The Corner of the Gym

It rained on Monday.

It started in the night and was still going at a quarter past seven, a steady, warm, grey September rain that came straight down without any wind in it and made the gravel outside the north wing door go dark, and Castellanos stood beside the car in it with an umbrella, a large black one, holding it over the open door so that Frederick could get in without getting wet, and himself not under it at all.

“You’re getting wet,” said Frederick.

“Yes, sir.”

“You could stand under it.”

“Then you’d get wet, sir.” Castellanos shut the door. He went round the car in the rain, without the umbrella, folding it as he went, and got in at the front and put it on the seat beside him, dripping. “Seat belt.”

At the side gate the bins were shining. The gym was dark red with wet. The yard was nearly empty, because everybody who could be was inside, in the corridor by the doors, steaming, and the bike racks were empty, and the low wall had a puddle along the top of it, and there was nobody on it.

Frederick walked round the back of the gym. He heard Castellanos behind him, ten yards, on the gravel, and then he heard him stop, at the corner, where he always stopped, and Frederick went on round the corner into the rain, and across the yard, and up the steps, and at the top of the steps he turned round.

Castellanos was standing at the corner of the gym in the rain.

He had put the umbrella up. He was standing under it, exactly where he always stood, on his yard of gravel, with his hands folded in front of him round the handle, and the rain coming off the edges of the umbrella all round him in a ring, like a man standing inside a small grey bell. He was looking at the yard, and the steps, and the bike racks, and the gate, the way he always did. He did not look wet. He looked as though being wet was a thing that happened to other people.

Frederick stood at the top of the steps and looked at him.

It was the second of September when he had started. It was the fifteenth now. That was ten school days. Ten days, at the corner of the gym, from ten to eight until half past three, with his hands folded, with a sandwich his wife had made at twelve when the yard was empty, and a coffee in a cracked cup, and nothing else. Frederick did the sum. Seven hours and forty minutes, ten times. Seventy-six hours and forty minutes, standing on a yard of gravel at the corner of a gym. He had stood longer than that, probably, by now, than Frederick had sat in all his lessons put together.

“Freddie.”

The boy from the wall was in the doorway behind him, with his hair dark with rain and stuck to his forehead and his sweatshirt dark at the shoulders, eating an apple. He had come in on the bus, wet, and was now standing just inside the doors where it was dry, looking out past Frederick at the corner of the gym.

“Is he going to stand there all day?” he said.

“Yes.”

“In that?”

“He’s got an umbrella.”

The boy looked at the umbrella for a while.

“That’s not the point,” he said, and went in.

---

He waved at Castellanos every morning.

He had started in the second week. Frederick did not know why. He came round the end of the bike racks from the front gate, where the buses stopped, at about a quarter to eight, and sat on the wall, and got out his apple, and before he bit it he looked across the yard at the corner of the gym and lifted his hand and waved. Not a big wave. The sort of wave you give a neighbour across a street when you are carrying shopping.

Castellanos did not wave back.

He did not do anything. He stood at the corner of the gym with his hands folded and looked at the yard and the steps and the bike racks and the gate, and his eyes went over the boy on the wall the way they went over everything, at the same speed, and did not stop. Frederick had watched it happen eight times. It was like watching somebody wave at a lighthouse.

“He’s not allowed to,” said Frederick, on Tuesday, at the bike racks, at break.

“Who says?”

Frederick thought about it.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody. It’s just the way they are. They don’t wave. They’re watching. If they wave they’re not watching.”

“He could wave and watch,” said the boy. “My dad waves at people all day. Out of the bus. He waves at every bus that goes the other way, and at the men on the bins, and at a lady on Canal Street who walks her dog at the same time every morning. He’s driving a bus. With people on it. And he still waves.” He bit the apple. “It doesn’t take long. Waving. It takes about a second.”

“It’s different.”

“How?”

Frederick opened his mouth, and found that he could not say how, exactly, except that it was; and the boy looked at him, chewing, waiting, with the patience of somebody who had asked a fair question and expected a fair answer, and when none came he nodded, as if that were an answer too, and looked across the yard at the corner of the gym, at the large grey man with his hands folded.

“I’m going to keep waving,” he said.

---

On Wednesday the boy from the wall walked up to the corner of the gym.

Nobody did that. Frederick had not seen anybody do it, in thirteen school days, not one person, not even Lucía, who walked up to everybody. The corner of the gym was a place that the whole yard went round without thinking about it, the way water goes round a stone; you could see it, if you watched from the top of the steps, a sort of clear patch in the morning, about twenty feet across, with Castellanos in the middle of it. People did not look at it, and they did not go near it, and if a ball went into it, nobody fetched the ball.

At ten to eight on Wednesday the boy from the wall got off the wall with his bag on his shoulder and walked across the clear patch to the corner of the gym, and stopped in front of Castellanos, at about a yard, and looked up at him.

Frederick, who had just come round the corner from the other side, along the back of the gym, with Castellanos ten yards behind him until a moment ago, stood on the gravel and did not move.

Castellanos looked down at the boy.

“Hello,” said the boy. “I’m Theo. I sit next to Freddie.”

“Good morning,” said Castellanos.

“Freddie said it was turkey. On Wednesday. Your sandwich.”

There was a pause. Castellanos’s face did nothing at all. Frederick watched it do nothing, and it was doing it very hard.

“That’s right,” said Castellanos.

“With a pickle in that you don’t like.”

“That’s right.”

“My mum does that,” said the boy. “With beetroot. My dad hates beetroot. She’s put it in his sandwiches for twenty years. He says it’s how he knows it’s from her and not from a shop.” He felt in his pocket. “Do you want an apple?”

He held it out. It was a red one, from the man at the depot whose brother had trees.

“No, thank you,” said Castellanos.

“They’re good. They’re from a man at the depot. His brother’s got trees.”

“No, thank you.”

The boy looked at the apple. Then he looked at the low wall of the gym, the brick one, behind Castellanos, which had a ledge running along it at about the height of a man’s elbow, and he reached past Castellanos, not touching him, and put the apple on the ledge, carefully, so that it would not roll.

“In case,” he said. “For later.”

And he turned round and walked back across the clear patch to the bike racks, and sat on the wall, and got out his own apple, which was green, and looked across the yard at the corner of the gym, and waved.

Castellanos did not wave back.

At half past three the apple was not on the ledge.

---

On Thursday the boy from the wall bled the radiator.

It was the one under the window by Frederick’s desk, the one that banged against his knee, and it had banged all through homeroom on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday while Mr Abernathy read the register, and on Thursday morning, while Mr Abernathy was writing on the board with his back to the room, the boy from the wall leaned down out of his desk and looked at the end of it, at the little square valve on the top corner, and then took a coin out of his pocket.

“What are you doing?” said Frederick, very quietly.

“Bleeding it.”

“Why?”

“Because it bangs.” The boy fitted the edge of the coin into the slot in the valve. It was a ten-pence piece. “It’s got air in it. That’s why it bangs. My dad bleeds ours every September. You open this and the air comes out, psssh, and then a bit of water, and you shut it, and it stops banging.” He turned the coin. “It’s easy.”

The valve turned.

The air came out, psssh, exactly as he had said, quite loudly, so that Amira Ibrahim, in the row in front, turned round. And then a bit of water came out.

And then a great deal of water came out.

It came out of the little valve in a jet, black, hot, as thick as a pencil, with a noise like a kettle, and hit the window, and ran down it, and came off the window onto the boy from the wall, and onto Frederick’s desk, and onto Frederick’s history book, which was open, at Chapter Six, The Coming of the House of Hanover, and onto Frederick, who sat absolutely still, because he did not know what else to do, while the radiator emptied itself across him with the steady, enthusiastic violence of a thing that has been waiting thirty-one years to be asked.

The boy from the wall was trying to turn the coin back. It would not turn. The valve had decided that it was open and was not interested in any other view.

“Mr Abernathy,” said Amira Ibrahim, loudly, with a very straight back.

Mr Abernathy turned round.

He looked at the window, which was streaming. He looked at the radiator, which was jetting. He looked at the boy from the wall, on his knees on the floor with his ten-pence piece in the valve and his face black and wet and his sweatshirt soaked, and at Frederick, at his desk, upright, soaked to the skin on one side, with black radiator water running out of his hair and down his face and dripping off the end of his nose onto Chapter Six.

He did not say anything.

He put down the pen. He walked down the aisle between the desks, not hurrying, and knelt down on the wet floor beside the boy from the wall in the brown jacket, and took the ten-pence piece out of the valve, and took out of his own pocket a small brass key, the proper key, a radiator key, which he had clearly been carrying in that pocket for a very long time, and fitted it into the valve, and turned it, once, firmly, with his left hand, the one with the scar.

The jet stopped.

There was a silence in Room 14. The window dripped. Somewhere under the floor the pipe that ran along the whole side of the room gave a long, low, contemplative gurgle, like a man settling into a bath, and was quiet.

Mr Abernathy stood up. His trousers were wet at the knee. He looked at the ten-pence piece in his hand for a moment, and then he gave it back to the boy from the wall.

“Mr Hartigan,” he said.

“Sir.”

“That radiator has not been bled since 1994.”

“No, sir.”

“Because the last person who bled it,” said Mr Abernathy, “was me.” He looked at the window. “In 1994.” He looked at Frederick, dripping. “Mr Hanover, you had better go to the office and ask for a towel. Mr Hartigan, you had better go with him and ask for two.”

They went.

When they came back, with towels round their necks, in the middle of first period, Mr Abernathy had gone, and the room was being used by a different class, and on the board at the front, under ROOM 14 and MR ABERNATHY and HOMEROOM 8.15 TO 8.30, there was a piece of paper, pinned with four pins, a sheet from an exercise book, with three words on it in Mr Abernathy’s large plain capitals:

DO NOT BLEED

---

On Friday evening Frederick asked Dame M.

He had been thinking about it all week, since the rain. He had never asked for anything on somebody else’s behalf before. He had asked for things for himself, not often, and mostly for books, and mostly they had come; but this was different, and he did not know how it was done, and he spent the whole of Friday afternoon, in Ms Varga’s art room drawing a jug that came out looking like a diagram of a jug, working out how to put it.

Dame M came at six, with the folder, and sat in the chair across from him by the fireplace with her hand flat on it, closed.

“Monday, sir,” she said. “School. Tuesday, your mother collects. Wednesday, Miss Hellström. Thursday, the first Thursday, which is next week; I have confirmed the hour with Government House. Friday…”

“Dame Margaret.”

She stopped.

“Sergeant Castellanos stands at the corner of the gym,” said Frederick. “All day. From ten to eight until half past three. He doesn’t sit down. He has a sandwich at twelve, standing up. On Monday it rained and he stood in it with an umbrella.” He had worked out the next part in the art room. “That’s seventy-six hours and forty minutes in the first two weeks. And then this week. That’s another thirty-eight hours and twenty minutes. That’s a hundred and fifteen hours.”

Dame M did not move.

“I would like,” said Frederick, “if it’s possible, for him to have somewhere to sit.”

There was a pause. The clock in the corner that had belonged to somebody’s grandmother ticked.

Dame M looked at him across the fireplace. It was not the searchlight look. It was a different one, which he had seen perhaps twice, and which he thought was the look she gave things she had not expected to see and wanted to remember.

“That is very kind, sir,” she said.

“It isn’t kind. It’s a hundred and fifteen hours.”

“It is also kind.” She put her hand a little more flatly on the folder. “But I’m afraid it is a matter for the detail, sir. Not for the Household. Where an officer stands, and why, and for how long, is decided by the head of the detail, on the advice of the officer, and the Household does not have a view on it, because if the Household had a view on it, and was wrong, and something happened, the Household would have put him in the wrong place.” She paused. “I could pass it on. To the Inspector. As a question.”

“Would it change anything?”

Dame M considered this honestly, which was one of the things he liked about her.

“Probably not, sir,” she said. “The Inspector will say that the corner of the gym is the correct position, because it has the sight lines. And he will be right.”

Frederick looked at the fire, which was not lit, because it was September.

“Then I don’t know who to ask,” he said.

---

The boy from the wall knew who to ask.

He worked it out on Monday, at break, on the wall, when Frederick told him what Dame M had said. Frederick had not meant to tell him. He had meant to say nothing about it, because it was the Household, and the Household was not a thing he talked about to anybody, and certainly not to a boy on a wall with an apple. But the boy had said is he going to stand there all winter, then? looking at the corner of the gym, and Frederick had said I asked, before he could stop himself, and then he had had to say what had happened, and the boy had listened, chewing, and nodded, as if it was about what he had expected.

“She said it’s a matter for the detail,” said Frederick.

“Right.”

“And the detail will say the corner’s the right place. Because of the sight lines. Because he can see everything from there.”

“Right.” The boy looked at the corner of the gym. “So you need somewhere else he can see everything from. Where he can sit down.”

“There isn’t anywhere.”

“There’s always somewhere.” The boy finished the apple and ate the bottom of the core. “You just have to ask the right person. And the right person’s never the boss. My dad says. He says if you want to know anything about a depot you don’t ask the manager, you ask the man who sweeps it.” He put the core in his pocket. “Who sweeps it here?”

Frederick looked at him.

“The custodian,” he said.

“Right,” said the boy, and stood up off the wall.

“Where are you going?”

“To ask him,” said the boy, and went.

Frederick stood at the bike racks and watched him go. He went across the yard, not across the clear patch but round it, round the end of the gym, past Castellanos, at whom he waved, without stopping, and who did not wave back; and along the side of the gym to a low brick building behind it, beside the bins, with a green door and a window with a geranium in it, where the custodian lived, or at any rate kept his brooms; and he knocked on the green door, and it opened, and a tall stooped man in overalls with a moustache came out, wiping his hands on a rag; and the boy from the wall stood on the step and talked to him, with his hands, for about four minutes, pointing, once, at the corner of the gym, and once at the window with the geranium in it; and the tall stooped man listened, and looked at the corner of the gym, and scratched his moustache, and said something, and the boy said something, and the man laughed, and went back inside.

The bell went.

The boy came back across the yard at a run, and took his bag off the wall, and they went in, in the order of the list, behind Grant.

“What did he say?” said Frederick, on the stairs.

“He said,” said the boy, out of breath, “about time somebody asked.”

---

The custodian’s name was Mr Pavlik, and he had been the custodian at Ellicott since 1987, and in the low brick building with the green door, behind the gym, beside his own room where he kept the brooms and the mops and the big floor-polishing machine he called the Countess, there was a second room, a small one, which had been the custodian’s office when Ellicott had had two custodians, and which since 1998, when it had stopped having two, had had nothing in it but a chair, a table, a kettle, a calendar from a hardware shop and a window.

The window looked onto the yard. Mr Pavlik had measured it. From the chair, through the window, you could see the yard and the steps and the bike racks and the side gate, all of them, and the corner of the gym, and along the back of the gym to the bins. You could see more, in fact, Mr Pavlik pointed out, than you could see from the corner of the gym, because the window was higher, being in a building that stood on a slight rise, which nobody ever noticed, because it was only about eighteen inches.

Frederick heard all of this from Castellanos, in the car, on Thursday afternoon.

“He came and got me, sir,” said Castellanos, to the windscreen. “At twelve. Mr Pavlik. He said he’d been told I needed somewhere to sit with a sight line, by a young man in a wet sweatshirt, and that he had one, and would I like to look at it. So I looked at it.” He drove. “It’s a good room.”

“Better than the corner?”

Castellanos considered this for some time, at the lights.

“It’s eighteen inches higher,” he said.

“Is that better?”

“Eighteen inches is a great deal, sir.” The lights changed. “I’ve told the Inspector. The Inspector came out at two and sat in the chair and looked out of the window for forty minutes and didn’t say anything, and then he got up and said it was acceptable. Which from the Inspector is a medal.” He drove. “There’s a radio. Mr Pavlik says I can have it on if I keep it low. And the kettle works.”

Frederick sat forward with his bag on his knees.

“Do you have to go back to the corner?”

“No, sir. From tomorrow, the room. I’ll walk you to the corner of the gym in the morning, same as now, and then I’ll go round the back to Mr Pavlik’s, and I’ll be in the room till half past three.” He paused. “With the door open. And the window. I’ll see you all day. You won’t see me.”

“Is that all right?”

“It’s what I’m for, sir,” said Castellanos.

They drove past the shops, and the stop, and over the bridge, where nothing happened.

“Sir,” said Castellanos.

“Yes?”

“The young man,” said Castellanos. “Theo.” He looked in the mirror, briefly. “Would you thank him for me.”

Frederick thought about it.

“You could thank him,” he said. “Yourself. He waves at you. Every morning.”

Castellanos did not say anything for the whole of the Axis. The sprinklers were off; it was late in the year for them now. The white buildings at the end had the sun low on them, going orange. At the north wing door he got out and opened Frederick’s door and stood beside it, and Frederick got out with his bag, and went in, and in the passage inside the door the hard wooden chair was standing where it had stood since August, a little out from the wall and turned round, facing the door to the stairs; and later, at six, when Frederick came down to the kitchen to tell Bridget that he had eaten the sandwich, he saw Castellanos sitting in it, by the door, with his black notebook open on his knee, writing, slowly, in small square capitals, the way you would sit in a chair that had become yours.

---

On Friday the twenty-sixth of September, at a quarter to eight, the boy from the wall came round the end of the bike racks from the front gate and sat on the wall and got out his apple, and before he bit it he looked across the yard at the corner of the gym, and lifted his hand to wave, and stopped.

The corner of the gym was empty.

There was the gravel, the yard of it, grey, neat, with footprints in it. There was the ledge where the apple had been. There was the clear patch, still there, about twenty feet across, which the whole yard still went round without thinking, out of habit, round nothing.

Frederick came round the corner of the gym, from the back, on his own.

He walked across the clear patch to the wall. He had walked across the yard to the steps every morning for three weeks and he had never once walked across it to the wall, and he felt the yard watch him do it, a little, not as much as in the first week, about as much as you watch somebody cross a road. He got to the wall. He stood beside it with his bag.

“Where’s he gone?” said the boy.

“There,” said Frederick, and pointed.

The boy looked.

Behind the gym, beside the bins, a little higher than everything else on its eighteen inches of rise, was the low brick building with the green door. And in the window beside the green door, the one that had had a geranium in it, the geranium had been moved along the sill to one side, and in its place, in the window, sitting in a chair, with a cup of coffee, in a grey suit, was Castellanos.

He was looking at the yard, and the steps, and the bike racks, and the gate.

The boy from the wall looked at him for a long time.

Then he lifted his hand and waved.

In the window of Mr Pavlik’s office, Castellanos did not wave back. He did not put down the coffee, or move his head, or do anything with his face. He went on looking at the yard. But on the hand that was round the cup, the right one, as the boy’s hand went up, the forefinger came up off the side of the cup, by about an inch, and stayed up, for about a second, and went back down.

The boy put his hand down.

“He waved,” he said.

“He lifted a finger.”

“That’s a wave.”

“That’s a finger.”

“That’s a wave,” said the boy from the wall, with great finality, and bit the apple. “In Milwaukee that’s a wave. My granddad did that. On the tractor. Every car that went past, for sixty years. You don’t need the whole hand, Freddie. You need the whole hand if you’re on a ship.” He chewed. “A finger’s a wave if you mean it.”

Frederick stood by the wall and looked across the yard at the window with the coffee in it.

He did not argue. He thought about arguing. He thought about saying that a finger was a finger, and that if Castellanos had meant to wave he would have waved, and that the detail did not wave, because if they waved they were not watching. But he found that he did not want to argue it at all, because he had seen the finger come up off the cup, and stay up, and go down, and he knew, with complete certainty, that the boy from the wall was right, and that it was a wave, and that it had been meant, and that it was the first one.

He sat down on the wall.

He did it without deciding to. He had stood at the end of the bike racks every morning for three weeks, near the wall and not on it, and on Friday the twenty-sixth of September he sat down on it, next to the boy from the wall, with his bag between his feet, on the flat stone top, which was cold through his trousers and still faintly damp from Monday, and the boy moved up about four inches to make room, which was not necessary, since there was eight feet of wall.

“Apple?” said the boy.

“I’ve got one. Bridget packed one.”

“Is it as good as this one?”

Frederick got it out. It was a large, perfect, polished red apple from the Palace kitchens, without a mark on it, the kind of apple that is put in a bowl in a painting.

The boy looked at it with deep suspicion.

“That,” he said, “is a shop apple.”

“It’s from the kitchens.”

“It’s a shop apple that’s been to a palace.” The boy held out the one he was eating, the one from the man at the depot whose brother had trees, small, and lopsided, with a brown mark on one side and a leaf still on the stalk. “Try that.”

Frederick looked at it. It had a bite out of it already.

“You’ve bitten it.”

“I’ll do you a fresh one,” said the boy from the wall, and felt in his bag, and produced a second, smaller and more lopsided than the first, and gave it to him, and took Bridget’s in exchange, and looked at it, and put it in his bag without biting it, as though it were a thing to be taken home and shown to people.

Frederick bit the apple from the depot.

It was sharp, and very cold, and a little soft at the brown place, and it tasted, he thought, of something; of a tree, he supposed, of an actual tree somewhere, belonging to somebody’s brother, that had been rained on. He did not know how to eat it. He did not know whether there was a right way. He turned it in his hand and looked at it, at the bitten place, and found the next place he wanted, and bit there, and beside him on the wall the boy from the wall watched him do it with an expression of great professional interest and said nothing at all.

At ten to eight the bell went. They stood up. In the window of Mr Pavlik’s office, Castellanos drank his coffee and looked at the yard.

“Freddie,” said the boy, picking up his bag.

“What?”

“You’re doing it wrong,” said the boy. “You go round. In a spiral. Then you eat the bottom.”

“Why?”

“So you don’t miss any,” said Theo, and they went in.