The Phone-In

The dining hall at Ellicott was in the basement of the old building, under the chemistry corridor, and on wet days it leaked too, in one place, by the salad bar, where there was a bucket that the dinner ladies had painted with daisies in 2019 to make it look intentional.

The table of nine was in the corner by the radiator. It had been the table of nine since seventh grade, and there were not always nine of them at it, and there were sometimes eleven, but it was called the table of nine because on the first day of seventh grade there had been nine chairs round it and they had all sat down and nobody had ever moved.

He got macaroni and cheese and sat down with it.

The woman at the hatch was Mrs Tolliver. She had served lunch at Ellicott since before he was born, from behind a counter with a sneeze-guard on it and a radio on the shelf behind her, a square cream radio with one dial, which was always on, at a level just loud enough to be heard over six hundred people eating, tuned to whatever Mrs Tolliver had decided that day she wanted to listen to.

On most days it was music. Old music, the kind with a brass section.

Today, as he came to the front of the queue with his tray, Mrs Tolliver reached up and turned the dial, without looking at it, from the brass section to a man’s voice, and turned the volume up, a good deal, and then put a spoonful of macaroni on his plate, and another, and looked at him across the sneeze-guard with an expression of complete innocence.

“Extra cheese, dear?”

“Yes, please.”

She gave him extra cheese.

“…if you’re just joining us,” said the radio, “this is Potomac Talk, I’m Gary Brandon, and we have been absolutely inundated this morning, absolutely inundated, with calls on the question of the hour, which is, and I never thought I’d be asking this on a Tuesday in February: is the King the King?”

---

He took his tray to the table of nine and sat down, and nobody at the table said anything, and everybody at the table stopped eating.

All over the dining hall, he could feel it, people were stopping eating. Not all of them. Not even most. But in rings outward from the hatch, where the radio was, the way rings go out from a stone, conversations were getting quieter, and heads were tilting, and forks were being held.

“…now, for those who haven’t seen it, and I’m told that by now that’s a minority of the city, a photograph has been going round since about half past nine this morning of a whiteboard. A whiteboard in a history classroom, I’m told, at Ellicott High School here in the capital, which as we all know, though we’re not supposed to say so, is where a certain young person goes to school. And on this whiteboard, in capital letters, in what I’m told is a teacher’s handwriting, it says: a person under sixteen cannot be King. And then in brackets, and this is the bit that’s got everybody going, a name. And the name, I’m told, is Hanover*.*”

“Oh no,” said June.

“Now I’m not going to say anything about that name,” said Gary Brandon, with tremendous satisfaction, “because we have an understanding in this city, and I respect the understanding, I’ve always respected the understanding. But I will say that the lines have been lit up since ten, and I want to get to as many of you as I can, so let’s go straight to the phones. Gerald in Alexandria, you’re on Potomac Talk.”

“Hello, Gary.”

“Gerald, what do you make of it?”

“Well, Gary, I was in the civil service for thirty-four years, at the Treasury, and I can tell you that the Regency Act 1811 is perfectly clear on this point.”

“Is it, Gerald?”

“It is perfectly clear,” said Gerald, and then there was a pause, “and I’ll tell you what it says, it says that, ah, in the event of the minority of the sovereign, ah. Well. It’s perfectly clear. I’ve got it somewhere.”

“Thank you, Gerald.”

---

“He doesn’t know either,” said Theo, with joy, writing.

“Nobody knows,” said Felix.

“Priya knows,” said June, and they all looked at Priya, who was eating a cheese sandwich she had brought from home in a paper bag, because she did not trust Mrs Tolliver’s macaroni, with her eyes on the middle distance, and who did not look up.

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

“You said that about break.”

“It applies to lunch,” said Priya. “Lunch is a kind of break.”

---

“Brenda in Silver Spring.”

“Hello, Gary, I’ve been listening since ten, my grandson goes to Ellicott.”

“Does he, Brenda.”

“He’s in tenth grade, Gary, and I rang him at break and I said, Darnell, is it true, and he said Grandma, it’s complicated, and I said Darnell, I’ve raised four children, don’t you tell me what’s complicated.”

At a table near the window a tall boy put his head down on his arms.

“And did he tell you, Brenda?”

“He said the old man did it, Gary. He said there’s an old man.”

“An old man?”

“A substitute, Gary. He says he’s about a hundred and he’s got a box. He says nobody’s told him. He says the whole year’s decided not to tell him.”

There was a pause on the radio.

“Not to tell him what, Brenda?”

“He wouldn’t say,” said Brenda. “He said it was manners.”

At the table of nine, Priya, for the first time that day, looked faintly pleased.

---

He ate his macaroni.

He did it because it was in front of him and because it was the kind of thing that you could do with your face doing nothing, and because Bridget had once told him that whatever was happening, you might as well have eaten. It was very good macaroni. Mrs Tolliver had given him the corner bit, with the crust, which was the best bit, which she did not give to everybody.

He looked across at the hatch. Mrs Tolliver was serving a seventh-grader with a ladle. She was not looking at him. She was very carefully not looking at him, in the way she had very carefully turned up the radio.

He had never thought about Mrs Tolliver very much. He found he was thinking about her now, and about why somebody who had served him lunch since he was twelve would decide, today, to turn the radio up so that he could hear it, and he thought she might be doing the same thing Mr Abernathy had done, in a different way, with a ladle instead of a register. Telling him something without telling him.

Read your reading.

---

“Now I’ve got,” said Gary Brandon, “and this is a bit of a coup, Potomac Talk, I’ve got on the line a man who knows the family. Not that family. The other family. The friend’s family. I’m told. Mike in Anacostia.”

Theo stopped writing.

“Hello, Gary.”

“Mike, you know the family.”

“I drive the 22, Gary. Same depot as Pete. Pete Hartigan.”

“Oh, no,” said Theo.

“And what does Pete say, Mike?”

“Pete doesn’t say anything, Gary. Pete never says anything. That’s Pete. I asked him at the depot at six this morning before any of this, I said Pete, how’s the boy, and he said fine, and that’s all you get out of Pete, he’s a Wisconsin man.”

“But the boy, Mike. Pete’s boy. He’s at the school.”

“He’s at the school, Gary.”

“And is he in the class?”

There was a pause.

“I couldn’t say, Gary,” said Mike in Anacostia, and Frederick, sitting at the table of nine with a forkful of macaroni halfway to his mouth, heard in the voice of a bus driver he had never met the exact thing he had heard in Mr Abernathy’s, and Mrs Tolliver’s, and Mr Obi’s, and Castellanos’s. “I drive a bus. I don’t know anything about classes.”

“Thank you, Mike.”

Theo had put his head in his hands.

“My dad’s going to kill Mike,” he said, through his fingers. “My dad’s going to drive the 22 into Mike.”

He wrote it down anyway.

---

He looked round for Castellanos.

Castellanos was at the end of the dining hall by the doors, standing against the wall under the noticeboard about the spring musical, which was The Pirates of Penzance, with his hands folded in front of him, exactly like a parent at a school lunch, which was a thing Frederick had never seen a parent do and suspected nobody had.

As Frederick looked, Castellanos’s jacket pocket rang.

Castellanos took his telephone out and looked at it. Then he looked across the dining hall, over six hundred heads, at Frederick, for one second, and then away. Then he answered it, and put his other hand over his other ear, and turned towards the wall, and listened.

He listened for a long time.

He said something short. He listened again. He said something else short. Then he said, Frederick could see it, Frederick could read it from the shape of his mouth across a whole dining hall, because it was a word he had seen Castellanos say to Dame M on the telephone at least a hundred times since October:

Ma’am.

He put the telephone away.

---

He came across the dining hall.

He did not hurry. He came between the tables at a parent’s pace, nodding to a dinner lady, stepping round a seventh-grader’s bag on wheels, and he arrived at the table of nine and stood at the end of it, by the radiator, and looked down at Frederick’s plate.

“Eat your lunch,” said Castellanos.

“I am eating it.”

“Good.”

“Who was it?”

Castellanos looked at the radio behind the hatch, which was saying something about the Regency Act 1811, in the voice of a woman who said she was a retired schoolteacher from Bethesda and had the Act in front of her and would read it out, and was now reading it out, slowly, and had got to section three.

“A parent,” he said.

“Which parent?”

“A senior one.” Castellanos looked at the table of nine, at June and Felix and Marcus with his trombone case and Lucía and Devon with his telephone face down on the table in front of him like a dead fish, and Theo with his planner, and Priya with her sandwich. “She wants to know if anybody is upset.”

“Is anybody upset?” said Frederick, to the table.

“I’m thrilled,” said Theo.

“I’m a bit upset,” said Devon. “It’s at four thousand.”

“Devon’s a bit upset,” said Frederick.

“I’ll pass that on,” said Castellanos. He looked back at Frederick. “And she wants to know if you are.”

Frederick thought about it.

“No,” he said. “I’m just wrong.”

Castellanos looked at him for a moment. Something at the corner of his mouth started to move and was put back.

“I’ll pass that on too,” he said, and went back across the dining hall to his wall.

---

“…and I’ve got,” said Gary Brandon, “and this is our last caller before the news, a lecturer in constitutional law, at one of the universities here in the capital, who doesn’t want her name used, which I understand, these are delicate waters. Doctor, you’re on Potomac Talk.”

“Thank you, Gary.” A woman’s voice, dry and quick and slightly bored, the voice of somebody who had explained the same thing to first-years every September for twenty years. “I’ll be brief. The terms adopted by the Compact governments on the thirtieth of October, and given effect here by the Act of the thirty-first, are not complicated. They are in the newspapers. They were in yours, Gary. I’ll read you the relevant words. They provide that the age at which a sovereign reigns in his own right is sixteen.”

“In his own right.”

“In his own right, Gary. Four words. Everybody this morning has been leaving out four words.”

The dining hall was quite quiet now. Not silent. But the rings had gone out from the radio as far as the walls, and come back.

“And what do they mean, Doctor? The four words?”

“They mean what they say. A person under sixteen may be King. A person under sixteen may not exercise the powers of the Crown in his own right*, which is why there is a Regent, who exercises them on his behalf. He reigns. He does not yet reign in his own right. The board is wrong, Gary. Whoever answered the question answered a different question, and whoever wrote it on the board wrote down a third.*”

“So the King is the King.”

“The King,” said the lecturer, with immense weariness, “has been the King since two o’clock in the afternoon on the thirty-first of October. It’s in the proclamation. I’d have thought that was the one thing everybody knew.”

---

He put his fork down.

He had been nearly sure in Spanish. He had been very nearly sure since the proclamation came back to him in geometry, and since the seventh-grader, and since Priya’s face, and since Mr Abernathy with the tray. He had put it away and conjugated estar for Marcus.

He was not nearly sure now. He was nearly sure that he was nearly sure, which was worse.

In his own right.

Four words. He had read them. He knew he had read them. He had read them in the newspaper at the kitchen table on the morning of the thirty-first of October with his mother’s coffee going cold beside him, in letters smaller than SIXTEEN, which had been an inch high, and he had read SIXTEEN and stopped, because that was the number, that was May, that was the bicycle in the garage. He had not read the four words. He had seen them. You could see a thing without reading it. You could carry a box without knowing what was in it.

A person under sixteen may be King.

He was a person under sixteen. He was King. He had been King since two o’clock in the afternoon on the thirty-first of October, which was the one thing everybody knew.

Everybody except him, and Mr Pettigrew, and an inspector from Virginia, and Gerald from Alexandria.

He looked at his plate. There was one piece of corner crust left on it. Mrs Tolliver had given him the corner crust.

“That’s the news coming up at one,” said Gary Brandon, “and after the news, more of your calls, because I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this, and I’ll tell you something else, Potomac Talk can now exclusively reveal, my producer’s just passed me a note, that the photograph we’ve all been looking at today has been seen, I’m told, at Charter House.”

There was a sound in the dining hall like six hundred people deciding not to look at one table.

“At Charter House,” said Gary Brandon, with enormous pleasure. “In the Prime Minister’s office. So stay with us.”

Mrs Tolliver reached up and turned the dial, without looking at it, back to the brass section.

Theo looked at the planner, and at his column, and at Frederick, and then, very slowly and with great care, as though writing the most important entry of his life, wrote at the bottom of the page, under everything else:

PRIME MINISTER KNOWS: ?

Frederick ate the corner crust.