Frank

Frank wanted to go on the Tuesday, so they went on the Tuesday.

He had not been on a train since the first of May. He had not been further than Hrynko’s corner. He came down the stoop of the house with the green door at half past ten in his good jacket, not the work one, the work one was gone, with his ribs strapped under his shirt so tight he walked like their father, very straight, with one hand going out to the fences as he passed them, and his face yellow now down the left side and the cut through the eyebrow healed into a second scar beside the old one from the Larkins’ wall, so that there were two, close, one white and one pink, and their mother had looked at it on Sunday across the table and said well, now you match, and gone out of the room.

Tom walked beside him to the station. He did not help him. You did not help a Keane along a beam.

On the platform Frank stood with his back to the wall, the way Tom stood. Tom had never seen him do it before. He did not say so.

---

The junction was a street.

That was what Tom saw first, coming out of the station at the foot of the bridge and round the corner onto Park Row. It was a street. Four streets meeting at the corner of the park, with traffic going through them, cars and a taxi and a delivery van, stopping at the lights, going on; and people on the pavements, walking, with bags and coffee and telephones; and the park beside it, the trees in full leaf now, dark green; and the bridge going up from the foot of its great stone ramp into the blue, with the cables like harp strings and cars going over and the walkway along the top with people on it, walking, small.

The asphalt was new.

He could see that. Where the junction had been, where the two columns had met at the moment the two crowds became one, the road was black, new, smooth, blacker than the roads leading into it from four directions, which were grey and patched and old. A square of black in the middle of the four grey streets. And on it, fresh, very white, the lines: the crossings, the stop lines, the arrows, painted perhaps a week ago, so white that they almost shone. You could see where the black stopped and the grey began. If you knew to look.

The buildings had windows. Not all of them. The ones on the north side had glass in again, new, clean, reflecting the sky, so that the row of black empty skulls that had looked down on the junction on the first of May looked down now with blue eyes. On the south side some still had plywood, pale yellow, with the frames. The big building on the corner, the one with its front come down, the one the fireman had pointed at with his flat chopping hand, was in scaffolding from the pavement to the roof, wrapped in green netting, with a sign on the hoarding at the bottom that said the name of a firm of builders and RESTORATION and a telephone number.

Frank stood on the corner and looked at it.

---

There were flowers on the railings of the park.

All along the railings, on the junction side, the whole length of the block. Tied to the iron with string and ribbon and elastic bands. Old ones, mostly, brown, dry, the cellophane gone cloudy in the sun; and some new ones among them, this week’s, bright. Photographs, a few, in plastic sleeves against the rain. A union banner, small, a sleeve banner, the kind you carried on a single pole, tied flat along the railings, from the transport workers of a depot in Queens, with a black ribbon tied across one corner.

And people.

Not many. Ten, perhaps. Twelve. Standing. On the pavement along the railings, and on the corners, and one, an old man in a cap, on the traffic island in the middle where the lights were, standing very still with his hands behind his back while the cars went round him. They were not doing anything. They were not reading the cards on the flowers, or taking photographs, or talking. They were standing, each of them on their own, apart, at the edge of the black square in the middle of the grey streets, and looking at it.

Nobody was walking across it. Tom watched. The people on the pavements going to work or to lunch or to the bridge, with their bags and their coffee, walked across the junction at the lights, over the white lines, the way you walk across any junction; and the ones who were standing did not. They stood at the edge of the black, on the grey, and did not step onto it.

Frank went and stood at the foot of the ramp.

---

Tom went with him.

He knew the place. Frank did not have to tell him. At the foot of the ramp, on the grey, just short of where the black began, a yard from the kerb. Where the steward line had been. Where Frank had stood with his arms out wide holding the line for the Queens column to come through, with the old red banner behind him on its poles in the sun and eighty men under it waiting, and Tom had come up beside him at fourteen minutes past twelve, white from Grand Central, and Frank had turned his head.

They stood there. Side by side. Frank on the left, Tom on the right, the way they had stood.

Frank did not put his arms out. He could not have, with the ribs. He stood with his hands at his sides and looked at the black.

---

“I can hear you,” said Tom. “If you’re close. If you talk loud. The left one’s better.”

He did not know how loud he said it. Frank looked at him.

“How much?” said Frank.

It came through. Flat and far off and blurred, through a wall, but it came, and it was his brother’s voice, and he had not heard it since at lunch.

“About half,” said Tom. “Less, in a street.”

Frank looked at him for a moment longer. Then he moved, slowly, with the ribs, round, so that he was on Tom’s left, and stood there, close, on the left side, with his shoulder nearly touching Tom’s shoulder, and looked back at the junction.

“Better?”

“Better.”

---

They did not say anything for a while. The traffic went through the junction in front of them, over the new black, stopping at the lights and going on.

“The banner’s at the hall,” said Frank. “Mick Larkin brought it back. On the Tuesday. On the poles. He walked it over the bridge on his own on the Tuesday morning when they opened the walkway, Dinny says, on his shoulder. He wouldn’t let anybody take it in a van.” He was talking loud and slow, for Tom’s left ear. “It’s got blood on it. A lot. And there’s a new tear. Long one, along the bottom, under the man on the beam, where the pole went through it when they rolled it.”

“Is Mum going to mend it?”

“She wanted to. She went to the hall last week and looked at it.” Frank stopped. “Dinny wouldn’t let her. Not the blood. Not the tear. He says it stays the way it came back. He says it’s not a banner any more, it’s the other thing.” He was quiet. “She stood there and looked at it for a long time. Then she said he’s right, and went home.”

Tom thought of the line of small dark red stitches in the bottom left corner, going past him on the old silk at the foot of the ramp with a woman lying on it, swinging with the steps of the men who carried her.

“The stitches,” he said.

“They held,” said Frank. “I looked. They’re the only bit of it that isn’t torn.”

---

A bus went through the junction.

A city bus, blue and white, the ordinary route, the one that went down past the park to the ferries, or had. It came down from the north and stopped at the lights at the edge of the black square, and waited, and the lights changed, and it went on, across the black, over the new white lines, and down the far side, south, with people on it reading and looking out of the windows and asleep against the glass, and none of them looked at the junction at all.

Frank watched it go.

“You can’t tell,” said Frank.

“No.”

“I thought you’d be able to tell.” He was looking at the black. “I thought there’d be something. I don’t know what. A mark. Something you could put your hand on.” He shook his head, slowly, the way their father did, once to the left and once to the right. “They’ve made it so you can’t tell. It’s a street.”

“That’s what they do. The City. It’s the same at the station. They’re putting the ceiling back to the old drawings. Every star.”

“I know.” Frank looked at the old man on the traffic island with his hands behind his back, standing in the middle of the cars going round him. “That’s why he’s standing there. That one. And them.” He nodded at the people along the railings. “Because you can’t tell. So you have to stand on it.”

Tom looked at them.

He had not thought of it like that. He thought of it now. The ten or twelve people at the edge of the black square in the middle of the grey streets, each of them on their own, apart, not walking, standing; because the City had made the junction whole and left no mark on it anywhere, so that a bus could go through it with nobody on the bus looking, and the only way left to mark the place was to come and stand on the edge of it with your hands behind your back.

---

“Some of them won’t talk to me,” said Frank.

Tom looked at him.

“From the local. The ones I held. Not many. Six. Seven.” Frank was looking at the black. “They say if I’d let them go when they wanted to go, at the start, they’d have got there four minutes sooner, and four minutes is a lot. Joey Callan’s brother was in the junction. Joey was behind my arm. He hasn’t spoken to me since. He came to the house on the Wednesday and stood on the stoop and looked at me and went away.” He stopped. “And some of the others came to the hospital and sat by the bed and said if I’d let them go they’d be dead, if there’d been another one, and there might have been, and thank you. And they’re both right.” He breathed, carefully, the way you breathe with ribs. “And they don’t talk to each other either. The two lots. In the hall. They sit at different ends.”

“Dinny?”

“Dinny sits in the middle,” said Frank, “and won’t say.”

Tom thought about that.

“He came to the hospital,” said Frank. “Dinny. On the Thursday. He sat by the bed for an hour and didn’t say anything at all and then when he was going he stood at the end of the bed with his hat in his hand and said, the trouble with you Keanes is there’s never been one of you would stand where he was put.” Frank’s mouth went in at the corner, and his ribs hurt, and it went anyway. “And then he said, your brother went in first and you went in last and you’re both going to have to live with it, and he put his hat on and went.”

Tom did not say anything.

“I don’t know if we’ll walk it next year,” said Frank, after a while, to the junction. “The march. Shea says we will. Half the hall says we will. Half says never again. Dad hasn’t said.” He looked at the black. “Dad won’t say.”

“No.”

“You could ask him.”

“He’d shake his head,” said Tom.

“Which way?”

“The one that means I don’t know.”

Frank looked at him. Then he laughed. He did not mean to; Tom saw that he did not; it came out of him all at once, short, and his face went white with the ribs, and he put his hand on Tom’s arm, hard, and held on, bent over a little, laughing and not laughing, at the foot of the ramp; and Tom stood still and let him hold on, and could hear it, a little, his brother laughing, through the wall, from a long way off, the first time in four years.

---

When it was over Frank straightened up, slowly, and let go of his arm, and they stood there.

At the place where the line had been. On the grey, at the edge of the black. Side by side, Frank on the left, close, his shoulder nearly touching Tom’s. With their hands at their sides. Not walking.

The traffic went through the junction in front of them. The lights changed. The people along the railings stood, each of them on their own. The old man on the traffic island stood. A woman came along the pavement with a pushchair and saw them standing, and slowed down, and stopped, a little way along, at the edge of the black, and stood too, with her hands on the handle of the pushchair, and did not know why.

Nobody had told anybody to.

They stood there until one o’clock, and then Frank said my ribs, and they went back to the station, slowly, with Frank’s hand going out to the railings of the park as they passed them, past the flowers, and the small banner from the depot in Queens with the black ribbon across its corner.