What I Was (7 page)

A hand shot out from nowhere and grabbed my wrist.

The shock of it caused me to lose the rest of my fragile contact with the cliff and for a moment I dangled over the rocks below, scrabbling hopelessly for a foothold, rigid with terror, too terrified even to scream. And then a head followed the hand out above me, and a body leant out and another hand grabbed the waistband of my trousers, and half of me was scrambling and the other half being dragged thrashing up on to a ledge, which turned out to be a sort of a cave, the place Finn had been telling me about when I was barely listening due to the combined forces of pain and resentment.

It took a number of minutes for my heart to stop pounding and my breath to settle into something like a normal rhythm. Finn lay there, watching me and smiling as if he’d just told the funniest joke in the world.

‘I am
not
bloody laughing.’ My voice had gone hoarse with terror, my eyes swam with tears and I was furious: at his superior physical prowess, at my near-death experience, at the extent of my humiliation.

And then his expression became solemn and he looked at me gently, with genuine compassion. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

Frighten me? Murder me, more like. I refused to answer, preferring to exert some miniscule power by remaining silent.

The entrance to the cave was narrow, but once I managed to wriggle into a more dignified position (flat on my stomach, arms folded under my chest, feet shoved deep into the recesses of the cliff) I realized I could stretch out with a fair degree of comfort. Physical comfort, that is. The prospect of having to climb back down kept me twitching with terror. And yet the sun beat down on the pale surface of the cliff with surprising warmth, we were out of the wind, and in the confined space Finn radiated heat and animal comfort beside me. I edged out, stretching over the terrifying drop and shifting forward until my left side settled into the graceful length of his body. In the tight space we fitted together like pieces of a puzzle.

Below us birds swooped and soared and I looked down on their backs as they flew, astonished, forgetting my fear. For that moment I was a god, with a god’s eye view of the universe. Exhilarated, I moved to get a better look, inching further and further out, until Finn reached out a hand to pull me back. I hovered, held aloft by the strength and warmth of his grip, feeling the hot slow pulse of his fingers. I wanted to launch us both into the sky, to pull him up with me towards the sun where we’d fly like gods and never have to tumble back to earth.

He studied my face, amused by what he found there. The moment hovered, weightless.

I have often looked back at that moment and imagined history veering fractionally in one direction or another, imagined if I’d been a different person, or if he had, whether what followed would have been a different story altogether and the history of the world might have changed ever so slightly around us.

As it was, nothing happened except the two of us watching the sea come in and go out again, listening to the birds, sheltering from the rain when it came and lying silent as the sky changed from blue to white to gold. For hours we lay side by side, breathing softly together, watching thin rivulets of water run down the cliffs and into the sea, feeling the world slowly revolve around us as we leant into each other for warmth – and for something else, something I couldn’t quite name, something glorious, frightening, and unforgettable.

For an instant I knew what it was to be immortal, to make the tides cease and time stand still.

And just this once, it wasn’t Finn’s power. It was mine.

Rule number five: Don’t let go of the cliff.

13

According to Mr Barnes (history), the Dark Ages dawned in the middle of the fifth century with the decline of the Roman Empire. Roman occupiers had been settling in Britain all along – marrying, raising families, farming. But once Rome withdrew its central authority from Britain (
AD
410), Saxon tribes invaded from Germany and divided England into four kingdoms: Mercia, Northumbria, Wessex, East Anglia. After a bloody and plague-ridden start, the Saxons settled down to a bloody and plague-ridden rule, until the Vikings came along to institute a new and improved (bloodier and more plague-ridden) kingdom.

Romance aside, no one with half a brain could be nostalgic for life in the Dark Ages. There were too many ways to live and die miserably in those days, particularly if you were a peasant. I could easily imagine myself as a peasant, dressed in scratchy homespun wool, trying to scrape a living from half an acre of land or maybe a single mangy cow. There would be a wife no one else wanted (pockmarked maybe, or lame) who’d probably die in childbirth leaving me no one to help with the cow or plough the little field. It would be cold all the time, and damp, and by midwinter we would run out of food and options while whatever children there might be wept with hunger, and later fell silent and died of starvation. I could easily picture the brutality and despair of this life, had no trouble imagining myself dying of something unromantic like plague, or something banal like a broken arm.

Mr Barnes was always keen to drive home the contrast between our charmed existence at St Oswald’s and the brutal realities of history. Much to our delight, this included lurid tales of Viking torture and debauchery, our favourite being the blood eagle. The blood eagle required two deep vertical cuts to be made in a living man on either side of the backbone, severing the cartilage connecting ribs and vertebrae. Through these cuts, the live lungs were grasped and pulled backwards out of the chest cavity. The goal of this unimaginable act of brutality was to preserve the victim’s life long enough to watch the lungs inflate outside the body like wings.

I thought of Finn’s crab.

From what I actually managed to absorb in class (the experience was novel and even rather exciting), there emerged a fantastically romantic image of bloodthirsty armies clashing ferociously on barren plains, vast horned heroes sweeping from one end of the island to the other, 960 soldiers slain by a single warrior with a single sword in a single battle on a single day.

What more could a boy ask for? Especially a boy without the passion or the capacity to rip
any
creature’s lungs out, even the lowliest.

You could almost hear the spark of genuine interest ignite during lessons that term. Something about the anarchy and violence of the first millennium struck a chord in us where the hallowed achievements of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome had failed. Which meant there was less groaning than usual when each of us was assigned an essay topic: Athelstan, The Venerable Bede, The Battle of Badon Hill, Alfred the Great, Offa’s Dyke. St Oswald, patron saint of our beloved alma mater, fell to me. Gibbon had lobbied for Boudicca, which he saw mainly as an opportunity to look at drawings of naked breasts.

‘Ho ho
ho,
’ he leered, waggling pictures out of dusty history books as if they were
Playboy
centrefolds.

‘Nice ones, Gibbon.’ He’d been drooling over etchings of two-thousand-year-old breasts for most of the afternoon. I stretched, desperate to get out. ‘Might go for a walk,’ I muttered. Having checked the tides.

Reese jumped up. ‘Can I come?’

Pulling on my coat, I avoided his eyes. ‘No dirty pictures in nature.’

‘You might get lucky, Kipper.’ Gibbon, ever the optimist. ‘Might see deer fucking.’

I ignored him. ‘Come on then. It’s going to be a lovely sunset.’

Gibbon erupted with laughter, prancing around the room cooing, ‘A
lovely
sunset! A
lovely sunset!
’ while Reese joined in nervously, not entirely sure whose side he was on. In the end, he chose the unambiguously heterosexual majority, as I knew he would. He had his own secrets, did Reese.

As I left the room, I could feel his eyes boring into the back of my head.

14

‘So, what do you know about the Dark Ages?’

I’d been nervous. About returning to the hut, about seeing Finn. Even remembering our afternoon at the cave made me nervous. The longing to see him did not diminish with the passing days, nor did the feelings sort themselves into tidy strands of information in the way of geography or English grammar. None of what I felt could be explained by what I generally understood about sex. The ceaseless tangle of emotions confused me, forced me to wonder what I was. There was no one to ask.

But I couldn’t stay away. And so, on a cold afternoon in early February I lay, one leg propped on the bookshelves at the bottom of my narrow bench, the other hanging over the side, asking about the Dark Ages while the fire in the stove crackled and Finn hunched over tiny scraps of feather, metallic foil from cigarette packets, and steel fish hooks, wrapping them securely with cotton to make lures. His cat glared and hissed at me whenever Finn wasn’t looking, and when he chirped to it and stroked it absently, I could swear it sneered.

Finn answered after the usual pause. ‘What do you know already?’

I told him my version of the first millennium and he snorted and shook his head in disbelief. ‘How much does your education cost? You could save everyone a fortune by reading a book once in a while.’

I ignored him, reached out to the cat and received an ugly scratch for my pains. I took a swipe at the beast but it was already comfortably out of reach, grinning back over its shoulder.

‘If you don’t mind, I didn’t exactly choose to be sent to the back of beyond to be bullied and buggered and starved.’

He appraised me. ‘You don’t look starved.’

I thought of the disgusting sausages filled with gristle and glue, the tasteless suet puddings, the stinking vats of boiled cabbage.

Finn walked over to the bookcase and pulled out an old-fashioned leather-bound book entitled
A Short History of Britain.
It smelled strongly of damp and must have had nine hundred pages. I groaned. ‘Really. I don’t need to know all that. Ten pages would be more than enough.’

‘No, it wouldn’t,’ he said, dropping the huge book in my lap. ‘You’re amazingly ignorant. Especially with all your advantages.’

‘Advantages?’

‘A proper education is a privilege,’ he said, a touch primly.

I laughed my best sardonic laugh and Finn looked at me sideways. ‘You’re actually quite proud of having failed so often, aren’t you?’ He turned away and behind his back I pulled a face.

This line of discourse infuriated me. For one thing, his imaginary version of school life bore no relation to reality, and he resolutely denied all my attempts to impart the truth. He imagined a world of frock coats and good manners, a respect for intellect and the individual, the mature exchange of ideas seasoned with healthy outdoor pursuits. I don’t know how or where he came by this vision (it sounded like something out of ancient Greece to me), but he clung to it in the face of all evidence to the contrary, perhaps charmed by the idea of the social and economic gap between us. He was, after all, a boy who lived in a hut by the sea, while my parents holidayed in France and Spain, employed a cook and a part-time gardener, bought a new car every four years and had the means to purchase for their only son a dubious education that would (at the very least) guarantee entrance to adulthood with an ability to decline Latin verbs with a recognizably expensive accent.

Finn, in contrast, had nothing. Only a romantic past, floating present, and lack of future, any of which I would have sold my soul to possess.

With a sigh, I picked up the history book and began to read, of chaos and bloodshed, and gold coins bearing the heads of Kings Offa and Horsa, of cakes and ale and vast feasts of oxen and honey and geese.

I liked how wild they were and yet how domestic, the extreme possibilities of so much land changing hands with such frequency and violence, and in between, peaceful farmers tending crops and carving fine sewing needles out of bone.

‘What about St Oswald?’

‘What about him?’ Finn came through, sat down very close to me, took the book from my hands and began flipping pages. ‘There were two Oswalds, actually. Look: “Archbishop of York – served at Ely Cathedral, tenth century.” The other was King of Northumbria, seventh century. Boy warrior, on a mission to spread Christianity and reunite the four kingdoms. He was hacked to death in battle, torn limb from limb in Somerset.’ He found what he was looking for, a black-and-white photograph of the head of a young man, a relief carving in stone. ‘Here. Oswald the King with his raven.’

I peered at it closely. The boy king was handsome, beardless, dressed in flowing robes. The caption on the picture read
Oswald of Northumbria,
AD
642.
I nodded, struck by the features of the young king, by the strong lines of the profile, the finely wrought mouth. In an instant I knew for certain that the other Oswald, the archbishop, did not – could not possibly – figure in my story.

I turned back to Finn, met his large dark eyes, and didn’t turn away. When he passed the book back to me his hand was steady and the expression on his face unreadable.

‘It’s all in there.’

I looked at the book, then at Finn. In our dance of friendship he led and I followed. At moments of intimacy it was always he who pulled me close and I who drew breath and trembled. It was always he who pulled away, as well.

‘I can’t possibly read all this.’

He knew everything, of course he did. He knew all about both Oswalds and all about me. I wanted to beg him to drag one of the painted chairs in from the kitchen, to sit down and tell me everything he knew about history. I wanted to hear him speak softly, to say with fond contempt that I understood nothing, to protest that he’d have to start from the beginning, that it could take all night to make me understand. I wanted him to lean in towards me. I wanted to feel the warmth of his skin, breathe the warm salt smell of him.

‘It’ll take hours to get through.’

That infernal half-smile.

‘Then you’d better get started,’ he said, and left the room.