Kimura

Cooper’s Hill was not a hill. That was the first thing Frederick thought, at the top of it, at a quarter to twelve on the last Monday in May, looking down. It was a wall with grass on it.

It went down from his feet at an angle that did not seem possible for something you were expected to stand on, two hundred yards of rough tussocky grass and bare earth and lumps of limestone sticking out of it, so steep that from the top you could not see the middle of it, only the beginning, falling away under your boots, and then, a long way below, the bottom, flat, green, with a crowd round it, thousands of them, and a line of people in yellow jackets at the very foot, standing with their arms linked, like a dam.

“That’s it?” said Lucía, beside him.

“That’s it,” said Jack.

“You run down that.”

“You run down it after the cheese.” Jack was standing at the edge with his hands in his pockets and a look on his face of a man showing a visitor round a church he is very proud of. “They roll the cheese from the top. A big round one. Seven pounds. It goes about seventy miles an hour by the bottom. You go after it. First one to the bottom wins the cheese.” He looked down the hill with deep satisfaction. “Nobody’s ever caught it. It’s too fast. You just go after it.”

“How do you get down?”

“You fall,” said Jack simply. “Everybody falls. You go over the edge and you fall down it. Two hundred yards. Head over heels. The first bit you’re running and then you’re not.” He nodded at the line of people at the bottom in yellow jackets. “Those are the rugby club. They catch you at the bottom. If you’re not caught, you go in the hedge.”

Frederick looked at the line of people in yellow jackets at the bottom of the hill.

He looked at the crowd.

He looked at the cheese, which was in the arms of a man in a white coat and a bowler hat at the very top of the slope, a few yards away: round, yellow, wrapped in some kind of cloth, the size of a small tyre.

“How many races are there?” he said.

“Four,” said Jack. “Three for men. One for women.” He looked at Frederick sideways. “Why?”

“I’m going to do it,” said Frederick.

---

Behind him, Kimura said, “No.”

She said it quite quietly. She did not say it to him. She said it to the back of his head, at a distance of about four feet, the way you would say no to a dog that has just looked at a sandwich.

He turned round.

Kimura was standing behind him in her dark coat with her hands at her sides. Not in her pockets. At her sides. Castellanos was beside her, a step back. Castellanos had been a step back all week. Since the Monday before. Since the depot. A step back, on her left, at the edge of every room, every street, every lane, where for eight months he had been a step in front.

Frederick had noticed it on the first day. He had not said anything. He had understood, without anybody telling him, that this was how it would be done: not all at once, at a ceremony, with an announcement, but a step at a time, a room at a time, Kimura a step further forward each day and Castellanos a step further back, until one morning he was at the back of the room and she was at the edge of it, and nobody had said a word.

This was the first day she had said no.

“Sergeant,” said Frederick.

“Sir.” Kimura did not move. “No.”

“I’m going to do it.”

“You are going to throw yourself off a cliff after a cheese,” said Kimura, “in front of four thousand people and every telephone in Gloucestershire, two days before a cricket match you have to umpire, three weeks before you go home.” She looked at the hill. “No.”

“Sergeant Castellanos?”

Castellanos looked at the hill for a long time. Then at Kimura. Then at Frederick.

“Sir,” he said, “it’s not my call.”

Kimura turned her head and looked at him.

“Sergeant,” she said.

“It’s not my call, Sergeant,” said Castellanos to her, very evenly. “It’s yours. From this morning.” He looked back at the hill. “I’ve been at the back of the room since eight. You didn’t notice. That’s the point.” He folded his hands. “Your call.”

Kimura looked at him for a long moment.

Then she looked at the hill, all the way down, the two hundred yards of tussock and earth and limestone, and the line of rugby players in yellow jackets at the bottom, and the crowd, and the hedge.

Then she looked at the King.

“If you do this,” said Kimura, “I resign.”

“Sergeant.”

“I’m not joking, sir. I resign. Formally. Now. As of the moment you go over the edge, I am no longer a member of your protection detail and I will not be responsible for what happens to you on that hill.” She took a breath. “And then I’ll come down after you, as a private citizen, because somebody has to, and if you’ve broken your neck I’ll carry you to the bottom myself and hand you to Hartigan, and then I’ll go back to the Realm on the next aeroplane and get a job in a bank.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’ve never been more serious in my life, sir.”

He looked at her. At Ruth Kimura, thirty, in her dark coat, with her hands at her sides, on the first morning she had ever been in charge, at the top of Cooper’s Hill.

“How many out of ten?” he said.

Kimura stared at him.

“For what?”

“For the hill,” said Frederick. “If I do it. How many?”

There was a very long pause at the top of Cooper’s Hill.

Behind Kimura, very slightly, at one side, Castellanos’s face did something.

“Ten,” said Kimura, through her teeth. “Obviously ten. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen anybody do and if you do it I’ll give it ten and then I’ll resign.” She looked at the hill. “Go on, then. Before I change my mind.”

---

He went on the third race, the second men’s race, at twenty past twelve.

There were fifteen of them at the top. Men, mostly young, in shorts and T-shirts and rugby shirts and one in a full Batman costume, standing in a line along the edge of the slope with their toes over the drop and the wind in their faces, and the crowd at the bottom roaring, and the man in the white coat and the bowler hat at the end of the line with the cheese in his arms.

Jack was beside him.

“You’re not doing it,” said Frederick.

“Course I’m doing it. I’ve done it four times. I’ve got a scar.” Jack showed him a scar on his chin. “I’m not letting you go down there on your own.”

“Kimura’s resigning.”

“I know. I heard. Everyone heard.” Jack looked down the hill. “She’ll un-resign at the bottom.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she likes you,” said Jack, “and she likes her job, and she’d be rubbish in a bank.”

The man in the bowler hat said, in a loud flat Gloucestershire voice, “One to be ready.”

The fifteen of them crouched.

“Two to be steady.”

He looked down the hill. The tussock and the earth and the limestone. The yellow jackets. The crowd. He thought about the Back Walk at Stirling, and his father going down forty-one steps one at a time with nobody’s hand. He thought about the pancake going out over the parapet, turning over and over in the wind.

“Three to prepare.”

He thought, quite clearly: my mother is going to kill me.

“And four,” said the man in the bowler hat, “to be off,” and let go of the cheese.

---

He ran four steps.

Then he was not running. Then the hill had him. It took him the way the Coln had taken him on the second of September, all at once, everywhere, and he went forward and down and over, and the sky went past, and the grass, and the sky, and a lump of limestone, and the sky, and somebody’s boot, and the grass, and the sound of four thousand people screaming, very far off, the way you hear things under water, and he was not thinking about anything at all, not the cheese or the crowd or Kimura or his mother, only down, and the ground coming up and going away and coming up again, and somewhere to his left, going over and over at the same speed, a red sweatshirt, and the sky.

Then the hill stopped.

Then he was lying on his back on flat grass at the bottom with his arms out and the sky above him, very blue, enormous, and the noise of the crowd coming back all at once like a door opening, and a pair of arms round him in a yellow jacket, a large person from the rugby club holding him by the shoulders, saying you all right, mate? you all right?, and he was laughing.

He could not stop laughing. He lay on the grass at the bottom of Cooper’s Hill with a large person from the Gloucester rugby club holding him and laughed until he could not breathe.

Then there was a face above him, upside down, against the blue.

Theo.

In his green uniform, on his knees on the grass, with the green bag open and the blue gloves on, looking down at him with an expression of the most complete and comprehensive exasperation Frederick had ever seen on a human face.

“Freddie,” said Theo.

“Hello.”

“Don’t move.”

“I’m fine.”

“You came down a cliff. Head first. After a cheese.” Theo was doing things with his hands, quickly, the way he did. Neck. Shoulders. Arms. Ribs. “Does this hurt? This? This?”

“No. No. A bit.”

“Which bit?”

“All of it. A bit.” Frederick lay on the grass and looked up at Theo upside down. “You were waiting.”

“Of course I was waiting. I’ve been waiting at the bottom since eleven. I put my name on the rota in April.” Theo sat back on his heels. “I knew you’d do it. The minute Jack said Cooper’s Hill at the New Inn in April, I knew you’d do it, and I went and put my name down for the bottom.” He looked at Frederick lying on the grass. “You’ve got a cut on your elbow and you’re going to have a bruise the size of a dinner plate on your back and that’s all. Somehow. That’s all.” He took off his gloves. “You’re the luckiest idiot in the world.”

Beside him, somebody sat up in the grass in a red sweatshirt with blood coming out of his nose.

“Did he get the cheese?” said Jack.

---

He did not get the cheese. The cheese was won by the man in the Batman costume, who had won it the year before as well and the year before that, and who stood at the bottom of the hill with the cheese held above his head and the cape torn to ribbons and the crowd roaring, and was later revealed to be a tree surgeon from Brockworth called Darren.

Kimura came down the hill four minutes later.

She came down the side, on the path, not the slope, which took her four minutes, at a run, in her dark coat, and she came across the flat grass at the bottom through the crowd and the yellow jackets, and stopped in front of him, where he was sitting up on the grass with a dressing on his elbow and Theo beside him with his arms folded and Jack beside Theo with a tissue held to his nose.

She looked at him for a long time.

“Sergeant,” said Frederick.

“I resigned,” said Kimura. “At the top. When you went over the edge. I said it out loud. I resign. To Sergeant Castellanos.” She took a breath. “He said noted.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For four minutes,” said Kimura, “on the path coming down, I was not a member of your protection detail. I was a private citizen of the Realm on a hill in Gloucestershire watching the King of fourteen countries fall two hundred yards after a cheese. I’ve never felt so free in my life.” She looked at the hill, behind him, going up into the sky. “It was horrible.”

“Will you come back?”

Kimura looked at him.

Then she looked over his head, up the hill, to the top, where, very small, against the sky, at the edge of the slope, a broad grey-haired man in a dark coat was standing with his hands folded, looking down, and had been standing there the whole time, and was not coming down, because it was not his call.

She looked at him for a long time.

“Ten,” said Kimura, to the hill. “For the hill. I said I’d give it ten.” She looked back at Frederick. “And I withdraw my resignation.” She put her hands in her pockets, for the first time that day. “Mostly because I’d be rubbish in a bank.”

Behind Frederick, Jack, with the tissue held to his nose, made a noise of enormous satisfaction.

---

Lucía found out that night.

It was Will who told her. Frederick learned this afterwards, and spent a long time afterwards trying to understand how it could have happened, and decided at last that it had happened because everybody in the world had assumed that everybody else had already told her.

It was at the New Inn, at ten o’clock, at the table by the fire, where the class had gone after Cooper’s Hill, and Jack was behind the bar with a plaster across his nose, and Lucía was sitting beside Will, which she always did now, Frederick thought, now that he came to think about it, though he had never thought about it before, and Will said something to her about the hill, about Frederick going over the edge, and then said, quite casually, the way you would say something everybody knew, and Jack went straight over after him, obviously.

And Lucía said, why obviously?

And Will looked at her.

And then Will looked at Frederick, across the table, with an expression of a man who has just put his foot through the floor of a house.

And Lucía looked at Will, and then at Frederick, and then across the room at the bar, at Jack, with a plaster across his nose, drying a glass, saying there you go to Gaz, and then back at Frederick, and her face went, slowly, through about four things, one after another, each of them louder than the last.

“No,” said Lucía.

Frederick did not say anything.

“No,” said Lucía. “No. No, no, no.” She put down her glass. “Him? The pub one? Jack?” She turned round in her chair and stared at the bar. “Since when?”

“November,” said Frederick.

“NOVEMBER?”

The whole pub turned round.

The whole pub turned back.

“November,” said Lucía, at a lower volume, but not by much, with a fury so pure and complete that it was almost beautiful. “Since November. Six months. Six months. I’ve known you since we were fourteen. I sat next to you in Spanish for four years. I came down a rope for you in the play. I held your dad’s hand.” She drew a breath. “And everybody knew. Didn’t they. Everybody knew. Theo knew. Inés knew, Inés always knows. Will knew. Will knew.” She turned on Will, who flinched. “Your Nan knew, his Nan, the old lady on the wall, she knew, didn’t she, she knew in September.”

“She’s not my Nan,” said Will faintly.

“I don’t care whose Nan she is,” said Lucía.

She stopped.

She looked round the table at all of them. At Theo, who was looking at his drink. At Inés, who was reading her book, and had not looked up once, and whose mouth was doing something very small at one side. At Kit, who was polishing his glasses with great concentration. At Will, beside her, who had gone the colour of a tomato.

At Frederick.

“I’m the last,” said Lucía, in a different voice. “Aren’t I. I’m the last person in the whole of Gloucestershire to find out.”

“I thought you knew,” said Frederick.

“How would I know?”

“I don’t know. I thought everybody knew.” He looked at her across the table. “I thought it was obvious. Everybody kept saying it was obvious. Kate saw it in five minutes. Will said obviously in the boot room. I thought you’d seen it at the play, at the curtain, when you said he looked terrified.” He stopped. “I thought you were being tactful.”

“I have never,” said Lucía, “in my life, been tactful.”

There was a silence at the table.

Then, from the other side of it, very quietly, without looking up from her book, Inés said:

“She’s right about that.”

---

It was at about this point that Frederick found out about Lucía and Will.

He found out because Lucía, in the middle of being furious, still furious, turning round in her chair to stare at the bar again, at Jack, put her hand out sideways without looking, on the table, and Will, without looking either, without thinking, put his on top of it.

That was all. Two hands on a table by the fire at the New Inn. Lucía’s hand, small and brown, and Will’s on top of it, large and freckled and covered in the small healed cuts that you get from working with sheep. Neither of them looked at it. Neither of them seemed to know they had done it.

Frederick looked at it.

He looked at it for some time.

Then he looked at Theo.

Theo was looking at the ceiling.

He looked at Inés. Inés turned a page.

He looked at Kit. Kit put his glasses back on and looked at Frederick through them with an expression of profound and silent pity.

“Oh,” said Frederick.

Lucía turned round from the bar.

“What?” she said.

Frederick looked at the two hands on the table.

Lucía looked down. She saw them. She saw her own hand and Will’s on top of it, and went, all at once, very red.

“How long,” said Frederick.

“Shut up,” said Lucía.

“How long?”

“February,” said Will, miserably, to the table. “After the play. Well. During the play. The rehearsals. In the tithe barn. She came down the rope and I was in the wig and.” He stopped. “February.”

“February,” said Frederick.

“I thought you knew,” said Lucía, with enormous outrage. “Everybody knew. Theo knew. Inés knew. Kit knew, Kit caught us, in the drying room. Jack knew, Jack served us at the bar every Friday night for three months, he gave us a candle.”

“Jack knew?”

“Everybody knew,” said Lucía. “I thought you were being tactful.”

There was a very long silence at the table by the fire.

Then Theo, looking at the ceiling, began to laugh. Silently, at first, with his shoulders. And then not silently. And then Kit. And then Will, miserably, with his face in his hands. And then Inés, who put her book down on the table, for the first time that evening, and laughed out loud, in her flat voice, which Frederick had never heard her do, and it was like hearing a bell ring in an empty church.

And Lucía and Frederick looked at each other across the table, furious, both of them, red, both of them, the last two people in Gloucestershire to know anything about anybody, and Lucía said, “You,” and Frederick said, “You,” and then they were laughing too.

At the bar, Jack, with the plaster across his nose, looked across the pub at the table by the fire, at the six of them all laughing, and at Lucía and Will’s hands on the table, and at Frederick, and lifted the glass he was drying, about an inch, the way the Duke lifted the hazel stick.

---

Mr Paredes arrived on Wednesday.

He came on an ordinary aeroplane from the Realm, into Heathrow, and on the train to Paddington, and Lucía met him at the barrier at the end of the platform, and Frederick was with her, because Lucía had asked him to be, because, she said, he’ll want to see you and he’ll pretend he doesn’t.

He was a short square man of about sixty with grey hair cut very short and a face like a closed fist, in a windcheater and a cap that said POMONA, and he came down the platform at Paddington with a small bag over his shoulder and looked up, as everybody did, at the iron roof, the whole length of it, the arches of glass and iron going away like the inside of a whale, and the pigeons going about in it like thoughts.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he looked down at his daughter.

“Hm,” said Mr Paredes.

---

He was a motorman. He had been a motorman for thirty-one years, on the Pomona line, in Los Angeles, before the earthquake, and on the same line after it, and he had flown before, twice, once to Hawaii for his honeymoon and once to New Westminster, for a reason Lucía would not let him talk about, and he had never been outside the Realm in his life.

He was not impressed by London.

He was not impressed by Paddington. He said the roof was very nice and the trains were very short. He was not impressed by the Palace, which they drove past in a taxi on Wednesday afternoon, and which he looked at through the window for some time before saying, it’s a big house. He was not impressed by the river, or the bridges, or the Houses of Parliament, which he said looked like a cake, or the Abbey, where Frederick took him on Wednesday evening, inside, to the place in front of the altar where a year and a half ago he had been crowned, and Mr Paredes stood on the spot with his hands in the pockets of his windcheater and looked up at the roof, a hundred feet up, and the light coming through the windows, and said:

“Long way up.”

“Yes.”

“You had a crown on. Here.”

“Yes.”

“Lucía sent me the photo.” Mr Paredes looked at the floor. “With the tall boy holding the cape.”

“The train.”

“Cape,” said Mr Paredes firmly, and looked at the roof again for some time, and then said nothing else about it at all.

---

On Thursday morning Frederick showed him the Underground.

He had not meant to. He had meant to show him the Tower, which was on the list Lucía had written out for her father on the back of a menu from the New Inn, TOWER, MUSEUM, PALACE, BIG CHURCH, PARLIAMENT, RIVER, UNDERGROUND (IF TIME), but it had rained, and the Tower was across the city, and the quickest way was the Underground.

So they went down.

They went down the steps at Westminster into the station, and through the barriers, which Mr Paredes looked at with professional interest, and down an escalator so long that it went down and down into the earth for what felt like a minute, and Mr Paredes stood on it with one hand on the rail and looked at the walls going past, and at the curve of the tunnel overhead, and at the escalator going up beside them, full of people, and down below, at the bottom, coming up out of the earth like a sound you could feel, the noise of a train.

He did not say anything.

At the bottom, on the platform, in the long tiled tunnel, with the rails in a trough below and the black mouth of the tunnel at the end, the train came in. Red and white and silver, round-topped, to fit the tube, out of the dark, very fast, with a wind in front of it that blew everybody’s hair back, and the noise, and then the brakes, and it stopped, and the doors opened, and a voice from somewhere said mind the gap.

Mr Paredes stood on the platform and looked at the train.

He looked at it from one end to the other, very carefully, the way the Duke looked at a train at Paddington. The cars. The doors. The cab at the front, with the driver in it, a woman of about forty, with her hand on the controls, looking straight ahead at the dark.

He did not get on.

The doors closed. The train went. It went into the tunnel at the far end of the platform, into the dark, and the wind went after it, and the noise, and the red lights at the back of it got smaller, and went round a curve, and were gone.

Mr Paredes stood on the platform.

“Eighteen ninety,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“The first deep one. Eighteen ninety. I read about it. On the aeroplane.” He was still looking at the tunnel. “Deep tube. They dug it. A hundred feet down. With shields. Under the river. Under everything.” He looked at the curve of the tiled wall over the track, the shape of it, perfectly round. “They built a railway in a hole in the ground under a city and it’s still running a hundred and forty years later, every three minutes, and nobody even looks at it.” He looked at the people on the platform, waiting for the next train, looking at their telephones. “Nobody even looks.”

The next train came in. The wind. The noise. The doors.

“That,” said Mr Paredes, “is a railway.”

He got on.

He rode the Underground for four hours. He did not go to the Tower. He did not go to the museum. He rode the Underground from Westminster to the end of the line and back, and changed, and rode another line to the end of it and back, and changed again, standing at the front of the first car every time, behind the window into the driver’s cab, with his hands in the pockets of his windcheater, watching the tunnel come at him out of the dark, mile after mile, curve after curve, the signals going by, red, green, red, and the stations coming up out of the dark one after another like lighted rooms, and at the end of the fourth hour, at a station in the north of the city called Cockfosters, which he said was the best name for a station he had ever heard, he got off, and stood on the platform, and took off his cap that said POMONA, and looked at it, and put it back on.

“Right,” said Mr Paredes. “Now I’ve seen London.”

---

On the train back to Gloucestershire that evening, the 16.42 from Paddington, which the Duke had timed in September at two minutes late and which today, by Frederick’s watch, his father’s watch, which he had wound that morning before anything, was on time, Mr Paredes sat by the window opposite his daughter with his hands on his knees and watched the fields going past, green, in the evening light, with the lambs in them.

He had not said anything since Cockfosters.

“Dad,” said Lucía.

“Hm.”

“Did you like it?”

Mr Paredes watched the fields.

“The roof’s nice,” he said at last. “At the station.” He watched a field go past. “The big house is a big house. The church is very tall. The Parliament looks like a cake.” He was quiet for a while. “The hole in the ground,” he said, “is the best thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Lucía looked at Frederick across the table.

“He means the Underground,” she said.

“I know,” said Frederick.

Mr Paredes turned from the window and looked at Frederick for the first time since Paddington. At the King, sitting opposite him on the 16.42, in a jumper, with a dressing on his elbow from Cooper’s Hill.

“You came down a hill,” said Mr Paredes. “Lucía said. After a cheese.”

“Yes.”

“On purpose.”

“Yes.”

Mr Paredes looked at him for a long time with his face like a closed fist.

Then the fist opened, slowly, from the middle, and it was not a smile, quite, but it was the thing that comes before one.

“Good,” said Mr Paredes, and turned back to the window.

---

In the blue notebook, on Thursday night, Frederick wrote:

Cooper’s Hill. Kimura resigned for four minutes. Castellanos was at the back of the room and nobody noticed, which was the point. Theo at the bottom. Darren from Brockworth in a Batman suit. Lucía found out about Jack and I found out about Lucía and Will on the same night at the same table and we’re both the last.

Mr Paredes rode the Underground for four hours. Nobody even looks.

He looked at it.

Then, under it, because it had been on his mind all week, since the depot, since the step back, he wrote:

Castellanos. Three weeks.