What I Was Read online

  He blinked, uncomprehending, and turned back to his work. ‘Don’t be daft.’

  I propped myself up on one elbow and drew shapes in the sand. Well, it hadn’t exactly been the scintillating conversation that attracted me in the first place. Finn seemed genuinely unclear as to the purpose of conversation. He could convey information. He could make an enquiry regarding something concrete or the advisability of immediate action. But I knew if I asked which he preferred, cabbage or sprouts, or how he envisaged his future, or if he missed his gran, he would have no answer to give. Not because he was hiding the information, but because his mind didn’t work that way. You might as well ask a duck what it thinks of capitalism.

  I lay flat, considering these facts. The winter sun beat down, warming the bits of me that showed; the rest of me huddled further down into my overcoat.

  It’s not that he lacked poetry. But his poetry was of the body, not the mind. He spoke it in the way he moved, the way he held a hammer, rowed a boat, built a fire. I, on the other hand, was like a brain in a box, a beating heart in a coal scuttle.

  ‘Don’t you want to know the worst thing about school?’ I held my breath, twitching the bait ever so gently across the surface of the pond.

  There was a beat of silence. Then: ‘All right.’

  Well, well, well. I doubted he was interested in the answer, but he was making an effort. There was something hugely touching about the unnaturalness of it.

  ‘The worst thing is… the lousy food, the cold, the boredom, the isolation. Winters that go on forever. Years stretching ahead, incarcerated behind brick walls with no hope of reprieve. The rules.’

  Finn leant over to look at me, bemused.

  I was on a roll. ‘Not to mention the loneliness. And at the same time, the crowdedness. The never being really alone, just to think, or rest or do something private –anything private. You can’t even go to the toilet in private. And if you want company, real company, not just people hanging about making a noise, that’s when you realize how lonely you are.’

  Finn had stopped working to listen. He was silent for a long moment, as if testing the words one by one to see if they made a connection, lit a light bulb, rang a bell. I watched the process, fascinated, watched the possibilities flit across the surface of his face. Hopeful, ever hopeful.

  And then I watched him lose interest. The roof needed fixing. The tide was high. A few years ago he’d lived with his gran and now he lived alone. These were the facts. Conjecture of the sort I thrived on made no sense to him at all.

  I wanted to say Jesus, Finn, didn’t anyone ever talk to you? But I could imagine that no one had. People around here didn’t waste words; language was a tool, not a treat. You didn’t roll it around on your tongue, revel in it.

  I sighed. And yet… how was it that Finn’s silences turned my words to dust? No matter how heartfelt my thoughts, the noises I made when I was with him took on the quality of monkeys jabbering in trees. While his silence had the power to shatter glass.

  I needed him to talk. ‘What’s your first memory?’

  He blinked at the absurd intimacy of the question and for a moment remained silent. But just as I moved on to something else in my head, he answered. ‘I remember my mother, talking. Shouting, actually, before she left.’ He paused again. ‘I was nearly three.’

  I guessed that his mum ran away because she was too young and too selfish to look after a baby. Or that rural life seemed unbearably dull to a beautiful nineteen-year-old. You only had to look at Finn to know she couldn’t have been plain. Poor girl. Poor Finn.

  He caught my expression, and smiled. ‘You needn’t look so tragic. You don’t miss what you haven’t got.’

  I nodded, composing my features into a man-of-the-world’s appreciation of emotional complexity. It was something I understood, but not exactly in the form that he presented it. In my conventional middle-class world, mothers loved their children and fathers pushed them away for their own good. I was ready (anxious even) to have these truths dispelled, but it took some consideration.

  Finn climbed down, cleaned each tool carefully, and replaced them in the wooden toolbox he kept under the stairs. Then, without a word, he set off, wading through the channel, which had started to fill. I followed, reluctantly, wondering if I could run back and get the kayak.

  ‘The earliest thing I remember is the sea,’ he said, heading north along the beach and tossing a stone far out into the surf. ‘Gran used to put me out on a blanket on the beach when I was a few weeks old and let me entertain myself watching the gulls. I still remember the smell of that blanket.’ He paused, nose in the air, as if he might still catch a whiff of salt and old wool. ‘Later I sucked pebbles. Mum said I’d choke on them and die.’

  There was nothing of self-pity in this observation.

  ‘One day, I got tired of lying still and just stood up and started to walk. Sometimes people on the beach brought me home when I wandered too far. Other times Gran had to walk the dykes calling my name. She always worried that I’d drown.’ He gazed up at the gulls, standing very still.

  While he spoke, I collected skipping stones. I positioned myself carefully, put a perfect flick and spin on my best flat stone and watched it sail into the sea at exactly the right angle, spinning backwards as it hit and leaping up again immediately, then bouncing again and again and again until it had skipped sixteen times. Glancing back, ready to accept Finn’s admiration with appropriate modesty, I saw that he was still watching the gulls and hadn’t noticed.

  ‘I would set off, always in the same direction with the sun behind me. No child walks into the sun,’ he said, turning to me, as if worried about my future. ‘Remember that if you ever lose one.’

  We had come to another channel further up the beach, where the river met the sea in a ferocious rush. Finn pulled off his jersey and walked in without pausing, his shirt soaked and snaking around his narrow waist and hips. It was quite deep in the middle and required him to swim backstroke with one hand in the air to keep the jersey dry. I dipped my foot in cautiously and jerked it out immediately. The cold was obscene. My heart sank as I watched Finn clambering out on the other side, his shirt and khaki trousers flapping in the icy wind. I never met anyone who felt the cold less.

  I sighed. This time there was no way round it, I would have to undress, or risk ruining my school uniform. I left my coat on the beach, stepped slowly out of my trousers, unbuttoned my white shirt, stuffed my school tie into a pocket, removed my socks and shoes and rolled them up together into a clumsy bundle.

  It was the thought of standing for any length of time on the bank – exposed and blue with cold in the underwear I’d been wearing for most of the week – that drove me to take the plunge sooner rather than later. Losing my balance almost immediately, I tried regaining it with Finn’s backstroke trick, but instead slid entirely under the freezing water, clothes and all, swallowing a huge mouthful of water and earning a snort of derision from the bank.

  Finn waded in and dragged me up on to the bank, shivering and dripping in my horrible white pants. I hated the feel of clammy underwear against my skin, knew I looked pathetic with my poor shrunken parts clearly outlined within, and that I would feel infinitely worse once I’d managed to drag my sodden trousers over shaking limbs. But despite the acute physical discomfort, the embarrassment proved more or less incidental. As usual, Finn seemed barely to have noticed my predicament. He was still talking, as if the awkward crossing hadn’t registered on his radar at all.

  ‘… there was a place I used to hide, up on the cliffs. A sort of cave. It was carved into the clay. You had to climb up from the beach to get to it.’

  We were walking along the shingle again, but the chafing of salty wet clothing had begun to turn my thighs and the contents of my pants so raw that I managed less than half an hour before I had to sit down, furious, cold, and in pain – a kind of silent protest. After hovering a moment, Finn sat down next to me.

  ‘Here, take this,’ he said,
pulling the thick jersey over his head.

  This was no time for heroism and I didn’t pause before accepting it. Pushing head and arms into the thick oily wool, surrounded by the woodsmoke smell of him and wrapped in the heat from his body, I felt almost dizzy with relief.

  ‘Have you rested enough?’ he asked eventually, uncharacteristically solicitous. ‘We can go back if you like.’

  Cheered by even so small a pledge of concern, I glanced down, silently telegraphing the plight of my genitals. In vain.

  ‘Let’s go then.’ Before I could react, he had leapt to his feet and was off.

  I sat upright. ‘Go where?’ The words came out as a bleat. When there are only two of you and you are always the last to know what is happening, you develop an acute (and accurate) sense of misgiving.

  Finn didn’t answer, so I scrambled after him, chafing and puffing.

  After another agonizing mile I noticed that the dunes had evolved into cliffs, and now rose steeply – thirty, forty, fifty feet up into the bright sky. Finn stopped, stepped back with his eyes shaded against the glare, scanned the surface of the cliff, turned, and without a word of warning began to climb.

  I stood below, staring up after him. He climbed like a monkey, quick and agile, finding hand- and footholds where none existed. I didn’t have a clue where he was headed; the sun’s uniform glare erased all features from the surface of the cliff. But, ever the dutiful acolyte, I dug my toes into the soft chalk, pulled myself up, and followed the leader. Slowly.

  It took every ounce of strength and concentration to cling to the surface of the cliff. My arms trembled violently with the effort, my toes slipped repeatedly off tiny crumbling ledges. The insides of my thighs were agony, my wounds scraped raw and anointed with salt.

  I hate you, I thought, I hate you with your bloody nature-boy airs and your bloody forced-march voyage of bloody discovery.

  I wondered then if Finn’s personality worked on everyone, or whether I had just the right sort of mentality to fall in step with a self-centred hermit-boy crab-murderer.

  The next time I looked up, Finn had disappeared.

  I shouted his name but there was no reply. Fury drove me on, and fear. There was no easy way down from here, particularly as I couldn’t see my feet, and didn’t dare look at the beach in case of vertigo. I felt above for another handhold, grasped what felt like a solid clay ledge. But as I began to haul myself up one more time it crumbled into nothing, leaving me poised in mid-air like a cartoon coyote, clutching a handful of dust with an almost restful feeling of inevitability, with enough clarity and what seemed like enough time to save myself, but with nothing to stop me tumbling backwards and somersaulting over and over to smash and break and bleed to death alone and abandoned on the rocks below.

  A hand shot out from nowhere and grabbed my wrist.

  The shock of it caused me to lose the rest of my fragile contact with the cliff and for a moment I dangled over the rocks below, scrabbling hopelessly for a foothold, rigid with terror, too terrified even to scream. And then a head followed the hand out above me, and a body leant out and another hand grabbed the waistband of my trousers, and half of me was scrambling and the other half being dragged thrashing up on to a ledge, which turned out to be a sort of a cave, the place Finn had been telling me about when I was barely listening due to the combined forces of pain and resentment.

  It took a number of minutes for my heart to stop pounding and my breath to settle into something like a normal rhythm. Finn lay there, watching me and smiling as if he’d just told the funniest joke in the world.

  ‘I am not bloody laughing.’ My voice had gone hoarse with terror, my eyes swam with tears and I was furious: at his superior physical prowess, at my near-death experience, at the extent of my humiliation.

  And then his expression became solemn and he looked at me gently, with genuine compassion. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

  Frighten me? Murder me, more like. I refused to answer, preferring to exert some miniscule power by remaining silent.

  The entrance to the cave was narrow, but once I managed to wriggle into a more dignified position (flat on my stomach, arms folded under my chest, feet shoved deep into the recesses of the cliff) I realized I could stretch out with a fair degree of comfort. Physical comfort, that is. The prospect of having to climb back down kept me twitching with terror. And yet the sun beat down on the pale surface of the cliff with surprising warmth, we were out of the wind, and in the confined space Finn radiated heat and animal comfort beside me. I edged out, stretching over the terrifying drop and shifting forward until my left side settled into the graceful length of his body. In the tight space we fitted together like pieces of a puzzle.

  Below us birds swooped and soared and I looked down on their backs as they flew, astonished, forgetting my fear. For that moment I was a god, with a god’s eye view of the universe. Exhilarated, I moved to get a better look, inching further and further out, until Finn reached out a hand to pull me back. I hovered, held aloft by the strength and warmth of his grip, feeling the hot slow pulse of his fingers. I wanted to launch us both into the sky, to pull him up with me towards the sun where we’d fly like gods and never have to tumble back to earth.

  He studied my face, amused by what he found there. The moment hovered, weightless.

  I have often looked back at that moment and imagined history veering fractionally in one direction or another, imagined if I’d been a different person, or if he had, whether what followed would have been a different story altogether and the history of the world might have changed ever so slightly around us.

  As it was, nothing happened except the two of us watching the sea come in and go out again, listening to the birds, sheltering from the rain when it came and lying silent as the sky changed from blue to white to gold. For hours we lay side by side, breathing softly together, watching thin rivulets of water run down the cliffs and into the sea, feeling the world slowly revolve around us as we leant into each other for warmth – and for something else, something I couldn’t quite name, something glorious, frightening, and unforgettable.

  For an instant I knew what it was to be immortal, to make the tides cease and time stand still.

  And just this once, it wasn’t Finn’s power. It was mine.

  Rule number five: Don’t let go of the cliff.

  13

  According to Mr Barnes (history), the Dark Ages dawned in the middle of the fifth century with the decline of the Roman Empire. Roman occupiers had been settling in Britain all along – marrying, raising families, farming. But once Rome withdrew its central authority from Britain (AD 410), Saxon tribes invaded from Germany and divided England into four kingdoms: Mercia, Northumbria, Wessex, East Anglia. After a bloody and plague-ridden start, the Saxons settled down to a bloody and plague-ridden rule, until the Vikings came along to institute a new and improved (bloodier and more plague-ridden) kingdom.

  Romance aside, no one with half a brain could be nostalgic for life in the Dark Ages. There were too many ways to live and die miserably in those days, particularly if you were a peasant. I could easily imagine myself as a peasant, dressed in scratchy homespun wool, trying to scrape a living from half an acre of land or maybe a single mangy cow. There would be a wife no one else wanted (pockmarked maybe, or lame) who’d probably die in childbirth leaving me no one to help with the cow or plough the little field. It would be cold all the time, and damp, and by midwinter we would run out of food and options while whatever children there might be wept with hunger, and later fell silent and died of starvation. I could easily picture the brutality and despair of this life, had no trouble imagining myself dying of something unromantic like plague, or something banal like a broken arm.

  Mr Barnes was always keen to drive home the contrast between our charmed existence at St Oswald’s and the brutal realities of history. Much to our delight, this included lurid tales of Viking torture and debauchery, our favourite being the blood eagle.
The blood eagle required two deep vertical cuts to be made in a living man on either side of the backbone, severing the cartilage connecting ribs and vertebrae. Through these cuts, the live lungs were grasped and pulled backwards out of the chest cavity. The goal of this unimaginable act of brutality was to preserve the victim’s life long enough to watch the lungs inflate outside the body like wings.

  I thought of Finn’s crab.

  From what I actually managed to absorb in class (the experience was novel and even rather exciting), there emerged a fantastically romantic image of bloodthirsty armies clashing ferociously on barren plains, vast horned heroes sweeping from one end of the island to the other, 960 soldiers slain by a single warrior with a single sword in a single battle on a single day.

  What more could a boy ask for? Especially a boy without the passion or the capacity to rip any creature’s lungs out, even the lowliest.

  You could almost hear the spark of genuine interest ignite during lessons that term. Something about the anarchy and violence of the first millennium struck a chord in us where the hallowed achievements of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome had failed. Which meant there was less groaning than usual when each of us was assigned an essay topic: Athelstan, The Venerable Bede, The Battle of Badon Hill, Alfred the Great, Offa’s Dyke. St Oswald, patron saint of our beloved alma mater, fell to me. Gibbon had lobbied for Boudicca, which he saw mainly as an opportunity to look at drawings of naked breasts.

  ‘Ho ho ho,’ he leered, waggling pictures out of dusty history books as if they were Playboy centrefolds.

  ‘Nice ones, Gibbon.’ He’d been drooling over etchings of two-thousand-year-old breasts for most of the afternoon. I stretched, desperate to get out. ‘Might go for a walk,’ I muttered. Having checked the tides.

  Reese jumped up. ‘Can I come?’

  Pulling on my coat, I avoided his eyes. ‘No dirty pictures in nature.’