The Interview

There was one pen in the kitchen drawer, and it said GRAND LAKE BAIT & TACKLE - LIVE MINNOWS - CRICKETS - ICE down the side in letters that had nearly worn off, and it did not work.

He found that out at nine o’clock on Thursday morning, at the kitchen table, with four hours’ sleep behind him and the back of an envelope in front of him, trying it. Nothing. He shook it. Nothing. He licked the end, which Felix said you did, and tried again, and it made a faint blue scratch, like a cat’s, and stopped.

“You have to warm it up,” said Marcus, from the stove, where he was learning eggs from Theo, badly. “My mother’s are all like that. You hold it in your hand.”

He held it in his hand. He held it in his fist for a minute and a half, at the kitchen table, while Marcus broke an egg into the pan and most of the shell after it, and then he tried it on the envelope again, and it wrote. Blue. Faint, and then darker.

Frederick Hanover, he wrote, on the back of the envelope, to see.

He looked at it.

He had written it before. He had written it on every school form since he was twelve, and on the backs of his exercise books, and once on the plaster cast of a boy in his class who had broken his wrist, very small, in a corner, under a great many other people’s names. But he had never written it on the back of an envelope at a kitchen table at nine in the morning having written something else a hundred and fifteen times between ten o’clock and three, and the hand that wrote it remembered the other thing, and wanted to go a different way at the F, and he had to make it not.

“Keep it warm,” said Marcus. “Put it in your pocket. Against your leg. And don’t let it get cold before you need it.”

“How do you know all this?”

“My mother,” said Marcus, scraping the egg off the pan, “has never in her life owned a pen that worked.”

---

He rode to the interview on the blue bicycle, with the pen in his front pocket against his leg, and the grey car behind him at twenty yards with its hazards on, and the bell going ting.

The office of the Cove Point Resort was a cabin by the marina, green, like the others, with a sign on the door that said OFFICE - IF CLOSED TRY THE POOL - IF NOT AT THE POOL TRY THE DOCK - IF NOT AT THE DOCK GOD BLESS YOU. Inside it was wood all over, walls and floor and ceiling, a dark yellow varnished wood the colour of honey, and on the walls there were fish. Eleven of them. He counted. Stuffed, and varnished, on boards, with brass plates under them, bass and catfish and a long thin one with teeth like a comb; and between the fish, a calendar from a bait company with a picture of a girl holding a fish, and a map of the lake with pins in it, and a framed photograph of the cabins in 1958, when they were new, with a man in front of them in a white shirt with his hands on his hips; and in the window, an air conditioner, an old one, square, the size of a suitcase, that roared and dripped steadily from one corner into a coffee tin on the floor.

Bonnie Tackett was behind the desk, on the telephone. She was on two telephones. She had the headset on, and the receiver of a desk telephone wedged between her shoulder and her ear on the other side, and a radio on the desk in front of her, the kind with a coiled lead and a microphone on the end of it, which was crackling; and she was writing on a pad with one of the pens from behind her ears; and when he came in she looked up and pointed the pen at the chair in front of the desk and went on talking to all three of them.

”… no, the other slip, Duane, the one with the… yes. Uh huh. No, I’ll hold. Mrs Abernathy, are you still there? No, not Saturday, Saturday’s full, Sunday, I can do you Sunday through… Duane, no, the other one…”

He sat down. He took the pen out of his pocket and held it in his fist, to keep it warm.

On the desk in front of him, face down, there was a sheet of paper.

---

Bonnie Tackett finished with Duane, and with Mrs Abernathy, who was not, Frederick hoped, any relation, and said ten-four into the radio, and put everything down, and took off the headset and looked at him across the desk.

“You got a pen?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Does it work?”

“If you keep it warm.”

Bonnie Tackett looked at the pen in his fist, and at him, and something happened in her quick brown face, under the visor, very fast, and went away.

“Bait shop,” she said. “I know that pen. I’ve got forty of them. None of them work.” She turned the sheet of paper over and pushed it across the desk to him. “Front and back. Take your time. I’ll be on the phone.”

She was. The desk telephone rang before he had picked up the pen, and she answered it, and it was somebody about ice.

He looked at the form.

COVE POINT RESORT. APPLICATION FOR EMPLOYMENT. At the top, in capitals, typed, and under it the sailing boat and the sunset and the leaping fish from the sign by the road, very small, photocopied so many times that the fish had turned into a smudge. And then the lines, with the questions at the start of each, and the spaces.

He had never filled in a form.

He knew it as he looked at it. He sat in the chair in front of Bonnie Tackett’s desk with the air conditioner roaring and dripping into the coffee tin and the eleven fish looking at him from the walls, and understood that every form there had ever been with his name on it had been filled in for him. By the Household, by the Private Secretary, by somebody at a desk in the west wing whose name he did not know, who had known the answers, and written them, and passed the form to him to sign at the bottom where it said to sign. School forms. Passport forms. The forms for the Swedish registry. The forms for the oaths. He had signed all of them. He had not written a word on any of them except his name.

He uncapped the bait-shop pen, warm, and began.

---

LAST NAME.

Hanover.

FIRST NAME.

Frederick.

MIDDLE INITIAL.

A.

Alexander. Nobody had ever called him that, either.

ADDRESS.

He did not know Mrs Sixkiller’s address. He knew where it was. He did not know what it was called. He looked up.

“Ma’am. I don’t know the address.”

Bonnie Tackett put her hand over the receiver.

“Loretta’s?”

“Yes.”

“Put Loretta’s,” said Bonnie Tackett, and took her hand off the receiver. “No, Earl, not you, I’m talking to… yes. Two bags. Two.”

ADDRESS, he wrote, Mrs Sixkiller’s (the farmhouse on the gravel road), Ketchum.

TELEPHONE.

He did not know that either. He looked up. Bonnie Tackett, without looking at him and without stopping talking about ice, reached across the desk and took the pen out of his hand and wrote seven figures in the space, from memory, very fast, and gave it back.

DATE OF BIRTH.

2 May 2013.

AGE.

16.

He looked at the 16 for a moment. He had been sixteen since the second of May. He had sworn the oaths on it, with his hand on a book. This was a form for a pool.

POSITION APPLIED FOR.

Pool attendant.

DATE AVAILABLE TO START.

Monday.

He turned the form over.

---

PREVIOUS EMPLOYMENT (MOST RECENT FIRST). EMPLOYER. DATES. DUTIES. REASON FOR LEAVING.

There were four sets of lines, for four employers. He looked at them.

He thought about writing none. Then he thought about Tuesday, and the trailer, and the clock.

Pettit’s, Vinita, he wrote, in the first set of lines. Tuesday 24 July 2029. Carrying. Finished.

Bonnie Tackett had come off the telephone. She was looking at the form upside down across the desk. She was very quick at upside down.

“Royce Pettit,” she said. “The pawn?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You worked for Royce?”

“For an afternoon. Four and a half hours.”

Bonnie Tackett picked up the desk telephone and dialled a number from memory, without looking, and put the receiver to her ear.

“Royce. Bonnie. No, I’m fine. Listen. You had a boy in on Tuesday. Carrying.” A pause. “That’s the one. Uh huh.” A long pause, in which her eyebrows went up into her visor, the way they had at the pass hut. “The whole trailer? From Bluejacket? The Mayfield place?” A pause. “By himself?” A pause. “Standing up?” A pause. “Huh. No. No, that’s all, Royce. Thank you. Bye now.”

She put the receiver down.

“Royce says,” she said, “that he got the clock in standing up.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Royce says nobody’s ever got a clock in standing up. Royce says he’s had that clock man come from Tulsa twice and it lay down both times.” She looked at him. “Royce says you turned the deer round.”

“It was looking at me.”

“It does that,” said Bonnie Tackett. “Next.”

---

REFERENCES (TWO, NOT RELATIVES). NAME. TELEPHONE. HOW LONG KNOWN.

He wrote Royce Pettit, Vinita. Two days.

He thought about the second one.

He thought about Mrs Sixkiller, who had known him five days and had said she would say it once and then never again; and about Earl, who did not know him at all, in any of the ways that counted, and who would have given him the best reference anybody had ever had, and would have meant every word of it, and would have been talking about somebody else. He thought about Kimura, who was not allowed. He thought about the man in the tractor cap, whose name was Cecil Rowe, and who had folded his newspaper over.

Darlene, he wrote. Cove Café. Four days.

Bonnie Tackett read it upside down. She picked up the telephone again and dialled.

“Darlene. Bonnie. I’ve got a boy here…” She stopped. She listened. “Uh huh. Yes. That’s him.” She listened for some time. Her face did several things. “Uh huh. Uh huh. Six eighty-five? On the board? Under Duane?” She looked at Frederick across the desk. “Well, Darlene, would you…” She listened. Her mouth moved at the corner. “That’s what I thought. Thanks, hon. Bye.”

She put the receiver down.

“Darlene says,” said Bonnie Tackett, “that you owe her six pounds eighty-five for biscuits and gravy and three cups of coffee, and she’d trust you with the till.”

He did not know what to say.

“That’s the best reference Darlene’s ever given anybody,” said Bonnie Tackett. “She gave my husband he’s all right. And I married him.” She tapped the form. “Next.”

---

HAVE YOU EVER BEEN CONVICTED OF A CRIMINAL OFFENCE? YES / NO.

He circled NO.

He had a moment, with the pen still on the paper, of thinking that he could not have been, under any circumstances, because of what he was; that the courts of the Realm sat in his name and could not try him in it; and that therefore the NO was not quite the same as anybody else’s NO, and was a sort of cheating. Then he thought that it was true anyway, and that he had never done anything, and that it did not matter why, and moved on.

ARE YOU LEGALLY ENTITLED TO WORK IN THE REALM? YES / NO.

He stopped.

He stopped for so long that the pen went cold. He felt it go. He sat in the chair in front of Bonnie Tackett’s desk with the cold pen over the paper and the eleven fish looking at him, and read the question again, and then again, and did not know the answer.

Bonnie Tackett had stopped too. She was looking at his face.

“Problem?”

“I don’t know,” said Frederick. “I don’t know if I am.”

Bonnie Tackett looked at him for a long moment.

“Well,” she said, “who’d know?”

He thought.

“The Lord Chancellor, probably,” he said. “Or the Private Secretary. He’d know who’d know.”

“Is he in the book?”

“No.” He took out the brown wallet. He unzipped it. He took out the Private Secretary’s list of telephone numbers, folded small, behind the receipt from Royce Pettit, and unfolded it, and looked at it, and at the desk telephone. “May I?”

Bonnie Tackett pushed the telephone across the desk to him without a word.

---

The Private Secretary answered on the second ring. It was eleven o’clock in New Westminster, an hour ahead, and he answered as he always answered, with his own name and nothing else, in a voice that suggested he had been expecting this call for some time, though he could not have been.

“It’s me,” said Frederick.

There was a very short pause.

“Sir,” said the Private Secretary. “Is everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine. I’ve got a question.”

“Sir.”

“Am I legally entitled to work in the Realm?”

There was a much longer pause. Through the window, behind the dripping air conditioner, a boat went past on the cove, slowly, with a man standing up in it.

“In what sense, sir?”

“In the sense of a form. It says are you legally entitled to work in the Realm, yes or no, and I have to circle one.”

“May I ask, sir, what the form is for?”

“A job,” said Frederick. “At a pool. On the lake. Towels and the snack hut and the chemicals. Eight pounds an hour.” He paused. “If I get it.”

There was the longest pause yet.

He could hear, very faintly, down the line, from New Westminster, the sound of the Private Secretary’s office: a clock, and a typewriter somewhere, which was not possible, because nobody used typewriters, except that it was the Private Secretary’s office, and they did. He could hear the Private Secretary breathing. He could hear him thinking. He had never heard the Private Secretary think before. The Private Secretary did not seem to need to.

“Sir,” said the Private Secretary at last, carefully, “there is nothing against it.”

“Is there anything for it?”

“No, sir. There is nothing either way. The question has not arisen.” Another pause. “It has, I think, not arisen in a very long time.” Another. “Possibly ever.”

“Then I’ll circle yes.”

“Sir,” said the Private Secretary. “If I may. Is it a good pool?”

Frederick looked through the window, past the air conditioner, at the white fence and the umbrellas, and the high white chair, and the kidney of blue water lying in the sun.

“It’s very blue,” he said.

“Then I think, sir,” said the Private Secretary, “that you should circle yes.” A pause. “I shall have to tell Dame Margaret.”

“Must you?”

“Yes, sir,” said the Private Secretary, and his voice did something that it did not do, which in another man would have been a laugh. “Before somebody else does.”

He circled YES.

---

WHY DO YOU WANT THIS JOB?

It was not typed. It was at the very bottom of the back of the form, below the last line, written in by hand, in Bonnie Tackett’s quick round marker, and photocopied with the rest, so that it was on every form, and it had a little box after it, about two inches square, for the answer.

He looked at it for a long time. He held the pen to warm it.

He thought about the queue, and the bomb, and the snack hut. He thought about the Programme, and its sixty-one engagements. He thought about the blue bicycle and the three damp notes in his hand at Pettit’s, the twenties soft and grey with use and the five with a telephone number on it in biro, and how he had not wanted to let go of them; and about the six pounds eighty-five on the slate at the Cove Café, under Duane, in chalk; and about Earl, voting for the train.

For the money, he wrote.

He looked at it. It was true. It was not the only thing that was true, but it was the first, and the others would not go in the box.

Bonnie Tackett read it upside down. She read it twice. Then she sat back in her chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment, and at the fish.

“Twelve years,” she said, “I’ve been doing this form. Every summer. Every kid in this county who wants a job comes in that door and sits in that chair and writes in that box that they love working with people.” She looked at him. “For the money.” She shook her head. “Best answer I’ve ever had.”

SIGNATURE OF APPLICANT.

He held the pen.

His hand went to the G. He felt it go. It had gone there a hundred and fifteen times last night and it knew the way; and he stopped it, a hair above the paper, and made it go back, and start again, at the F, slowly, the way he had on the envelope.

F. Hanover.

---

“Now,” said Bonnie Tackett, “you’ve got to see Kaylee.”

---

Kaylee was at the pool. She was on the high white chair, with her knees up and the zinc on her nose and the whistle in her teeth, and the pool under her was full; and when Bonnie Tackett brought him in through the gate and pointed up at the chair and went away again with her headset on, Kaylee looked down at him over her sunglasses and did not take the whistle out of her mouth.

“Bonnie says you want the job,” she said, round it.

“Yes.”

“Bonnie says you wrote for the money.”

“Yes.”

Kaylee looked at him for a while.

“Good,” she said. “Swim test.”

---

The swim test was four lengths without stopping, any stroke, which he did; and two minutes treading water in the deep end with his hands above his head, which he did, with the children on the edge watching him and counting the seconds out loud for him, all the way to a hundred and twenty, very slowly, so that it was nearer to three minutes; and then the brick.

The brick was a real brick, red, ordinary, with a hole through the middle of it, and Kaylee came down off the high chair for it, which he had not seen her do before, and stood at the edge of the deep end where it said 9 FT and held it out over the water and let it go, and it went down through the blue, turning slowly over and over, and lay on the bottom.

“Get it,” said Kaylee.

He went down for it. He went down through the warm blue and the legs and the noise going hollow and far away, nine feet, to the white floor of the pool, where the brick was, and the light came down through the water above him in wavering lines across it like the lines on a map; and he picked it up, and it was heavier than it had looked, much heavier, and he kicked off the floor with it held against his chest the way he had carried the clock, and came up.

He held it up. The children on the edge cheered.

Kaylee took it from him and looked at it as if checking that it was the same brick.

“Fine,” she said.

She went back up the high chair. He hung on the edge of the deep end with his chin on the hot concrete and looked up at her.

“Is that it?”

“That’s the swim test.” She settled on the top of the chair and put her elbows on her knees. “Now the rules. There are four. You listening?”

“Yes.”

“One. You don’t climb my chair. Ever. You’re not a guard. You haven’t got the certificate and you’re not getting it this summer. The chair’s mine.”

“Yes.”

“Two. You don’t touch the chemicals unless I’m standing next to you. Not the chlorine, not the acid, not the test kit, not the shock. I’m in chemistry at Northeastern, in Tahlequah. In the term. I’m going to be a pharmacist. You touch my chemicals without me and you’ll gas a pool full of children and I’ll lose my place, and then I’ll kill you, and then Bonnie’ll fire you, in that order.”

“Yes.”

“Three. You don’t have a whistle. You’re never getting a whistle. If you see something, you tell me, and I blow mine.”

“Yes.”

“Four.” Kaylee looked down at him, over the sunglasses, for exactly one second, the way she had at the queue. “Towels. Snack hut. Skimmer. Bins. Bathrooms.” A pause. “Yes. The bathrooms.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Nineteen,” said Kaylee.

“Yes, Kaylee.”

She put the whistle back between her teeth and turned to the pool, and blew it, once, short, at a boy on the far side who was running; and the boy stopped running, at once, as if he had been switched off, and walked, very fast, with his arms stiff.

“Monday,” said Kaylee, round the whistle, without looking down. “Ten o’clock. Don’t be late. If you’re late you do the bathrooms first.”

“I do the bathrooms anyway.”

“Then you do them more,” said Kaylee.

---

Bonnie Tackett gave him the T-shirt in the office. It was red, like Kaylee’s shorts, with the sailing boat on the front and STAFF on the back in white capitals across the shoulders, and it was too big, and she said it would shrink.

“Eight an hour,” she said. “Ten till six, Monday through Friday. Half an hour for lunch, which you don’t get paid for, and you can eat what you like out of the snack hut and I’ll take it out of your pay at cost. Paid Fridays. Cash. In an envelope.” She looked at him. “That all right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Next Friday’s your first one. The third.” She pulled open a drawer of the desk, and took out a machine, a small grey plastic one with a wheel of letters on the top and a handle, and a roll of tape, and turned the wheel, and squeezed the handle, and turned the wheel, and squeezed, with her tongue in the corner of her mouth. “What do they call you?”

“Frederick.”

“Too long. And anyway, everybody’s the same till Friday.” She turned the wheel back. Squeezed. Turned. Squeezed. Tore off the tape. Peeled the back off it and stuck it on a little white plastic badge with a pin on the back, and held it out across the desk. “You last the week, hon, I’ll do you a proper one.”

It said NEW GUY.

He looked at it.

He had never been new at anything. He had been born into the oldest thing there was, older than any of the countries it was the Crown of, and every room he had ever walked into had been expecting him, usually for years. He had been new at school, once, at twelve, for a morning, before everybody worked out who he was. He held the badge in his palm and looked at the six letters, black on clear, a little crooked where the tape had gone on, and felt something in his chest that he could not have named.

“Is that all right?” said Bonnie Tackett.

“Yes,” said Frederick. “Yes. It’s fine. Thank you.”

“Pin it on Monday. On the left. Kaylee’ll want to see it.” She put the label machine back in the drawer. Then she looked past him, at the door of the office, which was open, and in which, filling it, in the heat, in his sports jacket, there was standing, as there had been standing for the past hour, Sergeant Castellanos.

“And you,” said Bonnie Tackett.

Castellanos looked at her.

“You’re going to be here all day, are you? Every day? Starting Monday? Standing by my pool? In that jacket?”

“Ma’am.”

“You’ll frighten the children,” said Bonnie Tackett. She reached under the desk, into a cardboard box, and came up with another T-shirt, a blue one, with the sailing boat on it and the leaping fish and COVE POINT RESORT - GRAND LAKE across the front, in an enormous size, and threw it at him across the office.

Castellanos caught it. He held it, in front of him, by the shoulders, at arm’s length, and looked at it, the way a man looks at a fish he has been handed and does not know what to do with.

“On the house,” said Bonnie Tackett. “Wear it Monday.”

---

Theo was at the bottom of the farmhouse drive when he came back, at one, by the mailbox, in the sun, waiting, the way they had waited for him on Tuesday; and he rode the blue bicycle up to the mailbox and stopped, and put his foot down, and Theo looked at his face, and at the red T-shirt over his arm, and did not need to ask.

“Well?” said Theo anyway.

“Eight pounds an hour. Ten to six. Start Monday.”

Theo shut his eyes. He opened them again.

“Number four,” he said.

“Not yet. Not till I’ve done it.”

“You’ve got it. There was a form. You filled in a form.”

“I know. Not till Monday.” Frederick got off the bicycle. “It says get a job. It doesn’t say get given one.”

Theo looked at him for a long moment, and then nodded, slowly, the way he did when Frederick was right and he would rather he had not been.

Then he saw the badge.

Frederick had pinned it on, on the way home. He had not meant to. He had stopped the bicycle at the bottom of the hill by the café, with the car stopping behind him, and taken it out of his pocket and looked at it again, and pinned it on, on the left, on his own T-shirt, to see; and then had not taken it off.

Theo looked at it. He read it. He looked up at Frederick’s face, and down at the badge again, and up, and his mouth began to do something it could not stop.

“New guy,” said Theo.

“Don’t.”

“New guy.”

“I mean it. Don’t.”

“New guy,” said Theo, with the most complete and radiant happiness, and turned and ran up the drive to the house, shouting it, new guy, new guy, he’s the NEW GUY, and in through the screen door, which banged behind him; and from the kitchen, through the mesh, Frederick heard Marcus and Felix take it up, both at once, in a roar, NEW GUY, and somebody drop a pan.

He stood at the bottom of the drive with the blue bicycle and the red T-shirt over his arm, and the badge on his chest, in the heat, and found that he was smiling so hard it hurt his face.

At twenty yards, in the grey car, with the engine running, Castellanos sat at the wheel with the blue T-shirt on the seat beside him, folded, very neatly, and looked straight ahead through the windscreen at nothing at all.