The Wrong Bus

The bus was very clean and very cold and nearly empty, and the driver said “Evening” to each of them as they got on, and Theo tapped the cactus card on the reader five times, once for each of them, with the concentration of a man defusing something.

Frederick sat at the back.

He liked the back. He had never been allowed it. In every car he had ever been in, since he was three, there had been somebody whose job was to decide where he sat, and it had never once been the back of anything. He sat in the middle of the long back seat with Jack on one side of him and Lukas on the other and Alexander in front, very upright, with his hands on his knees, looking out of the window at Phoenix going past in the dark as though he had been asked to inspect it.

Theo sat across the aisle with the timetable open on his phone.

“Seven stops,” said Theo. “Then we change.”

“Where?”

“I’ll know it when I see it.”

The bus pulled out. Frederick put his head back against the window and shut his eyes and felt the cold of the glass on the back of his neck and the engine under him and the whole long ordinary movement of a city bus at night, and thought, for about the twentieth time since a quarter to eight, about a telephone on a bedspread at the Biltmore.

He could see it. He could see it exactly. The suite, with the lamps on and the curtains drawn against the heat. The bed, turned down. The phone on the bed, in the middle, where he had put it down to take off his jacket, face up. Ringing. And Kimura standing over it, in the doorway or at the foot of the bed, not touching it, looking at it, with her face doing the thing it did, which was nothing, very precisely.

He opened his eyes.

“Theo,” he said.

“What?”

“Is your phone on silent?”

“Yes,” said Theo, and did not look up from the timetable, and did not look at the small red number in the corner of the screen either, and Frederick saw him not look at it, and did not ask.

---

The mountain was in the wrong place.

It took him three stops to notice. He noticed it the way you notice that a clock has stopped: not at once, and then completely. They had come along Camelback Road at a quarter to eight with Camelback Mountain on their left, a long dark hump against the last of the light, the head of the camel and then the hump, as everybody in the Valley said, and he had looked at it all the way from the Biltmore. Then they had changed, and gone south, down to McDowell. And now they were going north again, toward Scottsdale, and the mountain should have been in front of them, getting bigger.

It was behind them.

He turned round on the back seat and looked out of the rear window. There it was. Camelback, dark against the orange glow of the sky over the city, and getting smaller, steadily, as the bus went on down a long straight road lined with petrol stations and palm trees and the backs of low shopping centres, away from it.

“Theo.”

“What?”

“Which way is Scottsdale?”

“North,” said Theo. “We’re going north.”

“Then why is the mountain behind us?”

Theo looked up from his phone.

He looked out of the front window, down the long straight road. He looked out of the side window, at a sign going past for a road with a name he did not know. He looked out of the back window, at Camelback, small and dark and getting smaller.

His face went through several things.

“Oh no,” said Theo.

“What?”

“Oh, no.” He stood up. He went up the aisle, holding the rails, to the front of the bus, and bent down and said something to the driver, and the driver said something back, and Theo said something else, and the driver laughed, kindly, and said something that Frederick could not hear but could see, which was the word south, and Theo stood holding the rail by the driver’s seat for a long moment with his back to them.

Then he came back down the aisle and sat down across from them and put his phone face down on his knee.

“It’s the right number,” said Theo.

“Good.”

“It’s the wrong way.”

“Ah,” said Alexander, from the seat in front, without turning round.

“I stood on the wrong side of the road.” Theo stared at the floor. “I put my hand up on the wrong side of the road. I’ve never in my life got on a bus going the wrong way. I’ve been getting on buses since I was four. My dad drives buses. I know which side of the road a bus is on. I’ve never got it wrong. Not once. Not in Milwaukee, not in New Westminster, not in Gloucestershire, where they drive on the wrong side, not once.” He put his face in his hands. “On my birthday.”

“Where does it go?” said Jack.

Theo did not take his face out of his hands. “Ahwatukee.”

“What’s Ahwatukee?”

“It’s the other side of the mountain. A different mountain. The big one. South. It’s a town.” His voice came out between his fingers. “It’s the end of the line.”

There was a short silence on the back seat of the bus.

“How far is it?” said Frederick.

“Twenty-five minutes.”

“Can we get off before it?”

“We’re on the freeway in four,” said Theo. “There’s no stops on the freeway. That’s what a freeway is.”

Lukas looked up from the map, which he had been reading the whole time, steadily, with his finger on it, as though it were a star chart.

“I could have told you,” said Lukas.

“Why didn’t you?”

“You were very sure,” said Lukas, and went back to the map, and that was his one thing for the night, Frederick thought, and he had spent it at a quarter to ten.

---

The freeway went through the mountain.

Not round it. Through it. The mountain came up ahead in the dark, a long black wall from one side of the windscreen to the other, and the road went straight at it and into a great cut in the rock, two walls of raw stone going up on either side in the orange light of the lamps, and out the other side.

Frederick knew about the cut. There had been a page. The mountain was sacred to the O’odham, and they had objected in the correct legal form, and the objection had been received, and the road had been built. He had read the page at the Tuesday table at fifteen and asked his mother what received meant, and she had told him, and he had not liked it then.

“They cut the mountain,” said Jack, looking up at the walls with his mouth open. “For the road. Can they do that?”

“They did,” said Frederick.

---

The end of the line was a row of shops.

The bus pulled into a turning circle beside a long low strip of them, set back from a wide empty road behind a car park, and stopped, and opened its doors, and the driver said, “Last stop, folks,” over his shoulder, and then, because he had seen Theo’s face, “There’s one back over at ten-forty, from the other side. You’ll be all right.”

They got off.

The heat was waiting. It came up from the car park like the inside of an oven with the door left open. It was ten o’clock at night. The car park was white concrete and still giving back every degree the sun had put into it all day. A sign on a pole at the edge of the road, in lit red figures, said 99.

The shops were all shut. A nail bar. A pizza place with the chairs up on the tables. A dentist. A shop that sold mattresses, with a mattress in the window on its side, as though it had tried to escape. A dry cleaner’s. Every one of them dark, with the security lights on, and a long concrete walkway in front of them under a roof, and a bench.

Behind the shops, and above them, filling the whole of the north side of the sky, was the mountain.

“Where are we?” said Alexander.

Theo was standing at the bus stop reading the timetable on the pole with the expression of a man reading his own sentence.

“Ahwatukee,” he said.

A woman was walking a small dog along the walkway in front of the shops, slowly, in the security lights, because at ten o’clock at night in August it was the coolest it was going to get. She looked at the five of them standing in the car park, and at the bus pulling away round the turning circle, and understood everything at once, the way people do who have lived a long time somewhere with only one bus.

“Wrong way?” she said.

“Wrong way,” said Theo.

“Happens all the time.” She came closer, and the dog came with her, and sniffed Lukas’s shoes, and Lukas let it. “Welcome to Ahwatukee,” she said. “The world’s largest cul-de-sac.”

“It isn’t any more,” said Frederick, before he could stop himself. “There’s three roads now.”

The woman looked at him with mild surprise.

“Well, we still say it,” she said, and walked on with the dog, and Frederick watched her go and thought that he had just corrected a woman’s opinion of her own town at ten o’clock at night from a page he had read at fourteen, and that it was, if anybody had been watching, the most royal thing he had done all day, including the plaque.

---

Alexander was looking after her.

“What is a cul-de-sac?” he said.

“It’s a road that gives up,” said Jack.

“It’s a street with one way in,” said Theo, from the bus stop, without turning round. “And no way out. You go in and you come back the way you came.”

“It is French,” said Alexander.

“Yes.”

“It is not French. In French it means the bottom of a bag.” He looked up at the mountain. He looked at the shut shops, the white car park, the wide empty road going nowhere in particular, the bench. He put his hands behind his back. “We are in the bottom of a bag.”

“Yes,” said Lukas.

“At ten o’clock at night. In August.” Alexander considered it. “On my cousin’s friend’s birthday. Having been carded in Phoenix for a lemonade.” He turned and looked at Frederick with great seriousness. “This is the best evening I have had since I became Emperor.”

“It’s not even half over,” said Frederick.

“That is what worries me,” said Alexander, and sat down on the bench, very upright, and looked at the mountain with deep contentment.

---

Jack lay down.

He lay down flat on his back on the long concrete walkway in front of the mattress shop, under the roof, with his arms out, and then said “Ow,” and got up again very quickly, because the concrete was as hot as a plate.

“It’s ten o’clock at night,” said Jack, to the sky, which did not answer. “It’s dark. Why is it this hot? Where does it go? In Gloucestershire when the sun goes down it goes. It leaves. It takes the heat with it, like a gentleman.”

“It doesn’t go anywhere,” said Theo. “It’s in the ground. It comes back out all night.”

“That’s horrible.”

“It’s August.”

“I’m going to die in a car park in front of a mattress shop,” said Jack, with feeling, and sat down on the edge of the bench beside Alexander, and put his head between his knees.

His neck was very red. It had gone red in eleven minutes that morning at the water works, standing in the back row of the dignitaries in a borrowed tie, and it had stayed red all day, and in the security lights it looked worse.

Frederick looked at the shops.

Between the dry cleaner’s and the dentist there was a drinks machine, lit up, humming, with bottles of water in it behind the glass. He went over to it. He put his hand in his pocket and took out the coins, the ones he had not given the barman at Castaways, and fed them in one at a time, and the machine took them without asking him anything at all, and gave him a bottle of water, and he fed it again, four more times.

He brought them back to the bench and gave them out.

Jack held his against the back of his neck and made a noise like a kettle going off the boil.

“The machine didn’t ask for ID,” said Lukas, looking at his bottle.

“No.”

“It is the first thing tonight that has served you anything but lemonade.”

“It’s water,” said Frederick.

“It is progress,” said Lukas, which was his second thing, and he looked faintly annoyed about it.

---

At the far end of the car park, under the last of the security lights, there was a car.

Frederick had not seen it arrive. It was a dark people carrier, a long clean seven-seat thing with tinted windows, parked nose out at the very end of the row by the mattress shop’s bins, with its engine running for the air conditioning and its headlights off, and there was somebody in the driver’s seat, not moving, a broad shape behind the glass.

Alexander had seen it.

He was looking at it from the bench with his hands on his knees and no expression at all.

“Is that…” said Frederick.

“Yes,” said Alexander.

“How long has he been there?”

“Since we got off the bus. He was behind the bus on the freeway. He was behind the first bus on Camelback Road. He was in the car park at Castaways, by the third post, beside the horse.” Alexander considered. “I think he liked the horse.”

“Can he take us back?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because he is not here,” said Alexander. “He is at the Biltmore, outside my door, telling everybody that I am asleep with a headache. If he drives us anywhere, he has seen us. He is not allowed to have seen us. If he has not seen us, he cannot be blamed for not having seen us.” He looked at the car with great affection. “Kessler is a very exact man.”

He lifted one hand from his knee, just a little, the way you lift a hand to somebody across a room at a reception.

At the end of the car park the people carrier’s headlights came on, once, briefly, and went off again.

Then nothing.

“He saw that,” said Jack.

“He did not,” said Alexander, and put his hand back on his knee.

---

The woman with the pickup came out of the pizza place at twenty past ten.

She was perhaps sixty, small and brisk, with grey hair pulled back and reading glasses on a cord round her neck, and she was carrying two cardboard boxes stacked on top of each other, and she locked the door behind her with one hand without putting them down, which Frederick thought was a skill. She walked to a big dusty pickup parked under the light, put the boxes in the back, and was opening the driver’s door when she looked across the car park and saw them.

Five boys. On a bench and the concrete in front of it, at twenty past ten at night, in 98 degrees, with bottles of water, outside a mattress shop, at a bus stop the last bus had left.

She shut the door again.

She walked over, not hurrying, and stopped in front of them with her keys in her hand, and looked at them one at a time, the way Theo’s mother looked at people, as if checking them for something that was not on any chart.

“You boys lost?” she said.

“The bus,” said Theo. “I got the wrong bus.”

“Wrong side of the road?”

Theo shut his eyes. “Yes.”

“Happens to everybody,” she said. “The last one back over the mountain went at ten. You’ve missed it.”

“The driver said ten-forty.”

“The driver doesn’t live here. It’s ten.” She looked at her watch, and at them, and at Jack’s neck, and made a decision. “Where are you going?”

“Scottsdale,” said Theo.

“Where in Scottsdale?”

They looked at each other. Theo looked at Frederick. Frederick looked at Theo, and saw that Theo did not know, and that Theo minded not knowing more than he had minded anything all day, and said:

“Anywhere that’s open.”

The woman laughed. It was a short, surprised laugh.

“I’m going up to my daughter’s in south Scottsdale,” she said. “I go up every Tuesday after I close up. There’s a place on Seventy-Fifth Street my son-in-law goes to, it’s got a patio and they do a good burger and it’s open late. I can drop you there.” She jingled the keys. “It’s a crew cab. It holds five. You’re five and I’m one. Two of you are going to have to be very good friends.”

---

Alexander and Lukas were very good friends, it turned out, and sat in the back on one seat belt, which the woman pretended not to see, and Jack sat in the front, because of his neck, with the air conditioning turned up as far as it went and pointed at him, and Theo and Frederick sat in the back on either side of the Germans.

The truck went north. Up through the town, past houses with gravel gardens and orange trees and lit garage doors, past a golf course, out onto the interstate, and round the end of the mountain.

The woman talked the whole way.

She talked about the town. She talked about the year it voted to leave Phoenix, and how Phoenix still ran the buses under contract, which was why the buses still did not know where anything was. She talked about the freeway, and the cut in the mountain, which she had marched against, with a sign, in the heat, and lost. She talked about the data centre, which she had marched against too, and which the town had beaten, in the end, by becoming a town.

“I wrote to the King about it,” she said. “About the data centre. Twice. The old King. Two years running.” She changed lanes. “Twice.”

There was a silence in the back of the truck.

Theo, beside the Germans, pressed his foot very hard down on top of Frederick’s foot, across the floor of the cab.

“Did you hear back?” said Frederick.

“A letter. From the Household. Thanking me for my letter.” She snorted. “Which is the same as not hearing back, only on better paper.”

Frederick looked out of the window at the dark side of the mountain going past.

He knew about the letters. Not hers; the letters. There had been a page about those too, which said that every one had been read and answered on the better paper, and that the answers had said nothing, because the Crown may say nothing about a town’s planning dispute. He had thought at fifteen that it was the right rule and a terrible letter, both at once. He still did.

He did not say any of that either.

---

She dropped them at ten to eleven on Seventy-Fifth Street, outside a long low building with a patio lit with strings of lights and music coming over the wall and a crowd of people outside in the heat, laughing.

“There you go,” she said. “Boondocks. Tell them Rita’s son-in-law sent you. They won’t know who that is.”

They got out. Jack got out last, slowly, out of the cold, as though being born.

“Thank you,” said Theo, at the driver’s window. “Really. Thank you. You didn’t have to.”

“It’s your birthday,” said the woman. Theo had not told her. Frederick realised that Lukas must have told her, somewhere on the interstate, in the dark, in a low voice, without anybody else hearing.

“It is,” said Theo.

“Then happy birthday.” She looked past him at the other four, standing on the pavement in the heat. At Jack’s neck. At the two upright German boys. At the tall fair one at the back with his hands in his pockets, who had said nothing at all for the whole of the interstate except one question.

She looked at him for rather a long time.

“And you,” she said to him. “If you ever meet him. The King. Tell him I wrote.”

“I will,” said Frederick.

“Tell him Ahwatukee wrote. Twice.”

“I’ll tell him,” said Frederick, and meant it, and she nodded, once, as if that settled something, and put the truck in gear, and drove off north toward her daughter’s, and they stood on the pavement on Seventy-Fifth Street and watched her tail lights go.

At the end of the street, under a tree, with its engine running and its headlights off, a long dark people carrier pulled in quietly to the kerb and waited.