What I Was (3 page)

5

It was nearly a month before I saw Finn again. By means of careful questioning I uncovered rumours of a boy who lived by himself on the coast, but no one I asked seemed terribly interested in the story. If he existed he was probably desperately poor, on the dole, with an alcoholic mother who showed up occasionally and knocked him about. The hut probably stank. It was, in other words, not the sort of story that would interest my contemporaries, involving as it did poverty, misery, deprivation.

This pleased me. Finn was my fantasy and I didn’t feel inclined to share.

Please don’t get the wrong impression from my use of the word ‘fantasy’. I didn’t long to see him
in that way.
It wasn’t even that I longed to
see
him so much as to
be
him, to escape the depressed sighs of my teachers, those exalted judges of my unexalted little life.

‘Not an athlete,’ sighed Mr Parkhouse. ‘Not a student either,’ sighed my Latin, maths, geography, French, English and RE masters.

And yet I wasn’t quite ready to resign myself to the existence they imagined for me: the minor public school boy with the minor job, minor wife, minor life. I could see by their expressions that they had me pegged as the bank manager who never gets promoted, the accountant who can’t afford to take the wife and children abroad, or even (imagine the horror) a sales person of some description – in advertising, perhaps, or insurance.

The truly frightening thing was that if you stared into enough eyes and saw enough of the same opinion staring back at you, you began to imagine that they might be right. What did I know, after all? My experience of the world came from comics and detective stories and Hitchcock films starring American actresses with stiff blonde hair. The rest of the time I spent staring at teachers or out of windows, or at the obscene scribbles on lavatory walls. Despite my exquisitely honed indifference, my life telescoped down to a few sad little desires: to have second helpings of food, to wear clothes that didn’t itch or cause undue humiliation, to be left alone.

Twenty-four days after my first encounter with Finn I found myself on the beach again at low tide, this time on an unseasonably cold October day. As Mr Parkhouse led the stampede past the fishing huts, I could see smoke rising from Finn’s chimney. It curled languidly, spelling out words of welcome against the bright grey sky.

Come in,
it said. And,
It’s warm…

Reese matched me stride for stride, vigilant, ubiquitous. My bad luck charm.

‘Meet you later,’ I hissed, nodding him off in the direction of our fellow runners. He hesitated, reluctant, but eventually disappeared round the point with the rest of the class.

This time, although I sat and sat (ostensibly getting my breath back), Finn did not make an appearance. I turned myself into a stone on the beach, inanimate and invisible, ticking off the minutes in my head, wondering how long I could wait, so overcome with disappointment I might have cried. The thought of not standing once more in that room by the sea was too much to bear.

It was cold. My clothes were clammy with sweat and I shivered. There was nothing for it but to stand up, hold my breath and rap on the door. Once. Twice. Nothing. And then suddenly he was there, not inside the hut but appearing from the dunes beyond, eyes clear, walk graceful, smiling a little as if he might actually be glad to see me.

Relief rendered me speechless.

He said nothing, but reached round and opened the door for me, the gesture proprietary and still accompanied by a smile. It was not a big smile, not particularly bold or polite or ironic or glib, not asking for anything or offering anything, not stingy or careless, not, in short, like any smile I had ever experienced before. But such a smile! You could burn a hole in the world with that smile.

‘Come in,’ he said.

The tiny hut felt over-warm after my run and the fire caused little waves of steam to rise from my armpits and crotch. I talked while Finn made tea, spinning a mix of half-truths and blatant lies about life at St Oswald’s. About the Latin master, mean and miserable, who beat us relentlessly and forced us to perform indecent acts after lessons. About the rats that nested in our shoes at night and had to be ejected snarling and squealing each morning. About the food, greyish meat in brownish sauce, the tasteless purple-grey puddings, the vegetables cooked unto mush (these things, at least, were true).

‘It’s vile,’ I sighed. ‘Torture by nutrition.’

Finn laughed at that, and I felt a tiny surge of triumph: I was Scheherazade, desperate to keep him amused.

He stirred the tea in an old brown teapot, poured it out black like last time, and handed me a cup. I perched on my bench and he sat on a painted wooden chair pulled from beside the stove. For the first time in weeks I relaxed, despite the fact that the only evidence I had for his friendship was that he hadn’t yet asked me to leave. And once again, sitting in that warm room, I was swept by desire – to escape the dull tyranny of everyday life and live here, by the sea.

To be Finn.

I imagined simply disappearing. After a desultory search of the marshes, the school would give me up as a bad episode in an otherwise sterling history of mediocre achievement, inform my parents that I had perished in a freak boating accident or been struck by lightning and reduced to ash. There would be a few tears on the home front, yes, but they would forget me quickly and get on with their lives. It would be better for all concerned.

For me, particularly.

As my clothes dried and the tea warmed my insides, Finn stood up and began adding wood to the fire. With his back to me I found the courage to pick up the interrogation where I’d left it nearly a month ago.

‘Do you live here alone?’

Once again he said nothing, but his lack of a denial proved the point in my eyes.

‘But
everyone
has at least one parent.’ Having said this, it occurred to me that perhaps Finn didn’t. He might have been a product of spontaneous generation or emerged from the sea like Venus. Neither would particularly have surprised me.

I persisted. ‘A relative?’

He merely shrugged. There was a note of finality in the gesture, and I didn’t dare ask my next question, namely:
How on earth have you managed to live alone in a state of perfect grace, away from the local authority and the endless stream of oppressors who populate every minute of every normal life?
Although we were taught to be proud of living in this great parliamentary democracy, the civil servants who ran it were a fearsome bunch, a nameless mass of people with jobs (police, social workers, record-keepers, teachers, councilmen) whose sole purpose was to keep everyone shuffling from birth to death in a nice orderly queue. Surely some social service record had been passed to the local constabulary bearing a huge black question mark beside the name of Finn, and the scrawled words
Why isn’t this boy in school?

I looked around the little hut, at the tidy crammed bookcases, the framed painting of a ship, at the bench under the window with its thin mattress and faded striped blankets.

‘But how do you live?’

He looked at me, uncomprehending.

Wasn’t it obvious? ‘Money. Food.’

‘I work in the market, hauling boxes.’

‘But,’ I said, trying to prevent my voice from becoming querulous, ‘but what about
school?
’

My outrage made him smile. That smile.

‘I don’t go.’

‘You don’t go?’

He looked at me mildly. ‘No one knows I exist. My birth was never registered.’

Never registered? What a brilliant start in life! Finn not only had no parents, lived alone, didn’t go to school, but according to the government,
he didn’t actually exist.
I couldn’t believe my ears. The area was rural but not that rural. It seemed impossible that here, in this modern twentieth-century state dedicated to the improvement of all its citizens by means of relentless conformity and hard graft, a boy could simply slip through the holes of the social net.

Envy was not nearly strong enough to describe what I felt.

I wanted to reassure him (though he didn’t seem to require reassurance) that I would do everything in my power to keep the secret of his precarious existence. Even the little I knew about Finn convinced me that he was vulnerable to capture and dissection by well-meaning officials. Without conscience, they would pack him off to some bleak Dickensian children’s home where he would be bullied, buggered, humiliated, and eventually found hanging from an improvised noose in his miserable cheerless room.

I didn’t know much, but I knew that much.

Another dozen questions required answers, but before I could speak again Finn asked if I had any plans to return to school. I took it as a request and left.

As he shut the door behind me, I caught a glimpse of his face. It was inscrutable, composed. Perfect.

Rule number three: Not everyone is subject to rules.

Reese was waiting for me in our rooms, expectant and eager for the confidences I’d already forgotten promising.

‘So?’ He sat up like a trained squirrel, eyes glittering with excitement.

‘So, what?’ I was already late for history.

‘You said…’

The penny dropped. ‘I just stopped for a piss, Reese. That’s all.’

His face fell. ‘But… what about that boy?’

Collecting books and papers, pulling on my shoes, I continued to ignore him.

‘I
saw
him, you know.’

‘Clever old you,’ I said, and left the room. His habitual wretchedness left me cold back then, as so much of human weakness did.

6

It’s a strange sensation to live inside another person’s life, to wonder all the time what he’s doing, or thinking, or feeling. I wondered if Finn ever thought about me, if he ever looked over his shoulder to see if I had crossed the sand to visit him. I would like to have spent every minute of my life doing just that, but of course I couldn’t. I had some pride, after all.

Instead, I stalked him.

I caught the bus into town after school, avoiding the sweet shop and off-licence where all normal schoolboys congregated, and wandered over to the market instead. It was a big town and the stalls ran off the high street for half a mile, down a long narrow road that ended at the fish market. The imposing marble building with the dolphin carved into the balustrade was still in use, but had seen better days. It looked tattered and sad, its tall windows opaque with grime. The marble gutters beside it held pools of bloody fish entrails and it stank.

At the high street end of the market, stalls sold dresses, men’s socks and – irresistible and repellent at once – ladies’ support garments. They were ugly beige with a surgical air and stoutly constructed, as if designed to conceal unpleasant truths about marriage. Kitchen goods were next, steel teapots and cheap tin saucepans, heavy china plates with red marks above the makers’ names to indicate rejected stock. Then the fabrics: great bolts of rough grey suiting made from wool mixed with waste cellulose that would be hell to wear. Further down the road the domestic products gave way to carefully composed pyramids of fruit and veg. It being October, that meant piles of dusty beetroot, huge cauliflowers, cabbages and great wooden bins of runner beans. In two months it would all change – to parsnips, turnips, carrots and spuds.

Nothing about this market set it apart from ten thousand identical others scattered throughout England, but something of the noise and chaos excited me nonetheless. If I squinted to block out the shiny gadgets and trinkets, I could easily imagine myself a century or two earlier in a scene from Hogarth or Daumier. The faces certainly wouldn’t have changed since then – the broken veins, bulbous noses and crafty eyes lifted straight out of
A Rake’s Progress.

I stood for a minute, just taking in the colour and noise and the great clamouring chaotic bulk of humanity all busy with everyday tasks. At school we lived with so much order and ritual and so little contact with real life that we might as well have been high-security prisoners or Trappist monks. There were no girls, no pets, no harried shouting fathers or sentimental doting mothers, no old people or babies, no sisters to pick up from ballet lessons, no dogs to walk or cats to feed, no heaps of bills arriving in the post each morning. As boarders, our basic needs were fulfilled, our brains and bodies stuffed full of texts and truths, but we were desperately, terminally, catastrophically starved of real life.

I looked for Finn.

He was there all right, near the end – his outline instantly recognizable among the broad-shouldered, raw-boned race of market vendors. He had his back to me, hauling boxes off a stack and packing them into the back of a van. A hard-faced stump of a woman watched him work, occasionally indicating which set of boxes went where. She had a kerchief tied round her neck and every few seconds scanned the market with quick, noticing eyes.

I wasn’t in the mood to be noticed, and the market was already starting to thin, so I turned back and walked away from them, past the flowered nightdresses and cheap fabrics, back towards the high street. I paused at the butcher’s where a sign reading
Fresh Meat
belied the fact that something (everything) smelled of death. Flies had colonized a cow’s shin, and six glassy eyes stared sightlessly out of a trio of gently rotting sheep’s heads. I shuddered and moved on.

At the top of the narrow street, there was nothing to do but head back. A few harried, last-minute shoppers bought bruised apples and onions from stallholders anxious to pack up and be off. I walked slowly, and this time he saw me from a distance and skipped a beat in the rhythm of stacking to look again and to steal a glance over at his employer. She had seen me too, though it hardly took a genius to pick a St Oswald’s boy out of this particular crowd. Schoolboys weren’t usually interested in mops and vegetables, and in my ugly grey-and-blue uniform I stood out among the housewives like a stoat in a pram.

I approached, failing to appear casual.

Finn collected his coat while the stump-woman unzipped a money belt that hung round the rolling slabs of her midsection and pulled out a few notes. I turned away out of a sort of modesty, or perhaps it was embarrassment on Finn’s behalf. But really I wanted to stare at the exotic transaction, the exchange of work for money. Money in my world meant tuition cheques sealed in discreet white envelopes.

Finn disappeared for a moment behind the stall and reappeared with two bulging bags – I could see potatoes and carrots sticking out of one and in the other, a small pineapple, rare as an African parrot.

‘Come on,’ he said, as if I picked him up at the market every Thursday. I fell in, half a step behind and to his left, grateful and obedient as a hound.

He stopped at the baker’s and bought a loaf of brown bread. As the owner bagged it and counted out his change, I cast about, desperate for an offering worthy of my devotion. In what I imagined was a grand gesture, I pointed to the most elaborate cake in the case – an absurd pink-and-white confection decorated with roses and piped icing – not noticing until it was too late that it was a christening cake complete with pink sugar cherub in the centre. I watched in horror as the woman’s assistant, or perhaps it was her daughter, made a great show of placing the cake in a box and tying it with string. Finn glanced at me, bemused, as I handed over the money and accepted the vile thing, wishing above all wishes that time might reverse and release me from my shame.

It began to hail. We hunched our shoulders and huddled into our coats, me in my regulation school topcoat, Finn in a canvas jacket that didn’t look very warm, neither of us with gloves. Exhaling white puffs of condensation, we hurried along, our footsteps hollow in the narrow cobblestone streets. It was dark and cold and almost everyone was indoors. On each side of the narrow street, cottages leant in towards us, leaking murmuring voices and small slivers of golden light. I felt like a moth, drawn to the cosy rooms beyond the shutters and curtains, rooms crammed with figurines and ugly suites of furniture where red-faced men and women watched the telly and mongrel collies snored. Smoke from a hundred coal fires poured out of chimneys and swirled around us in the frigid air. I held the cake stiffly behind my back, wondering if I could leave it on someone’s doorstep, and lengthened my stride so my footsteps merged with Finn’s.

It wasn’t until we were out of town that he spoke. ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’

I stopped, eyes wide. ‘That’s rich coming from you.’

He kept walking, and I skipped to catch up. ‘I’ve given up. Nothing left to learn.’

He turned to gauge my expression, and one side of his mouth twitched up in amusement.

We didn’t speak again till we reached the school gates. I hesitated, not knowing how to broach the subject of coming another time to the hut. Finn waited, silent, until finally I thrust the cake at him, muttered goodbye and strode off with an unnaturally long and manly gait invented on the spot to impress.

When I finally had the courage to look back, he had vanished.