Not Interesting

Señora Ruiz came into the hut at the back of the yard at nine o’clock on Thursday with a large handbag on one arm and a green folder under the other, and put the handbag on the desk and the folder on top of the handbag, and looked at them.

She was a broad, upright woman of about fifty with grey hair cut very short and a gold chain at her neck and an expression of great patience, the patience of a person who has heard every possible mistake in her language made by every possible kind of child and is prepared to hear them all again, once, and then not. She did not say good morning. She turned round to the whiteboard and took the cap off a pen and wrote, in large plain letters:

SOMOS

Then she turned back.

“Somos,” said Señora Ruiz. “We are.” She put the cap back on the pen. “This is the first word. Not hola. Everybody knows hola. Not me llamo. I do not yet care what you are called. Somos. We are. We are in this room. We are the seventh grade. We are going to learn Spanish, together, for a year, whether we like it or not.” She looked along the front row. “It is not a question. Notice that. There is no little hook in front of it, upside down, as there would be in Spanish if it were a question. Somos. We are. We simply are.”

Frederick looked at the word on the board.

He liked it. He did not know why. He liked that it was the first word, and that it was we, and that it had no hook in front of it. He wrote it in his exercise book, at the top of the first page, carefully, in capitals, SOMOS, and underlined it, and beside him Amira Ibrahim, with her very straight back, wrote it too, smaller, in lower case, and did not underline it, and looked at his underlining, and then at him, with an expression that suggested she thought underlining was showing off.

The chair on his other side was empty. It had been empty on Tuesday too, under the supply teacher, and it was the chair that in every other room in the building had the boy from the wall in it. He found that he kept looking at it. It was a perfectly ordinary chair, plastic, orange, with a crack across the back, and it had nobody in it, and he looked at it as if somebody had left it there for him on purpose.

“Usted,” said Señora Ruiz.

She was looking at him.

He looked up.

“Somos,” said Señora Ruiz. “Again. For me.”

“Somos,” said Frederick.

“Bien.” She looked at him a moment longer, a level, patient, unhurried look, exactly the length of the look she had given the front row, and moved on to Amira. “Usted. Somos.”

“Somos,” said Amira, perfectly.

“Bien.”

She went all the way along the front row, and the second, and the third, and every single person in the hut said somos to her once, and she said bien to every one of them in exactly the same voice, and Frederick sat at the front with his exercise book open at the word and thought that Señora Ruiz had decided something about him before she came in, and that he could not tell what it was, and that it was very well done.

---

The photographer was in the gym.

He had set up at the far end, under the very old banners, with a grey cloth on a stand and two lights on poles and a stool, and a table beside it where a woman from the office sat with a laptop and Mrs Lockyer’s list, and the seventh grade queued along the wall in the order of the list, because everything at Ellicott was in the order of the list, and went up one at a time, and sat on the stool, and was photographed, and got off.

Frederick stood in the queue between Grant and the boy from the wall.

He had been photographed all his life. He did not remember the first time, because he had been an hour old. There was a photograph of him on the steps of the hospital in Stockholm, in his mother’s arms, wrapped in a white shawl, with his father beside them looking at the camera as though it had asked him a question he intended to answer later in writing; it was in a frame in the north wing sitting room, and in a great many newspapers, and, he had been told, on a tea towel. Since then he had been photographed on every birthday, by the Household’s photographer, in the library, against the same bookshelves, so that if you put the photographs side by side you could watch him grow up in front of the same books; and he had been photographed by other people, through railings and from cars and across fields, with lenses as long as his arm, until the understanding with the press had been made when he started at Brookside and they had stopped, mostly. He knew how to be photographed. You looked at the camera. You did not do anything with your face, because anything you did with your face would be in a newspaper on Thursday with an opinion attached.

Grant went up. He sat on the stool and grinned, enormously, with his ears very red under the lights, and the photographer said lovely and took it and Grant got off.

“Hanover,” said the woman at the laptop.

He went up. He sat on the stool.

The photographer was a tired man in a cardigan who had clearly photographed several thousand children that week in several schools and would photograph several thousand more, and he looked at Frederick through the camera, and then over the top of it, and then through it again.

“Just a normal face, son,” he said.

Frederick looked at the camera.

He did not have a normal face. He realised it on the stool, under the lights, quite suddenly, the way you realise you have left something at home. He had the face for the Household’s photographer, in the library, which was a face that did nothing; and he had the face for the railings, which was the same face, harder; and he had his ordinary face, which he did not know what it looked like, because it was the face he had when nobody was taking a photograph. He could not do that one on purpose. Nobody could. That was the point of it.

“Normal,” said the photographer. “Relax. You look like you’re at the dentist.”

Frederick relaxed. He felt himself relax. He felt his face, in relaxing, do something, he did not know what, and the light went off, and the photographer looked at the little screen on the back of the camera, and paused, and looked at Frederick, and said, “Yeah, that’s fine,” in the voice of a man who has decided that it is not his job to argue, and Frederick got off the stool.

“Hartigan,” said the woman at the laptop.

The boy from the wall went up. He sat on the stool. He did not need telling. He looked at the camera the way he had looked at the apple, with enormous concentration, and then he grinned, slowly, as if something had occurred to him that was very funny and that he was not going to share, and the light went off, and the photographer looked at the screen and laughed, once, out loud, and said that’s a good one, and the boy got off.

“Can I see?” said the boy.

“You get it Monday. On your pass.”

“Can he see mine?” said the boy. “And I can see his?”

The photographer looked at the woman with the laptop. The woman with the laptop looked at Mrs Lockyer’s list. Then she shrugged, and turned the laptop round, a little, so that they could see the screen, where the two pictures were side by side in a row of small squares, GRANT, HANOVER, HARTIGAN, IBRAHIM.

The boy from the wall looked at Frederick’s.

Frederick looked at it too. He saw a boy on a stool against a grey cloth, with his hair very flat on one side where his mother had flattened it on Tuesday and it had decided to stay, and a blue shirt done up to the top, and an expression on his face that he had not known he had, an expression of mild, polite, total astonishment, as though somebody had just told him that the sky was a different colour from the one he had been led to expect.

“You look about nine,” said the boy.

Frederick looked at the boy’s. The boy was grinning out of the little square as though he had just been told that he had won a large sum of money and that nobody else in the room had.

“You look like you’ve won something.”

“I have,” said the boy. “I’ve got a better pass than you.”

---

He catalogued them.

He had not meant to. He had stopped keeping the notebook at Brookside when he was seven, when Bridget found it, and he had never started it again. But on Thursday afternoon and all of Friday he found that he was keeping it anyway, without the notebook, in his head, with headings, the way you keep on counting stairs after you have been told there is no need.

Devon Price. A boy in his year, from another homeroom, tall, thin, with very clean trainers, who was always behind somebody. On Thursday morning in the corridor outside Room 14 he was behind Frederick, and when Frederick turned round he bowed. It was not a big bow. It was a sort of nod that had gone too far down and could not get back up, and it went red at the top, and Devon Price came up out of it and walked very fast in the opposite direction. On Thursday at lunch, in the queue for the fountain, he did it again. On Friday at break, by the bike racks, again. Each time it was exactly the same bow, the same depth, the same red, as though he had practised it at home in a mirror and was now unable to stop.

The girl in the dinner queue. In eighth grade, by her size, with a ponytail and a tray. She was coming away from Mrs Tolliver’s counter with her lunch on Thursday as Frederick went past with his packed lunch to the round table by the radiator, and she saw him, and stopped, and bobbed. A small sharp dip at the knees, with the tray held out in front of her, level, so that nothing slid, which was, he thought, quite a skilled thing to do with a tray; and she came up out of it with her face scarlet and her friends behind her shrieking, and ran.

The boys by the steps. Three of them, older, tall, ninth or tenth grade, with their hands in their pockets. On Thursday afternoon, as he crossed the yard to the corner of the gym, one of them called “Your Highness!” very loudly, in a voice like a herald in a film, and the other two laughed, and all three of them looked at the corner of the gym, where Castellanos was standing, and stopped laughing, and went inside.

The mathematics teacher. A pleasant woman with a cardigan and a lanyard and a great many coloured pens, who on Thursday, handing out worksheets, came to his desk and said “Your Ro… Frederick,” and put the worksheet down very gently, as though it might break, and went on, pink. On Friday she said “Frederick,” clearly, in advance, before she got to his desk, as though she had practised it in the car.

The librarian. Who on Thursday at lunch, when he went in to look at the shelves, came out from behind her desk and showed him to a chair by the window that had a cushion on it, and said that it was the quietest chair, and stood over him while he sat in it, and then went away, and every time he looked up from his book she was looking at him to see whether the chair was all right.

Grant. Who went red. Every time. At everything. Who went red when Frederick said good morning and red when Frederick did not, and who had picked him in gym fourth from the end because he had been told to, and who sat at the round table by the radiator every lunchtime and turned slowly scarlet, from the ears inwards, over the whole of the lunch hour, like a sunset.

June. Who had said I’m not going to say anything about it and did not, with such tremendous effort that it was louder than saying something. On Thursday Lucía asked him whether the Palace had ghosts, and June put her spoon down and said “Lucía”, and Lucía said she was not saying anything, it was a ghost, and June said that a ghost in a palace was saying something, and they argued about whether it was, and Frederick did not get to answer, which he was sorry about, because there was a ghost, or at any rate a cold place on the second-floor landing that the housemaids would not dust, and he would have liked to say so.

Lucía. Who had decided to ask. Who asked everything. Who asked whether he had a horse, and a crown, and a ghost, and on Friday whether he had ever been to the moon, which he thought was a joke until he saw her face and understood that it was a test, to see what he would say to a stupid question, and he said no, and she nodded, satisfied, and wrote something down, actually wrote it, in a small notebook with a cat on the cover.

Señora Ruiz. Who had decided something, he did not know what, and done it perfectly.

Mr Ferrante. Whose eye went over him every lesson and did not stop, carefully, the way you step over a step you know is loose; who had decided, Frederick thought, that the kindest thing was never to make him answer a question with his family’s name in it, and who had therefore not called on him once in three lessons, which meant that he was the only person in the room who had not been called on, which everybody had noticed, including Mr Ferrante.

Mr Abernathy. Who said Hanover in the same voice as Grant, and left the same pause after it, the length of a breath.

He did not know what Mr Abernathy had decided. He thought perhaps that Mr Abernathy had decided not to decide, and that this was a kind of deciding too.

---

Ms Varga taught art on Friday afternoons, in a long room at the top of the main building with skylights and paint on every surface including the ceiling, and she was a small, quick, fierce woman in a smock so covered in paint that it had stopped being a smock and become something else, a sort of map, and she told them in the first minute that she had not washed it since art college.

“It’s a painting now,” she said. “In its own right. I’m waiting for somebody to buy it. Sit down. There’s a bowl of fruit. Draw it.”

There was a bowl of fruit on a stool in the middle of the room, under a skylight: two apples, a pear, a banana going brown, and a bunch of grapes, in a cracked blue bowl.

The boy from the wall looked at the apples with interest.

“Don’t,” said Ms Varga, without looking at him.

“I wasn’t.”

“You were. You were looking at them like lunch. Draw them.”

They drew them. Frederick drew them carefully. He did not know how else to draw anything. He looked at the bowl and saw how it was made, a circle seen from the side, which was an ellipse, and the fruit sitting in it in a particular arrangement, the pear leaning on the apple and the banana across the top, and he drew that: the ellipse, and then each piece of fruit in its place, in outline, very exactly, with the places where they touched, and the angle of the banana, and a small line where the bowl was cracked. It took him the whole lesson. When he had finished he looked at it and thought that it was accurate.

Ms Varga came round.

She came round slowly, desk by desk, with her arms folded over the smock, and stopped at each, and looked, and said something short, and moved on. She told Lucía that her pear looked frightened. She told Grant that his was very good and that he should stop going red about it. She stopped at the desk beside Frederick’s and looked at the boy from the wall’s drawing, which was of two apples, very large, in great detail, and no bowl, and no pear, and no banana, and no grapes, and said “Hm,” and the boy said “They’re the important bit,” and Ms Varga said “That’s an artistic position,” and moved on.

She stopped at Frederick’s.

She looked at it for a long time. He sat beside it and waited. He knew what she was going to do, because he had been waiting for it since Tuesday: she was going to be unimpressed. She had decided, he could see it in her folded arms and the set of her mouth, that she was going to be the one, the one teacher in the building who treated him exactly as she treated everybody else, and showed it, and she had decided it before she came in, the way June had decided not to say anything and Devon Price had decided to bow.

“Frederick,” said Ms Varga.

“Yes, miss.”

“This is a set of instructions,” said Ms Varga, “for assembling a bowl of fruit.”

There was a pause. Somebody behind him laughed and stopped.

Frederick looked at the drawing.

She was right. He saw it at once. It was exactly that. It was an ellipse, labelled, more or less, and then each part added in order, pear here, apple there, banana across, with the places where they joined, like the diagram on the back of a box that tells you which tab goes into which slot. You could have built a bowl of fruit from it. You could not have wanted to eat one.

“Yes, miss,” he said.

Ms Varga looked at him. Something happened at the corner of her mouth, under the decision, very briefly, and was put away.

“At least it’s clear,” she said, and moved on.

---

He watched the boy from the wall all of Friday, and by the middle of Friday afternoon he understood that the boy from the wall was bored.

He had not been bored on Wednesday. On Wednesday, when he knew, and nothing had gone across his face, he had still watched. Frederick had seen him watch. He had watched Lucía ask about the horse, and June not say anything, and Grant go red, with the interest you give to a new thing; and on Thursday when Devon Price bowed in the corridor the boy had stopped, behind Frederick, and looked at Devon Price with real curiosity, as though Devon Price had done a trick with a coin.

On Friday at break Devon Price bowed by the bike racks, and the boy from the wall, on the wall, with the apple, sighed.

He did not say anything. He just sighed, through his nose, the long patient sigh of a boy who has been shown the same trick with the same coin for the third day running, and went back to the apple.

At lunch, when the eighth-grade girl went past the round table with her tray and her friends and her face already going pink, and Frederick saw her see him and begin, at the knees, to dip, the boy from the wall looked up from his tray and said, quite kindly, as you might say it to somebody who was about to sit on a wet bench:

“He’s not a church.”

The girl stopped. She came up out of the dip with the tray perfectly level, and stared at him.

“What?”

“You don’t have to do that,” said the boy. “Every day. With your lunch. He’s not a church. He’s just a person who’s in the way of the radiator.” He went back to his tray. “Your chips’ll go cold.”

The girl looked at Frederick. Frederick did not know what to do with his face, and so did nothing with it, which was the face from the library. The girl looked at the boy from the wall again. Then she said “Okay,” in a voice that went up at the end, and went away, and her friends went with her, and did not shriek, and at the counter at the end of the hall Mrs Tolliver, with her ladle, watched her go, and then turned round and turned the radio up, by the width of a fingernail.

And at a quarter past three, at the bike racks, when Devon Price came round the end of the gym behind two girls from their homeroom and saw Frederick and began, helplessly, from the neck, to go down, the boy from the wall, who was doing up a shoelace that did not need doing up, did not even look up.

“Devon,” he said, to the shoelace. “It’s Friday.”

Devon Price stopped. Halfway. He stood there at the end of the bike racks, bent at the neck, like a coat hanger, and looked at the boy from the wall, and then at Frederick, and then at his own very clean trainers, and then, slowly, he straightened up.

“It’s Friday,” he said, as though checking.

“Yeah. Give it a rest. Have a weekend.” The boy finished the shoelace. “Do it Monday if you want. But it’s boring.”

Devon Price stood there a moment longer. Then he said “Right,” and nodded, a normal nod, at the right depth, that came up again, and went on round the bike racks behind the two girls, and did not look back.

Frederick looked at the boy from the wall.

“Does that happen all the time?” said the boy.

“Yes.”

“Every day?”

“Mostly. It goes down. After a bit. It went down at Brookside after about a year.” Frederick considered. “It didn’t go away. It went down.”

The boy looked at him, sitting on the wall with his bag between his feet, and then across the yard at the steps, where the three tall boys who had shouted Your Highness on Thursday were standing with their hands in their pockets, looking at the corner of the gym.

“Doesn’t it get boring?”

Frederick opened his mouth to answer, and found that he did not know the answer, and shut it.

He had never thought about it. That was the truth. He had thought about it in every other way: whether it was rude to mind, and whether it was fair to the people doing it, who had been told to by somebody, and whether they meant it, and whether it was his fault, and what his mother would say, and what you did with your face. He had made headings for it. He had never once thought about whether it was boring. It had never occurred to him that it was a thing a person could find boring, any more than he could find the weather boring, or Sunday, or his own hands. It was just there. It was the shape of the day.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never thought about it.”

“It’s boring,” said the boy from the wall, with great finality, the way you announce the result of a vote. “I’ve watched it for three days and I’m bored of it. Everybody’s doing a different thing and it’s the same thing. I’m not watching it any more.” He stood up and put his bag on his shoulder. “It’s not interesting.”

The bell went, the long flat electric bell from inside the building.

“See you Monday,” said the boy, and went off across the yard towards the front gate and the street and the stop where the buses were, and did not look back, and did not look at the three tall boys on the steps either, as he passed them, at all, not even a little, in the way that you do not look at a thing that you have decided is not interesting; and Frederick stood at the end of the bike racks and watched him go, and felt, quite distinctly, that something had been decided, by somebody, for once, not in advance.

---

On Friday evening Dame Margaret Roper came to the north wing sitting room at six with her folder, as she had come every Friday at six since he could remember, to go through the next week.

She was a tall woman of fifty-five with grey hair cut short and a straight back, who had been Master of the Household since he was three, and a captain in the Navy for twenty-two years before that, and who still walked as though the floor might at any moment pitch, and she sat down in the chair across from him by the fireplace with the folder on her knee and her hand flat on it, closed, the way she always did, and did not open it.

“Monday, sir,” she said. “School. Your mother collects on Tuesday. Wednesday, Miss Hellström at five, Swedish. Thursday, the Governor-General’s office has asked whether the first Thursday in October will be convenient as usual, and I have said yes. Friday, Mr Lorimer at four, your hair, because your mother has views.” She paused. “And Sunday, at four, as always, your father.”

“Yes.”

“Is there anything, sir, for next week, that the Household should know?”

He thought about it. There was the photograph, on Monday, on the pass, in which he looked about nine. There was a man at the side gate called Mr Obi who wrote his name on a clipboard every afternoon. There was a yard of gravel at the corner of the gym, and a cup with a crack in it, and a sandwich with a pickle in it that the man who ate it did not care for. There was a boy who said Devon, it’s Friday.

“No,” he said.

Dame M looked at him. She had a way of looking at him that went straight through whatever he had said and out the other side, the way a searchlight goes through fog, and she did it now, for about three seconds.

“And the week, sir?” she said. “Your first week. How was it?”

Frederick thought about it properly. He thought about all of it: Mrs Lockyer, and the radiators, and distant, and Lucía’s hands, and the field of wheat, and somos, and the stool, and the cushion on the librarian’s chair, and Devon Price, and the bowl of fruit, and a girl coming up out of a curtsey with her tray perfectly level, staring, and saying okay.

“It wasn’t interesting,” he said.

Dame M did not move.

“Not interesting, sir?”

“No. It was at first. On Tuesday. And on Wednesday. And on Thursday it was very interesting.” He considered. “And then on Friday it stopped.”

There was a pause. In the corner the clock that had belonged to somebody’s grandmother ticked. Dame M looked at him across the fireplace with her hand flat on the closed folder, and he watched her try to decide whether this was a thing that the Master of the Household ought to be alarmed about, and he saw that she could not tell, and he had never in his life seen Dame Margaret Roper not able to tell.

“Is that,” she said, carefully, “good, sir?”

Frederick thought about the boy from the wall, standing up with his bag, announcing the result of a vote.

“Yes,” he said. “I think it’s the best thing that’s ever happened.”

Dame M looked at him a moment longer. Then she took a pen out of the pocket of her jacket, and, without opening the folder, wrote something on the outside of it, on the cover, very small, in the corner, where he could not read it upside down; and put the pen away; and stood up.

“Thank you, sir,” she said. “Good night.”

“Good night, Dame Margaret.”

She went to the door. She stopped there, with her hand on it, and did not turn round.

“Bridget asks,” she said, to the door, “whether you ate the sandwich.”

“Every day.”

“I’ll tell her,” said Dame M, and went out, and shut the door behind her very quietly, the way you shut a door on somebody who is asleep.