What I Was (13 page)

28

All over Finn’s tiny kingdom were remnants of the storm, bits of boats, cork, shells I’d never seen before, mounds of seaweed, dead fish – but no body, and I found myself imagining (hoping, praying) that Reese had swum to safety.

I went for help.

There was no official welcome. A notice at the school gate warned
pregnant visitors or those in compromised states of health
to report directly to the head’s office. Despite the pleasant morning it was eerily quiet. There was no one about, no movement or sound; the ground was covered with branches and roof tiles swept up and smashed by the storm. A group of third-form boys suddenly materialized from round a corner, skipping across the ground like blown paper. In answer to my cautious query the leader shouted happily that lessons had been cancelled until further notice.

‘They’re looking for you,’ one of them laughed, and I shivered. I must tell someone about Reese. And yet I couldn’t, not without turning myself in. Besides, Reese was probably dead and Finn might still be alive. So I walked, stumbled, lurched into town. Waited for a woman with a huge supply of coins to finish an endless conversation of staggering banality, then took her place, closed the door and opened the phone book.

There was only one hospital near St Oswald’s. I dialled the number and asked if a haemorrhaging boy with glandular fever had been admitted two nights ago. The woman at reception said no.

‘His name is Finn,’ I insisted.

‘Finn what?’

I had no idea.

‘Sorry,’ she said, sounding anything but. ‘I can’t help you without a surname.’

The sound I made was expressive of despair.

‘Though as a matter of interest…’ She sounded kinder now. ‘… I don’t see anyone with that name on our admissions list.’

As an afterthought I asked for Reese. Her answer was the same and I put the phone down.

An image arrived unbidden in my brain, of Finn and Reese, pale and cold as marble, stored unclaimed in adjoining refrigerated drawers. The terror lurking just beneath the surface returned, and tears filled my eyes, blinding me. The newsagent on the high street told me where to find a bus to the hospital. I didn’t know what I’d do when I arrived.

The hospital looked new and ugly. Low-built and surrounded by car parks, it sprawled across what must recently have been a meadow. Behind the hospital buildings, cows pressed together against wire fencing. It took a minute to find the entrance, hidden among a series of blue and mirrored glass panels, and I wondered whose glaring incompetence had considered this a clever design for the entry to Accident and Emergency. I stepped through the doors that didn’t look like doors into a room with a large podium-style island marked
Reception.
To the right I could see the waiting room, in which a handful of broken-limbed or otherwise blighted individuals slumped. A man in his twenties with a congealed cut across one cheek lay asleep in one of the chairs. Another stared blankly at a machine offering
Coffee or Tea. Your Choice!

‘Hello,’ I said, leaning over the reception desk in a vain attempt to get a look at the register. ‘I’m looking for my friend –’

I paused. And in the instant of that pause, I could picture the scene, could see it happening. When they came for him they’d have asked his name. And I realized that despite his air of mystery I knew him. I knew how his mind worked.

The receptionist appeared indifferent to our relationship, to my motives, to any lie I might be preparing. She searched in her admissions book for the name I gave.

My name.

‘Here’s your friend,’ she said, and inside I shrieked with triumph. ‘Admitted on Wednesday. Ward F. The lift is behind you.’

I pushed the button with a wobbly finger.

The matron on duty checked her list. ‘Yes,’ she said, and pointed. ‘In the far corner.’ She barely looked up.

I tiptoed down the corridor, desperately needing Finn to smile at me weakly from deep down in his dark cipher’s eyes and thank me for saving his life.

There were eight beds in the room, all occupied. He lay in the corner with his back to me, covers drawn high up around his head.

I approached softly. ‘Finn…?’

Did he flinch?

I said his name once more, but there was no answer, so I sat on the ugly green chair beside the bed and waited. A different nurse came by to check his blood pressure, take his temperature.

‘We’re not getting much out of her today,’ the nurse told me with a smile.

She,
I thought, annoyed. But that always happened with my name. I’d been teased about it, taken for a girl on class registers my entire life.

And yet, I thought, what kind of nurse can’t tell the difference between a boy and a girl?

‘Is he going to be here much longer?’

She gave me a curious look. ‘Have you got the right friend?’ I followed her eyes to Finn’s left arm, curled over the cotton hospital blanket. It looked oddly fragile and delicate, the blue veins visible just under the skin. I could understand where the misapprehension came from.

She said his name, my name, and I gave a mirthless little laugh. ‘It’s a common mistake. People often think it’s a girl’s name.’

The nurse paused. ‘There’s been some question about next of kin, hasn’t there? Locating parents or guardians? Didn’t they find her living alone?’

I was beginning to feel uneasy. The warmth I’d felt when I realized Finn had taken my name was beginning to cool as I recognized the implications. The sick boy in this bed was supposed to be me. Eventually someone would trace the name to an NHS number, an address, a family, a school. Perhaps they already had.

The nurse looked closely at my jacket and frowned. ‘You’re a St Oswald’s boy?’ My clothes were filthy and crumpled, but perhaps no more than she expected. ‘Isn’t there a quarantine?’ She seemed about to say more, but a bell rang on the ward and she turned to go, looking back once from the door. And me? I was too tired to run, and besides, I’d run out of places to go. A feeling of dread settled somewhere in the region of my small intestine.

I waited. Nurses came and went. I couldn’t bring myself to approach Finn again. Inside my head, a single question ran endlessly on a loop: Will someone
please
tell me what is going on? Will someone
please…

A young doctor arrived for rounds. He spent a long time leafing through a folder with my name on it, then turned to me. ‘Perhaps you can help me, there seems to be some confusion about her NHS number.’

‘He is
not
a girl.’ I spoke the phrase in a very quiet voice, afraid to make myself heard.

The young doctor looked down at the chart once more. He frowned. ‘It says here she was admitted the day before yesterday, suffering from glandular fever and dehydration.’

The facts as I knew them. ‘I found him. I called the police. There was blood…’

He looked up, brow furrowed, his expression puzzled, but not unkind. ‘The patient was menstruating at the time of admission. Do you understand what that word means?’

A wave of something dark flooded the space behind my eyes.

He continued, peering down once more at the chart. ‘Though I’ll grant you, something’s not right. Damned paperwork.’ He flipped the pages back and forth. Looked up again with the resignation of someone accustomed to administrative disorder. ‘I’ll get someone to sort it out.’ He stood up to go. ‘Her parents are on their way.’

There was a movement from the bed, and slowly, slowly, Finn turned to face me. I could read a lifetime in his eyes, an explanation, an expression of… of what? Gratitude? Regret? But no, it was something else. Amusement almost, mixed with shame, as if he had told a joke that turned out not to be so funny after all. I flailed at the moment, desperate to grasp it, but it faded before I could make sense of it and was gone.

Finn turned away and all of a sudden the hilarity of the situation struck me with force. As I tried to control the rising bubble of hysteria, I wondered whose parents were on the way.

29

A few miles from where Finn’s hut sat there had once been a large medieval town, a prosperous community arranged round a C-shaped indentation in the coastline. The town boasted five royal galleons and a perfect calm harbour from which fishermen and traders set off adventuring into the North Sea, returning days or weeks later from what is now Holland and Norway and France, their boats filled with embroidered wool and linen, illuminated vellum, silk cloth, soft worsted wool. Most of their food they grew or raised themselves. It was a time of great prosperity, a mini golden age. But it didn’t last.

In 1328, a brutal storm reconfigured the coastline of East Anglia. Huge winds drove the sea crossways against the opening of the land, dredging shingle up from the shallow seabed and hurling it against the coast to wall off the harbour, while at the same time scrabbling away at the cliffs and causing one third of the town to collapse into the sea. What had been an idyllic protected cove was now a saltwater lake, and within a decade, the town of six thousand prosperous souls dwindled to half that number, then a quarter, and so on, until only a handful of farmers remained.

About the same time, the Black Death began its inexorable crawl west through Asia, finally reaching France and crossing the channel to Kent. England played its part in the spread of disease, sending an infected ship from London to Norway, which landed with its entire crew dead or nearly dead, each corpse grotesquely dotted with purple and black swellings. A gang of looters, ignorant of plague, caught the disease from their victims and as a consequence of sudden wealth, travelled up and down the coast spreading infection wherever they went. By the time they themselves succumbed, they had passed the disease to a quarter of Norway’s coastal population.

Some historians believe that the movement of plague across Europe forms a convenient division between the medieval world and the Renaissance – quite literally a clean sweep between one era and the next.

I cannot, in all honesty, make this parallel with my own life. Any rebirth I experienced came with agonizing slowness, over decades.

It was many years before I saw Finn again.

I was taken into police custody later that same day, thanks to the information Gibbon and his cohort beat out of poor Reese. At the time, so many questions were asked of me, of my parents and teachers, of the school, of the police and social services. And of Finn, presumably. The simple intimacy of those days at the hut gave rise to scenes of chaos and crisis.

There was an inquest into Reese’s death, and another into my relationship with Finn. When the newspapers took up the story, they found me guilty of manslaughter and sexual perversity, among other things. I was also judged by my peers, not as a murderer or a reprobate, but a laughing stock.

Good old Hilary. Guilty as charged.

I was released into the custody of my parents for the duration of the case, nearly two years in all, and was exonerated of all charges in the end. Not responsible for Reese’s death. Or for anything else. It took much longer for the shame to dissipate and the desire to see Finn again to surface. The shame interests me now, and I wonder at its power. Where was my guilt except in misapprehension, or is the ignorance of youth shame enough?

There was no question of my remaining at home. I told my parents I was through with education, packed a few belongings and what little money I had into a case and left. And was it my imagination, or were they not entirely unhappy to be rid of me? For what is more repulsive to the respectable English middle class than scandal, failure, the dreaded whiff of perversion?

It didn’t take a genius to guess where I went. The gravitational pull was irresistible, and besides, I didn’t know anywhere else.

I returned in July and waited as usual for low tide. Even at its lowest, the water now came nearly to my waist. The hut looked intact, but had obviously spent a good deal of the past two years flooded. It stank of seaweed and rot; every surface was stained and covered in mould and mud. I set to work at once. It’s not as if I had the money for a flat.

The first night I slept upstairs on Finn’s old bed, tossing and turning until eventually, at around midnight, I moved outside. The air was the temperature of blood and smelled clean and salty, and I lay for a long time looking up at the stars. At dawn I gave up trying to sleep, and began dragging whatever was ruined out of the hut and up on to higher ground, laying out things to dry on the sand.

Clearing the place was drudgery, though not without triumphs. While dragging armfuls of stinking seaweed out to the scrubby dunes I nearly tripped over Finn’s kayak, exactly where I’d left it, half-covered in sand and reeds and buried like a relic. But when I dug it out it looked intact, and I kissed its tatty green hull in gratitude.

I worked until mid-morning when hunger overcame any desire to finish the job, then took the kayak across the channel, left it in the old place, and walked into town. Heading straight to the most expensive hotel, I strolled into the dining room without looking left or right and sat down at a large table groaning with leftovers from a family of seven. I greeted the distracted parents, ignored their polite look of non-recognition, and began to help myself. Simple.

Meeting the stares of the uncertain waiters with a confident smile, I stuffed myself on rolls, warm coffee with cream, and the remains of a full cooked breakfast that had only been nibbled by a child. The politeness of the staff, their uncertainty as to whether I belonged (didn’t his face look familiar?) spurred me on. I particularly enjoyed an untouched plate of sausages, and couldn’t have eaten another bite if I’d tried. So, into a starched white napkin went the leftovers and (thanking the girl on duty) out of the restaurant strolled I, my lunch in a bundle, replete.

Next stop was the local hardware shop, where I bought kerosene, nails and a scrubbing brush. I stuffed it all into a large shopping bag, adding a loaf of bread, some butter and one of those cheap ginger cakes wrapped in greased paper. My bag was awkward to carry, so I took the bus. I looked away as it passed my old school.

The next two weeks followed a reassuringly productive pattern. I knew the breakfast staff at The Ship so well by now that they ignored me. I thanked them by being discreet, tidy, unobtrusive. Some days I got lucky and had leftover bacon and eggs, the rest of the time it was toast and hot tea or coffee. As I ate, I observed the hotel residents – well-dressed middle-aged tourists and school parents who rarely spoke over breakfast. Most looked as if they never spoke to each other over anything else either. It gave me a more objective picture of the sort of people who sent their children to St Oswald’s, the ones whose marriages were less than passionate, whose involvement with their children brought the word ‘duty’ to mind quicker than ‘love’. Occasionally there was an outdoorsy dog in tow, a spaniel or an apricot poodle to match mother’s hair. These hints expanded my cache of information, helped me imagine the homes they owned and the lives they led, with housekeepers and modern appliances and emotional lives kept well in check.

I had never been so interested in the upper middle classes before. But then, I’d never had a chance to observe them in the wild.

Some days after breakfast I bought materials: paint brushes, tacks, tools, and other things as they occurred to me. Some days I lugged back a piece of second-hand furniture (a chair, a fold-up table) to replace the smashed or rotten things in the hut. Nothing cost much, and it was satisfying, like playing at having a life. The next flood would happen soon enough and I would have to make my home watertight. Each moment demanded my attention.

Once I’d cleared the rubbish, I scrubbed the house till my hands bled. The sun was bright and strong, and it dried quickly and began to smell of salt and the sea instead of rot. I threw open the windows and only closed them at night to keep the moths out. I didn’t light the stove, despite missing hot water for tea, but I knew I’d need a fire soon, when the temperature began to drop. Despite the fact that the salty beach wood burned badly, spitting and sputtering like willow, it was considerably easier than transporting sacks of coal across in the kayak.

There was enough repair work to keep me busy all summer. And although DIY wasn’t exactly my speciality, I enjoyed the realization that it was possible. First job was to repair the metal chimney, which made a terrible noise smashing against the roof whenever the wind blew, so I replaced the broken brackets and screwed them down tightly. Next, I built a wall around the outside of the hut with sandbags, three deep. It was exhausting work, filling and arranging all the bags for my rampart, and took the better part of two weeks. By the time I had finished, I realized it probably wouldn’t work anyway. I wasn’t about to spend another week dismantling it, but its uselessness depressed me.

Replacing window glass required precision and expertise, neither of which I possessed. I bought a knife and had the panes cut and wrapped carefully in brown paper at the town hardware shop. It took nearly a whole frustrating day before I got the hang of chipping out the old putty on one side and replacing it with new in a straight smooth line. A few panes had to be trimmed where the windows had shifted and were no longer square, and in doing this I managed to break all four, despite having in my possession a glass cutter. For the second batch I re-measured precisely and paid extra to have the panes cut into parallelograms.

In preparation for winter I bought a roll of insulating wool and pushed it in between the struts of the unlined roof, securing it with whatever boards I could find from the scrap washed up on the beach. To say my patchwork of wood looked inelegant would be an understatement, but it worked – the August sun streamed in all day and the roof space became hot as a sauna. I knew it would come into its own in colder weather, but in the meantime I began sleeping downstairs again, like in the old days.

The following week I found half a box of the pebbly black asbestos tiles Finn had used to repair the roof. He had carefully wrapped and stashed them under the stairs, and I came across them while searching for tools. It had generally been a dry summer, but when it did rain, I needed every bowl and saucepan in the house to catch the drips. So I balanced on the window sill and heaved the heavy box over on to the roof, forgetting to take account of the scorching hot tin edges that took the place of gutters. Thick bands of burns reminded me of my folly for days afterwards, and I waited for an overcast day to try again. The pitch of the roof was only about twenty degrees, but it was difficult to hold a stable position while hammering (how had Finn managed it so easily?). I knelt carefully, hooked my feet over the ridge, then leant forward to nail down as many tiles as possible before sliding off. My technique wasn’t wholly satisfactory, given that in the process of nailing on new tiles, the old ones had a tendency to split, and in the end I just tacked strips of tarpaper over the whole mess. If that wasn’t the proper thing to do, you can send me a letter.

So piece by piece, I put the house back together, and when I stepped back to look at it, realized it was more snug and ready for winter than it had been during all the time Finn lived there. This realization startled me; I was not used to thinking of myself as the sort of person who could improve upon his work.

Her work.

I never exactly made a decision about what came next. It came over me slowly, ticking quietly at the back of my consciousness for the longest time before I even noticed it was there. But I was halfway to a decision already, living in the hut, becoming what I loved.

You would think there’d be a rule to go with that thought, but I had run out of rules.