What I Was (6 page)

12

Everything I know about Finn came in fragments, tiny shards to number and label and fit together with fake-casual persistence. Did he notice how I scratched at the surface of his hut with my delicate tools? How I studied his life and times? He was the cat that walked by himself and all places were the same to him, but wasn’t he also human? Was anyone immune to the sort of attention I offered?

The story circulating to explain my absences from school claimed that I periodically visited a desperate lecherous old townie for whom I was doling out personal services at a pound a shot. Sometimes it was a man, sometimes a desperate housewife, sometimes an ageing slapper with a yen for young boys.

Of course the official line on my whereabouts was slightly different: I told Clifton-Mogg I liked to commune with nature, an excuse he accepted with bored approval. It was a novel experience to find myself clinging to St Oswald’s, terrified I might be found unworthy of the effort required to sustain me in their midst.

Not that I was willing to forego the risk that made the experience worthwhile.

I planned my next journey for a Saturday, when I might catch the end of the low tide after morning lessons. The return crossing wouldn’t be possible until late night, but I was willing to swim back if I had to.

‘Where you off to?’ It was Reese.

‘Nowhere.’

‘Can I come?’ Wheedling.

‘Come nowhere?’

‘You go to the beach. I know you do.’

I snorted. ‘In January?’

His voice turned menacing. ‘I know where you go. I’ve followed you.’

Jesus.

‘You don’t have to worry. I won’t tell.’

‘Tell what, exactly?’

‘About your friend.’

‘You’re my only friend, Reese.’ The attempt at sarcasm came out wrong, more sincere than I’d intended, and to my horror he blushed with pleasure. I looked up at him slowly, adjusting my gaze to a fine beam of intensity and lowering my voice to a whisper. ‘And if you don’t keep your mouth shut I’ll have to kill you.’

His voice shook. ‘OK.’

‘Not that I’m hiding anything.’

‘N-no.’

I felt a sudden twinge of compassion. ‘Look. I’ll take you with me sometime, I swear.’ And then, unable to bear another second, I ran.

For once the crossing was easy, and I found Finn balanced on the hut roof, attempting to hammer down pieces of black asbestos tile where it leaked. He barely acknowledged my presence, which pleased me – I wanted to be taken for granted, considered part of his landscape. I slouched down on the south side of the hut, shielded from the wind, and began handing up tools as he needed them. The sun shone, he seemed content with my company, and an easiness settled over us. When I’d succeeded in passing every tool he owned up to the roof, I stretched out on the scrubby ground and closed my eyes.

‘This is the life.’ Based on unseasonable temperatures, the Met Office was predicting an early spring. Not that I put faith in weathermen, but the winter sunshine made me optimistic. I lay perfectly still, face pointed at the sky, and could actually feel my greyish pallor warming to gold. ‘What’s the worst thing about living by yourself?’

Finn looked at me over the edge of the roof, frowning. ‘Sorry?’

‘Oh, come on,’ I said, venturing beyond my usual deference. ‘There must be something. I know the
good
things. What about the rest? No one to talk to? Cooking for yourself? No post?’

He blinked, uncomprehending, and turned back to his work. ‘Don’t be daft.’

I propped myself up on one elbow and drew shapes in the sand. Well, it hadn’t exactly been the scintillating conversation that attracted me in the first place. Finn seemed genuinely unclear as to the purpose of conversation. He could convey information. He could make an enquiry regarding something concrete or the advisability of immediate action. But I knew if I asked which he preferred, cabbage or sprouts, or how he envisaged his future, or if he missed his gran, he would have no answer to give. Not because he was hiding the information, but because his mind didn’t work that way. You might as well ask a duck what it thinks of capitalism.

I lay flat, considering these facts. The winter sun beat down, warming the bits of me that showed; the rest of me huddled further down into my overcoat.

It’s not that he lacked poetry. But his poetry was of the body, not the mind. He spoke it in the way he moved, the way he held a hammer, rowed a boat, built a fire. I, on the other hand, was like a brain in a box, a beating heart in a coal scuttle.

‘Don’t you want to know the worst thing about school?’ I held my breath, twitching the bait ever so gently across the surface of the pond.

There was a beat of silence. Then: ‘All right.’

Well, well, well. I doubted he was interested in the answer, but he was making an effort. There was something hugely touching about the unnaturalness of it.

‘The worst thing is… the lousy food, the cold, the boredom, the isolation. Winters that go on forever. Years stretching ahead, incarcerated behind brick walls with no hope of reprieve. The rules.’

Finn leant over to look at me, bemused.

I was on a roll. ‘Not to mention the loneliness. And at the same time, the crowdedness. The never being really alone, just to think, or rest or do something private –anything private. You can’t even go to the toilet in private. And if you want company, real company, not just people hanging about making a noise, that’s when you realize how lonely you are.’

Finn had stopped working to listen. He was silent for a long moment, as if testing the words one by one to see if they made a connection, lit a light bulb, rang a bell. I watched the process, fascinated, watched the possibilities flit across the surface of his face. Hopeful, ever hopeful.

And then I watched him lose interest. The roof needed fixing. The tide was high. A few years ago he’d lived with his gran and now he lived alone. These were the facts. Conjecture of the sort I thrived on made no sense to him at all.

I wanted to say
Jesus, Finn,
didn’t anyone ever talk to you? But I could imagine that no one had. People around here didn’t waste words; language was a tool, not a treat. You didn’t roll it around on your tongue, revel in it.

I sighed. And yet… how was it that Finn’s silences turned my words to dust? No matter how heartfelt my thoughts, the noises I made when I was with him took on the quality of monkeys jabbering in trees. While his silence had the power to shatter glass.

I needed him to talk. ‘What’s your first memory?’

He blinked at the absurd intimacy of the question and for a moment remained silent. But just as I moved on to something else in my head, he answered. ‘I remember my mother, talking. Shouting, actually, before she left.’ He paused again. ‘I was nearly three.’

I guessed that his mum ran away because she was too young and too selfish to look after a baby. Or that rural life seemed unbearably dull to a beautiful nineteen-year-old. You only had to look at Finn to know she couldn’t have been plain. Poor girl. Poor Finn.

He caught my expression, and smiled. ‘You needn’t look so tragic. You don’t miss what you haven’t got.’

I nodded, composing my features into a man-of-the-world’s appreciation of emotional complexity. It was something I understood, but not exactly in the form that he presented it. In my conventional middle-class world, mothers loved their children and fathers pushed them away for their own good. I was ready (anxious even) to have these truths dispelled, but it took some consideration.

Finn climbed down, cleaned each tool carefully, and replaced them in the wooden toolbox he kept under the stairs. Then, without a word, he set off, wading through the channel, which had started to fill. I followed, reluctantly, wondering if I could run back and get the kayak.

‘The earliest thing I remember is the sea,’ he said, heading north along the beach and tossing a stone far out into the surf. ‘Gran used to put me out on a blanket on the beach when I was a few weeks old and let me entertain myself watching the gulls. I still remember the smell of that blanket.’ He paused, nose in the air, as if he might still catch a whiff of salt and old wool. ‘Later I sucked pebbles. Mum said I’d choke on them and die.’

There was nothing of self-pity in this observation.

‘One day, I got tired of lying still and just stood up and started to walk. Sometimes people on the beach brought me home when I wandered too far. Other times Gran had to walk the dykes calling my name. She always worried that I’d drown.’ He gazed up at the gulls, standing very still.

While he spoke, I collected skipping stones. I positioned myself carefully, put a perfect flick and spin on my best flat stone and watched it sail into the sea at exactly the right angle, spinning backwards as it hit and leaping up again immediately, then bouncing again and again and again until it had skipped sixteen times. Glancing back, ready to accept Finn’s admiration with appropriate modesty, I saw that he was still watching the gulls and hadn’t noticed.

‘I would set off, always in the same direction with the sun behind me. No child walks into the sun,’ he said, turning to me, as if worried about my future. ‘Remember that if you ever lose one.’

We had come to another channel further up the beach, where the river met the sea in a ferocious rush. Finn pulled off his jersey and walked in without pausing, his shirt soaked and snaking around his narrow waist and hips. It was quite deep in the middle and required him to swim backstroke with one hand in the air to keep the jersey dry. I dipped my foot in cautiously and jerked it out immediately. The cold was obscene. My heart sank as I watched Finn clambering out on the other side, his shirt and khaki trousers flapping in the icy wind. I never met anyone who felt the cold less.

I sighed. This time there was no way round it, I would have to undress, or risk ruining my school uniform. I left my coat on the beach, stepped slowly out of my trousers, unbuttoned my white shirt, stuffed my school tie into a pocket, removed my socks and shoes and rolled them up together into a clumsy bundle.

It was the thought of standing for any length of time on the bank – exposed and blue with cold in the underwear I’d been wearing for most of the week – that drove me to take the plunge sooner rather than later. Losing my balance almost immediately, I tried regaining it with Finn’s backstroke trick, but instead slid entirely under the freezing water, clothes and all, swallowing a huge mouthful of water and earning a snort of derision from the bank.

Finn waded in and dragged me up on to the bank, shivering and dripping in my horrible white pants. I hated the feel of clammy underwear against my skin, knew I looked pathetic with my poor shrunken parts clearly outlined within, and that I would feel infinitely worse once I’d managed to drag my sodden trousers over shaking limbs. But despite the acute physical discomfort, the embarrassment proved more or less incidental. As usual, Finn seemed barely to have noticed my predicament. He was still talking, as if the awkward crossing hadn’t registered on his radar at all.

‘… there was a place I used to hide, up on the cliffs. A sort of cave. It was carved into the clay. You had to climb up from the beach to get to it.’

We were walking along the shingle again, but the chafing of salty wet clothing had begun to turn my thighs and the contents of my pants so raw that I managed less than half an hour before I had to sit down, furious, cold, and in pain – a kind of silent protest. After hovering a moment, Finn sat down next to me.

‘Here, take this,’ he said, pulling the thick jersey over his head.

This was no time for heroism and I didn’t pause before accepting it. Pushing head and arms into the thick oily wool, surrounded by the woodsmoke smell of him and wrapped in the heat from his body, I felt almost dizzy with relief.

‘Have you rested enough?’ he asked eventually, uncharacteristically solicitous. ‘We can go back if you like.’

Cheered by even so small a pledge of concern, I glanced down, silently telegraphing the plight of my genitals. In vain.

‘Let’s go then.’ Before I could react, he had leapt to his feet and was off.

I sat upright.
‘Go where?’
The words came out as a bleat. When there are only two of you and you are always the last to know what is happening, you develop an acute (and accurate) sense of misgiving.

Finn didn’t answer, so I scrambled after him, chafing and puffing.

After another agonizing mile I noticed that the dunes had evolved into cliffs, and now rose steeply – thirty, forty, fifty feet up into the bright sky. Finn stopped, stepped back with his eyes shaded against the glare, scanned the surface of the cliff, turned, and without a word of warning began to climb.

I stood below, staring up after him. He climbed like a monkey, quick and agile, finding hand- and footholds where none existed. I didn’t have a clue where he was headed; the sun’s uniform glare erased all features from the surface of the cliff. But, ever the dutiful acolyte, I dug my toes into the soft chalk, pulled myself up, and followed the leader. Slowly.

It took every ounce of strength and concentration to cling to the surface of the cliff. My arms trembled violently with the effort, my toes slipped repeatedly off tiny crumbling ledges. The insides of my thighs were agony, my wounds scraped raw and anointed with salt.

I hate you,
I thought,
I hate you
with your
bloody
nature-boy airs and your
bloody
forced-march voyage of
bloody
discovery.

I wondered then if Finn’s personality worked on everyone, or whether I had just the right sort of mentality to fall in step with a self-centred hermit-boy crab-murderer.

The next time I looked up, Finn had disappeared.

I shouted his name but there was no reply. Fury drove me on, and fear. There was no easy way down from here, particularly as I couldn’t see my feet, and didn’t dare look at the beach in case of vertigo. I felt above for another handhold, grasped what felt like a solid clay ledge. But as I began to haul myself up one more time it crumbled into nothing, leaving me poised in mid-air like a cartoon coyote, clutching a handful of dust with an almost restful feeling of inevitability, with enough clarity and what seemed like enough time to save myself, but with nothing to stop me tumbling backwards and somersaulting over and over to smash and break and bleed to death alone and abandoned on the rocks below.