The Traitor Game

by B. R. Collins

  ‘Benedick. His parents really should have known better.’

  ‘Yes. Although if it wasn’t his name, it’d be something else.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess.’ For Michael it had been being clever. Not that he was, especially, except that at the comp anyone who could spell their own name was clever. Or even pronounce it properly. That was him. Clever Boy. Even when he started to fail tests, stopped reading, couldn’t think at all any more. Even then, they’d made him ‘explain’ Pythagoras’ Theorem before they started on him, mimicking his accent. He remembered thinking, that day, At least they didn’t kick me in the hypotenuse . . . laughing weakly all the way home, because if he cried someone might notice.

  They walked past the hall. Prayers had started. Everyone was on their knees. They went round the long way, so as not to walk past the windows, and up the stairs to the fifth-form corridor. Michael tried to think of something to say, to explain, so Francis wouldn’t think he was cowardly or cruel. But his mind stayed blank. Francis was first to the top of the stairs; he stopped right in front of Michael, and said, ‘You should be in Prayers.’ It took Michael a second to realise he wasn’t talking to him.

  Luke was standing at the lockers, his uniform already dishevelled, even though it was only ten to nine. He stepped aside for Francis to get past. He said, ‘I was late.’

  Francis had his head in his locker. ‘Well, if you get reported and Mum goes ballistic and blames me, you’re going to regret it.’ His voice was muffled.

  Michael went to his own locker and started to get out his books. Luke was still standing there, rolling his tie up and down his finger. He wore it short, like a flag, the way they all did. Trying to fit in, trying to be cool. Luke said, ‘Will you take me paintballing on Saturday?’

  Francis straightened up and cracked his head on the ceiling of his locker. He pulled his head out and stared at Luke, rubbing a hand over his hair. ‘No, I will not.’ He shoved a couple of textbooks into his bag. ‘Why are you asking now, anyway?’

  ‘Mum won’t let me go unless you come with me.’

  ‘Tough. I wouldn’t touch a paintball with a bargepole.’ Francis caught Michael’s eye and gave him a quick ironic grimace.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s puerile. Anyway, I have better stuff to do on Saturdays.’

  Luke put his head on one side and stared past Francis at Michael. There was real hostility in his eyes; Michael felt it register somewhere inside him, like something cold. ‘Going round to Michael’s, like you always do. Are you two gay or what?’

  Francis said, ‘Get stuffed, Luke.’

  ‘I just –’ Luke changed tactic. Michael could have told him he’d blown it, but you had to give him marks for trying. ‘Please, Francis. You’d like it. And I’ll do your chores for two weeks.’

  Francis finished putting his stuff back into his locker. There was a silence, and he looked up at Luke, like he was surprised to see him. ‘Are you still here?’

  ‘Michael wouldn’t mind. It’s only one Saturday.’

  Michael said, ‘How do you know Michael wouldn’t mind?’

  Luke looked at him – that expression again, like Michael was the scum of the earth – and didn’t answer. He turned ostentatiously towards Francis. ‘Francis, please. Please please please. All my mates are going.’

  ‘In that case, definitely not. I told you, no. My Saturdays are mine. Ask Dad to take you.’

  ‘He won’t. You know what he’s like.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to find someone else.’ Francis slammed his locker shut and turned the key in the door. ‘Piss off, squirt.’

  ‘I hate you.’

  ‘It’s entirely mutual. Go on. I said fuck off.’

  ‘I’ll tell Mum you said that.’

  ‘I look forward to it.’ Francis raised his eyebrows at Michael. ‘See you at break?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Michael watched Francis stride off. When he turned back to his locker Luke was still glaring at him. Stop looking at me like that. It’s not my fault. Although possibly it was, possibly Francis knew how much the Saturdays meant to him, how desperate he got if they had to miss one. It was pathetic, really, how dependent you could get. But Luke didn’t know that – did he? Michael said, ‘What?’

  Luke watched him in silence for a moment. Then he turned and went down the stairs, without saying anything.

  Michael left it thirty seconds, then shouldered his bag and trudged to double French. He sat down in the sunlight next to the window, the desk where he always sat, far enough back to piss around but not too far back, not where Father Peters always looked for troublemakers. Not that he felt much like pissing around today. He looked at the trees outside. Benedick. Bent dick. He was in Luke’s class, Francis said. That made it worse, somehow, although why should it? After all, Luke was an annoying little git . . .

  And Shitley. What would he do? If anything, Michael thought sternly to himself. He might not do anything. Anyway, he’d been OK here so far. It was just a one-off. It wasn’t like the comp. It wasn’t. It couldn’t be. He pushed away the dread, the voice that said: Feeling safe, Michael . . . how stupid can you get? He was being paranoid. No need to worry. He settled back and tried to concentrate on the lesson.

  When the bell went for break he felt better. He fought his way back upstairs – Get textbooks, then coffee – and made his way to his locker, pushing first-years out of the way on the stairs. There was music coming from the common room. He stooped to push books into his locker, cramming them in precariously, but there were too many, and the bottom ones started to slide towards him. He grabbed them and tried to steady the pile.

  There was a folded bit of A4 paper wedged into the bottom of the locker, as though someone had pushed it under the door. It said, MICHAEL THOMPSON. It wasn’t handwriting he knew. Michael slid it out, bracing the books against his chest, and flipped it open.

  It said, I KNOW WHERE ARCASTER IS.

  That was when the bottom dropped out of everything.

  .

  .

  Two

  Judas floors don’t exist in the real world. At least, if they did, Michael had never heard of them, and he definitely hadn’t seen anyone fall through one. But for a second he thought he knew how it would feel: the black, sick terror of falling, knowing that the best you could hope for at the bottom was cold stone, and the worst . . . well, if you were lucky you didn’t have time to think about the worst. In his imagination he’d made people dance pavanes and galliards on the great Judas floor at Calston, but it was only now that he really understood the horror of it. One moment you were there, in the middle of your galliard, hopping around as gracefully as you could, and then –

  He remembered, irrelevantly, that there was a net underneath the floor at Calston to break your fall, so for a second you’d almost think it was some twisted practical joke. Until you saw the vipers nesting in the ropes near your face . . .

  He shut his eyes as tightly as he could and took a deep breath. When he opened his eyes the note would be gone. Or rather (that was too much to ask) it would be something else. Maybe he’d misread it. Maybe it said, I KNOW WHERE ARCTURUS IS. (Michael wasn’t sure he did – was it in the Plough, somewhere?) Or, I FANCY YOU, although that was less likely. Or probably – and he felt warmer suddenly – it was just from Francis. His weird idea of a joke.

  When he opened his eyes it must have taken him a second to reread the note, but it didn’t feel like that. It felt as though the words went straight to his stomach, bypassing his brain. He knew instantly that nothing had changed. It still said, I KNOW WHERE ARCASTER IS. It still wasn’t Francis’s handwriting.

  Automatically he raised his head and looked round, like he expected someone to be there at his shoulder, laughing at him. No one. Just people drifting down the corridor to the common room. It came to him with a shock that it was still break; it had only been a few seconds since he opened his locker. But no one was looking at him. And Michael had a knack for knowing when he was being watched;
he could feel it in his bones, like old men being able to tell you when it was going to rain. There really wasn’t anyone. He heard a kind of rattling noise and looked down: his hand was shaking, hard, so that the paper flapped like a moth. He scrunched it up into a ball and shoved it to the back of his locker. He slammed the door. Please, please let it not be there when I come back.

  But once he’d shut the locker he didn’t know where to go. He knew he should carry on as normal, get his coffee, go to the common room . . . but it was unimaginable. Like submerging someone’s house and expecting them to live in it just the same. He couldn’t breathe properly. He wanted to stay still, silent, just leaning against the lockers, for ever, not letting himself think of anything.

  ‘’Scuse me, mate.’

  Michael rocked back sharply on his heels and stepped away from the lockers. ‘Sorry.’ It was Dave Murray, one of Francis’s friends. He didn’t look round as he got a drink and a chocolate bar out of his locker, but Michael stared at his back and wondered if he’d come to see how he was reacting. What if Murray was here to watch him squirm? Or to report back to someone? Christ, what was he thinking? He was being totally paranoid. Murray, for God’s sake! Amiable, uncomplicated Murray, whose only qualification was that he was one of Francis’s mates. He must be mad.

  And then it hit him. The full weight of what had happened punched into him, leaving him breathless and cold and weak at the knees. Francis had told someone. Francis had told someone. Francis had told someone . . . Francis, who only that morning had passed him an envelope as though it was something special. Like it mattered, like Michael mattered. He couldn’t believe it. It was like learning something in Physics, about atoms, how everything was mostly empty space, even though it felt solid: he knew it had to be true, he believed it, but it didn’t make any sense. He trusted Francis. Even now, even standing there with that note in his locker.

  Slowly he opened the locker door again. He picked up the ragged ball of paper and, very deliberately, smoothed it out.

  I KNOW WHERE ARCASTER IS.

  The next thing he knew, he was crouching in a toilet cubicle, retching and retching and retching.

  .

  Arcaster is a cathedral city about forty miles from the Evgard coast, south of Than’s Lynn, west of Minnon, ghist of Sirrol and north of Longroad and Gatt’s Farm. Although it’s the capital of Ghist Marydd, it’s much like other Evgard cities (the cathedral, for example, is within the city walls, not on the outskirts as churches are in most Mereish towns), fortified, and built on the slight incline that is the closest thing the flat Ghist Marydd landscape offers to a hill. It is renowned, in Ghist Marydd, at least, for urbanity and sophistication: its slave market is one of the largest in all of Evgard, as is its Closed School.

  But that doesn’t tell you anything worth knowing. If he shut his eyes Michael could see the long blackwood warehouses of the Ghist Quarter, and the patterned, formal gardens of the School behind high walls and great wooden gates with little sally-port doors set into them like cat flaps. He could hear the carts carrying bales of wool and silk, dyed the elusive blue-grey-lilac that was the colour of the marshes at dusk, the colour of the Mereish flag; he could smell the harsh rusty scent of the marsh-reeds they used for the dye, an odour like blood. He knew the weight of the Mereish accent, the heavier, softer sounds when the Mereish workers spoke Evgard, how it felt in their mouths. And outside Arcaster – he knew the roads, which ones were impassable in winter when the marshes flooded, how to get to Allhallows-gate for sanctuary if you were on the run, how to find your way to Skyph or Gandet or south to London, via Longroad and the Long Road. He knew it all so well he could close his eyes and be there, almost. When he couldn’t sleep at night that was where he went, staring into the dark, walking down the Trade Streets or the shadowy back ways or the network of cellars under the School. Arcaster was as familiar as his own body – only safer, beyond the reach of the real world.

  There was only one other person who knew where Arcaster was; who even knew it existed: Francis. It was as secret, more secret, than a love affair or a drug habit. Michael and Francis worked on it behind closed doors. Michael locked the papers and the Book in a big tin chest his mother had given him, with two padlocks, and Francis took one key home with him. Sometimes Francis worked on things on his own, and brought them round the next Saturday, but apart from that none of it, not the scrap paper or the roughs from a map or a drawing, ever left Michael’s room. No one had ever seen it. No one else knew it was there. Evgard was private. It was the piece of Michael that he could hold to himself; the only bit of him that he could keep safe.

  Sometimes, on a Saturday evening, when Francis stretched and stood up to go home, Michael would look up from whatever he was doing (a family tree, a poem, an account of the Mereish wars from the Fabianus Letters) and be shocked by the way the real world had carried on without him – as though, for a couple of hours, Michael had really been somewhere else, somewhere he wanted to be.

  And sometimes Francis was there too, when they worked on something together, and that was almost better, because it felt so real. When both of them were talking about Evgard, arguing, joking, pushing at each other for ideas, Michael felt like he could stretch out his hand and nearly, nearly feel the world of Evgard beyond the real one, as though the shape of it would show through, like a face behind a curtain.

  Some days it made Michael feel giddy, taken aback, that it had happened at all. He’d catch Francis’s eye when he looked up from his drawing, or hear him say, ‘No, but, no, you couldn’t get from Than’s Lynn to Arcaster in two days, it’s winter, you’d have to go the long way round, via Gandet and Hyps,’ and suddenly he’d want to grin like an idiot. It was crazy, they were fifteen, for God’s sake, it wasn’t like they were kids, but here they were inventing a country. He could imagine what people would say at school if they knew – it would be weeks of humiliation, endless horrible jokes that made you feel like shit – but they’d never find out. Francis knew as well as he did that telling anyone would be suicide.

  These days, Evgard was as much Francis’s as Michael’s: almost all the pictures in the Book were his – botanical drawings, portraits, a verse from the Ludus Umbrae that he’d illuminated. He had a talent for cartography that Michael envied. The maps in the Book were detailed and delicate, with little drawings of sea monsters off the coasts and the Four Winds spitting out puffs of air like gargoyles. Beside them, Michael’s originals looked clumsy and inconsistent. It made him wonder if it had been pity, originally, that had made Francis pick them up and admire them politely.

  That had been the beginning of it. It had been the start of the summer holidays, after Michael had left the comp, and his mum had finally persuaded Gran to loan the money for the fees for St Anselm’s. He still wasn’t sleeping, still wasn’t talking, still couldn’t leave the house. He knew his mum didn’t know what to do with him, but then he didn’t know what to do with himself. She was trying desperately to cheer him up, make him pull himself together. He could have told her it didn’t work like that, but she never asked, and anyway he didn’t want to talk about it. He couldn’t even fight with her properly. Michael thought sometimes that she wanted to have a row with him, but he couldn’t even manage that. He remembered how she’d shouted at him – ‘For heaven’s sake, Michael, just do something! I don’t care what, just anything!’

  He’d said, ‘I can’t think of anything.’ It was horrible, the way her face had gone when he said that. Like he’d hit her, only not angry, just small and sad. Her voice had gone soft, but giving-up soft, like she was too tired to care any more. She’d said, ‘Why don’t you dig out all the stuff under your bed and have a purge?’ As if she thought he might not even be able to do that.

  So when Francis came round, Michael had files and boxes of papers all over his room, his Year 9 notes on his bed, projects from primary school on the desk, loose papers in a pile on the floor. He wasn’t planning to let Francis into his room anyway. He’d talk to him durin
g tea if he had to, because Mum would be pissed off if he didn’t, but that would be it. She’d asked around at church for anyone whose son went to St Anselm’s, so Michael could get to know someone there before September.

  How desperate was that? ‘It’ll be easier for you, darling, if you already know someone who goes there . . .’ What she really meant was, Then maybe you won’t get picked on. He knew she was trying to help, but it made him want to laugh. Asking Francis round for tea? So he and Michael could make friends? How old did she think they were, six?

  It got worse. Michael was in the kitchen when Francis arrived; trying to look casual, but really jumpy as hell, dreading the whole thing. And when Mum ushered Francis into the room and started to bustle about getting him a glass of orange squash and a biscuit Michael wanted to die. For a start, Francis seemed completely at ease – that sort of private-school assurance that Michael knew he’d never have. And he was good-looking, easily four inches taller than Michael, with a sort of pale aristocratic face and dark reddish hair. Michael felt himself shrink down into the chair. He knew the type. You were either a victim or you weren’t – and Francis wasn’t.

  Mum said, ‘Why don’t you show Francis your room, darling?’

  Michael felt blood rush into his cheeks like boiling water being sucked up by a sponge. How did she not realise . . . ? For a moment he could have killed her. Adults – they thought they had all the answers – Just tell a teacher, stand up to them, don’t let them get away with it – when they didn’t have a clue. Yeah, right, Mum, ’cause that’s really gonna make him think I’m cool, and want to be friends with me. He bit his lip and turned his face into stone.

  Francis caught his eye. ‘I’d like that.’ And then, unexpectedly, he winked.

  For a second Michael thought he’d imagined it. But there was a glint of mischief – or was it sympathy? – in Francis’s eyes. He swallowed. ‘Yeah, right.’