What I Was (5 page)

9

Finn was gone by the time the sun woke me. I felt disconcerted by his ability to slip out without my hearing but there was no time to hang about. I dressed quickly, said a quick prayer of thanks for the low tide, and ran back to school, hoping to slip in to breakfast without anyone having noticed I was gone.

At the school gates, my housemaster stood waiting with the police.

My parents were phoned and informed that I was still alive, and a lifeboat search called off. I was punished for this extraordinary infringement of school rules by being placed under house arrest and losing all privileges. In a serious talk with my housemaster, I was threatened with expulsion, which for once bothered me.

And yet, oddly, no one asked where I’d been when I failed to return to my room all night, or what I’d done. This I found puzzling, satisfying and hilarious, as if ‘off school grounds’ were a generic place that didn’t require further specification. This omission confirmed my faith in the imbecility of the so-called
real
world, the one in which I pretended to live most of the time. I ignored the glares of authority and the taunts of my room-mates, but most of all I ignored Reese, who lurked and lingered and buzzed round my head with his sticky friendship and his sly questions and the barest suggestion that
he knew.

Knew what, I wondered. Enough to tell?

I was kept under lock and key for nearly a month, until our break-up for Christmas, allowed only to shuffle to and from meals and lessons. There was nothing to differentiate the days. I wouldn’t have minded so much if there’d been a way to tell Finn why I stayed away. Maybe he didn’t care, but I often sat gazing out of the window like a sea captain’s wife.

At the end of term, my father picked me up from school, shaking his head.

‘I don’t have to tell you how disappointed I am,’ he told me. ‘Not only are your grades appalling, but this other business…’ He looked at me with an expression that was almost contempt. ‘What were you thinking? What if you’d died of exposure, been hit by a car? How would we all feel then?’

How
would
we all feel, I wondered. I thought I knew how I’d feel. Dead and cold and stiff, my entrails twisted and septic in my decomposing body. Perhaps it would be a relief. I couldn’t muster up the emotion to mourn this imagined loss of myself, nor could I shake the suspicion that I’d be better off without a body, or at least without this particular body. For one thing, there would be far less opportunity for random betrayal. No more awkwardness, no more fumbles, no more strained lungs and blotchy cheeks. I felt infinitely cheered by this possibility of losing my physical self.

‘… your mother and I have had a long talk about the suitability of your continuing tenure at St Oswald’s –’

‘What?’
I tuned back in to the conversation with a start. ‘But I can’t leave!’

My father looked at me, his expression puzzled and slightly disgusted. ‘Just come along,’ he said. ‘We’ll discuss it later.’

It was late afternoon when we set off, and most of the drive took place in the dark. After the first few miles I turned my brain to neutral and stared out into the black night, counting the headlights that cast long bright shadows up my window. Mile after mile, I thought about the only thing capable of occupying my thoughts.

Despite the late hour, my mother met us at the door with exclamations of welcome. She made cocoa, relieved me of my filthy clothes, and kissed me goodnight with nervy affection. There were neatly ironed pyjamas in my bottom drawer; I put them on and settled into the unfamiliar squishy comfort of home. Although I’d been away nearly four months, nothing in my room had changed. In fact, nothing much had changed since I began my life of indentured education twelve years ago. Except me, of course, but I barely counted.

The next morning I slipped back into my old skin like a seasoned panto actor slipping into a horse suit. I knew the drill here (the rules, the disguises, the proper responses) the same as everywhere else.

Mother seemed pleased to see me, despite my disgrace. For the three weeks of Christmas break, she doted on me as much as she knew how, and when it came time to return to school, she and my father appeared stymied by my good cheer. Perhaps I was settling in after all.

10

In company with the monarchy and the army, boarding schools of the 1960s comprised the last outposts of the poor shrunken British Empire – complete with a full set of nineteenth-century values. This meant we were ruled by a code of conduct that tolerated all flaws save those pertaining to loyalty and rank. Having violated neither, I was clasped on the shoulder and forgiven my previous term’s crimes.

‘Our relationships here are based on trust,’ Clifton-Mogg intoned. ‘We have been entrusted to educate you, and we trust you to behave with maturity and dignity. This term you have a chance to begin anew, and we have no doubt that you will uphold our trust like a man.’

He sounded shifty, as if he didn’t quite believe the words he was saying, knew that I knew he didn’t believe them, and knew that
I
didn’t believe them either. Nonetheless, I set my features to indicate sincerity and could tell that he appreciated it; it made both our roles flow more smoothly. I, of course, had no trouble looking sincerely pleased; I intended to use this whole mutual trust business to clear off at the first possible opportunity. Tides willing.

Tides were crucial. The journey from my dormitory to Finn’s hut took thirty-five minutes (twenty minutes along the footpath to the edge of the causeway, fifteen minutes to cross and reach the end of The Stele). There were, however, all manner of contingencies to consider. The footpath was slower than the road, but safer from discovery. There was a general limit of two hours on either side of low tide during which it was possible to cross from the island to the mainland (and vice versa) without getting soaked, though this varied according to the phases of the moon and the height of the tides. Add it all up, and I had four hours at the hut (maximum) plus seventy minutes travel time. Give or take a few seconds. Of course there was always the possibility of straddling two tides, crossing two hours after the low tide and returning two hours before the following low tide: twelve hours minus four hours plus travel equals nine hours ten minutes. Or staying all night and hoping for the best. But I wasn’t keen to try that again in a hurry. At least not without a more sophisticated plan in place.

It may sound fanatical to time everything out so carefully, but minutes were what we lived by: stolen minutes, minutes between lessons, four minutes to smoke a fag, twenty minutes for a pint at the pub, free periods during which forged exam papers or contraband could be purchased. Every minute was crucial in the race from lesson to town shuttle bus, and from town to catch the last bus back (fifteen minutes) or be stuck hitchhiking (thirty-plus minutes), finding a taxi (up to an hour and a near-insane extravagance), or sprinting the four miles back from town (twenty-six to forty minutes, depending on fitness).

And so, tide chart tucked neatly into my book of Latin verbs, I made the necessary calculations and planned my next campaign.

This time I bought bacon and teacakes, two cans of baked beans, twelve sausages, a jar of Colman’s mustard, and matches. A schoolboy’s idea of necessities. In addition, I had a copy of
Moby Dick
and a fairly new edition of the latest James Bond (much in demand) stolen from the school library. From what I could tell, Finn read a good deal, and appeared to have memorized the hut’s meagre collection in its entirety; his appetite for fiction was considerably stronger than mine. I suppose there wasn’t much else in the way of entertainment by the sea. And I, after all, had him.

In my impatience, I arrived at the beach an hour early on the first Saturday morning of the January term. The outgoing tide still covered the causeway in a foot of frigid green water, but I was unwilling to hang about in the cold. Removing shoes and socks and rolling up my trousers, I plunged in, finding myself first ankle-deep, then knee-deep, and then, panicking, thigh-deep in icy water and mud, overstuffed satchel balanced on my head, unable (and unwilling) to turn back. I lost all feeling in my feet almost immediately, which rendered me even more clumsy than usual. My arms ached with the weight of the heavy bag.

About halfway across I realized what an idiot I was. The current was so strong that I could easily be swept out to sea and drowned. When I stepped on something that rocked, and slipped sideways, terrifying seconds passed before I regained my balance. By now the food and I were soaked.

This is how people die, I thought, intrigued despite my predicament. This is how people get swept away and make next day’s newspaper headlines (
Schoolboy Drowns, World Indifferent
) with no mention of what the aforementioned schoolboy was doing standing in the middle of a treacherous tidal canal with a bag on his head to begin with. I tried to brace myself, pausing to get my breath back as I imagined the private glee that would greet so tragic an announcement. I would be written off once and for all as the colossal imbecile the school had always suspected. Although it would require a certain amount of speaking-ill-of-the-dead, I would be eulogized as an incompetent, sexually suspect cretin. And for once they’d be right, I thought, choking as I inhaled a lungful of wave and sank to one knee, eyes clenched against the dark face of the sea.

With a final Herculean effort, I threw myself exhausted on to the sandbank and looked over at the line of huts. No sign of Finn, thank God. Even the thought of the
possibility
of his presence made me tremble.

It was nearly twenty minutes before I managed to wring the salt water from my clothes as best I could, gather my belongings, and set off again. I arrived cold and wet, teeth chattering, and tapped on the door. Finn answered immediately, seemingly unsurprised at – or by – my appearance. He raised an eyebrow, but offered no reproof.

‘Come in,’ he said, with an expression that was neither sympathetic nor amused, but contained minute traces of both. ‘You haven’t really got the hang of this, have you?’

11

‘The high-water mark is advancing quickly,’ he told me, eyes politely averted as I changed out of my wet school uniform and into a woollen sweater (his), and a threadbare towel. ‘Geologically speaking, that is. The high tide only began cutting us off in the last decade.’

Peering out of the hut’s window I could see the sea, only about fifty feet away. It wasn’t much of a distance, particularly considering that the tide was now at its lowest.

Finn followed my gaze. ‘If you compare the coastline to maps from a hundred years ago, you can see how much it’s changed.’

I tried to dry my legs without giving away too much of my physique. Not that it mattered; Finn never seemed to notice me the way I noticed him. If I’d affected an eyepatch, dyed my hair purple, and developed a lisp he wouldn’t have blinked.

‘We never used sandbags until recently. Last year storms flooded the house for three weeks, I lived upstairs and wore waders to light the stove. It wasn’t much fun.’ He reached over me for a book, a collection of local maps. ‘Look,’ he said, placing it on the table and opening to our part of the east coast. ‘These lines show the shape of the coast in 1800, 1850 and 1900.’ I followed his finger as it swept down the page.

‘Who owns the land?’

‘It’s common land, owned by the town since 1656. The island was still attached then.’ He pronounced words quaintly, with his gran’s old-fashioned accent. She had taught him to read, taught him the history of the area as she’d learnt it.

I studied the map, still thinking about the hut, flooded all those weeks in the icy winter months. The thought made me shudder.

‘What if something happened?’ I asked, tucking the towel round my waist, and not adding ‘to you’. ‘In a storm or something.’

Finn shrugged but I knew the answer. He had no one. In a panic of pride, responsibility and self-importance, I thought,
I will be the one to care.
I will take over the role of guardian, family, friend, all.

‘There was once a city nearby, quite a big city, between
AD
600 and 1200. I sometimes find bits of it on the beach.’ He crossed to the window sill. ‘Look.’

I looked. In his hand lay a smooth piece of pottery and a coin. He held them out to me and I took them, turning them over carefully. I knew about the city; it was part of the legend of St Oswald’s, famous mainly for the nineteen churches drowned with the rest of the town in a great medieval storm.

The pottery looked like every other uninteresting bit of terracotta I’d ever seen, but the coin was beautiful despite its corroded faces – dark grey with the remnants of a man’s head on one side, a sun on the other. I wondered who the man was, and how long ago he had lived.

Finn looked at me, as if considering the quality of my thoughts, then stood up to signal an end to today’s line of enquiry. The cat stretched and twined itself around his legs in easy ownership before returning to its place by the fire.

Oh, that I were the cat upon that hearth!

I followed Finn outside and together we combed the width of the beach, picking up wood and pieces of black beach coal for the fire. Despite it being the height of winter, the day had turned out sunny, clear and bright, and I began to sing, choppily, everything in my extremely limited back catalogue of tunes. I started with ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, and was well into quite a moving rendition of ‘It’s Now or Never’ in my best Elvis Presley croon before Finn grimaced and threw the biggest stone he could find in my direction.

There was plenty of driftwood at the tidemark, most of it waterlogged. The sea was rough, and the sun managed to raise the air temperature well above freezing, but after ten minutes my fingers were stiff and blue. Finn gazed at the water.

‘I’ve got to check my traps,’ he said, without looking at me. ‘You can’t swim, by any chance?’

Of course I could swim, having had swimming lessons force-fed at every grim institution I’d attended since birth. It was yet another facet of the empire mentality, part of our preparation for survival on the
Cutty Sark,
HMS
Victory, The Titanic.
I looked out at the grey sea uneasily. On the other hand, I wasn’t anxious to show off my skills here (on the North Sea) and now (January). One submersion a day was more than enough.

‘I’ll wait here,’ I said, trying to sound casual, as Finn dragged a long green kayak down from behind the house and slid it into the sea. The cat followed, and he clicked his tongue at it, but at the last moment it turned away.

Then, without a pause, he was off, slipping into the boat like a gymnast, one hand on either side of the cockpit, settling quickly, and in the same movement beginning to paddle; left-right-left, smooth and expert. I didn’t understand how he remained steady in such a fragile-looking craft, but he and the boat cut through the water with easy grace, as if the sea were a pond on a still day in June. He was nearly out of sight behind the swells when I saw the tiny craft swerve neatly to face the shore, and there he was, gripping a red buoy in one hand. I watched as he hauled the trap up, transferred its contents to a deep canvas bag, and then paddled to the next. Now that I knew what to look for, I could see the buoys, five of them, strung out in a line parallel to the coast.

For as long as I could stand it, which wasn’t very long, I waited on the beach. Then retreated to watch from the window. It required long minutes and a great deal of pain for my fingers to thaw from grey back to pink.

When Finn returned, I could almost feel the heat radiating off him, and his hair was slicked back with seawater and sweat. In one hand, he held the lumpy canvas bag drawn tight at the top with rope. I stared at it. Whatever was in it was alive. He laughed at the expression on my face and dumped the bag behind the hut, returning to the edge of the sea to fill a large bucket with water. Without waiting for instruction, I ran after him (shivering after the warmth of the stove) to haul the kayak up to the house. He accepted my help without comment.

‘Do you like crabs?’ he asked as he dumped at least two dozen of the large brownish creatures into the bucket.

I didn’t know whether I liked crabs. I couldn’t remember ever having eaten one and based on the look of the things felt quite sick at the prospect. Finn kept two back, placed a board on top of the bucket, and stood for a moment awaiting my answer.

‘I think so,’ I said nervously, and he nodded approval. And so I watched, transfixed, as he threw onions and bacon into the bottom of a saucepan.

My safe, conventional suburban upbringing had involved the consumption of food, but preparation had always been the sole domain of adults. I could open a fridge or a biscuit tin, hack a wedge off a piece of cheese or cut a slice of bread. But I couldn’t make a meal out of something I pulled from the sea. It had never occurred to me that food could be found somewhere other than on the high street. In my family it came from my mother, who fetched it home in bags and cans and neatly wrapped packages from the butcher’s.

Finn prepared the crabs. It wasn’t nice to watch, but I forced myself not to be squeamish, following my own rules as I invented them.

Rule number four: Don’t look away.

Gripping the first live crab in one hand, he plunged a small sharp knife through its mouth and up between its eyes. Next he pushed it into the crab’s underside, cut along the centre line, ripped off the top shell, dug the squashy brown lungs out and tossed them outside to the seagulls. He twisted the claws off, smashed them with a hammer and then tossed the broken creature and its parts into the smoking frying pan. It seemed cruel to me, and I hated it, hated him for what he was doing. But it didn’t stop me admiring him as much as ever or perhaps more, despite what I naively took to be this streak of cruelty. It was only a crab, after all.

And I ate it, didn’t I? And wasn’t it delicious?

Finn offered tiny morsels of organs and flesh a piece at a time to the cat, who accepted each one delicately and swallowed without chewing. When it had eaten enough, it waved its tail, turned up its nose and walked away.

In January the evenings came early. We had to light the lamps before we ate. By then, the last glow of sunset had gone, leaving behind an almost full moon that reflected brightly off the sea, casting sharp daylight shadows. I told Finn I had to go and reluctantly changed back into my clammy school clothes. He walked with me as far as the causeway, pointing to the easiest crossing place.

‘Will I –’ halfway through the question I hesitated – ‘see you soon?’

There was the longest pause, and I strained to interpret the silence. Was I trustworthy? Was my company more appealing to him than his own solitude? Was our version of friendship worth the trouble, the inconvenience?

And then came the smile, accompanied by a little mock-bow with one hand folded behind his back.

He’s laughing at me, I thought. But my heart skittered with joy.

I crossed the sandbar without incident, not looking back, though I wanted to. And when I’d passed through the magic boundary on to the beach, back through the rabbit hole into my own world, I broke into a run. Without his presence to blind me, it suddenly mattered that I might be in trouble again.

This time I was lucky. Crossing the main courtyard, a group of boys returning from choir practice made so much noise in the dark that I easily slipped in behind them without anyone noticing. I pretended to sign in and by ten thirty I was in bed, staring blankly at a Latin translation that was due the following day.

‘Hey, Barrett.’ I called my neighbour softly. He threw himself over the edge of the partition between our beds, staring at me blandly.

I stared back. ‘Have you done your translations?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But I’m not donating my hard work to the Save-the-Wanker Foundation.’

‘I’ll change it. Get some of it wrong.’

He considered this. ‘What have you got?’

I’d spent most of my money on Finn. I thought for a minute. ‘Fags?’

‘Got some.’

‘Magazines?’ I had some old pornography from a previous transaction, third hand, somewhat soiled.

He snorted. Having seen them at least as often as I had, they’d lost a good deal of their power to excite.

‘What then?’

‘Two quid.’

‘Two quid?’
I was outraged. The sum was absurd, though I didn’t have it in any case. ‘Sod off, I’ll do it myself.’

‘Suits me.’ He disappeared again, and after the usual jiggling, all fell quiet.

With a sigh, I went to work on Virgil.
Arma virumque cano:
I sing of arms and the man. Sleep was miles away and it felt good to think about something else.

Fifteen lines later, I shut off my light and used the darkness to dream about the sea beating against a different shore, two thousand years and a thousand miles away.