18

I studied Finn the way some other boy might have studied history, determined to memorize his vocabulary, his movements, his clothes, what he said, what he did, what he thought. What ideas circulated in his head when he looked distracted? What did he dream about?

But most of all, what I wanted was to see myself through his eyes, to define myself in relation to him, to sift out what was interesting in me (what he must have liked, however insignificant) and distil it into a purer, bolder, more compelling version of myself.

The truth is, for that brief period of my life I failed to exist if Finn wasn’t looking at me. And so I copied him, strove to exist the way he existed: to stretch, languid and graceful when tired, to move swiftly and with determination when not, to speak rarely and with force, to smile in a way that rewarded the world.

Of course in the most basic of ways, being Finn didn’t suit me. I was slow and clumsy; uncomfortable in my own body. I lacked the ability to tolerate silence. I was lazy. Self-conscious. Unspontaneous.

There were twelve days left of Easter break.

Very early on Wednesday morning, well before sunrise, Finn headed up the beach with his ocean fishing rod to the mouth of the river, where wheeling seagulls the night before had informed him that the minnows were running. The courageous throwing off of blankets didn’t faze him, but I hated it. It was bad enough on a cold morning in a miserable dormitory room. But in the early spring cold of a hut where you know that even the ordinary pleasure of an early morning visit to the toilet will bring your nether regions into direct contact with the wind off the North Sea? Practically impossible. So while I lay in bed, warm and snug and utterly content not to be dragged up and out by breakfast or chapel or lessons, Finn chose his lures and set off.

It was nearly an hour before I joined him, lazy and slow, but in the end unwilling to allow him any fragment of a life without me. In the grey light of early dawn, he cast his line off the beach where the river spat tiny fish out into the sea to flounder and die, attracting bigger fish to an easy meal. Patient and silent, he flipped his lure out over the water and reeled it slowly back in. I listened to the precise soft whir of the reel, watched the painted wood and feather decoy with its deadly armour of hooks become invisible, imagined it sinking down, languid and false, as Finn waggled it slowly back towards land. Hour after hour he repeated the exercise, patiently thinking his thoughts. It wasn’t the most exciting form of entertainment, but I didn’t mind. I was hypnotized by the simple grace of whatever it was he did and however it was he did it.

Huddled down into my jersey, dreamy and absent, I sat and watched the sun glow pink and rise out of the sea, when unexpectedly there was a hand on my arm and a nod of the head in the direction he’d been casting.

I looked up, startled. The surface of the sea scrambled and boiled in a circle about thirty feet across, and I wondered if it heralded the appearance of our own private leviathan. As my eyes grew accustomed to the scene, I could see the outlines of fish and parts of fish, tails and fins and whole bodies occasionally hurtling out of the water and falling back again with a little splash.

‘Herring,’ Finn whispered happily, substituting a lighter rod for the one he’d been using, baiting it quickly and flipping his hook so it landed in the centre of the teeming circle. On his third cast, the rod twitched and bent over and he reeled the line in carefully, producing a shining silver and blue fish as long as his forearm. It fought like a weasel all the way to the beach.

I watched him kill it, watched him catch six more in quick succession before the boiling circle moved out of range. With great care and precision he gutted and cleaned each fish, slitting the belly and sweeping out the insides, then scraping the scales off backwards with a rasping noise. They flew off, landing on the beach where the rays of the half-risen sun made them glitter like sequins. They looked so beautiful that I picked one up, but in my hand it became a lifeless thing, slimy and disgusting.

He concentrated on his work and never once looked at me.

Finn made money selling fish in town, so we didn’t eat them, but wrapped them in seaweed to be delivered later that day. In the meantime, we collected clams for lunch from a tiny cove in the estuary where they lived deep in the muddy clay. We waded barefoot and felt for them with our feet, reaching into the icy water to dig them up. My hands and feet quickly went numb as I dug the fat little creatures out and tossed them into a bucket. The blood from various scrapes and cuts ran unnoticed down my hands, leaving long pink streamers in the sea. Later I scrubbed the clams clean, and Finn threw them in a pot to steam with seawater and handfuls of bright green samphire from the marsh. The clams were salty and full of sand, but we wiggled the little bodies in hot water first to clean them, then dunked them in melted butter, sopping up the gritty butter with bread when we were done.

I kept waiting for the effect of this castaway existence to mark me somehow, make me more of a man, but as the hours and days slipped away I felt the distance between us increasing. The longer we spent together the more difficult it became to engage him in conversation. His silences grew, it seemed to me, became deeper, more remote. By Friday I had come to the conclusion that I was crowding him, so I made myself as small as possible, stifled the desire to burble over with enthusiasm for each new discovery or to follow him around like the adoring hanger-on I was.

An image of Reese crept into my brain and I cringed.

I became furtive, a silent, dismal being with nowhere to go and no permission to stay. This wasn’t how I had imagined our time together, and whatever vision I’d had imagined for myself – heroic and handy, living rough off the land – was countered by the reflection I saw in his eyes.

Next time, I stayed behind when he went to market with his fish. I huddled in a corner, staring at the huge old history book, my eyes glazed with tears. I dozed for an hour or so, and it was cold and nearly dark when I heard the scrape of the kayak behind the hut. Jerking into a seated position, I threw off the blanket and opened the book to a random page, studying it with enough false intensity to pretend I hadn’t heard him come in. Not that such posing was likely to have fooled him. My face, creased and flushed with sleep, betrayed me like a beacon.

He entered without greeting, and began stowing supplies in the kitchen.

‘How was town?’

He looked up as if noticing me for the first time, considered the question and shrugged.

‘I just meant…’ And then the real words burst out, all in a rush. ‘I’ll go if you want me to.’

Finn looked up at me, silent and closed, and I heard a horrible noise, wet and hollow, as something inside of me collapsed. Finally he shrugged, and in a tone more puzzled than hostile, said, ‘Go if you want to.’

I turned away. ‘I don’t want to.’

‘So?’ He frowned.

‘You want me to go.’ My voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I’m sorry, this isn’t how I meant to be.’ Halfway through this confession my voice broke.

Finn stared and shook his head. Then he left the room and went into the kitchen to build up the fire. Though unable to see and unwilling to wipe my eyes on my sleeve (the too-obvious gesture of a crying person), I could follow his movements as he chose a dry log and placed it carefully on to the bed of hot embers. Once the log began to crackle, he filled the kettle and placed it on top of the stove.

I turned away and began to gather my few belongings blindly, wondering what I would do and where I would go, imagined myself stooped and stumbling like Adam, wreathed in sin and expelled from paradise.

The riveting nature of my own self-pity distracted me so thoroughly that for a moment I forgot about Finn. When I looked up and saw him standing in front of me, I jumped a little.

There was a moment of silence during which he just stared: at the rumpled bed, the open history book, the socks and jersey and gloves scattered on the floor of the tiny house. His house, inviolate and solitary until now. I flushed and bent over like a supplicant, scuttling around to gather up the signs of habitation, to stuff them into my schoolbag, to erase myself completely from the scene.

Finn exhaled what might have been a sigh, then crossed over and began to climb the narrow staircase to his little room under the eaves. Halfway up he stopped and turned back to me.

‘Actually,’ he said, with an expression that was not meant to reassure, ‘I quite like having you around.’