The Otherlife

by Julia Gray

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that from creation to destruction it wasn’t a straight line, so much as an endless circle, or a spiral. Ragnarok was the end, but also the beginning. The world began anew each time.’

  She’s silent for a while. It all takes some getting used to, I suppose.

  ‘But why now?’ says Zara. ‘Why is this happening now, to me?’

  ‘I’m seeing it again too,’ I say. ‘And I haven’t seen it for years.’

  ‘Do you think it’s something to do with Hobie?’ she says suddenly.

  ‘Is there any reason why you’d think that?’

  ‘I just wondered,’ she says. ‘I think … I think I might have seen one of those lights before. Just once.’

  I wait for more, but she doesn’t say anything else.

  ‘Is he … I mean, how is he?’ I say.

  ‘Oh, Hobie. He’s the same.’

  Her voice is flat and quiet.

  ‘I think it has to do with Jason. I think we need to find out how he died,’ I say.

  ‘But his death was unexplained. I’m sure it was.’

  I don’t say anything, but I’m thinking, If she cares so much about finding out the explanations of things, it doesn’t make much sense that she should accept something like the death of a young and healthy person as unexplained. But there’s a weird tranquillity seeping into me, in spite of it all. It’s the kind of afternoon you’d think of as golden, like the beginning of Alice in Wonderland. It’s something about the people sprawled under trees with dogs and picnic baskets, the children scootering by, the smell of summer flowers. I can’t quite bring myself to ask any more questions.

  So we get up and go for a long walk, past the Diana Memorial Fountain and all the way to Marble Arch. We don’t talk much; I give her one of my earbuds and we listen to The Black Album, which she claims to enjoy. Then we take different buses home. Before she leaves (her bus, the 94, comes first), she gives me an awkward hug goodbye, and says, if I like, I can meet her again next Sunday, same time, same place.

  As I get on my own bus, a 23, I think: I still might not know what’s going on, but I don’t feel alone any more.

  Reg of Putney is reinstalled in the sitting room when I return, eating Tesco Finest biscuits and watching the racing. He’s certainly making himself at home. Mum is nowhere to be seen, but from the laughter reverberating from the kitchen I deduce that she’s on the phone to Aunt Jane in Canada. Aunt Jane is one of the few people Mum lightens up around.

  ‘Join me, Ben, why don’t you?’ says Reg, seeing me pass the sitting-room door.

  At first I pause; then, thinking that Zara wouldn’t hesitate to behave with due propriety under the same circumstances, I do.

  ‘Tell me about yourself,’ says Reg.

  ‘There isn’t much to tell. I’m doing GCSEs at the moment.’

  ‘Favourite subject?’

  ‘Nothing really.’

  A tenseness begins at the tops of my arms. I hope that Mum hasn’t said anything to him about Jason. I am not ready to share my grief with a stranger.

  ‘What sort of music do you like?’ asks Reg.

  This is a preferable question: metal is one of the few things I will genuinely go on at length about to anyone, even strangers. And – even better – it turns out that Reg has fond memories of Black Sabbath, from back in the day. One of his best mates was a roadie at an Ozzfest. He even saw Jethro Tull play one of their first-ever gigs! I have a real envy of people who were around for the early days of British Metal. I grill him in earnest, pressing him for sensory details. I find myself eating a biscuit, and offering to make him another cup of tea.

  ‘Of course, I didn’t have much time for concerts and the like when I was in full-time work,’ says Reg.

  ‘What kind of work do you do?’ I ask him, thinking how rude I am, that I haven’t already found this out.

  ‘I’m a coroner. Semi-retired now.’

  The uneaten half of my biscuit quivers in my hand.

  ‘A coroner … really?’

  ‘That’s right. Know what a coroner is?’

  A sprinkle of shrieking – oh-no-you-never, oh-yes-I-swear-to-you – tells me that Mum is still on the phone. I don’t want her to hear me quizzing Reg of Putney. But this is too good a chance to miss.

  ‘How would you establish cause of death, usually?’ I ask him casually.

  He settles himself more comfortably on the sofa; I realise I’m relieved that he’s not sitting in Dad’s old armchair.

  ‘Depends on the circumstances. If the person had been ill, we’d want to know if they’d seen their usual doctor in the fortnight before. The doctor would then issue a certificate. If that was not the case, and there was no obvious cause of death, a postmortem would be carried out. After that, if there was still no explanation, you could hold an inquest. Planning a murder, are you?’

  ‘Is it normal for a death to be … to be registered as “unexplained”?’ I say, still trying to sound as casual as I can.

  ‘Not usual, no. We always want to try to find the cause, if at all possible. People don’t die for no reason.’

  ‘What are you two taking about?’ says Mum, arriving with coffee cake and giving the question word her usual legal emphasis.

  I make my excuses and go upstairs. I was right; I knew I was right. Whatever Zara thinks – whatever she says – it is very, very unlikely that Jason’s death was ‘unexplained’. Someone must know. And I will find out. With an automated hand-to-mouth action, I reach for another painkiller, but, reflecting that it’s not that long until I have to give them up completely, I put it back in the bottle. On the wall there’s now a proper collection of trivia. There’s my wolf certificate. There’s Zara’s business card. I have pinned it exactly straight, because I know it would not please her to be even slightly askew. There’s a photocopied magazine cutting I found in my Gods of Northern Europe book entitled ‘Cannibal Ate My Mum with Ketchup and Peas’. I can’t remember the significance of it exactly, but it looks like something from one of Hobie’s magazines.

  And then there’s the picture of me and Hobie, arms around each other, smiling our feral, free-and-easy wolf smiles as though we haven’t a care in our hearts.

  HOBIE’S DIARY

  Thursday 30th October 2008

  Ben has the most amazing mural in his bedroom. He painted it himself. On the first day he gave me a guided tour, and I tried and failed to imagine what it would be like to live in a house that small. I mean, no gym, no home cinema or dedicated TV room, and just a bedroom each for him and his mum and then a minuscule one she uses as a study. I don’t know if I could cope with that. How would I get away from Zara? Ben’s room was at the back of the house overlooking the garden and about 19 other gardens as well, and from his window I could see loads of falling-down sheds and laundry lines with pegs dangling half-heartedly in the wind and cats slinking up and down the walls.

  But when he opened the door to his room I was fairly knocked out by the painting that stretched all the way along the end wall. In the foreground are all these flat rocks and marshland and then there’s a big stretch of sea the colour of slate with white tips on the waves and in the background massive mountains with snowy peaks, but the whole thing looks kind of grainy like it’s covered in mist. And somehow, even on, like, three or four metres of wall, Ben’s created this incredible sense of space like it goes on for miles and miles. And, best of all, there was a Viking longship just visible through the puffy white cloud. Ben knew enough to just suggest that it was there. He told me he painted it mostly with bits of sponge dipped in acrylic and a palette knife. His mum went ballistic at first, but in the end she said they’ll paint over it when they move to a bigger house.

  Ben says he likes to just sit in front of it, watching. Sometimes, he says, it moves. The longship changes position. Berserks appear and disappear. And the sky changes colour, meaning that the Gods are there. I’ve tried a few times, but all I can see is paint.

  Fr
odo’s Halloween party has been a major source of comfort all through the first week of half term. Now, I don’t like the guy, and I can’t imagine he likes me all that much given what I’ve done to him over the years – drawing a penis on the back of his blazer in chalk before the school concert (at which several minor members of the Royal Family were present), putting rocks and live snails in his sleeping bag on the Geography Fieldwork Trip, making that Facebook group called Stupid Fat Hobbit with his face as the profile picture … I forget what else, but a fair amount. But the rule at school is on pain of torture you always invite your entire class to your parties. And everyone was going apart from Matteo who was in Florence and they’d taken one of those Super Tutors with them, whose catchphrase was ‘Motivation, kid, you get me?’ I know because one time I saw them in the park, sauntering up and down with a pile of History notes. The guy was smoking roll-ups. I’ve asked Matteo whether he’s actually learning anything from this dude, but Matteo seems to be completely blown away by the Super status and is unable to recall what they do in their tuition time.

  I’ve been trying to persuade Ben to go with me to the party, which will involve trick-or-treating around all the streets nearby followed by supervised games and a frenzied consumption of collected loot. After five days of work, side by side in his dismal kitchen with only an endless supply of cheese pitta breads and microwavable M&S pasta meals to sustain us (or rather me – the quantity of food I brought with me increased daily), I think even he saw the benefit of an outing.

  Both our mothers had spent all week using the party as a bargaining chip. Any insubordination was instantly greeted with a ‘Listen, Hobie, if you do that to your sister again you will not be going to Frodo’s on Friday night,’ etc etc. But I don’t think we gave anyone a reason to deny us the right to go. Jesus, I got into the minicab every morning at precisely 9.35 a.m. like a veritable angel.

  Over the course of the week, we’ve done the following:

  Essay plans for English, History and General Paper – three of each in bullet point or mind-map format

  All our global locations (incl. rivers and seas and mountain ranges) and map symbols

  Complete revision of the periodic table, properties of metals and non-metals and the reactivity series

  A French reading and writing paper plus revision of all irregular verbs

  Two Maths papers, on which we marked what we didn’t understand so that Jason could explain it to us the following week

  Revision of tenses, third, fourth and fifth declension nouns and reported speech in Latin (but there’s so much that really we need Rebecca’s help with that)

  7. The first six chapters of our Greek textbook, doing questions at random.

  Eventually I made the decision to treat what we were doing as a kind of drawn-out version of super-intensive physical training, like I’d do in Tennis Camp, or before a really important match. Remembering that I’m a kinaesthetic learner, I started charging into Ben’s garden (which is the size of a five-pound note and mostly paved over, but at least it’s outside) and doing press-ups and star jumps every half-hour. The blood rushed around my body and jarred my brain into gear, and it felt really good. Ben would come and sit on the rickety picnic table and call out verbs so that I could complete the principal parts.

  ‘Cado …’

  ‘… cadere, cecidi, casum.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I fall.’

  ‘Caedo …’

  ‘… caedere, cecidi, caesum.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I cut, beat, slaughter.’

  As we ran in and out, kicking the kitchen door shut and slamming our textbooks down, I caught myself, to my horror, enjoying the charge of adrenaline that I was experiencing from getting things right.

  I was becoming a swot. Jesus.

  But I couldn’t really piss about all day and distract Ben. He genuinely needs to get a Scholarship for financial reasons, so it wouldn’t be fair. That’s my excuse. As soon as these bloody exams are over, I’ll go back to normal. Jason can do my homework and I’ll coast by on the bare minimum and they won’t be able to do anything about it. Anyway, they say Scholarship is harder than A level, don’t they, so it’s possible that I’ll never really have to do any proper work ever again.

  By Wednesday I felt confident enough at predicting the unannounced visits of Ben’s mother to risk smoking on their doorstep. (They do have a teeny-tiny loft but Ben wouldn’t let me go up there because there was definitely no way of getting on to the roof plus he was worried I’d put my foot through the ceiling. Since I’d already broken not only the arm of the kitchen chair but also a table lamp and two mugs, perhaps it was a fair point.) I’d bought a packet of Lucky Strikes at the very dodgy but quite cool corner shop next to lots of similarly random shops: one that sold chainsaws and big bags of compost, one that sold really hideous furniture and second-hand ovens, a couple of really cheap-looking hairdressers. I had no idea you could get a haircut for less than forty quid. I’d also bought an awesome magazine called It’s My Life; on the front cover it said ‘Cannibal Ate My Mum with Ketchup and Peas’ in orange italics. And I was sitting reading and smoking and thinking that for some reason I didn’t resent not being in the Bahamas as much as I’d thought I would, when I realised I could hear Ben on the phone to his mum.

  I listened.

  ‘I dunno,’ he was saying. ‘Yeah … no. Not too bad … Hobie’s helping loads. We’ve made a list of things to do with the tutors … Jason and Rebecca … I dunno. Oxford or Cambridge, I think … OK.’

  Was his mum questioning Rebecca’s qualifications? Ridiculous. Shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, as they say. Is that to do with the Trojan horse? I wonder.

  ‘Mum, I really can’t tell you whether I’m going to get a Scholarship or not … I don’t know what the other candidates are like, do I? I just don’t … OK, yeah. Yes, I will. See you later.’

  Then silence.

  I made a point of shutting the front door quite loudly to let him know I was coming back inside. It was nearly time for lunch and I was thinking about what to put in the microwave.

  Ben was slumped down, his head resting on his arms. I prayed he wasn’t going to cry. I don’t know what to do when people cry, except make fun of them. Then he raised his head and looked straight across the kitchen, through the glass door and over the garden wall, past the line of houses backing onto it and towards a little chink of pale sky between the chimneys.

  ‘Dude, are you OK?’ I asked.

  He didn’t speak for a while, and then said, ‘Ragnarok.’

  I sat down beside him.

  ‘The mountains are shattered. The World Tree shakes,’ murmured Ben.

  ‘The stars disappear from the sky,’ I joined in.

  ‘The monsters break loose,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ I said. Ben likes nothing more than telling stories. And I quite wanted to hear this one. I’d read about Ragnarok, but even so. Eventually I managed to persuade him. He fetched his Free Creative Writing book from his bag and fumbled around for a while. Then he cleared his throat a couple of times, and began.

  ‘It was the end of everything. Fire and frost giant joined forces on the plain of Vigrid, where the final battle would be fought. Heimdallr sounded his horn. Odin and the Gods rode out from Valhalla. Here God met monster on the massive plain, and all met their death. Thor slew the serpent, and then fell to the ground, overwhelmed by its deadly venom. Heimdallr did battle with Loki, and each killed the other. Tyr met the great dog Garm, who had broken loose from its fetters in the Underworld. Freyr met the giant Surtr. Mighty Odin stood among his fallen warriors as the wolf Fenrir came near, and though Odin fought to the last, he was swallowed up by the furious beast. His death did not go unavenged, however, for Odin’s son Vídarr set one foot on each of Fenrir’s jaws and ripped them apart. Finally, Surtr hurled a wave of fire over the world, so that the race of men perished alongside the Gods. The world sank beneath the sea.’r />
  He finished speaking. The kitchen was quiet. I thought about it: the Gods, waiting for the world to end. The wicked way that each God was paired with an enemy combatant – perfectly matched, like wrestlers or fencing champions. I was just sorry that Loki had to die too. Though, as Ben has tried to explain to me, the way the Otherlife works is that it’s constantly beginning and ending, and that sort of cheers me up because in one way Loki will live on forever.

  ‘Awesome,’ I said. ‘Dude, you read that really well.’

  His eyes were almost back to a normal colour, I was glad to note. Sometimes that frozen look of his sort of chills me.

  Then I had an incredible idea.

  ‘Hey!’ I said. ‘Hobbitboy’s Halloween party on Friday! We should go as wolves. Hati and Skǫll. Why the hell not?’

  Ben managed a smile.

  ‘OK,’ he said.

  I still had my envelope of cash from the sale of Mum’s gear and I hadn’t spent much of it. Normally I spend everything I have on me sort of automatically. For example, if we’re abroad and I have some euros I’ll just go into the nearest cafe or newsagent and buy a random selection of sweets or pastries or whatever. Or if Mandy, my godmother, comes to stay, sometimes she’ll give me a Hamleys gift card and we’ll go together and I’ll make sure I’ve used it up completely. But somehow I still had about £120 and I had it with me in my rucksack, just in case.

  It took some real skills on my part to get Ben to leave the house, but since his mum had just rung up it wasn’t very likely that she’d come back any time soon. And she doesn’t mind if Ben goes out on his own, not the way my mother does. My mother thinks the world is one big nest of murderous kiddy-snatchers.

  ‘Come on, Ben,’ I said. ‘We need some air anyway. Let’s just leave a note saying we’ve gone for a walk.’