What I Was Read online

  4

  One of the more notable facts about the stretch of coastline I have just described is that it is sinking at great speed.

  This is the sort of fact about which it has become fashionable to panic in the middle of the twenty-first century, when nearly everyone agrees that our planet is on its last legs, but it has been true of this stretch of land for at least a thousand years. In contrast, the opposite coast in Wales is rising, which suggests that all of England is slowly tipping into the sea. Once the eastern coast sinks low enough and the western rises high enough, the entire country will slip gently under water in a flurry of bubbles and formal protests from the House of Lords. I greatly look forward to this gentle slipping into oblivion and believe it will do our nation no end of good.

  Back then I might not have agreed. For one thing, I was less interested in geological catastrophe. For another, my contemporaries and I tended to view the future as a vast blank slate on which to write our own version of human history. But all this took a back seat to the real work that occupied each day – perfecting our lines for the drama of school life. It was important to be able to perform them without thinking – the not talking back, the respectful dipping of the head to teachers, the unsarcastic ‘sir’, the stepping aside for bigger boys.

  I rarely thought about the schools I’d left behind; whatever impression they had made had been all bad. Getting ejected from the first had been effortless, requiring nothing more than an enthusiastic disdain for deadlines and games. Even without much of a reputation to uphold, they were pleased to see me go.

  Expulsion from the second required slightly more effort, and the help of materials readily available from any school chemistry lab.

  It occurred to me, however, that falling out of favour with St Oswald’s (which specialized in low expectations) might be more difficult. Even the teaching staff, a ragtag bunch of cripples and psychological refugees, appeared to have few prospects elsewhere. Mr Barnes, a victim of shell shock with a prosthetic bottom and one eye, taught history. He had occasional good days during which he spoke with almost thrilling animation about battles and treaties and doomed royal successions, but the rest of the time he merely sat at the front of the class and stared at his hands. From motives having nothing to do with compassion we left him alone on his black days, tiptoeing out so that his classroom echoed with silence by the time the bell rang.

  Thomas Thomas, a refugee from All Souls, Oxford, with a stutter and lofty ideals, attempted fruitlessly to seduce our souls with the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats. Even without the idiotic name he’d have been branded a victim; with it, of course, he was doomed. We all knew his type: tall, dreamy and peevish, author of an unfinished novel destined to remain unfinished forever. It was easy to make him weep with frustration until he got the hang of school life, at which point (despite his aesthete tendencies and long white hands) he became our year’s most enthusiastic applier of the cane.

  M. Markel was always willing to set translations aside to recount his experiences with the maquisards, his comrades in the French resistance. We adored tales of torture and self-sacrifice under Vichy rule, but never heard one through to the end. The stories inflamed his passions to such a degree that, partway in, he would lapse into the impenetrable Basque patois of his youth.

  The rest barely deserve mention. Mr Brandt (dull). Mr Lindsay (effeminate). Mr Harper (hairpiece, vain). Last, and least, was the dreaded Mr Beeson, headmaster (thick), who also taught RE. It’s not that we thought we deserved a Mr Chips-type head (kindly, bespectacled, inspiring), but Mr Beeson barely topped five foot two, had the ruddy, unimaginative face of a butcher’s apprentice, and cherished a private passion for Napoleonic battle re-enactments that far exceeded any interest he had in the teaching profession. Rumour had it that he had gained the post due to the unfortunate shortage of candidates in the years following the war. The fact that his knowledge of Latin and Greek seemed scarcely better than our own bore this out.

  Have I forgotten to mention sport? Daily drilling in cricket or rugby took place under the relentless eye of Mr Parkhouse, who was a fiend for what he called ‘conditioning’. This entailed long runs across the muddy countryside on days when weather conditions prevented actual games. I can still hear the dull thud of all those feet, more than eighty at a time, propelled by sweaty thighs and wildly swinging arms, clambering through hedges and over stiles, too tired to express resentment but not too tired to feel it. To vary the routine we sometimes ran along the beach, panting along the damp sand in twos and threes until cramp or insurrection put an end to forward motion.

  It is always Reese I think of when remembering these runs. He had taken to seeking me out, trailing me like a shadow, mistaking the person least interested in tormenting him for a friend. He had a disturbing tendency to pop up in exactly the place I least expected him to be, tangling my feet like a jungle snare, and most of the time all I wanted was to shake him off.

  This combination of unwanted exercise and unwelcome company occasionally caused me to call a halt to the entire proceedings – once I lay flat behind a stand of trees, another time I crouched among the reeds until the thundering mass of boys disappeared from view. At those times, I felt a profound sense of release as I wandered back, admiring the mackerel sky and the soft silent swoop of owls.

  This particular September morning was warm and intermittently sunny. Gold and purple heather set the marshes ablaze, and beyond lay the dark green surface of the sea. The low tide had created a long stretch of clear sand between the beach and The Stele, and Mr Parkhouse led us out on to the causeway at a brisk gallop. My breath, hoarse and loud, drowned the outraged calls of shore birds. Ahead was a small group of abandoned fishermen’s shacks, mostly locked up and rotting with blacked-out windows. As we rounded the point, a feeling that irreparable damage had been done to my Achilles tendon made it clear that I should sit down, and I took advantage of the first shack to disappear from view.

  As the rest of the boys ran on, Reese jogged on the spot, his desperate smile twisted into an unintentional leer. ‘What you doing?’

  ‘Bugger off,’ I said. He turned beet red and legged it.

  A dreamy silence settled on the spot. I lay slumped against the shack watching the soft rise and fall of waves, silencing my own breathing until there was no sound and nothing left in the world except sand and sea and sky. After a few minutes, the cloud cover gave way to a burst of brilliant sunlight and the slow dull sea leapt with diamonds.

  The voice when it came was clear, oddly inflected, not unfriendly.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  I looked up, startled. In front of me stood a person about my own age, with black eyes and a quizzical expression. He was slim, slightly taller than average and barefoot, his thick dark hair unfashionably shaggy. A heavy, old-fashioned fisherman’s sweater topped baggy long shorts, chopped down from trousers and rolled.

  He looked impossibly familiar, like a fantasy version of myself, with the face I had always hoped would look back at me from a mirror. The bright, flickering quality of his skin reminded me of the surface of the sea. He was almost unbearably beautiful and I had to turn away, overcome with pleasure and longing and a realization of life’s desperate unfairness.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I managed to stutter, pulling myself to my feet.

  He gazed at me, taking in the exposed, blue-white schoolboy flesh, the stiff cotton shorts, the aertex vest plastered with sweat. From behind him a small grey cat gazed, its tail erect and twitching, as if testing the atmosphere for spies. Both looked, and neither shouted at me to leave. I took this as encouragement.

  ‘I don’t suppose I might bother you for –’ I fought for an excuse, any reason to stay – ‘a drink?’

  The boy hesitated, reluctant rather than unsure, then shrugged, turned, and disappeared into the little shack. The cat stalked behind him, crossing one delicate paw in front of the other as he went. I followed, delighted and amazed by this unexpected turn of events. Compared
to the beautiful boy and the cat I felt scruffy and crass, but I didn’t mind, being not unused to scraping dignity out of pathos.

  It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the interior of the hut. There were only two rooms: a tiny sitting room at the front facing the sea and an equally small kitchen overlooking the reed beds. Flattened, nearly colourless rugs covered rough pine boards, and the chipped remnants of a once-fine set of china sat neatly on wooden shelves in the kitchen. Two smallish front windows opened on to sweeping views of the sea. Across the room, a narrow staircase led to what I assumed was a sleeping loft; a shallow pitched roof indicated that the space would be cramped. Beneath the stairs, a cupboard closed with a worn wooden latch. Simply framed photographs hung in uneven intervals on the wall above the staircase: a bearded man with a weathered face. A portrait of a young woman. A fishing boat. A shire horse.

  All black and white. All decades old.

  The low, banked fire in the iron stove threw off enough heat to make the hut feel warm and comforting as soup. Settled in front of the stove, the cat never took its eyes off me.

  ‘You can sit if you like,’ said the boy in a slightly stilted voice, as if he didn’t speak English fluently or perhaps had lost the habit of speaking. He poured water from a large metal tin into a kettle and placed it on one of the hotplates.

  I thought of the dreary Victorian schoolrooms of St Oswald’s, of the freezing brick dormitories, of my parents’ home with its gloomy semi-rural respectability. This place was unassuming and intimate, its spirit soft, worn and warmed by decades of use. It was as if I had fallen through a small tear in the universe, down the rabbit hole, into some idealized version of This Boy’s Life.

  Remembering what I had in the way of manners, I gave the boy my name and he didn’t flinch – a rare enough reaction, and one I appreciated. Panic began to overtake me at the thought of having to drink my cup of tea and return to the reality of school food and school rules and school life. I sat, photographing the scene with my eyes and looking around for signs that the boy lived here with a grown-up of some description. The hut was very small, but also very tidy. The floors were free of sand, and there were none of the usual cheery beach relics crowded on to window sills. The cotton rugs, though worn, were immaculate. A large pyramid of wood had been stacked neatly beside the stove.

  Not a detail out of place.

  The boy returned to the little sitting room carrying a teacup with roses on it. ‘It’s black,’ he said, handing me the tea, with no apparent desire to know if that would do.

  ‘Thank you.’ I raised the cup and gulped a hot mouthful. ‘Do you live here alone?’

  He did not welcome questions, this much was clear. Without answering, he turned back to the kitchen, followed by the cat. I waited for him to volunteer an explanation, but it didn’t come so I jabbered instead, uncomfortable with silence.

  ‘I’m at St Oswald’s, a boarder. It’s diabolical,’ I said, in an effort to prove somehow that I was on his side. ‘I hate studying and I’m no good at sport. It’s cold all the time and the food is inedible. It’s the most idiotic waste of time.’ I looked up from my tea, anxious for sympathy. ‘And money.’

  He appeared not to be listening.

  ‘Do you have a name?’ I asked.

  ‘Finn,’ said the boy.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Finn.’

  I finished my tea slowly, but once it was gone could think of no reason to stay. ‘I’d better go then,’ I said, with what sounded even to me like a lack of conviction.

  ‘Goodbye,’ Finn said and I felt like weeping.

  Outside, I turned to wave, but Finn had already shut the door on our encounter. Back at school I’d missed breakfast, chapel, and the beginning of Latin. Which meant detention and fifty extra lines.

  And bothered me not at all.

  5

  It was nearly a month before I saw Finn again. By means of careful questioning I uncovered rumours of a boy who lived by himself on the coast, but no one I asked seemed terribly interested in the story. If he existed he was probably desperately poor, on the dole, with an alcoholic mother who showed up occasionally and knocked him about. The hut probably stank. It was, in other words, not the sort of story that would interest my contemporaries, involving as it did poverty, misery, deprivation.

  This pleased me. Finn was my fantasy and I didn’t feel inclined to share.

  Please don’t get the wrong impression from my use of the word ‘fantasy’. I didn’t long to see him in that way. It wasn’t even that I longed to see him so much as to be him, to escape the depressed sighs of my teachers, those exalted judges of my unexalted little life.

  ‘Not an athlete,’ sighed Mr Parkhouse. ‘Not a student either,’ sighed my Latin, maths, geography, French, English and RE masters.

  And yet I wasn’t quite ready to resign myself to the existence they imagined for me: the minor public school boy with the minor job, minor wife, minor life. I could see by their expressions that they had me pegged as the bank manager who never gets promoted, the accountant who can’t afford to take the wife and children abroad, or even (imagine the horror) a sales person of some description – in advertising, perhaps, or insurance.

  The truly frightening thing was that if you stared into enough eyes and saw enough of the same opinion staring back at you, you began to imagine that they might be right. What did I know, after all? My experience of the world came from comics and detective stories and Hitchcock films starring American actresses with stiff blonde hair. The rest of the time I spent staring at teachers or out of windows, or at the obscene scribbles on lavatory walls. Despite my exquisitely honed indifference, my life telescoped down to a few sad little desires: to have second helpings of food, to wear clothes that didn’t itch or cause undue humiliation, to be left alone.

  Twenty-four days after my first encounter with Finn I found myself on the beach again at low tide, this time on an unseasonably cold October day. As Mr Parkhouse led the stampede past the fishing huts, I could see smoke rising from Finn’s chimney. It curled languidly, spelling out words of welcome against the bright grey sky.

  Come in, it said. And, It’s warm…

  Reese matched me stride for stride, vigilant, ubiquitous. My bad luck charm.

  ‘Meet you later,’ I hissed, nodding him off in the direction of our fellow runners. He hesitated, reluctant, but eventually disappeared round the point with the rest of the class.

  This time, although I sat and sat (ostensibly getting my breath back), Finn did not make an appearance. I turned myself into a stone on the beach, inanimate and invisible, ticking off the minutes in my head, wondering how long I could wait, so overcome with disappointment I might have cried. The thought of not standing once more in that room by the sea was too much to bear.

  It was cold. My clothes were clammy with sweat and I shivered. There was nothing for it but to stand up, hold my breath and rap on the door. Once. Twice. Nothing. And then suddenly he was there, not inside the hut but appearing from the dunes beyond, eyes clear, walk graceful, smiling a little as if he might actually be glad to see me.

  Relief rendered me speechless.

  He said nothing, but reached round and opened the door for me, the gesture proprietary and still accompanied by a smile. It was not a big smile, not particularly bold or polite or ironic or glib, not asking for anything or offering anything, not stingy or careless, not, in short, like any smile I had ever experienced before. But such a smile! You could burn a hole in the world with that smile.

  ‘Come in,’ he said.

  The tiny hut felt over-warm after my run and the fire caused little waves of steam to rise from my armpits and crotch. I talked while Finn made tea, spinning a mix of half-truths and blatant lies about life at St Oswald’s. About the Latin master, mean and miserable, who beat us relentlessly and forced us to perform indecent acts after lessons. About the rats that nested in our shoes at night and had to be ejected snarling and squealing each morning. About the food, greyish meat in
brownish sauce, the tasteless purple-grey puddings, the vegetables cooked unto mush (these things, at least, were true).

  ‘It’s vile,’ I sighed. ‘Torture by nutrition.’

  Finn laughed at that, and I felt a tiny surge of triumph: I was Scheherazade, desperate to keep him amused.

  He stirred the tea in an old brown teapot, poured it out black like last time, and handed me a cup. I perched on my bench and he sat on a painted wooden chair pulled from beside the stove. For the first time in weeks I relaxed, despite the fact that the only evidence I had for his friendship was that he hadn’t yet asked me to leave. And once again, sitting in that warm room, I was swept by desire – to escape the dull tyranny of everyday life and live here, by the sea.

  To be Finn.

  I imagined simply disappearing. After a desultory search of the marshes, the school would give me up as a bad episode in an otherwise sterling history of mediocre achievement, inform my parents that I had perished in a freak boating accident or been struck by lightning and reduced to ash. There would be a few tears on the home front, yes, but they would forget me quickly and get on with their lives. It would be better for all concerned.

  For me, particularly.

  As my clothes dried and the tea warmed my insides, Finn stood up and began adding wood to the fire. With his back to me I found the courage to pick up the interrogation where I’d left it nearly a month ago.

  ‘Do you live here alone?’

  Once again he said nothing, but his lack of a denial proved the point in my eyes.

  ‘But everyone has at least one parent.’ Having said this, it occurred to me that perhaps Finn didn’t. He might have been a product of spontaneous generation or emerged from the sea like Venus. Neither would particularly have surprised me.

  I persisted. ‘A relative?’

  He merely shrugged. There was a note of finality in the gesture, and I didn’t dare ask my next question, namely: How on earth have you managed to live alone in a state of perfect grace, away from the local authority and the endless stream of oppressors who populate every minute of every normal life? Although we were taught to be proud of living in this great parliamentary democracy, the civil servants who ran it were a fearsome bunch, a nameless mass of people with jobs (police, social workers, record-keepers, teachers, councilmen) whose sole purpose was to keep everyone shuffling from birth to death in a nice orderly queue. Surely some social service record had been passed to the local constabulary bearing a huge black question mark beside the name of Finn, and the scrawled words Why isn’t this boy in school?