The Partition

“We signed for another year,” said Mr Hartigan, on Saturday, at ten in the morning, in the doorway of the second bedroom, with a box. “On Tuesday. So.”

He said it to the box. He did not say anything else. He stood in the doorway of the second bedroom of flat sixteen in an old checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pencil behind his ear, holding a long flat cardboard box against his chest in both arms, a box nearly as tall as he was, with a picture on the side of it of a room in which a beautiful pale wooden screen in three panels divided a beautiful pale bedroom into two halves, with a girl in one half reading a book and a boy in the other half reading a different book, both of them smiling, as though nothing had ever made either of them want to scream.

ROOM DIVIDER, it said on the box, in capitals. 3 PANEL. EASY ASSEMBLY.

“So,” said Theo, behind his father.

“So,” said Mr Hartigan, and carried the box into the room.

---

The second bedroom was the size of the small sitting room in the north wing, perhaps; perhaps smaller. It had one window, at the far end, which looked out over the roofs of the block next door at a strip of sky; and one radiator, under the window, cream, ribbed, like the ones in Room 14; and two beds, one along each long wall, with about four feet of carpet between them, worn grey down the middle where two people had walked up and down it for seven months.

The bed on the left, by the door, was Theo’s. Frederick could tell, because it had the green hat with the bobble on the pillow and a pile of books on the floor beside it with an apple core on top, and above it, taped to the wall, a timetable of the twenty-two, the leaflet from the depot, red and cream, with the times; and beside the timetable, a photograph of a man on a tractor with one finger raised off the wheel.

The bed on the right, by the window, was Kate’s. Frederick could tell, because everything else in the room was on it, and round it, and under it, and up the wall above it; clothes and books and a hairdryer and shoes and a guitar with three strings and a great many photographs of people he did not know, stuck to the wall with tape, in rows, and a mirror, and a string of small lights; and the mess began exactly at the edge of the bed and stopped exactly at the line down the middle of the carpet, the grey worn line, as though there were already a wall there that nobody could see.

Kate was sitting on her bed in the middle of all of it with her legs crossed and her arms folded.

“I want the window,” she said.

“You’ve got the window,” said Mr Hartigan, putting down the box.

“I want the window and the radiator.”

“The radiator’s under the window.”

“I know. That’s why I want it.” Kate looked at the box. “And I want it to go right to the ceiling. Not halfway. Not like a fence. Right to the ceiling. So he can’t see over.”

“I don’t want to see over,” said Theo.

“You look.”

“I don’t look. I glance. Because you’ve got a light on at two in the morning.” Theo sat down on his own bed, on the green hat. “And you talk on the phone. Under the duvet. Like nobody can hear. Everybody can hear. Mrs Okonjo can hear.”

“Theo.”

“She told me. On the stairs. She said, your sister has a very complicated life, Theodore.”

Kate threw a shoe at him. It hit the wall above his head, beside the photograph of the man on the tractor, and fell on the bed.

“Right,” said Mr Hartigan, as a statement of fact, and took the pencil from behind his ear, and knelt down, slowly, a big man getting down onto a small carpet, and began to open the box.

---

The instructions were in a plastic bag, taped to the inside of the lid.

Mr Hartigan took them out and unfolded them. They unfolded a great many times. They were a single long sheet, printed on both sides, folded into a concertina, and when Mr Hartigan had got them all the way open they reached from his knees to the far wall.

There were no words on them.

Not one. Frederick, kneeling on the carpet beside him, where Mr Hartigan had pointed with the pencil, looked along the whole length of the sheet and could not see a single word in any language. There were pictures. Twenty-three of them, in boxes, numbered, in a row, each a drawing in thin black lines of parts of the room divider at a different stage of being put together; panels and hinges and feet and screws and a small cartoon man in a cap who appeared in some of the boxes holding a screwdriver, or a panel, or, in box nine, his head, with lines coming out of it, as though something had gone wrong.

And arrows. Arrows everywhere. Arrows from parts to other parts, curving, with small numbers and letters on them, C, F, 4x, M6; and in some of the boxes a small circle with a tick in it, and in some a small circle with a cross.

Frederick looked at it for a long time.

He had seen instructions like this before. On the back of boxes. On the inside of the lid of the train set his cousin had been given at Christmas in Berlin, which his cousin had not been able to put together and Frederick had, in an afternoon, on the floor, while his cousin and his cousin’s sister watched. He had seen them in the manuals that came with the things in the Palace that the Household’s engineers fixed. He had never had to read one.

He had drawn them, though.

He had drawn them all year. He had drawn a bowl of fruit as a set of instructions for assembling a bowl of fruit, and Ms Varga had told him so. He had drawn a cake with INSERT. He had drawn a bus route as twenty-three parts and an arrow. And he knelt on the carpet of the second bedroom of flat sixteen and looked at a sheet of twenty-three boxes of thin black lines, drawn from the outside in, in their parts, exactly, by somebody in a factory somewhere who had clearly never felt anything about a room divider in their life and had not needed to; and understood, with a feeling like the one he had had in front of the guardsman on the forecourt in London, that he was looking at the work of somebody who drew the way he did.

“Right,” said Mr Hartigan, beside him, looking at the sheet. “Box one.”

“That’s the feet,” said Frederick.

Mr Hartigan looked at him.

“The feet go on first,” said Frederick. “Part D, four of them. Into the bottom of Part A, the first panel. With the short screws. The M4s, the bag that says G.” He pointed. “You can tell they’re the short ones because in box one he’s drawn them next to a coin, for size, and in box six the long ones are next to a pencil.”

Mr Hartigan looked at box one for some time. Then at box six. Then at Frederick.

He took the pencil from behind his ear and held it out.

“You read,” he said. “I’ll screw.”

---

They did it in order.

Frederick read, kneeling on the carpet with the long sheet in front of him, and Mr Hartigan screwed, with a screwdriver from a tin box he had brought from the kitchen, which had P. HARTIGAN, MILWAUKEE TRANSIT scratched on the lid; and Theo held things; and Kate sat on her bed with her arms folded and watched, and said things.

“Box two,” said Frederick. “The hinges. Part E. Three on each side of Panel A. The hinge goes with the flat side to the panel and the round side out. He’s drawn a circle with a tick on the round-side-out one and a circle with a cross on the flat-side-out one, so it matters.”

Mr Hartigan put the hinges on. Round side out.

“Box three. Panel B onto the hinges. You have to hold it at ninety degrees while the screws go in. He’s drawn a little square in the corner to show it’s ninety.”

“How do we know it’s ninety?” said Theo, holding Panel B.

“The spirit level,” said Mr Hartigan, and reached into the tin box, and took out a spirit level, a long yellow one with a small green bubble in a tube of liquid in the middle, and gave it to Frederick. “Hold that against the edge. When the bubble’s in the middle, it’s straight.”

Frederick held it against the edge of Panel B.

The bubble was not in the middle. It slid to one end. Theo moved the panel. The bubble slid to the other end. Theo moved it back. The bubble slid back, and wobbled, and settled, slowly, between the two black lines in the middle of the tube.

“There,” said Frederick.

“Hold it,” said Mr Hartigan, and began to screw.

He held it.

He held it for four minutes while Mr Hartigan put in the screws, one at a time, slowly, the way Castellanos took stairs; and the bubble did not move, because he did not move, because he did what he did on the balcony and at the chain and in the yard on the first morning: he picked a thing, over everybody’s heads, and looked at it, and stayed there. There was a crack in the ceiling of the second bedroom, a thin one, that ran from the light fitting towards the window in a long curve like a river on a map, and he looked at it, at the bend in the middle of it where it nearly touched the edge of the lampshade, and held the spirit level against the edge of Panel B, and did not move at all.

“You can let go,” said Mr Hartigan.

Frederick let go.

Mr Hartigan looked at him, kneeling, from where he knelt on the other side of the panel, for about two seconds, over his glasses.

“You didn’t move,” he said.

“No.”

“Not a bit. Four minutes.” Mr Hartigan put the screwdriver down. “Theo can’t hold a level for ten seconds without sneezing.”

“I don’t sneeze.”

“You sneezed on the shelf in Milwaukee and it’s still on the wonk.” Mr Hartigan looked at Frederick. “Where’d you learn that?”

Frederick thought about it.

“On a balcony,” he said. “You look at something over everybody’s heads. And then it doesn’t matter what they do.” He looked at the crack in the ceiling. “A guardsman told me. In London. His is a lamppost.”

Mr Hartigan looked at him for a long time.

Then he looked up at the ceiling, at the crack, the long thin curving one like a river on a map; and nodded slowly, as though a great many things had been explained to him at once.

“Mine’s a dent,” he said. “In the depot wall. Opposite the canteen door. At about the height of a wing mirror.” He picked up the screwdriver again. “Box four.”

---

Mr Dabrowski came up at eleven.

He came up in the lift, which he could use before six in the evening without anybody minding, and they heard it arrive on the fourth floor with a clank and the doors open, and then a long pause, and then the sound of somebody unfolding a folding chair on the landing, and then a knock, and Mrs Hartigan’s voice in the passage saying Mr Dabrowski, come in, they’re in the bedroom, and Mr Dabrowski’s voice, like a door that needed oiling, saying I have come to supervise.

He came in carrying a folding chair in one hand and a drill in the other.

The drill was the largest Frederick had ever seen. It was grey and green and made of metal, not plastic, with a handle on the side like a pistol and a long black cord wound round it, and a chuck at the front the size of his fist, and on the side of it, in raised letters, a name he did not know and MADE IN POLAND and 1979.

“For the wall,” said Mr Dabrowski.

“We’re not drilling the wall,” said Mr Hartigan, from the floor. “It’s a rental. It stands up on its own. It’s got feet.”

Mr Dabrowski looked at the feet.

“Feet,” he said, with deep contempt, and unfolded his chair in the doorway, and sat down on it, with the drill across his knees like a rifle, and the grey felt hat on his head, and looked at the room divider, which by now was two panels and a set of hinges standing against Theo’s bed, and then at Frederick, kneeling on the carpet with the long sheet of instructions.

“Ah,” he said. “The distant one.”

“Hello, Mr Dabrowski.”

“You read the paper?”

“The instructions.”

“Good.” Mr Dabrowski settled the drill. “Peter cannot read instructions. Never. In forty-six years in this building I have watched many men try to read instructions. Peter is the worst. He reads them like the paper. He reads the end first.” He looked at Mr Hartigan. “In 2025, when you come, you build the bunk bed. For the boy. You read the end first. It took eleven hours. I sat here.” He tapped the chair. “On this chair. Eleven hours.”

“It was not eleven hours.”

“It was eleven hours, Peter, and at the end the ladder was on the wrong side, and the boy had to climb in over the top like a burglar, and you took it apart again and that is why the boy has a bed now and not a bunk.” Mr Dabrowski looked at Frederick. “Read slowly. Peter is listening.”

“I’m always listening.”

“You are always doing the crossword,” said Mr Dabrowski, “which is a different thing,” and folded his hands on top of the drill, and supervised.

---

Box fourteen was wrong.

Frederick saw it at once, the way he saw a wrong time on a timetable, or a mistake in a Bill. He was kneeling on the carpet at half past eleven with the sheet, and Mr Hartigan had just finished box thirteen, which was the third panel, Panel C, onto the second set of hinges, and Theo was holding it, and Kate was saying that if it was going to be ninety degrees it was going to need to be ninety degrees towards her, not towards Theo, because otherwise the whole thing would lean onto her bed; and Frederick looked at box fourteen, and stopped.

Box fourteen showed the top rail going on. Part H. A long thin piece of wood that went along the top of all three panels, to hold them together, with four long screws, M6, the bag that said K, one into the top of each panel and one into each join.

And in box fourteen, Part H was upside down.

It was drawn with its groove facing up. The groove, a long channel down the length of the rail that the tops of the panels were supposed to sit in, was on the top, where nothing could sit in it. In box fifteen, the next box, the rail was on, and the panels were in the groove, which meant the groove was on the bottom; and in box fourteen it was on the top. Somebody in a factory somewhere, drawing it, had turned Part H over by mistake, between box fourteen and box fifteen, and nobody had noticed, and it had been printed like that, on how many thousand sheets, folded into how many thousand boxes, and sent to how many thousand bedrooms.

“Stop,” said Frederick.

Mr Hartigan stopped. He had Part H in his hands. He had it the way it was in box fourteen. Groove up.

“It’s upside down,” said Frederick.

Mr Hartigan looked at Part H. Then at the sheet. Then at Frederick.

“It says that way,” he said. “In the picture.”

“The picture’s wrong.”

There was a silence in the second bedroom.

Mr Dabrowski, in the doorway, on his folding chair, with the drill across his knees, sat up.

“The picture,” he said, “is wrong?”

“Box fourteen’s got the groove on top,” said Frederick. He pointed. “But box fifteen’s got it on the bottom, because you can see the panels going into it. So between fourteen and fifteen, he’s turned it over. Without meaning to.” He looked at the sheet, at the thin black lines, at the small cartoon man in the cap. “He made a mistake. Whoever drew it. In box fourteen. He drew it the wrong way up.” He looked at Mr Hartigan. “If you put it on like that, the panels won’t go in the groove. They’ll just sit on top. And it’ll fall over.”

Mr Hartigan looked at Part H in his hands for a long time.

Then he turned it over. Groove down. And looked at it. And looked at box fifteen. And looked at the tops of the three panels, standing against Theo’s bed.

“Huh,” said Mr Hartigan.

He knelt up, with Part H, groove down, and lowered it, very slowly, onto the tops of the three panels, and the tops of the three panels went into the groove, all of them, one after another, with a small soft sound, like a drawer closing.

Nobody said anything.

In the doorway, Mr Dabrowski took off his grey felt hat. He held it against his chest. He looked at the room divider, standing against Theo’s bed with its top rail on, groove down, holding all three panels; and at the long sheet of instructions on the carpet; and at Frederick, kneeling beside it.

“Forty-six years,” said Mr Dabrowski, in the voice like a door that needed oiling. “In forty-six years in this building I have never seen anybody find a mistake in the picture.”

---

They stood it up at one.

They stood it up in the middle of the room, along the grey worn line down the middle of the carpet, three pale wooden panels on their feet, with the top rail holding them, very nearly to the ceiling; not quite, about a foot short, so that you could see the crack in the ceiling running over the top of it from Theo’s side to Kate’s, like a river crossing a border. Mr Hartigan stood at one end of it and Theo at the other and they lifted it and walked it into place, slowly, with Frederick in the middle with the spirit level held against the side of the middle panel and his eyes on the crack in the ceiling, saying left, a bit more, stop, there; and the bubble went into the middle, between the two black lines, and stayed.

“There,” said Frederick.

Mr Hartigan let go of his end.

The room divider stood.

It stood on its feet in the middle of the second bedroom of flat sixteen and divided it into two halves: on the left, by the door, a narrow room with a bed in it and a green hat on the pillow and a pile of books with an apple core on top and a timetable of the twenty-two on the wall; and on the right, by the window, a narrow room with a bed in it and everything else in the world on and round and under it, and the radiator, and the window, and the strip of sky.

At the end by the door, where the room divider stopped, there was a gap, about two feet wide, between the end of the third panel and the wall, so that you could get from one half to the other.

“That’s the door,” said Theo.

“That’s not a door,” said Kate, from her bed, on the other side of it, where Frederick could not see her any more. Her voice came over the top of the panels, a foot from the ceiling. “That’s a gap. A door shuts.”

“We’ll put a curtain,” said Mr Hartigan.

“A curtain’s not a door either.”

“It’s a door if you mean it,” said Theo, and Frederick, standing in the middle of Theo’s half with the spirit level in his hand, put his other hand over his mouth.

---

Mrs Hartigan brought sandwiches at half past one, on a plate, to the doorway, and stood there and looked at the room divider for a long time with the plate in her hands.

“Well,” she said.

She did not say anything else. She came in and put the plate on Theo’s bed, beside the green hat, and went to the room divider and put her hand flat on the middle panel, the way she put it on the table, and pushed, very slightly, to see whether it would move. It did not move.

She went to the gap at the end, and through it, into Kate’s half, and Frederick heard her stop there, and heard Kate say don’t, and heard Mrs Hartigan not say anything at all for a while; and then come back through the gap, and stand in Theo’s half, and look at it, the narrow room with the bed and the hat and the timetable, for about three seconds, steadily.

“Eat,” she said, and went out.

The sandwiches were cheese, on rye bread, with something sharp in them that he did not ask about. He ate two. Mr Dabrowski ate one, on his folding chair in the doorway, with his hat back on and the drill across his knees. Theo ate four. Kate’s hand came round the end of the room divider, through the gap, at the level of the bed, without the rest of her, and took two, and went back.

“It needs something on it,” said Kate’s voice, from the other side.

“Like what?” said Theo.

“Like a thing. On your side. It’s just wood. It’s boring. It looks like a shed.” A pause. “It needs a poster.”

“What poster?”

There was a silence from the other side of the room divider.

Then Kate came round the end of it, through the gap, in her socks, with her long brown hair tucked behind her ears and her phone in her hand and an expression of great and sudden purpose, and said: “Canal Street. The shop by the launderette. They’ve got posters. Come on.” She looked at Theo. “You’re paying half.”

“Half? It’s my side.”

“It’s my idea,” said Kate. “If it’s your idea you have to turn up. That’s the rule.” She looked at Frederick. “Isn’t it?”

Frederick looked at Theo.

Theo looked at the ceiling.

---

He did not go with them. He could not; there would have been the shop by the launderette, and the Inspector, and the man in the newsagent’s on the corner already looking at the car. He stayed. He stayed in the second bedroom of flat sixteen with Mr Hartigan and Mr Dabrowski and the room divider, and Mr Hartigan put the curtain up across the gap, on a wire, with two hooks screwed into the wall, which was a rental, and which Mr Dabrowski said was drilling the wall and Mr Hartigan said was two small hooks; and Frederick held the wire.

They came back at three with a poster rolled up under Kate’s arm and Theo behind her with his hands in his pockets and an expression of terrible financial grievance.

“Nine pounds,” said Theo. “Nine pounds. For a poster. Four pounds fifty. Out of my birthday money. From August. I was saving that.”

“For what?” said Kate, unrolling it.

“For something better than that.”

Kate held it up.

It was a lizard. A large green lizard, very green, very detailed, on a grey rock in the sun, with its head turned to look straight out of the poster at whoever was looking at it, with an expression of complete, ancient, reptilian indifference.

Frederick looked at it.

Theo looked at the ceiling.

“Kate,” said Theo. “Why a lizard?”

“Because you were one,” said Kate. “At Halloween. You told everybody. You told Mr Ferrante.” She looked at Theo with deep satisfaction. “You were a lizard. Not a frog. A lizard. You said so. In front of everybody. So you can look at one every night.” She turned to the room divider. “On your side.”

She taped it on. On Theo’s side, the middle panel, at the height of the pillow, with four pieces of tape at the corners, so that the lizard looked out over Theo’s bed at the door.

“It’s half mine,” said Theo.

“I chose it.”

“I paid for half of it.”

“I chose all of it,” said Kate, and went back round the end of the room divider, through the curtain, into her half, and Frederick heard her lie down on her bed on the other side, among everything, and laugh.

“It’s half mine,” said Theo, to the lizard.

The lizard looked back at him with complete, ancient, reptilian indifference, and Frederick, standing in Theo’s half of the second bedroom of flat sixteen with the end of the curtain wire still in his hand, understood that this argument had just begun, and that it was not going to be settled today, or by anybody, least of all the lizard.

---

At four, before he went, Mr Hartigan did one more thing.

He did it when Mrs Hartigan was in the kitchen and Kate was behind the curtain and Mr Dabrowski had folded his chair and gone down in the lift with the drill. He knelt down at the end of the room divider, the end by the window, on Kate’s side, where it met the radiator, and pulled it out from the wall about a foot, carefully, on its feet, so that the back edge of the last panel, the edge that would face the wall, was showing; and took the pencil from behind his ear.

He wrote on it. On the back edge of the last panel, low down, near the floor, where it would face the wall for as long as the room divider stood, and where nobody would ever look.

Frederick, standing in the gap, could see it.

P.H.

And the date. 28.3.26.

Mr Hartigan looked at it. Then he held out the pencil, sideways, without looking round, at the height of Frederick’s hand.

Frederick took it.

He knelt down beside Mr Hartigan on Kate’s side of the room divider, on Kate’s carpet, among Kate’s shoes, by the radiator, and looked at the back edge of the last panel, at P.H. in small square capitals in pencil, and the date; and wrote, under it, in his smallest writing, one letter.

F.

He gave the pencil back.

Mr Hartigan looked at the F for a moment. Then he wrote, beside it, T.H., for Theo, who had held things. And then, after a pause, K.H., for Kate.

“She didn’t do anything,” said Frederick.

“She supervised,” said Mr Hartigan. “Like Mr Dabrowski.” He looked at the four sets of initials, low down on the back edge of the last panel of a room divider in a rented bedroom four floors up over a bus depot, in pencil, and the date. “That’s everybody.”

He pushed the room divider back against the wall. The initials went out of sight.

“Nobody’ll ever see that,” said Frederick.

“No,” said Mr Hartigan. He got up, slowly, a big man getting up off a small carpet, and put the pencil behind his ear, and put his hand flat on the side of the last panel, and pushed, very slightly, the way his wife had; and it did not move.

“That’ll hold,” he said.

He said it as a statement of fact. To the room divider. And then he went out, to the kitchen, to his chair by the window, and the crossword, and did not say anything else at all; and Frederick stood in the gap in the room divider, between Theo’s half and Kate’s, with the curtain on its wire beside him and the lizard looking at him from the other side, and the crack in the ceiling going over the top of it all like a river crossing a border, and found that he did not want to go home.