The Otherlife

by Julia Gray

  I decided I’d tell him about the NannyCam another time. Didn’t want to put him off coming.

  After lunch they told us we’d be having Mock Exams after half term and we had to spend forty-five minutes making a revision schedule. The Nicholson Twins had already done theirs on matching pieces of card with fineliner gel pens and kicked up a massive fuss about doing them again, so they were allowed to go to the library instead. Norville spent so long inserting a table into his Word document and then changing all the fonts for each section and colouring in the background that he still had an empty timetable at the end of the lesson and started hyperventilating.

  Ben and I worked on a joint schedule since we were going to be revising together. He opened a new Word document while I wrote ideas down on paper. We came up with something we thought looked quite workable. Five hours a day, and for the second week Jason and Rebecca would be there so we scheduled most of the Latin and Greek and Science for then. Jason can kind of do everything, but I think his PhD is in … now what is it again? Conversational Biology? Is that even a thing? I forget.

  Saturday 18th October

  Mum and Dad are making a big effort to act like nothing ever happened, regarding my brief flirtation with self-mutilation (as they see it) or symbolic tribal body art (as I do). Yesterday after school I saw the repulsive physio woman and she said I could take my sling off, which was a massive relief. When your arm’s in a sling everything’s a hassle. You have to move slower. Doors swing in your face and you have to catch them with your shoulder because your other arm is carrying all your stuff. You can’t push people so easily. Most frustrating of all is missing Sport. There’s something indescribably painful about standing by the sidelines watching the Nicholson Twins fall over each other and cry because they have migraines when I should be there, chasing them down the pitch. It’s like being outside a bakery that hasn’t opened yet and really, really wanting one of those apple-turnover things. I’m still not allowed to do anything like Rugby, but I’m sure they’ll let me play again after half term.

  So, anyway, my parents have decided that I’ve been punished enough by their disappointment or whatever and now are behaving as normal. Supper tonight was fillets of sea bass with steamed green vegetables and buckwheat noodles. Disgusting. I poured so much soy sauce over everything that it all just tasted like salt and then I needed sugar as if my life depended on it. It felt like I’d swallowed a tidal wave. I went to the larder, which has colour-coded baskets stacked with treats, and I had three snack packs of Oreo cookies and five strawberry shoelaces and some yogurt-coated cranberries as well, because once you start eating those things you can’t stop.

  ‘Zara, you must finish all your fish. It’s good for your brain,’ Mum was saying.

  ‘Yes, baby, you’re looking a little bit peaky,’ said Dad.

  ‘Well, she’s lost some weight which is really a good thing, but you absolutely must get all your nutrients, Za,’ said Mum, switching awkwardly from the third person singular to the second person singular and indicating the untouched noodles on Zara’s plate.

  Zara was smiling at them blandly. Under the table, though, I could see her ripping her paper napkin to shreds. I recognised the look on her face. It’s a look that I do sometimes too, when I don’t want my parents to know what I’m thinking. The thing about Zara is that mostly she’ll do what she’s told. On Wednesday morning I found 28 things beginning with c neatly stacked in the White Company laundry basket outside my room. Four pairs of Christian Lacroix earrings, one bottle of Cristal champagne, ten Crayola crayons, a family of moth-eaten toy chipmunks, some Colgate toothpaste and an assortment of chocolate and crisps which I devoured before breakfast. What’s vaguely interesting is that she’s not doing exactly what my parents are telling her to any more. They can say this stuff about vitamins and nutrients and five-a-day, and she’ll just hide her food under her fork and knife. Maybe she’s growing some sort of spine.

  After supper I showed Mum and Dad the revision timetable that Ben and I had made and they were both ecstatic. Mum photocopied it four times so there was one for the kitchen corkboard and one each for Jason and Rebecca and one to take down to the country house.

  ‘Ben’s such a good influence,’ I heard Mum saying. ‘It’s a shame they’re not applying to the same school, but I gather the Scholarship provision is very similar.’

  Good influence. Ha! She should see his tattoo.

  And then they made one with Zara. Comprehension, Composition, Vocab-building, VR, NVR, Fractions, Decimals, Times Tables.

  Of course they did.

  BEN

  Dad comes to the door on the third ring of the bell, rubbing his eyes, his hair sticking up like unmown grass. I used to have a key, but Dad locked himself out a few months ago and cabbed up to Kensal Rise to borrow mine and I haven’t got it back yet.

  ‘Fell asleep in the garden,’ he says ruefully. ‘Had lunch in Soho. Came back and went out like a light. Christ Almighty. I thought it was Thursday today.’

  ‘It is Thursday.’

  He gives me a proper Dad-hug. He’s much better at hugs than Mum. Every time he hugs me, I feel the waves of sorry, sorry coming off him. He will never stop being sorry about the cricket bat. But I’m sorry too, because sometimes I think if it hadn’t happened my parents would still be together.

  ‘Is it OK, me being here?’ I say. ‘I’m not due until tomorrow.’

  ‘Of course. You’re always welcome.’ Dad smells of damp grass, salt, something sweet and pungent. His hand rests against the side of my head, a protective gesture he’s done for years.

  The landline rings and I know it’s Mum.

  ‘Let the machine pick up,’ I say curtly. ‘I’ll text her, let her know I’m here.’

  So he does. I spread my revision out on the beaten-up oak table. It’s Maths tomorrow. English next week. Dad tells me he can help with poetry and short stories.

  ‘Ted Hughes,’ he says. ‘“The Rain Horse”. I remember reading this when it first came out. I was a little older than you are now. It made me pathologically afraid of country walks.’ He laughs, peering at where I’ve highlighted words, underlined things.

  I tell him it’s too obvious the horse is a figment of the man’s imagination. I’d prefer it to be more ambiguous. The strange black horse that roams around, tormenting the man for forgetting about this isolated farmland – it seems so … surreal. Not horse-like.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s real because he believes in it though?’ says Dad.

  I shrug. ‘Maybe.’

  When it’s getting on for 9 p.m. Dad begins assembling dinner. He’s a random, haphazard cook. When I was little he’d make sculptures for me out of toast, ice-cream puddings with faces splodged onto them in almonds and chocolate sauce. The faces used to scare me a bit, but I ate them out of politeness. Today’s ingredients, unearthed from the back of the fridge: feta cheese, green olives, red peppers, black-edged mint and half a pomegranate. Dad decides to make a rice salad. He puts the radio on, gives me a knife and a couple of peppers; for a while the kitchen is filled with vintage rock and roll and chopping and slicing, and Dad opening and shutting the fridge. And I feel something slip a bit inside me, like I’ve been holding on to something, clenched in my chest, and I’m finally allowing it to give. I almost feel … calm.

  Then I remember that Jason is dead.

  The rice, when we open the jar, is seething with weevils. Tiny insects that writhe, rice-like, causing the surface to shift so subtly that for a moment I think it’s the Otherlife, wriggling its way into the dry goods. Dad roars with laughter and rings for pizza.

  We eat in the sitting room at the tiny fold-out table, while the TV flickers on mute in the background. The room is crammed with falling-apart books, woven rugs hanging on the walls, wooden carvings of things Dad’s found on his travels or in antiques markets.

  ‘So, they’re going well then, are they?’ says Dad, a bit awkwardly. ‘The exams, I mean. Aeneid book twelve and E=mc2 and all t
hat.’

  I dropped Latin as soon as I could, but he never seems to remember that.

  ‘Fine, I guess,’ I say. ‘I need to get A stars though.’

  Dad pours himself a tumbler of water. I’m drinking apple and raspberry juice, which he buys if he remembers, because he knows I like it.

  ‘I suppose you’ve been through it all before. When was it, three years ago? When you did Scholarship?’

  I nod. ‘It felt more intense then.’

  It may have been more intense when I was thirteen, but I’m just not as clever now. I’ve addled my brain. It’s tired, like a machine that needs servicing. I’m tired. What’s the same is the expectation. The desire for me to do well. It’s a desire that’s so strong you can properly see and taste it: a thick, amber, oily desire that leaks from the bricks at school. Infusing the membranes. Bewitching the parents.

  ‘Ben. What’s the matter?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Well, you show up here out of the blue. You’re white and shaking. You’ve been on autopilot since you got here, and I may be a terrible father but I’m perfectly aware that something’s up. So why don’t you tell me? Is it something to do with your mother?’

  I start to cry. It feels awful and quite good at the same time, and then awful again because I don’t want to feel good. I don’t want to feel anything. My head aches, and there’s an exam tomorrow, and Mum’s a liar, and the Otherlife keeps coming and going and it’s been gone for so long that it doesn’t make any sense that it’s here now, and Jason is … Jason is dead.

  Jason is dead.

  Dad just lets me cry, his hand with its funny signet ring that he never takes off resting lightly on my arm. He doesn’t speak.

  Eventually I do.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ I say carefully, ‘that Jason died. You remember Jason, right? My tutor.’

  His phone squirms on the table.

  ‘Dad? Did you know?’

  ‘Who told you he was dead, Ben?’

  ‘I wanted to get in touch with him. I didn’t know how. I ended up calling Imperial College. They told me.’

  Dad pours himself another glass of water. ‘I suppose you would have found out eventually.’

  A mosaic of small memories of Jason begins to form in my head, like goldfish rising to the surface of a pond. His beard: always midway between patchy stubble and a triangular goatee. I don’t like my chin, he’d once told me, when I asked him about his obsession with facial hair. His Rotring pen poised like a surgical tool in one hand, while the other played a scale on the desk, thumb to little finger and back again. His voice, ash-grey from smoking and coffee and long hours of study, telling me always, Take your time, Ben. No rush.

  ‘How long have you known, Dad?’

  His hand twitches reflexively, just touches the edge of his phone. I reach out and move it away.

  ‘A while, I suppose. A few … a few months.’

  ‘But Mum says she found out a couple of weeks ago.’

  This is a lie, but I’ve learned from professionals. It’s the right thing to do. It catches him out, and I watch his face collapse, as if the structural supports, spillikin-thin, have given way, taking his skin down with them. He couldn’t possibly know anything related to my life, school, the world of revision and tutors and certificates, before Mum. It’s as impossible as dinosaurs on Mars.

  ‘Ben,’ he snaps, ‘sometimes you’re not told things for your own good. Have you never considered that possibility?’

  ‘She lied to me. And you’re lying too.’

  ‘We just emphatically couldn’t tell you at the time. Maud was worried about your exams. She was so desperate for you to pass them—’

  ‘Which exams? My GCSEs?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Your Scholarship exams.’

  The room has too many details in it suddenly. Too many books, haphazardly stuffed onto slanting shelves. Too much red, too much blue. The carpet swirls and heaves and buckles.

  ‘You’re saying Jason died before I took Scholarship? That was in May 2009! That’s three years ago!’

  His phone beeps again, urgently. Dad is starting to get that helpless look, the one he used to get in airport queues, busy galleries.

  ‘I don’t know how to do this,’ he mutters to himself, emptying his glass in one quick swallow. ‘She won’t want me to say anything.’

  ‘When did he die? When exactly?’ I say, the skin around my nose and mouth blistering, seizing up.

  ‘He died at Duvalle Hall, Ben. Hobie’s house. That November. The night of the fireworks.’

  The room finally stops its evil merry-go-round spinning complete with headless horses and flashing strobes, and I say, ‘OK. Just tell me whatever you know. Tell me everything.’

  It’s funny. I know that I was there for a week, during half term, revising with Hobie. I remember, vaguely, parts of Duvalle Hall – the airing cupboard on the landing, for some reason. A patchwork quilt pinned to a wall. A bridge over a lake. I know my parents were there. My mother was a house guest, and my father turned up unexpectedly. But so much of that week I just don’t remember at all. People say, sometimes, when they cannot remember, that things are a complete blank, but that is not the way I’d describe it. A complete dark would be more appropriate.

  Dad leans back in his chair, bringing his glass to rest softly against his chest in contemplation.

  ‘I came to Duvalle Hall, Ben, because I wanted to see you. I’d missed your birthday, and I knew where you were.’

  ‘So … you were only pretending you turned up by mistake.’

  ‘Your mother wouldn’t let me see you! You may have forgotten, Ben, but as soon as she found out about Marti she wouldn’t let me within a hundred metres of you.’

  I frown.

  ‘Is that true?’ I say.

  ‘I swear to Almighty God. Ask Maud.’

  ‘She never told me that. I thought you just vanished.’

  ‘She was incredibly angry with me, Ben. For leaving and being generally useless, the good-for-nothing waste of space that I indisputably am. It’s only been in the last year or so that she’s let you come to stay with me. The timing was bad. The divorce, her losing her job …’

  ‘Because of the financial crisis, right? The firm downsized.’

  ‘Actually, no. She was in a hearing and lost her temper with another solicitor. She slapped him. They had to restrain her.’

  I never knew that. Thinking about Mum though, it kind of makes sense.

  ‘You were in bed,’ he goes on. ‘Maud was spitting with rage … there was no reason for me to stay. But the Duvalles insisted, and I was starving hungry, I remember. I avoided Maud’s eye and talked mostly to the girl tutor; what was her name?’

  ‘Rebecca.’

  ‘Ah yes. Rebecca. The little girl was there too. Hobie was holding court, telling some outrageous anecdote about a chap called Bilbo—’

  ‘Frodo,’ I say, my eyelids hot.

  ‘Frodo – yes. Dinner was spectacular. Some kind of casseroled beef, creamy potatoes. A cheeseboard. Pudding of some kind. I had quite a lot to drink, out of nerves more than anything else, and I’m fairly sure the room was spinning a little by the end of dinner. The walls of the dining room were a dark plum colour and hung with tapestries, and all along the table were silver bowls of pine cones and guttering candles.’

  He’s doing his writer thing, adding unnecessary amounts of description, but I don’t want to interrupt him.

  ‘It all became rather Gothic and haunted after a while, and I remember starting to feel a strange sense of dread, as if something terrible was going to happen. After dinner we all put our coats and boots on and went out onto the lawn and watched the fireworks. It seemed horribly lavish for just a few people, but I suppose that’s what they were used to. There were more drinks: some mulled wine or cider, even champagne. Ike kept opening bottles, doing a kind of Lord of the Manor act. And then your mother dug me in the ribs and said wasn’t it time I went home before I embar
rassed myself. So I took the hint and wandered back to the Braithwaites’ cottage.

  ‘I actually phoned Maud the following evening, to apologise for turning up the way I did. And to see how you were. That’s when she told me that Jason had been found, dead, in the rhododendrons or the roses or somewhere, early that morning. I wasn’t to tell you.’

  ‘But I was still there in the morning!’

  ‘She drove you home straight away, before anyone could tell you. Remember, you really weren’t well at all. What did you have? Pneumonia, or bronchitis, no?’

  ‘Pneumonia,’ I say. I’d forgotten about it entirely too. Now I remember. I was in bed for four weeks; there was even a suggestion of hospital at one point. I missed the November mocks, not that I cared. For various reasons, exams were the last thing I wanted to think about. I was barely capable of thinking in any case. Being so ill was almost a relief in some ways. For months I felt a jagged scrap of scar tissue in one of my lungs. I remember the lengths I went to – the fixed obsession I developed with staying in my pyjamas, with bathing on my own, even when I was coughing so hard I could hardly breathe – so that my mother didn’t see my tattoo. By Christmas I was almost better, but I remained, I guess, for the rest of my time at Cottesmore House, in that curious, cotton-wool, invalid state, where words hover unheard in the air and nothing seems particularly real. Even the Otherlife took on a faded, patchy quality. In fact – and I can’t believe I’m only remembering this now, but then, how easy is it to remember the point of forgetting? – I think perhaps that by the New Year the Otherlife had pretty much vanished completely. I papered my room with Late Greats, and I began to worship them instead. From one set of Gods to another.

  ‘I believe the police were quite annoyed about Maud taking you away like that,’ says Dad. ‘She had to go back later in the week to talk to them.’

  At his mention of police, I remember something else that I’d forgotten, somehow, until this moment.