What I Was Read online

  I looked around the little hut, at the tidy crammed bookcases, the framed painting of a ship, at the bench under the window with its thin mattress and faded striped blankets.

  ‘But how do you live?’

  He looked at me, uncomprehending.

  Wasn’t it obvious? ‘Money. Food.’

  ‘I work in the market, hauling boxes.’

  ‘But,’ I said, trying to prevent my voice from becoming querulous, ‘but what about school?’

  My outrage made him smile. That smile.

  ‘I don’t go.’

  ‘You don’t go?’

  He looked at me mildly. ‘No one knows I exist. My birth was never registered.’

  Never registered? What a brilliant start in life! Finn not only had no parents, lived alone, didn’t go to school, but according to the government, he didn’t actually exist. I couldn’t believe my ears. The area was rural but not that rural. It seemed impossible that here, in this modern twentieth-century state dedicated to the improvement of all its citizens by means of relentless conformity and hard graft, a boy could simply slip through the holes of the social net.

  Envy was not nearly strong enough to describe what I felt.

  I wanted to reassure him (though he didn’t seem to require reassurance) that I would do everything in my power to keep the secret of his precarious existence. Even the little I knew about Finn convinced me that he was vulnerable to capture and dissection by well-meaning officials. Without conscience, they would pack him off to some bleak Dickensian children’s home where he would be bullied, buggered, humiliated, and eventually found hanging from an improvised noose in his miserable cheerless room.

  I didn’t know much, but I knew that much.

  Another dozen questions required answers, but before I could speak again Finn asked if I had any plans to return to school. I took it as a request and left.

  As he shut the door behind me, I caught a glimpse of his face. It was inscrutable, composed. Perfect.

  Rule number three: Not everyone is subject to rules.

  Reese was waiting for me in our rooms, expectant and eager for the confidences I’d already forgotten promising.

  ‘So?’ He sat up like a trained squirrel, eyes glittering with excitement.

  ‘So, what?’ I was already late for history.

  ‘You said…’

  The penny dropped. ‘I just stopped for a piss, Reese. That’s all.’

  His face fell. ‘But… what about that boy?’

  Collecting books and papers, pulling on my shoes, I continued to ignore him.

  ‘I saw him, you know.’

  ‘Clever old you,’ I said, and left the room. His habitual wretchedness left me cold back then, as so much of human weakness did.

  6

  It’s a strange sensation to live inside another person’s life, to wonder all the time what he’s doing, or thinking, or feeling. I wondered if Finn ever thought about me, if he ever looked over his shoulder to see if I had crossed the sand to visit him. I would like to have spent every minute of my life doing just that, but of course I couldn’t. I had some pride, after all.

  Instead, I stalked him.

  I caught the bus into town after school, avoiding the sweet shop and off-licence where all normal schoolboys congregated, and wandered over to the market instead. It was a big town and the stalls ran off the high street for half a mile, down a long narrow road that ended at the fish market. The imposing marble building with the dolphin carved into the balustrade was still in use, but had seen better days. It looked tattered and sad, its tall windows opaque with grime. The marble gutters beside it held pools of bloody fish entrails and it stank.

  At the high street end of the market, stalls sold dresses, men’s socks and – irresistible and repellent at once – ladies’ support garments. They were ugly beige with a surgical air and stoutly constructed, as if designed to conceal unpleasant truths about marriage. Kitchen goods were next, steel teapots and cheap tin saucepans, heavy china plates with red marks above the makers’ names to indicate rejected stock. Then the fabrics: great bolts of rough grey suiting made from wool mixed with waste cellulose that would be hell to wear. Further down the road the domestic products gave way to carefully composed pyramids of fruit and veg. It being October, that meant piles of dusty beetroot, huge cauliflowers, cabbages and great wooden bins of runner beans. In two months it would all change – to parsnips, turnips, carrots and spuds.

  Nothing about this market set it apart from ten thousand identical others scattered throughout England, but something of the noise and chaos excited me nonetheless. If I squinted to block out the shiny gadgets and trinkets, I could easily imagine myself a century or two earlier in a scene from Hogarth or Daumier. The faces certainly wouldn’t have changed since then – the broken veins, bulbous noses and crafty eyes lifted straight out of A Rake’s Progress.

  I stood for a minute, just taking in the colour and noise and the great clamouring chaotic bulk of humanity all busy with everyday tasks. At school we lived with so much order and ritual and so little contact with real life that we might as well have been high-security prisoners or Trappist monks. There were no girls, no pets, no harried shouting fathers or sentimental doting mothers, no old people or babies, no sisters to pick up from ballet lessons, no dogs to walk or cats to feed, no heaps of bills arriving in the post each morning. As boarders, our basic needs were fulfilled, our brains and bodies stuffed full of texts and truths, but we were desperately, terminally, catastrophically starved of real life.

  I looked for Finn.

  He was there all right, near the end – his outline instantly recognizable among the broad-shouldered, raw-boned race of market vendors. He had his back to me, hauling boxes off a stack and packing them into the back of a van. A hard-faced stump of a woman watched him work, occasionally indicating which set of boxes went where. She had a kerchief tied round her neck and every few seconds scanned the market with quick, noticing eyes.

  I wasn’t in the mood to be noticed, and the market was already starting to thin, so I turned back and walked away from them, past the flowered nightdresses and cheap fabrics, back towards the high street. I paused at the butcher’s where a sign reading Fresh Meat belied the fact that something (everything) smelled of death. Flies had colonized a cow’s shin, and six glassy eyes stared sightlessly out of a trio of gently rotting sheep’s heads. I shuddered and moved on.

  At the top of the narrow street, there was nothing to do but head back. A few harried, last-minute shoppers bought bruised apples and onions from stallholders anxious to pack up and be off. I walked slowly, and this time he saw me from a distance and skipped a beat in the rhythm of stacking to look again and to steal a glance over at his employer. She had seen me too, though it hardly took a genius to pick a St Oswald’s boy out of this particular crowd. Schoolboys weren’t usually interested in mops and vegetables, and in my ugly grey-and-blue uniform I stood out among the housewives like a stoat in a pram.

  I approached, failing to appear casual.

  Finn collected his coat while the stump-woman unzipped a money belt that hung round the rolling slabs of her midsection and pulled out a few notes. I turned away out of a sort of modesty, or perhaps it was embarrassment on Finn’s behalf. But really I wanted to stare at the exotic transaction, the exchange of work for money. Money in my world meant tuition cheques sealed in discreet white envelopes.

  Finn disappeared for a moment behind the stall and reappeared with two bulging bags – I could see potatoes and carrots sticking out of one and in the other, a small pineapple, rare as an African parrot.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, as if I picked him up at the market every Thursday. I fell in, half a step behind and to his left, grateful and obedient as a hound.

  He stopped at the baker’s and bought a loaf of brown bread. As the owner bagged it and counted out his change, I cast about, desperate for an offering worthy of my devotion. In what I imagined was a grand gesture, I pointed to the most elaborat
e cake in the case – an absurd pink-and-white confection decorated with roses and piped icing – not noticing until it was too late that it was a christening cake complete with pink sugar cherub in the centre. I watched in horror as the woman’s assistant, or perhaps it was her daughter, made a great show of placing the cake in a box and tying it with string. Finn glanced at me, bemused, as I handed over the money and accepted the vile thing, wishing above all wishes that time might reverse and release me from my shame.

  It began to hail. We hunched our shoulders and huddled into our coats, me in my regulation school topcoat, Finn in a canvas jacket that didn’t look very warm, neither of us with gloves. Exhaling white puffs of condensation, we hurried along, our footsteps hollow in the narrow cobblestone streets. It was dark and cold and almost everyone was indoors. On each side of the narrow street, cottages leant in towards us, leaking murmuring voices and small slivers of golden light. I felt like a moth, drawn to the cosy rooms beyond the shutters and curtains, rooms crammed with figurines and ugly suites of furniture where red-faced men and women watched the telly and mongrel collies snored. Smoke from a hundred coal fires poured out of chimneys and swirled around us in the frigid air. I held the cake stiffly behind my back, wondering if I could leave it on someone’s doorstep, and lengthened my stride so my footsteps merged with Finn’s.

  It wasn’t until we were out of town that he spoke. ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’

  I stopped, eyes wide. ‘That’s rich coming from you.’

  He kept walking, and I skipped to catch up. ‘I’ve given up. Nothing left to learn.’

  He turned to gauge my expression, and one side of his mouth twitched up in amusement.

  We didn’t speak again till we reached the school gates. I hesitated, not knowing how to broach the subject of coming another time to the hut. Finn waited, silent, until finally I thrust the cake at him, muttered goodbye and strode off with an unnaturally long and manly gait invented on the spot to impress.

  When I finally had the courage to look back, he had vanished.

  7

  The featureless trundle of my existence began to change. At the time, I didn’t have the insight to wonder at the transient nature of despair, but now I’m older I’ve seen how little it takes to turn a person’s life around for better or for worse. An event will do, or an idea. Another person. An idea of a person.

  In our cramped dormitory with its newspaper photos of film stars and football heroes stuck to every crumbling surface, I plotted my new life in private – insofar as privacy was available.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Reese, eager as ever.

  ‘Prague.’ I didn’t look up, nor had to. Gibbon made a rude gesture to Barrett who suppressed a snort of derision. I shut my eyes and turned all three into voles.

  A small paper bag launched by Gibbon flew through the air and landed heavily on my bed, splitting to release a smell of decay and a long rubbery tail. I picked it up gingerly and tossed it into the corridor, aiming for another door as the stooges howled with delight. The following morning I rose before dawn, removed that week’s translations from Gibbon’s exercise book, padded silently down five flights of stairs to the toilets, put the paper to good use, flushed and returned to bed. Between five and six I slept like a baby.

  The next afternoon had been reserved for my half-term interview, to gauge the progress of new boys in a manner consistent with our reputation for pastoral care. I answered all questions in a manner designed to satisfy Clifton-Mogg that I was doing as well as could be expected. He nodded his head absently while I listed the myriad unpleasant episodes that had occurred during my first six weeks at school, and sent a note off to my parents with the words he’s settling in nicely, written for perhaps the ten-thousandth time in his long and colourless career.

  Actually, I was settling out nicely.

  Two days after my third encounter with Finn, I caught the school shuttle into town after class.

  I bought a tide chart at the newsagent’s, then concentrated on squandering a month’s hoarded pocket money on supplies. According to my chart, the tide would be lowest at 4 p.m., so I caught the bus back to school, waited at the gate until everyone had dispersed, and then set off. Except for the afternoon shuttle to town, we were in theory only allowed to leave school property with a written exeat from our housemaster. St Oswald’s had not yet erected machine-gun towers and searchlights, however, so in practice the rule was nearly impossible to enforce.

  Wary of the road, I chose the footpath that ran parallel, hidden behind a row of trees. It was bitterly cold and nearly dark by the time I reached the beach. The tide chart had actually worked, and I crossed the causeway on damp sand by the last pink streaks of evening light. I reckoned I had a couple of clear hours to hang around before the crossing flooded again.

  It was impossible not to stumble in the gloom and I arrived at Finn’s hut with the bottoms of my grey school trousers soaked. No light was visible within. I knocked, looking out to sea as I waited for an answer, a little spooked by the loneliness of the place and the hollow crash of the waves. The sky was a uniform grey and bled seamlessly into the sea at an invisible horizon. There was no up, no down, no past or future. Aside from the far-off ghost of a coal boat chugging its way from Newcastle, I could have placed myself in the seventeenth century, or the seventh. No conurbation glowed orange in the sky, no traffic boomed, no street lamps shone. I remembered what I’d read about the stele that was found nearby, and wondered about the men who transported it from Northumberland, how they had lifted the heavy stone off their boat, carried it inland and set it upright to honour St Oswald. I imagined their boats tethered to shore, fires lit beside hastily constructed huts, fat stars overhead. Their proximity spooked me, their lives suddenly as real as mine. At my feet I might find the remains of Saxon cooking pots and animal bones, traces of woollen clothing.

  I felt a momentary urge to leap into the sea and swim free of the present.

  No answer.

  I knocked again, louder this time. How could he not be here? And what would I do now? I stood, silent, for a long moment and then as quietly as possible squeezed the latch and opened the door.

  ‘Finn?’ My voice wouldn’t rise above a whisper.

  There was no answer. It was dark in the hut, and cold. I felt my way to the stove, feeling sure there’d be matches, and there were, in the last place I looked (a biscuit tin with a lid). I struck one, searched around for a lamp, burnt my fingers then struck another, hoping they weren’t in short supply and making a mental note to add matches to my shopping list for next time. I didn’t see a lamp at first, but a torch hung beside the stove on a hook. I climbed up on the stool and flipped its string handle free.

  Moving tiny pools of light around the hut, I felt like a criminal. Guilty and excited.

  There were storm lamps at both windows, another balanced by the stove and a fourth by the stairs. I lit all four to dispel the awful loneliness of the place. And to warn Finn. I didn’t want to leap out at him like a burglar when he arrived.

  Replacing the matches, I tripped, knocked over a chair and heard a crash. But instead of a pool of wet among the pieces of broken china, I found a thin disk of frozen tea.

  Minutes passed. I sat on the little bench next to the lamp and rubbed my hands together, shivering and wishing I could build up the fire. But this was his home not mine. And I wasn’t much good at building fires in any case.

  The wind had picked up. Booming waves crashed against the banks of pebble. The hut was cold and full of ghosts; I couldn’t think what I was doing here or where Finn could be. Perhaps he had other friends. This had never occurred to me. There wasn’t room in my fantasy of our relationship for others.

  I stamped my feet and jumped up and down to get warm. Then I pulled one of the striped blankets off the bench, wrapped it round my shoulders and huddled on the bench in the alcove, increasingly drowsy, shivering, listening to the sea and waiting for Finn.

  The click of the latch woke m
e instantly.

  Finn stared. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Too many words choked up in my throat, and I reached for my satchel, fingers stiff with cold. ‘I’ve brought some things.’

  But he had already turned away and my heart sank. I had imagined a confident dropping by, a reunion of equals. I had imagined the sun low in the sky and the beach pink and gold as we chatted casually, easily, over black tea. But this?

  Finn arranged twigs, kindling and logs in the stove. He lit it and stood back for a moment as it smoked, then caught, crackled and began to roar. I watched his profile, wondering whether he was searching for the words to tell me to get out. And like a pathetic sap, I felt tears burning the back of my eyes.

  Silent and cold and blinking with unnatural rapidity, I tried to think of something with which to break the silence.

  Finn still had his back to me.

  With trembling hands I unpacked my treasures. Lamb chops wrapped in bloody paper from the butcher. A loaf of granary bread. A box of Typhoo tea. A pint of milk. A jar of jam. A book, Tales of the High Seas, stolen from Barrett. Laying them out on the bench, I suddenly wished I’d brought more exotic offerings: cashmere blankets and soft woollen socks, rare volumes of English history, a ship in a bottle. Gold, frankincense, myrrh.

  But Finn was staring at me now. ‘I don’t know why you’ve come.’