said Frederick.

“Don’t,” said Kate. “It’s the first thing I’ve ever done for you without being asked. Don’t let it go to your head.” She looked at him. “I wanted you to have one thing today that was nobody’s job. That’s all. Not the school’s, not your mother’s, not his.” She tipped her head at Castellanos, who was looking at the roof of the car. “Mine. Because I wanted to. And nobody’s going to put it in anything.”

“Nobody’s going to put it in anything,” said Frederick.

“Good,” said Kate Hartigan. “Then it’s ours.” She turned back to the wheel. “Out you get. It’s twenty-five past ten. Your mum said half past. Mine’s already counting.”

He got out. Theo leaned out of the back window as the car turned.

“Night, Freddie.”

“You said that at seven.”

“I’m saying it again,” said Theo. “Night is a time of day,” and the car went out of the side gate with its exhaust smoking in the cold, and turned onto the avenue, and was gone.

---

At eleven o’clock he went down to his mother’s study.

Neither of them was going to sleep. He knew that the way you know weather. The house had been quiet when he came in at twenty-five past ten, with his pockets full of sweets. The forecourt had emptied, slowly, while he was out, and the candles were gone, and the lamps along the avenue were shining on nothing, and Bridget had gone home, and the duty officer was in his room by the side door with the radio on very low, and Castellanos had gone off at last, with the carrier bag, and the night man had come on, and the north wing was dark except for one light, under one door, on the first floor.

He knocked.

“Ja,” said his mother.

She was at her desk. It was the desk he had sat under when he was four, a big dark old desk with a green leather top, and she was sitting at it in her navy suit still, without the brooch, with her glasses on and a lamp on and a pile of papers in front of her, in folders of different colours, and a pen in her hand, the one his father had given her, and she was not writing anything. She looked up.

“You should be asleep,” she said, in Swedish.

“So should you.”

“I’m a Regent. Regents don’t sleep. It’s in the Act.” She almost smiled. “Section nine. Come in. Sit.”

He came in and sat in the chair on the other side of the desk, the hard one, where the Clerk of the Parliaments would have stood this morning, at eleven forty-two, with the Act, while she signed.

He had thought, on the stairs, about how to say it. He had thought about saying it in English, which he spoke best, and decided not to, because in English he could make things sound clever, and he did not want this to sound clever. He wanted it to sound like what it was. So he said it in Swedish, which he spoke well, but not as well, so that it came out exactly as plain as it was, with nothing in it that he had not meant.

“I want to see everything you decide in my name,” he said.

His mother did not move.

“Not to decide it,” said Frederick. “I know I can’t. I know it’s yours until May. I don’t want to decide anything. I want to see it. All of it. What you sign, and why. So that I know what’s being done in my name, because it’s being done in my name whether I know or not. And not knowing doesn’t make it less mine.”

He stopped. He had said the last part almost exactly as Alexander had written it, and he heard himself say it, and heard that it sounded like somebody else, and did not mind.

His mother took her glasses off.

She held them in one hand, by the side, and looked at him across the desk, under the lamp, for a very long time. He had seen her look at him like that before, twice: on the twenty-sixth of September, in the kitchen, after midnight, when he had asked whether his father was dead; and on Wednesday, at the long table, when she had read his statement and changed nothing. It was a look that went all the way into him and found something and stayed there, and he made himself look back, and did not look away.

“Who told you to ask that?” said his mother.

“Nobody,” said Frederick.

His mother looked at him for one moment more.

“That is not true,” she said, “and I am not going to ask who, and the answer is yes.”

---

She put the glasses down on the desk.

“Tuesday evenings,” she said. “Here, or at the kitchen table, I don’t mind which. Everything from the week. Every folder, every realm. I’ll show you what I signed and what I was advised and what I thought, and you’ll read it, and you can ask me which, about anything, and I’ll tell you.” She held up one finger. “You’re not allowed an opinion until the second Tuesday. You’ll want one at once. You’ll be wrong at once. Everybody is. Wait a week.”

“All right.”

“And you’ll do your homework first. That hasn’t changed. That will never change, and if anybody in any of fourteen realms ever tells you that it has, you send them to me.”

“All right.”

His mother looked at him a moment longer. Then she pulled one of the folders towards her, from the top of the pile, a plain buff one, and opened it, and turned it round, and pushed it across the desk to him.

“Here,” she said. “This is the first. I signed it at a quarter past seven, before the statements went. It’s the warrant for London. For the Great Seal. They sealed it at midnight their time. It’s the first thing done in your name in any realm, and it’s British, because Britain asked to go first with this one, and nobody minded.” She tapped it. “It makes your father the Duke of Cumberland.”

He looked at it. It was one page, on thick paper, in a great deal of old type, with a space at the bottom, and in the space, small and straight and quick and blue, Christina, and under it, smaller, Regent.

He read every word. It took a long time, because of the old type. She waited. She did not look at her other papers. She sat with her hands folded on the green leather and waited while he read the first thing done in his name, all of it, to the end, and when he had finished he closed the folder and pushed it back across the desk.

“Thank you,” he said.

“That’s one,” said his mother. “There’ll be four hundred by Christmas.” She put her glasses back on. “It’s the first sensible thing anybody has asked me since September. Go to bed.”

He stood up. At the door he turned round.

She was already reading again, the next folder, under the lamp, with the pen in her hand, the one his father had given her, and her face was quite calm, and she did not look up.

“Mamma.”

“Mm.”

“Papa used to have a very large desk.”

His mother’s pen stopped.

She did not look up. She sat very still with the pen on the paper, and then, slowly, she lifted it, and looked at the desk in front of her, the big dark old one with the green leather top that he had sat under when he was four, and put her hand flat on it.

“Yes,” she said. “He did.” And then, after a moment, in English, not to him, to the desk: “Fourteen drawers.”

He went to bed.

He did not do the trains. He did not need to. He lay on his back in the dark in the north wing with the curtains open and the sky orange and empty over the garden, with a plastic wolf on the chair by the bed and four lollipops on the desk, and thought about a desk in the rain, and the R gone over twice, and Twice, and Where? and Good, and a woman in a brown coat, and the point on the curve that could go anywhere, and before he had got as far as Baltimore in his head, he was asleep.