She told me about her brother’s liver condition and that she needed alcohol to kill the virus in his liver. I told her about the stash of spirits my parents kept, so we rushed back to my house where we went through the alcohol collection. She ended up taking a lot, as much as her bag could carry, saying that it would keep him well for many weeks.
She thanked me with a kiss on the cheek and ruffled my hair, saying how cute I was, and then left again. I was in heaven the rest of the day. I didn’t even go to school as by that point I was running so late anyway.
That night, my parents went down into the cellar to select their drink for the night and found eight bottles missing. They got angry with me so I told them exactly what had happened. I thought there was no way they could be angry as I had potentially saved someone’s life. Well, they thought my story was ridiculous—helping a girl escape a school, a liver disease—and it suddenly dawned on me that the story did seem a little bit contrived. Micah worked himself up into a rage over it calling me a liar and a useless idiot. They searched all through my room and the house and couldn’t find the missing bottles. I was grounded and they never trusted me again.
I didn’t see Charmaine for over a year after that, but every time I walked past St. Scholastica’s the memory of her face and voice, and of that kiss, would come flooding back. I was as in love as a nine-year-old could be. Or at least, I was in love with the idea of love. And then it dawned on me—the chapel at St. Scholastica’s was open for a service every Sunday morning, and everybody was welcome. So early one morning I put on my Sunday best, which really consisted of nothing very special, wrote a note to my ‘parents’ who were still asleep, and set off on my way to St. Scholastica’s.
I sat at the back and spent most of the service scanning the crowd for her, but being predominantly teenage girls, she was hard to find. My eyes then spotted her around the middle row, so I rushed up to her after the service to tell her I always thought about her and could never forget that morning we spent together. The reception was cold. She seemed to not even remember me, and had a confused look when I asked her whether her brother was doing okay. She rushed away before I could tell her who I was.
Still, I decided to go to St. Scholastica’s the next week, and the next, and the next. I went every Sunday for about six months, always sitting in the back row and making a quick exit at the end of the service, never trying to speak to her again. But at least I got to see her from as close as a few metres away. It was the highlight of my otherwise dreary and insipid week. On my way out, I would often say a few words to Father Culpa, like ‘great sermon,’ or ‘I liked the bible reading today,’ and then rush out so that Charmaine couldn’t catch up with me.
He obviously saw the sense of urgency and anxiety in my face week by week, and one week he invited me to morning tea in the rectory after mass. How he had the time for that I’ll never know, but he’s always been a man who had time for anybody who needed it. We had morning tea and chatted about my life at home and my foster situation. I gave him my home phone number and he said he would call in from time to time to see how everything was going. I told him how much I would love to study at St. Benedict’s, but didn’t mention that the main reason for that wanting was to be close to Charmaine.
Well, he did more than ‘call in’—a few months later, Father Culpa turned up at my door. He went into the study with my parents and they talked for hours. I now assume he was trying to convince them to pay the hefty school fees of St. Benedict’s, because when the three of them exited the study, they told me that I would be starting at St. Benedict’s for the next term. I was over the moon. Now I could practically live with Charmaine. Micah and Alice also seemed happy for me. I guess they finally saw my education as more important than money.
The first room they gave me faced towards the forest, so I said I didn’t feel comfortable with my new roommate so I could be moved to a room that looks towards St. Gertrude’s. See over there? That’s Charmaine’s room, I can see just over the wall and can see if her light is on or off. I’ve even pieced together a schedule of her classes from things that have come up between people in casual conversation. I’ve tried extra hard in French class so that I can impress her. Je pratiquons mon verbe tous la soirs. One day, she’s going to wake up to the fact that Cole is a horrible person and she’ll leave him. He’s cheating on her anyway, so maybe I’ll even expose him for that. I’ve started lifting weights in the morning so I can be strong enough to stand up to him if he gets aggressive. My life’s going to get better. I’m going to make it so.”
Peter finished typing and the gravitas of the situation dawned on him. A twelve-year-old child pined over the heart of a seventeen-year-old woman. A child so delusional that in his own mind he not only had a chance with her, but was already only one step away from being with her. Worse still, he was a child who had engineered the last three years just to be near her. For those of us well-versed in Latin, I’m sure the phrase “vanitas vanitatum” springs to mind. Or perhaps for us better at English, a three letter acronym involving an explicative may be more suitable. As for Peter, he was completely lost for words. So many questions but where to start? After a few long moments of silence, he finally decided to ask his most burning question.
“Why do you think he’s got another girl?”
“I have photos and videos of him going down to the gap in the wall late at night and meeting up with a dark-haired girl. Sometimes they stay by the wall and sometimes she comes in to St. Benedict’s with him. But never the other way around, in case Charmaine sees him.”
By this point, alarm bells were going off in Peter’s head like a fire station. Not only had he geared his life to be with her, he was now stalking her boyfriend.
“Tom, I think you need to get your mind off Charmaine and Cole for a little while. Why don’t you try and focus on something else for a little bit?”
Peter decided to confide all of this information in Jack—he was his twin after all, they shared everything. Jack was of course naturally very interested in this, seeing as how he so longed for Charmaine as well, and he read Tom’s story word for word.
“You will keep this a secret, won’t you Jack?” confirmed Peter.
“Yes. Yes, of course.” Jack promised.
But the promises of young men are often ill-thought out, plagiaristic, and marred with obvious suppression. You’ve probably all heard of the story of the young man whose father went away on a long boat voyage. Before going away, he told his son to be a good person, even giving him ten specific instructions to which the son promised to obey. I forget what they were, but the point is that the son almost immediately started disobeying as soon as his father left. The rest of the story goes as you would expect: something about the son still waiting for his father…
The next few days went by fairly uneventfully. Peter and Jack continued to become closer with their group. The week dragged on with boring literature readings, endless mathematical calculations, and tedious historical event memorising amidst a rising sense of anticipation for the Romeo and Juliet auditions later in the week. All looked forward to the slight reprieve that the weekend would bring.
CHAPTER VII
“I took a test in Existentialism. I left all
the answers blank and got 100.”
—Woody Allen
Jack cleared his throat and gazed up into the expansive darkness ahead of him.
“There was a young man who said, God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Still continues to be
When there’s no one about in the Quad”
“Yes, very good reading Jack, thank you.” Ms. Bowen yelled from the back row of the theatre. “Next!”
Jack peered out into the darkness, squinting due to the heat of the lights burning his eyes. “But Miss, don’t you want to hear more? I can do really good dirty talk for Juliet.”
“No…no, please, Jack. Please don’t. You don’t need…”
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“Miss…just have a listen, please.” Jack cut in, clearing his throat and half yelling. “Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, stray lower, where the pleasant fountains…”
“Jack!” Ms Bowen yelled. “Somebody, get him off the stage.”
“But Miss, we haven’t done the kissing audition. I think Charmaine and I should try it,” Jack pleaded as another boy ushered him off the stage.
“Next auditionee,” Ms. Bowen looked at the page and sighed. “Another Lapin. Okay, Peter, make it quick.”
“Yes, Miss. I will. Thank you for this opportunity. My poetry reading is also a limerick, and it comes from Ronald Knox.”
“Dear Sir, your astonishments odd:
I am always about in the Quad.
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by, Yours faithfully, GOD.”
“Thank you, Peter, but you look and sound exactly like Jack and we can’t have two Romeos. Next!”
And as quickly as that, the acting ambitions of the twins were dashed. But that is not particularly interesting to our story as this is not a memoir of their rise to theatrical fame. The more interesting thing was the scene that Peter found when he walked out of the theatre. See, Cole had heard Jack’s comment about kissing and he wasn’t very happy about it. He had once again cornered Jack in an intimidatingly small space and looked like he was about to take a swing, in fact it appeared that Jack’s desperate ramblings of acquittal were revving Cole up more and more.
At the very moment Peter had walked through the door, Tom, who had been on the other side of the room minding his own business, decided Jack needed help. He threw the apple he was halfway through eating straight at Cole and hit him square on the back of the head. The chaos that ensued was tumultuous. Cole looked like he was literally going to end Tom’s life and so in a moment of blurred heroism, Jack tried to wrestle Cole to the ground. Tom bolted, with Lorenz hot on his trail under a very quick and angry order from Cole.
Although nimble, Tom’s small frame was no match for Lorenz’s athleticism and he caught up with Tom just outside the front of the building, tackling him from behind and briefly grappling until he had Tom pinned down in the dirt.
“Please, Lorenz, just let me go before Cole gets here,” Tom begged.
Lorenz just smirked. “Why would I do that?”
“Because…because I know you’re a good person. You don’t really want to hurt me.”
Lorenz looked sceptical and it was clear that that approach wasn’t going to work.
“And most of all I know you don’t actually like Cole. And you think Charmaine deserves better. Please.”
Lorenz loosened his hold on Tom. This last statement had gotten to him, but then he tensed again and wound back his fist, delivering an almighty blow which resulted in a solid thud. But he had not hit Tom, he had punched the dirt next to his head so that it would seem to Cole that it had come to blows.
“Take your shirt off and give it to me. Quickly.” Lorenz looked around worryingly as Tom obliged. “I’ll rub it in the dirt and show it to Cole as evidence that I got you but you slipped away.”
“Now go. Run as fast as you can.” Tom tried to give him a quick hug but he was pushed away. Lorenz knew he might regret his mercy. He looked at his fist and noticed his knuckles had started to bleed. Exactly the effect he had been aiming for.
To help take the boys’ minds off things, Peter organised a games night in the common room for that evening, it being a Friday night they could stay up as late as they wanted. But as they wound their way through the corridors between the dining hall where they’d been having dinner, and the common room, Jack heard a small tapping sound on one of the windows that they walked past. He looked out and saw Charmaine ushering him out and mouthing the words “come out here.” He looked ahead of him: he was at the back of the group and no one had noticed that he’d stopped. He guessed he could oblige, so he turned back and went out to see her.
“Have you seen Cole?” Charmaine asked—not exactly the question Jack had hoped for.
“No, I haven’t got a clue where he is. Why?”
“We were going to go watch the sunset together, but we’re going to miss out if he doesn’t turn up soon. We were going to meet under the apple tree but . . . ”
“Watch the sunset together? Lame.” Jack said discardingly. “You can’t even see it from here, the trees are in the way.”
“Come with me.” Charmaine smiled, half dragging him away by his arm.
She led him back inside the building, and swiftly up the stairs to the third floor, the top one. They weaved through a few corridors and into a storeroom with spare blankets and pillows where she pointed up to a loose ceiling panel. Upon climbing one of the racks, she pushed up and entered the roof-space, with Jack hot on her trail. They ducked and dodged through rafter after rafter and beam after beam until Charmaine opened a small door that lead onto a narrow walkway running between the crenulations and roof of the college.
“Here we are,” she said as she sat down between two of the crenulations.
Jack looked in awe out onto the landscape that surrounded the college, the sun wasn’t far from setting and had splashed beautiful, soft hues of gold across the grounds of the college. The long shadows of trees stretched all the way to the building. They were high enough above the trees to see the lake behind the college sparkling azurely in the setting sun, and to the East, the girls’ college sitting in the middle of its manicured gardens.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Charmaine asked. “Cole and I come up here often—it’s good to get away from everyone down there.”
“Yeah, it’s really nice.” Jack said awkwardly. “But does Cole like it? I can’t imagine him spending the time to watch the sunset.”
“Well, he likes it up here because I’m up here—I’m not sure if he cares that much about the sun.” She seemed to taper off at this, a sound of sadness crept into her voice. There were a few seconds silence before Jack spoke again.
“You’re not really that into Cole, are you? You and him are so different.”
Charmaine sighed. “Well, yes, we’re very different. He’s a bit rough on the surface but he really is a good guy. And for now I’m happy to be with him.”
“For now?”
“Well, I can’t imagine spending my whole life with him, though he seems to think we should.”
They sat there looking out over the sun-kissed landscape for a few minutes enjoying each other’s company in golden silence until Jack finally summoned up the courage to ask his next question.
“There must be a reason you brought me up here. Do you want to kiss?”
Charmaine screwed up her face “No—just because I said I didn’t want to spend my whole life with Cole doesn’t mean I want to kiss you.”
“Oh, sorry.” Jack started fidgeting with his fingers. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“That’s okay—I guess I’m just worried that people assume that because I’m with Cole, I’m open for anything.” She let out a little laugh. “I guess my biggest fear is that people will associate me with him my whole life.”
“My biggest fear is that we’re just made-up characters in someone’s head. Have you ever thought about that? What if we’re just part of some novel or play or movie that someone’s writing? And our fates are sealed in the pages of a book? How do we know we even exist outside of that book? Or that our names and actions don’t have hidden meanings behind them?” Jack looked down in embarrassment—he was so nervous and awkward that he’d started babbling.
“That’s so random, Jack. That’d be one boring book.” She laughed again; her face looked even more beautiful in the fading golden light. “What would even happen?”
“Well, I don’t know,” replied Jack. “I guess what happens in most books: a love triangle, a confrontation, someone’ll probably end up dead, probably the most loveable character? I know it probably sounds stupid.”
“Yeah, it does.” Smiled Charmaine. “But it’s ok to be stupid sometimes, isn’t it? Anyway, it’s getting dark. We should probably go back now.” So they made their way back down, Charmaine went to find Cole and Jack went to the Common Room to join in his group’s festivities.
The event flew by in the usual way that fun things happen. They played many games like Monopoly, Risk, Cards, and Charades from seven p.m. until around midnight, by which point all the boys in the peer group were so tired that they decided to sleep together in the common room.
It’s often said that ninety percent of fun things happen after midnight. Being an innocent young Christian man, I naturally have no idea what they are talking about apart from harmless frivolity and unhindered euphoria such as a board game night. Many of my fondest memories have been those late nights of ridiculous silliness. I find it impossible to even explain the astounding contradiction of the whole situation. The most consequential time of your life is probably night-time: a time which decides how productive you will be during the day, and yet those nights of throwing away any worldly consequentialism are sometimes the memories that stick with you and define your experience as a human being, when you’re happy just to be a human, uninhibited by any social constructs that exist during the day. When you’re perfectly content with being silly, frivolous, and inconsequential.
We unceasingly search for those moments of euphoria, and then when they end, sometimes we are so overcome with nostalgia that we wish they had never happened at all. To me, talk of late-night gatherings conjure up a somewhat Gatsby-esque picture—cigar smoke blanketing the air, empty cocktail glasses strewn around the room, exhausted party-goers strewn with them, and Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” (or some other melancholic tune) wafting through the air from an old gramophone. Of course, this is nothing like what the boys experienced. As the clock ticked over to midnight, the boys remained slumped in their chairs with a couple sprawled on the floor. No alcohol or cigars were had and yet they seemed drunk on life, la joie de vivre.
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