Twenty-One

She rang at six, because in Sweden you are woken on your birthday by people singing at the end of your bed, and she had woken him that way on every second of May of his life, at the end of the bed or at the end of a telephone, wherever either of them was.

He took it on the step under the narrow window, in his socks, with the window open an inch and the morning coming in through it already warm.

She did not say hello. She began.

She sang it in her low unhurried voice, in Swedish, Ja, må han leva, the whole of it, the first verse and the second, at the pace she did everything, which was her own; and he sat on the step with his eyes shut, and somewhere in the second verse he noticed that he was not listening for anything. He had sat on this step since August with the window open an inch and listened to every call from London for the breath. He was listening to the song.

She drew breath at the end of the line, where anybody’s goes, and went on to the end. And then, after it, from somewhere very close to her, a little below, his father did the cheers. There were four of them, in Swedish, as there always were, and each of them was a single word, and his father had known it for longer than Frederick had been alive and did not have to go anywhere in the house of himself to find it; and they came out round and loud and perfectly, one after another, the most fluent thing Frederick had heard him say since the September he was fifteen.

“Grattis, Fredde,” said his mother. “Twenty-one.”

“You didn’t stop.”

“No.” She sounded pleased with herself, which she rarely allowed. “I practised. Ebba timed it. I am not to tell you how long it took, but I am allowed to tell you that it was the same as the year you were twelve.”

He sat on the step and looked at the fire notice on the opposite wall.

“Where are you?”

“In the kitchen. At the table. Your father is beside me, on a chair, with a cake in front of him, which he has been told is for later and has already begun.” A pause. “Stockholm had the guns at noon. The Navy fired them from Skeppsholmen for the King of Sweden, and the Marshal of the Realm held his telephone out of a window of the Palace so that I could hear, and I sat in London and listened to Stockholm fire twenty-one guns for my son.” Another pause. “He says he is now deaf in one ear and does not mind.”

“Is Papa there?”

“He has been holding out his hand since the first verse.”

---

“Twenty,” said his father, in English. A breath. “One.”

“Yes, Papa.”

“Good.”

“Thank you for the cheers.”

“Easy,” said his father, with great satisfaction, and Frederick laughed on the step, and heard his father laugh in London without any voice at all, the breath going in and out in short pieces.

In January, on the telephone about a pencil, his father had told him to ask more. He had been trying to, since. There was a thing this morning that his father knew better than anybody alive.

“Papa. At nine. The address.”

“Yes.”

“You did fifty-six.”

“Fifty-six,” said his father, with satisfaction, as though it were a score at cricket.

“What do I do?”

There was a silence on the line from London, and it was the looking kind. He heard his father go along the corridors of the house of himself, opening doors, a long way in; and he did not fill the space, because if you filled it the word went away; and the clock in the kitchen in London ticked, and his mother said nothing at all.

“Text,” his father found. A breath. “Keep. To.”

“Always?”

There was a pause of tremendous dignity.

“Unless,” said his father.

“Unless what?”

“You’ll know.” A breath. “Twice.” Another. “In fifty-six.”

The telephone went across the table.

“He has been hoping for a month that you would ask him that,” said his mother, in Swedish, quite low. “He has had unless ready for a week. He said it to Brannigan on Thursday with the coffee, and Brannigan said yes, sir, and has been saying it back to him every morning since, so that it would be there.”

He could not say anything for a moment.

“Go and dress,” said his mother. “You have a broadcast at nine and you are sitting on a stair in your socks.”

“How do you know I’m in my socks?”

“I am your mother,” said his mother. “Puss.”

---

The ABC came at half past seven: a producer from Phoenix in a linen shirt with a headset round her neck, a sound engineer with a case, and one camera, which the cameraman carried up the forty-five steps because the lift had broken again on Saturday and Doug’s sign on it still said SORRY FOLKS.

They had wanted the ballroom at Old Main. The university had offered it in February, in a letter from the President with the seal on it, and the Household had liked the ballroom very much, and Kimura had read the paragraph about the fire doors, and the King had said, in a reply that Rhys had typed for him because his hands were full of the red box at the time, that he would do it from the landing, if the ABC did not mind, because it was where he took his calls.

The producer stood on the landing between the second floor and the third and looked at it: at the step, at the maroon rail, at the narrow window with its concrete fin and its view of the car park, at the fire notice on the opposite wall.

“Here,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You’re sure.”

“It’s where my mother sat down,” said Frederick.

The producer looked at him for a moment, and then at the step, and did not say anything else about the ballroom. She had the camera put on the half-landing below, looking up, so that it would have the step and the window and the light from the window and not the fire notice, and the engineer clipped a small microphone to his shirt, and asked him to say something.

“Good morning,” said Frederick.

“Say it again, a bit louder.”

“Good morning.”

A door opened on the third floor.

Priya came out on to the landing above in a T-shirt that said NURSING: WE CAN’T FIX STUPID BUT WE CAN SEDATE IT, with a pharmacology textbook held open against her chest and a highlighter in her teeth. She took the highlighter out. She looked down the flight at the producer, and the camera, and the engineer with his headphones, and the King, and her face did not change at all.

“It’s quiet hours,” said Priya.

The producer turned round.

“It’s the King’s Day address.”

“I know what it is,” said Priya. “I’ve got a final at nine tomorrow on the cardiac glycosides. It’s still quiet hours.”

There was a pause on the landing. Rhys, at the top of the flight, looked at the ceiling. Sam, at the bottom of the next, did not move at all.

“She’s right,” said Frederick.

The producer looked at him.

“It’s on the fire door,” he said. “In capitals. This means everybody.” He sat down on the step. “I’ll do it quietly.”

---

Jack was on the stairs below, out of shot, on the step above the second floor, with his phone in one hand and an earphone in one ear and the other earphone held out to Sam, who had declined it.

At two minutes to nine the producer counted with her fingers. At nine, which was noon in New Westminster, the engineer lifted one hand, and down the stairwell, very faint, out of the earphone in Jack’s ear, Frederick heard the first of them, from the old battery above the river on Charter Hill, two thousand miles away.

Boom.

Jack’s lips moved.

Boom.

He sat on the step under the narrow window with the light on his face and his hands on his knees and listened to them come, one every five seconds, faint and round and far off, out of an earphone in the ear of a landlady’s son on the stairs below him, who was counting; and on the twenty-first the earphone went quiet, and Jack looked up the flight at him and mouthed something, and the red light came on.

“Good afternoon,” said Frederick.

At the bottom of the flight Jack put the back of his wrist against his mouth.

---

He did it quietly. He did it at the volume of a man on a staircase in a building where people were sleeping and one was revising the cardiac glycosides, which was the volume at which he had taken every call from London since August, and the Realm heard that, and so did the thirteen others, all at once, for six minutes, a little out of step with one another, through every radio and screen that was turned to it.

He said that it was nine in the morning where he was, and that he was in Tempe, at the University of the March, on a staircase, in his first year, in finals week, and that he was grateful to the whole of the personal union for the day off, because so was everybody he lived with. He said that his mother, who had been ill, was well, and had sung to him that morning, and that he hoped everybody listening who had somebody to ring would ring them. He said what the King says on King’s Day, which was thank you, to each of the fourteen by name, because it was the one morning in the year when all fourteen heard the same voice at once, and each of them listened for its own.

He kept to the text. He had written it himself, at Sam’s desk, on Sunday night, and it was short, and there was no unless in the morning anywhere.

And at the end he said happy King’s Day, because it was, and the red light went off, and the engineer took off his headphones, and on the landing above, Priya, who had stood at the rail through the whole of it with the textbook against her chest, went back into her room and shut the door, quietly.

The producer looked up at him from the half-landing.

“That’s the quietest one there’s ever been,” she said.

“Was it all right?”

“I’ve no idea,” said the producer, honestly. “Nobody’s ever done one on a staircase.” She took off the headset. “My mother’s going to call me in about a minute and tell me.”

---

His mother did not call. She wrote.

You spoke very quietly. Your father turned it up. M.

Theo wrote, from New Westminster, where he had been revising in the medical school library and had watched it on his phone under the desk: Quietest thing I’ve ever heard. Happy birthday Freddie. Desmond says the same. Don’t let Jack buy you a drink.

Alexander wrote at ten past nine, from Potsdam, where it was six in the evening.

Many happy returns of the day. It was correct to do it quietly. Lukas wishes to know whether the stair is the one with the little step. He counted it in March and has not been satisfied since.

Tyler was asleep through the whole of it, with his headphones on and the small fire in its black window going slowly out, and woke at two in the afternoon, and looked at the screen, where it said GAME OVER, and said, “Oh, no,” and began again.

---

The tin was opened in the lounge at eight.

It sat on the table where Rhys’s mother’s pudding had sat at Christmas, with three kinds of tape still round it, cut, and a crowd round the table that Frederick had not expected: Rhys and Sam, and Priya, with the textbook, and Diego from the second floor, and the girl from Yuma, and the boy who had carried the fan to the gym in August and home at Christmas still in its box, and four people from the fourth floor whom Frederick knew by sight and not by name, who had heard there was cake.

Jack took the lid off.

It was a cake. It was a large square fruit cake, dark and heavy, under a coat of marzipan and a coat of white icing as smooth as a plate, and on the icing, in blue, in Sue Fennell’s piping, which leaned forward like her handwriting, there was a 21. And beside it, in yellow, with careful straight rays, there was a sun, copied from a photograph of a door; and in the middle of the sun, in blue again, very small, she had written FRED.

Through the middle of the R there was a small round hole, where a woman at Heathrow had put a stick.

“You said it wasn’t a cake,” said Frederick.

“It isn’t a cake. It’s a fruit cake.” Jack looked at it with immense pride. “A cake’s for eating. A fruit cake’s for keeping. She’s been feeding it brandy every Sunday since February. That’s what the dog could smell.” He took a folded card out of the tin and gave it to him. “She said give you that.”

It was in the same leaning hand, without capitals or punctuation.

happy 21st love keep feeding it on sundays it will last till christmas save a bit for the porter

Priya had brought candles from the cupboard in the RA’s office, a whole box, twenty-four, of which she counted out twenty-one, and Jack pressed them into the icing round the edge in a ring, and Rhys stood with the matches from his kit and looked up, slowly, at the ceiling over the table, where there was a small white disc.

“No,” said Rhys.

“It’s twenty-one candles,” said Jack.

“It’s twenty-one candles and a cake full of brandy under a smoke head,” said Rhys. “I’ve done this. There was an engine. A woman from Bisbee.” He looked at the disc. “Outside.”

“Four minutes forty,” said Sam, to nobody.

So they carried it outside, the whole crowd of them, through the lobby, past the day desk, into the arcade, where it was ninety-five degrees at eight at night and the light was going gold and long across the car park through the four palo verdes; and Jack put the tin down on the low wall under the concrete fins, and Rhys lit the candles one by one, and by the time he had lit the twenty-first the first had begun to bow.

They all bowed. They went over slowly, all together, in the heat of the evening and of one another, from the base, like the palms along the mall when the wind comes, twenty-one small white candles leaning gently to the west with their flames standing straight up out of the ends of them; and the crowd under the arcade looked at them and began, all at once and in four keys, to sing.

Across the road, over the dentist’s, the blind went down an inch, and stayed down, and then, while they were still singing, came up again, an inch, which it had never done.

He blew them out. It took two goes, because some of them were pointing at the car park.

---

Sam carried a slice across the road at twenty past eight, on a paper plate, under a napkin, and went up the outside stair beside the dentist’s and knocked, and the door opened about a foot, and the plate went into the gap, and the door shut; and he came back across the road with exactly the face he had gone with.

“She said thank you,” said Sam.

“Anything else?”

Sam considered.

“She said it wasn’t dry,” he said. “She said to tell Mrs Fennell that.”

Tyler came down at nine, in the hoodie, with the sleeves over his hands, when the cake was two-thirds gone and the crowd had thinned to the third floor and the boy with the fan, and stood at the edge of the arcade for a while looking at it from inside the hood, the way he looked at a thing on a screen before he decided whether to go in.

Then he came across, and held something out.

It was a bottle of the blue drink.

“It’s the end of the year,” said Frederick.

“Yeah.” Tyler kept holding it out. “They have to last.”

“There’s only six.”

“Five,” said Tyler. “Now.” He put it in Frederick’s hand. “Happy birthday, man.” And he took a piece of the cake, the corner, with the most icing, which nobody had dared, and ate it standing up under the arcade, with great attention, and said through it, “This is really good,” in a voice of real surprise, as though the world had been keeping cake from him as it had kept the waffle iron.

---

The man on the door of the bar with the cactus in a hat was the same man, on the same stool, with the same small torch, and the orange bands on a ring on his wrist.

Jack stopped on the pavement by the trough, a yard off, with his arms folded, and did not come any closer. He had said he would not. He had said that this was a thing you had to do on your own, like the first time you went down a cellar.

Frederick held out his card.

The man shone the torch on it. THE UNIVERSITY OF THE MARCH. The photograph from August, in which he looked as though he had been told something alarming by the camera. HANOVER, F. And the date. The man read the date, and looked at the photograph, and looked up at the face, and back at the date, for exactly as long as he looked at everybody’s.

His hand did not go to his wrist.

“Happy birthday,” said the man, and gave him back the card, and looked past him at the next one.

That was all. Frederick stood for a moment in the slab of cold air coming out of the door, and behind him by the trough Jack made a sound that was not a word, and was the sound Mr Purvis made, Jack had once told him, when the cricket on the radio went right.

---

He bought his own.

He stood at the long counter under the neon sign for the beer from Flagstaff, and the barman came along with a towel on his shoulder and looked at him, and said “What can I get you,” and Frederick said that he did not know, and the barman, who had heard that before from a great many people on their twenty-first birthdays, put a glass in front of him without asking anything else and filled it from the tap at the end, and said “Six-forty,” and he paid it, out of his own pocket, with a ten, and got his change.

“And one for him,” said Frederick, and nodded back at Jack.

“That’s allowed,” said Jack, coming up. “That’s the other way round.”

A man further along the counter, in a cap, who had been at the door behind him and had heard happy birthday, leaned over with his own glass and said, warmly, “Twenty-one? Hey. Let me get the next…”

“No,” said Jack.

The man looked at him.

“Sorry, mate,” said Jack. “House rule. Nobody buys him a drink.”

“Whose house?”

“His,” said Jack.

The man looked at Frederick for a moment longer, and at Jack, in the red sweatshirt, which he had put back on for the occasion, in ninety degrees; and then he shrugged, as people shrug at the customs of another country, and lifted his glass an inch, and went back to the game on the screen.

Jack took a photograph of him with the glass. He sent it to the New Inn, where it was seven in the morning, and the answer came while they were still at the counter.

about time

And then, a minute later:

purvis had yours at last orders he said it was a waste otherwise he says happy birthday and that its a bit flat

---

Mr Luna was at the desk at a quarter past twelve, under the lamp, with the radio on low and a slice of cake on a napkin beside the clipboard, half eaten, and a card propped against the jar of butterscotch, in a leaning hand without capitals, that said from sue fennell coln st aldwyns near wales.

He looked at them over his glasses as they came in.

“Twenty-one, son.”

“Yes.”

Mr Luna nodded slowly, and looked at the grey box on the wall, and wrote 12 a.m. 78 on the clipboard, at the top of a new day, and laid the pen across the crossword.

“Call your mother?”

“She sang.”

Mr Luna considered this for some time, with the pen in his hand, as a man considers a ruling that will be cited.

“That counts,” he said.