Ollie Always (18 page)

Yeah. There was only so much Ollie could listen to until his little red friend came into play again.

To be certain, he turned the phone off and closed his eyes for a while.

§§§

Ollie was woken by the sound of cars in the busy London street outside his room. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and he lay listening to the familiar and oddly restful music of engines, the occasional horn and shouting. England. He was home. Everything in New Zealand seemed a great deal further away than eleven thousand miles and thirty-six hours. It had been a dreamtime. And it was over.

He was surprisingly calm.

Sure, he was twenty-five and had absolutely no idea what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, or who he was going to do it with, but for some reason neither of these things bothered him unduly. He pulled a sheet of notepaper off the bedside table and began a list of things that had to be done immediately: buy a new phone; get a laptop; see his lawyer. He had a trust fund, but he’d never used it, never having any particular qualms about living off his mother’s money. But now he wanted to be independent of her—well, as independent as a vacuous sponger with no job could ever be. He doodled for a while then added,
phone my tutor
. Perhaps he could be a vacuous sponger with a PhD.
Dr Sponge
. He jotted this down. Then he wrote something else. Then some more. And soon all he could do was head out to the shops so he could buy a laptop, and when he had it back in his room, he lost the rest of that day.

It poured from him. It was a story about a boy. He called him Freddy. He was a nice little chap who lived very happily with his mother until he was seven, when his mother remarried. Freddie was then sent to boarding school. There, he discovered that life no longer allowed him to ride furiously around on his bicycle, solving great mysteries with his teddy bear companion, who was called Bartleby, and who was the best sort of bear to have on all adventures for a brave and cheerful little boy. Freddie quickly discovered that his kind of courage wasn’t wanted at all. When he stepped in to help another first year, whose head was being forced down a lavatory whilst it was being flushed, Freddie ended up swallowing the shitty water instead, and from that moment on, valour, honesty, and a desire to be kind to all things became his worst enemies. And so Alfred was born. But Alfred wasn’t a book character. Alfred was very real. He was a psychotic split from reality made manifest. He was everything Freddie needed to be to survive the vicious institution laughably called a school. Alfred took over for Freddie, and Freddie was able to hover almost invisibly in the corner of rooms, occasionally glimpsed by some of the boys who’d managed to hold onto some kind of integrity in the face of such carefully orchestrated bullying. But increasingly, Freddie became lost, merely a ghost flickering alongside disused cricket bats, or a sigh from a stack of jerseys left too long on a dusty floor. But Alfred didn’t exactly take Freddie’s place—he wasn’t noble or kind at all. That was the point. He was what was needed, and he didn’t discriminate. After all, what do all victims of bullying ultimately do to escape the pain? They learn how to dish it out instead. Alfred stopped being Freddie’s saviour and became his worst nightmare.

Freddie had to step out of his shadowy haven and face up to the monster he’d allowed to roam the hallways in his name. It was hard to persuade people that the devil who wore your face wasn’t actually you. But Freddie, struggling desperately for his life, noticed an interesting thing. If Alfred hurt a boy, he, Freddie, faded a little more. If he, Freddie, helped someone, Alfred began to smoulder and smoke and…lose solidity, just a little. Freddie remembered his courage, and marched steadily ahead during the days, taking the beatings and the mindless cruelties. At least if they were inflicted on him, he reasoned, some other first year was saved. He did random and completely anonymous acts of kindness whenever he could, and although he never dared bring Bartleby out of his locked trunk, where he’d been kept safe (if slightly aggrieved as only very brave bears can be), Freddie felt as if his steadfast companion of old was there alongside him. As the year slid toward its conclusion, Freddie became more and more frantic to stay alive, and war was declared, battlegrounds selected—cricket pavilions when the games master wasn’t looking, history classrooms where dusty chalk motes hung in the air over Teutonic knights, or dorm rooms where homesick little boys had always fought their inner demons.

But Alfred was fighting a losing battle. Once Freddie realised that there was in fact nothing Alfred or the prefects he now ruled could do to him, other than hurt him or kill him, then he had no fear. He recited to himself the words engraved on his father’s headstone in a distant churchyard in Devon where the sun always shone softly on lichen-covered stone: ‘
He who has lost all, but retains his courage, cheerfulness, hope, virtue, and self-respect, is still rich
.’

One day, Freddie woke up, and Alfred was not in the bed with him, whispering his foul secrets. The sun was indeed shining, just as brightly as he remembered it always shone in Devon, and he had a cricket match later that day that his mother had promised to come and watch.

Bartleby came to the match, too, and sat on the tartan rug with her all through the match. She needed someone to keep her company, as she was alone, and, as she pointed out to Freddie, a teddy bear was a much better companion than a worthless—but Freddie had not caught the end of this comment, as his friends had rushed over to drag him off for tea.

§§§

When Ollie emerged from his keyboard and his notes, he realised he had the draft of his first novel. A
children’s
book. He’d never thought to write something for children, and he supposed this might be a very unusual story and would probably never get published. It was full of very dark themes and written in the language of despair.

But now he, like Freddie, was free of his darkness, his other half, his self-destructive guilt, or whatever else it had been.

He had five pages of notes and a burning desire to start writing.

There was a first time for everything, Ollie supposed.

He wondered if the funny cats would miss him.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Ollie hadn’t lived almost independently of any adult help or guidance from the age of seven without learning to be very adaptable when required. He had no trouble at all returning to Cambridge and renting a room, all the while staying off the radar from anyone who might be looking for him.

As soon as he got settled, three days after his cathartic outpouring of thoughts into his new laptop, he emailed David with an attached letter for his mother.

He didn’t find this hard to write either.

Mother,

I’m safely back in England, and I’ve decided to finish my PhD if I can. I’m meeting with my tutor tomorrow to discuss my options.

Please don’t worry about me. I’m totally fine. I know I left suddenly, and I’m sorry I was rude. Please make my apologies to everyone.

If you see Tom Collins, which I suppose you will, don’t blame him for anything. He did his best, given the awful job he was forced to accept. All considered, he was very believable and almost succeeded in what I assume you had agreed was his aim.

I know you love me. I know you’ve always loved me. I can see that now very clearly for the first time. I’m not sure I could have done what you did. It must have been very hard for you to lie so thoroughly to me for so long. I think they call what you have for me tough love. Well, it worked. Something got shaken loose anyway.

You won’t find me. I’m living under another name for a while, and I’ve drawn out cash from Grandfather’s money. Don’t badger Dr Richardson either, he doesn’t know where I’m living, and once we’ve had our discussion tomorrow, I’ll work independently.

I did hear that you were flying back, but I phoned Mrs Martin in Devon and she said the house was still semi-shut up until the New Year, so I guess you changed your mind. Have a lovely Christmas. I hope the sun shines for you. I’m spending Christmas with someone called Freddie. I rather like him. I like to think you would, too.

I love you,

Oliver

§§§

It took a lot of effort for Ollie to sign off with that name. But it was mental effort not sugar or alcohol or self-harm or pills or any of the other substances he’d used in the past to do things he found difficult. He’d just at that minute come back from a run along the Cam and was very wet and cold, but that only made him smile as a small drip of Cambridge rain fell on the keyboard as he typed that final R.

He pressed send and imagined the email winging off into space to be received on a sleeping computer somewhere in the middle of the night in New Zealand.

He took a shower, made himself some scrambled eggs, and a large mug of tea then got back to Freddie and Bartleby. Bartleby had liked being in the trunk even less than Ollie had thought, and so now he lived in Freddie’s school bag during most of the great battles. He was fun to write. Freddie was taxing Ollie’s powers, however. It was hard to remember to be brave and good and kind all the time, and the siren temptation of Alfred was sometimes very hard to resist. But Ollie went for a run whenever Alfred made an appearance and, gradually, just as Freddie did, Ollie made Alfred very insubstantial and powerless indeed.

§§§

Christmas was going to be difficult this year. Ollie recognised this and the weakness within himself. It would have been very easy to go to a bar in Cambridge and find something, or someone, to make the Yuletide merry.

Instead, he took a break to the Lake District and wrote some more, watching snow falling on mountains.

The New Year kicked in but passed Ollie by as he sat huddled over his laptop and gave Freddie an ally—one young history master who knew what was happening and took the boy under his wing as best he could and fought Alfred with Freddy with all his knowledge of battles and strategy, garnered from a lifetime of reading. He made this young teacher bald-headed for some reason.

The spring came and went, and summer slipped by, as it often did in England—gone before anyone had really had the opportunity to find some shorts that fit.

Ollie didn’t mind, he had horrible deaths to conjure and the pomposity of bears to endure.

The autumn reminded him of something so poignant it made him sad when he took his daily run through fallen leaves and conkers and shafts of sunlight dazzling on the river. He could do twenty miles easily now, if he wanted. He usually turned at the five-mile point, however, and limited himself to ten.

After all, battles with sixth-form prefects didn’t write themselves.

His second Christmas home in England now loomed on the horizon. It had been threatening of course since June when the first carols had been played in the shops in Cambridge, the first rendition of
I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day
.

But by December, the long runs, the hard work, the strict diet and mental discipline weren’t quite enough. If there was any season designed to make you feel lonely and inadequate, Christmas was it.

He called in favours from some of his extended family. His mother wasn’t the goddaughter of the Colonel in Chief of the Grenadier Guards for nothing. Within a day of his enquiry, Ollie had the home address of a certain lieutenant colonel in Wiltshire.

She worked in London. Ollie knew this, but it was Christmas Eve, and he assumed that even ambitious colonels weren’t in the office the day before Christmas.

He hired a car and drove through appalling pre-Christmas traffic and even worse weather toward the west. He knew the way very well, for the address was a little way off the A-30 near Stonehenge, and he had been passing Stonehenge on his way to and from school for almost two decades.

He’d never turned off, however, into the large army camp, which lay a mile to the north of the famous stones. Larkhill was a camp for gunners, but Tom had told Ollie that his wife had been given a quarter away from her contemporaries, mainly because she was in the police, but mostly, Ollie had been told by his contact in the MOD, because she, an officer, had married a soldier. This was still very rare within the army, and necessitated neither of them ever being accommodated where either of them might have to socialise.

The address took Ollie to a large circle of houses around a central area of grass the size of four good playing fields. The circle was covered in trees and ditches and what appeared to be some ruined fortifications. The houses were impressive, solidly redbrick and surrounded by vast gardens, which in modern housing estates would have provided enough land for at least sixteen more houses to be crammed into each. There was little sign of maintenance on the houses or the gardens, however. Ollie, coming from rented university digs, recognised the lack of care of tenancy.

He sat outside the house for a while, thinking.

He wasn’t really sure why he was doing this.

It had something to do with his book. He’d been fighting his demons for a year and trying to be brave.

But it was more than that. He wanted to know the truth. He wanted to know if any of it had been as he’d wanted it to be. Janice Collins existed. He knew that much now. She lived here. That was also true.

It was time to face the rest.

At the moment Ollie had determined that he’d probably lurked long enough outside a policewoman’s house, and that he’d better make a move one way or another, a woman appeared in his rear-view mirror from the direction of the rough grass. She was running, and had clearly been doing so for a quite a while, if the muddy and soaking state of her clothes was anything to go by. She stopped briefly behind his car, and Ollie had the very distinct impression that his number plate had now been clocked. To forestall future embarrassment on either side, he climbed out and asked pleasantly, “Colonel Collins?”

The sweaty woman sniffed and nodded.

Ollie was dressed smartly in his visit-the-royal-relatives suit, so he approached, holding out his hand, well aware he was making a good first impression. “Hello. My name’s Freddie. I’m a very old friend of Tom’s from the army, but we’ve lost touch. I’ve been trying to find him.”