The Sign on the Bluff

The first thing was the light.

It was not hot, not after New Westminster in May, which could be as close as the inside of a glove. It was warm and dry, with a wind off the sea that smelled of salt and of something green and resinous he did not know the name of. And the light came down out of a pale, high, washed sky with a gold haze at its edges and lay on everything evenly, the concrete and the palm trees and the white sides of the coaches in their bay, so that no shadow was quite dark enough, as if it had all been lit for a photograph and the photographer had not come.

“It’s like a film,” said Theo.

“It’s where they make the films.”

“No, I mean it’s like one. Like it’s not real. Is it always like this?”

“Most of the year,” said Mr Ferrante, coming out of the terminal behind them with the last of the sophomores and the clipboard, which he had somehow taken off Mr Abernathy on the aircraft. “It’s the basin. Mountains on three sides and the sea on the fourth. Everything that goes up into the air stays in it.” He looked at the sky as though it had handed in an essay. “That gold is not a sunset, Hartigan. It’s the freeway.”

---

There were two coaches, white, with a company from Riverside along the side in red and a picture of an orange, and two drivers in white shirts who watched the fifty-eight of them come across the pavement with the faces of women who had driven a great many school trips.

He was on the second. Brannigan was three rows behind him, in the college sweatshirt, reading a newspaper. Kimura was on the first. Castellanos had gone ahead in a car before anybody else came out of the terminal.

The coach went north up a long straight road with palm trees down the middle and shops and car parks and petrol stations on either side, and signs in Spanish as well as English, and once, on the right, a long low station with a grey electric train standing in it, three cars, pantograph up, SANTA MONICA on its board in orange.

He turned round in his seat to watch it.

“Freddie,” said Theo.

“It’s the interurban. The old one. They never pulled it up. It runs from the mountains to the sea, the whole basin, the biggest electric railway in the Realm, everybody thinks Los Angeles is all freeways and it isn’t, they built the city along this before 1910, look, that’s the Santa Monica line, it goes all the way to the beach.”

“Freddie. I know. You told me on the plane. In Kansas.”

“Did I?”

“In Kansas and in the March and when we were landing, when everybody else was looking at the roofs.” Theo watched the station go by. “It’s a nice train,” he said, kindly, the way you would say it to a much younger child. “I like the orange.”

---

There were no blue roofs here.

He looked. The houses up the coast were low and white and pink and pale yellow under red tile, with bright purple trees in the gardens, and there were people in shorts with dogs, and a man selling oranges from a cart on a corner. It looked as though nothing had ever happened here.

He said so, quietly, to Theo.

“It’s fifty miles,” said Lucía, from the seat across the aisle.

Lucía Paredes, from history, with her knees up and her phone in her hand, looking out at the purple trees. She did not look round.

“From the fault to here. My grandpa says Santa Monica felt it, everybody did, but here it was a shake and some windows. Out there,” she moved her chin towards the haze at the end of the road, east, “it was the ground opening. He says people on the coast talk about it like it was a storm, and people in the valleys don’t talk about it at all.”

Frederick did not answer.

“I’m seeing them tomorrow,” said Lucía. “Grandma and Grandpa. They’re coming to the hotel for supper. Mr Ferrante said they could. They’ve lived in Pomona forty years and never been to the beach. Grandpa says it’s for rich people and tourists.” She almost smiled. “I told him the King was going to be there. He said, well, there you are, then.”

---

The hotel was on Ocean Avenue, on top of the bluff, facing the sea: the oldest building on the street, Mr Abernathy read from a leaflet, while Señora Ruiz went inside to argue about keys. Built in the 1920s, white, with a red tile roof and a tower at one corner and black iron balconies and a lawn so green it looked painted. It looked, Theo said, like the kind of hotel where somebody in a film is murdered in the first ten minutes by a man in a hat.

Inside, the lobby floor was tiled in blue and white and yellow, and there was dark wood and a carpeted staircase and a smell of polish and flowers. On the wall behind the desk, from the floor to the ceiling, ran a long jagged line.

Somebody had filled it with plaster and painted the plaster in the same cream as the wall, so that you only saw it when the light from the door fell across it at an angle. The light from the door was falling across it at an angle. Half the sophomores coming in with their bags saw it, and the noise in the lobby went down, and came back.

“November,” said the woman at the desk.

She was about fifty, with short grey hair and reading glasses on a chain, and a badge that said MARISOL, and she did not mind them looking.

“We were lucky. Two windows on the top floor, and the tower came out of true by about an inch, they tell me, and that.” She nodded at the crack. “The engineers said the building was fine. It moved. It’s supposed to move, they said, that’s what the code does.” She slid a key card across to Señora Ruiz, who had won. “I wasn’t here. I was home. I live in San Bernardino.”

Nobody said anything.

“My house is fine. My street is fine. The street behind mine is not there any more.” Another key card, and another. “I came back to work in January. There wasn’t anything else to do.” She looked at them over her glasses. “Welcome to Santa Monica. Breakfast is from seven. Please don’t run on the stairs.”

---

His room was on the fourth floor at the end of the corridor, with a door through to the next room, and the door was open, and Castellanos was standing in it in his shirtsleeves with a cup of coffee from the machine in the corridor, looking at the window.

“Sir. The window opens four inches and no more. I’ve checked. The fire escape’s at the end of the corridor on the left, and there’s a second staircase behind the lift. Sergeant Kimura’s across the corridor in four-oh-nine. Sergeant Brannigan’s on the stairs.” He drank some of the coffee. “This door stays unlocked and closed. If you need me, knock. If I need you, I knock. If you hear me knock twice, put your shoes on.”

“All right.”

“Mr Hartigan.”

Theo, in the doorway behind him with his rucksack, stood up a little straighter.

“You’re in the bed by the window. Not because of anything. Because the King has the bed by the door.” Castellanos looked at him over the coffee. “If anybody knocks who isn’t one of us or a teacher, you don’t open it. You tell me. If anybody rings the room telephone and asks for him, he’s out. Whatever time it is. Even if it’s his mother.”

“Even if it’s his mother?”

“His mother,” said Castellanos, “will not ring the room telephone.” He went back through and closed the door, gently, the way Dame M closed doors, and after a moment they heard him sit down in a chair on the other side of the wall.

Theo put his rucksack on the bed by the window.

“He likes me.”

“Does he?”

“He called me Mr Hartigan.” Theo bounced on the bed once, experimentally. “At the palace they call me the Page, like I’m a piece of furniture.” He lay back with his arms out and looked at the ceiling. “I’m going to tell Kate. She’ll be so annoyed.”

---

At six they walked along the top of the bluff, all fifty-eight of them and the three teachers, because on the first evening, Mr Abernathy said, everybody stayed together.

The park ran the length of Ocean Avenue, a thin strip of grass and palm trees and benches right on the edge, and beyond the railing there was nothing but air. A long way down, at the foot of a cliff of sandy yellow earth with ice plant growing on it, ran a road, six lanes, full of cars. Beyond the road was a wide pale beach, empty in the evening, and beyond the beach the sea.

He had seen the Pacific from Sydney and from an aircraft over Hawaii and once, very small, from a hotel window in Vancouver. Not like this, from the top of a cliff, with the sun going down into it. Grey-blue, then silver, then, where the sun was, a long path of gold coming straight across it towards him. The waves came in very slowly in long white lines and broke without any hurry, and the sound of them came up over the noise of the road, a long low hush, like somebody breathing in the next room.

To the left the pier went straight out into the sea on legs, long and low and wooden, with buildings on it, and at the end, against the sky, a Ferris wheel, its lights coming on one after another, red and gold and white, going round. Beside it a small red rollercoaster, and faintly along the beach, people screaming on purpose.

“We’re going there Thursday,” said Theo. “Thursday morning, Mr Abernathy said. Before it gets busy.”

“I know.”

“I’m going on the wheel.”

“I know.”

“You’re coming on the wheel.”

“We’ll see,” said Frederick, who did not like heights, and had never told anybody, and saw from Theo’s face that Theo had always known.

---

At the end of the park, where the path turned, a staircase went down the face of the bluff in a long concrete zigzag to a footbridge over the road and on to the beach.

At the top, on a post at the height of his head, there was a sign. Blue, square, white-bordered, with a white wave curling over a small running figure, and an arrow pointing up. TSUNAMI HAZARD ZONE. Underneath, smaller: IN CASE OF EARTHQUAKE, GO TO HIGH GROUND OR INLAND. And under that the same in Spanish.

He stopped and read it. All of it, from the top. The arrow pointed up the stairs, away from the beach, to where he stood. He looked back down the zigzag and counted the flights. Six. He counted the steps in the first. Sixteen. Ninety-six, then, give or take the landings, and the footbridge over the road, and then the sand, and from the end of the pier to the foot of the stairs a quarter of a mile. Perhaps more.

“Freddie. Come on. Everybody’s going.”

“In a minute.”

“It’s a sign.”

“I know it’s a sign. I’m reading it.”

Theo came and read it too, more quickly, and looked at him sideways.

“You’re doing the thing. The trains thing. With a sign.”

“It’s not a thing.”

“You’re working out how long it takes.”

He was. Fifty-eight people coming up ninety-six steps in a hurry, some of them frightened, one of them Marcus: longer than you would think, because a staircase is a queue and a queue goes at the speed of its slowest person. He had watched the six-fourteen from Richmond empty onto the platform at Union Station every evening for four years and knew to the second how long a crowd took to climb a stair.

“They have them all down the coast,” said Theo. “They had them in Hawaii. It’s like the fire exits at school. Nobody looks at those.”

“I look at those.”

“I know you look at those. That’s my point.” Theo turned back towards the others, going away along the park in a long untidy line towards the hotel and supper. “Come on. Abernathy’s counting.”

Frederick looked at it once more. The wave, the running figure, the arrow. Then he went after Theo along the top of the bluff, with the sea going from gold to grey on his left and the lights going round on the wheel at the end of the pier, and did not look back at it, and did not tell anybody that he had counted the steps.