Careers Day

Careers day was in the gym, on trestle tables, and the first table inside the door was the Navy’s.

It had a blue cloth on it and a model of a ship in a glass case and a great many pencils, blue, with ROYAL AMERICAN NAVY on them in white, in a pot; and behind it a young man in a white uniform with a very short haircut and a very large smile, who said “Morning!” to every single person who came through the gym door, in exactly the same voice, as though he had been wound up.

“Pencil?” he said, to Frederick.

He was holding one out. He was looking at Frederick the way he had looked at Grant, who had gone in just ahead, and at Gallagher, just behind: with the large smile, and the pencil, and the voice. He did not know. He had come that morning from a ship, or a recruiting office, or wherever young men in white uniforms came from, and he had been told that he was going to a school in the Columbia District to give out pencils to the seventh grade, and he had not been told anything else, and he was giving out pencils.

“Thank you,” said Frederick, and took one.

“Ever thought about the Navy?”

Frederick looked at the ship in the glass case.

“My mother sails,” he said. “Off Öland. In a dinghy. And Dame Margaret was a captain for twenty-two years.” He thought. “And my father reviews the fleet. Every few years. But he gets seasick.”

The young man in the white uniform looked at him.

He kept the smile. That was the thing. He kept it absolutely, the large, wound-up, recruiting smile, on his face, without moving it; but behind it, Frederick watched him go through it, all of it, in about a second and a half, reviews the fleet and Dame Margaret and Öland and the boy’s face and the boy’s scarf; and arrive, at the end of it, at the corner of the gym, where through the high window beside the Navy’s table you could see, eighteen inches up in the window of Mr Pavlik’s office, a large man in a grey suit with a cup of coffee looking straight back.

“Take two,” said the young man in the white uniform, and gave him another pencil.

---

The gym was full of tables.

They went round all four walls and down the middle in two rows, under the old championship banners from the 1980s, and every one of them was a different career, with a cloth and a sign and somebody behind it who had been sent: the Navy, and the Army, and the Royal American Constabulary, with a real helmet you could try on, which Lucía did, and which came down over her eyes; and a hospital, with a skeleton called Gerald on a stand, wearing a hat; and a bank, with a man in a suit who looked as though he would rather be at the bank; and the Post Office, with a woman with a counter and a stack of forms who was explaining to June, at length, how a passport was applied for, while June took notes; and a newspaper, and a law firm, and a farm, from somewhere in Maryland, with a real lamb in a pen that the seventh grade stood round three deep; and a museum, and a man who made violins, and a lady who was a judge.

Frederick went round them in order. He went round them the way he would have read a timetable, from one end to the other, missing nothing, stopping at each one for about a minute, because that was the way to do it properly. He looked at the skeleton, and the lamb, and the helmet, and the violin, which was beautiful, and the judge, who was very small and very old and asked him his name and when he told her said ah and gave him a leaflet.

Theo did not go round them in order.

Theo had stopped at the third table and not moved.

---

The third table had a red and cream cloth on it, and a sign, red and cream, with a wheel with wings on it, COLUMBIA DISTRICT TRANSIT, and a model of a bus, quite large, in a glass case, and a pile of leaflets, and two men.

One of them was very old. He was short and round and bald, with white whiskers that came down the sides of his face to his chin, in a dark blue uniform jacket with brass buttons and a badge on the lapel that said 40 YEARS, and he was sitting on a folding chair behind the table with his hands on his knees, looking at the seventh grade going past with an expression of deep and comprehensive suspicion.

The other was Mr Hartigan.

He was standing behind the table in his driver’s uniform, the jacket and the tie, done up to the top, with his hands behind his back, looking straight ahead over the heads of the seventh grade at the far wall of the gym, at a point about forty yards off; and he was not looking at anybody at all, least of all his son, who was standing in front of the table, in the middle of the gym, in his grey sweatshirt with the hole at the cuff, rooted to the floor, with an expression on his face of somebody who would like the boards of the gym to open, very quietly, and let him through.

Frederick came up beside him.

“Your dad’s here,” he said.

“I know my dad’s here.”

“You didn’t say.”

“I didn’t know.” Theo did not move his lips very much. “He didn’t say. He went out at half past six this morning in his uniform and Mum said where are you going in that on your day off and he said errand.” He looked at the table. “Errand.”

Mr Hartigan, behind the table, did not look at them. He looked at the point forty yards off.

The old man on the folding chair looked at them. He looked at Theo for a long time, and then at Frederick, for longer.

“That’s him, then,” he said. To Mr Hartigan. Without lowering his voice at all.

Mr Hartigan did not move his eyes from the point.

“That’s him, Harold,” he said.

---

Harold had been on the twenty-two since 1991.

He told them. He told them at length, sitting on the folding chair with his hands on his knees, in a voice like a bus going over cobbles; he told them about the twenty-two in 1991, when it had been a single-decker and the route had gone the other way round the market, and about the winter of 1996, when it had snowed for nine days and he had driven the last bus out of the depot every night with a shovel in the cab; and about the pothole, Part C and a half, which had been there since 2004 and which he had personally reported to the District eleven times; and about Bruno, Mrs Szymanska’s dog, who had bitten him in 2019, on the ankle, at the lamppost, at seven thirty-nine, and whom he had forgiven, in 2021, after a long period of reflection.

“Best map of the twenty-two anybody’s ever made,” said Harold, to Frederick.

Frederick did not know what to say.

“Got it framed,” said Harold. “In my hall. Between the 1996 snow and my wife.” He looked at Frederick from under his white eyebrows. “You got the times wrong.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Everybody gets the times wrong. The District gets the times wrong. They’ve had the times wrong since 1958.” Harold sniffed. “You got the pothole wrong too. You left it out. Nobody leaves out the pothole. The pothole’s the most important thing on the route.”

“Mr Hartigan’s colleague put it in.”

“I put it in,” said Harold. “In red. On Boxing Day.” He considered Frederick for a while longer. “Turn bus round,” he said, slowly. “Turn bus round. Like it’s nothing. Like you just turn it round.” He shook his head. “You ever turned a bus round, son? At the boathouses? With the rowing club’s cars parked all down one side and the river on the other and a man with a boat on his roof coming the other way?”

“No.”

“No,” said Harold. He leaned back on the folding chair. “It is not,” he said, with enormous satisfaction, “as easy as that.”

Beside Frederick, Theo put his face in his hands.

Behind the table, Mr Hartigan went on looking at the point forty yards off. But Frederick saw the corner of his mouth.

---

“What do you want to be, then?” said Harold.

“A signalman,” said Frederick.

He had not known he was going to say it. He had not decided. But Harold had asked, and he had been brought up to answer the question he had been asked; and when he looked for the answer, it was there, quite clearly, the way the answer to a Bill was there, as though it had been there for some time waiting for somebody to ask.

Harold looked at him.

“A signalman,” he said.

“On the railway. In a box. With the levers.” Frederick thought about it. “On the Boston line, I think. Or the slow one to Richmond. There’s a box at a junction outside Baltimore that controls four lines, and it’s one of the oldest boxes in the Realm still working, and it’s got forty-eight levers in a row, and the man in it has to know where every train is on all four lines at once, in his head, without looking, and pull the right lever at the right minute so that nothing hits anything.” He paused. “I read about it. In a book. In the library.”

Harold went on looking at him.

“You want to sit in a box,” he said, “on your own, all day, by a railway, pulling levers.”

“Yes.”

“Knowing where everything is.”

“Yes.”

“And making sure nothing hits anything.”

“Yes.”

Harold looked at him for a long time from under the white eyebrows. Then he looked up at Mr Hartigan, behind the table, with his hands behind his back, and his eyes on the point forty yards off.

“Peter,” said Harold.

“Harold.”

“Lad wants to be a signalman.”

“I heard, Harold.”

Harold looked back at Frederick.

“Well,” he said, at last, slowly, “you’re at the wrong table, son. This is buses.” He jerked his head towards the far end of the gym, the last table on the left, under the scoreboard, where there was a dark blue cloth and a model of a locomotive and a man in a cap. “That’s the railway. AmRail. Down the end. Go and ask the man with the hat.” He sniffed. “Tell him Harold sent you. He’ll know. He’s been trying to get me on the trains since 1991.”

---

The man with the hat was a signalman.

He was a real one. He was a thin, quiet man of about fifty in a dark blue jacket with AmRail on the pocket and a peaked cap, the kind signalmen wore in the photographs in the book in the library, and he had come that morning, he said, from a box at a junction outside Baltimore that controlled four lines, which was one of the oldest boxes in the Realm still working, and which had forty-eight levers in a row.

Frederick stood at the AmRail table and looked at him.

“I read about your box,” he said.

The signalman looked at him.

“In a book,” said Frederick. “Signal Boxes of the Mid-Atlantic, 1988. In the library. There’s a photograph of the levers. And a diagram of the junction. And it says that the man in the box has to know where every train is on all four lines at once.”

“That’s my box,” said the signalman slowly. “That book’s got my box in it. That photograph.” He looked at Frederick with an expression of dawning wonder. “Nobody’s read that book. There were four hundred printed. My wife’s got one. My mother had one.” He paused. “You’ve read it?”

“Twice.”

The signalman looked at him for a long time.

Then he reached under the table and brought out a thing Frederick had never seen except in photographs: a lever. A real one, about three feet long, steel, painted red at the top, with a brass plate on the handle with a number on it, 17, and a catch, a small sprung handle, that you squeezed to release it; on a stand, so that it could be pulled.

“Off the old box at Havre de Grace,” said the signalman. “When they closed it. I bring it to these. Nobody ever wants to pull it.” He set it upright on the table. “Go on.”

Frederick put his hand on it.

It was cold, and heavy, and the red paint was worn off the top of the handle where hands had held it for, he thought, a hundred years. He squeezed the catch. It gave, with a click. He pulled.

The lever came over, in a long smooth arc, heavier than he had thought and then lighter, all at once, at the end, the way a door goes when it is properly hung; and stopped, with a solid sound, a clunk, in its slot, at the far end.

“That’s a signal off,” said the signalman quietly. “That’s a train somewhere being told it can go.”

Frederick stood with his hand on the lever.

He did not say anything. He stood at the AmRail table at the end of the gym under the scoreboard with his hand on lever 17 off the old box at Havre de Grace, and felt the weight of it go through his arm and stop, and thought about a train, somewhere, a long way off, in the dark, at a signal, waiting; and the signal going off; and the train going.

“You want to be a signalman,” said the signalman.

It was not a question. He said it the way Mr Hartigan said Frederick. As a statement of fact.

“Yes,” said Frederick.

The signalman looked at him a moment longer. Then he looked past him, across the gym, at the window, and the low brick building behind it, and the large man in the grey suit in the window with the coffee, looking back.

“Well,” he said, quietly, “it’s a good job. If you can get it.” He took the lever back, and pushed it home, with a clunk. “Nobody ever asks. Everybody wants to drive. Nobody wants the box.” He put the lever under the table. “Tell Harold I said so.”

---

In third period, Mr Ferrante gave out a sheet.

It was the careers day sheet. Every class got one, in third period, after the gym, from a stack sent round by the office: a single sheet, with the school’s oak tree at the top, badly drawn, and three questions, with lines under them, which every pupil in the seventh grade had to answer, in pen, and hand in; and which every teacher in the school had to mark, out of five, for effort and for thought, and send back to the office, where Mrs Lockyer put them in a file.

1. What would you like to be?

2. Why?

3. What would you need to do to get there?

“I don’t care what you write,” said Mr Ferrante, pacing, with the red pen. “I care whether you can defend it. If you write astronaut, you’d better be able to tell me what you’d need to do to be an astronaut, and it’d better not be go to space.” He pointed the pen at Gallagher. “Gallagher. You’ve written something already.”

“Footballer, sir.”

“Defend it.”

“I like football.”

“That’s why. That’s question two. I want question three.” Mr Ferrante turned. “Fifteen minutes. Use your brains. Do not use your phones.”

Frederick looked at the sheet.

He did not have to think about question one. It had been there, waiting, since Harold asked. He wrote it in the space, in pen, in Mrs Forsythe’s loops, all the same height.

A railway signalman.

He looked at it. It was three words. It was the shortest answer he had ever given to a question in writing in his life. He did not add anything to it. It did not need anything adding to it; it was the answer.

He did question two. He wrote about the box at Havre de Grace, and the lever, and the weight of it going through his arm and stopping; and about knowing where everything was, on four lines at once, in your head, without looking; and about the train in the dark, somewhere, waiting, being told it could go. He wrote that it was a job where if you did it right nobody knew you were there. He wrote that he would like that.

He looked at question three.

What would you need to do to get there?

He sat at his desk by the window, three from the back, with the pen, and looked at it for a long time.

He knew the answer. He knew it the way he knew the answer to in right of which Crown. You would need to leave school, and apply to AmRail, and be trained, at the signalling school in Wilmington, for six months, and then go to a box, as a relief man, on nights, and learn the box; and in about ten years you might have a box of your own. That was what the book said. Signal Boxes of the Mid-Atlantic, 1988, page four.

And you would need not to be the heir to fourteen Crowns.

He sat with the pen over the paper.

He thought about writing it. I would need not to be the heir. He thought about how it would look, on the sheet, in Mrs Forsythe’s loops, in Mrs Lockyer’s file, for ever. He thought about Mr Ferrante reading it, at his desk, at the end of the day, with the red pen. He thought about not writing it, and writing about Wilmington instead, and the six months, and the nights, as though there were nothing else at all.

He did not lie. He had never lied. He could not write question three as though it were the whole answer, because it was not; and he could not write the whole answer, because it was not a thing you wrote on a careers sheet.

Beside him, at the desk by the aisle, Theo had finished.

He had finished in about four minutes. Frederick could see his sheet, sideways, across the gap. 1. What would you like to be? And under it, in Theo’s big slanting hand:

Undecided. Possibly a lizard.

And under 2. Why?: Ask my sister.

And under 3. What would you need to do to get there?: Evolve.

Frederick put his hand over his mouth.

He took it away. He looked at his own question three. And he wrote, in pen, in Mrs Forsythe’s loops, all the same height, the only true thing he could find that was the right size for the space:

I would need to apply to AmRail and train at Wilmington for six months and work nights as a relief man for about ten years. I would also need there to be a provision for it.

He handed it in.

---

Mr Ferrante gave the sheets back on Thursday, in third period, marked.

He walked down the rows with the stack, the way Mr Abernathy had walked with the passes in September, reading each one before he handed it over, briefly, and putting it down on the desk without a word. Gallagher got his back with 3/5 - DEFEND THE KNEES written on it in red. Lucía, who had written journalist and four paragraphs, got hers back with 5/5 - TERRIFYING. June, who had written Post Office counter officer and a diagram of the passport process, got 5/5 - ON PRINCIPLE.

He came to the window row.

He put Theo’s sheet down on Theo’s desk. Frederick saw the mark, sideways. In red. 2/5. Evolution is not a career plan, Hartigan. See me. And underneath, smaller, in a different, less teacherly hand, as though it had been added later, at the end of the day: (But it made me laugh. 3/5.)

He came to Frederick’s desk.

He did not put the sheet down. He stood beside the desk, by the window, three from the back, with the sheet in his hand, and looked at it, and then at Frederick.

“Hanover,” said Mr Ferrante.

“Sir.”

“A railway signalman.” Mr Ferrante looked at the sheet. “Three words. Question one. No hedging. I like that.” He looked at question two. “Question two is very good. Question two is about a lever and a train in the dark, and I’ve read it four times, and I’d give it five on its own.” He turned the sheet slightly. “Question three.”

Frederick sat very still.

He felt the room. It was the second term; the room did not turn round. But he felt it go quiet, the way a room goes quiet when a teacher stands at somebody’s desk with a sheet longer than he stands at anybody else’s.

“I would also need there to be a provision for it,” read Mr Ferrante. He looked at Frederick over the sheet. “Explain.”

Frederick looked at him.

He had stepped over this desk for a term, Mr Ferrante. Carefully, the way you step over a step you know is loose. And then in October there had been a frog, and in January there had been a train to Boston, and the eye had stopped stepping over anything. And now he was standing at the desk with the sheet, and asking.

“There isn’t one, sir,” said Frederick. “In the Charter. Or anywhere. For the heir to do anything else.” He thought about it carefully. “The Charter says what happens to the Crown when the King dies, and who it goes to, and how. It doesn’t say what happens if the person it goes to would rather be in a box at Havre de Grace. It doesn’t say anything about that at all.” He paused. “There’s no provision.”

Mr Ferrante looked at him for a long time.

“No,” he said. “There isn’t.” He looked at the sheet. “The Charter makes no provision for it.”

“It should,” said Frederick.

He had not known he was going to say it. It came out of him the way distant had come out of him, in September, before roll call, as though it had been there for some time, waiting, perfectly true.

The room was absolutely silent.

Mr Ferrante looked at him. He looked at him the way he had looked at him in October, with the frog, beside the desk, when Frederick had used his own rule against him in front of the whole class: with something fighting its way up through the beard he was not good at, and the beard not good enough at hiding it.

“It should,” he said.

“Yes, sir. Not for me. I don’t mean that.” Frederick looked at the sheet in Mr Ferrante’s hand. “I mean it should say. Somewhere. That it’s allowed to be a question. Even if the answer’s no.” He thought. “Everybody else in the room got asked what they’d like to be. And they wrote it down. And nobody had to write that there was no provision.”

Mr Ferrante stood beside the desk by the window for what felt like a long time.

Then he took the red pen out of his pocket. He put the sheet down on the desk, in front of Frederick, and leaned over, and wrote on it, in red, at the bottom, under question three, in his large blocky capitals.

5/5.

And under it, smaller:

The Charter makes no provision for it. You are quite right that it should. The mark is for the answer.

He straightened up. He put the pen back in his pocket. He looked at Frederick a moment longer, with the thing still fighting its way up through the beard; and then he turned, abruptly, and walked back to the front of the room, and stood with his back to the class for a moment, looking at the board, at 14 JUNE 1838 still in the corner in faded red from January; and his shoulders moved, once.

“Chapter Fourteen,” said Mr Ferrante, to the board. “The Second Great War. Page two hundred and six. Paredes, read.”

Lucía read.

Frederick sat at his desk by the window, three from the back, with the sheet in front of him, and 5/5 on it in red; and beside him, across the gap, Theo leaned over, one elbow on Frederick’s desk, his head quite close, the way he did it before roll call, and looked at the sheet, at question one, and at the red underneath question three, for a long time, without saying anything.

Then he whispered, quite seriously, with no joke in it at all:

“Lever seventeen.”

Frederick looked at him.

“Harold told Dad,” said Theo. “Dad told Mum. At supper. On Tuesday. That you pulled it. And the man said it was a train being told it could go.” He took his elbow off the desk. “Dad didn’t say anything else all night. He did the crossword in pen.”

He sat back in his own desk, by the aisle, and looked at his own sheet, at Evolve, and See me, and (But it made me laugh. 3/5.); and Frederick saw him look at it for a moment longer than he looked at anything, and fold it, carefully, in half, and in half again, and put it in the pocket of his sweatshirt, inside, against his chest, as though it might be rained on.