What I Was (9 page)

17

The sound of Finn boiling water woke me at dawn. He wasn’t much for talking, especially at that hour, and wouldn’t answer any conversation I initiated. Like the hut, he warmed up slowly, and I had a feeling his habit of solitude had existed for so long that it surprised him every morning to find me asleep where his granny had once lain.

It occurred to me that I had been at boarding school for a good many more years than Finn had lived alone, so perhaps my social skills were a little on the odd side as well. Whenever I was at home, I watched my mother chat brightly over breakfast the way an anthropologist might note typical social behaviour of the human species.

I hated getting up in the cold, and slept buried up to my eyes in blankets, removing them only to wrap my hands round a warm cup of tea. Finn had added sugar to mine unprompted and I turned away to hide my flush of pleasure. I knew that if I waited in bed for him to build up the fire and perform his morning tasks, the hut would gradually fill with a kind of fuggy warmth, so I lay still, savouring the familiar sounds and postponing re-entry into full consciousness for as long as possible.

Nothing in my life so far compared with those first minutes of the day, half-sitting in bed, still swaddled in warmth and with no imperative to move, just staring out of the window as the first pale streaks ignited the sky. I watched boats chug slowly past the windows: fishing boats returning from a long night of work, sailing boats from the nearby estuary taking advantage of the favourable tide, little tugs on their way back to port. At night passenger ships twinkled on the horizon like stars, but the daylight made them invisible.

‘We’ll take the dinghy,’ Finn said over his shoulder, heading out of the door. Through the window I watched him go, watched his outline soften and blur as he disappeared into the morning haze. The world had not yet come into focus. Even the sound of the sea seemed muffled, as if heard from a long distance away. From where I sat it was nearly invisible, lost in a cloak of grey mist. I knew this moment of half-light wouldn’t last, that in less than an hour daylight would have burned off the fog and restored the shape of things.

When I finally dressed and joined him, he was outfitting the little boat for our expedition: a wooden mast and sail retrieved from the dunes, a long coiled rope, a tin for bailing, an anchor. The sun blazed down and I knew that my thick jersey would soon feel uncomfortably warm.

Finn hauled up the little sail, swung the boat into the wind and pointed to where he wanted me. I climbed in at the bow and with a push and a jolt we were off, Finn handling the tiller and sail, and me singing pirate songs and ‘What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor?’ to amuse him.

He frowned at me. ‘I’m doing all the work while you sit there making a horrible noise.’

‘Yes,’ I said happily, delivering a lusty chorus at twice my usual volume.

Finn grimaced. ‘Come on, let’s switch over. That ought to shut you up.’

‘I can’t sail.’

‘I’ll teach you.’

And suddenly there it was. The smile.

Awkwardly, we swapped places. Finn handed me a rope and a length of tiller and told me to hold both steady. ‘Feel for the balance between them,’ he told me.

I had no idea what he meant, and at first I struggled against wind and waves with every ounce of strength I possessed. To no avail. We proceeded in fits and starts, jerking along like an old car in the wrong gear, stopping and starting and swinging awkwardly left and right. Finn leant back and focused on the middle distance, smiling a little and refusing to help, and just as I was ready to give up, our forward motion turned tight and clean and straight and suddenly, against all expectation, we were sailing.
I was sailing!
The little boat sped along and together we soared, with the slap of the sea against the bow, the wind coming over the port side nearly in front of us, the sail taut as a trampoline. Speed and a slim wedge of terror made me reckless, ecstatic, for the three or four minutes it took before I headed the boat up too close to the wind and lost hold of the tiller. My moment of oneness with wind and sea ceased. The momentum of the boat jammed the tiller up into the far corner of the stern where I couldn’t hope to reach. I hung on to my rope for dear life, despite the fact that the boat was now tipped up at a terrible angle, hurtling along, taking water in over the side.

‘Let go of the sail!’ I could hear Finn shouting, but my limbs had gone rigid, my eyes half-shut in a paralysed prayer for salvation, my hands locked obstinately around the rope. It took an almighty heave for him to pull the line from my hands and set it free, which had the magical effect of flattening the boat almost instantly. The tiller, suddenly loose and friendly, swung gently into his hand, and with a few minor adjustments we were sailing once more. He motioned me back to my place at the bow, uncharacteristically triumphant. If I hadn’t known better I might have suspected him of proving a point: something about the very thin line between positive forward motion and chaos, panic, death.

Then again, maybe not.

Trying to think inside Finn’s head was like committing what our English master called Pathetic Fallacy, the attribution of human emotions to boulders or trees. Finn was more likely thinking about the not-so-thin line between someone who knew how to sail and someone who didn’t.

But I harboured no ill feelings; ballast was a role I embraced happily. By now the wind had picked up and I leant over the side, hypnotized by the flashes of sunlight on the dark sea as it rushed under our bow, by its green-black opacity. We’d been sailing north along the coast, out less than an hour, and already I’d forgotten our goal.

‘Look there.’ Finn pointed left at a shallow cove surrounded by collapsing cliffs – great shelves of chalk and clay sliding down on to the beach. ‘That’s where the habour was.’ I turned to look, squinting to focus better, while he neatly changed direction, angling the boat away from the shore.

We were about three hundred yards off the beach when suddenly I could see something ahead, something dark and looming just above the water line. I pointed, but Finn had already altered our course. As we approached I could see that it was man-made, but by the time I recognized it as the fort, the sea was trying to smash us to smithereens against it. Finn steered hard and swung us round the rampart as if it were a racing marker, an uncharacteristically reckless move, I thought, on the chance that there was substantially more Roman fort just under the surface.

It sounds like one of those horrible clichés, but this barely visible construction of two-thousand-year-old stone made the hairs rise on the back of my neck. Ever the romantic schoolboy, I suppose I’d been expecting something pristine: light grey walls carved into tidy castellations like a plastic play-castle in the bath. But the reality of it was heavy and dark and shaped like a thing from a nightmare, covered in barnacles and seaweed, and so low in the water that it was nearly invisible except when the sea parted between waves and the light caught it a certain way.

Fantasies I’d nursed about tossing a rope over a tower and stepping out of the boat to explore were laughable. The treacherous surge of the sea against those massive walls made such thoughts absurd. The only form of life that might cling to them belonged to limpets and mussels.

Finn had removed us to a safe distance and now we drifted, the sail soft and luffing, spilling wind while we mulled over our position.

He cocked his head at me, eyes sparkling with reflected sunlight. The corners of his mouth rose slightly, and if he could have leant back and crossed his arms over his chest, I think he would have.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s your fort.’

There it was indeed. I strained for some sign of St Oswald’s monastery, the tiniest remnant of cloisters and arches perched on top of the leviathan. But if such a thing had ever existed, there was no sign of it now.

Finn looked at me and shrugged. ‘What next?’

Back at the hut that morning, safe in my warm bed, I had imagined slipping over the side of the boat and diving down, feeling my way along the smooth stone sides to the bottom, miraculously holding my breath until I neared the bottom, where a golden goblet and a crown would lie wafting softly in the sunlit sea, waiting for me to pluck them out and deliver them to Finn. I could see myself breaking back through the surface, spouting water like a whale and tossing the priceless treasure casually into the bottom of his boat as an offering.

But only a serious death wish could get me into the water now. With no clouds to muffle the wind, it flew round us, smashing waves against the ancient walls with a deep hollow
boom.
It was hard to believe those walls still held up against the sheer weight of cold black sea. The sea had been hurling itself at the masonry minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, for more than a thousand years and it made me wonder about the Romans, how they had managed to build walls so strong. And how had the barbarians breached the defences so easily? ‘Easily’ was how the history book described it, and I wondered if the person writing those words had ever seen a Roman fort close-up.

‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen enough.’

Finn swung the boat away. The wind was behind us now, and he let the sail out all the way, cleating the mainsheet, and sitting back with the tiller under one arm. We flew over the water; our speed wonderful and terrifying. ‘Changed your mind about exploring?’ He had to shout to be heard.

‘It wasn’t what I expected.’ I was glad the wind made conversation difficult.

‘Do you want to have a look at the lost city? It’s still early.’

I nodded and watched the smooth muscles in his arms as he brought the boat about. He was neither big nor particularly muscular, but agile and deft, able to convert the power of the sea, the wind, and the momentum of the boat into acceleration. Physics made easy.

I stared down into the water, hoping to catch sight of a fish swimming past. Finn slowed again and pointed at the shore. Through the scrubby trees growing out of the cliff, I could see the remains of what had once been an abbey perched high above the beach.

‘We’ll have a look around here,’ he said, leaning over with his face a few inches underwater. Half a minute later he surfaced, spluttering. The water was freezing, and it took a few tries before I managed to get used to its murky density. I plunged my head into the dark silent world, holding my breath till I thought my lungs would burst.

I saw nothing. Not a thing. No ruined city, no piece of a ruined city. No church or town hall or burgher’s manse, not even a bloody fish. Just the cold, cold depths of the dark, dark sea. I felt sick with disappointment, worse than sick when I remembered what the witch had said about my future. Look more carefully? At what? I was searching with every fibre of my being and there was nothing to see.

Bugger the city, I thought, and bugger Finn’s witch.

I was about to haul myself back up into the boat when I thought I glimpsed something. There wasn’t much air left in my lungs but I turned my head to where the image appeared. Whatever it was or had been, it was gone. Yet something lingered on my retina like a photographic negative, a pale oval with streaming hair, fleeting and bright as the moon.

Jerking out of the water, I ducked my face into the crook of one elbow for warmth. ‘Let’s go,’ I mumbled, without looking up. But then I heard Finn laugh, saw him soaked and dripping, and realized I’d been had. No mysterious vision then. Just him.

I growled and he made a ‘hmph’ noise like a camel, unaccustomed to any show of defiance by his lackey. But when I lowered my arm and raised my eyes, and he saw the blotchy face, the comic twist of mouth, the dripping hair and red nose, he smiled. It was a smile that might have expressed affection or amusement or something entirely else.

With the wind blowing full across the stern, we sailed for home.

18

I studied Finn the way some other boy might have studied history, determined to memorize his vocabulary, his movements, his clothes, what he said, what he did, what he thought. What ideas circulated in his head when he looked distracted? What did he dream about?

But most of all, what I wanted was to see myself through his eyes, to define myself in relation to him, to sift out what was interesting in me (what he must have liked, however insignificant) and distil it into a purer, bolder, more compelling version of myself.

The truth is, for that brief period of my life I failed to exist if Finn wasn’t looking at me. And so I copied him, strove to exist the way he existed: to stretch, languid and graceful when tired, to move swiftly and with determination when not, to speak rarely and with force, to smile in a way that rewarded the world.

Of course in the most basic of ways, being Finn didn’t suit me. I was slow and clumsy; uncomfortable in my own body. I lacked the ability to tolerate silence. I was lazy. Self-conscious. Unspontaneous.

There were twelve days left of Easter break.

Very early on Wednesday morning, well before sunrise, Finn headed up the beach with his ocean fishing rod to the mouth of the river, where wheeling seagulls the night before had informed him that the minnows were running. The courageous throwing off of blankets didn’t faze him, but I hated it. It was bad enough on a cold morning in a miserable dormitory room. But in the early spring cold of a hut where you know that even the ordinary pleasure of an early morning visit to the toilet will bring your nether regions into direct contact with the wind off the North Sea? Practically impossible. So while I lay in bed, warm and snug and utterly content not to be dragged up and out by breakfast or chapel or lessons, Finn chose his lures and set off.

It was nearly an hour before I joined him, lazy and slow, but in the end unwilling to allow him any fragment of a life without me. In the grey light of early dawn, he cast his line off the beach where the river spat tiny fish out into the sea to flounder and die, attracting bigger fish to an easy meal. Patient and silent, he flipped his lure out over the water and reeled it slowly back in. I listened to the precise soft whir of the reel, watched the painted wood and feather decoy with its deadly armour of hooks become invisible, imagined it sinking down, languid and false, as Finn waggled it slowly back towards land. Hour after hour he repeated the exercise, patiently thinking his thoughts. It wasn’t the most exciting form of entertainment, but I didn’t mind. I was hypnotized by the simple grace of whatever it was he did and however it was he did it.

Huddled down into my jersey, dreamy and absent, I sat and watched the sun glow pink and rise out of the sea, when unexpectedly there was a hand on my arm and a nod of the head in the direction he’d been casting.

I looked up, startled. The surface of the sea scrambled and boiled in a circle about thirty feet across, and I wondered if it heralded the appearance of our own private leviathan. As my eyes grew accustomed to the scene, I could see the outlines of fish and parts of fish, tails and fins and whole bodies occasionally hurtling out of the water and falling back again with a little splash.

‘Herring,’ Finn whispered happily, substituting a lighter rod for the one he’d been using, baiting it quickly and flipping his hook so it landed in the centre of the teeming circle. On his third cast, the rod twitched and bent over and he reeled the line in carefully, producing a shining silver and blue fish as long as his forearm. It fought like a weasel all the way to the beach.

I watched him kill it, watched him catch six more in quick succession before the boiling circle moved out of range. With great care and precision he gutted and cleaned each fish, slitting the belly and sweeping out the insides, then scraping the scales off backwards with a rasping noise. They flew off, landing on the beach where the rays of the half-risen sun made them glitter like sequins. They looked so beautiful that I picked one up, but in my hand it became a lifeless thing, slimy and disgusting.

He concentrated on his work and never once looked at me.

Finn made money selling fish in town, so we didn’t eat them, but wrapped them in seaweed to be delivered later that day. In the meantime, we collected clams for lunch from a tiny cove in the estuary where they lived deep in the muddy clay. We waded barefoot and felt for them with our feet, reaching into the icy water to dig them up. My hands and feet quickly went numb as I dug the fat little creatures out and tossed them into a bucket. The blood from various scrapes and cuts ran unnoticed down my hands, leaving long pink streamers in the sea. Later I scrubbed the clams clean, and Finn threw them in a pot to steam with seawater and handfuls of bright green samphire from the marsh. The clams were salty and full of sand, but we wiggled the little bodies in hot water first to clean them, then dunked them in melted butter, sopping up the gritty butter with bread when we were done.

I kept waiting for the effect of this castaway existence to mark me somehow, make me more of a man, but as the hours and days slipped away I felt the distance between us increasing. The longer we spent together the more difficult it became to engage him in conversation. His silences grew, it seemed to me, became deeper, more remote. By Friday I had come to the conclusion that I was crowding him, so I made myself as small as possible, stifled the desire to burble over with enthusiasm for each new discovery or to follow him around like the adoring hanger-on I was.

An image of Reese crept into my brain and I cringed.

I became furtive, a silent, dismal being with nowhere to go and no permission to stay. This wasn’t how I had imagined our time together, and whatever vision I’d had imagined for myself – heroic and handy, living rough off the land – was countered by the reflection I saw in his eyes.

Next time, I stayed behind when he went to market with his fish. I huddled in a corner, staring at the huge old history book, my eyes glazed with tears. I dozed for an hour or so, and it was cold and nearly dark when I heard the scrape of the kayak behind the hut. Jerking into a seated position, I threw off the blanket and opened the book to a random page, studying it with enough false intensity to pretend I hadn’t heard him come in. Not that such posing was likely to have fooled him. My face, creased and flushed with sleep, betrayed me like a beacon.

He entered without greeting, and began stowing supplies in the kitchen.

‘How was town?’

He looked up as if noticing me for the first time, considered the question and shrugged.

‘I just meant…’ And then the real words burst out, all in a rush.
‘I’ll go if you want me to.’

Finn looked up at me, silent and closed, and I heard a horrible noise, wet and hollow, as something inside of me collapsed. Finally he shrugged, and in a tone more puzzled than hostile, said, ‘Go if you want to.’

I turned away. ‘I don’t want to.’

‘So?’ He frowned.

‘You want me to go.’ My voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I’m sorry, this isn’t how I meant to be.’ Halfway through this confession my voice broke.

Finn stared and shook his head. Then he left the room and went into the kitchen to build up the fire. Though unable to see and unwilling to wipe my eyes on my sleeve (the too-obvious gesture of a crying person), I could follow his movements as he chose a dry log and placed it carefully on to the bed of hot embers. Once the log began to crackle, he filled the kettle and placed it on top of the stove.

I turned away and began to gather my few belongings blindly, wondering what I would do and where I would go, imagined myself stooped and stumbling like Adam, wreathed in sin and expelled from paradise.

The riveting nature of my own self-pity distracted me so thoroughly that for a moment I forgot about Finn. When I looked up and saw him standing in front of me, I jumped a little.

There was a moment of silence during which he just stared: at the rumpled bed, the open history book, the socks and jersey and gloves scattered on the floor of the tiny house.
His
house, inviolate and solitary until now. I flushed and bent over like a supplicant, scuttling around to gather up the signs of habitation, to stuff them into my schoolbag, to erase myself completely from the scene.

Finn exhaled what might have been a sigh, then crossed over and began to climb the narrow staircase to his little room under the eaves. Halfway up he stopped and turned back to me.

‘Actually,’ he said, with an expression that was not meant to reassure, ‘I quite like having you around.’