Freddie

September 2025. Theo Hartigan asks, before the register, whether he is any relation of the Hanovers in the history book, and is told distant. By the second morning somebody has told him. By the end of the first week it has stopped being interesting, and by the second week he is calling him Freddie, which nobody else in the world is allowed to do. The Household dislikes the name and never says so. The Hartigans, four floors up over a bus depot, find out about the friendship when their son asks for a lift to a birthday.

Freddie is a year of a half-birthday held at a palace with a guest list of one, a frog in a history teacher's drawer, the schools' wreath carried twenty paces alone, a nice lady with a folder who remembers the cat's name, a dumpling, a pack of Schafkopf cards, a room divider in twenty-three wordless steps, a railway signalman, a portrait and a grey, four minutes in a corridor with the King, a letter under the salt, and a reply that everybody in the building helps to write except the one person who knows how.