What I Was Read online

  ‘Come in,’ he called, with that perfect mix of kindness and authority meant to seduce confidences and bring about the collapse of will.

  I entered his study and he ignored me for long minutes, another old trick for prolonging the agony (the curiosity, the worry, the guilt). It had the opposite effect on me. As he scribbled notes, my heartbeat slowed, my tendency to babble dried up. I became Finn, steely, resolved.

  ‘Did you have a pleasant holiday?’ He didn’t look up.

  ‘Yes, sir. Quite pleasant.’

  ‘Majorca, was it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Chilly this time of year, wasn’t it?’

  How should I know? ‘Not very,’ I said cautiously. ‘Warmer than here, anyway.’

  Mr Clifton-Mogg grunted.

  My parents had indeed gone to Spain for Easter and enjoyed themselves greatly. I knew this from the letter I received on my return from Finn’s.

  ‘There is talk,’ he began, looking up at last and speaking slowly, lips pursed with disapproval. ‘There is talk’ – he repeated the words for emphasis – ‘that you were sighted in town during the holiday break.’

  There is talk. You were sighted. Despite his many faults, Thomas Thomas had managed to impress upon us the importance of avoiding the passive tense in our spoken and written work. It denoted weakness. This weakness (combined with the fact that Clifton-Mogg had posed no direct question) gave me the confidence to execute a king’s gambit.

  I said nothing.

  Clifton-Mogg glanced away, a peevish note in his profile – uncertainty, perhaps? ‘Well?’ he said at last. ‘What do you have to say to these accusations?’

  Accusations, suddenly?

  With the perfect composure of the pathological liar, I looked him straight in the eye, unblinking. ‘I was with my parents, sir. You’re welcome to phone them up and ask.’

  He stared at the board as I exposed my queen.

  It was a gamble, certainly, but not as real a gamble as you might imagine. With no hard evidence and no confession to go on, Clifton-Mogg was stumped. I knew it and he knew it. He couldn’t simply phone my parents and ask whether I’d really gone with them to Spain during the break; it would amount to a blatant confession that the school had no clue where the boys in its charge spent their time, and furthermore, that it had taken this many weeks to discover the extent of their irresponsibility.

  Checkmate.

  He sighed again.

  ‘Very well. Assuming your parents are happy to confirm your whereabouts, we needn’t discuss the matter again.’

  But I knew he wouldn’t take up the matter with my parents. I held his gaze, modestly triumphant, and he looked away.

  ‘Now.’ Here he cleared his throat, as if getting to the real reason for our meeting. ‘Tell me, how are you getting along this term generally?’

  I nearly laughed out loud. ‘Fine, sir.’ And then, lowering my voice to an earnest drone, ‘I want to do well.’ My eyes met his, pupils dilated with conviction.

  He cleared his throat again. ‘Excellent. We often succeed with boys like you where others have failed. It’s rather a point of pride.’

  Ah, the platitudes of a long, uncontroversial career.

  ‘Good food and brisk exercise of body and mind. Never fails. Right then. Off you go.’ He consulted a large chart in front of him on the desk. ‘RE, is it? Tell Headmaster I kept you.’

  I bowed my head, muttered ‘Thank you, sir,’ and scarpered, my feet swift and light with relief. I felt like launching into a wild dance, but instead, practised my impersonation of a schoolboy keen to get back to work, my face set in a mask of humility.

  Beneath the mask, I grinned.

  21

  My triumph didn’t last. I was being watched, I was sure of it. The school suspected illicit behaviour and was out to prove it, determined to thwart any idea I had of escaping, if only for an hour or two. The campaign was infuriatingly subtle and effective – they couldn’t restrict me from leaving school grounds because, technically, I’d done nothing wrong. But, along with a number of my classmates, I found myself volunteered into service for the drama club –working evenings and weekends on the school’s summer term presentation of The Importance of Being Earnest.

  My partner? Who else but Reese.

  Thereafter, every spare moment was spent converting school desks into Chippendale escritoires with the help of plywood and paint. We painted thousands of dummy book spines on to cardboard and stapled them in rows on wooden armatures representing bookcases, mounted drawing-room doors on wheels for the scene change and used cardboard and papier mâché to construct a grand piano from the miserable tuneless wreck in the music room. I kept myself separate from the fray, toiling for hours painting unnecessary titles on to the spines of books with a tiny paintbrush, and more hours on a grand ancestral portrait of Algernon’s grandfather (historically accurate down to the curl of the moustache, but cartoonishly awful nonetheless).

  I didn’t mind working on props as much as I thought I would. It was something to do, after all, and the approval rating we got for mucking-in far outweighed the effort required. I couldn’t have cared less about the production itself, though we had a fine Lady Bracknell with a great shelf of a bosom played by a senior boy, James Aitken. He was tall and fair-haired with a talent for rugby and an inability to hide his excitement at wearing ladies’ clothing. He couldn’t act, but his figure in a Victorian gown gave every syllable an unintentional comic flourish that would prove a great success on the night.

  At first I refused to respond to Reese’s attempts at conversation, but as time wore on I gave in. Finn wasn’t exactly chatty, and more to the point, I couldn’t talk to him about the subject I was most interested in, namely Finn. Being horrible to Reese, on the other hand, took quite a bit of effort given how much he seemed to like me, and I flattered myself that he’d keep our conversations secret because I told him to.

  The confessions all went one way – I’m ashamed to say I never asked him a thing about himself – and it wasn’t exactly an unburdening of the heart. I told him about the boy in the hut, describing him as impossibly heroic, and myself only slightly less so. As I indulged in the ecstasy of telling someone, I heard myself building an elaborate fiction around our already-glorious pursuits. In my stories we built slingshots and rafts, hunted deer and sailed to Holland. The idea of having to exaggerate what was already the most amazing story of my life makes me sad for my former self. But Reese’s awe made the fiction irresistible, and he was as close a friend as I was ever likely to have at St Oswald’s, despite the fact that I couldn’t stand him.

  Rule number eight: Trust no one – least of all yourself.

  Between rehearsals and preparation for exams, I was too tired even to think about plotting escape. But nights were another story. There, in the dark, nothing stopped my mind from returning to the place I was happy. In my dreams I didn’t need lies. My imagination conjured Finn’s salty woodsmoke smell, and filled in the spaces between us.

  In the harsh light of day, I wondered whether Finn missed me, or felt hurt that I hadn’t been to see him. Part of me revelled in my role of prisoner, always with the vain hope that it might be a punishment for Finn as well. Without admitting it, even to myself, I lived in hope that a sign would somehow arrive, a note addressed to me in unfamiliar handwriting, a request to meet.

  But there was nothing.

  Until one day I could stand it no longer. On Friday morning, with the dress rehearsal weekend looming, with exams in seven subjects just two weeks away and an epidemic of glandular fever raging through the school, I queued to see matron and obtain a sick note, an excuse to stay in bed all day Friday. Such notes were not easy to come by; matron could detect a fabricated symptom from half a mile away. But with so many feverish, red-throated boys congregating outside her little medical room, she barely had time to examine us all, and I took the extra precaution of running the long way round to get there, arriving splotchy, red-faced and overheat
ed. She barely glanced at my throat.

  ‘Here,’ she said with a sigh, scribbling on her blue pad, ‘here’s your note. There’s nothing for it short of bed rest. I’ll see you again on Monday and for God’s sake, don’t kiss anyone.’ She glanced at me with a malicious little smile, repeating the joke she’d probably made a hundred times already that week. And yet I couldn’t help wondering if even she’d heard the rumours.

  With gritted teeth and half-shut eyes, I made a great show of dragging myself to my feet, staggering a little at the doorway. Acting? Ha. Compared with Lady buggering Bracknell, I was Laurence Olivier. Any minute now I’d be called to collect my award for best performance in the role of boy with non-specific symptoms of a useful alibi.

  Luckily, my evil room-mates had not yet succumbed to the plague, and I waited, huddled and moaning slightly for effect, till they disappeared off to lessons the next morning.

  ‘Lucky bastard,’ from Gibbon was all they offered by way of sympathy, and, ‘that’s what you get for snogging old men.’

  When I didn’t answer, Gibbon loomed in close, nose to nose. ‘You don’t look ill to me.’

  I kneed him in the groin and turned over to face the wall, leaving him to shriek agony and revenge from the floor until Barrett dragged him away. Reese lingered, his mouth opening and closing like a fish. In the end he too left.

  By 8 a.m., with what was left of the healthy student body hard at work, I was out the front gate and partway down the footpath. Desperate though I was to see Finn, I didn’t dare risk the road, and so hurried along, head down, behind the thin cover of trees. The sun might turn warm in a few hours, but for now I tucked my hands up into my armpits as I jogged along, hugging myself for comfort as much as for warmth.

  When I arrived at the beach, the water was high. There had been no time for the niceties of a tide chart, and I muttered a prayer under my breath and trudged up into the dunes, hoping to find Finn’s kayak.

  It was there, neatly lashed to the old rusted winch. So Finn was either working or had left the boat for me on the off chance that I might get away. If only it were the latter. I prayed I’d find him at home, drinking tea or reading, that he’d look up calmly yet with barely disguised pleasure and say, ‘Well, well. It’s about time you showed up.’

  The crossing blew treacherous with eddies, but I was no longer helpless in the kayak. I could balance fairly well, and knew how to use the currents to guide my little craft gently to the beach on the far side. Once there, I dragged the boat behind me to the hut and carefully secured it, drawing out the moment of anticipation. I noticed that the sea seemed to have advanced even in the few weeks since I’d last visited, the little waves washing up to within a few feet of the hut.

  There was no sign of Finn through the windows, and no answer to my series of bold knocks.

  I opened the door. The hut was empty and the fire just glowing ash, a sign that it had been left for some hours. I walked through the little house touching things gently, reminding them of my presence, rubbing up against Finn’s life like the cat, reclaiming ownership. At a loss for what to do next, I built up the fire, set the kettle on the old stove and stood watching, waiting for it to boil. Which it did at last, despite the old adage.

  With my tea I stepped out of the hut, scanning the shore and then turning towards the horizon, where fishing boats trailed seagulls like pennants. Nothing on earth could convince me the fisherman’s life was a romantic one, what with the relentless rocking cold, the loneliness, the danger. Not to mention the killing. All those silvery bodies drowning in air. I went back inside and just sat, wondering what to do next.

  The door opened.

  ‘Thanks for stealing my boat.’ He was shivering and dripping wet.

  ‘Oh, God, I’m so sorry…’

  But through chattering teeth he smiled and I felt that he really might have been pleased to see me. The water in the kettle was still hot and I turned into one of those cartoon figures racing about fetching things and talking at the same time, babbling apologies, and information about The Importance of Being Earnest and how I’d wanted to come sooner.

  All the while Finn stood in the centre of the room, dripping and strangely passive. His face was flushed, and when I handed him a towel I could feel the heat coming off him in waves.

  ‘You don’t look well,’ I said, in a spirit of joviality rather than concern. ‘Get changed and I’ll make the tea.’

  He nodded, turned, and began to ascend the stairs to his little loft, moving carefully, clumsy with cold.

  Something in me hesitated, but I didn’t stop to think. Even if I’d wanted to, I had no idea how to worry about Finn.

  He’ll be pleased to see me again, I thought, throwing myself wholeheartedly into the task of brewing tea. He’ll be pleased to have someone make him a cup of tea for a change.

  I made it thick and black and waited for him to reappear, working slowly, stalling a minute or two, adding a heaped teaspoon of sugar on my own initiative because of the chill, searching around in vain for a biscuit or a piece of cake, perhaps left over from my last visit. There’d been no time to bring supplies this time – I’d even thought (yes, a touch defiantly) that he’d have to take me as I was, without bribes and offerings for his favour. But now I regretted having nothing to give. It was my fault, after all, that he was freezing cold and soaking wet.

  I shifted from foot to foot, impatient, a housewife having gone to all the trouble of making dinner and receiving no response from her family. I tried swallowing the silence along with my tea, glancing at the stairs occasionally, casually, where things seemed to have gone rather quiet.

  ‘You haven’t gone to sleep on me, have you?’ I called loud enough for him to hear but there was no answer. Frowning, I started across the room. ‘Finn? I’ve got your tea.’

  Silence.

  I had never been upstairs. ‘Finn?’ The tremor in my voice betrayed nerves – about his failure to answer, and the possibility of having to breach the inner sanctum. I climbed a few steps. ‘Finn?’

  Panicked now, I took the stairs two at a time, splashing hot tea on the floor and walls, and found him lying on his bed under the eaves, his face chalky white. ‘I’m OK,’ he whispered, though clearly he wasn’t. ‘I haven’t been feeling too well.’ Even huddled under the blankets he was shivering. When he swallowed, he squinted with pain.

  Oh, Lord. ‘Hang on,’ I yelped, running downstairs for the hot-water bottle. With trembling hands, I unscrewed the stopper and emptied the kettle into it, splashing my fingers with boiling water and cursing. There wasn’t quite enough in the kettle to fill it, so I tipped in what was left of the tea and bounded back up the stairs, replacing the stopper as I went. It took some insistence to pry the blankets out of his fist and give him the warm rubber bottle to hug. In the process I noticed that he’d managed to pull on a dry shirt and jersey, but his legs were bare; he’d evidently collapsed before he could finish dressing. There was a small pine chest near the bed, and I pulled open drawers until in one I found a pair of flannel long Johns. He struggled with me, embarrassed, and at last I bowed to his modesty and left him to wriggle into them himself.

  What price dignity, I thought for a wry instant. And then, ‘Have you got any aspirin?’

  ‘Downstairs,’ he croaked. ‘In the red tin.’ I found the tin, and rummaged through the ancient first-aid kit with its neatly rolled Second World War bandages, in search of something for pain. The thought that I had managed to infect him with glandular fever on my last visit did occur to me – we’d been told it could take weeks to incubate – but the fact was, Finn did not get ill. He had told me himself that he could not remember feeling unwell, ever. And yet perhaps I had infected him, perhaps I had carried the weapon into his life disguised as friendship, like the American settlers, bearing alcohol, the common cold, and other fatal trinkets.

  An ancient pillbox was marked ‘aspirin’, and I guessed they were his gran’s and about a hundred years old. Tipping out a handful, I pou
red a mug full of cold water and hurried back upstairs.

  Finn shook his head when he saw the tablets and closed his eyes again, so I fetched a spoon and crushed them to powder, stirring until they dissolved in half an inch of water and placing it in his hand, firmly, like an Edwardian nanny. He managed to sit up a little and drink the foul mixture, grimacing. One more trip downstairs for the blankets off my bed and then I smoothed his covers and left him, eyes closed, breath peaceful.

  Now what? I couldn’t exactly go back to school and forget him. And what was the food situation? I kicked myself for not having brought anything, wondering if I could make it into town, back here and back to school without getting expelled. There was leftover porridge in a saucepan, a few days old at least, to which I added water, sugar and butter, then heated and stirred it to make a sloppy gruel. After that there was nothing for me to do but bank up the fire and collapse, no longer able to suppress the tremor in my limbs that came from being tired and stressed and chilled with responsibility I didn’t want.

  22

  Finn slept and slept. It grew dark, and my fretting about the time took on an edge of panic. Unable to wait any longer, I woke him, and to my relief he seemed a little brighter.

  ‘Could you eat something?’ When he made a face, I adopted a brisk, no-nonsense voice. ‘Of course you can, here, it’s nice.’ I practically forced the sweet porridge down him, spilling some on the bedclothes and some down his neck, and I think he ate just so he wouldn’t have to lie in a puddle of the stuff after I left.

  ‘Look, Finn,’ I said, ‘I’ve got to get back to school. But I’ll come on Sunday with food and aspirin. In the meantime, I think you’ve got to move downstairs by the fire. That way there’s not so far to go if you need anything.’

  He nodded, and I helped him to his feet, supporting him awkwardly down the narrow stairs. Together we lurched and wove back and forth like Laurel and Hardy, and I couldn’t help wondering if he’d have done a better job on his own. He sat in a chair while I returned for his bedding to make up the little alcove bed. Despite the warm day, I was cold with inactivity and fear.