The Otherlife

by Julia Gray

  I walked down Pembridge Crescent, thinking it was where Archie lives and maybe I could put a dog turd through his letterbox as I was passing, to make his day a little more interesting. And just as I was thinking this, I saw a dog, not on a lead, sort of pottering around on the pavement in front of me. It was small and white and annoying-looking with a brown patch over one eye and another near its tail. I wondered whether I could steal it and take it into one of those grotty pubs where the same old men sit outside drinking Guinness and smoking, day in, day out, and sell it. I’d read in the Daily Mail about people selling dogs in pubs. I could say my mother didn’t want it. I could start a whole business, selling things my mother didn’t want. But I probably had enough money now, and anyway I couldn’t think who’d want such a weaselly, unattractive dog. Just then a gate opened and a woman came rushing out, and she scooped up the dog and practically snogged it, saying things like, ‘Oh darling Percy, naughty Daddy left the door open,’ and this show of affection was putting me off my sandwich. And she put it down and it pissed on her shoe.

  I turned left down Chepstow Villas and then walked nearly the whole length of Portobello Road, which was seething with people buying street signs that said Portobello Road W11 and bits of lace and silver candlestick holders. The houses are quite pretty and it looks like a film, but you have to walk at a snail’s pace, like when everyone’s leaving Assembly and the hall is massively congested with Year 4s and 5s. I passed the Hummingbird cupcake shop, and was debating popping in for a Red Velvet when I saw this old grey-haired man standing behind a table of flasks and lighters, and I got a feeling like he’d have something I wanted to buy. Sure enough, after a spell of rummaging I unearthed a dull silver lighter with a wolf emblazoned on it in relief. It was only a fiver so I bought it immediately. It was a Sign.

  As I walked I tried to do what Ben does, and look on the edges of things. I stared at the side of the Falafel King van, tried to force the air to move, the particles to start glinting or whatever he says they do. I waited for the Gods to show up. It made me a bit dizzy. Then I crashed into a Japanese tourist.

  I couldn’t quite remember where the tattoo place was, but I knew I’d seen one somewhere, among all the shops selling identical-looking flowery dresses and the fruit stalls and that place with loads of bars of soap that you can smell from across the street. When I eventually found it I marched in with my envelope of cash and went straight up to the man at the counter, shoved my picture of Hati the wolf under his nose and said, ‘One tattoo, like this picture, please.’

  This man was literally a map of ink. His arms were covered in vines and there was a headstone on his shoulder with some crosses and dates on it and RIP which is from the Latin requiescat in pace (and in Latin you’re supposed to put the verb at the end, so how come it’s at the beginning there?) and even his hands had tattoos on them. He was bald and there were three little stars under his right eye.

  He smiled at me. His teeth were very white and square.

  ‘I’m, uh, going to need to see some ID.’

  ‘I don’t have any ID and I’m in a hurry,’ I said. ‘Can’t we just get on with it? I don’t mind paying extra.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Sorry, kid, but you don’t look a day over eleven.’

  ‘I’m twelve,’ I said angrily.

  ‘Yes, well, according to UK law, you need to be 18 to get a tattoo, or 16 with parental consent. Come back in a few years.’

  Why does everyone have to follow the rules the whole bloody time? But I could see there was no point arguing with him.

  My iPhone informed me that I had thirteen missed calls. By the time I rang Clothilde back she was completely hysterical. That word comes from the Latin for womb so it’s appropriate that women are always being it. I managed to get her to believe that I’d been called by school to go in and help them with an Open Day at the last minute and had got a lift with Simon, and even though it was unlikely that Mum would buy this story, it got me temporarily off the hook. I walked home because buses are really dirty, and I bought another Super Club sandwich on the way and ate it, even though I wasn’t really hungry.

  BEN

  Mum calls seven times over the weekend, trying to get me to go home. We assure her that I am fine, I am fed and watered, I am revising, that I went to my exam on Friday and that it went OK. We are unreliable in this regard. I am watered and fed – according to the best of Dad’s intentions – but I am barely revising, and I am not fine.

  I really am not fine.

  I sit in Dad’s garden, with The Five Stages of Grief on my lap. One good thing about my father: he always has a book for every occasion, and if he doesn’t, he’ll go out and borrow one. I feel like an invalid. Solomon calls, with his unerring instinct for distress, and then arrives on Saturday afternoon with St John’s wort and spirulina and vitamin C, all in fancy dark-glass bottles, and a bunch of tulips from M&S.

  I haven’t slept properly for days, and my nights have been peppered with nightwalking – including an uncomfortable moment when I woke up at a petrol station, propped up against a diesel pump, and another when I found myself in the middle of Brompton Cemetery, having somehow climbed over the wall – and the filaments of horrifying dreams. Omitting, for now, the story of the Otherlife, which will be too long and too strange in the telling, I sit with my eyes closed and explain to Solomon everything I’ve found out about Jason. He listens with exceptional patience, never interrupting. At the end he breathes out in a single, solid sigh.

  ‘Ben, you poor old suffering thing,’ he says, patting down Dad’s IKEA garden chairs with antibacterial wipes. ‘That’s quite a conspiracy, not to tell you.’

  ‘They wanted me to get my Scholarship,’ I say darkly, thinking about that phone call from school (We are delighted to offer your son a Major Scholarship – he’s done exceptionally well across the board, Mrs Holloway), and how, after I’d called Dad, the first person I’d wanted to get in touch with was Jason. I hadn’t seen him for many months, but the frenzy of Scholarship preparation had been so all-consuming that I bought without particularly questioning it the statement that Jason had too much work with his PhD to come and tutor me, and besides, all the hard work – that mad week of revision at Duvalle Hall – had now been done. But when my result came through – I’d done the best in the class, apart from Frodo and one of the Nicholson Twins who had made a late bid for his own identity by massively outscoring his brother – I demanded to talk to Jason, no matter how busy he was. But Mum’s BlackBerry had deleted half of her contacts in some mysterious malfunction, so in the end I wrote a postcard instead, and posted it myself. Dear Jason, I got a Scholarship!! Thank you so much for all your hard work. You are awesome. Ben. My mother wrote a postscript herself, in her lawyerly scribble. My mother is a woman who can bring herself in cold conscience to write a note to a dead person. That she managed to do this still astonishes me.

  ‘You didn’t know, did you?’ I ask, suddenly.

  ‘Me? Of course not! Why would you think that?’

  ‘I think that Frodo knew,’ I say.

  There was something about the way he turned his back to me, his tone of voice when he said, That Jason.

  ‘Not a thing,’ Solomon replies. ‘But there are all kinds of stories that go round about tutors. You hear them from time to time. That marriage that broke up, you know – and the mother ran off with the tutor. People talking about getting off with their tutors, and you never know quite if they’re telling the truth. I certainly never have. There was a story – and it was a very long time ago, now, that I heard it – about a tutor being found dead, outside a house somewhere. Only I got the impression that it was abroad.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘OK.’

  I’m glad he didn’t know. I couldn’t bear it if he too was somehow part of this web of collusion. Then again: if he did know, he’d almost certainly have found out the truth. All of it. And that’s something I need to do, more than ever. If my father thinks Jason took an overdose, there
are probably other people who do as well. I know he didn’t. He was too sensible, too measured in his approach to things. He was too serious about life, and all the things he wanted to achieve in it. One day, I remember him telling me, he was going to be a professor.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ says Solomon.

  According to The Five Stages of Grief, I’m supposed to feel: fear, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I’m not entirely sure what stage I’m at: drug-fuelled emptiness and mind-fogged paranoia? GCSE-revision-induced traumatic nothingness? There’s probably a label; I just don’t know what it is.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  Dad is drinking colourless liquid out of a Tom and Jerry mug in the kitchen. Solomon raised an eyebrow when he arrived: Is this what I think it is? I smiled a flat non-smile: Perhaps. I’m not sure what stage Dad is at either.

  A beetle crawls like a tiny tank across the arm of my chair. I watch it, willing myself to concentrate on the deliberate placing of each foot, on its slow, sure, uninterruptible progress.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ Solomon asks, gently.

  It’s a good question. What am I going to do?

  Hermódr came first, to tell me that someone had died.

  Then Frigg appeared, to ask for my help. I can still hear the anguish in her voice, and how the syllables seemed to stretch out into longer notes, discordant and heartbreaking.

  Hjálpaðú …

  And then, on Thursday night I saw Baldr in the street – faintly, but definitely. He was Baldr, but he was also Jason. The Gods themselves have asked me to find out what happened to Jason. And I have to know, for myself.

  ‘Ben?’ says Solomon.

  ‘Find out how Jason died,’ I say, tracing my fingers over the ancient wine stains on the old wooden boxes that Dad uses as outdoor tables. ‘No one knows, or else no one wants to tell me.’

  Finally, on Sunday evening, I run out of boxer shorts and T-shirts and Dad runs out of washing powder, and – not wanting to look at another Domino’s delivery box for a while – I take the bus back to Kensal Rise. Mum opens the door; our eyes meet. This is the moment for us to talk, for her to say she’s sorry.

  She doesn’t.

  ‘It was for your own good, Ben,’ she says, her hands spread. When are my parents going to understand that cheap clichés about my own good and circumstances and finding the right time are an insult to the intelligence that they claim I possess? I push past her, go up to my room and lie on the bed. My mural watches me. Letting my vision go soft, I stare, and stare, waiting.

  Sure enough, slowly, the mural begins to move.

  Millimetre by millimetre, the clouds roll in a leisurely way towards the sea. The leaves on the tree float, like feathers, onto the shore, where they disappear into the stones. And now the corpse of Baldr appears, honey-gold, darkening, against the base of the tree. Over in the corner, at the mouth of a rocky cave, fire-red Loki is tied down, furious, squirming beneath incessant drips of poison. Some of the other Gods stand around him, watchful, jittery. They know it is too late. There is nothing they can do, after the death of Baldr, to prevent their world from ending.

  I swallow another painkiller, close my eyes and sleep.

  Big Days come and go. Sometimes I nightwalk, and sometimes – too exhausted, maybe, to venture outside – I don’t. I’m living to the rhythms of my alarm, the announcements on the tube, the giant clock in the exam hall. I have no other biological functions; I feel like an automated puppet, a thing made out of cardboard and basic electronics. I take two more exams, English and physics. English is OK: I bend my head close to the page, coax a thought-flow from my brain down my arm to my pen and just keep writing, writing. Physics is a minefield. I can’t remember any of the formulae. I look at the blank spaces, as unfilled in as my stages of grief, and know that my head-state just isn’t right for exams.

  Mostly I make a point of ignoring my mother. At mealtimes our conversation goes like this:

  Her: Have you revised for (fill in blank according to timetable)?

  Me: Yep.

  Her: Do you want some more (fill in blank according to menu)?

  Me: Nope.

  And I know I’m being horrible to her, when she’s trying to help me do well, like she always does. But I’m just so angry. (This, maybe, is a good sign: I’ve reached an identifiable stage.) Partly I feel like she doesn’t even care that Jason is dead. That he died in this weird, unexplained way. To her, I suspect it was an inconvenience, in more ways than one. It was an event that would have deeply upset me, had she seen fit to let me know about it, and might have affected my exam scores. I wonder sometimes whether Mum has proper feelings at all.

  She’s like the giantess who wouldn’t weep for Baldr.

  A sleepy, cloud-covered Saturday. London simmers in a do-nothing haze. I’m lying on the floor, reading my old Free Creative Writing book, hoping I might find some clues: the Gods grieved for Baldr as I am grieving now, but what should I do next?

  On my wall I have stuck a picture of Jason, next to the wolf certificate and the picture of me and Hobie. It’s beginning to look like a serial killer’s shrine, or the desk space of a criminal psychologist. Not for the first time, I wish that I could ask Hobie. He was there, after all, on the night that Jason died. He stayed up for dinner; I didn’t. He’d have seen more than me. But I can’t ask Hobie. I wish I knew how to reach Jason’s family. But if I couldn’t find Jason online – and I spent days trawling through Google searches and old Myspace pages, trying everything I could think of – I can’t imagine how I’d reach his relations. I don’t even know what family he had. I tried calling Imperial College again, but I couldn’t get through to the woman I’d spoken to before, and they said it was against their policy to give out any details about their students, living or dead.

  So there’s no other resource but my brain. What’s left of it.

  The sides of my vision go soft. I stare at the middle of the page, looking at my twelve-year-old writing. A line stares out at me, somehow bolder and darker than the rest:

  Hermódr crossed the bridge of glowing colours and went down, down, down to the gates of Hel.

  Hel.

  The Underworld.

  If I didn’t take so many painkillers I’m sure I’d have made this connection sooner, but it strikes me, suddenly, that if I’m meant to go to the Underworld, I can actually get there with relative ease. I drop the book and reach for my shoebox of gig flyers, where I rummage around until I find a leaflet for Infernal Damnation 2012. Tonight. At the Underworld in Camden Town.

  ‘I need a break from revision,’ I say to Mum as I thunder down the stairs. ‘I’m going to this gig in Camden.’

  ‘Taking a break is not a good idea …’ she begins.

  ‘I’ll be back before midnight.’

  ‘You haven’t always been back before midnight.’

  ‘Are you saying I’m a liar? You lied to me about Jason for three and a half years, remember?’

  Ignoring this, she gives me fifteen quid from the drawer of loose change and tells me to remember my key.

  The 31 bus takes forever. I arrive in time to catch the last part of Ctulu and all of Funeral Throne. The Underworld is salty and sour with sweat and spilt beer. People of all ages and sizes jostle and mosh and sway in time to the symphonic, down-tuned soundscapes. One thing I love about metal (good metal) is that so little has changed since its early days, the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the New Wave of British Heavy Metal started sending its dark vibrations into the post-punk community. It makes me feel like I could almost be there, at an early Iron Maiden or Motörhead gig.

  I buy a beer, thread my way to the back and lean against the wall, letting the noise consume me. A strobe begins to pulse and I close my eyes: strobes used to do funny things when my eye was bad, and I’m seeing enough unwanted stuff as it is.

  When I open my eyes again, Fever Sea are onstage doing their line check, tapping the microphones, plugging in their leads. People are
milling about, going to the bar, drifting outside to smoke. I transfer my gaze from the stage to the crowd of black-clad metalheads.

  There’s a girl directly in front of the stage. Unusually for girls at metal gigs, she’s on her own. It makes her stand out exquisitely, like a pine tree on an ice shelf. I squint at her. Her hair hangs down on either side of her face. Her arms sway gently at her sides, but oddly out of time to the music. She looks as if she’s waiting for someone. I study the knots of bone at her elbows and wrists. The lights change from murky green to a clearer blue as the band begins to play, and I stare, and stare, and am sure.

  That’s Zara.

  Slowly, because you can’t really move fast when this kind of music is playing, where the chords are lordly and wallowing and wide-spaced, I nudge and apologise my way through the crowd.

  But when I reach the front, she’s nowhere to be seen.

  I find her outside, leaning against the heavy bar of the fire-escape door. She looks anxious, fiddling with a jewelled iPhone and a pink-strapped watch. She’s tall, much taller than I remember, like a plant starved of light. That makes sense: she must be fourteen now. Her hair, which used to hang in crimped, blondish-brown twists, now lies flat against her head, as though it lacks the will to move. Her skin is shadowy and pale. I can almost see through her, she’s so thin. She is very beautiful. Or she would be, if she didn’t look so ill.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say, and she looks up, her eyes cross-referencing me with memory, with Facebook, with mental snapshots of everyone she knows. ‘Are you Zara Duvalle?’