Pomona

The green exercise book was in the drawer under Lord Whitlock’s plan of the abbey.

He took it out on Thursday night after chemistry and opened it at the back, where the drafts were. The first message was there, a year old, in pencil, crossed out twice and written a third time. This morning the ground moved under Los Angeles and the valleys east of it. His mother at the window reading it, and his father on the telephone the next day saying short.

He turned to a clean page.

Rosalind Aird had asked in September what he wanted for the second of November, the same as for the thirty-first. He had said: a message, short, from him, to California. And then, after a moment: read by somebody else.

Whose voice, sir?

The man on the ABC’s Pacific service. In May. In the white car on Ocean Avenue and the gym at Franklin. He read the roads and the shelters for three days. I don’t know his name.

Bill Okafor, sir. I’ll ask him.

She had asked him. He had said yes before she finished.

---

He wrote it four times.

The first was too long. It had the six-oh-two in it and the lawn at Government House and the girl with the cool box, and when he read it back it was about him.

The second was about the dead, and it had a number in it, because the number had been signed in March and was in the box, and he crossed the number out so hard the pencil went through the page.

The third said a year ago three times.

The fourth was four sentences.

A year ago this morning the ground moved under Los Angeles, and the whole Realm came, and it is still there. The trains run, and the water runs, and there are people still in tents on the Crown’s ground who should not be, and they will not be forgotten. I was in a school in New Westminster when I heard, and I will be in a school in New Westminster when you hear this, and I will be listening. Thank you to everyone who is still carrying somebody.

George R.

He read it once and did not change it.

At the foot of the page, smaller, he wrote: Bill Okafor, and underlined it, so that Rosalind would know whose voice, and put the book in his bag.

---

History was third period on Fridays, and on Friday Mr Ferrante had a radio on his desk.

It was old and brown and the size of a shoebox, with a dial and a handle on top, and he had put it on the corner of the desk by the window before anybody came in and said nothing about it. He did the Northwest Ordinance for forty minutes, at the board, in chalk. He did not look at the radio and nobody else looked at anything else.

At thirteen minutes past eleven he put the chalk down.

“Los Angeles is three hours behind us,” he said. “Which you know. At seventeen minutes past eight there last year the San Andreas went. Which you also know.” He wiped the chalk off his fingers on a cloth. “The Commonwealth keeps a minute at that time. The ABC’s Pacific service carries it. I asked the principal whether we could listen, and the principal asked the district, and the district said that it was a matter for the professional judgement of the teacher.” He looked at the room. “So this is my professional judgement.”

He turned the radio on.

It took a moment to warm up. Then a hiss, and under the hiss a voice, a woman’s, from Los Angeles, saying that it was a quarter past eight at the Plaza, and that there were a great many people there, and the bells at the cathedral were about to strike.

Nobody in the room moved.

The bells struck. Far off, through the hiss, from three thousand miles, from a city where it was a quarter past eight on a Friday morning in November. Then nothing. Not silence exactly. A sound like a great many people standing in the open air: wind in a microphone, a bird, a bus somewhere a long way off stopping.

A minute.

He looked at his desk. He did not count.

At the desk by the door, in the front row, Inés Castañeda sat with both hands flat on her open book and looked straight at the radio.

The bells struck once more. Then a man’s voice, tired, steady, that half the people in the room had heard through a cot and a gym wall and a borrowed transistor in May.

This is Bill Okafor in Los Angeles. I’ve been asked to read you a message.

He read it slowly. He read the whole Realm came as if he had been there when it did, which he had. He read people still in tents on the Crown’s ground who should not be without changing his voice. At I will be in a school in New Westminster when you hear this he paused, as if he had looked up.

Thank you to everyone who is still carrying somebody. George R.

Then the hiss, and the woman’s voice again, and the names of streets.

Mr Ferrante turned the radio off.

Nobody said anything.

“Who heard it?” said Mr Ferrante.

He said it to the room, quite quietly, the question from the first day.

Nobody answered. Then, from the desk by the door, without turning round:

“I did.”

Inés did not look round. She looked at the radio.

“I heard that one,” she said.

Mr Ferrante looked at her. Then he picked up the chalk.

“Good,” he said. “The Northwest Ordinance. Article Three.”

---

At break she came across the yard to the low wall by the bike racks.

She had never done that. She sat on her bench by the far fence every break with an apple and her bag on her knee, and Lucía went to her, and sometimes Priya; nobody else did, and she came to nobody.

She stopped in front of the wall. Theo, beside him, went very still. Marcus stopped talking in the middle of a sentence.

“You asked for him,” said Inés. “The radio man. Lucía says.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He thought about it.

“Because he read everything else. In May. For three days. The roads and the shelters and the names of places. I thought people would listen to him.” He looked at her. “And because if it was me, it’d be about me. If it was him, it’d be about them.”

Inés looked at him for a while.

“My mom heard it,” she said. “At the shelter. In Ventura. She texted me.” She held up her phone, briefly, and put it away. “She said it was the first time anybody on the radio said still about the tents. Everybody else says now. There are now so many families in. Like it’s news.” She hitched her bag. “Still means you know.”

“I know.”

“I know you know,” said Inés. “That’s why I came over.”

She went back across the yard to her bench, and sat down, and took out an apple. Lucía got up off the wall and went after her.

Theo let his breath out.

“She talked to you,” said Theo.

“She talked to me.”

“In front of everybody.”

“Yes.”

Theo thought about that.

“I’m going to write it down,” he said, “and fold it in half, and give it to Castellanos.”

---

At nine that night he was in the kitchen with a cup of cocoa he had made himself, at the end of the long table nearest the range, and Bridget was at the sink with her back to him, not washing anything.

She had not gone home. She did not say why. He did not ask.

The old cream telephone on the wall by the dresser rang at two minutes past nine.

Bridget picked it up. Kitchen. She listened. She held it out across the room at the full length of the curly cord.

“Pomona, pet. He says you’ll know the time.”

It was six o’clock in Pomona. He took the telephone.

“Hello.”

“I rode it,” said Mr Paredes.

His voice was rough and close and out of breath, as always, as if he had come in from the yard.

“The six-oh-two,” said Mr Paredes. “This morning. From Pomona. I didn’t drive it. I sat in it. Second car, by the window, like a passenger. Like a tourist. Yoli came. In a hat.” A pause, and a sound in the background, sharp, in Spanish. “She says it’s not a hat, it’s her good hat. To the Plaza. Fifty-eight minutes. On time.” Another pause. “First time in my life I ever rode it to the end without driving it.”

“How was it?”

“Terrible,” said Mr Paredes. “The motorman was too fast through El Monte. He braked late at the crossing at Alhambra. I could feel it in my teeth.” A breath. “And I sat there by the window, with Yoli in her good hat, and I thought, a year ago today I was in my yard with no water and no trains and the ground going, and today I’m sitting in the second car of the six-oh-two complaining about a boy at Alhambra.” He stopped. “That’s what a year is. That’s all it is.”

Frederick held the telephone very still.

“At the Plaza,” said Mr Paredes, “they had speakers. For the minute. Thousands of people. And after the minute the radio man read your thing. Through the speakers. Over the whole Plaza.” His voice went lower. “Yoli cried. In her good hat. I didn’t. I was looking at the clock on the station. It was right.”

“Mr Paredes.”

“What.”

“Thank you for ringing.”

“I didn’t ring for that,” said Mr Paredes. “I rang to tell you the boy at Alhambra braked late. Somebody should know.” And then, in the other voice, the low one: “And to tell you we heard it. Me and Yoli. At the Plaza. Somebody should know that too.”

The line went to a hiss, and then to Spanish, and then to nothing.

He gave the telephone back to Bridget across the kitchen at the length of the cord. She hung it on the wall.

“Was that your train?” she said, to the window over the sink.

“He rode it this time. As a passenger.”

“Well,” said Bridget. She turned the tap on, at last, and off again. “That’s a holiday, then.”

He finished the cocoa. It had gone cold. He drank it anyway.