The Warning

He rang his father at six. He had promised: every morning till Tuesday.

Castellanos was on the floor at the end of the row, against the wall, where he had sat all night, and he held the satellite telephone up as Frederick sat up on the cot. “Nine o’clock in New Westminster, sir. The sixth floor. I’ve rung ahead.”

Frederick took it into the corridor and sat on the floor under a noticeboard covered in drawings of whales, and dialled.

Four rings. Then Niamh said Sixth floor, and when he told her, oh, sir, oh, thank God, her voice breaking in the middle. The receiver went down on something hard. Footsteps, very fast. A trolley, a door, the lift going ping. Then the receiver picked up and held against something, carefully, and his father breathing, faster than on Thursday.

“Papa. It’s me. I’m all right.”

The breathing stopped, and started again, slower.

“I’m in a school in Santa Monica. A middle school, on a hill. The whole class is here. Theo’s here. I’ve got a cut over my eye and a nurse taped it.” The whales. “I haven’t got any trains for you. I’m sorry. The timetable’s in the hotel and nobody can go in. And nothing’s running anyway.”

Nothing from the other end.

“But Mamma said to tell you something that wasn’t trains. So.” He swallowed. “I went on the wheel. The Ferris wheel, at the end of the pier, with Theo. We were at the top when it started. And I didn’t hold anybody’s hand, Papa. Not once. Not even Theo’s. I held the bench. Theo says the bench counts. I say it doesn’t.”

His father breathed in, and held it. Frederick waited, and did not help.

“Vienna,” said his father.

Frederick shut his eyes.

Three syllables. The longest word since September.

“Yes. Mamma told me. She said you held her hand the whole way round.”

A short sound on the line. Then another. His father was laughing, with his breath, in and out, short and fast, and from beside the bed Niamh said, very quietly, he’s laughing, sir, I don’t know if you can hear it, and Frederick said I can hear it, and sat under the whales with his eyes shut and listened until it stopped.

---

The radio said San Francisco at eight minutes past eight.

Breakfast had been a cereal bar and a bottle of water each, from the truck at seven. The class was on the cots by the stage. Theo was teaching Marcus a card game with no cards. Priya had her borrowed radio beside her, low.

It was the tired man from the white car on Ocean Avenue, reading out shelters and roads and telephone numbers. He stopped in the middle of a road. Paper. When he started again his voice was different.

We are getting reports of a major earthquake in the San Francisco Bay area. At approximately seven fifty-two this morning the Seismological Laboratory at Berkeley recorded an earthquake of magnitude … I’m sorry. Of magnitude seven point six. The location is given as offshore, near the Golden Gate, and the rupture appears to extend north along the coast. We have reports of severe damage in the city of San Francisco. We have reports of fires. The Golden Gate and the Bay bridges are closed. We do not have …

Priya’s hand went to the little wheel on the side and turned it up, and the voice came out into the gym, and the gym went quiet. Not from one end to the other, the way it had for the roll. All at once. Two hundred people on cots, and then only the tired man and the generator in the car park.

… we do not have figures from the north. I am being told that this earthquake is believed to be separate from yesterday’s earthquake off Ventura, and I am being told that it may not be, and I don’t know which, and I’m not going to guess. If you are in the Bay area and you can hear me …

A woman near the doors stood up and said my sister, loudly, to nobody, and sat down.

Somebody started to cry.

From the far end, by the climbing frames, a man’s voice, high: It’s the whole coast. It’s going up the whole coast. It’s going to keep going. Isn’t it?

Nobody answered him.

Theo put down the cards that were not there. On Frederick’s other side Marcus said, very quietly, my uncle lives in Oakland.

At the end of the row Castellanos was already on his feet with the telephone to his ear, his face turned towards Frederick.

---

In daylight the principal’s office had sun across the books on the floor, and the photograph face down on the carpet had a little brass plate on its frame: FRANKLIN CLASS OF 2009.

The principal stood in the door in her orange vest. “Again?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

He sat in the plastic chair. The telephone rang at half past eight.

“Sir,” said Lord Whitlock, through the hiss. “I’m sorry it’s this. I have the Governor on the line, and the State Chancellor of California, from Sacramento. She asked to be on it.”

“Your Majesty.” Governor Marchetti, close, the edges of her words worn off. “Good morning, sir. Or not. You’ll have heard.”

“On a radio. In the gym.”

“And this is Diane Mukherjee, sir.” A woman, quick, precise, very level, the voice of somebody who had been awake for twenty-five hours and had decided not to let it show. “State Chancellor. The building shook at seven fifty-two and it’s still standing. The Prime Minister told me what you said to him yesterday, about the water and the telephones and the sea, and the water was in the shelters by four and the telephones by six. I’d like to say thank you once, and then not again, because there isn’t time.”

“It wasn’t me. It was the Governor’s office. It was the trucks.”

“It was your list, sir. I’ve had a great many lists since yesterday. Yours was the only one with three things on it.”

---

Whitlock first. The federal emergency extended to the nine counties of the Bay at nine, New Westminster time. A carrier and four ships at the base across the Bay, which had shaken and stood, already moving. A column from Fort Irwin turned round on the road north. The House sitting again at noon to extend the Supplementary Estimate.

Then the State Chancellor. The Commonwealth had been stretched to its edge at nine forty-one yesterday and was past it now. Every fire crew it had was in the south. The roads were jammed, the interstate and the coast road and the inland road, because people in Fresno and Bakersfield and San Luis Obispo had heard San Francisco at eight minutes past eight and decided the whole coast was going.

“They’re driving east, sir. Into the desert, with their children and their dogs and no water.” She stopped. “I can stop the roads. I can’t stop the fear.”

Then the Governor. Government House in Los Angeles had a garden, and a park behind it, and a gate she had opened herself at four yesterday, without asking, for the people from the streets round it who had nowhere to go.

“It isn’t my house, sir. It’s the Crown’s. I should have asked.”

FRANKLIN CLASS OF 2009.

“Prime Minister.”

“Sir.”

“I’d like to ask for three things. I know I can’t do any of them. I know they’re yours. I’d like you to have heard me ask, and then you can decide.”

The hiss.

“Please, sir.”

---

To be consulted. To encourage. To warn. Bagehot, at twelve, from a chair in the library at Columbia Palace where his father had left it. He had been consulted under the big tree. He had encouraged, in five sentences. The third he had never done.

“The first thing. Government House. The Governor’s opened the gate. I’d like it to be open because I asked, so that nobody can tell her later she shouldn’t have.” He looked at the window. “And the Crown’s land along the coast. Castellanos says the Royal Parks Service has land in the mountains north of here and along the shore, and some of it’s flat, and there are people sleeping on pavements in Santa Monica. If it can be camps, with water, I’d like it to be camps. I know it’s the Realm’s, not mine. I’d like it asked for in my name.”

“It’ll be done by noon, sir. I’ll advise it formally at ten. You’ll have the paper tonight.”

“The second thing. People carried other people yesterday. Sergeant Brannigan went down ninety-eight steps and took an old man out of a teacher’s arms and went back for the teacher. Mr Ferrante went back across the sand for a man he didn’t know. The man who ran the wheel brought it down by hand with the sea going out. I don’t know his name. Two surfers came back down the stairs for the old man when they’d already got to the top. A nurse carried a little girl up the stairs because somebody put her in her arms.” He looked at the floor. “And there must be hundreds that nobody saw. I’d like them recommended, for gallantry. Not now. But I’d like somebody to write it down now, while people remember.”

“The committee will want citations, sir. With witnesses.”

“Ask Mr Abernathy. He was there for all of it. He counted.”

A short silence.

“Yes, sir. I’ll ask Mr Abernathy.”

---

He held the telephone against his ear with the sun on the books, and was quiet so long that the State Chancellor said sir?

“I’m here.” He breathed. “The third thing isn’t a request. I’m not allowed to ask for it. I think I’m only allowed to say it once.”

Nobody spoke.

“In 1988 there was an earthquake in the San Fernando Valley. Mr Ferrante told us about it on the coach on Wednesday. It rewrote the building code. That’s why the hotel I was in didn’t fall down, and the school I’m in. That’s why the hospitals stood in November.” He held the telephone very tightly. “And afterwards the money went to the Valley. It didn’t go to the eastside, which had been hurt less and was poorer to start with. The Register says the money followed the damage assessments and the damage assessments followed the property values. It doesn’t say anybody meant it. And it took seventeen years to see what it had done.”

Only the hiss.

“I’ve been in Santa Monica. It’s the rich part. It’s where the hotels are. It’s where the King’s class trip went. On the radio they keep saying Ventura is very bad and Oxnard is very bad, and nobody says Santa Monica, because it isn’t, not like that. And now there’s San Francisco, which everybody’s heard of.” It was the voice from the bluff. “I’d like somebody to make sure that this time the money goes where the damage is. Not where the property is. Not where the King was. Not where the cameras are. Oxnard. The farm towns up the valley behind Ventura. The streets in San Francisco that nobody visits. Wherever it’s worst and poorest, first.” A breath. “That’s the warning. I know you’ll decide. I just wanted it said, by me, once, so that nobody can say afterwards that nobody said it.”

Nobody answered.

Then the State Chancellor, much less level: “Sir, I sit for San José. But I grew up in Oxnard.”

He waited.

“My father picked strawberries in the fields behind it for thirty years, and my mother cleaned the houses in Ventura of the people who owned the fields. I’ve been trying since yesterday morning to say what you’ve just said to a Prime Minister without it sounding like a State Chancellor asking for her own home town.” A pause. “I’m going to put it in writing this morning, sir, in those words, if you’ll let me. Where the damage is, not where the property is. With your name on it.”

“Yes.”

“Sir,” said Lord Whitlock, slowly, each word set down separately. “I’ll remember it in the Cabinet this morning, and I’ll remember it when the Treasury brings me its first allocation, which it will, by Monday, on the basis of the damage assessments, which will follow the property values, because they always have. And I’ll send it back.” A pause. “I may not be the Prime Minister who has to remember it in seventeen years. But you’ll be the King. So you can remind whoever is.”

“I will.”

“I know you will, sir. That’s rather the point of you.”

---

“One more thing, sir,” said the Governor. “The ABC has a truck in Los Angeles with a dish on it that can go anywhere. They’ve asked whether the King would speak to the Commonwealth this afternoon. Live.” A pause. “I said you’d probably say no, because you’d say it wasn’t yours. But the roads are full of people driving into the desert because they think the whole coast is going, and nobody can tell them it isn’t, because nobody knows. And I think there’s one voice every person in California would stop the car to listen to. I don’t think it’s mine. I don’t think it’s the Prime Minister’s, with respect.”

“None taken,” said Lord Whitlock.

“Not to tell them anything, sir. Just so they hear somebody who was on the pier yesterday morning and is still here.”

The window. Sun on the playing field, the bright tents, people walking between them with bottles of water.

“Prime Minister. Is it allowed?”

“It’s a message to your people, sir. You don’t need my advice to send it. You’d have it if you asked, and it would be yes.”

“Then yes. This afternoon. From the gym. Not from anywhere better. From where the cots are.”

He heard the Governor breathe out. “Two o’clock. They’ll be there by one.”

“Thank you, Governor. Thank you, State Chancellor. Thank you, Prime Minister.”

“Sir,” said all three at once, from Los Angeles and Sacramento and New Westminster, and the line closed.

He got up and turned the photograph over. The glass was cracked across it in a long zigzag, like the front of the hotel. Behind the crack, on the playing field outside this window, a hundred children in white shirts squinted into the sun.

He propped it on the desk against the bottle of water, facing the chair, and went out.

Castellanos was outside the door.

“Two o’clock, sir.”

“Yes,” said Frederick. “I need another permission slip.”