The Otherlife

by Julia Gray

  For lunch Clothilde my nanny, who is supposed to improve my conversational French, brought me a tray from Feng Sushi, but it was left too long at Reception and the fish wasn’t as cold as I like it, so I tried some of Simon’s spelt fusilli but it was repulsive. He doesn’t eat wheat, sugar or dairy.

  This evening I had three homeworks (sometimes there’s as many as four): a Frankenstein comprehension, simultaneous equations using the substitution method, and more Latin which was sentences using deponent participles. Clothilde brought me a hot chocolate. Mum emailed school to complain that they didn’t refrigerate my sushi tray. She also told Clothilde to remember to drop off my lunch as close to lunchtime as possible. She was annoyed because Clothilde is supposed to make my lunch for me in the morning, but the Ocado delivery was late today, so she couldn’t.

  I have a tutor three days a week now. He’s just there for support, which means if I don’t understand my homework he explains it to me and he times everything I do and tells Mum if there are any problems, and he’s very quiet most of the time and just looks through my books and things. His name is Jason and he’s 24 or 34, I can’t remember which. He is doing a PhD. He always asks for a Nespresso, which is coffee made with our special machine. Sometimes he doesn’t shave properly and his clothes look old.

  Mum and Dad both want me to get a Scholarship, because Dad got one. He got to wear a special badge for scholars and live in a special boarding house and I forget what else, but there must have been some other considerably cooler perks or else I can’t think why he bothered. They’ve said it doesn’t matter if I don’t succeed and it has nothing to do with how much they love me. But that’s only half true. It does matter. That’s why Jason’s always here. They want his genius molecules to float out of his brain and into mine.

  Tonight we finished everything in an hour and forty-five minutes and Jason initialled my homework diary, and Clothilde cooked mine and Zara’s supper which was pizzas made on our pizza stone, and I ate half of Zara’s for her because I told her she didn’t really need a whole pizza.

  When I checked my Facebook after supper there was an invitation to join the group for 8 Upper and I thought for quite a long time about whether to accept, because there would be something quite cool about ignoring it. But I did join after all, because they probably use the group to share study skills, and I don’t want to be left behind.

  Thursday 11th September

  Today Ben sat next to me in History. At Scholarship you’re likely to get source questions about a time period you’ve never studied. It’s about the skills you use to analyse the sources. We were doing an old paper that had been photocopied several times – you had to really squint to read some of the questions. After discussing the sources in small groups, we had forty minutes to do the essay that went with them. The title was: ‘Do great wars always have great causes?’

  I spent the discussion part squirting the back of Frodo’s head with hand sanitiser. When it came to the writing bit, I had no idea what to say. I mean, all wars are great, obviously, but I totally couldn’t be bothered to sit there like a loser and come up with an argument and a counter-argument and a whole bunch of examples off the top of my head. I cast around the room to see whose ideas I could steal, and my eye landed on Ben. He was sitting in the next row of seats, up and to the right. He was using a laptop. He really knows how to type. His fingers worked the keyboard like one of those master jazz musicians you see on old TV programmes. He was making notes. I could see things like: ‘Intro – analyse title – how do you define great? How do you define cause?’

  I got out my Pelikan fountain pen and wrote: ‘Before answering the question it is important to attempt to analyse the title. “Great”, for example, can have several interpretations.’

  Then I waited for Ben to put down some more thoughts.

  Pretty soon he started composing the essay. I simply copied everything down in my own words. I couldn’t really follow his train of thought half the time. He opened with a quote from something called For Whom the Bell Tolls, all about soldiers and things. Then he started writing about something called Ragnarok, which apparently was a giant battle fought between some Gods and monsters where everyone died. According to Ben, the cause of Ragnarok was the death of some dude called Baldr. ‘It was not a great cause so much as a catalyst,’ wrote Ben. ‘Baldr’s death foretold the end of the Gods.’ I wasn’t convinced this was properly historical. Ben must have realised this, because he deleted his opening paragraph and began again, writing about something different this time. I think I made a noise, like a grunt of frustration or something, because he suddenly jumped and looked around at me. His eyes were completely black. He raised his hand, and Miss Flower, who had been reading an Excel spreadsheet from a wedding catering company while pretending to mark some books, came hurrying over.

  ‘Please can I move to that desk over there?’ Ben asked her. ‘I need to plug in the power supply.’

  He has a gruff, almost lispy voice. He can’t quite do his Rs, but not the same way as Simon, who sounds like a four-year-old girl. Ben sounds more like a rescue dog that isn’t sure whether to whine or howl.

  I had to write my own essay for the rest of the lesson.

  Ben doesn’t say much in class. I think he’s quite weirded out by the lunatics in 8 Upper. Norville likes to rap whatever we’ve been doing, like the periodic table, or that thing that starts: ‘Ah, Faustus, now hast thou but one bare hour to live, and then thou must be damn’d perpetually …’ And then Archie and Frodo join in, because Frodo, stupid fat Hobbit, thinks he knows how to beatbox. Most of the teachers, apart from Mrs Ottoboni who does Art, let us make lots of noise as long as it’s to do with the lesson. Ben just sits there looking out of the window or scribbling illegibly in his books.

  There’s only one time that I remember when Ben did contribute, sort of. Earlier this week we were looking at the Creation in Genesis and Mr White (who teaches RS as well as English) was reading us the bit where God creates the world in seven days or possibly six, and the Nicholson Twins were going on about how they’d read bits of the Bible in Greek (because they don’t have any friends or anything more interesting to do with their time), and suddenly the room went a bit quiet and there Ben was, at the back, with his hand up.

  And Mr White said, ‘Yes, Ben? Do you have a question?’ and Ben went red and put his hand down and shook his head.

  Mr White said, ‘No, go on. What were you going to say?’

  And Ben took a deep and ragged breath and said something completely incomprehensible, about how in the beginning there was fire in the south and ice in the north and a giant who gave birth to a man and a woman from his arms (Is that what he said? Sounds absurd) and a cow that turned up from somewhere, and then everyone pissed themselves with laughter and he shut up again.

  ‘What’s he going on about?’ I whispered to Jean-Jacques, who shrugged.

  ‘Comparative Mythology,’ said Mr White. ‘I wish we could discuss this further, Ben, but there isn’t time today.’ Ben meanwhile had retreated down into his blazer and definitely wasn’t going to share any more thoughts with the group.

  He’s actually just as weird as the rest of them.

  Friday 12th September

  We were changing for Games when I saw the scar. Or I thought it was a scar. Just below his ribs, sort of where you imagine Christ was pierced by the spear, although I have no idea why that came into my mind. Maybe because Ben’s so silent and creepy and seems to know so much. You can kind of picture him healing the lame.

  ‘Hey, what’s that?’ I asked him.

  ‘What’s what?’

  ‘That weird mark.’ I tried to grab at him, but he twisted away and pulled down his rugby shirt.

  ‘It’s nothing, just a transfer. Came free with a packet of chewing gum.’

  Then Mr Voss came in and started barking war commands at us and we had to run out onto the pitch and I forgot about it, because I wanted to beat the hell out of everyone who got in my way.
In the first lesson after the holidays I bloodied Simon’s nose. And I totally got away with it, because it was Rugby.

  If aptitude for Scholarship and a total lack of sporting ability go hand in hand, then I probably don’t belong in 8 Upper. Apart from Archie, they’re all malco lame-arsed old men who go in for tackles like they’re on ice skates and cry in scrums. They want to go back inside and translate Petit Nicolas into fluent English. I, on the other hand, live for Sport.

  I felt really strong today, stronger than usual. It must have been all the swimming over the summer, all the diving off the top of the yacht, cannonballing into the water inches away from where Zara was paddling around, washing her dolls’ hair in the sea. I felt like the whole length of the pitch wasn’t enough to wear me out.

  I watched Ben lingering near the sidelines, and I found myself thinking about that weird mark on his ribcage. The skin underneath was pink like sunburn. And the mark was almost black. If it was a transfer, it was a pretty crap one.

  Sometimes he looked over in my direction. I think he looked kind of afraid.

  We had ICT last lesson. Ben was called halfway through by his harp teacher. Yes, he actually plays the harp. He left his books behind, which is the sort of thing he does because he apparently has mild dyspraxia and his organisation isn’t that good. I picked them up and said I’d bring them back to our form room.

  On the way I leaned against the wall and flipped through his homework diary. Nothing. Just his strange scribbly writing straggling all over the page. I would’ve investigated his laptop, but I didn’t know how to log in. I unzipped his pencil case. Clothilde would be waiting to pick me up from the gate with my snack, usually a cherry and chocolate drop scone from Gail’s and a Vitamin Water. But I wanted to find something. I don’t even know what I was looking for.

  In Ben’s pencil case were about 100 Caran d’Ache water-soluble drawing pencils, two biros, a Pritt Stick, scissors, a calculator, the usual. I slid open the calculator.

  And found something.

  Taped to the back of the cover, a square of paper. Ben’s writing.

  He’d written:

  Skǫll … son (?) Fenrir (genitive?)

  Skǫll sonr Fenris

  Underneath was a drawing of a wolf, or a large dog like an Alsatian, done quickly with thick black lines.

  And it looked a bit like the mark that I’d seen on his side.

  Monday 15th September

  I watched the back of Ben’s head in Assembly as we sang ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ and the organ blared away like a fire alarm and all the portraits of former and/or deceased Headmasters stared down at us from above. My school is very old so there’s a lot of them. Most of them are from the Cottesmore family. The school was started by Vincent Cottesmore in, like, 1850. (There’s a mouldy falling-down museum behind the Science Block with some tragic-looking newspaper cuttings and commemorative plates and assorted crap which you have to show visitors when they come round.) So there’s old Vincent, who looked practically dead by the time they painted his portrait, and then Alfred and George and Leonard and Richmond, then it skips to some other dude and then there’s a whole bunch more Cottesmores and finally there’s Roland, who’s our current Headmaster and has hair growing out of his ears. I find this fascinating and repellent in equal measure.

  I had a magazine with me, from my huge collection of Real Life Drama magazines that are so weird and gross that I find I just can’t stop reading them. Celebrities are boring in comparison. What I like are stories about women who are so fat they squash their husbands to death or people setting each other on fire. Anyway, it was rolled up in my sleeve, ready to be whipped out and shoved under Simon’s nose (he’s especially squeamish and you can sometimes induce him to actually throw up), but for some reason I was too busy watching Ben. When he thinks no one’s looking Ben tips his head back slightly and shakes it, like Zara’s pony used to do, so that his fringe jumps. Now Zara doesn’t ride any more because she’s got to sit the 11+ and Mum and Dad think that all her spare time should be spent doing extra Maths and English. They didn’t ask Zara what she thought about it, but I know she was scared of her pony, which used to bite her. So maybe she doesn’t mind. Zara is scared of most things.

  Ben was standing in between the Nicholson Twins, and even though they’re grotesquely underdeveloped and have only ever used their muscles for carrying the Liddell and Scott Greek–English Lexicon up and down the library stairs, they made him look puny and weak by comparison. At the end of the hymn you’re supposed to sing the line about ‘O still, small voice of calm’ really quietly. I made sure I didn’t, just to annoy Miss Atkins, who was looking over and scowling.

  Ben brushed past me on his way out of the hall.

  ‘Hey,’ I said.

  ‘Hi, Hobie,’ he said, not really looking at me. I kept pace with him as we went back to our form room to pick up our stuff.

  ‘We probably need to bring our Science folders with us, and our French grammar notebooks and our RS homework,’ I said as if to myself, but actually it was for his benefit. I noticed, when we got upstairs, that he was collecting everything together. If you don’t turn up with the right stuff you get a Demerit and if you get three Demerits you get a Detention and then you have to stay after school and it messes up all your clubs and activities and things.

  ‘Don’t forget the test on the water cycle after break,’ said Simon, who carries everything around in a vintage satchel the colour of dog diarrhoea. I haven’t mentioned that to him (recently) because he is very easily upset by things like that and it’s not worth the hassle if someone catches you doing it.

  Damn. The water cycle. I knew there was something I was meant to revise for.

  Ben was looking at me sideways.

  ‘I’ll sit next to you in Geog, if you like,’ he said.

  What he meant was: I could copy his answers. I think that was what he was saying. But the other day he moved away from me when I copied his History essay. So what was different?

  ‘Cool.’ I shrugged. ‘Whatever.’

  And when it came to the test he made sure that his paper was turned towards me a bit and actually most of the key words came back to me because they’re all derived from Latin and it was just a question of drawing the earth and sea and sky and getting all the arrows the right way round, and what possible use it could be to anyone is completely beyond me, but the point was passing the test. Scholarship Geography is really, really complicated, all about quaternary industries and deforestation and Human Disasters.

  I started thinking that this was going to work out well. For me. I could copy Ben’s work, which looked pretty high-standard, and that would definitely keep me going for a few weeks while I got my head around some of the harder Scholarship stuff. I mean, I don’t find it difficult, of course, but it’s all such a massive effort.

  We ended up sitting together at lunch too.

  ‘Sushi?’ he asked me, indicating my tray, extra bowl of edamame on the side. He looked as if he’d never seen sushi before, which is unlikely because most kids have at least one sushi-rolling party for their birthday at some point. Simon says that Ben’s parents split up over the summer and it was really bad timing because then his mother lost her job and the Financial Crisis is happening so she can’t get another good one. Now they live in some really small house, just him and his mum, somewhere off the Harrow Road. They probably can’t afford sushi any more.

  ‘You shouldn’t eat sushi on a Monday,’ said Frodo, who had one of those compartmentalised lunchboxes with all these different Italian deli items like breadsticks and mozzarella balls in it.

  ‘Why the hell not, Hobbitboy?’

  ‘Because,’ he said, sneering, ‘fishermen take Sundays off. So you’re eating fish that can’t be 100% fresh. That’s why so many sushi restaurants offer deals on Mondays. To tempt customers that don’t know better.’ There was a puddle of oil from his artichoke hearts pooling underneath his elbow.

  After that I didn’t rea
lly want any sushi.

  Ben unwrapped his sandwich.

  ‘It’s ham and mustard,’ he said, holding one half out to me.

  It looked totally boring, not on any particular artisan bread, no rocket or Gruyère or fancy ham like Serrano. Just: ham and mustard. But actually it tasted quite good. I’d forgotten some kids bring normal lunches to school.

  ‘Cheers,’ I said. I hate being hungry in the afternoons. Some kids, like Norville, don’t eat at all until they get home. I can’t imagine how they survive.

  ‘No problem,’ he said.

  And then: ‘Hobie?’

  I knew there was something.

  ‘I’d be really, really grateful if you didn’t mention my … my transfer to anyone.’

  ‘What, you mean that black mark on your ribcage? Why would I want to do that? Do you think I’m, like, obsessed with you or something?’

  He looked down. ‘I just don’t want anyone knowing about it.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘For all I care, it’s just necrotising fasciitis.’

  ‘OK, great. Thanks.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  As he was getting up to leave, I said, as if to nobody, ‘Skǫll. It’s an interesting name, isn’t it?’

  Ben got that frozen look again, where his eyes look like marbles, and his skin actually went white.

  ‘Can’t think why that came into my mind just now,’ I said. ‘Thanks again for the sandwich, dude.’