by Matt Haig
All those times you thought I was doing the accounts, or scanning the auction lists, or repairing antiques, I would be holding the speaker to my ear and listening to your conversations with Imogen.
Out of the crackle, your voices quiet as ghosts:
YOU: I kissed him.
HER: Ugh.
YOU: It was nice.
HER: Oh my God! Ugh. I'm sorry. It's just. Ugh.
YOU: I said a kiss. Nothing else. I like him. More than like.
HER: I suppose you heard Mozart or something, when you kissed him.
YOU: Stop it.
HER: I'm sorry. It's just –
YOU: What?
HER: He's –
YOU: He's what? He doesn't live in a stately home? It's not a Jane Austen novel, you know.
HER: Go on. He's what?
YOU: Never mind. You're just prejudiced.
HER: Ha. Pride and Prejudice.
YOU: Funny.
HER: I'm not a snob. I'm just not that into boys in sportswear. It doesn't really do it for me.
YOU: He's a boxer. That's why he –
HER: Classy.
YOU: Stop it. He's nice. He's kind. You can see it. In his eyes. You know, there's a depth. It's not what he says, it's –
HER: Bryony, you are the strangest individual sometimes. Do you even know what he's into?
YOU: What?
HER: Music and stuff. God, could you imagine him at the Cockpit?
You said something that I failed to catch, as Higgins had just jumped up on the bed at that point, crying for his forgotten supper.
HER: What does he like, band-wise?
YOU: I don't know. We didn't talk about it.
HER: I couldn't put my lips on a boy's face without knowing what he was into. It would be like, I don't know, going to church without knowing the religion.
YOU: I didn't plan to kiss him. It just happened.
HER: Oh my God. Your eyes are glazing over. You're falling for him.
YOU: No. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not.
HER: Denny, Denny, wherefore art thou Denny?
YOU: I'm warning you.
HER: Give me my Denny: and, when he shall die,/Take him and cut him out in little stars.
YOU: Stop it. Stop. It.
I heard the thump of a pillow and your words stopped and became laughter and then I heard her offer you something and the window opened and it was at this point I knocked on your door. You eventually opened it, and sighed at the sight of me.
'Bryony, would you be able to feed Higgins while I get on with the dinner,' I think I said.
You looked at me with disgust, but no suspicion, and Imogen left with her unsmoked cigarettes.
I have learned that in this life there are two principal types of belonging, namely the type you are born into and the type you have to prove. This is the difference between a family and a tribe. A family requires no test, whereas a tribe always expects, and needs new proof from those furthest from its centre.
I believe that Reuben lacked that essential core feeling of belonging he should have got from us, from me specifically, and that is why his focus was always out towards the tribe. And what proof did that tribe require? That tribe which Denny had also been a part of? What did Reuben need to do to show his allegiance, to show he wasn't just a middle-class boy who would cut and run at the earliest opportunity? Well, we already knew the answer in part, didn't we? But other information came, as the York Daily Record rushed a crowd of foreign thoughts into my brain.
The boy's face stared out from the second page. The shaven head and hard, squinting eyes. It was the one who had staggered backwards, away from the scene of Reuben's death. And then, in bold Times Roman: TEEN SUICIDE NIGHTMARE. I read on, picking up only the more crucial words. 'Aaron Tully', 'overdose', 'his mother's midweek nightshift', 'suicide note', 'I am sorry', 'on antidepressants', 'single parent', 'distraught', 'living nightmare', 'police', 'no suspicion'. And then his address, no less horrifying for being cushioned inside the last line: '17 Winchelsea Avenue'.
I closed my eyes and I saw this boy. He pressed a bottle into my chest. 'There you go, Tea-stain, take a sup on that.'
'I'm all right,' I said. 'I don't want a drink.'
We were in a living room with toys on the floor. We were in school uniform. It was daylight outside. There were other boys there too, laughing, and I felt their laughter as bats flapping around my head.
'Drink it.'
'No, not that 'un,' another boy said. The small boy who had been with Denny and Aaron the night Reuben died. The one who vomited on the pavement. 'Me mam will kill me.'
'Shut up, Cam,' Aaron said, then to me: 'Drink it.'
His hard eyes offered no alternative so I took the bottle and read the label. Hierbas Ibicencas. A cheap liquor picked up as a souvenir from a package holiday, no doubt.
Within the dark green glass there was a cutting from a plant which had spikes for leaves. I drank it back, and kept going. It tasted foul. Rough and hot and ancient, liquid amber drawn from the belly of the earth. I wanted it to stop. My novice tongue couldn't cope with this. Yet I was aware of my audience, aware that this was one of those times when I could prove myself to my tribe. When I could belong.
The drink burned my chest but I kept on, forcing the gulps, as some of the other boys did drum rolls on the furniture. There was a rising cheer, from everyone apart from Aaron, and the noise was inseparable from the taste and the heat I felt as it went down. And then it was over and the room spun round and I saw the other boys. I saw their faces. Gargoyles and comedy masks, nudging laughter out of the others.
The laughter was aimed at me. At Reuben.
He leaned in. Aaron Tully.
'Tea-stain's going to throw up. Must have seen himself in the mirror. The ugly ——.' He walked his fingers across my cheek, towards the mark. 'Let's go to Australia.'
The laughter increased and I saw Denny. The only one not laughing. He faded away, erased from the scene, as I sat down on a chair.
Someone was hammering out random noise on a keyboard. A cheap child's toy.
'That noise,' I mumbled (as he must have also mumbled), 'is me.'
The burning laughter kept on, and I closed my eyes and lost myself in the loud and accidental notes of our existence.
*
We humans love to believe the thoughts inside our heads are collected as if in some deep and private well, each equipped with only one bucket, and from which we alone are allowed to drink. We go through our life and watch experience rain into our well, and we keep lowering the bucket every day safe in the knowledge that the water we drink from is protected by a circular wall of stone. We understand that the same light or dark clouds may rain into others, but we like to think that the water running into ours is our own private supply.
But do you ever think, as Tristram Shandy did, that your mind is full of borrowed thoughts?
Do you feel ideas and images leaking in from other places?
Well, yes, I know you do. Or, at least, know you did. Back in those halcyon days, when you used to talk to me in a decent manner, when you used to always go on about peculiar coincidences. The unusual word that you would say two seconds before it was spoken on the radio. The times you thought about Cynthia just as she telephoned.
Now, imagine these little glimpses became panoramic views. Imagine you could feel another's pain as you feel your own. Then, take the next little step and imagine that you found yourself with knowledge you didn't want, knowledge so complete it gave you snatches of another's experience wrapped inside your present. Imagine if there were times when the false barriers we build between one another – even those between life and death – were suddenly washed away and there, in the merging of eternal souls, we could remember things we never knew, and feel a pain we could never have felt.
Oh, Bryony, I swear it was his memories, inside me. All of them. Aaron Tully. Mr Weeks. Uriah Heep. I could not have imagined these things. They were there, washing in to the well, every
time he entered. I struggled to remember him and so he was punishing me, filling those vacant spaces with the footage of his experience. Adjusting the levels. Realigning the balance. Preparing for the final flood.
You had gone to school.
The shop hadn't opened but I was sitting at the counter with some benzene, a clean rag and a dismantled late-Victorian bracket clock. Halfway through cleaning one of the wheels I sensed a presence outside and looked up to see the gargantuan figure of George Weeks behind the glass, his pale face looking in with an intense expression I couldn't quite interpret. How long had he been there? I had no idea, as I had been fully absorbed with the clock for at least ten minutes, but once I had seen him I left it and went over to open the door.
'Hello,' he said, in a voice that seemed to come from somewhere further away than his mouth.
He was smartly dressed, with his neat hair and chequered shirt and his tie, and he quietly apologised for being early. I beckoned him inside, and he listened mutely as I ran through everything.
I concluded by showing him the auction catalogues behind the counter. 'Now, George, do you have anything you want to ask me?'
He nodded and pointed over to the wooden case that housed the percussion pistol. 'What's in there?'
'Oh,' I said. 'Just some old . . . bits and pieces. Sewing things. To help me repair upholstery . . . fabrics . . .'
'Can I look?'
'No,' I said, the word stopping his hand as it reached forward. 'No, George, you can't.'
I was already thinking this was a mistake. The whole thing. I should never have agreed to this. If only Cynthia hadn't gone and acquired herself a hernia. If only Mrs Weeks hadn't had such an effect on me.
In my mind I rehearsed the conversation I would have with his mother ('Mrs Weeks, I truly feel George's talents would be better suited elsewhere'). However, I have to say that these early doubts were slowly erased through the day. Indeed, George showed himself to be a highly interested and capable young man. He handled the till well, proved to have his mother's knowledge on a range of customer-initiated subjects (Royal Worcester, the correct application of French polish, how to identify calf leather) and he even helped clean and repair the bracket clock I had been occupied with that morning.
True, his manner was somewhat awkward, and his heavy breathing certainly disconcerted Higgins, but our takings were up and this was surely a happy omen. Indeed, even his awkwardness began to grow on me. I interpreted his long silences and shifting glances as signs of embarrassment. Symptoms of the shame he felt over his previous behaviour, when he had tripped me over in the field. I even had the confidence to leave him on his own in the shop for twenty minutes while I fetched you from school.
'I can't wait for you to meet my new assistant,' I said, as you pressed your head against the car window.
'Who is it?' you said, with only the most lethargic interest.
'You'll see.'
You kept on looking out at the streets and traffic sliding by and said nothing else.
It was becoming clearer to you, wasn't it? Your disdain for me was growing with your affection for Denny. This disdain and this affection were twin forces, which could neither be quenched nor intensified in isolation. That blasted boy had devoted three minutes of his existence to protecting you, that evening in the stables, and that had swung it for you hadn't it? Three minutes! I had spent your entire life, an entire fifteen years, devoted solely to that same task and yet I still couldn't measure up. What did that say about me? Or about you? I had no idea.
'It isn't real, you know,' I told you, as we waited at the crossroads. 'What you are feeling. For him. That boy.' I felt your suspicious eyes and decided to tread more carefully. I couldn't let you know I had overheard your conversation with Imogen, or seen you at Clifford's Tower. 'That boy who came around to see you, I only got rid of him to make things simpler. He's clearly got it into his head that he stands a chance with you and I believe it's best we nip it in the bud right now. Don't you, Bryony?'
And then out I stepped into more dangerous territory again. 'It will pass far sooner than you realise. It will only be a few days without seeing him and you will come to your senses and, once you have, you will apologise. And you will thank me for looking after you.'
You closed your eyes, determined not to take my bait. I tried to change the subject, asking how you were feeling about the festival, but you ignored me. Maybe you were feeling worried about the cello lesson you had missed. I didn't know. Even the sight of George Weeks himself, back at the shop, produced no visible response out of you.
'Hello, Bryony,' he said, as he smoothed the back of his hair with his hand.
'Bryony, say hello,' I said.
I am trying to remember your reaction. To try and detect something in your face that may have gone unnoticed at the time. You didn't say anything. I can remember that much. You ignored us both and headed upstairs to practise your cello and make up for that lost lesson.
I might have grumbled to George about you.
A mistake, I realise, and one more for which I must say sorry.
Over the years I have developed a keen eye for differentiating between a counterfeit and the genuine article. When visiting furniture dealers I have learned to identify artificial finishes that only simulate age. I can detect a genuine patina, with a deep and attractive sheen on the wood, as easily as I can spot a silver mark on a piece of cutlery.
Just looking at and touching an item enables me to authenticate it. Sometimes all the validating signs can be there and you know there is something wrong, as though the object leaks an invisible shame that only those who have known and loved the genuine equivalents can detect.
Oh how I wish I had this gift with people!
How I wish I could look into someone's eyes, unblinded by my thousand prejudices, and assess the nature of their soul. If only I could have been able to know where the truth lay in all of those things.
You see, my fatal flaw has not simply been that I have allowed my soul to lose strength and weaken, and become at times wholly possessed. That is just an element of this tragedy. Indeed, the possession has only in part been an external one. The other curse has been spawned by my very own nature, and this curse has been with me for as long as I can remember.
To be succinct about it, I have never quite known how to trust myself, and this tends to thwart and twist my relations with others. Even Reuben's attacks upon me seem wholly seeded within the fertile soils of my own flawed being. Had I not always transferred my own guilt regarding your mother's demise (a guilt which leapt out of that prior, more unjustified sense of responsibility regarding my own mother's suicide) onto your brother? Hadn't I, myself, been the source of everything?
Wasn't I always liable to take truths as untruths, to mistake an Iago for a loyal Horatio?
Wasn't this how everything became so distorted? How my own will to protect became as dangerous as his will to harm?
Wasn't it, ultimately, the same thing? Hadn't it all been fathered by the same unbalanced love. Yes. I can answer it now. Yes, it was. It was.
Oh, Bryony, it was.
You stood in front of us, all our old and expectant faces that were waiting for you to break the silence.
'Look at her, Terence,' Cynthia whispered. 'Isn't she magnificent?'
As you stood there I began to worry that nerves would get the better of you, that you would cower under the pressure of the audience. The audience who watched, who waited, who shifted uncomfortably as the pause stretched further.
You glanced at your grandmother. Cynthia tried to hide the discomfort she was feeling with her hernia and reassured you with her warm, dark-lipped smile.
You closed your eyes, like Pablo Casals always had during his performances, and began to play. I closed my eyes too, in order to feel the same darkness, to feel what you were feeling. And in that voluntary darkness I heard the opening bars and imagined the music becoming an invisible fortress around you, something that protected you from the audi
ence and from your own fears, giving you the confidence you needed.
What were they hearing, these people? Was it the waking into despair Beethoven intended or simply the soothing satisfaction gained from watching a fifteen-year-old girl playing classical music?
Someone walked into the hall, and stood at the back. I let the light back in, and you did too. I turned to see his boxer's face. And the dark eyes of a very hungry little boy admiring a feast too rich for his appetite. You fixed your gaze on him and he smiled and scratched his brow.
I felt such hatred for him then, and wished I could stop the messages you carried to him with your music. His presence was a curse that tarnished the whole thing for me. Indeed, I was relieved when it was over and the applause rained down on you and we were able to take you away from those hungry eyes. Back home, oblivious to the danger that lay waiting.
As I write this all down I notice strange recurrences, echoes and symmetries. For instance, your accident on the stairs. An accident that so vividly recalled that last image of your mother lying on the shop floor. An accident I was convinced was not an accident at all.
Now, you may well have believed it was a coincidence that the evening of your cello concert was also the evening Higgins turned on you, but I had an altogether different understanding.
Of course, I appreciate the changeable nature of our feline friends. Indeed, I had always admired T. S. Eliot's suggestion that we should give our cats three different names, yet even you must admit that Higgins had rarely been anything other than a Higgins. He wasn't like our long-lost Matilda who, for every minute she would spend as Matilda, would have two more as a Queen of Sheba or a Mad Bertha. As you know, Higgins was never like that. We knew when he was hungry, certainly, but for the most part he had an even and gentle temperament, and kept himself to himself. This made his sudden transformation all the more curious.
I came into the living room and knew something was wrong.
'Bryony, what's the matter?'
You were wincing, holding your hands. I saw the blood, rolling like a tear towards your thumb. 'Higgins scratched me.'