The Otherlife

by Julia Gray

  ‘Check this out,’ I said. I moved one of the boxes, stood on it directly under the skylight and opened it by twisting the handle. ‘Lucky you’re skinny,’ I told Ben. ‘Frodes couldn’t get through. Too many Hobbitburgers.’

  I jumped up a bit and then used my hands to support my weight as I pushed myself through and out onto the roof. ‘Hurry up!’ I called back to Ben.

  It took him a few goes.

  The part of the roof we came out onto was flat. The sky was smeary with purple and gold, the sun just settling down towards the site of the Westfield shopping centre. London opened out on all sides.

  ‘I like it when there are fireworks,’ I said.

  And Ben said nothing for a while.

  It was like he could see something I couldn’t. That’s the best way I can describe it. His chest was moving out and in, as though he was drawing in big lungfuls of air, and he was turning his head from side to side. It made me feel like I’d never really absorbed the view. And maybe I hadn’t. I only go up onto the roof to smoke, and to get away from Zara.

  And then he said: ‘From this kind of vantage point, you’d almost be able to hear the voices of the Gods.’

  I extracted my Lucky Strikes from my back pocket and offered him the pack. He shook his head.

  ‘Je n’en ai pas besoin,’ he said again.

  ‘It’s not about whether you need a fag, it’s whether you want one.’

  ‘I don’t,’ he said.

  The sun dropped and took the warmth with it. My skin started getting those little bumps, like the Thames when the wind starts rattling over it. I lit up and watched Ben sink down to a crouch on the tarmac.

  I knew it. I knew I had something he wanted. I don’t know how I knew. He might not have wanted a smoke, but he definitely wanted the view from the top of my house.

  ‘You should come round every Friday, dude,’ I said. ‘We can get our homework done and come up here.’

  He did his weird head-shake thing where his neck snaps back and his hair ruffles up.

  ‘Don’t your parents mind?’ he asked.

  Mind? Of course they’d mind.

  ‘They don’t know, do they? I only come up here when they’re out. Which they almost always are. My dad is barely ever here anyway cos he travels so much.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Now, about my tattoo—’ I said. But he interrupted me.

  ‘Look, Hobie, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He closed his eyes for a moment. Then he put his hand on his right side, just under his ribs. ‘I did this tattoo for a reason. Everything has to have a meaning; do you understand?’

  No, I bloody well didn’t. So I stayed quiet.

  Ben opened his eyes again and he fixed them on some point far in the distance and he said, ‘Skǫll is … he’s a kind of symbol. He’s like …’

  ‘Your inner wolf?’

  ‘No – yeah. Almost. But more than that.’

  I waited.

  ‘Skǫll represents the Otherlife. A place where beasts eat the sun and the Gods do battle with giants and it’s cold, cold, cold … and people are savage and cruel and they live and die and all the colours are really big and bright. And there’s no X Factor or reality TV or TV full stop and there’s no texting and coffee shops and there’s no bus stops and Oyster cards and … do you see? Everything is real.’

  To me it sounded the exact opposite of real. But I also began to see what he was saying. A bit.

  ‘What did you call it? The Afterlife?’

  ‘The Otherlife,’ he said.

  And then it really was getting dark and cold so we climbed back down into the loft.

  Even after he’d gone home, after we’d done our Maths and French and History homework and ordered Thai curries from Deliverance and watched four episodes of South Park, I kept thinking, Otherlife, Otherlife, Otherlife.

  BEN

  When I wake up, I’m flat on my back, on a bench in Kensal Green Cemetery. I must have nightwalked again; I don’t even remember doing it. Maybe it’s the painkillers. I’m starting to worry about the painkillers. I peel myself off the bench, leaving an outline of my body in the condensation. My legs and arms ache, and so does my head.

  I make my way home, past delivery trucks and mail vans, the world organising itself for another day. It moves with speed and assurance in perfectly straight lines. The edges seem a little more blurred than usual, and I wonder, suddenly, whether I need to go back to the ophthalmologist. I hope not, because I don’t know how Mum will pay for it. I feel for my scar: a tiny dent, like a slanting staple-mark, on the side of my head, and remember again the day – long ago now – when I was hit by a cricket bat.

  It was some kind of charity event: a team of writers versus a team of actors, or else maybe television presenters. I can’t remember. My dad was never famous, but there was a time when his books sold reasonably well. For whatever reason, he was on the team. Mum and I had come with him, our car smaller and dirtier than the rest when we parked behind the pitch.

  Lunch was served beforehand: a lavish, many-coursed affair, with cheesecake and four different kinds of bread roll, and salmon sweating in a pastry shell. Those sugar granules that look like rough-cut semiprecious stones, served in a silver bowl along with the tea and coffee. My dad drank a lot of wine. He had a new bat, one he was excited to deploy; I went with him after lunch to the car to fetch it, just before the start of play. He was already dressed in his cricket whites, with a red blazer over the top. He looked like he belonged, among these actual stars of screen and page. Pride tied a little loop around my neck.

  From the boot of the car Dad pulled the new bat, which he’d already battered with a mallet and rubbed down with linseed oil the night before. My dad was always good at pretending to fit in at events like these, acting posher than he was; I asked him how many times he’d actually played cricket and he laughed, wryly, and said, ‘Oh, fewer than you’d think. See if there’s film in the camera, why don’t you?’

  Fiddling with the back of my mother’s old Nikon, I was standing too close to the boot of the car. It was my fault really. But Dad – perhaps more nervous than he cared to admit, perhaps loose-armed from too much to drink at lunchtime (and Mum would never forget this; she would never let him forget this) – didn’t see me behind him as he began warming up with the bat. Two or three times he swung it up into the air and round in generous, wide-wheeling circles. The third time, or else the fourth, he hit me – a good hard bone-cracking knock at the edge of my right eye. I remember an eclipse: a round red moon that bloomed across the circle of my vision; I remember my mother screaming, and how the wives of the famous people seemed to draw away a little before they came rushing towards me.

  There was nothing Dad could ever do that would prove how sorry he was. In the hospital he cried beside me, and that seemed to make Mum angrier, because she didn’t cry herself.

  I lost the sight in my right eye for nearly two months. I spent dark hours at Moorfields Eye Hospital, robbed of the ability to read. I missed school. When – in tiny, flickery darts of light and fractured shape – my vision began to come back, my parents hired a tutor named Jason to help me catch up with my schoolwork.

  Unlike a lot of the kids I knew, I’d never had a tutor before, but it seemed to me straight away that Jason was everything you’d want in one: calm, focused, knowledgeable. He made the prospect of catching up on everything I’d missed seem less daunting. He would often put music on while we studied: something rich with organs and woodwind, or moody, beautiful piano pieces. If Mum and Dad were arguing downstairs, he’d turn the music up. Sometimes we’d make mind maps and stick them to the wall. Sometimes we’d record history or geography notes onto the computer, so that I could keep them in iTunes. For each session, he’d make a target sheet, written out in his delicate, calligraphic hand with his special pen, a Rotring. Knowing how much I loved to see the colour change, he kept a supply of different ink cartridges – red, turquoise, brown – and would make sure to change f
rom one colour to the next during our sessions, so that the line of his writing would modulate smoothly from, say, green to blue, via every magical shade in between. And each time we hit a target (memorising the different plate boundaries, reciting the key aspects of the Norman invasion), he’d let me shade in the box.

  ‘Target met,’ he’d say. ‘Onwards, Ben.’

  He also had an extraordinary store of hidden facts and trivia and folklore. He would tell me why it would be possible to build habitable colonies on Mars but not on Venus; he knew the name of every bird we saw in the garden. And it was Jason who introduced me to the Norse Gods.

  He’d say, ‘Ah, Ben, you mustn’t worry about only one eye. You know who only had one eye? Odin!’

  And then he’d tell me the story of how Odin sacrificed the sight of one of his eyes in exchange for wisdom.

  ‘You’re wise, too, Ben. Plus you’ll get your sight back perfectly,’ Jason would say. ‘Hold tight. No rush.’

  I loved the parallel he’d drawn, so quickly and so easily, between me and the world of the Gods. I remember thanking him for it, in a clumsy kind of way. He told me that it came sort of naturally to him, because he also had something in common with one of the Gods, a kind of physical quirk. I forget the story, if he ever told me. It was related to something that had happened early in his childhood, he said.

  He bought the Old Norse grammar for me, one of the few birthday presents I received that year, and even helped me to learn some of the verbs, though he didn’t know the language himself. Sometimes we’d sit in the park and drink coffee and read together. Jason’s favourite of the Gods was Heimdallr, the watchman, who sat on the rainbow bridge, Bifrost, and watched everything that went on in the world. Jason was, I suppose, quite like Heimdallr. He was a good observer, and he didn’t judge.

  When I started seeing little halos, trails of coloured light that formed into the faint edges of what appeared to be faces, figures, I imagined it was some by-product of the recovering muscles in my eye. But they persisted, growing brighter and more intense. I began to associate each colour with one of the Gods. Sky blue for Odin. Blue-green for Tyr – brave Tyr, whose hand was bitten off by Fenrir. Burnt orange for Heimdallr, honey-gold for Baldr, fire-red for Loki – not really a God, but often counted as one. Lemony-green Frigg. Greenish-bronze Hermódr. Sea-blue Freyr and purple-pink Freyja. And two uncoloured trails of light, one pearlescent and one midnight dark, that I knew were Hati and Skǫll.

  I christened it the Otherlife.

  I wasn’t afraid; I was curious. I could see the Gods; I was quite sure of it. For some reason I could see them. And I was glad that I could, because I was lonely. I became an expert seer, constantly on the lookout for signs of the Otherlife. Odin’s hand extending from behind a fallen tree, pale blue and blinding. Jǫrmungandr billowing beneath the undertow in the murky waters of the canal. Best of all were glimpses of Skǫll, who sometimes showed up as the shadow of some smaller dog: a sharp-jawed, magnificent flicker against the hot dirty pavement. Faint: outlines only. Suggestions. But enough. It was like a channel that was always on, if you tuned into it right. Their stories played out, forwards, backwards, over and over, in my secret cinema; their world was the underlay of mine, and it made sense when mine did not.

  I feel a hotness behind me: heavy breath condensing in the May morning air. I become sure that someone – something – is following me. I quicken my pace. Near the cemetery gates I hear twigs breaking, gravel scuffled by sharp-clawed feet.

  A whispered growl, camouflaged by the howls of cars and motorcycles.

  I stop, listen again.

  Silence.

  The house reproaches me for leaving it unattended. I chuck my keys onto the table. They make a hard noise, like money in a slot machine. I make coffee. There’s no point in going to bed for half an hour. Better to get changed, head into school and hope I stay conscious. Out of no more than habit (my headache, for the moment, is gone) I open the drawers in the kitchen, sifting through bulldog clips and clothes pegs, candle stubs and string, in search of triangular pills. Mum’s driving licence. Booklets of stamps: first class, second class, cartoon Santa. A rectangle of warped cartridge paper. I lift it out of the drawer and take a look.

  On one side, a wolf, masterfully drawn with a calligraphy pen. A hundred thousand times more accurate, more powerfully captured than my tattoo. On the other side, a handwritten certificate that says, I, Benjamin Holloway, have survived a week of intensive study. It’s dated 8th November 2008, and it’s signed by the person who drew it.

  Jason.

  For most of Years 4 and 5, he was more than a tutor really. He was a friend too, a protector. Once, just before he arrived for our session, Mum had taken Dad’s favourite wineglasses and smashed them, two by two, on the paving stones in the garden. It was the precision of it, the way she took them out in pairs, a glass in each hand, that really affected me as I watched from my bedroom window. It made me think of the Ark, in some kind of weird, backward fashion. There were three sets of expensive-sounding crashes: delicate high-pitched screams that broke the silence. I retreated from the window and listened as Dad yelled at her for breaking his favourite glasses which were a wedding gift and she yelled back that it was symbolic of her deep frustrations and then, as they always did, their voices became nothing but angry music, sounds I couldn’t decode.

  Mum had already gone out by the time Jason arrived on his bicycle; Dad was upstairs, barricaded into his study. As Jason boiled the kettle to make coffee I crept into the garden to survey the damage. Suddenly it struck me that my parents shouldn’t have just left it all there like that, for the neighbours to see. The stones were strewn with minuscule shards of glass. I told myself that it was a glorious trove of diamonds, one I was lucky to have discovered. Then I knelt down and swept up the pieces.

  Jason came out and found me sitting in a sea of broken glass, hands bleeding. Without saying anything, he took me inside and mended me, washing the cuts, bandaging me properly with crepe and safety pins. He went back outside with a dustpan and brush and disposed of the remains of my parents’ argument. Instead of tutoring, we read about the time when Thor dressed up as a woman, and by the end of the hour and a half I was laughing inside and out.

  I carry the wolf certificate upstairs – carefully, by the corners, like a museum specimen – and after a little thought I take my clump of Blu-Tack and stick it, wolf-side out, just above the Otherlife mural. Then, slowly, I stick the photograph of Hobie next to it. There’s a song my dad really likes – I don’t know who it’s by, a duo from the sixties or seventies – which he likes to sing, in his vague way, when he’s doing the washing-up. I don’t remember it perfectly. It’s about a time of innocence, and having a photograph, and preserving your memories. And it’s this song that I think of now, as I look at the photograph. It’s like looking at a relic from another era.

  Strange. Forget the Otherlife, with its definite article. I had, once, another life: one where I didn’t know Solomon, didn’t take pills every day and loiter by night in cemeteries and parks and fire escapes. My daily uniform, instead of black and grey, was green and burgundy, with a pale pink tie and the school initials on my peaked Just William cap. And I was friends with Hobie. Best friends almost, you could say. I was innocent; he was confident – magnificently so, with his rugby swagger and his ability to get away with anything. There was a famous story about a penis – or perhaps it was a swastika – drawn in chalk on the back of Frodo’s blazer before a Summer Concert. Hobie’s first line of defence: deny it ever happened, and then blame someone else. (The chalk was later discovered in Archie’s violin case.) Some people harboured a strong suspicion that Hobie, in order to be put into 8 Upper, had cheated in his end-of-year exams, though there was no proof of this and he was too savvy to own up to it, even to me.

  How did we become friends? When did he stop alarming me and start trying to be nice, and – more – why? I remember playdates, heavy with snack food, where we ran away from his litt
le sister and hid on the roof, smoking. I remember his house. It was built like a luxury battleship, all sturdy cream walls and impenetrable bars on the windows. There was a certain novelty in being there. If you left a towel on the floor it would be replaced, silently, with a fresh-minted one from some unseen laundry cavern. Everything smelt of hundred-pound candles: lofty, unnameable scents with anagrammed French labels. But the real novelty was Hobie. At the start of Year 8 he ignored me, like everyone else did. Suddenly he changed. He wanted to sit with me. He copied my work – that infuriated me at first, before I started really wanting him to do well and feeling sorry for him, because he couldn’t keep up with the rest of the group. I changed too, I suppose. But Hobie … why did he suddenly want to be friends with me?

  I feel, as I so often do, that I cannot remember. But suddenly I realise that I do.

  The tattoo.

  That was why.

  During the long, sad summer of 2008, my parents’ arguments were nightly and the panel of glass in the front door shattered, not once but twice, from the force of being slammed. I didn’t have school. I didn’t have friends. I didn’t even have a tutor, for there was no more money for luxuries such as Jason by the time I reached Year 6, and besides, I didn’t need him any more, they said. I had the Otherlife, and I had Old Norse, and I had metal. I started a collection of heroes, preferring, for some reason, (perhaps because they’d been killed or died for their art, which added a certain nobility), the dead ones. And their tattoos were fantastic – literally, inked fantasies that took up whole arms, backs, shoulders. I decided that I wanted one. I liked drawing. I didn’t mind pain, if I could control it. A tattoo would require both, and it would give me something to look forward to over the holidays.