The Story of Us

by Barbara Elsborg

“I can’t.”

  His father took down the riding crop he kept on the top of the door trim. He’d never ridden a horse. It had been purchased specifically to hit his sons. One son.

  “You’re not sorry at all, you antikke.”

  Farsi for a piece of shit. That’s all I am to you? It was hard to have a father who seemed to hate him no matter what he did.

  His brother picked up the plates and cleared the table. Tamaz knew better than to intervene, though Zed could count on the fingers of one hand how many times Tamaz had been beaten.

  “You ungrateful…” His father rolled up his sleeves.

  Zed didn’t have much to be grateful for since his mother’s death. A roof over his head. A bed. Clothes, though never the ones he wanted, and mostly Tamaz’s hand-me-downs so by the time they fit Zed, they were never the latest fashion. Some food he could eat. That was about it. No kind words. No hugs. No gentle touch. Ever. If he was touched, it was only to be beaten.

  His father dragged him out of his seat by the scruff of his neck and hauled him into his study. Zed sometimes felt as if he were living in a different world to everyone else. His was dark and lonely, full of pain, disappointment and sadness. Whenever anyone at school complained about their parents, it was because they hadn’t bought them the latest mobile phone, or allowed them to stay out late, or up late, or because their computer time had been limited or their phone confiscated. Zed couldn’t even tell anyone what his father did to him. Shame and fear kept his lips sealed. If he was asked about his bruises, he lied.

  “You know what to do.” His father’s eyes had the glassy look that scared Zed.

  Zed took off his T-shirt, pulled his shorts and boxers down to his ankles and leaned against the back of the chair. The first strike was always a surprise, because for a brief moment, it didn’t hurt. Then it did. Zed buried his face in his forearms and clenched his teeth. With each blow, his skin became more tender and the burn increased until he felt as if he were being licked by flames.

  His father struck his back, bottom, and the top of his legs. Zed couldn’t help crying. Tears rolled down his cheeks, but he didn’t utter a sound. He’d have bitten through his arm before he did that.

  “Pull up your clothes.”

  Even doing that hurt. Zed clutched his T-shirt hard to hide his shaking fingers.

  “I forgive you.” What his father always said, as if it made the beating excusable.

  “Thank you, father. I’m sorry I disappointed you.” Zed forced out the words his father expected to hear. If he hadn’t, he’d have been hit again. He wished he was brave enough to keep quiet, to take another beating and another until he passed out, but he wasn’t.

  He went straight to his room, each step on the stairs sending searing pain down his legs and up his back. He cleaned his teeth, tried to piss and failed because he was so tense, then lay face down on his bed. He heard a faint knock at the door and turned his head to see Tamaz. His brother came over and put a packet of crisps on the pillow.

  Tamaz sighed. “I’m sorry he beats you. You should try harder not to aggravate him. All he wants is for you to be a good Muslim.”

  That wasn’t it. Zed didn’t have the energy to speak or to open the crisps. He closed his eyes and heard Tamaz leave.

  Twice in the last year, his father had beaten Zed so hard, he’d lost consciousness. This time hadn’t been too bad. No blood for a start. No tell-tale warm trickle down his skin. Part of him wished his father would go too far and he’d have to be taken to the hospital, assuming the bastard cared whether he lived or died. If his father really went too far and killed him, then it would all stop.

  The glimmer of hope that one day it would stop was the only ray of light in Zed’s darkness. Maybe a little bit of him wished he was dead. He didn’t know anything other than unhappiness and it was only going to get worse. Two more years at home with no Tamaz to comfort him. He’d count down the days.

  He reached for his alarm clock and set it for five thirty. Zed wanted to be out of the house before his father left because he’d insist Zed went with him. It was what always happened in the holidays. On Fridays, Zed would be expected to work in the pharmacy. All day spent moving products so he could dust shelves only to be told to do it again and again. Following that, he and his father would go to the mosque. No thank you.

  The next morning, Zed sneaked out at twenty to six and silently closed the door behind him. He’d removed two slices of bread from the middle of a new loaf, resealed the packaging so no one would notice and put the folded bread in his pocket, along with a bottle of water. It was likely all he’d get to eat that day because he’d be in trouble when he returned home. It was more than likely the tongue would be served up again, because he suspected it lurked under foil on the top shelf of the fridge.

  His father hadn’t bothered closing the electric gates but there was a way through the hedge at the side anyway. The village was quiet. Still early for the commute to Canterbury or London, though there was plenty of traffic on the bypass. Zed hurried across the road, heading for the grassy field on the north side of the village. He squeezed through a gap in the hedge and made his way up a long slope to a wooded ridge.

  He usually ran up the hill, pretending he was escaping from aliens or big cats or an axe-wielding father. Running fast set him free, let him forget, but his body hurt too much to do that today. It had said on his report that he’d won the school cross-country race, beating runners a lot older than him, but his father had either not noticed, or probably not cared. The cup had been presented in assembly and Zed was entitled to take it home for the year, but he’d left it in the school trophy cabinet.

  Once he climbed over a wire fence and moved into the wood, he was hidden and felt safer. Not that his father was likely to come after him, neither he nor Tamaz had any idea where he went when he had the chance, but he was on private land now. Whoever owned it might get pissed off even though Zed was doing no harm. He made his way to the rocky outcrop he’d come across a couple of years ago, and gingerly sat down.

  Unfortunately, there was no book to retrieve today. He usually put one in a plastic bag and tucked it under the front of the rock so he had something to read when he was up here. But he’d had to take the one he’d been hiding back to school. It was about an assassin in a fantasy world and it was good, but he hadn’t had a chance to finish it.

  He often spent hours there reading or composing, even when the weather was cold, but for six weeks, he’d have no access to books, and no access to music, no way to practise the instruments he loved, the piano and the cello. He could only listen to music at school. Only play an instrument there. But music was always in his head. He hummed when he was alone, kept the sound inside him when he wasn’t. He often ran to the rhythm of a song though he was too out of breath to hum at the same time.

  His music teacher let him practise at lunchtimes and after school and had said as long as the room was free, Zed could continue doing that in September. There was no library in the village. No book in the house except for the Quran. It wasn’t forbidden in Islam to read novels, but the type allowed wasn’t what Zed wanted to read.

  His mother had had lots of books but after she’d died, his father had given them all to charity. Even his baby ones and Zed had really wanted to keep some of them, particularly the one she used to read to him about a little bear and his mum. The bear got into all sorts of trouble, but his mum was always there to keep him safe. Zed didn’t even have a photograph of her. Photographs weren’t forbidden but couldn’t be on display. Maybe his father had some in an album but whenever Zed asked, he’d been told there were none.

  Below where he sat, the land fell away down a green, treeless expanse into a wide valley patterned with fields of every shade of yellow, green and brown. It looked like a massive, neatly arranged plate of salad. Beyond that was another ridge, and in the distance, out of sight but not too far away, was the sea. He hadn’t been to the sea for years. Could he walk there and back in a day? May
be if he set off very early.

  The village in the valley below was called Lower Barton. The one he’d come from was Upper Barton. Zed had been surprised when his parents said they were moving from Lewisham, but the house in Kent was much nicer. His mother said it was a better environment for all of them. She’d been a primary school teacher and had landed a job in the village school. His father stayed as a pharmacist in Maidstone and now commuted in a different direction.

  Tamaz told Zed that the house in Upper Barton had been bought with money left to their mother after her parents had died. Zed missed his English grandparents. He’d loved going to see them. He’d never met any Iranian relations. His father sent money to his parents in Iran but he’d never been back. Any questions about his father’s homeland were met with silence.

  Zed sat on his rock imagining he was a successful king overlooking his domain. He hummed Morning by Grieg as he watched his world come alive. Cars pulled out of neat gravelled driveways onto the road, people crisscrossed the village on bikes and on foot, a delivery van stopped outside a shop and a removals lorry reversed to the door of a big house. He could see people walking their dogs, stopping to talk. While he watched, the express raced through the station on the way to Sandiford, the closest place to catch a fast train to London.

  London. I could disappear there.

  But while he was underage, if he was caught, the police would bring him home. Desperate as Zed was, he would never admit his father beat him because no good could come of that. His worst fear was that he’d be sent to Iran to live with his grandparents and he’d never escape. Even if he was put into care, not an alternative that appealed, he’d always be scared his father would find a way to destroy him. So when he went, he had to go for good, make sure he disappeared completely.

  Zed ate one of the slices of bread, taking small bites and chewing each mouthful slowly to try and trick himself he’d eaten more than he had. He had two pounds in his pocket, but he didn’t want to waste it on food. He needed to save as much as he could to start his new life.

  Though when would he ever have enough? The money he’d collected, hidden in a box under the bottom of his wardrobe, was made up of what he didn’t spend on school lunches, loose change Tamaz sometimes slipped him and odd coins he’d picked up that his father had left lying around in the house. He knew it was stealing but he never took much.

  He pushed to his feet and headed down the field toward the wood at the bottom. He’d never bothered exploring there before but today he wanted to be as far from home as he could get.

  Chapter Two

  Caspian watched the boy walking down the field. The wood he’d emerged from at the top of the slope belonged to Caspian’s father, as did the field he was tramping through, and the wood he was heading towards. He was a similar build to Caspian, tall and skinny, and wearing light grey cargo shorts and a plain pale blue T-shirt that looked too big for him. A bottle of water dangled from his fingers.

  As the trespasser drew nearer, Caspian leaned out of the window of his treehouse to get a better look. The boy seemed sad, not just miserable but bowed down with the weight of unhappiness, his whole body screaming with it.

  Sad boy in blue

  You cry with white loneliness

  For technicolour hopes and dreams

  Your future grey

  Unless you find the sun

  Worth the effort of writing that down? No. It was rarely worth the effort.

  Caspian climbed down the ladder and moved closer to where the strange boy would enter the wood. When Caspian spotted him about twenty metres ahead, he slipped behind a sycamore tree and watched.

  The dark-haired boy put the water bottle in the pocket of his shorts, then dragged a fallen branch to a clearing. He dropped it and went for another one. What’s he doing? What’s he humming? Caspian’s father would be furious if anyone lit a fire on his property, especially in the middle of a wood when there’d been no rain for weeks. But the branches the boy was collecting were too big for a fire. Though maybe he didn’t know that. Or maybe he wanted to burn the wood down. That wasn’t going to happen. Caspian wouldn’t let him. He loved these trees.

  He waited until the boy was heading away from him, then shinned up the tree he’d hidden behind. As the boy came back, he headed straight for Caspian’s hiding place. Realising he might have been seen, Caspian reached for a higher branch. As he tried to pull himself up, the branch broke, and he crashed back to a fork in the trunk with a gasp of pain as he scraped his knee.

  “Are you okay?” the boy called from below him.

  “Too-wit too-woo.”

  The response was a laugh. “That was a really good impression of a flamingo. But flamingos don’t live up trees.”

  Caspian grinned and looked down at him. “How do you know?”

  “Well, that’s true. I’m not an expert on flamingos, but you’re obviously rare because you’re not pink.”

  “I’m extremely rare. One of a kind.”

  “Ah, right.”

  “What are you doing with those logs?”

  “Building a den.”

  “Why?” Caspian asked.

  “To hide from flamingos, obviously.”

  Caspian’s smile widened. “Now I know about it, you’re doomed.”

  There was a pause before the boy spoke again. “Want to help me make it?”

  “I think I might be stuck.”

  “Will the fire brigade come out for a flamingo?”

  You’re funny.

  The boy started to climb. A moment later, he was standing on a limb close to Caspian, steadying himself by holding onto an overhead branch. His eyes… Wow. Blue with a dark line around the iris. Caspian had never seen eyes like that before.

  “There’s a branch just behind you. You need to reach out with your left hand, grab it, and push yourself up so you can untwist, and you’ll free your foot.”

  Caspian leaned back and looked up. “I can’t stretch that far.” He probably could but he was interested to see what the boy did.

  “You’re disappointingly unbendy.”

  “What! My flamingo knees bend backwards. You can’t get more bendy than that.”

  “That’s not your knee, that’s your ankle, flamingo.”

  Caspian gasped when the boy swung round and ended up straddling a branch above him. He leaned down and looked so exotic surrounded by leaves, as if he were some strange woodland creature, that Caspian froze, not wanting to spoil the moment.

  “I’ll pull you up, but you need to hug the trunk the moment you’re upright or we’ll both fall.”

  He reached down and Caspian grabbed his hand. A moment later, Caspian was on his feet clutching the trunk. A moment after that, the two of them were on the ground. Same height. Same build. But this boy had smooth olive skin, hair darker than his, and those amazing eyes. Then he smiled and Caspian was lost. Not just lost but lost forever. Something inside him opened up, burst into life and the breath caught in his throat.

  This is the boy I want.

  “You okay?” the boy asked for the second time.

  I am now. “Yes. Thanks for rescuing me. I could have been there forever.”

  “You weren’t that stuck.”

  Oh, you noticed? “What’s your name?”

  “Zed.”

  Caspian widened his eyes. “Didn’t your parents know what to call you? Archibald, Bertram, Cuthbert, Desmond, Eustace… Did they get to the end of the alphabet and stop?”

  Zed rolled his eyes. “My family name is Zadeh.”

  “So what’s your real name?”

  “Zed.”

  Caspian tsked. “Okay. I’m Caspian Ulysses Octavian Nathaniel Tarleton.”

  Zed gaped at him.

  “I’m not making it up. My brother is Lachlan Josiah Mortimer Nash and my sisters are Araminta Eugenia Persephone and Cressida Beatrice Juliana. Our parents clearly think we’re still living in the nineteenth century. And I’ll say it before you do, once you register my initials. I�
��m almost a cunt. Thank fuck for the Octavian. I must be one of the few people in the world who’s grateful to have that as one of his names. Your actual name can’t be worse than any of mine.”

  “Caspian’s good. I like it.”

  “Unless you get called Ass or Pee, or Aspie.” Though no one usually did that twice, except for his pain-in-the-neck brother. Caspian might be dyslexic, but he didn’t have Asperger’s. It wasn’t fair to make fun of anyone who did, though Lachlan didn’t care.

  “My real name is Hvarechaesham.”

  Don’t laugh. “Right, yeah, Zed is easier. Does Hvare… mean something?”

  “Having eyes like the sun.”

  Caspian stared at him. “You do.”

  “They’re golden yellow orbs that blind you when you look at them?”

  Part of that is true. “They shine. They’re b…beautiful.”

  For a moment neither of them spoke. Caspian waited to be hit for telling a boy his eyes were beautiful, but Zed shrugged and looked both embarrassed and maybe a little pleased.

  “I suppose I should be grateful I wasn’t called Frashaoshtra. That means having useful camels. Or Spityur, one who possesses white lambs.”

  Caspian laughed. “What country are they from?”

  “Iran. Persian names. I’m half Iranian, half English. English mother. Iranian father. I was born here though. So you want to help me build a den?”

  That was a swift change of subject, but Caspian went with it. “Okay.”

  Zed smiled at him again and Caspian’s heart lurched. Shit.

  “Let’s lean these pieces of wood either side of this low branch to make an A-frame, like a tent,” Zed said. “Then we can weave in the smaller twigs.”

  The two of them worked together, dragging larger logs from all over the wood though Caspian was careful not to lead him toward the treehouse. They levered up the branches and propped them against the horizontal living branch until they’d made something big enough to sit inside. A couple of times he noticed Zed wince as if he were in pain.

  “You all right?” Caspian asked. “Have you hurt yourself?