by Julia Gray
James Hetfield addresses the congregation:
‘METALLICA IS WITH YOU!’
The cry of the crowd is almost singular.
‘ARE YOU WITH US?’ he yells. ‘ARE YOU WITH US?’
I give myself up to the gig.
I am going to be sick. It’s an unstoppable wave, coming from deep down. I palm my forehead; it’s sticky with sweat. I don’t feel the headache yet, the headache that I’m sure will inevitably come. Just sick. In my bones as well as my stomach. The smell of rubbish rises up from the festival floor, creeps into my nostrils. Cigarette smoke from the couple on my left. The kids in front are jabbering like rabid monsters, arms in the air, camera phones aloft. And now – suddenly – the metalheads are gone, and a rabble of Berserks surrounds me. Iron-limbed and savage-toothed, hurling themselves about in front of the stage. The air is rich with battle cries. A line of food stalls stretches away to the left of the stage, each containing a skewered hog turning on riotous flames, and I can see Berserks throwing themselves at the roasting meat, tearing off limb-sized chunks that glimmer with grease in the fluorescent light.
As fast as I can, I begin to edge my way backwards and out of the crowd. The Otherlife – this strange and almost-unrecognisable Otherlife – is all around me: a looming, menacing circumference. I cannot escape it. If the painkillers were the only thing keeping it at bay, I cannot escape it now. A Berserk seizes my arm, his eyes pale yellow and rolling about in his head.
‘Watch it, mate,’ he says, the saliva gathering at the corners of his mouth.
I jump as a rattle of gunfire explodes from the stage. Fireworks are starting. I turn my head, catch a glimpse of pink and green starbursts dissipating into the inky sky; the green starbursts wriggle and twist like tiny flies, taking on a yellower hue. They form the face of a weeping woman. There she is: huge, etched in the sky above the stage. Firework tears flow, lemony-green, as Frigg cries for her dead son Baldr.
Finally I reach the fraying edge of the crowd, where the bars and kebab vans begin, where the less hardcore are watching from the relative comfort of rugs and chairs.
The queue for the toilets is immense. I won’t make it. I pull away and veer behind the backs of the stalls, towards the high wire fence that separates the parkland from the festival site. Rubbish is strewn over the ground. The screwed-up paper and discarded cartons look like angry flowers. I stumble this way and that, looking irrationally for an unlittered spot. Then I give up. I sink to my knees and litres of wet vomit pour out of me: water and part-digested apple, and Ben-ness. I am throwing up my own identity. In this landscape of roasting meat and metalhead Berserks, I may as well disappear entirely.
‘Ben!’
It’s Solly, kneeling at my side.
‘God, Ben, I totally blame myself. We need to get you to the medical tent. I didn’t think you’d go into withdrawal so quickly.’
He helps me to my feet, and we start back towards the complex of shops and fairground rides. Strains of Metallica float in the air behind us. I’m walking away, I think, from the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to immerse myself in fully. From the music I love best. It feels hollow, somehow: unsatisfying. I too am hollow. There is nothing inside of me.
Three girls overtake us, each waving a glowstick above her head, like a sword. Long trails of blue light, green light, purple light spread out from the tips of the glowsticks, and now the girls are girls no longer, but Valkyries mounted on horses, flame-haired and victorious. Shrieking, translucent, they take to the skies, wheeling in cawing circles like birds of prey.
‘What are you looking at?’ says Solly. ‘What’s happening?’
I stumble on a tuft of earth and he holds me up.
‘Something I can’t do anything about,’ I whisper, my throat sticky with phlegm. ‘Can’t tell what’s real any more …’
‘Shush. You’re just quoting from Metallica.’
‘No, it’s …’
‘Right now you are a poster boy for addiction,’ says Solo mon. ‘I hope you’ve learned your lesson. I know that sounds heartless, and trust me I have no wish to sound heartless, but there’s many a tragic accident that’s taken place because people—’
It’s his speech from earlier; he must have planned it before we left London.
‘I know,’ I say. ‘Because people haven’t known better. I’m an idiot.’
‘You didn’t even know what was in those painkiller things.’
‘I know,’ I say again.
Another huddle of Berserks surges past us, bear-coated and beer-laden. A heavy, orange-brown light plays about their heads. Is it the Otherlife? Or is it the painkillers leaving my system? I wonder if maybe it’s some hideous combination of both.
I feel it now: the glittering. The sides of my world curving. The soft, sad hum of Frigg’s voice, asking me for help.
And all at once a memory pushes itself up to the surface: me and Hobie, roaming through the woods on the edge of the Duvalles’ land – wolves ourselves, chanting in Norse, throwing ourselves onto the damp-leaf ground, rolling around … his white trousers darkening with soil … sun setting overhead …
‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if the Berserks were here?’
‘Imagine a line of them coming out into that clearing …’
‘Painted …’
‘With Odin watching …’
I stagger again, and then – suddenly – I stop, and grab his arm.
I remember.
I remember.
‘Solly. What was the thing you were saying earlier?’
‘About drugs?’
‘About mushrooms. You said it’s easy … it’s easy to …’
‘I said it’s easy to mistake a poisonous mushroom for one containing psilocybin. That what you mean? But what—’
I bend down and throw up again. With damp hands I wipe my hair away from my face. I can feel the little dent in the side of my head where Dad hit me with the cricket bat. I can feel the broken beat of my pulse in the middle of my forehead. Solly hands me a bottle of water and I drink from it, feeling the liquid trickle down my throat, cooling my heart.
‘Ben. Are you OK?’
I look at him and say, ‘I don’t know how, or why, but I think I do know what killed Jason.’
HOBIE’S DIARY
Thor’s Day, 6th November 2008
It turned out that Ben’s mother’s arrival had been planned by Mum as a kind of birthday surprise. I don’t think Ben much likes surprises, and you’d have thought his mum would have known that, frankly. Anyway. Getting Ben’s mother to come and visit (and not just for the day – she’s bloody staying until the end of the week, which is awful) is just the kind of thing that my mother would think of. Mum is the Year 8 Parent Rep and likes doing showy-offy things like ordering cupcakes personalised with initials and edible glitter and getting celebrities to come in and do workshops. I can just imagine her doing her Bountiful Lady of the Manor thing down the phone, all ‘Oh but you absolutely must come for a few days … No, we don’t dress for dinner, don’t be silly … Ben will be so thrilled’ etc etc.
I’m not too sure Ben is that thrilled. In his house, all last week, you could really feel it when his mother was around. She was kind of suffocating, like a really hot sleeping bag. The way she stared at him sometimes when he was bending over his laptop, murmuring to himself. Like she wanted to eat him. The more I think about it, the less strange I find it that she smashed the goldfish bowl. No wonder he’s always thinking about the Otherlife. No wonder he has it on the wall. He must want to really live there, I reckon, to get away from the way she looks at him.
Of course she wanted a detailed update from Jason and Rebecca and insisted on being shown all the work we’d done so far. I mean, obviously first she hugged Ben and gave him a present of a new laptop case and begrudgingly showed him an email from his father that she’d received earlier this morning saying happy birthday, and then she practically frogmarched both tutors into the dining room for a full-on Progres
s Report.
She was suspicious of Rebecca.
‘Really? You’re an actress? Did you study drama?’ she was asking in the manner of a courtroom judge, oblivious to the fact that she’s not the one paying £200 per tutor, per day, so she could just shut up and be grateful Rebecca wasn’t a lunatic/paedophile/Communist.
‘No, Classics,’ smiled Rebecca, her earrings dancing.
‘Where?’
‘Oxford.’
Ben’s mother seemed appeased. Then she cross-examined Jason about whether he had access to the mark schemes for the Maths and Science papers.
‘Well,’ he explained, ‘the schools don’t tend to release their marking criteria. With Scholarship it’s often about looking for a kind of brilliance, displayed in a certain way.’
‘I don’t understand. Are you saying Ben isn’t brilliant?’
Like Rebecca, Jason was very patient. He must be used to it, I guess.
Ben and I looked at each other and crept out of the room.
We raced out of the house, crossing the courtyard, climbing over the gate behind the guesthouses and then running through the old paddock where Zara used to ride. Then we charged up the hill and into the woods. It was a really crisp afternoon, already almost getting dark, the trees loaded with red and gold. The edge of the forest is where I normally turn back if I’ve just left the house to stretch my legs and have a smoke or whatever, but Ben dived into the woods and I could tell that he was being Skǫll again, without the wolf suit this time, and I thought, What the hell, and ran after him.
Twigs and dying leaves crunched under our feet as we careered in and out of the trees, baying crazily in the setting sun. The air was thick with the smells of wet earth and decay and pine bark. Ben threw himself to the ground and started rolling around in the leaves and I thought it was amazing how he can just become Skǫll like that. I still feel like I’m pretending to be a wolf. Pretending to be Hati. I wish I believed everything the way Ben does. I didn’t want to roll around on the ground because I was wearing these new really expensive trousers.
‘Ben,’ I said, ‘teach me some more Norse.’
He unrolled to his feet and shook his fringe.
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, aiming a kick at a low-hanging branch to see if I could break it. ‘Like a verb or something. Like être or whatever.’
‘Ek em, þú ert, hann er, vér erum, þér eruð, þeir eru.'
‘Jesus! Slow down. Again.’
He recited the verb once more and I did my best to repeat it back to him while we walked on into the middle of the forest. (Later I checked, so I could copy it down properly, with all the accents and everything.) How does Ben have time to learn this stuff? You’d think we had our hands full enough with Scholarship work. I breathed in cold air and closed my eyes as I walked and tried to imagine that we weren’t in the middle of England at all, and that it wasn’t 2008 any longer. It was hard. Normally when I close my eyes I see random shapes and holographic lights, imprints from computer games. I see menus, rows of sandwiches in Pret a Manger, set out like library books. I hear gunfire. I think about what I want people to give me. I think about Rugby. But I tried, I really tried. I realised I’d never heard the proper sounds of the forest before, but now that I was listening I could hear the swoosh swoosh of the wind in the branches and the chatter of birds, the noise of twigs breaking. Everything was alive. I squinted at Ben and he had his eyes sort of closed too. I knew that he could see the Otherlife. I knew that it was inside him and he was inside it.
I opened my eyes and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if the Berserks were here?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Imagine a line of them coming out into that clearing—’
‘And another one on that side—’
‘Dressed as wolves—’
‘Painted—’
‘With Odin watching—’
We looked at each other. I could almost feel it in my bones. Why couldn’t it be real? Why couldn’t I see what Ben could see? After Halloween, he told me that when we robbed the little kids and were racing away down the road, before the Great Steak Heist, he actually saw part of Naglfar, the awesome ship made of dead men’s nails. Just sort of sailing down Westbourne Grove.
Yggdrasil was waiting for us. At its base was this crop of mushrooms, a perfect cloud of them with white helmets. Quite big too – bigger than puffballs. I fell on them immediately.
‘Awesome! We can pick them and eat them.’
One of my favourite starters is smoked mozzarella with mushrooms and Parma ham, which I always order if we go to our local Italian restaurant. I was already fumbling in my pocket for a Kleenex or something to wrap them up in.
Ben said dreamily, ‘Some people think the Berserks ate hallucinogenic mushrooms before they went into battle. They think that’s why they were so frenzied and fearless.’
‘What do you mean, hallucinogenic?’
‘The mushrooms sent them into a trance. They had visions.’
I breathed out. Even more awesome.
I reached out my hand to break off a mushroom at the base of the stem. Ben opened his eyes.
‘Wait, Hobie. No.’
‘Why not?’
‘They could be poisonous.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Ben. Either they’re food or they’ll send us into a psycho Berserk state. Which’d be amazing.’
‘They could be poisonous,’ he repeated obstinately. ‘You need to check.’
Then, to my surprise, Ben took a running leap and began to climb. I hesitated, then followed. I’m much better at gym and sports so I should have been leading the way really. The tree was sticky with yellowy moss, and pieces of bark peeled away as we scrabbled for hand and footholds. Ivy covered the surface like a fur wrap, and sprigs of white berries clung here and there. It was harder than a climbing wall, but much more interesting. Ben laid his head against the tree.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Listening to it breathing.’
We got to the top and crouched together in the nest of branches, peering down into the hollow, which was spectacularly black like a ghost-train tunnel. Anything could’ve been down there: a roosting owl, a monster of some kind, the skeletons of long-dead cats. I wasn’t about to suggest that we should climb down into it, but I could tell that Ben wasn’t going to be persuaded not to. He turned round and slithered backwards and then jumped and I heard him land with a muffled crunch.
‘Are you OK?’ I yelled.
‘Fine. Come down!’ he yelled back.
‘Can you get back up?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Watch out then.’ And I dropped into the hole.
It was weird, like being inside the stomach of a strange beast. I flicked my wolf lighter and Ben’s skin leaped out like a pale flash against the black walls. His pupils were huge and he was grinning. Ben really loves secret places.
‘I wish we could stay here,’ he said, ‘in the tree. I could live in a tree.’
Well, I bloody couldn’t. Breathing was a bit difficult, for a start. I crouched down and craned my neck to catch a glimpse of purple sky, crisscrossed with branches like one of Mrs Ottoboni’s woodcuts. It made me feel like there was definitely some oxygen coming from somewhere, which was a relief. I wished I’d brought a snack, even just a Fruit Roll-Up or something. It was definitely getting on for teatime. And it was cold. On the other hand, I liked being down there with Ben. Away from the grown-ups. Away from Zara. No books and no papers. Just Norse words and being wolves and the Otherlife.
‘Tell me a story,’ I said. For a weird, scary moment I really wanted to hold his hand. I didn’t though, of course.
So he told me about the World Tree, and how it was watered by maidens called Fate and Being and Necessity, and preyed on by animals like the serpent that was curled at the root along with hundreds of other snakes. And a squirrel called Ratatoskr scurried up and down the tree carrying insults back and forth from the serpent
to this huge eagle that sat at the top.
‘What kind of tree was it?’ I asked. I was beginning to feel sleepy, like the cold was slowing my bones.
‘An ash tree.’ His voice echoed slightly.
‘Like this one?’
‘Nah. This is an oak.’
Shit! Suddenly I remembered about the wolf cakes. It was a special tea and we were going to be late. We climbed back out of the tree, which was seriously quite frightening at certain points, but luckily there were a few knobbly things to hold on to and the prospect of eating my own bodyweight in cupcakes (and maybe some hot buttered toast – I don’t know why but I always want a lot of hot buttered toast when I’m in the country) propelled me to the top. I helped Ben get up too and then we fairly hurtled out of the woods and down the lanes while the sky grew darker overhead.
‘What’s the massive rush all of a sudden?’ he panted as we scrambled over the gate.
‘It’s your birthday, you moron. You can’t miss your own birthday tea, can you?’
We clattered into the house just as Clothilde was setting the teapots and cups and things in front of the fire. ‘Where have you been?’ she cried. ‘Your mothers were inquiètes.’
Dad came wandering into the sitting room, looking much more comfortable in his chunky knitted sweater than he ever does in his office suits.
‘Hey, boys,’ he said. ‘How was your hike? Did you find anything interesting?’
We shrugged and piled onto the rug in front of the hearth like the wolves we still were on the inside, huddling as close to the fire as we could.
Mum came in. She was wearing a dark green dress and a pink cardigan which I thought was a silly combination. Her face looked sort of twitchy and I found out later that she’d been weighing Zara, which had ended up with both of them screaming at each other. Zara had gained half a kilo and had gone into this massive panic despite Mum and Rebecca telling her it was a good thing, and apparently Zara shouted at Mum that it was all her fault for putting her on a diet in the first place and she hated her and she hated herself and she was going to fail the 11+ no matter what happened. It was lucky Rebecca was there because she succeeded in talking Zara out of the bathroom (Zara had locked the door) and now she’d taken Zara to the guesthouse to watch The Princess Diaries.