DJ's

At ten past twelve the King of fourteen countries stood at the bar of DJ’s on Stetson Drive and was asked for identification for the third time tonight.

“ID?” said the barman.

He was not unkind about it. He was a large calm man with a towel over his shoulder and the look of somebody who had asked the question ten thousand times and had never once enjoyed the answer. Behind him, along the back of the bar, ran a long list of beers on a board, and above the board a television with the sound off, and under the television, on the stools along the bar, sat the people who sat on those stools, which Frederick could tell at once, because there is a way a person sits on a stool they have sat on for twenty years, and every one of them had it.

“I haven’t got any,” said Frederick.

“None?”

“None.”

The barman looked at him. Six foot one, fair, a white shirt that somebody else had ironed for the reception and that had been through a bus, a quiz, Ahwatukee and a dance floor since. The barman looked at him the way they had at Castaways and at Boondocks: as if he were a perfectly reasonable young man who had for some reason gone out at night without his face.

“Lemonade?” said the barman.

“Lemonade,” said Frederick. “Thank you.”

Beside him Theo put his driving licence on the bar the way a man puts down a royal flush. It was the third time tonight he had done it and he had not got tired of it once.

“Eighteen,” said Theo. “Today. As of this morning. Six-fourteen this morning, actually, which is when I was born, my mum says, she says she remembers because the radio was doing the traffic.” He looked at the barman. “I’ll have whatever the third one down on the board is.”

The barman read the licence. He read the date on it, and the date on his own watch, and something in his large calm face moved.

“Happy birthday,” he said, and pulled it.

Alexander put his German passport on the bar, open at the page, and Lukas put his beside it, and the barman looked at them both, at the two eagles on the two red covers, at the dates, and at the two boys, who were standing very straight, side by side, with their hands behind their backs, like a delegation.

“Seventeen,” said the barman.

“Yes,” said Alexander.

“Both of you.”

“Yes,” said Lukas.

“Lemonade,” said the barman.

“Thank you,” said Alexander, with enormous courtesy, as though he had been offered a decoration.

Jack had his passport out before anybody asked. It was dark red and battered and it had one stamp in it, from the Realm, nine days old.

“Pint,” said Jack. “Of whatever he’s having.” He nodded at Theo. “And don’t ID the tall one again, he’s sensitive about it. He’s eighteen. He’s been eighteen since May. He just hasn’t got anything to prove it, because nobody’s ever made him anything.”

“That’s very sad,” said the barman, pouring.

“It’s a tragedy,” said Jack. “Nobody understands.”

---

They took the end of the bar, the part by the wall that nobody was on, because the stools along the rest of it were spoken for in a way that did not need saying. Theo and the Germans went to a table by the window. Frederick and Jack stayed at the end, with their backs to the wall, a pint and a lemonade on the wood in front of them, side by side.

It was cool. It was the first cool room since Castaways. The air conditioning came out of a vent over their heads with a long steady roar like a weir, and Frederick stood under it with his eyes shut for a moment and felt his shirt come unstuck from his back.

“You’ve gone very quiet,” said Jack.

“I’ve had five lemonades.”

“That’s what lemonade does. Nobody tells you. It’s the sugar. It goes in like a party and then it just sits there being sugar.” Jack drank some of his pint. “Are you all right, Hanover?”

“My phone’s on a bed at the Biltmore.”

“I know.”

“And it’s been ringing since twenty to eight.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know exactly.” He looked at the lemonade. “I know which ring. I know what she’s wearing. I know she’s stopped calling it and is just letting it ring, now, because she knows where it is, and she’s letting it ring because she wants me to know that she knows.”

“She can’t want you to know if you can’t hear it.”

“That’s what makes it worse,” said Frederick.

Jack considered this.

“That’s very complicated,” he said. “Is everything in your family like that?”

“Yes.”

“Right,” said Jack, and drank some more.

---

At twenty past twelve the television over the bar went from a baseball game to the late news, and the late news, after a fire in Glendale and the heat, went to the King.

Frederick saw it a second before anybody else did. He saw it the way you see your own name on a list across a room. The water works in the white light of the morning, the tanks, the long white awning and the dignitaries in a row under it on folding chairs, and a tall fair young man in a dark suit stepping up to a low wall of brown stone with a square of red velvet on it, taking hold of a gold cord, and pulling it.

The curtain moved an inch and stopped.

On the screen, he pulled it again.

Nothing happened. He pulled it a third time, and the cord came away from the curtain and hung from his hand. The young man on the screen looked at the cord, and then at the curtain, and then, very briefly, straight at the camera, with an expression that Frederick had last seen in a mirror at the age of nine when he had been told that he would be in a pageant.

The sound was off. It did not need to be on.

“Oh, look at him,” said a woman three stools down, with feeling.

She was about sixty, with silver hair cut very short and a glass of white wine, and she had been sitting on that stool, Frederick would have bet the March of Arizona on it, since before he was born.

“The poor kid,” said the woman. “Look at him. It won’t open.”

On the screen a big broad boy in a suit came past the King’s shoulder, took hold of the red velvet at its bottom corner, gently, and lifted it, the whole square of it, up and over its little rail, and folded it back over the top of the wall like a towel, and stepped back, two paces and one to the left, and the plaque was open, and everybody on the screen applauded, the way people applaud when they have been very worried about something for a long time.

At the table by the window, Theo raised his pint to the television, very slightly, and drank.

“That’s government for you,” said the man on the next stool, who had a moustache and a baseball cap and the air of a man who had opinions about government. “Billion-pound water works and they can’t buy a curtain.”

“It’s a beautiful water works,” said the woman. “My nephew works there.”

“I’m not saying it’s not a beautiful water works.”

“You said they can’t buy a curtain.”

“I’m saying the curtain. Not the works.” The man with the moustache looked up at the screen, where the King was now shaking hands in a line, with a hard hat on that did not fit. “He’s a good kid. My wife likes him. She says he looks like he’s thinking about something else the whole time.”

“He looks like he’s hot,” said the woman.

“He looks like he’d rather be anywhere else in the world.”

“Well, so would I,” said the woman, “if I had to open a water works on a Tuesday,” and she looked down the bar, idly, the way people look down a bar, and her eyes passed over the end of it, and over Jack, and over the tall fair young man beside him in a white shirt with a lemonade.

And came back.

She looked at Frederick for a long moment. Then at the screen. Then at Frederick.

“You know who you look like?” she said.

Jack made a sound into his pint like a drain.

“I get that a lot,” said Frederick.

“You do. You really do. Around the eyes.” She squinted. “Not as tall, though. He’s taller. You’d think he’d be shorter, on the television, but he’s always taller than everybody. That’s the Germans in him, my husband used to say. They’re all six foot six, the Germans.”

At the table by the window the German Emperor, five foot ten and a half, looked into his lemonade.

“Thank you,” said Frederick.

“He’s eighteen,” said the woman. “Did you know that? He was eighteen in May. They had a cake on the news.” She shook her head at the screen. “Eighteen, and opening water works. When I was eighteen I was in a band.”

“What did you play?” said Jack.

“Tambourine,” said the woman, with great dignity, and turned back to the television, and to her wine, and to the man with the moustache, with whom she had a great deal more to settle about the curtain, and did not look down the end of the bar again.

Jack put his pint down very carefully on the bar and put his forehead on the wood next to it and stayed there.

“Don’t,” said Frederick.

“Around the eyes,” said Jack, into the bar.

“Don’t.”

“Not as tall.”

“Jack.”

Jack lifted his head. His face was red and wet and he was not making any sound at all, which with Jack was the most dangerous kind of laughing, the kind that could go on for days.

“I’m fine,” said Jack. “I’m absolutely fine. I just need a minute.” He took a breath. “Tambourine,” he said, and put his head down again.

---

At half past twelve the news had gone back to the heat, and the woman had gone back to the man with the moustache, and the bar had gone back to being a bar, the low steady noise of people who knew each other, and the air conditioning roaring over the end of it like a weir.

Jack had stopped laughing some time ago. He had finished his pint and not ordered another, and was turning the empty glass round and round on the wood by its base, a quarter turn at a time, the way he turned glasses on the bar of the New Inn when he was waiting for somebody to finish a story.

“Hanover.”

“Mm.”

“I’ve worked something out. On the bus. The wrong bus. The one to the place with the shops shut.” He turned the glass. “I’ve worked out what I want to do.”

Frederick looked at him.

Jack had not known what he wanted to do since Frederick had met him. He had not known in October, at the bar of the New Inn, with a pint glass half dried in his hand, and he had not known in the snow, or at the cricket, or on the morning of the ball, or at Heathrow, and he had said so, each time, cheerfully, as if not knowing what you wanted to do were a kind of weather and he had been born in it.

“Go on,” said Frederick.

Jack put the glass down. He looked along the bar. At the stools. At the people on them. At the woman with the white wine and the man with the moustache, still arguing about the curtain, and the large calm barman with the towel over his shoulder sliding a glass of water in front of the man with the moustache without being asked, because he had seen the man’s face and knew it was time. At the board of beers. At the television. At the room.

“This,” said Jack.

Frederick looked at the room.

“You want to live in Arizona,” he said.

“No. God, no. Not with the weather.” Jack waved a hand at the room. “This. A bar. Standing behind one. For forty years. Knowing everybody’s name and what they drink and when to put the water down.” He nodded at the barman. “Like him. I watched him do it. He knew. He didn’t even look.” He picked up the glass again. “I’ve been standing behind Mum’s bar since I was fourteen and I thought it was a thing I did while I worked out what I wanted to do. And it’s not. It’s the thing. I want the New Inn. Or one like it. I want to be the person behind it.” He turned the glass. “That’s all. I worked it out on the wrong bus, in a place with the shops shut, looking at a closed-down nail bar. I thought I’d tell you.”

“That’s good,” said Frederick.

“Is it?”

“It’s very good. You’ll be very good at it.”

“I know,” said Jack. “I’ve always been good at it. I just didn’t know it was it.” He put the glass down. “That’s not the thing, though.”

“What isn’t?”

“That’s not the thing I came to say. That’s just a thing I worked out on a bus. The thing I came to say I’ve had since Heathrow.” Jack looked at the glass. “I’ve been carrying it round for nine days like a library book.”

The air conditioning roared.

“I didn’t say it in England,” said Jack, “because in England there was always somebody. Kimura by a drainpipe. Your dad. My mum. Mick with his scrapbook. Four hundred people from Swindon. And I didn’t say it at the airport, because Theo’s dad was there, and he’s the kind of man you say how do you do to and not anything else. And I didn’t say it in your kitchen because Dame M was in it. And I didn’t say it on the aeroplane on Monday because you were asleep, with your mouth open, which I’ve got a photograph of, by the way, for later, for leverage.” He stopped. “So I’m saying it in a bar in Arizona at half past twelve in the morning with a woman down the end who thinks you look like you around the eyes. Because there’s nobody here. Nobody here knows who you are. It’s the first room I’ve ever been in with you where nobody knows.”

“Jack.”

“I love you,” said Jack Fennell. “That’s the thing. That’s all it is.” He looked at the empty glass. “I’ve never said it. I’ve thought it since Bonfire Night and I’ve never said it, because I didn’t know if it was allowed. You’re a King. I’m a barman. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing you’re allowed to say to somebody whose face is on the money.” He shrugged, a small shrug, at the bar. “But it’s not on the money here, is it. I checked. It’s only on the coins. And the hundred, and nobody’s got a hundred.”

Frederick did not say anything for a moment.

It was not that he did not know what to say. It was that he had known for some time, since a lane in September and a bonfire in November and a cricket field and a crossroads, and he had been waiting, he found, to be asked, the way he had been told as a child to wait to be asked before he spoke, at Councils, at tables, at the edges of rooms. Nobody had ever told him what to do if somebody simply said it.

“I love you too,” he said.

Jack looked at him.

“Well,” said Jack, after a moment, in a slightly different voice. “Good.”

“Good.”

“That’s sorted, then.”

“Yes.”

“Brilliant,” said Jack, and picked up his empty glass and looked into it and put it down again, and wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist, quickly, once, and looked at the ceiling, at the vent, at the long roar of the cold air coming down, and said, to the vent, “Christ,” quite quietly.

Down the bar the large calm barman came along with a jug of water and two glasses and put them in front of them, without a word, without looking, the way he had for the man with the moustache, and went back up the bar.

---

At twenty-five to one Theo came over from the table by the window with the two Germans behind him, and stood at the end of the bar and looked at the two of them, and at the jug of water, and at Jack’s face, and at Frederick’s, and was silent for a moment, which for Theo at twenty-five to one, on what he still considered his eighteenth birthday, with three pints in him was a considerable feat of restraint.

“Right,” said Theo. “Good. Okay.” He looked at Jack. “Did you say it?”

“Shut up,” said Jack.

“He said it,” said Theo, to the Germans.

“We heard,” said Lukas. “Everybody heard. The man with the moustache heard.”

“He did not,” said Jack.

“He did,” said Lukas. “He said ‘good for them’ to the woman with the wine, and she said ‘who?’, and he said ‘never mind’.” Lukas looked at Jack. “That is a fact. Facts don’t count.”

Alexander stood with his hands behind his back and his lemonade, and looked at Frederick for a long moment with his exact pale eyes, and nodded, once, very slightly, the way he had nodded across the front row on the crest at Arlington nearly three years ago, and said nothing, which was, from Alexander, a speech.

“Where now?” said Frederick.

“Coach House,” said Theo. “It’s on Indian School. It’s the oldest bar in Scottsdale. It’s been there since 1959.” He held up his phone. “And it’s the Christmas bar. It’s got the lights. Thousands of them. The whole building. It’s famous. I want to see the lights on my birthday.”

“It’s August,” said Alexander.

“It’s the Christmas bar,” said Theo, as if that settled it, and turned and went to the door.

---

They went out the side, onto Stetson, into the heat, which at twenty to one in the morning was still ninety-four degrees and came at them out of the dark like an animal that had been waiting by the door. Theo first, then the Germans, then Jack, then Frederick last, holding the door.

He looked back once, from the door, the way you look back at a room you have been happy in. The television over the bar had gone round to the water works again, the late news on its second time through: the awning, the wall, the curtain, the cord coming away in a tall young man’s hand. Under it the large calm barman had stopped with the jug of water. He looked up at the screen. He looked along the bar at the empty stool at the end of it, under the vent. Then he looked at the side door, and at Frederick in it.

Frederick let the door go.

He heard it as the door shut.

Behind them, out on Stetson, a car came round the corner from the far end, fast and then not fast, and pulled in to the kerb outside the front of DJ’s with a short soft squeal of tyres, and a door opened, and a pair of feet came down onto the pavement, quick and light, and the front door of the bar opened, and closed.

He did not look round. Theo had him by the sleeve, and was pulling him round the corner towards Indian School Road, saying come on, come on, Freddie, they’ll be on, I can feel it, the lights, and Jack was laughing again, and the Germans were walking ahead in step with their hands behind their backs like a pair of small Prussian bishops, and he went round the corner with them into the dark.

He did not see who it was. He was round the corner by then, and gone.