What I Was (14 page)

30

I went to see Finn’s witch.

Two years is a long time in the life of a teenage boy, but in the life of a market trader it’s barely longer than a wink. I had the sense that Finn’s witch had been at this game for a few centuries at least and was unlikely to change her ways at such short notice. And sure enough there she was, just as I’d left her, with the same filthy handkerchief knotted round her neck and the same face like a rotten turnip. She gave no obvious sign of welcome as I approached, but I could tell from a certain darting away and back again of the eyes that she recognized me. I wondered if she read the local papers, and then realized she wouldn’t have had to: the unofficial version of news travelled from stall to stall, and on a good day moved with a great deal more speed and accuracy than Reuters.

She turned her back on me, but I didn’t care. I sat down, pretending to concentrate on something in the distance, watched the action at the next stall, hummed to myself. It took nearly a quarter of an hour for her to establish that I wasn’t leaving. She came and sat beside me.

‘You’re back.’

‘Yes.’

She nodded.

I remained silent for the longest time, remembering Finn, practising power. And then, ‘I need a job.’

She seemed surprised by this, which in turn surprised me. What’s the point of second sight if you can’t anticipate the simplest conversations?

‘Don’t suppose you’re much use.’

I faced her. Go on, I thought, have a good look. Not the finest specimen, perhaps. But at least I am what I seem to be.

‘Tuesday,’ she said, just when we were in danger of moving out of awkward silence into permanent stasis. ‘Early.’

‘How early?’

‘Six.’

Six was fine. A job was a job, I wasn’t about to quibble over the hours. I was up at sunrise most mornings anyway.

Today was Saturday, and I counted down the hours till my return. I was sick of stolen breakfasts, and the hotel would soon be replacing its summer staff with locals, whom I guessed would be less welcoming. I was also out of money, would have had to try for a job in town if the witch hadn’t offered work. The thought of having to serve St Oswald’s boys at the Co-op or fish-and-chip shop made me cringe.

In the event, there were no surprises. Tuesday morning at
6
a.m., Witchy pointed to a pile of boxes in the back of a van, pointed again to an area behind her market stall and left me alone. Couldn’t have been easier. I unpacked boxes, stacked them carefully at the front of her stall, ran errands, and by 11 a.m., when she handed me a cup of tea, I could no longer raise my arms above my shoulders.

‘This the new boy?’ The wizened forty-year-old chain-smoker who sold cheese and sweets and tinned sardines at the next stall checked me out. ‘Quite a looker, ent he?’ she said, unable to control her mirth. Her name was Alice, and it didn’t suit her.

The witch handed me a broom. Highly appropriate, I thought as I swept. At one o’clock, she led me over to the market cafe and waved to the waitress, who brought over two plates of sausage and mash and placed one in front of each of us. It was the first proper meal I’d had in weeks that wasn’t breakfast, and she didn’t try to tell my fortune. I was grateful and vowed to be less unpleasant for the rest of the day.

The market closed up at three, and all the work I’d done first thing had to be undone in the same order, with everything stacked in the back of the van and the stall dismantled. It struck me as an impossible amount of work for the lazy old stump, and I was surprised she’d had an opening for a dogsbody. Perhaps she’d been holding the position open, knowing I was about to show up and ask for it.

When everything was finished, folded and swept, she reached into the little leather pouch round her waist and handed me six shillings. Enough to buy tea and milk and bread and biscuits, and nails, and an economy packet of minced beef.

‘When shall I come back?’

‘Tomorrow,’ she said, clambering into the cab of her little blue van and slamming the door.

Thirty shillings a week. Ecstasy.

31

As the summer wound down, there was less work to do on the hut, and I spent my free time reading books that I borrowed from the library or bought at the junk shop for a penny. Most of what I read was chosen to impress Finn, whose absence I took to be temporary. Or maybe he had existed so much in my head that when he left, the difference was negligible. The thought that he might return at any moment led me to devise topics of conversation based on my reading. It seemed unlikely, after all, that we would spend time reminiscing. I started with classics like
Moby Dick
and
Treasure Island,
but soon drifted into modern adventure:
Kon Tiki, The Wooden Horse, The Day of the Triffids.
The recent fiction I read furtively, like pornography, in bed.

Week in, week out, I worked and I lived and I thought about Finn.

But which Finn did I think about? The Finn in my head was strong and fearless. Virile. Male.

I knew nothing about the real one.

And yet I waited for his return, in part because I didn’t have a better plan. On the plus side, Finn’s witch was a good employer (not that I had anything to compare her with), the work was straightforward, and she paid me for it, which seemed a miracle in itself.

On the minus, my sleep was haunted with drownings, and my house (
my house
) was slowly being reclaimed by the sea.

One day it rained constantly and Witchy sent me home early. I trudged the long road to the coast to save bus fare, turning across the marshes as usual. Now that the hut was inaccessible by foot, my main fear was losing the kayak, so I’d bought a heavy plastic-covered bicycle cable and padlock, looped one end through the ring at the bow and secured it to Finn’s rusted old winch. I had unlocked the boat, flipped it right side up and begun dragging it down to the channel when I heard a noise, a low hiss of outrage which caused me to drop it and jump back, dumbstruck as a single grey paw emerged from the bow cabin, followed by a grey head with raked-back eyes, twitching torn ears, a coat of matted fur. And, finally, the strange cartoon tail, held erect.

Finn’s cat greeted me (its long-lost friend) disdainfully, and stepped into the centre of the boat, each paw meticulously planted, daring me to reclaim what it obviously considered Finn’s property, or perhaps its own. But having lost the need to curry favour with its owner, I was no longer frightened of the beast. Wet and bad-tempered, I hissed back at it, took hold of the boat by the gunnels, tossed it roughly into the channel, hauled myself in, and as an afterthought checked with one hand to see if the creature had retreated under the bulkhead. It sank its teeth into my hand just like in the old days, and I withdrew with a curse, looking round to catch Finn’s take on my humiliation.

I paddled up to my (
my
) front door and tethered the boat to the latch. It floated in three inches of water where once it would have sat on dry land.

Let the beast get out by itself, I thought, not interested in risking another attack for its welfare. But it followed me exactly, leaping from deck to threshold, then stepping inside, where it carried out an inspection of the new order, tail slowly sweeping back and forth, as if testing for mines. It even rubbed up against me a few times, establishing ownership. And so I was marked: Property of Finn’s Cat.

The creature was obviously not reliant on anyone else for survival. Despite its ragged coat and torn face, no ribs showed. I threw it scraps because it had once belonged to Finn, and also because I was in charge.
Noblesse oblige.
So we were bound together by shared loyalty if nothing else.

Pragmatist that it was, the cat began to follow me the way it had once followed Finn – all the way from the beach into town, parading down the centre of the market at my heels. Alice found this behaviour hilarious. Her stall already had four or five cats prowling about, which made perfect sense, given that her cheese gave off the heady aroma of decay. Mice staggered out of their hiding places like drunken sailors, drawn inexorably towards the stink. When this happened, her cats picked them off one at a time with quick, delicate flicks of the paw. The mice were so intoxicated by rotten cheese, they didn’t seem to mind being eaten.

Finn’s cat did not join the general game, but remained aloof, waiting for particular handouts from the fishmonger. It seemed quite at home sitting patiently in anticipation of lunch, and I wondered if this were the source of its well-padded figure. It certainly shunned anything so demeaning as catching its meals live.

Despite my understanding that cats groomed themselves, the animal’s coat appeared to be matted beyond repair and as I refused to touch it, Alice produced a comb and brushed its fur till it fluffed out, shiny and clean, like sable. The creature looked better, beautiful almost, and it pleased me. It was more flattering to be followed around by a thing of beauty.

We had lots of regulars, and one girl hung around the stall most afternoons. I didn’t discourage her, and on our third or fourth encounter we struck up a conversation. She had wonderful coppery eyes and asked if my cat had a name. I yawned, bored and a little annoyed by the subject.

‘It’s called Beast,’ I said, aiming a half-hearted kick, and she frowned.

‘Don’t do that.’

I shrugged and went back to work, and eventually the girl drifted away. But she came back the next day and the next, and I guessed she was desperate for attention because she not only hung around, but started walking home with me, or as close to home as I’d let her come. She was pretty enough, with long, flat hair parted in the centre and she didn’t walk so much as wander. Her features were small and clear, and occasionally I squinted at her, trying to imagine her as a boy.

We reached the place where the tarmac road turned left along the coast and I stopped and told her she couldn’t come any further.

‘Where on earth do you live?’ she asked, but I only gestured vaguely towards the footpath that ran across the marshes and practised my inscrutable smile. I didn’t turn round or wave, just left her there, Finn’s cat following at my heel. I knew it added to my air of mystery, and for once I felt complicit with the beast.

The girl never tried to follow.

32

There are other things I haven’t mentioned. Like Finn turning out to be two years younger than I’d thought, which was all part of the scandal. There were enough
anomalies,
as the court-appointed social worker said, to cause serious concern: a sixteen-year-old boy and a fourteen-year-old girl practically cohabiting over school holidays, the girl dressed as a boy and acting like one, and
Lord knows what else.
Articles of my clothing were found in the hut, and a diary of my movements somehow made its way to the authorities. Poor dead Reese, vigilant to the end.

To me they always said: ‘Of course you knew, didn’t you?’

They mostly asked this question gently, but with a subtext of incredulity, as if they couldn’t get their heads round the possibility that anyone could have been so stupid. This was always the question, phrased in a way that stopped just short of the subject of buggery – or something more conventional than buggery, as it turned out. The whole subject made me feel ashamed and furious but most of all embarrassed for Finn, and what he’d become in everyone’s eyes because of me.

What she’d become.

No one knew what to think, least of all me. Could I really have been so naive? Every question held a trap, a sex trap usually, and the real questions weren’t voiced. You just had to look at the men (it was usually men), wetting their lips a little, sometimes apologetic, sometimes challenging, sometimes just plain desperate for details.
Did you have sex?
they nearly asked, and
How? What exactly did you do? What was the precise nature of your perversion? I’m afraid we’ll require details.
Their eyes begged me for details.

Of course, they had it wrong. I said it again and again, sometimes impatiently, sometimes with calm assurance, sometimes in an explosion of violence, though in fact it didn’t matter. No matter what I said, my innocence emerged twisted, looking and sounding like guilt and conforming to everyone’s worst fears and dearest desires. They wanted us to be perverts so badly that the truth began to sag.
Just tell us,
they cooed, but underneath lurked the words held in readiness:
faggot, paedo, pervert, deviant,
and best of all,
Public School Boy,
as if (with the right sort of emphasis) no further explanation were necessary.

The authorities located Finn’s mother, and I expect the reunion was an emotional one. Note how carefully I have phrased that, in order to leave space for the reality of it, whatever that might have been. I doubt she was glad to see him, but I could be wrong. The newspapers reported that she lived nearby, had a boyfriend and two other children – girls. Whatever else may have been true of her, she didn’t want Finn having anything to do with me. As if somehow I had made him what he was, when all I did was come along near the end of the story and trust that Finn had told me the truth.

Reese’s body was found three weeks later, washed up on shore a mile or so from the hut. After all the testimony, the suggestive headlines, the pointed fingers, it was ruled an accidental death. He had come looking for me, and, overtaken by the storm, had drowned. It was a good simple explanation, despite everything it left out.

Of course, back then, I still thought of history as a full and frank collection of facts. Now I understand that it is only a story, one of many, or many parts of several different stories – in my case, the one about Goldilocks and the Big Bad Wolf.

Think about history and tell me that I’m wrong.

33

I should have liked this particular story to end with me settled happily ever after in the hut on the island, but it didn’t happen. It wasn’t long before I had to face the fact that I was living in the sea.

Once the fact became obvious, I packed up and left. There was no point hanging about waiting for floods to sweep away all those lives: Finn’s, his gran’s, the fisherman from a hundred years ago, the farmer from a thousand, and everyone else in between, including me. The closer Finn’s island came to extinction, the more I wandered back in my mind to the lives that came before us, the huts and houses, the remains of animals and clothing, the coins and latrines and cooking pots, the messages from the past left in bones and kitchen dumps. And the people.

Sometimes I thought about the content of those lives, the intangible things that leave no fossils and no marks on history. Would people from the future excavate traces of passion? Of hope, disappointment, despair? Would they discover layers of love and layers of loss? Or would the entire human race end up drowned and forgotten, buried under waves of melting ice, with no one left to dig us up or wonder at what was or what might have been?

Which brings me back to the present, where we have begun to drown in a sea of our own making. Our idyll is gone, squandered on a headlong rush towards the future. Our lives in this fragile place have taken their toll. We have emerged, ragged and ruined, filled with wisdom and regrets that are much too late.

We were wrong about time, wrong to believe it would move forward in an orderly fashion filled with promise and opportunity and progress forever. We know now that time leaps and skids and suddenly stops short, as it will soon for me, as it did once on a day in the middle of the twentieth century when I met the person I wanted to be, and asked him for something to drink.

Despite the fact that Finn never blamed me, I paid my penance into a bank account every month for nearly eighty years. He never thanked me and I never wanted to be thanked, so we were in agreement. For reasons I find hard to explain, even now, I paid it in memory of Reese. There was so much of me in him, and I have often wondered whether he may have been the truer friend.

I am almost a hundred years old; waiting for the end, and thinking about the beginning.

There are things I need to tell you, but would you listen if I told you how quickly time passes?

I know you are unable to imagine this.

Nevertheless, I can tell you that you will awake some day to find that your life has rushed by at a speed at once impossible and cruel. The most intense moments will seem to have occurred only yesterday, and nothing will have erased the pain and pleasure, the impossible intensity of love and its dog-leaping happiness, the bleak blackness of passions unrequited, or unexpressed, or unresolved.

And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly, with desire. My old man’s brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else’s gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of helpless, selfless love, to behold itself, illuminated, in the golden light of another’s eyes.

Time erodes us all.

The coast is gone now, submerged and continuing to sink. Even dear old St Oswald’s has been lost at sea, like my Roman fort. I am pleased to say that I’ve survived long enough to rejoice, at least, in this small aspect of hope amidst our disaster, at the drowning of those mean little classrooms, those mean little aspirations, that mean little history. I have one goal left in life, and that requires me to row my boat over what is left of those towers.

So this is where my story ends. Here, bobbing quietly in a reliable little skiff over the past. I am an old man with a head full of memories, and there is always a part of me that looks backwards, that flows in reverse past the twentieth century, past the nineteenth, eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, and keeps on flying backwards, back, back and further still, until it slows, and finally stops in the middle of the seventh century where I live in a hut by the sea and fish for a living and make stew in an iron pot and collect wood for my fire on the beach and fish and fight in wars to protect what is mine, despite that not being very much.

For many years we had an arrangement. I travelled to see Finn, self-contained and poised as ever, with the same rare smile, still with short hair like a boy’s. She always welcomed me gladly, a little absently, secure in my affections while offering only the smallest sliver of herself in return. And what would be different about that?

Sometimes the softness of her eyes and mouth made me wonder how I ever missed the truth about what she was. Though to be fair, she was never anything more nor less than she always had been.

The door was never locked and I was the one who put the kettle on, stirred the tea, fetched the biscuits and laid them on a plate. She was often busy in the garden, and wouldn’t come in to me at once.

When eventually we sat down together, she would look at me with the same amused affection as ever, and allow me to gaze into her grave dark eyes and once again feel the familiar tug at my heart. She always asked how I was, and I never once, in all those years, told the truth.

I smile now, knowing that this is all in the past, that I have outlived her; that the story is finished and can never change. I am the only person left on earth with memories of what happened between us and what didn’t.

The girl I met at the market came back into my life a few years later. She had cut her hair to shoulder length and I barely recognized her until I saw those coppery cat’s eyes.

She tapped me on the shoulder in the queue for the bakery, and we chatted about the weather and the bread and Finn’s cat, who still lived with me, and still followed me around in its imperious way.

‘I’m Lara,’ she told me, and held out her hand.

‘My name is Finn,’ I told her. It was the only time I said it out loud.