Uppsala

His mother rang at four minutes to six, which meant that she had meant to ring at six.

He was in bed. The alarm had gone at twenty to, as it had gone every morning since the twenty-first of August, with the word BUTTE across the top of the screen in capitals, and he had put his thumb on it without opening his eyes, and it had given him nine minutes, and then another nine, and the second nine were very nearly up when the screen lit again with a different word.

Mamma.

He answered on the first ring.

“You are in bed,” said his mother, in Swedish.

“I’m not.”

“You are. You answered at once. On the hill you answer on the fourth ring, and you are out of breath, and you tell me you are fine before I have asked.” There was a pause, very slight. “Good morning, Fredde.”

“Good morning.” He sat up. “Hang on. Tyler’s asleep.”

Tyler was asleep at his desk. He was sitting in the chair with his headphones on and his arms folded on the desk and his face on his arms, and on the two screens in front of him it was snowing, as it had been snowing since August, on a dark forest, and in the middle of the forest a fire was burning in a ring of small hooded figures, and somebody in Finland was keeping it going. Frederick got out of bed and went past him in his T-shirt and his shorts and his bare feet, and out into the corridor, and shut the door on the snow.

“Where are you going?” said his mother.

“Somewhere I can talk.”

“You can talk in the corridor.”

“Not in this corridor.”

---

He went to the stairs, because the stairs were where he went. There was a girl from the second floor on the landing in a dressing gown, crying quietly into a telephone, who looked up at him and then away, and he went on down past her, all the way, to the one place in Palo Verde Hall where nobody would be at six in the morning, which was the laundry room in the basement, because nobody in Palo Verde Hall did laundry before noon on principle.

Sam Oyelaran was in the laundry room.

He was standing at the folding table in a grey T-shirt with his reading glasses on, folding T-shirts into squares of exactly the same size and putting them one on top of another in a stack that would not have moved in a wind. He looked up when the door opened. He looked at Frederick, and at the telephone at his ear, and without saying anything he took a pair of earbuds out of his pocket and put them in his ears, one and then the other, and put the end of the cable back in his pocket, where it was connected, Frederick happened to know, to nothing at all.

Then he went back to folding.

Frederick sat down on the floor with his back against a washing machine. It was warm. In the corner, one of the dryers was going round, slowly, with a single red sock in it.

“I’m here,” he said.

“Good,” said his mother. “I have something to read to you. It is from the Court. It is four pages long, and I would like to read all four of them before you say anything.”

“Is it Uppsala?”

“It is four pages, Fredde.”

---

She read it in the voice she used for papers.

He had heard the voice all his life, through doors. It was her ordinary voice with everything taken out of it that was hers: the low unhurried pitch was still there, and the Swedish was still hers, Stockholm Swedish, the vowels long and the consonants put down carefully, like cups; but it had no opinion in it, none, about anything, and it moved through the sentences at a steady pace like a ship going through ice, without slowing at the hard parts or speeding at the easy ones.

The Court respectfully recalls that the course of formation for His Royal Highness the Crown Prince, published in 2026, was to begin on the completion of His Royal Highness’s schooling, and observes that it has now waited for two years and four months, with great patience.

“Great patience,” said Frederick.

“You said you would let me read it.”

“Sorry.”

The spring term at Uppsala begins in the middle of January. The Court has identified rooms near the castle, of an ordinary kind, with a room adjoining for an officer of the Court. Kalmar nation, to which the Duke of Öland would by custom belong, Öland being in Kalmar county, has written to say that it would be honoured. A term at Karlskrona would follow. The municipality in the north which His Royal Highness indicated as a boy has written to say that it has a very good school and a very poor road, and that it would welcome him to either.

He laughed. He could not help it. Across the room, Sam folded a T-shirt with tremendous concentration and did not hear him laugh.

The Government has been consulted and concurs. Having regard to Her Majesty’s health, the Court considers that the course should not be further deferred.

His mother read it in exactly the same voice as the rest. She did not slow down. She went on, into the next paragraph, which was about the arrangements for the press.

“Say that again,” said Frederick.

She stopped.

“Which part?”

“The part about your health.”

There was a short silence on the line. Then she read it again, in exactly the same voice. Having regard to Her Majesty’s health.

“It is a phrase,” said his mother. “The Marshal is fond of phrases. He has used that one four times. I have counted. It is on every page, like a watermark.” He heard her turn a page. “May I go on?”

“Yes.”

She went on. She read the arrangements for the press, and the arrangements for the transfer of his credits, which he had not known were transferable and was not sure he had, and a paragraph about the Riksdag’s Constitution Committee that was so carefully written that he could not tell, when she had finished it, whether the Committee was for him or against him or had simply been mentioned; and then she said, “That is the end. It is signed by the Marshal of the Realm. There is a note in the margin of the last page in Ebba’s hand, which is not part of the letter, and which I will not read to you.”

“What does it say?”

“It is not part of the letter.”

“Mamma.”

“It says No,” said his mother. “With a full stop.”

---

The dryer went round. The sock went up the drum, and over the top, and fell.

“No,” said Frederick.

“I know.”

“Then why are you…”

“Because I was asked to read it to you. And I have read it to you.” He heard her put the papers down on something, a table, and the sound of a cup being picked up off a saucer, and the cup going down again. “That is the first thing. Now I am going to do the second thing, which is harder, and I would like you to listen to that as well.”

“What’s the second thing?”

“To tell you that they are right.”

She said it in the voice for papers, and he did not say anything.

“Sweden is not a summer, Fredde,” said his mother. “You have had Solliden. You have had the Ingrid, and Elsa and Nils, and the maypole once a year, badly. That is not Sweden. That is a holiday in Sweden. You have never queued in a Swedish post office. You have never been in a Swedish town in January where you know nobody, at three in the afternoon, when it is already dark and will be dark until nine the next morning. You have never been bored in Swedish.” She let that sit. “A king who has never been bored in his own country does not know it. He knows a postcard of it.”

“I’m not a king there.”

“Not yet,” said his mother.

It was the only thing in the whole of the argument that she had not said in the voice for papers, and she seemed to hear it too, because she stopped, and when she went on it was in the paper voice again, steadier than before.

“The Course was published when you were thirteen. You finished school, and you went behind a bar for a year in New Westminster, and Sweden said nothing. You went to Berlin and climbed a hill in the snow and chose Arizona, and Sweden said nothing. Swedes are very good at saying nothing.” A pause. “They are even better at remembering afterwards how long they said it for.”

“I chose,” said Frederick.

“I know you chose.”

“I chose on the Kreuzberg. In front of everybody. I said it out loud.”

“I know what you said. You telephoned me from the top of a monument at twenty past eight in the morning, and I could hear an Englishman shouting.”

“I said four years. Every morning for four years.”

“Yes,” said his mother. “And the Course is four years. Two years at Uppsala. A term at Karlskrona. A year in your municipality with the very poor road. The committees.” He heard her breathe in. “It is also four years. Everything is four years, Fredde. It is the length of things.”

“So it’s four years either way.”

“Yes.”

“Then why does it have to be now?” He was sitting up straighter against the washing machine than he had meant to, and Sam, at the folding table, had stopped folding, with a T-shirt held up by the shoulders in front of him like a man about to hang a flag. “Why not after? I do four years here and then four years there. I’ll be twenty-four. That’s not old. You were twenty-four when you’d only just finished Uppsala. Why can’t it be after?”

His mother did not answer.

She did not answer for longer than she usually did not answer. He knew the length of all her silences. He had grown up inside them. There was the silence before a joke, which was short, and the silence in which she was deciding whether to tell him something, which was longer, and the silence at the end of the day at the kitchen table in the north wing, when she was too tired to talk and wanted him there anyway, which could go on for an hour and was the best of them. This was not any of those. This one had something in it that he could hear and not see, the way you can hear somebody in another room putting a hand flat on a table.

“Mamma.”

“After,” said his mother, “is a long time.”

---

The sock went round.

“Is it worse?” said Frederick.

“It is the same.”

“That isn’t…”

“It is the same, Fredde. It is a valve. The cardiologist says it is doing what valves do.”

“What do valves do?”

“He says that they are very boring for a long time, and then they are not.” She said it lightly, in her own voice, and he heard what it cost her to say it lightly, and she heard him hear it. “At the moment I am very boring. I promise you. I am sitting in a chair by the window, in London, at two o’clock in the afternoon, in a cardigan, which you have never seen me wear and never will. I am drinking my second cup of coffee, of which I am allowed two, and I have chosen very carefully which two. Your father is at the other end of the room doing the crossword. He has found four words since lunch. He is extremely pleased with all four of them.”

He listened to the breath at the end of it, the way he had listened to all of them since August. It came where it should, or nearly. He shut his eyes. He could see it. The tall window in the house in London, with the plane tree outside it, and the chair, and his father at the table at the far end with the newspaper folded into quarters and the pen held up, waiting for the next word to come, the way he waited now, patiently, as though it were a train that was late and would certainly arrive.

“Uppsala has a hill too, you know,” said his mother.

He opened his eyes.

“It’s got a castle on it.”

“It is a hill with a castle on it. It has a bell, as well. The bell rings at six every morning and at nine every night, and has done for longer than Sweden has been a democracy. You would not need a telephone to wake you.” A pause. “You would not be able to put your thumb on it.”

“I don’t…”

“You did this morning. Twice. I could hear it in your voice.”

He said nothing. Across the laundry room, Sam put down the T-shirt, folded, on the stack.

“And nobody would care,” said his mother. “That is what you wanted. A hill, and nobody caring. They are Swedes, Fredde. They are the best people in the world at not caring who you are. When I was at Uppsala, in my first year, in a room like anybody’s, with a Court officer in the next room listening to me brush my teeth, there was exactly one person in the whole of Uppsala who cared who I was, and that was the girl across the corridor, and she only cared because somebody was using her milk.”

“Were you?”

“Every morning. For a year.” A pause. “She thought it was the Court officer. She never spoke to him again.” Another pause, shorter. “I have never told anybody that. Not your father. You may not tell the Marshal.”

---

“Your father is listening,” said his mother, after a while.

“Is he?”

“He has put down the crossword. He has been listening since the castle.” Something happened at the other end, a movement, a chair, and a voice in the room behind her, not close enough to be words, low, with the long pause in the middle of it that his father’s sentences had now, where a word had gone and was being looked for. “He would like me to say one word to you.”

“What word?”

“I am not going to say it. It is not in the letter. The Court would not like it.”

“Mamma.”

There was a silence on the line from London. It was not one he knew.

“Hill,” said his mother.

She said it in English. She said it in her own voice, not the one for papers, and she said it exactly as his father would have said it, with a full stop after it, and the breath before.

“I have done my best with it,” she said, in Swedish again. “He says it better.”

---

At twenty to seven, when the sun was up over Mesa and the light had come down the stairs into the basement through the little window by the ceiling that looked out at the level of people’s ankles, she said that she must go, because Ebba was in the doorway with a face.

“Think about it,” she said.

“I don’t need to think about it.”

“Then think about it anyway,” said his mother. “For me.”

He looked at the dryer. The sock had stopped. The drum had come to the end of whatever cycle somebody had set at two in the morning and had stopped, and the sock lay at the bottom of it, red, alone.

“For which of you?” he said.

There was a short silence.

“That is not a fair question.”

“It’s the only one I’ve got.”

“Then keep it,” said his mother. “It is a good question. I will have to think about it as well.” And then, in a different voice, so quietly that he was not sure, afterwards, that it had been meant for him at all: “Four years.”

She said it the way she had read having regard to Her Majesty’s health. As though it were a phrase, in somebody else’s letter, that she was fond of and did not trust.

“Go back to bed, Fredde,” she said. “You have class. Puss.”

“Puss, Mamma.”

---

Sam took his earbuds out when the phone went into Frederick’s pocket.

He wound the cable round two fingers and put it away. He picked up the stack of T-shirts, which did not move, and held it against his chest.

“I didn’t hear anything, sir,” he said.

“Do you speak Swedish?”

“No, sir.”

“Then you didn’t hear anything.”

“That’s what I said.” Sam looked at the dryer in the corner. “That’s been going since two. I came down at five past and it was going. I’ve been watching it. Nobody’s come for it.”

“It’s one sock.”

“I know,” said Sam. “I keep thinking somebody will.” He looked at it a moment longer, and then at Frederick, over the reading glasses, without any expression at all. “Rhys is outside your door. In his kit. He’s been there since twenty to. He’d like to know about the butte.”

“Tell him not today.”

“He’ll be very sorry,” said Sam, and went out with the T-shirts, and Frederick heard him on the stairs, going up, two at a time, and then, quite distinctly, at the top, a voice that was Rhys’s say “Oh, thank God.”

---

Mr Luna was at the desk in the lobby with his thermos and the radio turned down low, and on the radio a man on the March station was reading out the Heat Office’s figures for the day in the voice of a man reading football scores.

“Ninety-eight, son,” said Mr Luna, as he came past. “Cooler. Practically sweater weather.”

“Is it?”

“No,” said Mr Luna. He looked at Frederick over the top of the thermos cup, at the bare feet and the T-shirt and the telephone in the hand. “Early call.”

“My mother.”

“At six?”

“She’s always early.”

“Mine’s ninety-one,” said Mr Luna. “Up at four. I call her Sundays.” He drank his coffee. “If I called her at six she’d want to know what took me so long.” He put the cup down. “Everything all right?”

Frederick stood at the desk.

“She wants me to change universities,” he said.

Mr Luna considered this.

“To where?”

“Sweden.”

Mr Luna considered this for longer. On the radio the man from the March station had finished with the heat and gone on to the water, and was reading out the level of Roosevelt Lake in feet, slowly, as though it might be the answer to something.

“It’s cold in Sweden,” said Mr Luna.

“Yes.”

“You’d hate it.”

“I was born there.”

“Doesn’t mean you wouldn’t hate it,” said Mr Luna, and picked up his western, and opened it at the page with the corner turned down. “Lot of people hate where they were born, son. That’s why there’s buses.”

---

Tyler was awake when he got back.

He had moved from the desk to the bed by the window. He was lying on his back with the headphones round his neck and the blind down behind him, and the light came round the edges of the blind in a thin bright line, the way it always did, so that the whole of the window was a dark square with a gold frame. Beyond it, Frederick knew, was the butte, with the sun on it, and the A on its flank, and the stepped path going up the face of it to the top, empty.

“Who calls at six?” said Tyler, to the ceiling.

“My mother.”

“From Sweden?”

“London.”

“Huh.” Tyler thought about this. “Is she okay?”

Frederick sat down on the edge of his own bed.

He had not expected it. He had not expected it from Tyler, who had in six weeks asked him one question about his life, the same one, more than once, which was what a king actually did, and had never yet stayed awake to the end of the answer. He sat on the bed with the phone in his hands and looked at the gold line round the blind.

“She wants me to go to university in Sweden,” he said.

Tyler turned his head on the pillow.

“Like transfer? Now?”

“In January.”

“Dude.” Tyler looked at him with real concern. “It snows in Sweden.”

“Yes.”

“Like, a lot.”

“Yes.”

Tyler looked at him for a while longer. Then he looked back at the ceiling, and said, slowly and with great conviction, in the voice of a man who had crossed a continent to find out the one true thing he knew and was handing it on for nothing:

“Don’t go anywhere it snows.”

He put the headphones back on. Then he took one side off again.

“How long’s it for? The Sweden one.”

“Four years,” said Frederick.

“That’s, like, the whole thing,” said Tyler, and put the headphones back on, and on the screens across the room, in the forest, in the snow, somebody in Finland, where it was already the middle of the afternoon, put another log on the fire.