The Otherlife

by Julia Gray

  And just as I am about to kiss her, she kisses me first.

  This is the closest I have ever stood to another person. I can feel her hands on my shoulder blades, where my wings would be; for the sake of symmetry, I find myself putting my hands in exactly the same place on her. Although she looks so cold, her skin is warm.

  Now we break apart and look at each other in a new way. She smiles. I smile back.

  Then, like an idiot, I say, ‘Zara, don’t you think there’s more to Jason’s death than everyone is saying?’

  She moves slightly away.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean. Who in the house liked tricks and practical jokes? Who was constantly in trouble for—’

  ‘Ben!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘But we need to look at all the evidence.’

  ‘There is no evidence to suggest that anyone had anything to do with Jason’s death. The police—’

  ‘But the police didn’t question everyone, did they?’

  They barely asked me anything myself, I think, recalling the brief visit, the sequence of seemingly random questions, the omission of the fact that my tutor was dead.

  ‘I can’t believe you’d accuse the one person who can’t defend himself,’ Zara says, slowly and sorrowfully, like an adult.

  ‘But I—’

  ‘I don’t like where you’re going with this. There are some questions people really shouldn’t ask.’

  But I promised, I say in my head. I promised the Gods. I promised Jason. I can’t stop now. Even if Zara wants me to.

  I escort her to the corner, where she hails a cab. She climbs into it without saying goodbye.

  HOBIE’S DIARY

  Monday 3rd November 2008

  So here we are at our country house. We drove down late last night and this morning Rebecca and Jason arrived, Jason taking the train to Loughborough and Rebecca in her green Mini, which is a silly car but somehow suits Rebecca who likes small, neat, brightly coloured accessories. And Rebecca said, ‘Ooh what an amazing house,’ and started asking Mum lots of tedious questions about paint colours and extensions, which of course Mum was only too thrilled to answer. Jason had a whole briefcase full of exam papers and old textbooks and he immediately went off to the dining room where we’ll be working, me and him and Ben, and started arranging everything in a fussy old-womanish way.

  Our house is called Duvalle Hall, although it used to be called something else until Grandpa bought it in, like, the 1960s or whenever, and changed it. It’s properly enormous, and when I go to other people’s country houses I always feel pleased that ours is the biggest. Alongside the house itself, which I think dates back to the 16th Century though I could be wrong, there’s a whole bunch of converted stables and outhouses which are really plush and modern, and there’s a games room out there too, with a snooker table etc. We have a croquet lawn and a swimming pool, but it’s not that big, and to be honest I mostly can’t be bothered to swim in it unless it’s really, really hot. It’s covered at the moment and there’s puddles of rainwater and dead leaves on the plastic surface that look a bit like chicken pox. There’s also a gigantic lake at the bottom of the south lawn which looks good in photographs, Mum always says. To the right of it there’s an ornamental maze that’s quite cool (one of my favourite games ever is called Lose Zara in the Maze and I’m definitely going to make sure that we play it this week) and then there’s a lot of woodland up towards the top, near where our land ends and some random farmer’s begins.

  The house is made of grey stone with a pebbly drive and rose bushes on big lawns on all sides of the house. The hall is huge and then there’s this massive wooden staircase that splits in two directions to go upstairs, with a landing halfway up and a mahogany table with flowers on it. I am sharing my room with Ben. There’s about ten other bedrooms, but I want to share with him. Rebecca and Jason are staying in the converted stables. There’s another, actual stable bit, but it’s empty now since they got rid of Zara’s pony. I want them to put an indoor climbing wall in it, or maybe a music studio. I don’t play an instrument. I used to but I would always refuse to practise and then eventually each teacher (recorder, violin, etc) said there really was no point in me learning. But I’d quite like a drum kit, now I think about it. I think I would be very good at the drums.

  As soon as we get down here, Mum suddenly gets into cooking in a big way. She rallies the troops (Zara, Clothilde, Anna the housekeeper, maybe the other women who clean and stuff) and I come along if there’s something I can lick from the spoon, and this huge production line of gloriousness gets going in the kitchen. I’m getting hungry just writing this and we only had supper an hour ago. Sometimes Dad and his friends go on shoots, and if they shoot things like pheasant or partridge or whatever then we eat them too. I’m not allowed to shoot yet, but sometimes I’m a beater, which means I get to rampage into the undergrowth and startle the birds out of their cover so that they fly up and get shot.

  The first thing I did when we got here was check my room very, very carefully for hidden cameras. I’d done a bit of research on the ‘digital clock’ in my bedroom in London and I reckon it was on a timer and had a motion-sensor function so it just captured footage when there was someone in the room. I’m not sure, but I don’t think it picked up sound as well. Luckily I never tried to smoke out of the window, but I’m trying to figure out what else they’ve seen.

  Anyway, I’m looking forward to sharing a room with Ben. It’s an awesome room, even bigger than my London one, and packed full of board games and my Grandpa’s antique model ship collection which he left me when he died, although I’d have preferred cash. They’re still rather magnificent though. I’m hoping I can talk Ben into tattooing me on the sly, and we have loads to talk about, with all the Gods and Monsters and Otherlife things.

  We did a hell of a lot of work last week. And it wasn’t all just Ben, you know. I feel like I made quite a big effort. Last night, me on the lower bunk bed and him on the upper one, we even went over the subjunctive.

  ‘You do the imperfect and I’ll do the present,’ I said.

  ‘Amarem, amares, amaret, amaremus, amaretis, amarent. Your turn.’

  ‘Amor, amaris—’

  ‘That’s the passive, not the subjunctive.’

  ‘They’re the same thing, you idiot. Aren’t they?’

  He sighed and said I should get Rebecca to explain in the morning. We abandoned the subjunctive and went through the indicative instead, person by person, until the silence fought its way into the gaps between the words and we both fell into that really deep sleep that you sleep in the countryside.

  It’s Ben’s birthday on Wednesday. He was born on the 5th of November. Quite cool, sharing your birthday with the anniversary of a failed assassination attempt on the King, when people ritualistically burn an effigy and set off shit-loads of fireworks. The cardboard tube from Amazon was waiting on the marble table in the hall when we arrived which was awesome, as with our stupendously exacting tutoring schedule there’s no way I’d have been able to get to the nearest town to go shopping. We are working with the same timings each day because Jason and Rebecca say that students like routine or something. Zara has less to do, but she’s smaller and there aren’t so many subjects at 11+. Also she and Rebecca are doing reading aloud every morning and evening and trying to incorporate all the useless new words Zara’s collected into her creative writing (examples: desiccated, esoteric, coop. I mean who’s going to use the word coop in a sentence unless they keep chickens?). Zara is so bad at creative writing it makes me almost sick. She always, always, puts in something about a boy who has ‘eyes like melting chocolate’ or a girl running through the wintry forest trying to find her mother who abandoned her when she was born or something. It’s not like I read what Zara writes, but sometimes she leaves her books lying around.

  Rebecca is also charged with making sure Zarie is eating at mealtimes. Zara adores and clearly wants to be just like Rebecca,
so she is actually copying what Rebecca does. Rebecca is vegetarian. Anna has been making quiches and risottos with goat’s cheese and semi-dried tomatoes, homemade ravioli stuffed with spinach and mascarpone, and more cheese straws than Zara has active brain cells. And Zara’s all chuffed that she and Rebecca are getting special meals and she’s eating everything on her plate. I wonder if they’ll be paying Rebecca extra for this. Now Za wants to be vegetarian too, and Mum and Dad aren’t arguing with her about it just now because they’re so grateful that she is eating. She was beginning to look a bit weird, I guess.

  Anyway this afternoon Rebecca patiently re-explained the subjunctive and then got us to spot it in translation passages. Purpose clauses and result clauses contain the subjunctive. So do indirect questions and indirect commands. My question is, did the Romans actually write in this awful constipated way or have the examiners/textbook creators/teachers just pretended that they did in order to make us work harder? And the phone rang and – surprise, surprise – it was Ben’s mother ringing up for another Progress Report. Jesus. Who gave her the landline number? I want to know. It never bloody stops ringing. I suppose Ben doesn’t have a mobile so she has no choice but to keep ringing up the house phone. If Ben tells her he got something wrong she really starts freaking out. Even from the next room I could hear this ghastly, high-pitched interrogative squeaking, like a grumpy mosquito.

  ‘So, is Ben your best friend, d’you think?’ asked Rebecca as she leafed through my grammar book.

  I considered this. ‘I suppose he is, yeah.’

  I told her about Ben’s birthday, and she got all excited and said why didn’t I make something for him?

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘What about a cake in the shape of something Ben likes? And perhaps Zara could help?’ Another of Rebecca’s policies is to do lots of creative cookery with Zara so she stops thinking food is something evil that will hurt her and is more like one of her Barbie houses.

  ‘He likes wolves,’ I said carefully.

  ‘Done.’ Rebecca laughed her little laugh that sounds like baubles clattering together as you fix them to your Christmas tree. She wears these dainty pear-shaped earrings made out of semiprecious stones like onyx and labradorite. I know because I asked.

  As Ben shambled back into the room she patted my arm and gave me a conspiratorial wink. If Rebecca was my nanny I think I would quite like that.

  I go for a lot of walks in the country. I like to get away from the house to smoke and stuff. It’s nice having Ben here because we can go out together. We went out just after five today, taking big pieces of apple pie with us, still hot from the oven. It balanced the late afternoon chill very well.

  Ben notices everything. He knows the names of the birds that call out (wood pigeon, raven) and of the little flowers that grow in the hedgerows. He sees foxes and deer. I don’t because I’m not quick enough and they flash by me while I’m still trying to figure out what direction he’s pointing in. He likes the woods that cover the top part of our land. He looks for owl pellets. He reads the clouds and knows what the weather is going to do. People used to think the Gods were responsible for the weather. I wonder if Ben thinks it’s all Odin’s doing.

  Today I took him on a massive tour. We crossed the bridge that spans the ornamental lake and then we went into the maze to look at the weird wicker statue that Mum commissioned some famous artist to design. Zara was working with Rebecca, more’s the pity. Otherwise we could have left her at the centre. I love hearing her crying as she tries to remember the difference between left and right. Then we climbed up into the woods.

  ‘Do you like it here?’ I asked him. A question I’ve never asked anyone before. Usually I don’t give two shits whether they like it or not.

  ‘It’s great,’ he said. ‘I like being close to nature.’

  Once upon a time I’d have disagreed roundly with this statement, but I understand it more now. Being close to nature is being close to the Otherlife. Thor didn’t pop into the village shop to buy a scratchcard. Frigg didn’t have a Knightsbridge hairdresser. Trees and fields and rivers and sky: these are the things of the Otherlife.

  ‘Will you tattoo me while you’re here?’

  ‘Maybe. I still think you should do it yourself.’

  ‘Plee-ease.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  I swiped at him. We walked on. I lit a cigarette, making a mental note to sit close to the wood fire when I got back to disguise the smell. The trees stood around, their leaves hanging limply, like guests about to leave a party. I kicked the ground, sending stones skimming away in low arcs.

  When we got to this really massive tree we both stopped at the same time and we were both thinking the same thing.

  ‘Yggdrasil!’ I said.

  We both stared up at it. I don’t know what kind of tree it was. It towered over us, its branches knobbly and evil-looking, twisting up and away. I chucked up a couple of rocks and we could hear them tumbling down inside the trunk, knocking against its walls with satisfying clunks as they fell.

  ‘Hollow!’ I said. ‘Awesome.’

  Odin’s Day, 5th November

  This morning I got up at 6am, which was completely unprecedented, but I really needed to find a time when I could make Ben’s present without Ben finding out, didn’t I? I squashed my alarm really aggressively, rolled out of bed and went into the bathroom to get dressed so that I didn’t wake him up. Briefly I wondered what he was dreaming about. I’m jealous of Ben’s dreams. He tells me about big landscapes full of frost giants, the great bridge in the sky, hearing Odin’s voice over the sound of storms and trumpets. I only ever dream about being in restaurants and not getting served quickly enough.

  It was still eerily dark and cold as I crossed over the courtyard, trying not to crunch too loudly on the pebbles, and opened the door to the converted stables. Rebecca had suggested going over there because the guest annexe has a fully equipped kitchen and it would be more of a secret like that. I was rather hoping she wouldn’t be dressed yet but maybe wearing one of those silky nightgown things that look gross on Mum but (I could imagine) would look exactly right on Rebecca. Sadly, though, she was already dressed and wearing an orange-and-brown striped dress and little red shoes, and was sitting in the tiny kitchen drinking coffee. Jason was also up and reading an immense book called Algorithms and Sequences and underlining things in pencil. He was also drinking coffee. I’ve never seen Jason without some kind of caffeinated beverage at his elbow.

  ‘What are you doing up so early?’ I asked him. I sort of wanted to be alone with Rebecca.

  ‘Studying,’ he said in his Northern accent. ‘You lot aren’t the only ones, you know.’ He chuckled.

  Rebecca had already, in consultation with Mum, assembled all the ingredients for Ben’s cake on the work surface and was pre-heating the oven.

  ‘We’ll start by measuring everything out,’ she said. She didn’t look like she minded being up insanely early to bake a cake. ‘Oh, Hobie, I forgot. You need to pick a design.’

  She pushed her laptop towards me and began showing me all these different wolf cakes that she’d found on the Internet, telling me that of course I could do my own if I wanted. I thought of my drawing of Hati for my as-yet-unfinished tattoo, and decided it wasn’t as good as the ones she’d found.

  Rebecca had decided on a Black Forest cake because she said it would be totally appropriate for wolves, with a painted design of a wolf howling at a full moon on it, and some wolf cupcakes with ears and snouts and eyes and teeth that Jason said looked pretty complicated and disgusting (you had to use cut-up marshmallows and about 4 different kinds of icing) but that Rebecca and I were convinced would be a piece of piss. The thought of cherries and chocolate made me realise I hadn’t had breakfast and I ran back to the main house to see if Clothilde was up yet, and if so how many bacon sandwiches she’d allow me to consume. But she wasn’t.

  I stood in front of the open fridge spooning Greek yogurt out of a carton while I deba
ted whether I could be arsed to fry myself some eggs. There wasn’t a lot of time and it was possible that Ben would emerge from the bedroom, although he’s given to sleepwalking and/or wandering about at night (as I’ve discovered) and thus is normally pretty hard to rouse in the mornings. By now it was about a quarter to seven. In the end I shook half a packet of Special K into a bowl and added whole milk, sliced banana and some Melt flakes as an experiment. I put a pain au chocolat in the microwave but left it for slightly too long so it went all spongy and gooey. I was just nudging the door open to carry my breakfast back to the stables when Zara came in with her hair all sticking up like a haystack.

  She was wearing the clown suit.

  Momentarily lost for words, I eventually said, ‘Blimey, Za, I’m glad to see my present’s such a success.’

  She shrugged. ‘I forgot my pyjamas.’

  Then she looked at the open door.

  ‘You’re baking Ben’s present!’ she squealed. ‘Rebecca said I could help. She did.’

  Her upper lip was giving way as it always does when she’s about to cry. I sighed dramatically. Actually I was pleased at the thought that someone else could do all the boring weighing and measuring.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Keep your voice down, OK? Come over when you’re dressed.’

  There was something about the sight of her, all bones and sticky-outy hair under the drapey, shiny folds of the clown suit with its massive sleeves and droopy pompoms, that made me picture a starving orphan or something.

  Two hours later we were finished. A dozen wolf heads sprouted from vanilla cupcake bases, marshmallow snouts wide open and packed full of icing spikes for teeth. They were awesome, those wolf heads, with wicked red-and-yellow eyes made from halved M&Ms and covered all over with tufty grey-brown icing. Jason had done the icing bit as he seemed to have the steadiest hand. My contribution was to order everyone around and dispose of the unwanted marshmallows. The Black Forest cake looked so good that I really didn’t know how to restrain myself until teatime. It was a shame that Ben, who’s so good at painting and whatnot, couldn’t have done the wolf design himself, but Jason didn’t do a bad job, and Zara helped with the pine trees. Rebecca took lots of photographs and put them on Facebook.