Eleven O'Clock

It was a low sound, and it came through the wall behind the sofa from the far end of the passage, and it was not snoring.

He knew Mr Hartigan’s snoring now. He had lain under it for two nights. It was a bus idling at a stop, steady, patient, regular as a timetable. This was not that. This was a man’s voice, very low, making a sound it did not want to make, through closed teeth, and stopping, and then making it again.

He sat up on the sofa in the dark.

Then Mrs Hartigan’s voice, at the far end of the passage, sharp, one word, in Wisconsindeutsch, that he did not know and understood.

Then the light in the passage. A line of it under the door to the room. And feet.

---

He was at the passage door before he had decided to get up. He was in his pyjamas and his socks, with the crocheted blanket from Milwaukee still caught round one ankle, and he opened the door to the passage and the light came at him, and he stood in it.

The bathroom door was open.

Mr Hartigan was on the bathroom floor.

He was on his knees, on the lino, between the bath with the fish on the curtain and the basin with the mug of six toothbrushes, bent forward over his own knees with one hand flat on the floor and the other pressed hard into his side, low down, on the left, at the back, below his ribs. He was still in his green and gold shirt with the G on it. His face, turned a little towards the door, was the colour of the lino, grey, and wet, and his mouth was shut tight, and the sound was coming from behind it.

Mrs Hartigan was on the floor beside him.

She was in a dressing gown, a blue one, tied, with her hair loose, and she was kneeling with one hand on his back and the other on his wrist, and she was not looking at his face. She was looking at nothing, at the wall over the bath, with her lips moving very slightly, counting.

She looked up at Frederick in the door. One glance, very fast, the glance of a woman at the foot of a bed reading a chart.

“Stone,” said Mrs Hartigan. “Left kidney.”

She had been looking at her husband for eleven seconds, perhaps twelve. She said it the way she said bowls and jobs and Katharina: as a fact, to be acted on.

---

“I’m all right,” said Mr Hartigan, through his teeth, to the floor.

“You are not all right,” said Mrs Hartigan.

“I’ve got the six fifteen.”

“You have not got the six fifteen.” She took her hand off his wrist and put it on his forehead, flat, for two seconds, and took it away. “You are grey and you are sweating and your pulse is a hundred and twenty and you have a stone the size of I don’t know what coming down from your left kidney, and I have watched four hundred men on that ward in twenty-three years with exactly that face on, and every one of them said I’ve got the six fifteen, or the equivalent.” She stood up. “Theo.”

Theo was behind Frederick in the passage. Frederick had not heard him come. He was in the T-shirt he slept in, barefoot, with his hair standing up on one side, and he was not saying anything, and his face was white under the freckles, and he came past Frederick into the bathroom without a word, and knelt down where his mother had been, on the lino, beside his father, and put two fingers on his father’s wrist where his mother’s had been, and looked at his own watch.

“Count it,” said his mother.

Theo counted. His lips moved. His other hand was on his father’s back.

“One eighteen,” said Theo, after fifteen seconds. His voice was perfectly steady. It was the voice Frederick had heard on a playing field in Santa Monica with a first-aid kit open on the grass. “Regular. He’s hot.”

“He’s hot,” agreed his mother. “Keep him there. Don’t let him get up. He’ll try to get up.”

“I’m getting up,” said Mr Hartigan, to the floor.

“He’s trying to get up,” said Theo.

“I know he’s trying to get up. Keep him there.”

---

Kate was at the door of the bedroom with the partition, in a T-shirt and pyjama bottoms with stars on them, holding the rabbit against her chest in both arms, very tight. The rabbit’s ears were flat. Its eyes were very round.

“Mum,” said Kate.

“Stone,” said her mother. “He’ll live. He’ll wish he hadn’t for about six hours.” She went past Frederick into the room that was two rooms, to the green telephone on the wall by the fridge, and took it off the hook. “Kate. Hot water bottle. The red one. Under the sink. Not boiling; hot from the tap. Frederick. Stand there.”

He stood there.

She dialled. Three numbers. The emergency number, which he had never once dialled in his life.

She got something. She got a woman, and said ambulance, and then, in the English she used for doctors, every consonant, gave the address, the fourth floor, the name, the age, fifty-one, the symptoms, the pulse, the temperature, I’d put it at thirty-eight and a half, I’m a nurse, acute medicine, at the General, twenty-three years, and left renal colic, I’d stake my licence on it, he needs analgesia and a scan.

Then she listened.

He watched her listen. He watched her face, which did not change, while she listened for what seemed to him a long time.

“How long,” said Mrs Hartigan.

She listened again.

“I see,” she said. “Yes. I know what night it is. Yes. Thank you.” She put the receiver back on its hook.

She stood with her hand still on the receiver for a moment, with her back to him.

“An hour,” she said. “At least. Possibly two. It’s Bowl night. There are four hundred thousand people in this city who have been drinking since six and a third of them are now in the street, and half of the rest have fallen over in their own kitchens. He’s not dying. They’re triaging. He’ll get the next one that’s free after the ones that are.” She took her hand off the telephone. “Which is right. I’d do the same.”

---

From the bathroom, a sound. Lower. Longer.

Mrs Hartigan’s face did change then. Not much. At the corners of the mouth.

“An hour,” she said again, quieter. “With that.”

Kate came back from the sink with a red rubber hot water bottle in one hand and the rabbit still in the other arm, and Mrs Hartigan took the bottle without looking and went back down the passage with it.

Frederick stood where he had been told to stand.

He looked at the room. The table back under the light, with the oilcloth with the lemons. The sofa, with his sheets pulled back and the crocheted blanket from Milwaukee on the floor where it had come off his ankle. Theo’s cheese hat on the arm, squashed from his coat pocket, smelling of beer. The window over the sink, dark, with the yellow light from the depot yard coming up through it onto the ceiling, and beyond it, below, the street.

He went to the window.

He looked down.

The depot, the buses in their rows, sleeping, under the yard lights. Mr Lasko, very small, going along between them with his torch. The gates. The street, empty, wet, under the lamps. And at the corner, opposite the door of the block, where the cross on Castellanos’s map had been, circled, a dark car with its engine off.

Its interior light was on.

He could see the shape in the driver’s seat. He knew this one. He did not need to see the face. He knew it from the way it sat: square to the wheel, with the shoulders level, very still, with a newspaper folded small on the wheel in front of it, not reading, looking at the newspaper the way you look at a thing that gives you somewhere to put your eyes while you watch something else.

Castellanos had not gone home.

He had walked them a mile and a half up from the river at the end of the row, and seen them in at the brown door, and he should have given the corner to the night man then and gone home to bed, because he had been on since noon and four hours of it in seat sixteen watching sixty thousand people. And it was ten past eleven, and the shape in the car at the corner was Castellanos, and Frederick understood, standing at the Hartigans’ kitchen window in his pyjamas, that Castellanos had stayed on Sunday night of his own accord because it was Bowl night and he had known, the way he always knew, that somebody always did.

---

The car could be at the General in ten minutes.

He knew the way. He had been driven it every day for fourteen months, at four o’clock, from Ellicott and from the Palace, to the sixth floor: down the avenue past Dorsey’s, left at the lights, across the bridge, up the hill to the main gate. Ten minutes on a Sunday night. Eight, with Castellanos driving.

And Castellanos could carry a man.

He was built like a door. He had knelt on the boards on Twenty-Second Street on a Friday in June with a boy’s ankles in his hands for twenty-two minutes and not let go.

Fifty-six steps. Four flights of fourteen. With a big man grey on a bathroom floor, who could not stand, and would not be carried by his son or his wife, because he was Peter Hartigan and he had the six fifteen.

And the lift had a notice on it.

He took his telephone out of the pocket of his pyjamas, where it had been since nine, when he had rung his mother from the landing and told her that Green Bay were losing seventeen to three and she had said good, it’s character-forming.

He looked at it.

3. NO HOUSEHOLD UPSTAIRS.

In capitals, larger than the rest, on a napkin, in Theo’s inside pocket, behind a button, with eleven pounds.

Castellanos stays in the car. Kimura stays in the car. Nobody from the Palace comes up.

He had agreed to all of them.

He typed.

Come up. Now.

He stopped. He looked at it.

Behind him, in the passage, Theo’s voice, perfectly steady: “One twenty-two. He’s trying to get up again, Mum.”

And Mr Hartigan’s voice, through his teeth, to the bathroom floor, very low, in English, to nobody, the first thing Frederick had ever heard him say that was not a fact:

“Anneliese.”

He typed the rest.

Come up. Now. Both of you if Kimura’s there. It’s Mr Hartigan. Bring the chair from the landing.

His thumb was over the button.

From the passage door, behind him, Theo said: “Freddie.”

He turned round.

Theo was standing in the passage doorway in his T-shirt, barefoot, with his father’s sweat on his hand, and his face white, looking at the telephone in Frederick’s hand, and at Frederick’s face, and Frederick saw him understand it, all of it, in one second, the way his mother read a chart: the car at the corner, and the man in it, and the fifty-six steps, and the lift, and the napkin in his own blazer pocket on the back of the bedroom door, behind a button, with rule three on it in capitals.

“The bet,” said Theo.

“Shut up, Theo,” said Frederick, and sent it.