Ten Steps

The flowers on the railings were sunflowers.

One morning at the beginning of August there had been a single one tied by the main doors with green garden wire, taller than the railings, its face to the street. By the end of the week, twenty. By the end of the month a hundred, from the corner to the steps, tied with wire and string and once with a school tie. No cards. They did not seem to need any.

He went in past them at ten to four. The lift. The sixth floor. The doors opening on the desk.

Not Niamh. Joanne, with the short grey hair and the glasses on a cord. She did not say good afternoon, sir. She stood up and put down her pen and looked past him down the corridor.

“He’s in the corridor, sir. At the far end. He’s been waiting for you to come out of the lift.” A pause. “Don’t go to him. Niamh says. Stay there.”

---

He stood by the desk with his school bag on his shoulder.

Pale green walls, the wooden handrail, the linen cupboard, the trolley. The corner room with no name on it and the police officer outside it, standing up. At the very end, the long window over the river, the afternoon coming in low and gold, so that everything down there was a shape against the light.

Three shapes. Niamh on the left with her plait, a hand out, not touching. A young man on the right in a navy tunic with a lanyard, crouched slightly, the way you crouch beside somebody learning to ride a bicycle. And between them, upright, in a claret dressing gown over pyjamas, both hands on the grips of a grey aluminium walking frame with four grey rubber feet, his father.

Standing.

The half-rise from the chair on the apron in June. Once in July, for a breath, between bed and chair, held by two people. Three times in August, holding the frame by the bed, not moving. Not this. Alone between the two of them at the end of the corridor, white hair brushed, chin up, face turned to the lift.

“Five,” said the young man, very quietly, and the whole floor was so silent that Frederick heard it from the desk. “We’ll do five, sir, and stop, and see.”

His father was looking down the corridor at Frederick.

The frame came up off the floor an inch, forward six inches, down. A brown leather slipper came after it, slowly, a long way for six inches. Then the left.

“One,” said Niamh.

---

He counted. On the apron he had not, and had been proud of it. These he counted, along with Niamh aloud, and Joanne under her breath behind him, and the police officer whose lips were moving.

Two. Frame, right foot, left.

Three.

His father’s face was the one he had at the head of the table on the terrace when a minister was saying something long and he was waiting for the end of it. Patient. Absolutely concentrated. On the desk at the end of the corridor.

Four.

Five.

“That’s five, sir. That’s very good. We’ll stop there.”

His father lifted the frame.

“Sir,” said the young man.

“No,” said his father.

Rough and low and quite clear. The young man looked at Niamh across the frame. Niamh shook her head, barely. Let him. The young man put his hand out again, not touching.

Six.

Seven.

Slower. The frame coming up less, going forward less, the feet taking longer. His father’s knuckles had gone white on the grey grips, and Frederick could hear his breath from the desk, short and hard.

Eight.

The apron last September, ten to eleven at night. A stretcher coming down the steps of a grey aircraft and him beside it on the concrete, walking. Ten steps to the ambulance door before Castellanos took his arm. He had counted them every night for months in the north wing.

Nine.

His father had been on the stretcher with his eyes shut. Nobody had told him about the ten.

Ten.

His father stopped, halfway down the corridor, the window behind him, breathing hard, hands white on the grips, and looked down the rest of it at Frederick.

“Your turn.”

---

Frederick walked the rest of the way. He did not count those. Past the linen cupboard and the trolley and the open door of a room where an old woman sat up in bed with her hand over her mouth, until he was in front of the frame.

The long look, from the top of his head to his shoes.

“Taller,” said his father.

“Not me. Theo. Two inches.” His voice did something, and he let it. “I’ve only done one.”

His father’s breath went in and out, twice, short. Laughing, with no breath to spare for anything else.

“Sir,” said the young man. “The chair. Please. Now.”

Niamh had the black wheelchair a yard behind them and brought it forward. The young man took one elbow and Niamh the other, and Frederick, unasked, took the frame when his father let go of it, and they turned him and lowered him, and he sat, and shut his eyes, and breathed with his hands open on the arms of the chair.

“That’s twelve this week,” said the young man to Niamh. “He did six on Friday.”

“Ten,” said Niamh. “Today was ten. I counted.”

“I counted ten,” said Joanne, from the desk.

“Ten,” said the police officer.

The young man looked from one to the other, and at Frederick holding the frame.

“Ten,” said Frederick.

“Ten, then,” said the young man, and wrote it on his clipboard and underlined it twice.

---

His name was Mr Bayliss and he was the physiotherapist, three mornings a week since June and this afternoon because the Duke had asked for a Tuesday afternoon, on Friday, in a sentence of four words that took him about a minute and a half, and Mr Bayliss had said yes before he got to the end.

“What were the four words?”

Mr Bayliss looked down at the white head in the chair.

“Tuesday. Afternoon. Boy. School. I worked it out.”

---

In the corner room Niamh put his father in the chair by the river window with a rug over his knees and a cup of tea on the tray table, which he could lift now, with both hands, slowly, and drink from, and put down.

Frederick sat in the plastic chair with the wooden arms and put the bag on the floor. In it, on the first day: a term timetable, Mr Ferrante’s copy of the Charter’s first page, and AmRail’s blue book.

His father drank some tea. Put the cup down. Looked at him.

Three words, with a breath between, like stones put down to cross a stream:

“How. Was. School?”

---

Nobody had ever asked him that.

His father had lived in London until Frederick was fifteen and telephoned on Sundays at a quarter to four. They had talked about the realms and the boxes and the trains and what each of them was reading, but by Sunday the week at school was over, and twenty minutes was not long enough to go back to Tuesday. Then Kittyhawk, and the sixth floor, and no words at all.

Peter Hartigan asked it every evening at the flat with his mouth full. Theo said fine. Peter Hartigan said fine how. Frederick had sat at that table forty times and listened to it like a play in a language he understood but could not speak.

“It was good, Papa.”

His father waited. Good was not going to be the end of it, any more than fine was at the Hartigans’.

So he told him. Breakfast and the second piece of toast. Castellanos saying have a good first day at the gate, and his father’s eyebrows went up, very slightly. Theo on the wall, two inches taller; Kate gone to nursing school with the lizard. The homeroom, the radiators, the brown jacket, the white scar across the knuckles. Abrams. Bello. And the stop.

“There’s a new name. The first in four years, between Bello and Diaz. A girl from Ventura. Her family’s house was on the flats by the river mouth. She’s living with her aunt in the Heights.” He looked at the river. “She told Lucía to tell me she didn’t hear me. On the Friday at two. They were in the high school gym at Ventura with a thousand people and no power, and when the six point four came nobody told them anything and they ran. She wanted me to know so I wouldn’t think she owed me anything.”

He looked at his father.

“And I was glad, Papa. All summer people have thanked me because they heard. Hundreds. And I’m grateful. But she didn’t hear, and she said so, and it was the most honest thing anybody’s said to me since June.”

His father was quiet a long time. Then the breath, and the hold.

“Most,” said his father. The lips tried the next shape. Once. Again. “Most. Never. Hear.”

---

Fifty-six Christmas messages. May Day. Every speech in every realm in its own language. And most people at work, or asleep, or six years old, or in a house with the radio off, or in a gym in the dark. He had said the words anyway, to the ones who did.

“Mr Ferrante said something like that, in history. He said every time we read a document this year the question isn’t what did it say. It’s who heard it. And who didn’t.”

His father’s eyebrows went up.

“Ferrante. Good.”

“You remember Mr Ferrante?”

A look Frederick had not seen since before the sixth floor: the very slight, very old exasperation of a man who had read every box in fourteen realms and was being asked whether he remembered a history teacher.

“Wheel. Beach. Old man.” A breath. “Leg.”

“Yes. Him.”

“Good,” said his father firmly, and that settled it.

---

At a quarter to five he opened the blue book at tomorrow, Wednesday, and began in the voice from the tannoy at Union Station.

“Six fifty-eight. The Capitol. From Chicago. Via Pittsburgh.”

“No,” said his father.

Frederick looked up. On his father’s face was something sharper than patience: a man who has caught a minister in a mistake.

“Seven,” said his father. A breath. “Oh four.”

Arrives Union Station 6.58. Printed. He had read it a great many times since May and his father had marked it every time.

“It says six fifty-eight.”

“Old.”

The cover. AmRail. National Timetable. Summer 2029. Valid from Monday 21 May.

“Monday,” said his father. “New.” A longer hold, the lips trying. “Autumn. Book.”

AmRail changed the timetable on the first Monday in September and the third Monday in May, and had since 1971. The autumn book had come in yesterday. For the first time in his life he had not thought about it. His father, who could not hold a book, had.

“How did you know?”

His father looked at the doorway, where Niamh stood with her arms folded, leaning on the frame.

“He has me read him the whole newspaper on Sundays now. Every page. On page thirty-one at the bottom there was a notice from AmRail about the new timetable from the third, and he made me read it twice. Then a third time, the bit about the Capitol: six minutes later from Monday, because of works at Harpers Ferry. Seven-oh-four.” She unfolded her arms. “And then he said Tuesday to me, and boy, and I didn’t know what he meant. Now I do.”

His father sat under the rug with the empty teacup at his elbow and the expression of a man who has waited three days to be right about something, and been.

“Get. The. New. Book.”

---

He read the rest from the summer book anyway, with his father correcting him. It took the last quarter of an hour and ten minutes past it, and Niamh did not knock at five. At most of them, the small mark. At four, through the day, no, and then, with the breath and the hold between, the new time. Two later. Nine fifty. Gone. Cut. Eight sixteen. Same. Platform. Changed.

All of them, from small print read three times on a Sunday by a nurse who had not known why.

“I’ll get the new one tomorrow from Union Station, before school. I’ll ask Castellanos to stop. And I’ll read it to you properly on Wednesday. From the beginning.”

His father looked out of the river window. The light on the water had gone deep pink. On the far embankment, very small, a local going along towards Union Station, on whatever time it was now.

“Papa.”

His father looked back.

He had decided in the car not to say it today. “The coronation. The seventeenth of November. Mamma says the doctors have said, about the flight and the abbey and the cold and the length of it, and the stairs.” He looked at the summer book. “I don’t want you to if it isn’t safe. I’d understand. If you were here with Niamh, watching on the television, I’d know you were watching. That would be,” and he stopped, because his father had lifted his hand off the arm of the chair.

It came up slowly and stopped in the air between them, palm out, flat. The hand from the head of the table, for fifty-six years, when a minister was about to say something long that he already knew the end of.

Frederick stopped.

The breath. The longest hold of the afternoon. The lips trying, once, again, again.

“I,” said his father. A breath. “Am. Going.”

From the doorway Niamh made a small sound.

“He told the doctors on Friday, sir. All four of them, in this room. They came in to say no, the way they’d agreed, and the senior one said it very kindly, the flight and the cold and the stairs. And His Royal Highness listened to all of it, and said three words back.” She looked at the chair. “Then come too.”

On his father’s face was the old expression from the head of the table, the one that meant the matter was closed.

“Ten. Steps,” said his father. A breath. “Abbey.” A breath. “Twenty.”

Frederick could not answer.

“Practise,” said his father, and shut his eyes, and very slowly smiled.