Experience

Rhys had finished his essay on the eighteenth of November, and had been reading it to himself ever since.

He read it at breakfast, on his phone, under the table. He had read it in the Furnace at half-time during the Tucson game, with twelve thousand people shouting, moving his lips. It was two thousand five hundred words exactly, with thirty-eight footnotes, and it was called Held in Trust: The Reserve Powers as Convention, 1943 to 2006, and Rhys had printed it on good paper and put it in a clear plastic folder in his bag, and every so often Frederick saw him put a hand into the bag to make sure it was there.

Sam had finished his on the Tuesday. It was a hundred and thirty-eight words long.

“And two thousand three hundred and sixty-two of footnote,” said Sam, at lunch, on the Thursday, laying it on the table between the salt and the hot sauce. “Footnote one is on the title. Footnote nineteen is on the word the.”

Rhys picked it up as though it were warm.

“He’ll fail you.”

“He said it,” said Sam. “If you can’t put a footnote under it, I don’t want it. I’ve put a footnote under everything. There’s nothing in it he doesn’t want.” He took the essay back and looked at it with an accountant’s tenderness. “The best one’s twenty-six. It’s about the Lord Marcher’s reports. Every time it was considered and declined, since ninety-six. I counted them. I went through the record.” He turned a page. “Forty-one. Forty-one times in thirty-seven years somebody in March House sat down and thought about it and didn’t.” He put his finger on the figure. “And wrote down why.”

“That’s not a footnote,” said Rhys. “That’s an essay.”

“It’s a footnote,” said Sam, “in this one.”

They both looked at Frederick.

“How long’s yours?” said Rhys.

“Eleven hundred words.”

“It’s due tomorrow.”

“I know when it’s due.”

“At nine.”

“Rhys,” said Sam, quite gently, and Rhys stopped.

---

He had eleven hundred words, and they were all true, and they were all somebody else’s.

He had read the books. He had read four of Rhys’s nine, and the published papers, and the Clerk’s commentary on the Continuity Proclamation, and the evidence to the New York Investigation, and he had gone on the Tuesday to the special collections room on the top floor of the library and signed a form and been given, by a librarian in white cotton gloves, a grey archive box, and inside the box a folder, and inside the folder four typed pages with a signature at the bottom that he had seen in a hundred photographs: the Lord Marcher’s report of 1994, on the occasion on which he had proclaimed without advice.

He had read it twice. It was very short. It said what he had done, and why, and for how long, and that he had considered the same course on eleven earlier occasions and declined it, and listed them, with dates; and it said at the end, in a sentence that the librarian told him every constitutional textbook in the Realm had reprinted, that an authority of this kind was justified only by the record of its refusal.

He had copied the sentence out by hand. It was in the essay. It had a footnote.

It was the only sentence in the eleven hundred that sounded like anybody.

He read the rest of it again at lunch, while Rhys and Sam argued about footnote nineteen, and it sounded like Rhys. It sounded like the Clerk. It sounded like a very good student who had been told by a republican to keep his feelings out of it, and had; and it went as has been argued and it may be observed, and located the reserve powers very carefully, in convention and trust and the record of 1943, and Frederick read it and could not find himself anywhere in it at all.

Which was what Brennan had asked for.

He put the phone away.

---

His mother rang at one, which was eight in the evening in London.

He took it on the step under the window on the landing between the second floor and the third. It was seventy degrees on the stairs, and seventy outside, and the car park through the window was full of sun and empty of people, the red car gone, a single shopping trolley that had come from somewhere standing in the middle of it on its own.

“You have an essay,” said his mother, in Swedish.

“Tomorrow.”

“Is it written?”

“Some of it.”

“Then I will be quick.” He heard her settle, and the small sound of the cup going down on a saucer. She was not on the landing. He could hear the room: the clock, and the long window with the plane tree outside it, which he could not hear but knew was there. “The Master of the Household has written to me. She would like to know whether you are coming to London for Christmas, so that she can make arrangements, because she is a woman who cannot sleep unless there are arrangements.”

“Yes,” said Frederick. “The twenty-first. I looked at the…”

“No,” said his mother.

He stopped.

“I would like you to stay in Tempe,” said his mother. “For Christmas. I am going to write to her tonight and say so.”

He sat on the step and looked at the shopping trolley.

“Why?”

“Because I am asking.”

“That isn’t a reason.”

“It is the only one I am going to give you,” said his mother, “today.”

He heard it. It was not the voice there was no door in. It was the other one, the one underneath that, which he had heard perhaps twice in his life, once in a car in New Westminster in October 2028 on the way back from the High Commission when he had asked her what the Regent’s oath said, and she had told him, from memory, and stopped halfway through, and looked out of the window, and finished it.

“Is it worse?”

“It is the same.”

“Then why…”

“Fredde.” She said it quite quietly. “I have something I must think about. It is a large thing, and it is mine, and I cannot think about it with you in the house, because when you are in the house I think about you.” The clock, behind her, below her somewhere, struck once, for the half hour. “That is true. It is not the whole of it. It is true.”

“What is it?”

“If I could tell you,” said his mother, “I would not need to think about it.”

He did not say anything. He sat on the step with the telephone and found that he was holding the rail, the maroon steel rail beside the step, the way she had held it in October, and that his knuckles had gone white on it, and he let go.

“I could just come,” he said. “You couldn’t stop me.”

“No,” said his mother. “I could not.”

“I’d get on a plane on the twenty-first and I’d be at the door on the twenty-second, and the Household would open it, and there’s nothing you could do.”

“Nothing at all,” said his mother. “You are a King fourteen times over and I am a Queen once and I have no powers whatsoever, in any of them. We took them away the year I was born.” He heard her almost laugh, and not. “You could come. Nobody in the world could stop you. I am asking you not to.”

He looked at the trolley in the car park, alone, in the sun, at a slight angle, as though it had been about to go somewhere and had thought better of it.

“All right,” he said.

There was a pause.

“That is not a promise,” said his mother.

“It’s an all right.”

“Then I will take the all right,” said his mother, “and write to the Master of the Household, and she will take the rest.” Her voice changed, a little, the cloth going over it. “Now go and finish your essay. Write it from the books.”

“It is from the books.”

“Good,” said his mother. And then, after a moment, in a voice he did not know at all: “Is it any good?”

He thought about the eleven hundred words.

“No,” he said.

“Ah,” said his mother, softly, as though he had told her something she had been waiting to hear for some time, and was glad of, and was sorry for; and said goodnight, and rang off.

---

At eleven the alarm went, the one under BUTTE that he had set in September and called NOTHING, and he rang London, where it was six in the morning, and she answered before it had rung once. They talked about the rain in London, which was coming down, and the trolley in the car park, which was still there, for four minutes; and neither of them said Christmas.

At midnight he went down to the lobby, because he could not write in the room. Tyler was in a raid with some men in Korea, and the gap at the edge of the blind showed a strip of black with the shoulder of the butte in it, and he had sat at the desk since six with the eleven hundred words and added ninety and taken out a hundred and forty, which was going the wrong way.

He took the laptop. On the way to the door, because the lobby at night was always cold, he took the jumper down off the shelf and put it on. He had worn it on the A, and twice since, and each time it smelled a little less of the cupboard in London it had come out of, and he minded that more than he had expected to.

---

Mr Luna looked at the jumper over his glasses.

“The October sweater,” he said.

“It’s cold.”

“It’s sixty-eight.” Mr Luna considered the sleeves. “You rolled them. On the A. I saw the picture. To above the elbow, like I said.” He seemed, very faintly, moved. “First kid in thirty years who listened.” He pushed the plastic chair out from the end of the desk with his foot. “Sit.”

Frederick sat, with the laptop on his knees, at the end of the night desk, under the lamp.

Mr Luna wrote on the clipboard, without looking at the grey box, because he did not need to, 12 a.m. 68, and picked up the western, and opened it at the corner that was turned down, and did not read it.

“What’s the essay?”

“The reserve powers.”

“What’s that?”

Frederick told him. He told him the short version, the one he would have told Tyler if Tyler had ever stayed for the end of it: that there was a person in New Westminster who could, if everything went wrong, if the Prime Minister and the Speaker were both down and Parliament could not meet and the whole thing seized, take hold of it and keep it going; and that it had happened twice in two hundred and fifty years; and that nobody could say exactly where the power came from, because it was not written anywhere, and it worked because the person who had it did not use it.

Mr Luna listened to all of it. Then he put the western down.

“Like nights,” he said.

Frederick looked at him.

“Thirty years,” said Mr Luna. “You know how many nights something happened? Something real. Not a kid locked out. Not a fire alarm from toast.” He held up his hand and did not count on it, because he did not need to. “Twenty-two. The chiller in August, that’s one. I count that. Twenty-two nights in thirty years, a little under eleven thousand.” He looked at the doors, at the dark arcade beyond them and the green trees in the light from the lobby. “The rest, I sit here.”

“What do you do?”

“On the twenty-two?”

“On the others.”

Mr Luna considered the question with great seriousness.

“Nothing,” he said. “That’s the hard part. Anybody can do something, son. They don’t pay me for the something. Anybody they hired could do the something. They pay me for all the nights I’m sitting here and I could, and I don’t.” He picked up a butterscotch and looked at it and put it down. “You know how many times in thirty years I could’ve called somebody? Woke up a director? Called the campus police on a kid? Every night. Every single night there’s a kid comes down those stairs at three in the morning that I could call somebody about.”

“And you don’t.”

“Mostly I say sit.” Mr Luna nudged the plastic chair with his foot, the one Frederick was sitting in. “That chair. Thirty years.” He was quiet for a while. “Two thousand nine. A girl came down at ten past three with a suitcase. Packed. Coat on. In April. She was going to the bus station to get the first bus to Gallup, and she wasn’t coming back, and she wasn’t telling anybody why, and she’d been crying since about Christmas, by the look.” He looked at the doors. “I could’ve called her RA. I could’ve called the director. I could’ve called the police and said a kid’s going to walk to the bus station at three in the morning on her own, which she was. I had all of them on a card. I had a card for everything.”

“What did you do?”

“I said sit.”

“And she sat?”

“She sat in that chair from ten past three to six. Didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. I did the crossword. I gave her a butterscotch about four.” He picked up the pen and looked at the clipboard. “At six I went off and the day porter came on, and she picked up her suitcase and went back up the stairs.” He wrote nothing. “She’s a doctor in Flagstaff. Sends a card at Christmas. Never says anything in it either.”

Frederick sat in the plastic chair with the laptop on his knees.

“How did you know?” he said. “Not to call?”

“I didn’t,” said Mr Luna. “That’s the point. I could’ve been wrong. If I’d been wrong, they’d have fired me, and they’d have been right to.” He opened the western. “It’s not a power if you can’t be wrong with it, son. Then it’s just a rule.”

---

He did not write the essay from the books.

He sat at the end of the night desk in the jumper, under the lamp, with the radio low and Mr Luna turning the pages of the western and writing a number on the clipboard every hour, and at a quarter to one he deleted the eleven hundred words, all of them, except the one sentence from the grey box with its footnote, and began again.

He wrote: The reserve powers are on a plastic chair at the end of the night desk in the lobby of Palo Verde Hall, from ten at night until six in the morning.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he went on.

He wrote about the night desk, and the twenty-two nights, and the card with everything on it, and a girl with a suitcase, without her name, which he did not know. He wrote about the chiller in August, and four hundred cots in a gymnasium, and that nobody on that night had used anything but the law and a box of earplugs, and that that was the point, that the ordinary machinery had held because a man from Residence Life had read a pillow and a porter had brought earplugs, and nobody had had to reach for anything else.

At two he went up the forty-five steps in his socks and came down again with the second box from under his bed, and took out of it, at the bottom, under the map of the wold, a printed copy of the Regency Act 1811 that a Clerk had given him five years before, which he had marked in two colours at the kitchen table in the north wing in the last week of September 2028: black, for what the Act said would happen, and red, for what had.

There was a great deal of red.

He wrote about that. He wrote about sitting at the table of the Privy Council at fifteen, as an observer, without a voice, with a school exercise book, on the day his mother was sworn Regent; and about the Governor-General, who had been in the room, and had said almost nothing all day, and had done, in the whole of that month, when the Realm had no King who could act, exactly nothing that was not asked of the office, perfectly; and that he had not understood at fifteen that what he was watching was the reserve powers, being held, in a room, by a person who had decided all day long, every hour, not to use them.

He wrote I was there, and put a footnote on it, and in the footnote, because Brennan had asked for one, he wrote The author.

At half past three he wrote a sentence about a green chair on the landing of a house in London, with buttons, bought in Marylebone by a man who could find his words only one at a time; and about a woman five thousand miles away who had no powers at all in any of her realms, and had said on the telephone that afternoon you could come, nobody in the world could stop you, I am asking you not to.

He read it back.

Then he took it out, all of it, every word, and sat for a while with the cursor blinking where it had been.

“Finished?” said Mr Luna, at four, writing 4 a.m. 66.

“Nearly.”

“What was that one?”

“What one?”

“The one you took out.” Mr Luna did not look up from the clipboard. “You sat there twenty minutes after.”

“It wasn’t mine to put in.”

Mr Luna looked at him then, over the glasses, for a long moment, and then pushed the jar of butterscotch an inch across the desk.

“Four o’clock,” he said. “Have one.”

---

At six the day porter came on, the sophomore with her hair up in a pencil, yawning, with a coffee, and Mr Luna stood up from the desk for the first time in eight hours and put on his jacket over the cardigan and picked up the western and the thermos.

He looked at Frederick in the plastic chair, in the jumper, with the laptop shut on his knees and two thousand four hundred and ninety words in it, and the printer behind the desk still warm.

“You’re up early, son,” said Mr Luna.

“I’m up late.”

“At six,” said Mr Luna, “it’s the same thing,” and went out through the glass doors into the dark arcade, where it was just beginning to be grey at the far end, and away along it towards the road, and home, without looking back.

---

Brennan took them at the door.

He stood just inside it at five to nine, in the corridor that smelled of floor polish, with the leather bag over his shoulder and his reading glasses in his hair, and took each essay as it came past him, and put it on the pile in the crook of his arm without looking, and said thank you eighty times in the same voice. Rhys’s went past in its clear plastic folder. Sam’s went past with its footnote on the title.

Frederick’s went past.

Brennan put it on the pile. He said thank you. He took the next one, from a boy from the second floor called Diego, and said thank you, and put it on the pile; and then he stopped, and took the glasses down out of his hair, and lifted Diego’s essay off the pile, and Frederick’s from under it, and held Frederick’s in front of him, and read the first line.

The corridor did not stop moving. It went round him. He stood in the middle of it like a man in a river reading a letter, with eighty students going past on either side and in through the door, and read the first line again.

“Mr Hanover.”

“Sir.”

Brennan looked up.

“Who,” said Brennan, “is Ignacio Luna?”

“The night porter, sir. At Palo Verde.”

Brennan looked at him for some time. Then he looked down at the essay again, and turned the first page, and Frederick watched his eyes go down it to the foot, to the footnotes, and stop at the third, and stay there.

He watched Brennan open his mouth.

He watched him take hold of whatever it was, with both hands, in the corridor, in front of everybody, and put it back on its high shelf, physically, like a man putting something back that he knows he will have to come for later.

“Hm,” said Brennan, and put the essay on the pile, and went in, and shut the door.