16

A group of students remained behind at St Oswald’s during the break between Lent and summer terms to pursue areas of excellence (swimming, choir, chemistry) – although this was generally a cover-up for those boys whose parents lived abroad, or holidayed without them, or simply couldn’t be bothered to have them at home. In the spirit of entrepreneurship, I forged a letter from Clifton-Mogg informing my parents that I would be staying at school during the break, and another to Clifton-Mogg from my parents with permission to return home by train. I had something of a talent for forgery and wondered if I’d found my calling at last.

The fortnight preceding the break was nerve-wracking, but I needn’t have worried. Neither the school nor my parents noticed anything suspicious and I felt wonderfully smug at the successful planning of my enterprise.

‘Parents not here yet, Kipper? Must have forgotten you,’ Gibbon sneered. ‘Wish I could stay and keep you company. But, bad luck. South of France again.’

‘Father on the run from the revenue?’ I didn’t bother looking up.

He dropped a used condom on my textbook. ‘A going-away present. Broke it in for you.’ Across the room Barrett howled with mirth. ‘At least you and Reese will have each other for company. You have had each other, haven’t you?’

I sighed. Reese had been signed off to spend the holiday with an elderly aunt, but wouldn’t be leaving till Monday. He was the perpetual fly in the perpetual ointment, was Reese.

So the last Friday of term, while most of the other students signed out to travel to Spain or Cornwall or France with their loving families, I packed my bag while Reese buzzed about.

‘Where are you going?’ He hovered, suspicious.

‘Spain. I told you.’

‘Where are your parents then?’

‘I’m meeting them. Taking the train.’ I continued to pack. He continued to hover.

‘Could I meet your friend now? You promised.’

‘I’m going away.’

‘I’ll follow you again.’

Again? That was it. I swung at him, catching him in the stomach. To my horror, he folded instantly and began to sob, and I felt tired and fed up and wished vaguely that I hadn’t hit him.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Reese.’ I helped him up but he shook my hand off his arm with surprising violence. ‘Look, I’m sorry I hit you. Stop crying for Christ’s sake.’

I sat, embarrassed and unhappy, as he struggled to control his (embarrassed, unhappy) sobs. When at last his breathing calmed, I offered him water but he wouldn’t take it, wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t even look at me, and so finally I picked up my bag and left. He just wasn’t that important.

He realized this, naturally, with the perfect instinct a dog has for rejection. And just as naturally, he despised me for it almost as much as he despised himself.

I walked through the deserted school and caught the bus into town, where I’d arranged to meet Finn, but when I arrived at the market a few minutes early, he was nowhere to be seen. His menacing boss-lady fixed me with her beady eye and called me over.

‘Your friend will be back in a minute.’

‘I’ll wait.’

For about ten minutes we sat in uncomfortable silence. At least I was uncomfortable; she looked as imperturbable as ever.

I got up and browsed the stalls but retraced my steps quickly, too excited by the prospect of the weeks ahead to miss out on Finn’s return. He still wasn’t there.

Boss-lady offered me a thoroughly unpleasant smile. I didn’t want to know what she made of my presence here. It wouldn’t have occurred to Finn to wonder.

‘Must be boring for you hanging about. Has anyone ever looked at your future?’ Her voice was slick as hair grease and I remembered the snake from Jungle Book even as I struggled to understand her meaning. Was she offering me a job in the civil service? But then it clicked and I recoiled in horror. Was it possible that she actually told fortunes?

I shook my head, no, embarrassed by this obvious ploy to extort money. Did I really need to be told I would meet a dark lady and settle down in a town beginning with ‘S’? My future seemed too obvious to bother predicting. Finn’s fortune would have been more interesting – I couldn’t imagine how he would ever be anything but sixteen, anywhere but in that hut by the sea, his face and limbs any more or less graceful than they were now. It was like imagining a future for Peter Pan.

‘Come with me.’ She laid a hand like a pig’s trotter on my shoulder and I searched frantically for Finn.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘There’s time.’

The fact was, I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know that I was running out of life, that hard times lay ahead, that I was unlucky in love. I didn’t want to know that all my money would be stolen from me by the one I loved most, that trust would turn out to be laced with deceit, that nothing was what it seemed, that my life would be riddled with bonuses disguised as catastrophes, or vice versa.

It was all too obvious in my case anyway.

‘Never mind,’ she said caressingly, ‘we’ll have a cup of tea while you wait.’

With no hope of escape, I followed her into the market cafe with its proud announcement of today’s specials: pork chops and custard pie. I sat across from her at the table nearest the door while an ancient crone brought the tea.

‘Let me look at you,’ she said, when the thick white teacups had been placed on the table.

Although her face was squashy as a pudding, the eyes set within it were glittering and hard. She fixed me with them and my heart stopped beating; it was only after some seconds that I remembered to keep breathing, and exhaled.

‘There’s a girl,’ she said without preamble.

Of course there’s a girl, I thought, performing the mental equivalent of eye rolling. Beautiful, like a princess, with a fat baby on each hip. I felt like laughing out loud.

She gave a little shrug of annoyance. ‘Concentrate.’ It was not a request. She held up the little glass salt cellar from the table and I looked from her to it.

Oh, great, I’m about to be hypnotized and kidnapped now, sold into slavery as a… but exactly what would I be useful for? I stared at the salt cellar and once more nearly laughed when I thought about all the noise in my brain, and what she’d said, and it occurred to me that she was probably right, there were too many thoughts, too many sides to every object and every single person, too many attempts to make sense of it so that I always ended up confused and distracted and somehow out of control, whereas salt, a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife, or was it Orpheus, someone turned into a pillar of salt by looking back when he? – she? – wasn’t supposed to. And while I was thinking all this, a picture came into my head, of a face, not altogether human, and rippled as if separated from me by a thick plate of glass. It was a girl and I knew her the way you know someone in a dream, a familiar packaging of misinformation. Her hands came up, strong hands with long narrow fingers, and touched my face and the experience was so startling in its clarity that I could actually feel her fingers pressing lightly just above my cheekbones, and when I looked out from the image I realized it was the old woman’s hands on my face, and I jumped back, confused and horrified.

‘How interesting.’ Her voice was light and without inflection, like someone blowing gently through a tube.

The face reappeared for an instant in my head, in ripples, indistinct.

And then it was gone, and the witch had her fingers wrapped round the salt so I could no longer see it, and she looked at me and nodded, though I didn’t say anything. I was back in the outside world, sitting at a table in the cafe while my tea grew cold.

Finn’s witch stared at me and her face had a new dimension. Was it compassion? Pity? She shook her head, narrowed her eyes and pointed a gnarled finger at me, gently tapping the centre of my forehead.

‘Look more carefully,’ she said.

I blinked and realized that was it; that was my fortune. Trotting after her into the market, I wanted to ask questions, but she ignored me as thoroughly as if we’d never spoken.

Which brings me to my next rule, written with hindsight and a certain hard-won wisdom.

Rule number six: There are clues everywhere.

Finn arrived a minute later, and when we left, Witchy handed him his money, and sent him off with a wave. I might have been invisible.

‘What’s wrong?’ Finn asked, nearly as soon as we set off. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

I could have laughed at the appropriateness of the old cliché, but the ability to see the funny side had temporarily deserted me. I wanted to tell him about the uninformative fortune and the strange floating image, but I waited and waited for the right moment and for some reason it never came.

We walked briskly in the pale light, travelling single file along the footpath that skirted the school gates. Pale furled leaves and dazzling sunshine scoured my brain of dark visions. When we reached the water, the ebb tide was running strong, but instead of the kayak, Finn dragged a little dinghy out of its hiding place. I hadn’t seen it before and despite its advanced state of disrepair, I was touched that he had considered the fact that there would be two of us crossing, and prepared for it – concrete evidence that I had entered his consciousness at a time when I was not actually standing in front of him. A thrilling discovery – like seeing a chimp make tools.

I helped him pull the heavier boat down from the dunes, wondering how hard it had been for him to get it up there in the first place. He stowed my bag in the bow while I clambered in as gracefully as possible, squinting into the sun. Finn pushed off, waded in a little and stepped lightly over the side, picking up the oars as he settled. The land rushed away from us at speed; all he had to do was steer in the direction of the little peninsula. The tide swept us out towards the sea, and then suddenly the momentum stopped and we were out of the current, becalmed. With a few lazy pulls of the portside oar, Finn guided us slowly to shore and I scrambled out to help him drag the boat up behind the shack.

My whole being was focused on trying to remain cool, pretending that spending two weeks without adults, without school, without authority or structure of any kind with my best (my only) friend was an ordinary occurrence. Impossible, of course. My head and stomach felt odd, my hands trembled, I had forgotten how to speak normally and was too agitated to eat.

Finn never seemed to notice my failures of poise, which surprised me. I had never in my life entered a room without instantly forming an impression of what everyone in it was doing and thinking. It was as natural as breathing to me, and I wondered if his ignorance were wilful.

The menu that night featured Finn’s fish stew (stew, I had learnt, was his main area of culinary expertise), dished into large bowls with a teacup in lieu of a ladle. I could make out potatoes, carrots, crab, mussels and a mix of fishes, but suspected they were only the beginning; all manner of monsters were routinely dredged up from the bottom of the sea and served for tea courtesy of my host. But it tasted excellent.

The sense of occasion was such that we carried our food outside and ate leaning against the front of the house in the late golden light with the gentle lapping of waves in the background. Finn’s little cat hung around, curling up on his lap for warmth. As I sat and tried to eat, my nerves seemed to flow out with the sea and I began to feel calm.

We sopped up the end of the stew with bread and sat back, sated, with no one to insist on prayers or protocol, and nothing at all to do before the next course, if we decided to have one.

When it came time for dessert, I brought out a cake, the last one left in the bakery, this time decorated with a clown in blue and green icing. I pulled the clown’s head off and used a blunt knife to cut the cake into more or less wedge-shaped chunks. Finn accepted his without enthusiasm, having lived for years without jam and sweets, but for me, at that moment, cake had no equal on earth.

Licking icing off my fingers, I asked about our assault on the fort. I knew it would require an early start to hit the tide right. We didn’t want to fight a vicious current on top of everything else.

‘We won’t have long,’ Finn said, ‘but we might catch a glimpse of it.’ He seemed excited by the possibility, like a child, and I revelled in this unexpected show of enthusiasm.

We sat for a long time in the dark, watching the beam of a lighthouse flash, hypnotic and reassuring, accompanied by the toll of a buoy. The tide seemed particularly low tonight; the beach stretched far away from us and the waves lapped quietly in the distance. I guessed it had to do with the full moon.

‘Is it true that you can still hear bells under the sea?’ My question referred to the legend, popular at school, that the bells of the churches from the lost city could be heard on quiet summer nights. Naturally, I was convinced of the absurdity of such a notion.

‘Of course,’ Finn said, without turning his head.

I looked at him sideways to see if he was serious, but nothing in his face offered a clue. For the next half-hour, until the temperature dropped and drove us inside, we sat in silence. I listened as hard as I could for the magic, but heard nothing but the clang clang clang of a buoy.