What I Was Page 4

  My heart stopped. I want… I want to… I want you…

  I fled. In my damp clothes, in the night, with the tide racing in and my eyes flooded with salt, I ran. All the way back to my real home, the only place I belonged.

  ‘Hey, look who’s here!’ Gibbon, hunched over a history essay in our study, was delighted at this turn of events. He had obviously resigned himself to a slow night. ‘Back from servicing granddad?’

  Across the room, Reese said nothing. His position in the hierarchy was delicate. Barrett sat at the fireplace, charring bread on a fork. A small heap of stolen coal flickered blue with flame but did nothing to warm the room.

  ‘Come on, loverboy, show us your stuff.’ Gibbon giggled at the brilliance of his own repartee.

  Barrett pulled his fork out of the fire and waved it at me encouragingly. ‘Go on then.’ He made obscene sucking noises, leading the way.

  I looked from one colossal cretin to the other, then placed my hands on Gibbon’s desk and leant right into his face, lips puckered for a kiss.

  He drew back sharply and I slid my foot under the front leg of his chair, flicking it upwards. The crash and howl that followed distracted Barrett long enough for me to stroll from the desk to the fire and drop Gibbon’s essay on to the coals. The cheap paper smouldered for all of three seconds before bursting into flame.

  Reese’s hand flew to his mouth, hiding an expression of delight.

  I walked past the wailing Gibbon (despite the impressive gash at the back of his head, he managed a respectable lunge) and closed the study door in his face. The torrent of abuse that followed is not worth repeating.

  Gibbon spent the night in the sanatorium while I tried to anticipate his next move. It was much easier to get inside his brain than Finn’s, despite the fact that his psychopathic tendencies took me to places I’d rather not go. A few days later when the smell of rotten fish began accompanying me to lessons, I almost had to admire him, though the idea stank (literally) of Barrett’s more subtle intelligence. By preference, Gibbon would have dropped an anvil on my head.

  Suddenly there were kippers everywhere. In my bed, my shoes, my cap, my blazer, book bag, PE kit. It was a hellishly effective plot, a smell impossible to remove by methods available to a schoolboy, and by the time our housemaster cottoned on to foul play, I had acquired a new name and a reputation for putridness.

  Ferreting kippers out of my personal belongings took up most of my spare time for the better part of a week. But I knew better than to complain or acknowledge the offence, and eventually the hostilities faded. Throughout this period, Reese provided solace in the form of the occasional small smile or furtive greeting, for which I actually felt grateful. And when I took to wandering off behind the playing fields and into the woods, he often followed a few paces behind like a dutiful Indian wife. An old yew hedge, nearly hollow on the inside, provided an excellent sheltered place to sit and read. It was damp, but so was everywhere else. I had moments of being almost happy there, and only occasionally gave in to the misery of so much lost, so much nearly won.

  8

  I didn’t need Finn.

  So the next time we ran down to the causeway, an afternoon in mid-November, with the trees bare and the days only a few hours long, I didn’t slow down, didn’t look left or right, didn’t acknowledge that anyone (much less anyone I knew) lived in the little hut. And yet… physiology had its own imperative, and there was no point pretending that my racing pulse and flushed face had everything to do with exertion.

  Reese panted along at my side. He hung around in my vicinity with such persistence these days that we were halfway to becoming a comedy act – Kipper and Reese, the two stooges – and I tolerated his presence because it made me look less friendless. When we rounded the rat’s nose, I slowed, and stopped. Reese hesitated, but after a moment glancing hesitantly from me to the disappearing pack, he ran on.

  Such a courageous boy I was. To act brazenly under such scrutiny and risk further injury to my wounded heart. Ah, the resilience, the blind, dumb persistence of youth.

  There was smoke coming from the chimney. Driven by anger and a degree of fatalism, I opened the door without knocking. I’m back, I said silently, boldly. Take it or leave it.

  And here’s the miracle. Finn’s expression (unless I have rewritten history, unless I was unable to read it at the time, unless wishing has the capacity to pervert truth), his expression was not shocked, but relieved.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, my mouth curled into a little satirical grimace, my spirit cautiously elated.

  He actually smiled. At my foolish runner’s kit, perhaps, or my brazen expression, my vulnerable legs. At my idiot’s audacity. My barefaced cheek. I didn’t care why.

  He smiled.

  Then he took a saucepan down from above the stove and left the hut. When he returned, it was sloshing with water and smelled of brine. Placing it on the iron stove he dumped in half a dozen potatoes, scooped some lard into a heavy frying pan and waited for it to melt. With infinite care, he placed a flat brown fish in the sizzling fat and as it cooked, put two plates on the wooden table beside the stove, pulled two forks and two knives out of a drawer in the table, and turned to me. Paused. Spoke softly.

  ‘I’m no good at company.’

  Did the words carry a hint of explanation? Not that it mattered. I’d already forgiven him.

  ‘Sit,’ he said.

  I sat. No more good at being company than he was at having it.

  And suddenly I was starving. Starving despite the silence, the absence of the sweaty wool and foot smell of ninety other boys. I forced myself to eat slowly, not to bolt my food like a dog in case someone arrived mid-bite to take it away. I still finished before him.

  Finn made tea and we sipped it and listened to the sea while this thing I didn’t dare name glowed between us. And then all of a sudden I couldn’t stand the silence so I began to tell him about my family, and my first two schools, and Reese and Barrett and Gibbon, and whatever else popped into my head.

  He listened politely, without comment, head turned slightly away from the sound of my voice. There were none of the usual listening comments you expect from normal people, or the hilarious cracks I might have received from my schoolmates. Instead he just sat, face composed, dark hair hiding his expression – if he had one. He might have been asleep for all I knew, so complete was his lack of response. And yet, I thought I could feel him listening, I could almost see my words wandering in long trails around his head, circling, searching, until he sighed and yielded and granted them entry. My face flamed with the joy and the shame of exposure, while Finn sat silent and safe behind his fringe of hair, behind the long black lashes that guarded his eyes and his thoughts and the entrance to his soul.

  After a while I ran out of words and fell silent, stubbornly awaiting a response. Perhaps no one had ever explained the concept of a conversation to him. As the minutes ticked by and he said nothing, I felt an irresistible urge to laugh, conceding game set and match to his talent for silence. I gave up and asked how he’d ended up living here.

  He appeared not to have heard the question, but just as I was about to repeat it, he started speaking, slowly, feeling his way step by step in case the words contained a trap. ‘The hut belonged to my gran.’ He paused. ‘She taught me history and reading. And how to handle a boat. I cooked for her because her eyes weren’t much good towards the end.’

  This sudden disclosure caught me entirely off guard and I scrabbled in my brain for an appropriate comeback, anything to keep him going. Her name, what she looked like, how she ended up living in a half-ruined hut on the beach?

  ‘She grew up in Ipswich.’ He turned to me, head tilted slightly. ‘In a big house in town. She wanted to be a teacher, but her father didn’t believe in educating girls. She eloped at eighteen and he left everything to her brothers when he died.’ Finn paused and looked at me gravely. ‘Though he might have done that in any case.’

  I concentrated hard, trying to
produce a clear picture from these fragments of family tree.

  ‘She moved to the hut when her husband died. Other people lived here then – fishermen, families.’ He paused. ‘People were poor then. It didn’t cost much.’

  I searched the shadows of his face for marks of his past. Surely the preceding generations had crept into the colour of his eyes, the curve of his brow, the shape of his cheekbones. I wondered if his ancestors had survived to the present day in a way mine hadn’t. Our family photographs showed respectable bankers and lawyers in sober Edwardian clothes. They stared at the camera, expressionless, and never seemed related to anyone in particular. Neither of my parents would have been able to imbue the previous generations with life, in the unlikely event that they might try. My history had evaporated before I was born.

  I sat motionless. When Finn finally looked up, remembering me, he yawned and indicated the bench. ‘It’s late. You can sleep there. The privy’s out back, I’ll show you.’

  The tide would be high. There was no way I could get back to school. Terror and resignation swept over me at once, and as I met Finn’s steady gaze – a little puzzled, a little impatient – I realized the decision had somehow been made. Heart pounding, I followed him out to the old-fashioned camp toilet. OK, I thought, I’ll think about it tomorrow. I’ll get away with it somehow. I’ll…

  The wind whipped the heat from my clothes, the reason from my brain. Gazing up at the sky, I sought the two constellations I knew, as if somehow I could spin an astronomy lesson from so vast a transgression.

  When I returned, there was a lumpy pillow on the bench and a pile of blankets – the thick striped ones, faded with age. I didn’t want him to go yet.

  ‘Your gran… when did she die?’

  ‘Four years ago. The solicitors located her youngest brother. He came up from Cornwall to pay for the funeral. They hadn’t spoken in years.’

  ‘Didn’t anyone ask what would happen to you?’

  ‘I told him I’d arranged to live with my mother. He didn’t check.’

  More holes in the net. I tried to imagine fending for myself at – at what? Twelve?

  ‘But didn’t your mum…’

  He waited.

  ‘Didn’t she… does she know you live here?’

  His expression was mild. ‘She was sixteen when she had me, nineteen when she left.’ Finn leant down and picked up the little cat. ‘I don’t remember what she looks like.’

  I thought of my own mother, reliable as the furniture.

  There was so much more to ask, but the conversation was over. A complex contract was in the process of being forged, whereby Finn agreed to tolerate my presence and I agreed to worship him – totally, but carefully, so as not to destroy the fragile equilibrium of his life.

  The cat leapt from his arms and Finn crossed over to the kitchen to close the vent on the stove. Without saying goodnight, he handed me a lamp and disappeared up the stairs. I unfolded the blankets and crawled between them, lying for a long time wrapped up warm against the night, listening to the wind and looking at the pictures on the walls and the trembling shadows cast by the little flame.

  I can be there again now, huddled in a private pocket of warmth as the fire dies and the hut cools, snug against the roar of wind and sea, wrapped in blankets permeated with Finn’s smoky-wood smell, and always aware of the other presence in the loft above me, mysterious and powerful as an angel. After all these years, I can barely think back to that night without succumbing to emotions both wonderful and terrible, to a feeling as deep as the sea and as wide as the night sky. It was love, of course, though I didn’t know it then, and Finn was both its subject and object. He accepted love instinctively, without responsibility or conditions, like a wild thing glimpsed through trees.

  At last I extinguished the lamp, though according to my watch it was still early. And then, divided from the night by nothing more than four flimsy walls and an idea of a friend, I fell asleep.

  9

  Finn was gone by the time the sun woke me. I felt disconcerted by his ability to slip out without my hearing but there was no time to hang about. I dressed quickly, said a quick prayer of thanks for the low tide, and ran back to school, hoping to slip in to breakfast without anyone having noticed I was gone.

  At the school gates, my housemaster stood waiting with the police.

  My parents were phoned and informed that I was still alive, and a lifeboat search called off. I was punished for this extraordinary infringement of school rules by being placed under house arrest and losing all privileges. In a serious talk with my housemaster, I was threatened with expulsion, which for once bothered me.

  And yet, oddly, no one asked where I’d been when I failed to return to my room all night, or what I’d done. This I found puzzling, satisfying and hilarious, as if ‘off school grounds’ were a generic place that didn’t require further specification. This omission confirmed my faith in the imbecility of the so-called real world, the one in which I pretended to live most of the time. I ignored the glares of authority and the taunts of my room-mates, but most of all I ignored Reese, who lurked and lingered and buzzed round my head with his sticky friendship and his sly questions and the barest suggestion that he knew.

  Knew what, I wondered. Enough to tell?

  I was kept under lock and key for nearly a month, until our break-up for Christmas, allowed only to shuffle to and from meals and lessons. There was nothing to differentiate the days. I wouldn’t have minded so much if there’d been a way to tell Finn why I stayed away. Maybe he didn’t care, but I often sat gazing out of the window like a sea captain’s wife.

  At the end of term, my father picked me up from school, shaking his head.

  ‘I don’t have to tell you how disappointed I am,’ he told me. ‘Not only are your grades appalling, but this other business…’ He looked at me with an expression that was almost contempt. ‘What were you thinking? What if you’d died of exposure, been hit by a car? How would we all feel then?’

  How would we all feel, I wondered. I thought I knew how I’d feel. Dead and cold and stiff, my entrails twisted and septic in my decomposing body. Perhaps it would be a relief. I couldn’t muster up the emotion to mourn this imagined loss of myself, nor could I shake the suspicion that I’d be better off without a body, or at least without this particular body. For one thing, there would be far less opportunity for random betrayal. No more awkwardness, no more fumbles, no more strained lungs and blotchy cheeks. I felt infinitely cheered by this possibility of losing my physical self.

  ‘… your mother and I have had a long talk about the suitability of your continuing tenure at St Oswald’s –’

  ‘What?’ I tuned back in to the conversation with a start. ‘But I can’t leave!’

  My father looked at me, his expression puzzled and slightly disgusted. ‘Just come along,’ he said. ‘We’ll discuss it later.’

  It was late afternoon when we set off, and most of the drive took place in the dark. After the first few miles I turned my brain to neutral and stared out into the black night, counting the headlights that cast long bright shadows up my window. Mile after mile, I thought about the only thing capable of occupying my thoughts.

  Despite the late hour, my mother met us at the door with exclamations of welcome. She made cocoa, relieved me of my filthy clothes, and kissed me goodnight with nervy affection. There were neatly ironed pyjamas in my bottom drawer; I put them on and settled into the unfamiliar squishy comfort of home. Although I’d been away nearly four months, nothing in my room had changed. In fact, nothing much had changed since I began my life of indentured education twelve years ago. Except me, of course, but I barely counted.

  The next morning I slipped back into my old skin like a seasoned panto actor slipping into a horse suit. I knew the drill here (the rules, the disguises, the proper responses) the same as everywhere else.

  Mother seemed pleased to see me, despite my disgrace. For the three weeks of Christmas break, she doted on me a
s much as she knew how, and when it came time to return to school, she and my father appeared stymied by my good cheer. Perhaps I was settling in after all.

  10

  In company with the monarchy and the army, boarding schools of the 1960s comprised the last outposts of the poor shrunken British Empire – complete with a full set of nineteenth-century values. This meant we were ruled by a code of conduct that tolerated all flaws save those pertaining to loyalty and rank. Having violated neither, I was clasped on the shoulder and forgiven my previous term’s crimes.

  ‘Our relationships here are based on trust,’ Clifton-Mogg intoned. ‘We have been entrusted to educate you, and we trust you to behave with maturity and dignity. This term you have a chance to begin anew, and we have no doubt that you will uphold our trust like a man.’

  He sounded shifty, as if he didn’t quite believe the words he was saying, knew that I knew he didn’t believe them, and knew that I didn’t believe them either. Nonetheless, I set my features to indicate sincerity and could tell that he appreciated it; it made both our roles flow more smoothly. I, of course, had no trouble looking sincerely pleased; I intended to use this whole mutual trust business to clear off at the first possible opportunity. Tides willing.

  Tides were crucial. The journey from my dormitory to Finn’s hut took thirty-five minutes (twenty minutes along the footpath to the edge of the causeway, fifteen minutes to cross and reach the end of The Stele). There were, however, all manner of contingencies to consider. The footpath was slower than the road, but safer from discovery. There was a general limit of two hours on either side of low tide during which it was possible to cross from the island to the mainland (and vice versa) without getting soaked, though this varied according to the phases of the moon and the height of the tides. Add it all up, and I had four hours at the hut (maximum) plus seventy minutes travel time. Give or take a few seconds. Of course there was always the possibility of straddling two tides, crossing two hours after the low tide and returning two hours before the following low tide: twelve hours minus four hours plus travel equals nine hours ten minutes. Or staying all night and hoping for the best. But I wasn’t keen to try that again in a hurry. At least not without a more sophisticated plan in place.