by Julia Gray
‘What about Reg of Putney?’ I want to ask. But I don’t really care. At least, for once, she’s told me the truth about something.
I make sure that I am not late to meet Zara. I don’t think lateness is a quality she’d admire. I take a different route today, crossing the canal, just as I once did with Hobie, when we went shopping for our wolf suits.
Early, I stand outside the church at the top of Ladbroke Grove, and I realise I haven’t just been thinking about Zara a bit. I’ve been thinking about her a lot.
It’s a greyer day than last Sunday. Swollen clouds drift solemnly overhead. I listen to the soft rise and fall of embarrassed British singing. The alleluia choruses peak and drop, peak and drop. Hymns always seem so sad. This one sounds like ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’. Whenever we sing it at school it makes me think of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’.
Then the doors swing open and people trail out. A young couple carries a newly baptised infant, wrapped in a pink-and-white blanket. Well-wishing godparents step smartly in shiny shoes. Ike and Elsie climb into a dark Mercedes. I look for Zara.
When she appears, my heart surges a little, like it’s been charged with an extra amp. And then it surges again, with recognition.
Next to Zara, in a long purple skirt and matching cropped jacket, is Rebecca.
HOBIE’S DIARY
Sunday 2nd November 2008
Early on Friday Ben’s mum texted and asked if I could go round after lunch instead of arriving at 10 a.m., and although she didn’t say why I presumed it was something to do with Ben’s dad. I went through a number of possibilities aloud while Clothilde boiled me a second egg because the first one was too runny. Maybe Ben’s parents were getting back together and they were all sitting round in pyjamas watching television or something. Or maybe Ben’s father had tried to kidnap Ben and take him to France and half the Greater London police force had been after them in a massive car chase and they’d caught up with them just as Ben’s dad was getting on the Eurostar with his unconscious son stuffed into a sports bag.
‘Or maybe you watch too much television and read too many stupid magazines, Hobie,’ said Zara, staring down at a piece of white toast that she was bizarrely eating with her knife and fork.
I thought fondly of ‘Cannibal Ate My Mum with Ketchup and Peas’.
Dad had left for a breakfast meeting and Mum was panicking about her Gala Dinner, racing round the house as fast as her high heels would permit, simultaneously putting on face cream, yelling down the phone at someone called Kirsty about whether the caterers had the vegetarians marked on the table plans and necking vitamins straight from the bottle.
‘What are you doing for Halloween?’ I asked Zara.
She recoiled as if I’d suggested a merry jaunt to Wormwood Scrubs to feed the convicts.
‘Nothing. I need to work.’
Recently Za has started asking if she can go to boarding school. I think Mum and Dad were a bit taken by surprise because she is hardly an independent spirit. I mean, she’s still frightened of the dark, isn’t she? But they went along to some Open Day and predictably Zara was enchanted by the flowery cushions in the boarding house and the fact that you could keep your own rabbit in some dedicated pet area. And Mum and Dad, you could tell, were not unexcited by the prospect of having us both out of the house next year so they could go on more holidays and things. So Zara is studying all the time, writing new bits of vocabulary in a pink book with a fluffy cover, reading Little Women and Pride and Prejudice and working with Rebecca twice a week like clockwork. The doctor apparently said that Zara was a bit underweight so now she has to keep a food diary and Clothilde and Mum have to make sure she’s eating at mealtimes. If anything, I think Zara’s eating less as a result.
I didn’t mind not going to Ben’s after breakfast. We’d done enough bloody revision, even by Hobbitboy’s standards. I had one of my favourite sorts of morning instead, roaming around the house half-dressed and playing computer games. I ran 4 kilometres in the gym (at least I’m allowed to do that, if no other exercise) and watched Cribs on MTV and had a very splashy bath where I read the Gods book (Ben won’t mind if it’s a bit waterlogged). Then, when Mum’s masseuse came round, I spent a good twenty minutes in the second sitting room, which no one uses much and is just full of sculptures and poncey art books, and where the goodie bags for the Gala Dinner were sitting in solemn white rows, like those war graves in Flanders Fields.
‘What were you doing in there?’ Zara asked suspiciously as we collided on the stairs. ‘You’d better not have taken the salted caramels out of the bags.’
When I got to Ben’s house the kitchen felt different. Sort of cleaner and lighter, like someone had mopped it very thoroughly. Funny, I felt almost sad about the week coming to an end. I’d actually sort of enjoyed working at Ben’s house, which, apart from his mother barging in every lunchtime and ringing up and harassing Ben all the time, had been really peaceful and constructive. We got a lot done, and I am prepared to care about it as long as the teachers don’t move me down and say I can’t take Scholarship. I wish Ben and I were applying to the same school.
‘What was going on with your mum and dad last night?’ I asked Ben as we sat at the table on Friday trying to get through everything at top speed, scribbling the last of our Geography notes by hand rather than waste time formatting them in Word.
He put his pen down and started building a house out of the colour-coded index cards we’d been writing on. Clothilde has been dutifully trotting back and forth from Ryman’s all week, satisfying our every demand for stationery supplies. His face was all tight, like he didn’t have enough skin. I waited.
‘My dad’s getting married again.’
‘Whoa, no way! That’s kind of fast, isn’t it? Who to?’
The top of the card house wobbled and gave way, and the index cards collapsed into a messy mix of pink and blue.
‘My old nanny, Marti,’ he said shortly.
That’s when I saw what was different about the kitchen. Following my gaze, Ben said, ‘We came home and mum went mental and smashed some things. Plates, bowls …’
The empty space on the counter next to the fridge looked like a massive yawn.
‘Shit! What happened to the goldfish?’
‘They died pretty much straight away.’
I tried to imagine Ben’s sleek-haired, boringly dressed mother breaking the goldfish bowl. Had she just dropped it straight downwards to the floor or hurled it across the room? A watery stain, low down on the white wall opposite, confirmed my suspicions.
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Maybe she’s a Berserk too.’
He put his finger to his lips. ‘She’s upstairs.’
I thought perhaps Ben wouldn’t want to go to the party, but he seemed really up for it in his quiet way. Maybe he didn’t want to spend the evening with his mother, who when she came downstairs at teatime looked as if she could definitely give Morticia Addams a run for her money. Her eyes were red and bloodshot and for once her hair was all nasty and scruffy like a mass of wires. Like my mother when she has no make-up on, she looked loads older. She made herself a cup of tea and looked blankly about the kitchen, and asked me if I would remember to take all my chargers and pencils and mini Post-it notes and Tupperware containers with me as it would be very nice to regain the use of her kitchen table. That sounded rather sarcastic, I thought, but I was in the middle of a buttered raisin muffin with strawberry jam so I didn’t wind her up about the dead goldfish or anything.
So I packed up my stuff and Ben and I got into our wolf suits, which took a hell of a long time. I wore black jeans from DKNY Kids and Ben put on some old faded grey ones. We cut up the tatty old fur stoles and safety-pinned them to our trainers so they could be wolf paws. We actually sewed strips into long sausages for tails, sitting on the floor with our backs against the bed and listening to this awesome music called Heavy Metal that is really quite old but still incredible. It sounds like how I often feel before rugby and football m
atches, furious and frenetic, with huge drums that beat really fast and whole armies of guitars on top of it and mad high-pitched screaming. And a lot of the songs are about war and madness and death. Like I said, awesome.
‘How come your mum lets you listen to this stuff?’ I asked as I attached my tail to the back of my fur coat.
‘She used to make a fuss about it,’ he said, ‘but then she read an article about how children that listen to heavy metal have higher IQs.’
With our fur hats and leather masks and fangs, with just the bedside lamp on and Ben’s mural as our background and the chug-chug-chug and drone of the music, we stopped being Ben and Hobie and became Hati and Skǫll. One song by a band called Metallica was actually called ‘Of Wolf and Man’. Like it was written specially for us! I was jumping up and down on the bed and trying to bat the ceiling with my tail and Ben was leaping about the room in that slightly shifty way that he has, shaking his hair about. He was chanting, ‘Bǫðvar úlfr brandi tekr!’ over and over and I asked him what it meant and he said it meant ‘Wolf of combat takes up blade’ which was about as far as he had got at teaching himself Old Norse and I thought it was one of the coolest things I’d ever heard. He wrote it down for me on one of our revision cards and I told him it was really quite impressive the way he’d managed to learn all the spellings and things. And Ben explained that it was sort of out of respect to the Otherlife, which was why he preferred to use the proper Norse names for most of the Gods, even if it takes a bit of time to get it right. Then he taught me a Heavy Metal sign called the mano cornuto, which you make by holding up your hand with all the fingers clenched into a fist except your index and little fingers, so it looks like a pair of devil’s horns.
Awesome.
Ben’s mother opened the door and said she was ready when we were and could we please turn down the music and stop ruining the furniture. ‘Good Lord!’ she said, presumably taken aback by our wolf suits. Then we drove to Frodo’s in absolute silence.
Frodo’s house, which I hate to say is bigger than mine, was lit up neon green by these massive floodlights on either side of the door. Life-size cutouts of Frankenstein and Dracula were parked between the bonsai trees. His housekeeper and cleaner were stationed inside the hall, each holding a gigantic wicker bowl full of organic sweets. I lunged at them, and was immediately pulled away by the scruff of my wolf suit by Frodo’s mother, who appeared out of nowhere. Now, if I find Frodo irritating, fat, pretentious and boring, then it’s highly probable that his mother is responsible for all of the above except the fatness, which he gets from his father. She has a dried-up face and scraped-back hair and wears all black all the time. I have never seen her smile, even when she is talking about Frodo and his amazing gifts and talents. According to her, he was playing the violin at eighteen months and composed the music for his grandmother’s funeral when he was only seven, never watches television because he would prefer to have private classes with a member of the Olympic fencing team and knows how to make crème brûlée with a mini blowtorch. Oh well, I suppose that’s the pudding that matches his personality most accurately. His mother is called Vonda and she hates me as much as I hate her because of the chalk penis episode. Quite often she sends Frodes into school with vomit-inducing cookies like pumpkin seed and molasses, which none of us will eat, so we take them home and then the other mothers see what a stupendous Baking Talent she is.
We were the last people to arrive, and apart from Matteo everyone was there. Norville was in a bespoke £300 chicken suit. The Nicholson Twins had come as Jekyll and Hyde. Archie was Little Bo Peep but spattered with blood and with a lightsaber instead of a shepherd’s crook. Only Archie, who is strong enough to hit you back, could get away with something as tempting-to-violence as dressing as a girl. And everyone was rushing around shrieking and jumping on balloons and the whole of the downstairs floor was decked out with cobwebs and huge toadstools that lit up and changed colour and scary ghost noises were playing through the speakers.
There was a photographer there, sidling around all the groups of kids with his camera. He had one of those old Polaroid cameras that are supposed to be really cool because they’re from like the 1950s or something.
‘A pair of wolves!’ he said.
‘I don’t want to be in a photograph,’ said Ben.
But the photographer was hustling us into an empty space in front of a cobwebbed wall.
‘Smile!’ he said.
I put my arm around Ben and whispered, ‘Wolf of combat takes up blade!’
He chuckled. The camera popped and flashed and I felt Ben cringe and tense up a bit but when the photograph came out it was really cool because we were both doing proper wolf grins and I decided that I liked it more than the signed picture of me and Tom Cruise. Ben didn’t seem to want it so I put it in my jeans pocket, folded in half.
Somebody coughed loudly from the landing and we all looked up at the massive curvy marble staircase because Frodo was coming down the stairs. And I have to say it was pretty cool of him to dress as an actual Hobbit, complete with pointy ears, hairy toes and a flagon of ale in each hand. Almost as though Frodes has a sense of humour after all. Knowing him and his mother, it was probably an actual costume from The Lord of the Rings and I was half expecting her to say she’d put in a call to the director and he’d had it shipped over specially, just for Frodo.
And then she did say just that.
Frodo’s nanny took us trick-or-treating and we traipsed up and down the sloping tree-lined roads ringing on all the same doorbells as the other convoys of kids. We must have passed fifty or sixty other groups of ghosts and goblins and devils and witches and so on, marching with the sugar-crazed intensity of army recruits and yelling insults at each other across the street. Our Happy Halloween bags groaned under the weight of chocolate coins and packets of Haribo and Oreo cookies. I had the idea after a while to start howling instead of shouting ‘trick or treat’ and then Ben and I both began howling non-stop and capering from side to side, dangerously close to the edge of the pavement.
We fell behind the others and then met a phalanx of Teletubbies coming the other way, which caused a bit of congestion.
Ben caught hold of my sleeve with his paw.
‘Let’s run away,’ he said.
So we did.
We tore off down the road, jumping high in the air and howling bloodcurdling howls and ‘Bin the air and howling bloodcurdling howls andðvar úlfr brandi tekr!’ which I’d pretty much got the gist of by that point, cannoning into the other trick-or-treaters. Just as we were coming up behind a group of really little kids, no more than seven or eight I’d say, it was like we both had the same idea, because Ben leaped around one side of them and I leaped around the other and roared really loudly, which made several of them start screaming. As an afterthought I snatched one of their bags of treats and then we sprinted away on our wolf feet, fast as tornadoes. The father who was with the little kids started yelling at us to come back and apologise and what did we think we were doing etc, so I reached for a handful of Quality Street and flung them behind me as I ran and yelled, ‘Bǫðvar úlfr brandi tekr!’ although I guess I should’ve replaced the object noun with the word for sweets, but they probably didn’t have those a thousand years ago.
We rounded the corner and pelted down the street and crossed the road and crept along it in exaggerated steps, like burglars do in cartoons. We pressed our masks to the windows of shops and soon came to an incredibly posh restaurant that my parents go to sometimes on dates. It was low-lit inside with candles on the tables and was full of expensively dressed people with wine in silver buckets and waiters with white tea towels over their arms. We crouched down behind the door, under the dark green awning.
I looked at Ben. He looked back at me. No one needed to say the words I dare you.
We were Hati and Skǫll.
We opened the door, and although it jangled loudly I could see the maître d’ lady with her massive appointment book on a little plinth and
her back was turned because she was saying goodbye to someone. We sprang into the room and ran around the tables, doing a sort of Wild Rumpus dance from Where the Wild Things Are. This caused a wave of diners to break abruptly from their boring conversations about house prices etc etc and give little, polite screams (some were louder than others) and the maître d’ started marching in pursuit, but of course she couldn’t properly shout at us because the restaurant is what my mum calls hushed tones. And we met a waiter coming the other way and he was holding a wooden board with a huge, perfectly cooked steak for two people to share which I think is called a côte de boeuf, and there was a glittery serrated knife artfully poised among some rocket leaves and I pounced at the waiter. But Ben pounced first.
Randomly, I started thinking about last week’s creative writing homework, which had been to write a story called ‘Crossing the Line’. When Ben seized the côte de boeuf and made off with it, and I followed him, I think we probably crossed it.
We ran for what seemed like an hour but actually just took us around the block. And finally we collapsed on someone’s doorstep and howled with wolf-howl laughter.
‘Wolves of combat take up steak!’ I said.
Ben looked down at the frankly enormous steak, charred on the outside and oozing juices.
‘It should be raw really,’ he muttered.
‘We should have got hold of some chips,’ I said.
We tore it in half and devoured it.
It felt like being free.
The rest of the evening was, of course, dull by comparison. Hobbitboy’s nanny is so moronic that she had actually failed to notice that we were missing, and we managed to catch them up just as they were approaching the house. Frodo had slowed to a waddle, encumbered by his excessive bulk and the acquisition of about four tonnes of treats. Archie had broken his lightsaber and was trying not to cry.
