The Second Term

There was a card on the hall table of the north wing when he came in from the airfield on Monday the fifth of January, at four in the afternoon, in the dark, with the snow coming down again.

It was a Christmas card, of the cheap kind sold in packets of ten, with a robin on it, standing on a fence post in the snow and looking as though it had been told something it did not approve of; and it was addressed in green to Frederick, Columbia Palace, New Westminster, with a second-class stamp in the corner, a little crooked, and a postmark from Canal Street dated the twenty-second of December.

It had been there a fortnight. Nobody had moved it. Dame M had left it exactly where the Post Office had put it down, on the hall table, on top of where the scarf had been, square to the edge; and on top of it, to keep it from blowing away every time the north wing door opened, she had put the cheese.

Not the cheese from Bridget’s fridge. A second cheese. Bright yellow, rubber, with holes in it, the same as the first, from the Wisconsin Dells.

He looked at it for a long time.

“Sergeant Castellanos.”

“Sir.” Castellanos was behind him, taking off the dark overcoat, with snow on the shoulders.

“Where did this come from?”

Castellanos hung the coat on the peg.

“There’s a shop on Canal Street, sir,” he said, to the peg. “That sells Wisconsin things. For people who miss Wisconsin.” He brushed the snow off the shoulder of the coat. “Dame Margaret asked me, on the twenty-third, whether I knew where it was. I said I could find out. I found out.” He turned round. “She said the card needed something on it. And that she didn’t want to use a paperweight from the Household, because it would look like the Household.”

“Four pounds ninety-nine,” said Frederick.

“I wouldn’t know, sir,” said Castellanos. “She paid for it herself.”

---

He opened the card in the small sitting room, by the fire, with his coat still on.

Dear Frederick,

Happy Christmas. Theo has put your instructions on the fridge, under the cake. They are holding each other up. Peter took one look at them on Friday night and went very quiet and then went out to the depot at eleven o’clock at night, which he does not do, and came back at half past twelve and did not say where he had been. I think he has shown them to somebody.

I said we would be at it until Christmas. It is Christmas. I do not see why we should stop.

With best wishes for the New Year,

Anneliese Hartigan

P.S. February. Mrs Thursby. The dumplings will be ready.

He read it twice. Then he put it on the mantelpiece, standing up, between the clock that had belonged to somebody’s grandmother and a photograph of his father on the dock at Lac du Roi, where he could see it from the table under the window; and he put the second cheese in his pocket, because it seemed to him that it was his, now, and that it ought to go wherever he went.

---

He found out where Peter had been on Tuesday, on the wall, at ten to eight, in the snow.

“The depot,” said Theo.

He was in the dark red coat with the sleeves turned back, and a new hat, a woollen one, green, with a bobble, which his mother had bought him for Christmas because the old bobble had never come back up; and he was sitting on the wall in four inches of snow, on his bag, to keep his trousers dry, with an apple.

“He photocopied it,” said Theo. “Your instructions. On the machine in the office. At eleven o’clock at night. The night man let him in. And he pinned it up on the noticeboard in the canteen. Next to the rota. And next to Mr Dabrowski’s pictures.” He bit the apple. “Of your house. With the flag.”

Frederick looked at him.

“The canteen?”

“Where the drivers have their tea. Between shifts. There’s forty of them on the twenty-two and the nine. And they all go in the canteen. And they all saw it.” Theo chewed. “And they all started correcting it.”

“Correcting it?”

“In biro. On the photocopy. Dad says by Boxing Day it was covered.” Theo took something out of his pocket, folded small, and gave it to him. “He did another photocopy. Of the corrected one. For you. He said you’d want to see it. He said you’re the kind of lad who’d want to know if he’d got the times wrong.”

Frederick unfolded it.

It was his card. INSTRUCTIONS FOR ASSEMBLING THE 22. His line, ruled, from left to right; his stops, his small capitals, PART A to PART J; his bus, with INSERT BUS HERE; his tiny driver with the tiny finger raised, DRIVER (1). WAVES.; and the wall, and the two figures on it.

And all over it, in biro, in blue and black and red, in about forty different hands, there was writing.

There were arrows. There were crossings-out. There were corrections to the times: 0733 crossed out and 0734 written above it, with AFTER THE LIGHTS ON CANAL WERE CHANGED IN OCTOBER; 0740 (APPROX) at the lamppost with NEVER APPROX, SHE IS THERE AT 0739 EVERY DAY, SET YOUR WATCH BY HER beside it, and under that, in a different hand, HER NAME IS MRS SZYMANSKA AND THE DOG IS CALLED BRUNO, and under that, in a third, BRUNO BIT ME IN 2019. There was a new stop, added in red between MARKET and the lamppost, with a circle and a label, PART C½: WHERE YOU SLOW DOWN FOR THE POTHOLE (DO NOT FORGET THE POTHOLE). Beside TURN BUS ROUND at the boathouses somebody had written IT IS NOT AS EASY AS THAT and somebody else SPEAK FOR YOURSELF HAROLD.

And beside the tiny driver at the depot end, DRIVER (1). WAVES., at least a dozen different people had drawn, in the margin, very small, a dozen tiny figures at a dozen tiny wheels, each with one tiny finger raised; and somebody had written over them all, in capitals, WE ALL WAVE.

At the bottom, in the corner, under COST: £0.00. (UNDER FIVE.), somebody had written, in a careful upright hand, in black: Best map of the 22 anybody’s ever made. Lad’s got a future in scheduling.

And under that, in a different hand, in pencil, small: Is this the distant one?

And under that, in a third, in blue: YES.

Frederick sat on the wall in the snow with the photocopy in his hands and could not say anything for a long time.

“Dad says,” said Theo, “Harold’s the one who wrote not as easy as that. He’s been on the twenty-two since 1991. He says nobody’s ever drawn a map of his route before. He says nobody’s ever drawn a map of anybody’s route.” He bit his apple. “He says he’s going to frame his photocopy. For his house. He’s got a whole wall of buses.”

“Who wrote future in scheduling?”

“The depot manager,” said Theo. “He’s never written anything on the noticeboard in his life except DO NOT PARK HERE.” He chewed. “Dad says he stood in front of it for ten minutes on Christmas Eve and then got out a pen.”

---

That was the first thing about the second term.

The second thing was that the school had finished.

He noticed it on Tuesday, in the first hour. He noticed it the way you notice that a noise has stopped which you did not know was there: the fridge, the radiator, a clock. He came round the corner of the gym from Mr Pavlik’s at ten to eight, across the snow, to the wall, and sat down on it next to Theo, and nobody in the yard looked at him at all.

Not the ring. Not the turning. Not the boys by the steps. Not the girls by the flagpole. Nobody.

He sat on the wall and waited for it. He had been waiting for it for four months; every morning, round the corner of the gym, the small flinch of attention going out across the yard from wherever he was, smaller in October than in September, smaller in November than in October, but there, always, the way the pull of a magnet is there even when you are holding the cheese a long way from the fridge. And it was not there. The yard was full of people in coats in the snow, back from Christmas, loud, showing each other things, throwing a few snowballs, half-heartedly, because it was not the first snow and the first snow had been used; and they went past the wall, and round it, and over it, and not one of them looked at the boy sitting on it in a long green and white scarf.

He did not know what to do with his face.

“What?” said Theo.

“Nobody’s looking.”

Theo looked round the yard. He looked at it for about three seconds, steadily, taking it in.

“No,” he said. “Why would they?”

---

It was not only the yard.

In homeroom Mr Abernathy said Hanover in the same voice as Grant, and left the same pause, the length of a breath, which he had always done; but now it was the same as everybody else’s in a way it had not been before, because before, the room had listened to it, and now the room did not. Nobody’s head turned when he said here. Carmen in the front row was doing her hair. Gallagher was asleep.

In mathematics the mathematics teacher, who had said Your Ro in September and Frederick very clearly in advance from October to December, as though announcing a train, said “Frederick, question four,” in the middle of a sentence, while looking at the board, without announcing anything at all, the way she said “Grant, question three,” and went on.

In the library, at lunch, the librarian did not come out from behind her desk. He went to the chair by the window that had had a cushion on it since September, and the cushion was not on it. It was on a different chair, at the other end of the room, under a girl from the ninth grade with a broken ankle, who needed it.

In history, Mr Ferrante called on him.

He had called on him once before, in October, about the frog, because he had had to. He had not called on him since. His eye had gone back to stepping over the desk by the window three from the back, carefully, the way you step over a step you know is loose, all through November and December, through the Four-Year War and the Charter and the Great Lakes. And on Wednesday the seventh of January, in the second week of Chapter Eleven, The Railways, Mr Ferrante paced to the window, and turned, and pointed the red pen, and said:

“Hanover. When did the first train run from New Westminster to Boston?”

The room did not turn round. That was the thing. Nobody looked at the desk by the window three from the back to see whether he was answering it as a student or as something else. It was a question about trains. It did not have his family’s name in it at all. It had Boston in it, and a date, and a gauge, and a man who had come over from England with a crate of drawings; and everybody in Room 9 knew, by the second term of the seventh grade, that if there was a question about trains, Hanover would know it, the way everybody knew that if there was a question about a frog, Hartigan would not.

“The fourteenth of June, 1838,” said Frederick.

“Correct,” said Mr Ferrante, and turned back to the board, and wrote 14 JUNE 1838 in red, and went on; and his eye did not step over anything at all.

At lunch, Lucía did not ask him a question.

She did not ask him one all through lunch. She sat at the round table by the radiator, opposite him, with her black hair in her eyes, and told June about Christmas in Pomona, at her grandparents’, where her grandmother had made forty tamales and her grandfather had eaten nineteen, and argued with June about whether nineteen tamales was a principle or a medical event; and she did not once look across the table at Frederick with the frank, direct, uninterrupted interest of somebody looking into a fish tank. She looked at him the way she looked at Grant: as somebody at the table, who was there, and might be asked for the salt.

He sat with Bridget’s sandwich, which was turkey, left over from somewhere, with a note that said THE SANDWICH (THE LAST OF THE TURKEY, THANK GOD), and did not know what he felt.

He had wanted it. He had wanted it, he understood, sitting at the round table, since the first morning, since the ring had gone out across the yard and he had stood at the corner of the gym and let them look because there was nothing else to do. He had wanted them to have looked. He had wanted it to be over. And now it was over, all at once, over Christmas, while he was in London, as though the whole school had gone home on the nineteenth of December and decided, separately, in eleven hundred kitchens, that it had finished; and he did not know what he was, now, if he was not the thing they had been looking at.

“Freddie,” said Theo, beside him, eating something brown with a crust. “You’ve got that face.”

“What face?”

“The face you had on the wall. When nobody was looking.” Theo chewed. “Like somebody’s taken a radiator out and you can’t stop listening for it.”

---

He decided to be funny.

He decided it on the Wednesday night, in his room, under the wall map. He did not know why. He thought perhaps it was because if he was not the thing they had been looking at, he had better be something; and the thing that people were at the round table, the thing that Theo was, the thing that made the whole table look at him and Mrs Tolliver turn the radio up, was funny. And Frederick had never in his life been funny on purpose. He had been funny by accident, he knew; with distant, and in right of the hat, and the kit; but those had happened to him, the way the bowl of fruit had happened to him, because of the way he was made. He had never once set out to make anybody laugh and done it.

So he decided to prepare a joke.

He had one. He had brought it back from London. It had come out of a cracker, at Christmas lunch, at Windsor, at the long table in the dining room with the tree at the end of it, his father at the top and his mother at the bottom and himself in the middle with his great-aunt from Hanover, who was ninety-one and did not like to be reminded; and his father, at the top of the table, had pulled a cracker with the great-aunt, across the corner, and the cracker had gone off with a small sad bang, and his father had unfolded the paper hat and put it on, without comment, because it was Christmas and that was what was done; and then had unfolded the small slip of paper with the joke on it, and put on his reading glasses, and read it out, to the whole table, in exactly the voice he used for the Speech from the Throne:

“What do you call a man with a spade on his head?”

The table had waited.

“Doug,” his father had read.

And there had been a silence; and then his great-aunt from Hanover had laughed so much that she had had to be helped from the room.

So Frederick had the joke. And on Wednesday night he practised it.

He practised it on Bridget, at the range, on Thursday morning, over the egg. He said, “Bridget, what do you call a man with a spade on his head?”, and Bridget did not turn round, and said, “Doug,” to the frying pan, because she had heard it every Christmas since 1971 and so had everybody, and then she turned round and looked at him with a sort of horrified tenderness and said, “Oh, Frederick. Not that one.”

He practised it on Castellanos, in the car, at the lights on the Axis. He said, “Sergeant Castellanos, what do you call a man with a spade on his head?”, and Castellanos looked at him in the mirror for about two seconds, and said, “I don’t know, sir,” in the voice for gravel, and Frederick said “Doug,” and Castellanos looked at the road, and the lights changed, and they went up the Axis, and Castellanos did not say anything for the whole of the bridge; and then, at the bins, getting out to open the door, he said, very quietly, to the gravel, “Doug,” and Frederick saw the corner of his mouth do something, and be put away.

He practised it on his father, on Sunday, at four, on the cream telephone.

“Doug,” said his father, from London, before Frederick had finished.

“You knew.”

“I read it out, Frederick. At Christmas. At the table. Your great-aunt Louise had to lie down.” The faint scratch of the pen. “Why are you telling me a joke I told you?”

Frederick sat in the chair by the side table with the cream telephone.

“I’m going to tell it at school,” he said. “At the table. At lunch. I’ve never been funny on purpose. I want to see if I can.”

There was a silence on the line from London.

“Frederick,” said his father. “That is not a joke. That is a syllogism. A man has a spade on his head. A man with a spade on his head is dug. Therefore he is called Doug.” A pause. “The difficulty with a syllogism is that the listener can see the end of it from the beginning.”

“Then how do I make it funny?”

There was a longer silence.

“I have no idea,” said his father. “I have never been funny on purpose in my life. I have been funny on several occasions, I am told, by accident, in the Speech from the Throne.” The chair creaked. “Your mother is funny on purpose. Ask her.” A pause. “Or ask the boy from Milwaukee. He is, I understand, funnier than you are, and everybody knows it.”

“Who told you that?”

“It is in Dame Margaret’s note,” said his father, “of the ninth. She says it is the general view of the seventh grade, as reported to her by the Paredes girl’s mother at a parents’ evening, in some detail, unprompted.” A pause. “She says she does not think you will mind.”

He did not mind. He found, sitting in the small sitting room with the cream telephone and the robin on the mantelpiece, that he did not mind at all.

---

He told it on Wednesday, at lunch, at the round table by the radiator.

He waited until there was a gap. That was the method. He had worked it out: you could not tell a joke into the middle of somebody else’s sentence, because then it was an interruption and not a joke; you had to wait until there was a gap, a natural one, when the table had finished something and not yet started the next thing, and then you put the joke in the gap, the way you put a candle in a cake. Insert. He waited through June’s principle about tamales and Gallagher’s account of his cousin’s new dog and Grant going red about a girl in the eighth grade who had said hello to him in the corridor. And then there was a gap.

“What do you call,” said Frederick, into it, clearly, the way you read a question in the game, “a man with a spade on his head?”

The round table looked at him.

All of it. All eight. Grant, and Amira Ibrahim, and Priya with a crisp halfway, and Lucía, and June, and Gallagher, and Devon Price behind his tray. And Theo, beside him, who stopped eating.

Nobody said anything.

He realised, in the silence, that they did not know it. They were American. They had never had a Christmas cracker at Windsor with a great-aunt from Hanover; they had never had a Christmas cracker at all, probably; they had never heard it every Christmas since 1971. They did not know that the answer was Doug. They were waiting, with real interest, for him to tell them; and he understood, at the same moment, with a feeling like stepping onto a stair that is not there, that this was much worse.

“Doug,” said Frederick.

There was a silence at the round table.

It went on. It was not an unkind silence. It was a puzzled one. He watched it go round the table, face by face, the way the field of wheat had gone round Room 9 in September: Grant working it out, slowly, with his lips moving, spade, dig, Doug; Amira Ibrahim getting it at once and deciding it was not funny and looking at her lunch with a very straight back; Lucía with her mouth slightly open; June frowning, as though a principle had been violated but she could not tell which; Gallagher, still not getting it; Priya, who had got it, and was looking at him with an expression of great and gentle sympathy, as you might look at somebody who has dropped a tray.

He sat at the round table and felt the heat come up the back of his neck, the way it did when the room looked at him, except that the room was not looking at him, quite; it was looking at the joke, which was lying on the table between them where he had put it, in the gap, and was not getting up.

And then Theo said, slowly, in a voice of dawning wonder:

“Doug.”

The table looked at him.

“Doug,” said Theo again. He put his fork down. He looked at Frederick with an expression of enormous, delighted, scandalised respect, as though Frederick had just told him something extraordinary about the weather. “A man with a spade on his head. Doug.” His face started to go. “Freddie. That’s the worst joke I’ve ever heard in my life.”

“It came out of a cracker.”

“A cracker?”

“At Christmas. At Windsor. My father read it out.” Frederick looked at his sandwich. “My great-aunt had to lie down.”

Theo stared at him.

“Your dad read it out?”

“In the voice for the Speech from the Throne.”

And Theo put his head down on the round table by the radiator, on his folded arms, beside his tray, and laughed.

He laughed the way he had laughed on the floor of Bridget’s kitchen at INSERT in sugar; helplessly, silently at first, with his shoulders going, and then not silently at all; and the table looked at him, at Theo Hartigan with his head on his arms, shaking, saying into his sleeve the Speech from the THRONE, he read it in the voice for the Speech from the THRONE; and Lucía started to laugh, at Theo, not at the joke, because nobody could watch Theo laugh like that without; and then Gallagher, who still had not got it; and then June, on principle; and then Grant, scarlet; and then, at last, very quietly, with a very straight back, Amira Ibrahim.

Theo sat up. He wiped his eyes with the cuff of the dark red coat.

“What do you call,” he said, to the table, in a shaking voice, “a man without a spade on his head?”

The table looked at him.

“Douglas,” said Theo.

And the round table by the radiator went.

It went the way the yard had gone in the snow; all at once, in every direction. Gallagher fell sideways off his chair. Lucía screamed and put her face in June’s shoulder and June said that’s not even a principle, that’s just stupid and laughed so much that her bunches shook. Grant went a colour Frederick had never seen on a human being. Devon Price, behind his tray, made a sound like a kettle. Priya put her crisp down and put both hands over her mouth and her eyes streamed. The tables nearest them turned round to look. And Theo sat in the middle of it, wiping his eyes, and did it again, without mercy: “What do you call a man with a car on his head? Jack,” and the table went again; “What do you call a man with a seagull on his head? Cliff,” and Gallagher, on the floor, banged the radiator with his fist and it banged back; and Frederick sat beside him, at the round table, with Bridget’s sandwich in his hand, in the middle of the noise, and found that he was laughing too, so much that he could not breathe; at Theo, and at Douglas, and at his father in a paper hat at Windsor reading it out in the voice for the Speech from the Throne; and at himself, mostly, at himself, who had prepared a joke for a week, on a cook and a sergeant and a King, and put it carefully in a gap like a candle, and had it lie there, and then had it picked up and thrown across the table by somebody who could actually do it.

At the counter at the end of the hall, Mrs Tolliver, with her ladle, looked across at the round table by the radiator, at nine people round it laughing so much that one of them was on the floor; and she reached up behind her without looking, and turned the radio up, by about the width of a whole hand.

---

“That was my joke,” said Frederick, on the wall, at a quarter past three.

“It was,” said Theo. “It was a terrible joke. It was the worst joke anyone’s ever told at that table. It came out of a cracker.” He was doing up a shoelace that did not need doing up. “You told it like the Speech from the Throne.”

“So did my father.”

“I know. That’s why it was funny.” Theo pulled the lace. “Not the joke. You. Telling it. Like that. Into the gap. Like you’d been practising it for a week.” He looked up. “Had you?”

“On Bridget. And Castellanos. And my father.”

Theo stopped doing up the shoelace and put his face in his hands.

“You practised it,” he said, into his hands. “On a King.”

“He said it wasn’t a joke. He said it was a syllogism.”

Theo did not say anything for some time. He sat on the wall with his face in his hands and his shoulders going, very slightly, in the snow; and then he took his hands away and looked at Frederick, sitting beside him, in the long green and white scarf with the F on the end, with a cheese in his pocket.

“Freddie,” he said. “You don’t have to be funny.”

“You are.”

“I know I am. That’s my job.” Theo picked up his bag. “Yours is to tell it like the Speech from the Throne. And then I do Douglas.” He stood up. “That’s how it works. That’s how it always works. That’s how it’s going to work. You put it in the gap, and I pick it up.” He considered. “It’s like the dumbwaiter.”

The bell went.

“That’s not how a dumbwaiter works.”

“It’s exactly how a dumbwaiter works,” said Theo. “You put the thing on the shelf, and somebody else pulls the rope.” He went off towards the gate and the buses, and turned round, walking backwards across the snow, past the three tall boys on the steps, who did not look at him, or at the wall, or at anything in particular, because it was the second term, and they had finished. “What do you call a man with a radiator on his head?”

Frederick sat on the wall.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Abernathy,” called Theo, and turned round, and went.