by Julia Gray
‘Yes.’
The sounds of Camden on a Saturday night are turned up too high, like Dad’s radiators. The screams of drunken women and police sirens intrude on the silence of her face, the sweetness and seriousness of her expression, as she tries to work out who I am.
‘I’m Ben. Ben Holloway.’
She jumps slightly, like she’s heard something unexpected. Her eyes take on a pale, frozen glaze. She puts out her hand, a reflex born of years of cocktail parties and social interaction. I shake it, feeling the dryness of her skin, the bolts of her knuckles. As I look into her eyes, the same open-sky blue as Hobie’s, it occurs to me that I don’t often look properly at people. And just at that moment, I feel like she’s really looking at me too, because her expression changes again, and I see the old Zara. The Zara who would follow me and Hobie wherever we went, begging to be allowed to join in.
She says, ‘Oh my God. Ben.’
And smiles.
‘Do you often go to metal gigs?’ I say. My mouth feels drained of saliva. I don’t really know how to make conversation with beautiful girls.
‘Sometimes. Once, twice a year, maybe.’
A gaggle of under-dressed women clatters past; they’re decked out in devil’s horns and five-inch heels, their arms flailing at the air, as if to keep them from falling. The night buzzes with noise. Broken beer bottles and Chinese takeaway boxes gather in the gutter below us, like washed-up sewage.
Zara checks a doorstep for obvious debris and then sits down, carefully. After a little hesitation, I join her.
‘I don’t much like metal gigs,’ she says.
‘So why do you go?’
‘For Hobie. He can’t, so I do, sometimes. It makes me feel … I don’t know how it makes me feel. I just think he’d like it if I went on his behalf. That sounds stupid.’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ I tell her.
‘Do you really listen to this music?’
I nod. ‘It’s a lot more complex than it sounds.’
‘I remember – you once told us about it over breakfast. When Hobie gave you the poster of that Metallica guitarist who died.’
‘Bassist,’ I say automatically, then wish I wasn’t quite so pedantic when it comes to metal.
‘My parents think I’m at the theatre,’ Zara says, ‘but I’m going to have to get back. I have to work.’
We both make a study of the side of a bus, something to do with the Olympics. A sprinter in sunflower yellow, a slogan: Flow faster with VISA.
‘It’s nice to see you,’ I say.
‘It’s strange to see you,’ she replies at once, and I remember as well how Zara always had to say what she felt, all the time. She had no emotional filter. The bus pulls away; lurid chip-shop signs glitter in the space it reveals. A motorcyclist pulls up at the traffic light; on his helmet there are wings of red and gold. He turns his head to spit, and I see that he is not human; his face is covered in dense fur as he bares his teeth in a grin. Around him the air hums and quivers.
Blink: he’s gone.
I shake my head, gently. I never saw anything quite like this when I was younger and saw the Otherlife. There’s something alien about it now. Something I can’t put my finger on.
‘You know,’ I say, ‘nobody told me about Jason.’
Immediately she puts her hand out to touch my sleeve.
‘Oh, Ben,’ she says. ‘And you really loved him, didn’t you? He was your tutor when you were small. He wasn’t just Hobie’s tutor. He was so great with you both. And he was so kind to me. I was in such a state about the eleven-plus and he just … he made it OK if I didn’t understand how to convert top-heavy fractions into mixed numbers, and he always drew those little target squares on the wall, with that pen he had …’
‘A Rotring. It was a Rotring.’
‘He was an amazing tutor,’ says Zara.
‘But … how did he die?’ I say. ‘You must know.’
‘I don’t … I think … It was just one of those really sad things. Like Sudden Death Syndrome or something. I was too young at the time for anyone to tell me. I don’t know if I asked. That sounds really awful, Ben, I’m sorry. But honestly – I really don’t know.’
Although she falters as she says it, tripping delicately over each phrase, it still sounds a little rehearsed to me. Like she’s been told to say it, if anyone ever asks her about Jason. Maybe I’m paranoid; maybe I’m mad. But that’s how she sounds.
I try again.
‘But you don’t think … I mean, he definitely didn’t take an overdose, right? Nobody said that? The police, the medical people …?’
She pauses.
‘I never heard anything like that,’ she says at last, and I can’t be sure if she means it. ‘But that weekend … it just isn’t something we talk about.’
Delicately she picks at the edge of a shell-pink fingernail. Somehow the mood has changed. Zara looks up. A solid, glossy CompuCab hovers beside the kerb.
‘I must go,’ she says.
She hesitates, as though she can’t make up her mind about something. I find myself longing to know whether her hair smells the same as it always used to. (Buttery and sweet, like popcorn.) Then she looks in her bag and takes out a business card, a tiny one with a cartoonish strawberry print on one side and Zara Elspeth Duvalle on the other, with an email address and phone number. She holds it out to me.
‘You can call me,’ she says, ‘if you like.’
She climbs into the car, her legs origami-folding beneath her, and the car drives away, as smooth and silent as a predatory fish.
I stand there watching until it’s out of sight. Then I head back inside.
Metal is metal, after all.
HOBIE’S DIARY
Monday 27th October 2008
It doesn’t feel like bloody half term, even though we have two weeks. Ordinarily we’d have gone abroad, somewhere warm where they bring you drinks by an infinity pool. The Maldives maybe, or the Bahamas. It feels monumentally unfair that we’re staying in England for the entire time.
Anyway this week I am going to Ben’s house every day from ten till four. His mother has a copy of our revision timetable. I suspect there may not be enough food, so I am equipped with the following:
5 sherbet Dip Dabs
Three loaves of sliced Malt Loaf
2 bags of Babybels
A large tangle of strawberry shoelaces
An enormous tin of Melt flakes for hot chocolates
‘D’you think they’ll have milk or should I bring that too?’ I fretted this morning as Clothilde cleaned my shoes. Dad has this thing, which he apparently inherited from his dad (Hobart Duvalle II), about clean shoes on Monday mornings. Whatever.
‘I’m sure they will, darling,’ said Mum, who had taken a croissant from the basket of pastries and was delicately picking flakes off it in much the same way as gorillas check each other for fleas. She doesn’t eat bread products usually, so I assume she was entering into the festival spirit of the school holidays.
Dad put down the bunch of papers he’d been studying, fixed me with an earnest eye and said, ‘Hobie, it’s great that you’re sensitive about your friend not having, ah, access to the same kind of resources that he once did—’
‘No, I’m just worried they won’t have any milk for my hot chocolates, because apparently his mum goes shopping kind of sporadically. That’s all.’
‘Listen,’ he said sternly, ‘from where I’m sitting it’s coming across as a little bit sarcastic. Ben’s parents have had a difficult time, he and his mother are living in a much smaller house and they can’t pay full school fees. It’s good that you’re aware of that, and that you don’t flaunt things that you have in his face. But, Hobie, I’m sure there’ll be milk for hot chocolate, OK? You mustn’t get carried away. There’s a thin line between understanding and mocking.’
I had no idea what he was talking about. It could have been in Ancient Peruvian for all the sense I could make of it. As for flaunting things in
people’s faces, it’s one of my favourite occupations. Only Ben and I have far too much to talk about for that to be the case with him.
Just as Clothilde and I were leaving for Ben’s house the post arrived and my half-termly report was among the letters. There was also a thick posh-looking envelope marked Tibbert and Taylor Consultants, which must’ve been my Ed Psych report. Mum put it in the pocket of her robe. Then she opened my school report. Dad and I watched, soundlessly, like someone had paused a DVD.
My grades were a mixture of Bs and Cs for achievement (and a D in Greek – damn you, Miss Atkins!) and 2s and 3s for effort. So, sort of average. Absolutely fine, really, except for one thing. They weren’t good enough for Scholarship.
‘If we don’t see a marked improvement across the spectrum of academic subjects,’ Mr White had put at the end, ‘we will, unfortunately, have to consider moving Hobie into 8 Middle, where he may feel more at home.’
‘Well, Hobes,’ said Dad, putting on his overcoat and gloves, ‘the ball’s in your court now, isn’t it?’
I felt sure he’d chosen a sporting image on purpose. Mum smothered me in a hug and said she knew I was going to be trying my hardest over the next two weeks, and then she left to go and visit the venue for her Gala Dinner for the massive children’s charity which is on Friday night, same as Halloween. God knows how Mum’s any use at these things. I suppose she just puts ribbons around the chairs and fixes bits of paper to clipboards and shouts at the caterers. She’s got Zara and a couple of ghostly work-experience girls making up goodie bags today with organic hand cream in them and salted caramels and Manuka honey lip gloss. Two hundred of them. I know because I demanded to be allowed to eat the surplus caramels and Mum, meanly, said no.
Clothilde can’t drive because she’s pathetically afraid of it, so she took me to Ben’s house in a taxi. We went along Ladbroke Grove and round a roundabout and past this massive Sainsbury’s and then we were driving along the Harrow Road and turning into a maze of little streets with teeny tiny little houses, almost cottages, mostly covered with creepers and roses and the whole place had a really eerie, empty feel to it, though if Zara’d been there she’d have probably thought the houses were adorable.
Ben’s house was about halfway down one of these little labyrinthine streets, with a blue door that needed painting. I got out with my rucksack and my food bag and my laptop and charger and phone charger and a couple of DVDs in case we finished ahead of schedule. At that moment Ben’s mother opened the door. I recognised her from plays and concerts and things and of course she looked the same, not noticeably poorer after all. Ben’s mother has got dark hair that sort of sits exactly in these long curves like a house plant that drapes its leaves on the floor. She was wearing a black suit and flat shoes and a silky scarf with all these orange and peach triangles printed on it. Pretty hideous. Her skin is too pale for such bright colours. And she was waving and smiling and then Ben appeared behind her looking completely different, smaller somehow in his non-school clothes.
Ben’s mother said, ‘I hope you don’t mind, Hobie, but I’m not going to be able to stay with you boys today. There’s a crisis in the office and they’re really short-staffed. Ben’s got my number and Jovita will be here for most of the morning. If you have any problems, just ring me.’
And then she showed us what was in the fridge and reminded Ben not to leave the lights on in rooms that we weren’t using and how to use the gas cooker if we wanted to heat up the New Covent Garden soup.
‘Who’s Jovita?’ I asked Ben.
‘The cleaner,’ he said.
I don’t know my cleaner’s name. I’ve never asked. I guess they could still afford one of those. Maybe not every day though. And it definitely looked like there was milk in the fridge. Which was good because I hadn’t had my mid-morning hot chocolate yet. Or my mid-morning snack.
While I embraced the novelty of heating milk up for myself in the microwave and mixing my own paste of sugar and Melt flakes in the bottom of a Mr Men mug, Ben made himself a cup of tea and we discussed the day’s activities. Now, like I said, ordinarily I’d have been the first person to dispense with the revision schedule, which looked about as enjoyable as another day with Dr Tibbert, a wasps’ nest and a power cut. But I was beginning to concede that I needed to do some actual work.
So we sat like adults at Ben’s super-small kitchen table and instead of routinely taking the piss out of the teachers and their monotonous and demanding expectations, we checked our timetable, set the timer on the oven, plugged in our laptops and got started.
By eleven thirty I was ready to kill myself. I’d already made myself two and a half hot chocolates (the milk had indeed run out by the time I got round to my third), made substantial headway with my bag of assorted snack food, broken the arm of the chair I was sitting on by assuming it would support my whole weight (well, I didn’t know it was cracked already, did I?) and been told off by Ben for scuffing the walls with my trainers.
‘I’m so bored,’ I told him. ‘I can’t go on.’
‘Hobie, you agreed that we don’t have a choice about this. Isn’t it better to just get it done? Haven’t your parents promised you, like, a treat or a holiday or something if you get a Scholarship?’
Now that was an idea that hadn’t yet crossed my mind. I haven’t really focused on the actual Scholarship exams themselves. Firstly because next May seems quite a distance away. Secondly because, well, all right, I’ll admit it, I’ve been feeling constantly like I shouldn’t even be in 8 Upper. I shouldn’t be doing Scholarship, but I am, and I hate, hate, hate to fail at stuff. I pretend I don’t care and that everything is other people’s fault, but, honestly, I really don’t want to fail. The worst thing is, if you do really badly they can make you take Common Entrance, whereas ordinarily even if you don’t do well enough to get a Scholarship they’ll usually let you in anyway. I don’t know if I could bear the humiliation. It’s hideous to even think about it, which is probably why I haven’t.
As if he could read my mind, Ben took a pint of milk out of the freezer and put it on the counter to thaw. Two goldfish globbed tragically around a spherical bowl next to the fridge, as though they were looking for something but couldn’t remember what. The kitchen was dark and gloomy.
‘Look,’ said Ben, ‘do you think you can do it or not? Are you just afraid to try?’
I threw a pencil at his head. It missed and tinkled against the side of the bin.
‘I am a Berserk. I am fearless,’ I said, digging around in my food bag for a strawberry shoelace, which I proceeded to cram, whole, into my mouth, letting the overspill hang out like intestines.
Ben sat back down and opened his Geography textbook, a monumentally humourless tome entitled The World and Man’s Place In It, which is full of detailed maps of microclimates. ‘Right then,’ he said. A smile twitched at the corners of his lips.
That’s the thing about Ben. He’s nice.
Wednesday 29th October
So the days seem to be falling into a pretty regular pattern, like amo. I wake up, have a shower, eat breakfast, take a taxi to Ben’s house, study from ten till one and two till four, come home, get changed, run on the treadmill, piss about watching TV, eat dinner, mess around on the Internet, go to sleep. Every night Mum and Dad check up on what we’ve been doing and mark their copy of our revision plan with careful ticks and bracketed notes. Zara annoys me in small doses but I’m largely spared the burden of her company.
The thrill of being unsupervised (good thing my parents assume that’s not the case) is dampened by the fact that Ben’s mother rings up every hour, on the hour, to see how we’re doing and to check we haven’t been electrocuted or abducted by the people that come to the door with leaflets about Christianity. She’s obsessed with Ben doing well. Often she comes back in her lunch hour (she works somewhere pretty nearby in some office) and sits at the table with us, maniacally checking through all of Ben’s notes and revision cards and patting her hair over and over.
‘We’ve got to show your father,’ she said to Ben when I was in the bathroom and she thought I couldn’t hear. ‘We’ve got to show him. Just because he’s run off to sit on his behind writing self-pitying claptrap that no one’s going to read, doesn’t mean we can’t get on with our lives. And when you get your Scholarship he’ll know that we don’t need him to be happy, do we?’
Wow. I’ve never heard anyone sound so angry without shouting. I wonder what Ben thinks.
In keeping with his suggestion, I have demanded a reward if I get a Scholarship. Dad laughed and said that he, personally, was sure that I’d feel so proud of my achievements that it’d be a reward in itself, but I could tell Mum would jump at the chance to dangle another carrot in front of my nose. And even though I greeted with derision her idea of taking me to Paris, just the two of us, to look at boring sculptures and buy Fendi handbags for her, I liked the idea of Tunisia and some of the other places she came up with. In Tunisia there’s this awesome hotel where the breakfast buffet has, like, everything you can think of and you can just keep filling up your plate.
It occurred to me that Ben’s mum and dad blatantly weren’t going to reward Ben if/when he gets his Scholarship except, like, by buying him a pencil case or taking him to the zoo or whatever. It’s his birthday next week and they probably aren’t going to bother much about that either. So I went on Amazon and found the biggest Metallica poster they had, because Metallica is his favourite band and the poster was of this guy with really long hair called Cliff Burton. Ben loves Cliff. And I got Mum to put in her credit card details and the Duvalle Hall address and she said I was very nice to be thinking about my friend.
Of course, Mum and Dad had to think of something for Zara too, in the unlikely event she passes the 11+. I thought she’d be well up for the Paris idea in a girlie, Sex and the City sort of way. Wearing frilly accessories and skipping about on the banks of the Seine, buying little trinkets, etc. But Zarie was totally apathetic about it and just blinked at them. Eventually she said she didn’t want to think about it in case she failed everything. She keeps getting ill at the moment and has a kind of permanent sniffle, which is an additional reason to stay away from her. Mum is going to take her to the doctor.