The Otherlife

by Julia Gray

  Then there were games and feasting supervised by Frodo’s unsmiling, witchlike-in-all-seasons mother. Ben and I didn’t join in as much as we could have done because we felt full. Full, and sort of smug. To be honest, I hadn’t thought Ben had it in him to be that naughty.

  I really slept in yesterday morning. It had already been agreed that I could take the whole weekend off from revision. Despite being mightily pissed off that I still wasn’t allowed to go to Football Club, I was looking forward to some proper lounging about.

  My father is half-American so really goes in for brunch on Saturdays – when he’s not on a business trip, that is. Brunch involves smoked salmon, freshly baked bagels, orange juice squeezed by Clothilde using our Kenwood Multipro machine, fruit salad and eggs cooked by Dad any way you like. Awesome.

  I could hear Zara in her room, so I put my head round the door. I resisted the temptation to boast about the Great Steak Heist, perpetrated by ferocious mystery wolves.

  ‘Coming down, Za?’

  She was sitting at her desk, halfway through a Non-Verbal Reasoning paper.

  ‘Not hungry,’ she said, not looking up. ‘Got to finish this so Rebecca can mark it.’

  I peered over her shoulder. ‘That’s wrong, that’s wrong and that’s wrong,’ I said, pointing at Find the Missing Shape and Which of the Shapes on the Right Contains the Hidden Shape on the Left. She flung her head down over the paper and wrapped her arms around it.

  ‘Go away, Hobie!’

  ‘OK, okaay!’

  I pottered downstairs.

  Mum and Dad were at the second-cup-of-coffee stage. The radio was burbling in the background. Newspapers were littering the table, providing a comprehensive spread of Sports, Travel and Money news. I poured myself a big glass of orange juice and picked out the strawberries from the fruit salad while I pondered what mode of eggs to choose. Fried are the most greasily satisfying. If you go for scrambled it always feels like it’s not quite enough. Poached? They look like boobs, I always think, which is diverting.

  ‘I just can’t imagine who would have done something like that,’ Mum was saying mournfully. She was swaddled in a white robe.

  ‘Oh, how did your gala go, Mum?’ I asked with my mouth full.

  Dad sliced a bagel in two and began smothering it with Philadelphia.

  ‘Someone at the venue with a sick sense of humour?’ he said. ‘One of the waiters perhaps?’

  I froze with my hand still out to grab a handful of papaya chunks from the bowl. Were they talking about the Great Steak Heist? Had it somehow reached the national papers? Wicked!

  But they weren’t talking about that.

  The Gala Dinner had been a huge success, apparently, with a silent auction thing that had raised a hundred thousand pounds. Mum had come home elated and triumphant and had already started planning next year’s event.

  Then, at 9 this morning, the phone had started ringing.

  It turned out that all those Gala Dinner goodie bags had contained, along with the salted caramels and hand cream and spa vouchers etc, a photocopy of a tasteless magazine article entitled ‘Cannibal Ate My Mum with Ketchup and Peas’.

  No one could think how it had happened.

  BEN

  It’s Rebecca who plunges towards me, a rush of familiar, heathery perfume reaching me first.

  ‘Darling, dearest, lovely Ben,’ she says into my earlobe, squeezing me tight. ‘How are you, my friend? Zara said she’d been seeing you.’

  We stand on the stone path that leads from the church to the street. Breezes ruffle the tops of the trees. Zara’s hands are blue.

  Rebecca slips an arm around Zara’s shoulders and says to me, ‘Come for tea? We’ll go to my flat. It’s a nice walk from here. Quickly though – it’s going to pour with rain. My geraniums will be thrilled!’

  As we hurry down Ladbroke Grove, I try to figure out what Rebecca’s relationship is to Zara now. Is she still a tutor, or more of a friend? A big sister? The way she holds Zara’s arm, just above the elbow, as we cross the road, makes me think that she’s still in a position of authority. Or perhaps she just cares about Zara, who seems so fragile. Another person from the past has crept back into my life. It’s hard to accept that Jason never will.

  Rebecca keeps up a carol of conversation the whole way.

  ‘And what about your heavy metal, Ben? Are you still a fan, or have you moved on to postmodern jazz?’

  ‘Still into it,’ I say, thinking of Solomon.

  ‘I remember you and Hobie going absolutely nuts over it at Duvalle Hall. There was a song about wolves, wasn’t there? And then one by Hemingway.’

  ‘Well, it was by Metallica, but—’

  ‘Oh yes. “For Whom The Bell Tolls”!’ Rebecca laughs.

  I tell her about Download in a couple of weeks’ time. Less. In one week and four days, I’ll be there. I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to an event so much.

  ‘Download?’ says Zara. ‘That’s held in the grounds of Donington Park, I think. We see signs for it, on the motorway. It’s quite near Duvalle Hall, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. I only ever went to Duvalle Hall once, by car. I don’t remember its location. I do, however, remember Hobie telling me that Duvalle Hall was the second-largest estate in the whole county.

  ‘Well,’ says Rebecca, ‘Zara and I will be there that weekend, so if you get sick of the noise and the smell, you’ll know where to find us.’

  A group of tourists headed to Portobello straggles past us, spilling onto the road. To our left is a funeral parlour, dressed solemnly in black. Zara goes into BestOne to buy a Diet Coke; Rebecca and I wait outside. If Rebecca ran a funeral parlour, I find myself thinking, she’d dispense with the tedium of tradition. No more shiny black. No more urns and lilies. The outside would be cobalt blue with baked-in sparkles. Inside there’d be a fountain, where mysterious fish with bright, feathery tails would swim, and a string quartet would sit at the back making gentle music.

  ‘What’s the deal with you and Zara?’ I blurt out, hoping I’m not sounding rude.

  ‘I suppose what you’d call me is a mentor,’ Rebecca says thoughtfully. ‘I do offer some homework support, but that’s not really the kind of help that Zarie needs. I keep an eye on her, especially if Ike and Elsie are away. She’s been very ill for quite a while. I try to phone or text every day, and then I go and stay there sometimes. Or at Duvalle Hall. You really should come and visit us there some time. She’d like that.’

  I look at her. ‘Don’t you think …? Don’t you think it will bring back bad memories?’

  ‘For Zara, you mean?’

  ‘For everyone.’

  We watch Zara in the queue. I’m not quite sure, but from the way she is holding her purse, I think she’s counting out, in pennies and five-pence pieces, the exact price of her drink. To save the cashier from having to give her change.

  ‘I wonder if sometimes we are all pushing those memories away,’ says Rebecca, ‘when actually we need to face up to the past. Then again, I think to myself, sometimes, that I will try to talk to Zara about Hobie, but … I don’t.’

  Rebecca’s flat is on the third floor of a narrow terraced house in a tree-lined street. There are no cobalt-blue surfaces or floating fish, and you could fit the whole of it in any of the rooms in either of Hobie’s houses. But the floorboards are glossy and white and the walls are covered with pictures and sketches and photographs. There is a tiny roof terrace crammed with herbs and flowers. The air smells of warm milk and baking spices. There are toys everywhere and a big wooden abacus sits in the fireplace. Rebecca must do quite a lot of child-minding, as well as looking after Zara. I wonder if she ever did any more acting. I remember she was an actress once.

  As though she’s reading my mind, Rebecca points out a long row of silver discs in wooden frames, like they have in recording studios. Above, the CD sleeves in separate frames: dragons, trains, a full moon. Children’s books. Some of them famous.


  ‘Those are mine,’ she says. ‘Audiobooks. I did the voices.’

  Zara is making tea. She spoons loose leaves into a wire holder and pours boiling water into the pot.

  Rebecca takes a cake out of a tin and cuts big, healthy slices.

  ‘You aren’t allergic to nuts, are you, Ben?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘This is my grandmother’s recipe. The secret is soaking the fruit overnight.’

  We don’t sit on the terrace, because the rain is now pattering down, in that gradual way that suggests a full-blown storm is on its way. The roof is alive with drums. You can hear the whoosh of trains hurtling across the flyover, the clink of Zara’s spoon in her teacup.

  I watch Zara pull her cake apart, raisin by crumb. Her hands aren’t blue any more. They’re white, the skin almost translucent. The lines of her bones are clearly visible. Rebecca and I talk about books, about my GCSEs, about my plans. All the time I’m answering, I’m trying to use more than monosyllables, because Rebecca’s one of those people who makes you want to speak properly, with good adverbs and interesting synonyms. I’m looking at Zara’s fingers undoing her cake, the too-slenderness of her wrist. And despite the hollowing out of my stomach, the acid wave of sickness that always kicks in when my head hurts, I force myself to eat all my cake. To show Zara that it’s possible. In all fairness, it’s delicious.

  The doorbell rings and Rebecca jumps up.

  ‘That’ll be my neighbour,’ she says.

  When she returns, she is carrying a little boy of maybe two or three. His hair is the colour of weak sunshine and his arms are wrapped chubbily about Rebecca’s neck.

  ‘Ben, you must meet Ashley. Ashley, shake hands,’ she commands.

  The little boy extends a pudgy arm, with a pudgy hand at the end of it. His fingers fan out, like seaweed fronds, or a tiny starfish. I shake hands with just my index finger. I’ve never done that before.

  ‘He’s grown,’ says Zara.

  ‘He’ll be as tall as an oak tree one day. Won’t you, my little acorn?’ says Rebecca, as she kisses him. I stare at his face, his little round nose and olive-green eyes. Watch as he kisses her back.

  ‘Zaza is here,’ the child pronounces, reaching messily for a fragment of cake.

  Rebecca passes him over to Zara and he reaches out for a strand of her hair, his face smeared with icing sugar and spittle.

  ‘How old is your son?’ I ask.

  ‘He’ll be three in July. It goes so fast.’

  ‘I like the name.’ In Norse mythology, Askr was the first man. Ash and Elm, the two original trees. I wonder if Rebecca knows that.

  ‘He doesn’t look an awful lot like me,’ she muses, ‘but I’m holding out for his acting abilities.’

  I wonder if I look like Mum. I think I have her features: her beaky nose and serious brow. I have Dad’s eyes though.

  ‘Then again,’ Rebecca goes on, ‘he’s the spitting image of his father. You can probably tell, can’t you, Ben?’

  I blink at her. Wonder what she means.

  And then I see.

  I see whose son he is.

  ‘He’s … Jason’s?’

  Rebecca sighs. ‘I thought Zara would’ve told you. Jason and I weren’t exactly going out. But we did get – close, at Duvalle Hall. That lovely converted stables. You can sort of imagine. Of all the strange things to happen to me, it must have been the strangest. An accident. A death. A life. The events of that weekend … they changed me. I cared too much about how things looked, before, about the surface of things. It’s only when something like that happens to you that you realise there are stronger undercurrents in this world, that there are things more powerful than beauty. Sorry. That probably doesn’t make sense. I tend to ramble.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say.

  ‘I’d like to say that I loved Jason,’ says Rebecca, ‘but I didn’t know him well enough. I love him in retrospect though. I love his memory.’

  She smiles. Her eyes look moist.

  ‘He talked about death quite often, oddly. He had all these deep-seated beliefs about honouring the dead, proper burials for people in case they came back and haunted you …’

  ‘Did you go to his funeral?’

  She shakes her head. ‘It was very small, I think. Up in Yorkshire. You have to remember, I wasn’t really a friend of Jason’s. We knew each other as fellow-tutors; that was all. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks after he was buried that I even realised I was pregnant.’

  I say, more harshly than I mean to: ‘I would have wanted to be there. Nobody even told me he was dead.’

  ‘Oh, Ben. That’s … I suppose your parents wanted to protect you. It was such a difficult time.’

  ‘They wanted him to get his Scholarship,’ adds Zara, refilling our cups.

  ‘How did he die, Rebecca? Do you know?’ I ask.

  She winces.

  ‘I’ll never forget it, Ben. Finding him. We weren’t even meant to stay that night, but my car wouldn’t start. It had been a long week. You were adorable and really motivated, but trying to get Hobie to work properly was like pulling teeth. The meal went on for ages. Then the fireworks … I couldn’t see Jason, and I thought he must have gone to bed early. In the morning I knocked on his door, and when there was no answer I thought that perhaps he had gone for a walk. But I got a feeling, Ben, a kind of eerie feeling that something bad had happened. I went into his room, and saw that his bed hadn’t been slept in. I ran outside and found him, curled up on his side, just near the rhododendrons. His face was all swollen and puffy. His eyes were closed.’

  ‘Sorry, Rebecca,’ I say. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Ashley clambers over her, his fingers closing over a small gold R around her neck. She kisses his hair, inhaling him.

  ‘Wasn’t there an investigation? A coroner’s report?’ I say.

  ‘Of course there was. Yes.’

  Zara gets up and crosses over to the window. She places her hands on the pane in five-point stars. Rebecca glances at her, and then at me.

  I begin to feel another presence in the room. The air curves inwards, bending into a different shape; hot and cold currents cross and recross, jostling for space, as the floral-print cushions, the children’s books and house plants take on the unreal gloss that tells me that something else is here, something other. Subtly, a golden light hangs for a moment near Zara’s head. A red light. A light of lemony-green. They tense and pulse, briefly, and are gone.

  Zara turns around suddenly and says, ‘It’s OK. You can tell us.’

  Rebecca pauses briefly. ‘It was an allergy of some kind. People do have terribly bad reactions to things sometimes. They go into anaphylactic shock. That’s how Jason died.’

  ‘But an allergy to what?’ I say.

  ‘I really, truly don’t know,’ says Rebecca, taking a sip of tea. ‘I was never told. I don’t think anyone ever established it. Maybe he was stung by a bee.’

  In November? That hardly seems likely. Does she really believe that he might have been stung by a bee? I realise it’s quite hard to tell what Rebecca is really thinking.

  ‘What about his parents?’ I say. ‘You must see them sometimes. Surely they must have told you what he was allergic to. Have you never asked them?’

  ‘Both his parents had died, long before he did. The only relative of Jason’s I ever met was Great-Aunt Ivy. I took Ashley to meet her in Fortnum & Mason’s. We had tea. It was all very polite. We didn’t talk about his death. It didn’t really seem like the place for it.’

  When we come out onto the doorstep it’s raining hard. The street is deserted. Water paints it a dirty, tarnished silver. I walk right out into the middle of the road, taking off my hoodie, allowing the water to drum into the fibres of my T-shirt, the pockets of my jeans. If I stand here long enough, the rain will erode me like a limestone stump, dissolving me into the gutter. Either that, or a car will run me over. I tip my head back so that a shelf of water cascades onto the plane of my forehead. In my head,
Slayer’s ‘Reign in Blood’ begins. Distilled into my senses, arms out in a scarecrow’s pose, I wait to be washed away.

  ‘Ben. What on earth are you doing? Are you OK?’

  The uninvited roof of a small umbrella interrupts my silence. Now a hand on my shoulder. She guides me back to the kerb.

  ‘Put your hoodie back on,’ says Zara, eyes blue and unavoidable. ‘And tell me what’s wrong.’

  ‘I’m sick to death,’ I say, relishing the unpleasantness of the word, ‘of being lied to.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She’s lying. She knows. She knows what really killed Jason and she’s lying.’

  Zara’s voice is measured and composed. ‘Rebecca never lies. She isn’t like that, Ben. It’s just the way she is. She doesn’t think about things that are painful and ugly, like death. And she doesn’t … She wouldn’t want to upset me, by talking about it all.’

  ‘An allergy?! It sounds completely made up. If Jason had been allergic to anything, I’d have known about it. She’d have known about it. She’d have remembered what they found, instead of being all vague and mysterious and …’

  ‘Calm down. Breathe.’

  Her hand rests on my arm; her fingers are white-and-blue from the cold. There’s a damp heat around my nose. Tears at the corners of my eyes. I imagine Jason’s PhD papers stacked, unfinished and waiting for him on a desk he’d never return to. I imagine Rebecca, carrying a child he’d never meet, her earrings glittering in gentle sorrow.

  I will find out what happened, Jason.

  ‘Cry if you want to,’ says Zara, reaching her arms up around my back. Her teeth are chattering. So are mine. The top of her head comes to just beneath my chin. Her hair is darkened by water to a burnt-toast brown. The roof of the umbrella roars with syncopated rain. I cannot cry in front of her.

  ‘You’re a very kind person,’ I say.

  I place my hands on her shoulders and move her away from me slightly so we’re staring at each other. I notice that she has tiny freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her teeth are white and even and small. She was probably wearing lip gloss earlier today; there’s a tiny smudge of coral above her lip line. Her eyes are vivid and clear-seeing. I wonder at the roundabout of my emotions; that the tangled rage of five minutes ago could have been so completely replaced with something so completely different.