Road March

Theo had been waiting two and a half years.

He had been waiting since the autumn of 2029, when Mr Szabo, the Household tailor, had measured him in the long gallery at Columbia Palace for the short dark blue coat of a Page of Honour, and had shown him the drawings, and Theo had looked at the drawings, at the hat, which had a plume on it, white, about a foot high, and had taken a pen out of his pocket and written across the bottom of the drawing, in capitals, CONDITION: NO FEATHERS, and underlined it twice, and Dame M had looked at it and taken an inch off the coat and the hat off the drawing altogether, and he had never worn a feather in his life.

He had been waiting, Frederick now understood, for exactly this.

“It’s a costume,” said Theo, on the Saturday afternoon, in the hotel, holding out a garment bag. “For the road march. Everybody in the band wears one. You have to. It’s the band’s rule. Mrs Merriweather said, and the Household said, and the band said, and I said I’d choose.” He held the garment bag a little further out. “So I chose.”

Frederick looked at the garment bag.

“What’s in it?”

“A costume,” said Theo, with an expression of perfect innocence that Frederick had last seen on his face in 2025, in seventh grade, when Theo had put a frog in Mr Ferrante’s desk drawer and denied it for three years.

Frederick unzipped the bag.

---

There were feathers.

There were, Kimura counted that evening, with a professional thoroughness that Frederick felt was unnecessary, three hundred and eighty of them. They were red and gold and orange and purple, and they were mostly attached to a frame that went on the back, a sort of enormous fan, like the tail of a peacock that had been told it was going to a wedding, which stood up behind him about four feet above the top of his head and spread out on either side about three feet each way. The rest were on a headdress, which was a band of gold sequins with a fountain of red and gold feathers coming out of the top of it, another two feet. There was a waistcoat, gold, sequinned, with nothing much under it. There were gold trousers. There were, on the sides of the trousers, from the hip to the ankle, more feathers.

“Theo,” said Frederick.

“It’s the band’s colours,” said Theo. “Red and gold. It’s called Sun Rising. Everybody in the section’s got one.” He paused. “Yours has the most feathers. Because you’re the King.”

“Did you ask for that?”

“I asked,” said Theo, “for all the feathers.”

Frederick held the headdress up. A single red feather detached itself from the fountain and floated slowly down onto the carpet of the hotel room.

“Condition: no feathers,” he said.

“That was my condition,” said Theo. “For my coat.” And then, unable to keep it in any longer, he sat down on the end of the bed and laughed so hard that he had to put his head between his knees, and Frederick stood in the middle of the room holding a headdress of three hundred and eighty feathers and found that he was laughing as well, and could not stop, and Kimura, in the doorway, looked at both of them with no expression at all.

“Sergeant,” said Frederick, when he could. “What are you wearing?”

“A suit, sir.”

“The band’s rule,” said Theo, from between his knees. “Everybody in the section.”

Kimura looked at Theo.

“I’m not in the section,” she said.

“You are if you’re on the truck,” said Theo, and held out a second, smaller garment bag.

---

The bar was a truck.

That was the thing that nobody in the Household had fully understood until the Saturday, when the band’s organiser, a vast cheerful woman called Mrs Clarke who had run the Sun Rising band for twenty-two years, showed them. A Carnival band on the road march was three thousand people in costume, dancing, behind a truck with a sound system on it the size of a house, which played soca at a volume that you did not hear so much as wear. Behind the sound truck, in the middle of the band, was a second truck. The second truck was the bar. It was an open flatbed lorry with a canopy over it and a counter round three sides and coolers full of ice and rum and beer and bottled water stacked to the roof, and it moved, with the band, at walking pace, for eleven miles, from the National Stadium up through the city to Half Way Tree and back, from nine in the morning until dusk, and the people in the band came up to the counter as it moved, dancing, and bought drinks, and danced away.

“You serve from the back,” said Mrs Clarke. “While it moves. You don’t stop. The band doesn’t stop. If you stop, three thousand people walk into the back of you.”

“How fast does it go?”

“As fast as the band dances,” said Mrs Clarke. “Which depends on the music.” She looked at the King in his three hundred and eighty feathers, which he had put on to show her, and which went up past the top of the canopy, so that the headdress had to be taken off and put on again every time he moved from one end of the counter to the other. “You’ll want to take that off.”

“Can I?”

“No,” said Mrs Clarke. “It’s the band’s rule.”

---

It was ninety-one degrees at nine in the morning on Sunday the twenty-fifth of April in the car park of the National Stadium, and the sound truck started, and the noise hit him like a wall falling over, and three thousand people in red and gold began, all at once, to move.

He was on the back of the bar truck in his feathers, behind the counter, with Theo beside him in a costume of his own choosing, which had, Frederick noticed with bitterness, no feathers at all, and was a pair of gold shorts and a red sequinned waistcoat and a pair of sunglasses, and at the far end of the truck, behind the coolers, in a gold sequinned waistcoat and red trousers and a headdress of exactly eleven feathers, which she had negotiated down from forty in a conversation with Theo the night before that Frederick had not been allowed to hear, sat Kimura, on an upturned crate, with a bottle of water, perfectly upright, perfectly still, looking at the crowd.

“Sergeant,” said Frederick.

“Don’t, sir.”

“You look.”

“Don’t,” said Kimura.

The truck moved.

---

He served rum.

He served rum punch, mostly, which came in a cooler the size of a bath, red, sweet, with lime and nutmeg in it and a great deal of rum, ladled into plastic cups, and he served beer from the coolers, and bottles of water, and rum with grapefruit soda, which he had never heard of and served wrong four times before a woman in a costume of blue feathers leaned over the counter and showed him. He served them to people who were dancing. That was the hardest part. You could not take an order from somebody who was dancing. You could not hear an order over the sound truck. People came up to the counter of the bar truck as it moved and held up fingers, two, three, and pointed at the rum punch or the beer, and put money on the counter, Caribbean dollars, coins with his head on them, and he gave them the drinks and they took them and danced away, and the truck moved on, at the speed of the band, which was the speed of the music, which was, by eleven in the morning, quite fast.

He was terrible at it.

He spilled more rum punch on the King of fourteen countries’ gold sequinned waistcoat than he served. He gave a man a bottle of water who had held up two fingers for two rum punches, and the man looked at the water and at him and then at the feathers and laughed so hard he had to stop dancing, and three hundred people walked into the back of him. He lost the headdress twice, once to a low branch on a tree on the road up to Half Way Tree, where it hung for a moment, red and gold, like a strange bird, until Theo climbed onto the counter of a moving truck and got it back, to a cheer from about four thousand people, and once to the wind, which took it off the back of the truck and into the band, where it was passed forward, hand to hand, over three hundred heads, dancing, and handed back up onto the truck by a girl of about twelve, who said you dropped your crown, and was given a bottle of water.

He did not stop. The band did not stop. The truck did not stop.

At one o’clock, at Half Way Tree, at the top of the route, where the road march turned round and started back, the truck slowed and the sound truck ahead of it turned off its sound for one minute, the only minute of silence in eleven miles, and in the silence Mrs Clarke climbed onto the back of the bar truck and took the microphone and said, to three thousand people in red and gold in the road, ladies and gentlemen, His Majesty is going to have a rum.

Mr Quennell, who was walking beside the truck in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and a sun hat, because he had refused a costume and had been allowed to refuse on the grounds that he was an official observer, said, very loudly, it’s not television.

“It’s not television,” Mrs Clarke agreed. “It’s Carnival.”

She poured him a rum. It was a small glass, clear, of something white, that smelled, when he lifted it, like a gas station that had been set on fire in a sugar plantation. It was overproof, she said, sixty-three per cent, the island’s own, and you drank it neat, in one go, and then you made a face, and then everybody cheered.

He looked at it.

He thought about Soho, and Phoenix, and Ottawa, and the face that had folded up like a paper bag on three television channels. He thought about the Speyside and the drop of water, and the Islay and the beach at night, and the Fife, which was not the best, and was good. He thought about Rennie saying that’s the first time I’ve seen you like something that wasn’t on the schedule.

He did not drink it in one go.

He put it under his nose, the way Rennie had shown him. He breathed. Behind the gas station and the burning sugar there was something else, very faint, bananas, or something like bananas, and molasses, and something like the sea.

He drank it slowly. He held it in his mouth. He swallowed, and breathed out through his nose, and it went down like a lit match and stayed in his chest like a coal, and his eyes watered, and his face did not fold.

He put the glass down on the counter of the bar truck.

“Bananas,” he said, to Mrs Clarke.

Mrs Clarke looked at him for a long moment.

Then she lifted the microphone, and said, to three thousand people in the road at Half Way Tree, he says bananas, and three thousand people in red and gold, who had expected a face, and had got a King in three hundred and eighty feathers saying bananas, did not cheer. They laughed. They laughed so hard and so long and so all at once that the sound truck ahead of them, which was supposed to have come back on after one minute, did not come back on for four, because the DJ was laughing as well.

Then it came back on, and the truck moved, and the band danced, and they went back down the hill.

---

At dusk, in the car park of the National Stadium, at the end of eleven miles, the truck stopped.

He climbed down off it. He had been on it for nine hours. He was soaked through with rum punch and sweat and the sequins on the waistcoat had come off in patches and he had lost, by Kimura’s count, which she had kept all day on the back of a cardboard box from the coolers, a hundred and nine of his three hundred and eighty feathers, and the headdress was bent, and his feet hurt more than they had ever hurt in his life, more than at Trooping, more than on the Back Walk at Stirling, and he stood in the car park in the evening light with three thousand people going home around him in red and gold, and found that he was happier than he could ever remember being.

Theo climbed down beside him.

“Condition,” said Theo, “met.”

Kimura climbed down after them, last, from behind the coolers, in her gold waistcoat and her red trousers and her headdress of eleven feathers, all eleven of which were, Frederick noticed, still in it.

“Sergeant,” said Frederick. “You didn’t lose any.”

“No, sir.”

“How?”

Kimura looked at him, in the dusk, in the car park of the National Stadium in Kingston, in eleven red and gold feathers, with no expression at all.

“I didn’t move,” she said.

On Tuesday, in the back room of Eight Bars, a photograph of the King in three hundred and eighty feathers on the back of a truck went up on the wall, between the cricket ball in its glass box and the Duke in his apron. Mrs Merriweather had to put two nails in for it, because the frame was so big. Mr Quennell, at the table, proposed Rule Seventeen, which was that the Page of Honour shall not choose the Sovereign’s costume, and the committee carried it, three to one, Bridget voting against, on the grounds that it was the best photograph on the wall.

Kimura’s own photograph, in eleven feathers, did not go on the wall. Kimura had seen to that. But there was a copy, small, in a frame, which nobody was supposed to know about, on the shelf above the kettle in the flat upstairs, beside the Monday cup, and Theo dusted it every Sunday, and did not say anything, and neither did Frederick.