What I Was (4 page)

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 me 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.’

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.