The Otherlife

by Julia Gray

  Ben was looking really stressed out. He’s really good at all this academic stuff so I don’t know why he’s so wound up at the moment, but maybe it’s because his mum keeps pestering him about his progress. I basically dragged him out the door and down the road, past all the dodgy shops full of girls with prams and Ugg boots and people muttering to themselves and pushing tartan shopping trolleys. We walked over the canal and through an estate and eventually we got to the Golborne Road, which I know about because Clothilde and I drive past on the way to Ben’s. And there were a few shops along that road that I knew would be perfect.

  The first one we tried had exactly what we needed: loads and loads of fur coats of all shapes and sizes hanging up outside or lumped together on rails. I started rifling through them and pretty soon Ben began to see the point and helped me look. And finally we found two coats small enough to fit us. One was grey with white flecks and the other was quite dark, almost black, with a big fat collar, and when we tried them on they came down to about mid-thigh. The shop lady obviously thought we were delightful, and when we explained to her that we wanted to be wolves for Halloween she pointed us in the direction of this massive bin full of hats and gloves and scarves, and we pulled out big hats with flaps that could cover our ears and were nearly the same colour as our coats. I wanted the black one, of course, because it was cooler, and Ben said he didn’t mind which one he had. And we got black gloves for me and white gloves for Ben that were made of really thin material like suede or something. And the woman told us that if we went into a couple of other shops we might be able to find some wolf masks if we looked hard enough. So I paid her £90 for everything and she threw in some moth-eaten old fur wrap things she said we could cut up for tails. Then we trailed about poking around in all these different shops until we found a proper fancy-dress place that had loads and loads of masks; I mean you could get a rubber head of Prince Charles if you wanted, or about fifteen different clown ones that made me think of Zara. Perhaps I could make her wear that enormous clown suit when she goes trick-or-treating with her pathetic little friends. That would amuse me loads.

  ‘Here,’ said Ben, chucking what appeared to be a piece of black leather at me. I looked down and saw that it was half a wolf’s head with holes for eyes and all over it this amazing spidery design in patches of shiny silver. Awesome! He’d found one for himself too, in red and gold. Last but not least, we bought a couple of packets of fangs. We were sorted.

  Like I said, once I start spending I honestly feel like I can’t stop. I made Ben go via the newsagent’s with me on the way back to his house (I’m starting to like the man behind the counter who blatantly doesn’t care that I’m under 18) because I wanted a can of Coke, something I’m routinely forbidden from drinking at home. Just as we were going inside Ben sort of froze and I asked him impatiently what the matter was, thinking he’d had a sudden vision of Odin descending from the dusky clouds or whatever. But he stood totally still and I followed his gaze, which led across the road to this cafe place, and there, sitting in the window, was Ben’s mum.

  And sitting opposite her was Ben’s dad.

  I stared from them to him and back again, trying to figure out what might be going on in his head. I know Ben hasn’t seen his dad (who is a novelist, apparently quite a crap one according to the reviews on Amazon, but then they’re probably all written by Ben’s mum or something) for like weeks and weeks. I think he misses him, although he never says so. If I was Ben, I’d definitely miss living in a bigger house and going out for dinner and stuff. But Ben’s weird. Who knows what he thinks about anything?

  A solitary tear, like one of those glass beads Zara puts in her dolls’ hair, trailed down his cheek. I thought of Freyja, twin sister of Freyr, who wept tears of red gold when her husband disappeared.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  Then Ben took off across the street, sending two cyclists and a 228 bus skidding to a standstill as he went. I looked on as he tugged open the cafe door and waited for his parents’ heads to turn. I felt like it just wasn’t right to watch what happened next, a bit like when you walk in on someone changing and you know you shouldn’t stare at their naked body. Normally I don’t care or I think it’s funny. But I went into the newsagent’s, like I’d meant to, and bought my can of Coke.

  I hung about in there for a while, figuring that Ben’d be embarrassed if I loomed into view while he was talking to his dad who he hasn’t seen for so long, and who appears to be meeting his mum without bothering to come and see Ben as well. I cast around for something else to buy, something else to do. And my eye lit upon the super-cheap photocopier in the corner of the shop.

  Now that was an idea.

  Although the corner-shop guy seemed bemused by my desire to photocopy the same page 200 times, he was perfectly happy to let me get on with it.

  BEN

  Solomon and I are in the ICT Room, looking at hotels within a two-mile radius of the Download site, and running a couple of Bitesize Revision pages on separate tabs in case teachers are about. We have a history paper after lunch. Source questions on the Cold War. School vibrates with that strange, stifling quietness that always creeps up around exam time. It seems at odds with the blue skies and lush trees, the carefree games of cricket and tennis that go on in cinematic Technicolor on the outside.

  ‘So,’ says Solomon, ‘who is this Zara person?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The one you keep texting under the table.’

  ‘Just … someone that I used to know,’ I say, inadvertently quoting a song that’s always on the radio.

  ‘But who is she? Is she one of the Carlisles? It’s the family that owns all those racehorses, isn’t it? Or is it the toilet-seat manufacturers? I think their youngest is called Zara.’

  Solomon is a kind of walking database of social trivia. His parents instilled this in him at birth: an innate need to ‘place’ people on a social scale that takes into account money, property and titles.

  ‘She’s no one,’ I say. ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Oh, just a face then. Or do you like her for her brain?’

  He unwraps a sandwich. We’re allowed to bring in our own food during exams.

  ‘What’s her last name?’

  ‘Duvalle,’ I say, with reluctance, thinking how right he is: I do like her for her brain. ‘Look, Sol, why don’t we just camp at Download? It’s so much cheaper.’

  ‘This hotel’s only a hundred and twenty-eight pounds!’ he protests.

  ‘Per night.’

  ‘Per night, that’s nothing. That’s – what, oh, you do the maths, Bennikin. It’s only three stars though. That might be a challenge.’

  I look out of the window at the low brick walls of the science block, its tinted windows strangely sinister in the late May sun. The ICT suite is empty apart from us: everyone else is in the library, stocking up on dates and quotes for the last two-hour paper of the week. Or they’re outside, free from worry, free from duty, on their backs on the lawn, absorbing the sunlight.

  ‘It’s about the music though,’ I say.

  Solly pats my arm. ‘Yeah, I know. Course we can camp. I’ll borrow some gear off my sister. She’s always racing off to the Isle of Wight and whatnot. Peeing into a funnel and wearing face paint. Aren’t you eating?’

  ‘Maybe in a bit. Got a headache.’

  ‘The thing about you, Ben,’ says Solly, ‘is that you’re continually deeply uncomfortable in your own skin. You want to be somewhere else all the time. You are not actually in pain; you’ve manifested a constant sense of being in pain in order to necessitate the taking of medication. This gives you a feeling of control.’

  ‘Spare me your therapy-speak,’ I say.

  ‘Don’t forget our deal,’ he replies.

  Suddenly the room erupts into a burst of body odour and unwashed hair and I feel fat hot hands clamping my shoulders. Jake and Ally Stonehill: hockey champions known for their brutal stickwork and ferocious tackling. Feared by the entire lower sc
hool, and most of the teachers. Jake is one year above us; Ally is two. Committed metalheads. I don’t hang out with them a lot at school. Sometimes we go to gigs together. I think maybe they’ve been abroad somewhere; I haven’t seen them since their house party.

  I half get out of my chair as Ally grabs me in a headlock. Up close, the sweat on his face threatens to diffuse onto mine. The threads of his corn-coloured fringe are greasy and stale from late nights and beer-clouded gigs. Jake and Ally see every band that plays. Even school nights, whatever. Their parents fear them too.

  He pulls at the back of my head.

  ‘Looking goooood, Benny! Looking good!’

  ‘Yeah, not too bad,’ I say. I’ve been trying to grow my hair for a long time. Sooner or later someone’ll make me cut it.

  Jake makes the sign of the mano cornuto at me. Also known as the maloik. Index and little fingers pointing forward, out of a balled fist. I make it back.

  Solly coughs. He’s edged himself all the way over to the other side of the bank of desks.

  ‘What ho,’ he says.

  Jake blinks at the screen in front of me. He looks at the train times, the hotel dates, the location. Puts two and two together and, eventually, makes four.

  ‘You’re going to Download!’ he exclaims.

  Exams don’t figure prominently in the Stonehills’ Life Priorities. They’re so rich that you can see their house on Google Earth. School would have evicted them long ago had it not been for the newly refurbished (and rechristened) Stonehill Sports Hall and the fact that they’re unbeatable at games.

  ‘Awesome,’ yells Ally. ‘Gods … of … RAWK!’

  ‘We got tickets already,’ says Jake. ‘Early bird.’ He smirks.

  ‘Are you taking the 5.36 on the Thursday night?’ Solomon asks politely, no doubt planning an alternative. ‘Or are you driving?’

  ‘Yar,’ roars Ally. ‘Want a lift?’

  Solly is the kind of person they’d beat up for fun, except that I like Solomon. And Jake and Ally like me. Die-hard metalheads stick together.

  When they’ve gone, overturning box files, swearing, kicking the door, Solly turns to me and frowns.

  ‘I know, I know,’ I tell him. ‘We don’t have to hang out with them when we get there.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ he says. ‘I’ve just realised who Zara is. Hobie’s sister!’

  It’s my turn to frown. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Our mothers were friends,’ he says. ‘Hobie and I used to have playdates in Year 3. He once tried to make me eat a spider.’

  A pause.

  ‘Let’s not think about him,’ says Solomon, turning back to the computer. ‘Not now anyway. Sorry, Ben.’

  Solly’s wrong. I haven’t been thinking about Zara. I haven’t been texting her constantly. Just a couple of times. I may have written her name once or twice on the back of a past paper, but that was just to see how it looked written down in my handwriting. Hobie often called her Za or Zarie, I remember. In my spidery scrawl, the Z looks too harsh, too forbidding, with its jagged angles and straight lines. I try to make it more calligraphic, curving the lines slightly, as Jason would have done. I wish I had a Rotring.

  Hobie was always pretty horrible to Zara. I didn’t really know her at all. I only saw her at playdates, and then that half term at Duvalle Hall. I remember her as a gentle – almost too gentle – person, who loved animals and soft fabrics and pretty colours. Her room in Duvalle Hall was beautiful. There was a patchwork quilt pinned above the bed, something she’d inherited from her great-grandmother. Rosy hexagons, a riot of flowers and polka dots, a dark purple border. On the shelves between the windows that looked down across the lawn were six or seven large, real-looking dolls, with long eyelashes and placid faces. Each one, Zara once told me, was an American Girl, from a different period in history. There was a Settler one with blonde plaits, a 1920s tomboyish one, a princessy Victorian orphan in a sumptuous velvet dress. It was the Victorian one that I most often saw her wandering about the house with, whispering in its ear. Samantha, I think it was called.

  Hobie found me in Zara’s room, listening to her explaining the histories of her dolls, and extracted me with typical urgency. ‘What are you doing in there?’ he demanded. ‘You’ll become infected with gayness. Let’s go outside. Come on.’ And he manhandled me out of the room, fingers digging into my arm. The only game he really liked playing with Zara was Lose Zara in the Maze.

  I want to say that I told him he shouldn’t be so cruel to Zara. But I’m not sure I did. It makes me feel a bit sick, the thought of that. He used to tell her she was fat; I remember that quite clearly. She wasn’t fat, not ever. Even if she had been, I don’t see why it should have mattered to anyone, not unless she was life-threateningly overweight. She wasn’t even plump. By the time I went to stay at Duvalle Hall she was skin and bone. And he still laughed at her for being chubby. It amused him, I think, to see how much power he had over her. Also, he liked to eat her food.

  OK, maybe I have been thinking about Zara a bit. And, since it isn’t really possible to think about Zara without thinking about Hobie, I’ve been thinking about him too.

  ‘Ready?’ says Solly, pouring a sachet of powdered vitamin C into his water bottle.

  ‘Ready,’ I say, logging off.

  Side by side, we make our way down to the exam hall.

  I wake up on Sunday with a foul, bone-splitting pain between my ears. It feels as if my mouth is stuffed full of cloth. My eyes, when I open them, jam themselves shut in horror. Emergency. The glass by my bed is empty, so I go downstairs in my tracksuit bottoms and Sad But True T-shirt to fetch a drink. I will take a third of a pill, and no more. Solomon is right: I ought to cut down.

  Mum is sitting at the kitchen table. The blinds are shut; the garden door is closed. She’s on the phone. Her mobile is palmed against her cheek, and she’s whispering into it.

  ‘Can’t tell him now,’ she says.

  Then something I can’t hear, as I stand in the doorway.

  ‘Just … hold tight. I’ll be … but try not to …’

  She looks up and our eyes lock. Her tone shifts, becomes bright. Fake, like plastic flowers.

  ‘But we’ll speak later, all right, Jane?’

  Unlikely that it would Aunt Jane on the phone, at 9 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time.

  ‘Bye for now, then. Bye.’ She puts the phone down, like it’s perfectly normal to be sitting and whispering in the gloom of an unlit kitchen.

  ‘Ben, you’re up early!’ she says warmly. She twiddles the blinds, floods the kitchen with light. Soon she’ll be in full-on breakfast mode.

  ‘Coffee? A boiled egg?’

  ‘Who was that on the phone?’ I blurt out. ‘Was it Dad?’

  I don’t know why I’ve just said that. But I can see in the sudden flash of panic in her eyes, the way her nostrils flare slightly, that I’m right.

  ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong with Dad?’

  She takes a box of eggs out of the fridge. Lifts one up to the light, checking for cracks.

  ‘I should have got some smoked salmon,’ she murmurs. ‘They have offcuts at Co-op.’

  ‘I don’t want any smoked salmon! What’s the matter with Dad? Is he ill?’

  ‘Ben, calm down, please. Your dad’s fine.’

  ‘Why do you keep lying about everything?’ I shout at her, my voice catching, as if I’ve surprised it with my own daring.

  She stops rifling through the fridge and looks at me – actually at me, rather than through me. Like Zara did, for a moment, outside the Underworld. Then she sits down at the table, her forehead in her hands. When she speaks, she speaks quietly.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Jason. You probably think I didn’t care about him, that I only cared about your Scholarship exams. He was a deeply brilliant tutor and a very nice person who didn’t deserve to die, suddenly, like that. I’m sorry your father and I couldn’t make it work. I’m sorry I lost my job. I’m sorry I
sold your harp. I’m sorry about the goldfish. I’m sorry about everything.’

  I don’t know what to say. I stand there, looking out from under my fringe.

  ‘You told the police not to tell me,’ I say accusingly. ‘When they came to talk to me. You are such a liar that you actually got the police to lie to me too.’

  ‘Not lie. Just … not tell you the … the whole truth.’

  ‘Big difference.’

  ‘It was for …’

  ‘Don’t keep saying it.’

  She closes her eyes for a second.

  ‘As for your dad,’ she says, ‘he’s had one of his episodes. You know how he gets.’

  ‘Are you going to go and see him?’

  ‘I think I should. He sounded in quite a bad way.’

  ‘When I went round the other day he was drinking again,’ I tell her.

  ‘Poor Robin,’ she says.

  ‘He thinks Jason took an overdose,’ I say. ‘Did you know that? Is that what you think too?’

  She tilts her head a little, as though it’s a new thought.

  ‘No,’ she says at last. ‘That’s just the sort of thing Robin would think.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I thought perhaps he was diabetic, asthmatic … I don’t know. There are so many possible reasons why he could have died. But an overdose: no. I wouldn’t allow a drug addict to tutor my son.’

  ‘Did you not ask the Duvalles?’

  ‘Believe it or not, Ben, I haven’t seen either of them since. I haven’t particularly wanted to. Hobie was not a good influence on you. I should never have let you play with him.’

  I watch the knot of her dark hair rise and fall as she busies herself at the worktop, her back turned. I don’t see how she can be right, any more than Dad can be right. I don’t believe there are so many possible reasons why Jason could have died.

  I down a pint of water and accept her offering of a boiled egg. We eat in silence, with the radio tinkling in the background.

  After breakfast, Mum loads up the car with books and mineral water and cake and drives to Battersea. I don’t know how I feel about this. She used to hate Dad. Now she’s going on a rescue mission.