The Otherlife

by Julia Gray

  ‘Should we … perhaps we can find a tutor?’

  I had lots of tutoring when I was little, and lots more in Year 8 to get me through Scholarship. It was great. I learned things I’d never have known about; I was taught to really use my brain. I wouldn’t object to it. But I doubt we can afford it. Tutoring is a way of life for most of the people I know.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ I say.

  ‘Well, it’s good for you to be independent,’ says Mum, pausing mid-flow while she negotiates a roundabout. ‘Best not to turn out like your father. He can’t do anything for himself.’

  I only see Dad on alternate weekends. He and Mum split up a while ago, when I was twelve. She’s probably right. He isn’t much good at getting things done. I wonder if he goes on nightwalks too. I’ve never asked him.

  ‘But, Ben, honestly – if they kick you out … I don’t know what we’re going to do with you.’

  My school has a habit of rounding up the potentially lower-grade GCSE students and ‘asking them to leave’; there are league tables and reputations to be considered, and it’s a competitive world. Last year a boy was framed, in most people’s opinion, for stealing a digital camera. He’d been predicted a handful of imperfect grades. Sometimes I think being kicked out would be a relief. But I doubt my mother would ever get over it. Even Dad, who is typically more laid-back, might be a bit disappointed.

  It’s not until we get to school that I find a moment to ask her, just as she’s double-parking the car and wishing me luck with my French exam.

  ‘Mum,’ I say.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Is somebody … is Granddad OK?’

  Her face at once is a screensaver of perplexed annoyance; then something softer takes over, but only for a minute, before annoyance returns.

  ‘Of course he is,’ she says as she switches on the ignition. ‘You must learn to manage your anxiety better, Benjamin.’

  School rises up out of the early morning mist: a ghostly monument in ochre stone. The giant clock in the courtyard never tells the wrong time. Shoals of boys in grey suits and black coats stream beneath it, dwarfed by the architecture. It’s a lot like the courtyard in The Shawshank Redemption. Schools and prisons: not so different. The first couple of years I was here, I barely spoke to anyone. No one bothered me, and I bothered no one.

  Solomon is in the locker room, doing Rosetta Stone on his laptop, waiting for me. He’s one of those people whose face really lights up when they see you. He is one of the nicest people I know.

  ‘Bennikin. What’s up?’

  I open my bag and tip it upside down. Books and papers clatter to the floor. My English file breaks apart, revealing a Seamus Heaney essay that is both unfinished and late. Chadwick has already issued several warnings to our set for shoddy work and unmet deadlines. It’ll mean a definite detention. And a letter home.

  Solly scrutinises me as I gather up armloads of index cards.

  ‘Let me guess: another nocturnal perambulation?’ he enquires. ‘Such extraordinary things you choose to do with your time.’

  ‘Not exactly. I went to the Stonehills’.’

  ‘Partying on a school night! That’s even worse,’ says Solomon, in the exact tone of voice he used to play Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest last year. But he doesn’t go on.

  I sit down on the bench, resting my head against the locker behind me.

  ‘I haven’t revised for French. And I’ve not done my essay,’ I say.

  ‘Relax,’ says Solomon. ‘I’ve done a spare. Just in case. Just for you. Different font, different line spacing, and some of those unmistakable Ben Holloway malapropisms. You always get infer and imply the wrong way round.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, taking it.

  ‘As for the French, just take a few calming breaths now and again, centre yourself and it’ll all come back to you.’

  Solomon will make an excellent counsellor one day, though I think he has his heart set on running the country. He always knows when people are upset. He helps me sift through the debris from my bag, picking out unfiled A4 pages and stacking them together.

  ‘Ben. What’s the matter?’

  ‘I have this feeling … I think someone’s died,’ I say.

  Solomon replies, ‘I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: you listen to too much heavy metal. Songs about death, by people who are mostly dead, or who probably will be soon. Small wonder you’re unduly preoccupied.’

  For the first time today, I almost raise a smile.

  The French listening exam comes and goes. I mark the boxes, indicate the true statements, doodle with inky magnificence on the back of the sheet. I watch the neat nodding heads of the columns of boys before and to the left and right of me. The exam hall rustles with the sound of sleeves and watchstraps catching on paper. In my earphones, solid, deliberate-syllabled French voices declare that they cannot attend the meeting, or explain that their working day begins at seven twenty-five in the morning. Sometimes the voices swim, fragment. Gaps appear. And another sound – a hollow, whipping-wind sound, a low rumble underneath – can be heard. Old Norse. On a piece of rough paper I begin to trace the words I think Hermódr said, the verb I think they came from.

  Deyja.

  To die.

  To stop living.

  But I can’t be sure.

  After school there’s Cold War revision to do, and a whole set of chemistry notes to hammer into my medium-term memory. On Friday it’s my first maths exam, so I also need to revise for that. I make a pot of coffee and take it upstairs. I’ve always liked coffee. Not for the taste, but because it makes my nerves jangle and roar, my veins surge with caffeinated blood. It’s like a cheap metal gig at the Camden Underworld.

  My brain doesn’t function the way it once did. I find it difficult to remember things now. Not, perhaps, surprising, given what I habitually do to my brain. I revise some equations, knowing that I am never again in all my waking days going to need to know what happens when calcium carbonate is heated, or added to water.

  The knocking adds a polyrhythm that I don’t notice until my door opens and Mum comes in, putting a plate of oatcakes and hummus near my elbow.

  ‘Ben,’ she says, ‘your ears.’

  I hit the iTunes tab and slide the volume down.

  ‘Chemistry?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Good … good. Don’t let me interrupt you. I’m just off to my ballroom-dancing class,’ she says.

  ‘Oh yeah. That’s cool. Have fun.’

  Mum used to go to kickboxing on Wednesdays. Recently, though, she’s switched to dancing. It’s a good sign, I reckon: she’s got less rage in her now. She explains what I need to do for dinner, right down to the number of minutes the salmon needs to cook in the oven for, the exact amount of tinfoil I need to wrap it in. We both know that I’ll pop down the road and get some chips, if I’m hungry, which I probably won’t be. But she’ll leave the salmon anyway, like a ritual sacrifice.

  Mum looks down at the rug. ‘I may not be back till tomorrow,’ she says, almost shyly. ‘Reg is taking me out for dinner afterwards, and we’ll be in Putney, so …’

  Although I can’t believe there are still people in the world called Reg, it doesn’t bother me at all that Mum is seeing someone. She hid this from me for months. If I started seeing someone too, ours would be the most clandestine household in W9.

  I haven’t met Reg. Mum thinks I’d be rude to him.

  ‘Mum. It’s fine. I’ll see you tomorrow after school, then.’

  She hovers. ‘I don’t want to have to worry about you, Ben. No leaving the house at night. Please. I just … I’d just like to enjoy myself.’

  She doesn’t add for once. But we both know it’s there.

  As soon as she’s gone, I put Metallica back on at top volume.

  I revise for two hours, by which I mean that I listen to music while looking at things. I remember the revision cards I used to make at my old school, the colour-coded charts that
logged my progress. I was better at achieving things when I was twelve. I go downstairs, take pity on the salmon and return it to the morgue of the fridge. I’m not good at being hungry: my stomach doesn’t know how to signal when I am, or else my brain can’t read the signals. I have a couple of oatcakes and drink some juice from the carton.

  Then I catch sight of the box on the kitchen table.

  It’s a mailbox, made of white cardboard. It must have been there all day, and yet I didn’t notice it when I came home. Picking it up – it’s quite heavy – I see that it’s addressed to me. Mum must have forgotten to tell me. Now I am looking at it more closely, I can see that the box has taken a fair beating. Once a perfect cube, it’s now scuffed and bruised and discoloured; the masking tape that secures the top, once white as well, is the yellow of stained teeth. I peer at the date on the postmark; it’s hard to make out. At some point the box has been left out in the rain. I can’t read the place it was posted from either. All I can say for sure is that it’s been in transit for a very long time. The reason why becomes clear once I look at the address: it’s been written in a looping, rather feminine hand, the letters squashed together and difficult to read. Although we live at 9B, it looks more like 98. Our street name’s spelt wrong, and there’s an error in the postcode as well. It’s obvious from the various messages written by Royal Mail workers in irate biro – Not known in Bevington Road. Try Bevington Crescent – that someone’s done a good deal of detective work in order to finally deliver this parcel. If the sender had written their own address somewhere, I suppose it would have been returned to them.

  I take a pair of scissors and score the tape. The box breaks open and thousands of polystyrene packing chips, the ones that look like little butterflies, spill out onto the table. I plunge my hands in and pull out a folded sheet of paper with my name on it. It says:

  Duvalle Hall

  17-12-11

  Dear Ben,

  Hope all is going well with your studies. I was clearing out some cupboards and came across these books, which I believe are yours. Sorry we held on to them.

  Friendly wishes from everyone here,

  Clothilde.

  With the eerie sense of unpacking an unexpected Christmas stocking, I take the books out, one by one.

  My Elementary Old Norse Grammar.

  My dictionary of Old Norse.

  My book about the Gods, the one I used to take everywhere. It’s warped and bloated, as though someone’s dropped it in the bath.

  My green notebook, where I once made language notes, adding bits of vocabulary as I came across them. Bátr: boat. Dvergr: dwarf. Just looking at the notebook, I start to remember them.

  My red notebook, where I copied out parts of the poems that particularly appealed to me.

  There’s the children’s book with the beautiful watercolour illustrations.

  And finally, there’s my Free Creative Writing book, where I once wrote stories of my own.

  Once upon a time, these books were my most valued possessions.

  Something has risen up out of the box along with the books and butterflies. I wish I knew how to describe it. Something like a pull. An undertow. A slow tide. Something that wants to draw me in, very deeply, and take me very far away. Far back.

  To the beginning.

  It cannot be a coincidence, that first Hermódr appeared in the small hours of the morning, and now my Norse books – long lost, long forgotten – have suddenly been delivered to my door.

  I pick up the Old Norse grammar. It’s a mildewed, disintegrating volume with ancient yellowed pages, full of footnotes and endnotes and tables. I wonder where I got it from originally. Wait: I know this too. Portobello Market. Autumn half term, Year 5. I remember now: fumbling through the massed heaps of old books, tracing my fingers down their spines. Opening the grammar slowly, almost reverently, like a church bible.

  And a voice, soft and slightly lilting:

  ‘It’s your birthday tomorrow, isn’t it, my friend? Here. I’ll get this for you.’

  I spend a few minutes flipping to and fro, taking care with its old pages, remembering how gentle I tried to be with this particular book. I look for the paradigm of deyja, but I can’t seem to find it. Eventually, after comparing some different verb forms, and hoping that I still remember what it was that Hermódr said, I take the green notebook – and it’s so weird to suddenly be using it, as though I am twelve again – and write:

  Hann er dauðr.

  He is dead.

  I wonder if that’s right.

  There is something stuck between two pages of the Norse grammar. Slowly, carefully, I take it out. It’s brittle and nearly square.

  It’s a photograph.

  In the photograph I am twelve. In the photograph I am smiling. I did not often smile in photographs. I am smiling through a complicated red-and-gold mask, with a pointed snout and whiskers, and wicked tufted ears. I have a mouthful of fangs that glow with a sickly iridescence. I have something – bubblegum, I think – tangled in my fang-teeth. I am wearing a fur coat. I am a wolf. Next to me, in a similar outfit, is another wolf. Underneath his fur coat his clothes look pricier than mine, and where his mask ends you can see how curly and bright his hair is. Like me, he is smiling. He has his arm around my shoulders.

  For a few seconds I sit totally still, holding the photograph flat in my palm. Then, unconsciously mimicking the image in front of me, I smile, unable to help myself. In a strange way I realise I’ve been thinking about it all day: being twelve, being at Cottesmore House, revising for exams. It makes an odd kind of sense that this photograph should have found its way back to me, along with everything else. Although I barely remember the moment the photograph was taken, it was certainly taken when I was in Year 8. And I do, for sure, remember the other person in the picture, though I haven’t seen him for a long, long time.

  It’s my old friend Hobie.

  HOBIE’S DIARY

  Monday 8th September 2008

  Mr White has told us that even though we’re back at Cottesmore House we’re supposed to carry on with our journals. I seriously do not see the point. But now it’s Year 8 and we’re all doing Scholarship I suppose everything we do is meant to sharpen our brains and make us even smarter than we already are. Anyway, I have no intention of writing in this diary after this week, but I might just do some quick notes about the kids in 8 Upper – by which I mean the supergeeks, the Greekists, the teeth-grinding, book-toting weirdos, the Gifted and Talented lot who can’t even speak properly, some of them, because their brains work too fast for their mouths.

  I thought being put in the Scholarship form was quite cool until I realised how much work we’re expected to do. I don’t understand what’s going on in Maths any more. In English we dissect poetry that makes no sense. Then there’s a General Paper that’s more like undergraduate-level Philosophy, so they say. Means nothing to me. And now I am basically stuck here.

  Everyone in 8 Upper is obsessed, totally and utterly obsessed, with how Special we all are. There are nine of us altogether. We’re doing Scholarship for a bunch of different schools but you can prepare for the exams in quite similar ways. Apart from me, there’s:

  Frodo, aka Fat Frodo, aka Hobbitboy. He is very good at Physics and can sing lots of show tunes from pointless old musicals.

  Matteo, who has blond hair like mine but completely straight, that covers his head like an egg cosy.

  Norville, who doesn’t eat all day because he thinks nervous energy makes him a more efficient worker. He is very scrawny and his voice is breaking and he likes to share all his opinions very loudly, all the time. He can recite pi to the seventy-eighth figure.

  The Nicholson Twins. I suspect that there is only one of them actually, because they are not interesting enough to be two people. They’re called Peter and Ferdie. They like Greek.

  Jean-Jacques, who does jiu-jitsu and aikido out of school and collects war memorabilia like bullets and things and lives in South Kensington, which is w
here French people live. Every Saturday afternoon his nanny takes him to do Warhammer off Kensington High Street.

  Archie, who has lots and lots of freckles and plays the violin and is Chess Champion and would be, like, the perfect pupil if he wasn’t hideously ugly with sticky-outy teeth that overlap.

  Simon, who is allergic to lots of things.

  Oh, and there’s a new boy called Ben, who’s been moved up from 7 Middle. I’ve never really noticed him because he isn’t any good at Games and doesn’t speak much to anyone. He has dark brown hair that falls over his eyes in a heavy fringe and he looks like he’s never taken any exercise at all, because he’s really skinny and weak-looking.

  Matteo says Ben needs to get a Scholarship because otherwise his parents won’t be able to pay for him to go to a private school. If he gets a Scholarship it can be means-tested and then his next school will pay up to 100% of his fees, like something in Dickens. Norville and the Nicholson Twins are working extra hard now, just to be on the safe side. They don’t want to be beaten by a newbie.

  Apparently Ben’s parents have just got divorced. If my parents got divorced I don’t think I’d mind that much, because I’d just get two of everything then. Mum and Dad could have houses on the same street and Zara and I could swap round every few days so I wouldn’t have to put up with her whining and moaning. I don’t see what the problem would be.

  Wednesday 10th September

  Miss Atkins stood over me during break while I sat my retest. Her legs are very thin but her ankles are quite swollen. She ought to wear boots. She told me my attitude was all wrong.

  ‘Hobie, you really need to think about whether you’re taking Scholarship work seriously. I don’t expect to retest anyone from 8 Upper.’

  I would have passed the test the first time, but I lost the sheet and we went out for dinner last night, and there wasn’t time to call someone when I got back. It wasn’t my fault.

  Latin deponent verbs: they look passive, but are active. Like morior, I die, and hortor, I encourage. How ridiculous. What’s the point of looking like one thing and being another? I asked Miss Atkins and you could tell she didn’t know, because she looked in her silly teacher’s bag which is covered with embroidered owls and told me to be quiet and finish the retest. I’m actually pretty good at Latin. When my grandfather, Hobart Duvalle II, was alive, he’d give me £100 every time I came top. That was a perfectly reasonable incentive, and even now he’s dead I find that I don’t have to make too much of an effort to do well. I was hoping for a lump sum when he died last year, but all he left me was his antique model-ship collection. To be fair, the ships are pretty awesome.