Break

Break was nineteen minutes, and on wet days it happened in the covered yard, a long concrete space under a corrugated roof between the old building and the gym, with benches along one wall and a vending machine at the end that had been out of the orange crisps since the accession.

It was full. It was always full on a wet day. Six hundred people in a space meant for about two hundred, all talking at once, under a tin roof with rain on it, so that the whole place sounded like the inside of a drum somebody was trying to tune.

He went to the bench at the far end, where the table of nine sat at break, and sat on the end of it with his bag between his feet, and tried to look like somebody who was sitting on a bench.

Theo sat beside him with the planner open on his knee and a pen in his mouth, looking round the yard like a man at a racecourse.

“Listen,” said Theo.

“To what?”

“To it.” Theo took the pen out of his mouth. “It’s going round. You can hear it going round. It’s like when they put the river green, you can watch the colour go downstream. Listen.”

Frederick listened.

The yard roared. Under the roar, in pieces, the way you hear your own name in a crowded room, he heard it.

“…said he’s not King…”

“…no, he said nobody’s King till May…”

“…his mum’s King…”

“…in history, with the old man…”

“Seven,” said Theo, writing. “I’ve had seven so far. Different versions. I’m writing them all down.” He held up the planner. “One. The King said he isn’t King. Two. The King said there isn’t a King till May. Three. The King said his mum’s King. Four. The King said you have to be sixteen to be King, which is the actual one, so that’s a control. Five. The King has abdicated in history.”

“Abdicated?”

“Five, I said. Six. The King’s going to be King in May, so there’s no King now, so there’s no detentions. That one’s a seventh-grader, I heard him, he’s going to try it on Mrs Hendry this afternoon and I’d pay money to watch.” Theo wrote something. “Seven. The old man is the King.”

“The old man is the King?”

“Somebody heard Mr Pettigrew said and somebody heard Mr Pettigrew’s King and here we are.” Theo looked at the list with deep content. “It’s the best thing that’s happened at this school since the roof fell in on the swimming gala.”

---

June came and sat down on his other side, and put her lunchbox on her knees and did not open it.

“My mum’s texted.”

“What about?”

June held up her telephone. On it was a message from somebody saved as MUM with three heart emojis after it, and it said: Is it true the King isnt the King?? Saw it on Shana’s page. Is it to do with your school??

“Who’s Shana?”

“I don’t know. Somebody who knows Devon’s cousin, I suppose. Or somebody who knows somebody who knows him.” June looked at the message. “What do I tell her?”

“Tell her it’s a history lesson.”

“She’ll think I’m covering for you.”

“You are covering for me.”

“Yes, but she doesn’t need to know that.” June typed something with her thumbs and sent it and put the telephone face down on the lunchbox. “I’ve told her the old man’s got a box of cards from 1974. That’ll keep her busy.”

Felix came and stood in front of them in his duck tie.

“Mr Kaminski asked me if you’d resigned,” he said.

“What did you tell him?”

“I said I didn’t know you could.” Felix looked worried. “Can you?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so,” said Felix. “I said that. Then I said I didn’t know if you could be King either, actually, any more, so I couldn’t really say. He said right and blew his whistle at someone.” He sat down on the end of the bench. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine, Felix.”

“It’s my tie,” said Felix. “I can’t think in it.”

---

A boy came and stood in front of the bench.

He was a seventh-grader. Frederick could tell, because seventh-graders at Ellicott all carried bags that were too big for them, as though they had been issued in September with the expectation of growth, and this boy’s bag was the largest he had ever seen, a navy-blue thing on wheels that came up to the boy’s shoulder, and the boy was holding it by the handle and looking at Frederick with an expression of great seriousness.

Behind him, at a distance, were four other seventh-graders, watching.

“Are you him?” said the boy.

There was a pause on the bench.

“Am I who?”

“Him.” The boy did not move his eyes. “Are you King or not? My brother’s in your year and he says you said in history you’re not. And Marcus’s little sister says you are, because Marcus says so. And Leo says the old man’s King.” He tilted his head at the four behind him. “So which?”

Frederick looked at him.

He had been asked a great many questions since October. He had been asked them by the Private Secretary and by Dame M and by the Lord Chamberlain and by a bishop and by a woman from the ABC with a microphone on the steps of New Westminster General, and by his mother, in Swedish, on the stairs, at night, Hur mår du, egentligen?, how are you really, which was the hardest. He had answered all of them. He had a way of answering, by now, a short, plain way that Dame M said was exactly right and the Private Secretary said was very nearly right.

He had never been asked this one. He found, sitting on the bench with his bag between his feet in the covered yard, that he did not have a short, plain answer to it.

“It’s complicated,” he said.

The seventh-grader considered this.

“That’s what my dad says about my mum,” he said.

Theo made a noise into his planner.

“It’s not that kind of complicated.”

“It’s always that kind,” said the seventh-grader, with the weariness of somebody who had been twelve for a long time. He turned his bag round on its wheels and went back to the four, and Frederick heard him report, in a clear high voice that carried across the yard: “He says it’s complicated.”

“Oh,” said one of the four, with deep understanding.

They went away.

Theo wrote, under the seven versions, in capitals:

8. IT’S COMPLICATED.

---

He looked down the yard to the vending machine.

Castellanos was standing beside it. He was standing beside it exactly like a parent who has been told to wait by a vending machine and has decided that he might as well look at the vending machine while he does, and he was looking at it, at the empty spiral where the orange crisps had been, as though it were a matter of professional interest.

Mr Kaminski was standing beside him.

Mr Kaminski taught gym. He was a short, very broad man in a tracksuit with a whistle on a cord round his neck, and he had taught gym at Ellicott for nineteen years, and on the morning of the first of November he had blown his whistle for travelling at Frederick in a basketball game in exactly the same voice he used for everybody, which Frederick had decided was the second kindest thing anybody had done for him all year.

He was looking at Castellanos’s badge.

Frederick could not hear them. He could see them. Mr Kaminski said something and pointed at the badge. Castellanos looked down at it as though he had forgotten it was there. Mr Kaminski said something else, longer, with a question in it. Castellanos thought about it, and said one word.

Mr Kaminski looked at him for a while, and then nodded, slowly, and went away.

“What did he say?” said Theo.

“I don’t know.”

“Go and ask.”

“I’m not going to ask. I’m not supposed to know him.”

“You’re not supposed to know your own parent?”

---

At the end of break, on the way back through the yard to the old building, he passed the vending machine.

“What did you tell Mr Kaminski?”

Castellanos did not take his eyes off the empty spiral.

“He asked whose parent I was.”

“And?”

“I said several.”

Frederick looked at him.

“It’s true,” said Castellanos. “I’m in loco parentis for a great many people in this building, as of eight o’clock this morning. It says so on the form Dr Brooks made me sign.” He looked at the spiral. “There are no orange crisps.”

“There haven’t been since November.”

“Since the accession?”

“The man who fills it said it was a mark of respect.”

Castellanos almost did something with his mouth, and did not.

---

The inspector was in the yard.

Frederick had not seen him come in. He was simply there, at the end of the covered yard by the door to the gym, standing very straight in his three-piece suit with his clipboard against his chest and his stopwatch in his hand, looking at the litter bins.

There were three litter bins in the covered yard. Mr Stroud was looking at them one at a time. He looked at the first one and clicked the stopwatch and looked at the second one and clicked it again, and it was so obviously and completely impossible to tell what he could be timing that Frederick stopped walking to watch, and Theo stopped beside him, and so did June, and Felix.

“He’s timing the bins,” said Theo reverently.

“He can’t be timing the bins.”

“He’s timing how long between the bins. Look. He’s walking it. He’s walking from one bin to the other with the stopwatch. He’s going to write down how long it takes a child to find a bin.” Theo was nearly incoherent with joy. “Freddie. He’s going to write it down.”

Mr Stroud reached the third bin and clicked the stopwatch and looked at it and wrote something on the clipboard. Then he turned round and looked along the yard, and his eye fell, the way it fell on everything, like a hand going along a shelf, on a crisp packet on the concrete by the bench, orange and black, the old kind, the kind there had been none of since November, which somebody must have been keeping since the autumn and had finally given up on.

And then on Frederick, who was standing nearest it.

“Boy,” said Mr Stroud. “That packet.”

---

Frederick bent down and picked up the crisp packet.

He did it without thinking. Afterwards, he thought it was probably the first thing anybody had told him to do since October that he had done without thinking, and he was not sure how he felt about that, and decided that he felt fine about it.

He took it to the nearest bin and put it in.

“Thank you,” said Mr Stroud, and wrote something. He looked up. The hand went along the shelf and stopped, this time, on Frederick, for perhaps a second longer than it had in the corridor.

“I know you,” said Mr Stroud.

Behind him, Frederick heard Theo stop breathing.

“Name?”

“Hanover, sir.”

“Hanover.” Mr Stroud looked at his clipboard, and turned back a page, and found something, and his face cleared, in the way of a man who has placed a face at a party. “Of course. Hanover. The boy with the sixteen.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sound boy on the Charter.” Mr Stroud wrote something. “Unsound on triangles.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well. One out of two.” Mr Stroud capped his pen. “In Virginia, Hanover, at the Fairfax Academy, I used to say to the boys that a sound grasp of the constitution would get a man further in this Realm than all the triangles in Euclid. You’ll find that’s true.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Carry on.”

He went into the gym. The door swung shut behind him.

Theo started breathing again, very loudly, in short bursts, as though he had been underwater.

“The boy with the sixteen,” he said. “He knows you as the boy with the sixteen.” He opened the planner and found the column and wrote in it, and Frederick read it over his shoulder:

INSPECTOR KNOWS: 0 INSPECTOR THINKS: SOUND ON CHARTER

“I’m going to have that framed,” said Theo.

---

Priya was the last to get up from the bench.

She never hurried at break. She had a way of finishing whatever she was reading, which this morning was the Spanish vocabulary for fourth period, before she got up, and then getting up, and the bell could do what it liked about it.

Frederick waited for her.

He did not know he was going to until he had. He stood at the end of the bench with his bag on his shoulder while the yard emptied round him, and she closed the vocabulary book and put it in her bag and looked up and found him there, and did not look surprised, because Priya never looked surprised by anything.

“Priya.”

“Mm.”

“This morning. The board.”

“Mm.”

“You were going to say something. Before the inspector came in. You opened your mouth.”

Priya looked at him for a moment with her calm dark eyes.

“I was,” she said.

“What were you going to say?”

She picked up her bag and put it on her shoulder, and looked at the rain coming off the edge of the tin roof in a long silver fringe, and then back at him.

“I don’t do the Charter at break,” said Priya.

“Priya.”

“It’s a rule.” She went past him towards the door. “I do Spanish at break. I do the Charter in history. That’s what history’s for.”

“It’s important.”

“Everything’s important,” said Priya, at the door, over her shoulder, without stopping. “That’s why I have rules about it.”

The door swung shut behind her.

Frederick stood alone at the end of the covered yard, in the drum-noise of the rain on the tin, beside the vending machine with no orange crisps in it, and found that the small unease of first period had moved, at some point during break, without his noticing, from somewhere quite distant to somewhere about the level of his stomach, and was sitting there, the way a drip sits in a bucket, getting very slightly fuller.