What I Was (12 page)

25

On Monday, the day of the opening of our play, the weather turned glorious. All around, schoolboys emerged like tortoises from deep down in their coats, at first naked and pale and a little dazed, then leaping and running with the sheer exuberance of feeling sun on their skin.

I had lessons all day Monday, and a last-minute run through before dinner. The play went on at seven, and was considered a success despite a number of conspicuous prop failures: my portrait fell off the wall halfway through Act Three and Lady Bracknell’s bosom broke free of its harness in the final scene, requiring poor Aitken to speak his final scenes with both hands supporting his cleavage. The effect was most unladylike, but with encouragement from the front rows, Aitken bounced his rubber assets so energetically that by the time the curtain came down, audience and cast had collapsed in joyous anarchy.

With the play on all week and a history essay to write, there was no possibility of escape before late afternoon on Wednesday, and even that meant skipping a meeting with my housemaster. There was nothing for it but to go to Finn and afterwards tell old Clifton-Mogg that I was ill, had forgotten, become so absorbed in medieval England that the hours had simply flown past.

I’d been stealing food from meals to avoid the necessity of another full-fledged kitchen raid, and had filled my satchel with apples, oranges, stale rolls, butter, half a ginger cake, four greasy sausages and a handful of teabags. I half expected to be followed around school by a line of rats.

The late afternoon shimmered with sunshine and for the first time I noticed that the hawthorn hedges were in bloom. The pungent combination of brine and warm soil filled my nostrils, and at one point I heard the whoosh whoosh whoosh of heavy wings and looked up in time to see a trio of giant white swans flying just above my head. Under other circumstances the vision would have filled me with joy.

Finn lay exactly where I’d left him seventy-two hours earlier, and whatever shreds of optimism I’d preserved turned to fear at the smell that hit me when I came through the door. I called his name but there was no answer. Oh, Lord, I thought, what if he’s dead? But there was no one to appeal to for help so I approached the bed, trying not to breathe through my nose, and crouched next to him. His eyes flickered open.

‘You scared me for a minute there.’ I smiled encouragement, felt his head (which was hot), and retreated to build up the fire. The nights were windy and damp, and despite the sunny day, the hut felt uncomfortably cool without a fire. Once it was crackling away, I tapped out two more pain tablets, meaning to dissolve them in a little hot broth, but there was a thick layer of yellow fat in the large saucepan, so I gave them to him with cold water instead. He still hadn’t spoken, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that glandular fever made its victims painfully ill, but wasn’t the sort of disease that killed you if left untreated.

And the smell? I kicked myself for not having thought of the stack of blue-and-white enamelled bedpans in the San. But it was too late for that.

I approached the bed again, silently lifting a corner of the pile of blankets. My stomach lurched, I could taste vomit at the back of my throat, but I only had a second to see that the bedclothes were soaked and filthy before he struck out at me with what little strength he still possessed. I made a soothing noise and looked at him, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes, and I wondered whether his lack of response had as much to do with embarrassment as anything else.

‘Never mind,’ I told him. ‘You can have a bath when the water heats up.’ It must have been awful for him, lying there in the bed full of shit and piss, but until the stove did its job, I wasn’t going to touch him. I passed the time fetching coal from the bunker and stacking wood from the woodshed behind the hut. His cat, yowling, followed me around until I fed it a few small pieces of fatty pork. Take it or leave it, I sneered, in honour of old wounds.

The soup warmed up eventually and he managed to drink most of what was in the teacup. I left him to it and set about dumping saucepans filled with hot water into the tin washtub he used as a bath. It nearly emptied his water store and took forever to heat enough for a decent bath. My arms ached. We didn’t speak; the excuse of his bad throat a relief.

I found a bar of soap by the sink and dropped it in, swooshing the warm water around until it made bubbles. ‘OK, let’s do it,’ I said.

He shook his head.

‘Come on, Finn.’ Jesus, he was stubborn. ‘I haven’t got much time, and I’ll have to make the bed again too.’

He croaked that he wanted a chair, and at last, with a sigh, I brought one over and left him to it. I guessed anyone living on his own for so long might be modest; I’d noticed before that he never took his clothes off around me. I was completely immune to such physical niceties, had been undressing in front of other boys all my life. I shrugged, went back into the kitchen, and left him alone for ten minutes or so, until the splashing noises stopped. A blanket draped over the chair hid him from me. ‘Are you OK?’ I called and he nodded. ‘I’ll get you a towel.’ There were bubbles in the bath water and it had turned a horrible colour. I wasn’t sure a person could get clean this way, but I supposed it would be an improvement. Upstairs I found clean flannel trousers, an old soft shirt, a woollen pullover and warm socks. Without looking, I placed them on the chair and held the towel out for him.

He took it. ‘I’m OK now.’ I turned away, and he wrapped himself in the towel and pulled on the shirt as I prepared to attack the bed.

‘I’ll do that,’ he said, staggering slightly in an attempt to push me away.

‘Oh, for the love of buggering Mary mother of buggering Christ what is wrong with a little help? Just let me get on with it!’ I scrabbled in the drawer under the bed for anything resembling clean sheets. I had a feeling it was thanks to his gran that a pile remained, carefully folded and smelling of smoke, unused all these years.

I pulled his sheets and blankets off the bed in a bundle, dumping them together on the floor, postponing the moment I would have to separate the soiled from the non-soiled. God, they stank. I kept my head politely averted while he dressed, and when I turned back, had to admit he looked better – the pills had lowered his fever, and despite soaking in a vat of his own filth, he looked a healthier colour, pinkish and clean.

Turning the narrow mattress over to the dry side, I laid towels over it, spreading one of his granny’s plain white sheets on top and tucking in the edges. It was lumpy but serviceable, and I reckoned it was best to be prepared for more accidents. Finn seemed to have spent any strength he had getting clean; I helped him up and he collapsed on to the narrow bed. Tucking another sheet on top of him, I covered it with all the clean blankets that were left, then began sorting through the stinking mess on the floor. Some of the blankets were probably OK, I thought, or at least usable. I unfolded the heap and began to sift through it.

The last thing I expected to find was what I found. Piss, yes. Shit, yes. But blood? Blood everywhere.

‘Oh, God,’ I said. ‘Oh, God, Finn. What’s all this?’

He said nothing, just looked away from me, his eyes brimming with tears, the shadows under them sharply purplish and bruised, his face deathly pale.

‘Jesus Christ, Finn.’ My mind raced. I had no answer for this, for blood. There was so much of it. His face collapsed, he turned away from me and his shoulders began to shake.

‘Go away,’ he murmured, softly at first, and then louder, shouting, his voice hoarse with pain, ‘Go away!’

‘Don’t worry,
don’t worry.
’ I was in control. ‘I’m going for help!’

I didn’t hang around long enough to observe his reaction.

Rule number nine: Don’t look back.

26

Even at St Oswald’s, that hotbed of cultural mediocrity, every schoolboy knew that the Renaissance was top historical era. It was the age of invention, piety and good government; the age of writing and painting and medicine, of magnificent glittering intellect. You could tick the geniuses off on your fingers: Leonardo, Machiavelli, Galileo, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Raphael, Gutenberg.

No question about it. The Renaissance ruled.

In our lessons, however, the Dark Ages beat the Renaissance hands down. We didn’t care about the Sistine Chapel or the printing press or the flourishing of perspective in art. We cared nothing for the first modern novel or the investigation of anatomy, the invention of the microscope or the discovery that the earth moved round the sun. The rebirth of the classical world was as nothing to us, because like most boys, we were far more interested in blood than in art and culture. We craved beheadings, brutal drawings and quarterings, noses and ears and upper lips cut off for various minor crimes, brandings with hot irons. We longed to hear more of trespassers boiled to death, murderers burnt at the stake, eyes gouged out and tongues pierced through with nails or sliced off at the root. There couldn’t be enough rape, pillage, torture, pain, boils, flaying, and stinking festering plague to satisfy our lust for gore.

But then there was Finn, and my first lesson in the difference between what’s titillating and what’s terrifying, the difference between historical blood and its contemporary equivalent.

When faced with the real thing, real shit, piss, and plague, I did what real heroes never do. I ran. What I required more than anything in the world was my safe little bed in my claustrophobic room, the thick walls and thick attitudes, the meaningless tasks and the trivial rules, the execrable food and the antiquated values and everything else I needed and despised.

It’s not that St Oswald’s offered comfort. No. It offered certitude. Refuge in the shape of conformity. Deliverance from danger
out there,
a danger I couldn’t define, decline, conjugate, calculate.

For a few seconds I
got
it, the meaning of the place.

But it couldn’t deliver me from blood.

My head ached. What should I do? In the eyes of the world Finn didn’t exist; he had no family, no medical record, no National Insurance number. You couldn’t send an ambulance to a beach hut to rescue a non-existent sixteen-year-old and expect no one to ask questions. Perhaps I could beg the school nurse to accompany me to the beach. But no matter how I twisted the players around in my head I couldn’t imagine a scenario whereby this could happen.

I arrived panting and desperate back on school property. As I entered the gate, a figure slid out from behind a hedge, silent and boneless, hunched and wringing his hands. I could barely make out his features in the dark, but the posture was unmistakeable.

‘What do you want?’ I grabbed him by the front of his shirt and pulled him close so I could see the expression on his face. His eyes were round and red with weeping and there were streaks of dirt and tears, and blood.

‘Don’t, you can’t – don’t go back to school, they’ll, they’ll –’

‘They’ll
what?
’

‘I had to tell them,’ he moaned. ‘They threatened me and –’

‘Tell them
what?
’

‘Gibbon and and –’

‘Tell them what?’
I shouted in his ear and he winced.

‘A-b-b-bout you and the the the…’

I threw him to the ground and kicked him in the ribs, though not as hard as I should have. Then I turned my back on his sobbing form and ran. The information didn’t particularly ruin my day. So they knew. I’d be expelled, but that seemed like minor news at this particular juncture.

I could see the torches now, patrolling school grounds. Not exactly a threat to a boy in dark clothes on a black night. At the school phone box, grateful for vandals and the smashed light, I dialled emergency services. Gave a false name. Told them there was a boy, ill and bleeding to death, and where to find him. I told them it wasn’t a prank call, and how to get to the hut. ‘You’ll need a boat,’ I told them.

‘Please stay on the line while we repeat the information back to you,’ ordered a voice with sinister neutrality, but I was in enough trouble already, and they’d had plenty of time to get the message.

‘I have to go.’

‘I’m sorry,’ came the monotone, ‘but we can’t help your friend unless you give us your –’

I hung up.

Then I turned and walked away, ambled actually, calmly, trusting someone else to do what was right. I had done enough, had taken enough responsibility for saving and destroying this particular life.

If I’d been interested in power, of course, the thought might have appealed to me.

27

My two bolt-holes had been closed off. I couldn’t go to my room and I couldn’t return to the hut. Dodging the torch patrol, I let myself into the school gymnasium through the side door and spent the night hidden at the back of the equipment cupboard. The hard brown vaulting mats made a serviceable mattress; my coat did for a blanket. But dreams tormented my thoughts and it was impossible to sleep. At dawn I walked through the woods at the back of the playing fields, and followed an overgrown footpath the long way round to where it met the coast beyond Finn’s island. I approached carefully, aware of Reese’s warning, and wondered how specific his confession had been. I had no idea what I’d find.

At the coast, all was silent, but it would be more than an hour before I could cross. So I sat down on the cold sand in a depression surrounded by sea grass, pulled my arms deep into my coat, wrapped my school scarf round my face and waited.

A noise very close woke me and I opened my eyes. Like a nightmare vision, the entire world was blotted out by Reese’s spotty, frightened face. He knelt uneasily, ready to flinch away if I hit him again.

‘What are you doing here?’

He said nothing.

‘Go. Do you hear me? GO.’ I grabbed his hair with one hand and his throat with the other and he rocked backwards, startled and gasping, eyes overflowing with tears.

‘I can’t go back,’ he sobbed. ‘I can’t. Gibbon says –’

‘Oh, fuck Gibbon.’ I couldn’t even be bothered to shout. I felt sorry for Reese, but there wasn’t room in my overcrowded brain for him just now, and probably never would be.

He backed off about fifteen feet and hovered, and I thought
if only I had a rock or a handful of gravel to throw at him.
Instead I closed my eyes, wishing him gone.

The next time I opened them the world was empty, the sky heavy and grey, the sea unnaturally flat. A flicker of movement turned out to be nothing but shivering reeds. In another twenty minutes the causeway would appear, but I already knew the hut was empty. I could taste Finn’s absence in the air.

Of course I was right. There was no note. No forwarding address.

I sat down, relieved, my heart hollow. In a trance of habit I banked up what remained of the fire and put the kettle on. Finn’s cat rubbed against my legs and I kicked it away. It slid out of range and stood staring at me with its cold yellow eyes, unperturbed by the strength of my dislike.

The thought of returning to school sickened me. There would be a gargantuan uproar when I returned, and somehow I’d have to find Finn. And what would happen when I found him? I gazed up at the sky, wondering if I should just leave town. Exhaustion settled over me, into me, suffused my bones. I was tired of running, needed time to think.

As my tea brewed, the air grew heavier, intensified into an uncomfortable clamminess, and maybe if I’d had access to a newspaper or radio I’d have known what was happening, would have had time to make a plan or batten down the hatches. But as it happened, the first I knew something was wrong was when I saw the wooden foundation of the hut submerged in water. The sea was oddly flat. There was always at least a gentle swell and fall, though more usually little white riffles and uneven waves. It looked eerie out there now, unnatural. Dead flat and motionless.

A concatenation of signs.

I remembered about the sandbags, and with a feeling of resignation, dragged them from behind one of the other huts, wondering whether they should go inside or outside. After some hesitation, I pulled them in over the threshold and slumped them by the door.

An area of light appeared in the sky, sharp as a razor and weirdly dazzling in a way that made no sense if I looked inland past the town, at an ordinary pale blue sky. It was only when I went outside and turned to the north that the strange light made sense. There, a flat greenish-black area of cloud had attached itself to the sky like a malignancy. It was still a mile away, moving slowly down the coast, the sickening mass boiling slightly. I stood mesmerized, watching the rain stream from it in dark vertical rods. A wall of cold air hit me, so solid I could have reached out and felt its edges. It swept over the beach like a plough, parting the humid air. I could hear the storm right behind it, a wild hissing noise like God calling for quiet, followed by a blaze of branched lightning and a crack of thunder, loud and close. Half a mile up the beach the landscape looked comic, the world turned wrong way round. I could see the tops of scrubby trees bent almost flat as huge waves battered the dunes. The angry, biblical violence that slouched south along the coast couldn’t have looked less like the weird calm at my feet. Watching it, I felt the extent of my vulnerability, my laughable, pitiable humanity. When it hit, it would hit like a fist. What power I had once possessed was gone, transported (I hoped) to somewhere safe, and I was left behind, exposed and small, too weak to fight, too slow to run away, with a brain drowning in loneliness and self-doubt, and a poor human voice that could never make itself heard above the crash of the sea, even if there had been someone to listen.

The rain hit. For a moment I stood in the doorway and spread my arms and invited it to drench me, wash the blood from my conscience. But it didn’t. It just soaked my clothes, my hair, and my feet, left me shivering with exposure and self-consciousness.

What followed was like no storm I’d ever experienced. The sea lashed at my feet, the wind howled, the lightning and thunder came together in an ecstasy of torment as the sky contracted with one screaming birth spasm after another, pushing out a vile purple beast with an uncontrollable temper.

There was no longer any time to run away, and (in any case) nowhere to go. I slammed the door shut and hauled on shutters stiff and rusted with lack of use, pulling them free, fastening their metal bolts over the window frames. Slamming the final shutter plunged the hut into darkness; the only light dribbled down from the diamond-shaped window in Finn’s room, so green and faint I could barely see my shaking hand in front of my face. The little flickering flame of the storm lamp offered light but no comfort. I huddled in a corner.

Outside, something (the wind?) screamed. Once. Twice.

As the minutes ticked by, I lost confidence in my senses. I’d heard that rabbits screamed when their throats were cut.

It came again and it might have been human or it might have been animal but it definitely wasn’t the wind. I slipped out of the door into the gale and tried to peer through the sheets of rain, but it was hopeless, the rain so heavy I couldn’t see anything at all. Soaked and shivering, slammed by wind and rain, I waited. It came again, only this time more clearly, and I ran towards the sound.

He stood on the shore, across the channel from me, and all I could see of him was an outline. But there was no doubt, it was my rabbit, my Gollum. Reese.

Crystallized to a pinpoint of pure terror, he had become less than human, incapable of rational action. I shouted to him, and only long afterwards realized I might have saved his life by doing nothing at all.

He heard me and waved his arms, dashed up and down the beach in panic, then plunged into the churning water, and it didn’t matter what I shouted then because the wind snatched my words away and if he heard anything at all, it would just have been a howl, as human or as inhuman as his. I waded in as far as I dared, my voice hoarse with shouting at him to stop, go back, my usual threats. For a moment I saw his head bobbing as he thrashed against the angry sea, but even the very best swimmer would be helpless in this storm, and Reese was anything but the best.

I stood shoulder-deep in churning water with no strength left to shout or fight against wind and sea, and there was a moment during which I thought I could sink slowly to the bottom where the wind and rain and my thoughts couldn’t reach, and there drift slowly, silently into sweet unconscious eternity. The promise of peace extended its arms to me and I swayed softly towards it… but… no. Whoever decides such things had decided. Life wasn’t finished with me yet.

By the time I hauled myself back on to dry land, there was no longer any sign of Reese.

Inside the hut, I stripped off my clothes with awkward fingers, wrapped myself in a blanket and fell asleep, empty and exhausted. Minutes or seconds later the noises in my head jerked me awake, while the gale howled louder than ever and the sea crashed against the hut walls. It was inky dark, the candle flame drowned in a pool of melted wax. I crammed another candle on top of it, grateful to the pinpoint of light and its feeble warmth. It repaid me with treachery, illuminating the sea trickling in through the front wall. I begin clearing things off the floor, mechanically, doing what had to be done.

An hour later, or two, or three, I tried opening the door a crack, but the wind swooped down and stole the handle from my hand with a howl of glee, wrenched the door sideways, and filled the hut with a gale furious enough to send us whirling off to Oz. It took all my strength to pull it shut and it wasn’t the wind that frightened me so much as the garish purple-and-yellow sky.

For what seemed an eternity, the storm raged. Now I could hear something banging against the house, repeatedly, BANG BANG BANG, followed by a pause; BANG BANG BANG. I couldn’t think what it might be, couldn’t know that the metal chimney had blown off (still connected by a single screw along one edge) and was smashing a hole in the roof as it tried to break free and fly away. The entire hut groaned and squealed with anguish, unable to withstand the wild, wild wind. If only I had a radio, or a telephone, or any of the thousand modern devices Finn had scorned in favour of a slow picturesque suicide by the sea. What on earth had made me return to this place? Only a lunatic would choose to live so lightly moored to land with no protection from sea monsters and the wrath of heaven.

Four hours. Five. Six. Snatches of sleep filled with images so horrible it was preferable to stay awake. Gales swept down the ragged hole in the roof where the chimney used to be, spewing damp ash over everything. I began to imagine it was howling at
me,
refusing to stop until the hut had turned me out, turned me over to the forces that would try my case, convict me of murder and treason, sentence me to death.

I began to laugh wildly, realizing with a start that the gale would blow the house down if I didn’t do something to stop it. And suddenly I knew exactly what to do. I threw open the door, the shutters, the windows. I filled the house with holes so the wind would pass through instead of flattening it.

Inside became thrilling, a tempest in a teacup. I tried to save what was loose, but it was too late, the wind snatched anything light enough to fly and turned it into a missile, so that after five minutes I gave up, scrambling retreat up the little staircase to safety. Under the eaves the air retained traces of stuffy warmth and I huddled on Finn’s bed waiting for it to pass, as all things must do.

The next time I awoke it was quiet. Not just quiet, silent. Still as death.

Wrapped in my cocoon in the dark, I slept again, a mercifully dreamless sleep, waking at dawn to a warm spring day with the sun streaming in the open windows.

The morning was all innocence, as if its night of passion with the storm had never occurred. In the sweet stillness of the day, it seemed to be denying all knowledge of the seaweed, the upturned table, the smashed crockery, the kitchen full of water and sand.
All these things are mysteries,
whispered the soft still air caressingly,
I am not responsible.

Rule number ten: There is no such thing as truth.