Flash

The flash went off at nineteen minutes past six, which was the exact moment the floor disappeared.

Frederick saw it happen in two stages. First there was the flash, white, from the end of the bar, where Mrs Merriweather stood with the camera up to her eye and her other hand flat on the counter, the way she had stood at the front of every school concert since ninth grade. Then there was the floor, or rather there was not. Where the floor had been, a moment before, black and white tiles worn grey in a path from the door to the counter, there was a pale and rising sea. It was coming up the cellar steps behind him. It came up quietly, which was the worst part. It came up the steps and over the top one and across the duckboards behind the bar and round his shoes, and it was warm, and it smelled of bread, and it was still coming.

“Freddie,” said Theo, from the other end of the bar, in a voice of great calm. “The floor.”

“I know.”

“It’s going up my legs.”

“I know.”

“Should it be going up my legs?”

“No,” said Frederick, and looked at Mrs Merriweather, and Mrs Merriweather lowered the camera, and looked at the foam, and at him, and then raised the camera again and took another one.

---

It had been his idea to change the keg.

By Monday the photograph was on the wall behind the bar in a black frame, with a brass plate under it that said THE FIRST KEG: a young man in a black T-shirt with EIGHT BARS across the chest, his mouth open and his hands up, in a cloud. The plate did not say whose idea it had been. It did not need to.

The bitter had run out at twelve minutes past six. He had known it was going to, because the pint before had come out of the tap in a series of small, apologetic coughs, the way the Thirty-Two coughed on a cold morning, and Marcus’s mother had said from the till, without looking up, “That’s the keg,” and he had said, “I’ll do it,” and she had looked up.

“You don’t know how.”

“Jack showed me.”

“Jack showed you how to pull a pint.”

“He showed me the cellar as well,” said Frederick, which was true. Jack had shown him the cellar at the New Inn, six days ago, for about forty seconds, on the way to showing him something else, and had said a number of things about couplers and gas and the little red handle, never touch the little red handle, which Frederick had listened to carefully and could now remember almost none of.

“I’ll do it,” he said again, and went down the cellar steps before anybody could stop him.

The cellar of Eight Bars was small and low and cold and smelled of stone. There were eleven kegs in it, silver, in two rows, and a tangle of pipes coming out of the ceiling like the roots of something, and a gas bottle in a cage, and on the wall a laminated card in Mrs Merriweather’s handwriting that said KEGS: ASK ME FIRST. He did not read the card until afterwards. He found the empty keg, because it rang when he knocked on it. He found the coupler on top of it, because it was the only thing on top of it. He took it off, which was easy. He carried it to the full keg, which was heavy, and was where it was supposed to be, and he put the coupler on it, and twisted it, the way Jack had twisted it, and pushed the handle down.

Then he looked at the little red handle, and could not, for his life, remember whether Jack had said never to touch it or always to.

He touched it.

---

“Right,” said Mrs Merriweather.

She had come down the steps. She stood at the bottom of them, in the foam, up to her ankles, in her good black shoes, with the camera round her neck, and looked at the coupler, which was making a high, thin sound like a kettle that had been insulted, and at the keg, which was emptying itself into the cellar through a gap the size of a thumbnail with tremendous enthusiasm, and at the King, who was holding the little red handle in his right hand, because it had come off.

“Give me that,” she said.

He gave her the handle.

She looked at it, and then reached past him, and did something with two fingers to the top of the coupler that he did not see, and the sound stopped, and the foam stopped, and the cellar was suddenly very quiet except for the drip from the pipes and the sound, overhead, through the floor, of a hundred people trying not to laugh.

“That,” said Mrs Merriweather, holding up the red handle, “is the pressure relief.”

“Yes.”

“You relieved it.”

“Yes.”

“You relieved about forty pints of best bitter into my cellar.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“I know you are.” She put the handle in the pocket of her apron. “I’ll take it out of your wages. That’s eleven pounds an hour, and the keg’s a hundred and ninety, so you’ve worked tonight for nothing and you’ll be working Saturday for nothing as well.” She turned round and started up the steps. “Mop’s by the door.”

He stood in the cellar in the foam.

“Mrs Merriweather.”

She stopped on the third step.

“Is that legal? Taking it out of my wages?”

Mrs Merriweather considered this, with one hand on the rail.

“I’ve no idea,” she said. “Ask a lawyer. Or ask the King.” And went up.

---

He had come in at four.

Down the back stairs from the flat, eleven seconds, with Theo behind him, both of them in the black T-shirts, whose invoice Mrs Merriweather had paid and then shown him, so that he could see what he was costing. At four the bar had been empty. Long and dark and narrow, with the counter down the left side and the booths down the right and the pool table at the back, on a slope, so that every ball you did not hit went slowly and with great dignity into the left corner pocket on its own. Ellicott pennants above the booths, faded. The trombone over the bar on two brass hooks, polished, with a light on it. By the door, the class of 2031 on the school steps in June, himself in the middle of the second row, because H came in the middle.

He had stood behind the counter with his hands on it and thought that the eight feet of floor between the bitter and the till were his, for a year, and that he had never had eight feet of floor that was his before.

At five past four the first one had come in.

At half past, there were nine. At five there were forty, and there was a man outside on the pavement in a bright yellow jacket counting people with a small chrome clicker in his hand, and a queue behind him going along Garfield Street past the laundromat and the shoe repair and round the corner towards Ellicott, two and three wide, in the sun, with folding chairs. At half past five Frederick had gone to the window and looked at it and said, “Who are they?” and Kimura, on her stool at the end of the bar, without turning round, had said, “Everybody, sir.”

It was not everybody. It was everybody who had read the Courier that morning, which had run on its front page, under a photograph of the outside of Eight Bars taken from across the road at seven in the morning with the shutters down, the headline THE KING WILL SEE YOU NOW, and under that, smaller, Sovereign to work behind bar near old school “for about a year,” says Palace; landlady says “he’ll do Fridays to start.” It was every student at Ellicott old enough, and several who were not, turned away by Kimura with a look; a man from Ohio who had driven eight hours and said so, often; and most of the third floor of the Department of the Interior.

And at five to six, it was a Cabinet minister.

---

He knew her face. He had initialled four of her papers that week alone, in pencil, in the red boxes, at the kitchen table in the north wing, and she had a way of writing the Minister is minded to at the start of every second paragraph that he had come to look forward to. She came in through the door at five to six in a dark suit, with a young man behind her carrying her bag, and she walked straight past the queue, and past the man with the clicker, who opened his mouth and shut it again, and past forty people waiting three deep at the bar, and arrived at the counter in front of Frederick and put her hand on it, flat, the way people put their hands on the dispatch box.

“Sir,” she said. “A gin and tonic, if you’d be so kind.”

He opened his mouth.

“No,” said Mrs Merriweather.

She was at the till, three feet away, ringing up something for the woman from the depot. She did not look round.

The Minister looked at her.

“I beg your pardon?”

“No,” said Mrs Merriweather. “There’s a queue. It starts on the corner of Garfield and Ninth. The end of it’s about by the church now, I should think.” She shut the till. “You can join it, or you can go.”

The Minister looked at Frederick.

Frederick looked at Mrs Merriweather.

There was a pause in the bar. Forty people in it held their drinks still and did not look, in the way people do not look when they are looking as hard as they can.

“I think,” said Frederick carefully, “she’s the landlady.”

“She is,” said Mrs Merriweather. “And you’re the barman.”

The Minister for Transport of the United Kingdom of America looked at the King for a long moment. Then, with great dignity, she took her hand off the bar, and turned round, and walked out past the forty, and past the man with the clicker, and down Garfield Street to the end of the queue, which was by then, Kimura reported later, past the church and turning into Tenth, and stood in it, with the young man and her bag, for an hour and ten minutes, and at five past seven arrived at the bar again and put her hand flat on it and said, “Sir. A gin and tonic, if you’d be so kind,” and he made her one.

It was not a very good one. He put the tonic in first. But she drank it, all of it, standing at the bar, and put the glass down, and said, “Thank you, sir. Very refreshing,” in the voice of a woman who had sat through a great many things in her career and would sit through more, and went.

Kimura, at the end of the bar, reached out and took the glass, and looked at it, and then at him, and said, “Tonic first?”

“I panicked.”

“Noted,” said Kimura, and wrote something on a beer mat.

---

The foam had gone by eight. It had gone because he had mopped it, alone, in the cellar, for an hour and a quarter, with the mop by the door and a bucket and the door at the bottom of the steps propped open so that he could hear the bar overhead, and because Theo had come down at seven with a second mop and a face of solemn professional interest and said, “It’s a spill. I’ve done spills. You work from the outside in,” and had worked from the outside in, and been right, which was the only thing Theo had got right all evening.

Because Theo was terrible. Frederick had expected him to be good: a bus driver’s son, who could say exact fare, please in the voice of a man of fifty and deal calmly with blood, panic and a vicar in a cake tent. And Theo, behind the bar of Eight Bars on the first Friday, had in the first two hours dropped six glasses, poured a pint of lager entirely into the drip tray while looking at a girl from the junior class, given a man change for a twenty from a ten, and put salt round the rim of a glass of white wine because the woman had said something with a twist and he had panicked as well.

“We’re bad at this,” Theo said, in the cellar, mopping.

“Yes.”

“I thought we’d be all right.”

“So did I.”

“It’s very hard,” said Theo, wringing out his mop.

“Jack’s going to see the photograph,” said Theo.

“I know.”

“She’s going to put it on the wall.”

“I know.”

“He’s going to see it on the wall, and he’s going to call, and he’s going to say rubbish.”

“He’ll say it properly,” said Frederick. “That’s the main thing.”

---

The worst of it was the till.

He was good at arithmetic and had thought he could do the till. He could not do the till. The till at Eight Bars was a large grey machine from a decade before he was born with forty buttons on it, and the buttons were not marked with the names of drinks but with numbers, and the numbers were on a card taped to the side of it, in Mrs Merriweather’s handwriting, which was very small, and the card had been there so long that some of the numbers had faded and been written over in pen and faded again. A pint of bitter was 14. A pint of lager was 15, except on Tuesdays. A bottle of wine was possibly 31, possibly 37, depending on the light. And the price on the card was the price you paid, with the tax in it, because that was federal law, and the English form, who had come in at seven in a single loud group in their navy blazers to watch, had found this so remarkable that one of them, a boy called Ollie, from Evenlode, the one who had thought the Throne looked lonely, had asked for an itemised receipt to send to his mother.

Frederick did not know how to give an itemised receipt. He gave him a beer mat with the price written on it in pencil, which Ollie said was better, and kept.

And at half past nine, in the busiest part of the night, with the queue still outside and the man with the clicker still counting and Marcus, who did not play on Fridays yet, because it was the first one and his mother had said not the first one, darling, let him find his feet, sitting in a booth by the pool table with his trombone case on his knees looking wistful, a man came up to the bar.

He was a large man of about sixty in a short-sleeved shirt with the crest of the Realm’s bus company on the pocket, and Frederick did not know him, but he knew the crest, because it was Peter Hartigan’s crest, and the man said, “Bitter,” and Frederick pulled him a bitter, the best one of the night, with a head on it you could have stood a coin on, and put it down, and said, “Two pounds forty, please,” and the man put his hand in his shirt pocket and took out a note and laid it on the bar, flat, with great care, and slid it across.

It was a hundred-pound note.

It was the only note in the Realm with the sovereign on it. Washington and Lincoln and Hamilton and Franklin and the two Roosevelts had the others, and always had; but the hundred had the sovereign, alone of all of them, and for a year and a half now the sovereign had been a young man of seventeen in an engraved oval, looking slightly to the left, with his hair rather better than it was now. It was the most expensive note in the country. Most people had never held one. It was printed in green and a faint violet, and in the corner, very small, under the oval, it said GEORGE V.

The man from the depot looked at Frederick.

Frederick looked at the note.

The young man in the oval looked slightly to the left.

“I’ll need change,” said the man from the depot, pleasantly.

Behind him, the whole bar had gone quiet. The English form had gone quiet. The third floor of the Department of the Interior had gone quiet. At the end of the bar, Kimura had lowered her glass. At the till, Mrs Merriweather had put one hand, slowly, on her camera.

“Ninety-seven pounds sixty,” said Frederick.

“That’s right,” said the man.

Frederick opened the till.

He had, in the till, at half past nine on the first Friday, the takings of five and a half hours, which was a great deal of money, more than Eight Bars had taken on any single night since Mrs Merriweather’s father had run it as the Anchor, a navy bar, in the 1980s, and very little of it was in the right denominations. He counted out ninety pounds in twenties and fives and ones, slowly, laying each one on the bar, Hamilton and Lincoln and Washington, while the bar watched. Then he counted out seven pounds in coins.

Every coin had his head on it.

He had known that, of course. He had sat for the portrait for the coin in a room at Columbia Palace in March 2029, in profile, for three hours, while a sculptor from the Mint walked round him with callipers, and he had been shown the first one struck, and had held it, and had felt nothing in particular except that it was cold. But he had never had to count them out. He had never had to stand at a bar and put his own head down on the wood, seven times, one pound, two pounds, three, in front of a hundred people, and then sixty pence more in smaller heads, each one looking left, each one looking at the man from the depot with exactly the same slightly serious expression, while the man from the depot looked back at him.

“Ninety-seven sixty,” said Frederick.

The man counted it. Then he picked up his bitter, and drank about a third of it in one go, and put it down, and wiped his mouth, and said, “Good pint.”

“Thank you.”

“I drive the Forty-One,” said the man. “Peter Hartigan says you can’t make change.” He put the money in his pocket, all of it, coins and notes, and then, after a moment, took one of the pound coins out again and looked at it, and at Frederick, and back at the coin. “He was wrong.”

Then he put the coin down on the bar, by the till, and pushed it across with one finger.

“For you,” he said.

Frederick looked at it.

“You can’t tip me,” he said. “I don’t think. I don’t think you’re allowed.”

“Who says?”

Frederick opened his mouth, and found that he did not know who said, and shut it again.

“There you are,” said the man from the Forty-One, and took his bitter away to a booth.

At the till, the flash went off.

---

At closing, which at Eight Bars was a quarter to one, Mrs Merriweather rang the brass bell over the till, three times, and the man with the clicker clicked the last one out, and Kimura stood up off her stool for the first time in nine hours and stretched, very slightly, so that her back made a small sound, and went to stand by the door.

There was a beer mat on the counter in front of the stool where she had been sitting. Frederick picked it up.

It was covered on both sides in small, neat handwriting in blue ballpoint, a list, with times. 6.19: keg. 6.21: red handle. 7.05: gin and tonic, tonic first. And so on, down one side and round the edge and over, through 8.40: T. salts white wine and 9.31: change from a hundred, correct, slow and 9.33: tipped, coin, own head, to the bottom of the back, where she had drawn a line and written underneath it one more entry.

Drinks finished by the detail, being errors: 7.

He turned it over.

“Seven?”

“The gin and tonic,” said Kimura, from the door, not turning round. “Four of Mr Hartigan’s. Two pints that were mostly head. And the white wine with salt on it.” She thought. “That one was nearly nice.”

He put the beer mat down on the counter, beside the pound coin with his head on it, which nobody had picked up, because nobody knew whose it was.

Mrs Merriweather came down the bar with a cloth, and looked at the coin, and at him, and then at the wall behind the bar, where there was a space, at eye level, a long empty stretch of red-painted brick between the end of the optics and the door to the cellar, about twelve feet long, with nothing on it but a single nail.

“I’m going to need,” she said, “a great many more nails.”

---

On Tuesday, the Household’s committee met for the first time in the back room, and its first act, at a quarter past two, after some discussion, was to resolve, on a show of hands, three in favour and one abstaining, that the coin should go to the Treasury, which it did not; and its second act was to adopt Rule One.

Rule One. The King shall not be tipped.

It lasted, by Kimura’s beer mat, until twenty past six the following Friday.