The Otherlife

by Julia Gray

  But there were other problems too. Zara and I did plenty of research. We learned that it could take weeks, sometimes, or longer, to die after ingesting poisonous fungi. The Internet was full of horror stories, and we read as many as we could bear to. But Jason was found dead, not after days or weeks, but a few hours later. Plus: the effects of mushrooms such as Amanita phalloides or Amanita virosa are readily traceable. Why then had nobody known that this was what killed him? Why was it never reported?

  As far as I was concerned, there was only one reason why there was any mystery about the cause of Jason’s death. Surely Ike and Elsie somehow managed to influence the coroner’s report, or suppress the real one in some way. It seemed reasonable, with their connections and their near-unlimited funds, that they could have been able to do this. And if they’d thought that Hobie might have had something to do with it – which, after what happened to Hobie after Jason’s body was found, might have seemed likely – surely they’d have been all the more keen to minimise the attentions of the police, and even, maybe, the press. Zara told me that she’d been instructed not to say anything to anyone about it, no matter who asked. And this explained why nobody at Cottesmore House said anything to me – people like Frodo, who I’m sure must have found out at some point. The combination of my mother not wanting me to find out, plus the Duvalles making sure that nobody talked about it, plus my weird, wrapped-up head state, where I barely knew what day of the week it was, plus the painkillers I started taking regularly … all of this together was enough to keep me from figuring it out.

  Until Hermódr came.

  Zara and I decided that we needed to see the actual report. So, as soon as my exams were over, that – with a little guidance from the ever-helpful Reg of Putney – is what we did.

  It took a while for the local coroner’s office to accept that we were ‘interested parties’; in the end, we took Rebecca with us. We didn’t think they could deny the mother of Jason’s child the right to look at his records.

  Hobie had been buried for a week. It was curiously dull and grey for early July; the day had an anticlimactic feel. We waited for a while at reception, and then were shown to a small carpeted room. A woman in a blue suit told us there was a small fee, which Rebecca paid with her debit card.

  And then, after so many weeks of waiting, and wondering, and speculating, Jason’s report lay, at last, in front of us, in a long, official envelope. Zara, who had been content for so long not to wonder what had really happened to Jason, was the one to open it.

  And it said nothing about poison at all. (Nothing about drugs either, I was glad to note.) And nothing about mushrooms.

  According to the report, Jason Adrian Young, deceased, had died of ‘asphyxiation resulting from severe anaphylactic shock’. In other words, Jason had had an allergic reaction. The allergen itself was not noted. Rebecca had apparently been right. Except it was not right at all.

  After that, even Zara had to agree with me. It seemed that Ike and Elsie Duvalle really had managed to change the report so that it said nothing about poisonous mushrooms, which were so much more suspicious and harder to explain than a simple allergic reaction. Was that really so hard to believe? Perhaps it wasn’t.

  But even now, as we leave the churchyard and make our way back up the lane to the Duvalles’ land, entering through the small gate that will take us into the woods, we are still not quite sure that we really know the truth.

  We thread between the trees, the gnarled oaks and slender beeches, the willows with their outpoured graceful fronds. Afternoon sunlight filters through thick-layered leaves. Wood pigeons murmur from far-off places.

  We come to a small grove, a clearing.

  At its centre: Yggdrasil.

  The sight of it, grand and ancient, fills me with sudden emotion. The history of me and Zara and Hobie and Rebecca and Jason all bundled up inside it, running deep into the memories in its roots. For a few moments we stand in its shadow, side by side but not touching, in total silence.

  This is where Hobie was found.

  This part is the bit that I never really knew, but I know it as well now as if I’d been there, because Zara has told me, so many times.

  On the 9th of November, early in the morning, Jason was found dead. In a magazine-perfect house run with clockwork precision, anguish and confusion suddenly reigned. Amid the chaos of police taking statements, the coroner being notified, people lamenting in hushed voices, nobody noticed that Hobie had vanished. Ike and Elsie were in the drawing room with the police. Clothilde was hysterical. Rebecca was on the phone to Jason’s flatmates, her voice low and choked; even her earrings had ceased to dance.

  Zara padded from room to room, looking for her brother.

  ‘Where’s Hobie?’ she said to the cleaner, to Anna in the kitchen, who was quietly devastated, as though she was personally responsible for the death of Jason.

  She looked in Hobie’s room, his bathroom, their parents’ room.

  Nothing.

  Then, without putting on her shoes, she ran out into the cold grey morning. She thought about the maze, wondering whether he was waiting for her there. Let’s play Lose Zara in the Maze, he’d say, tugging at her ponytail, dragging her by the hand. But the maze was silent, uninhabited. The pool was undisturbed, its tarpaulin flat and blue and ignorant.

  She climbed up into the woods, following the broken stems and footprinted undergrowth that suggested that someone had passed that way. She’d trailed after me and Hobie many times besides, wanting to be part of our close-knit team of two. She knew this was the way we often came. Distantly, she heard the crackle and crash of someone ahead of her, stampeding a path towards the tree, the huge hollow tree where she knew we sometimes used to sit. The one with a funny name, a many-syllabled name.

  ‘Hobie!’ she called out. ‘Where are you?’

  When she came to the clearing he was already at the top of the tree. He stood, poised, one hand supporting his weight on a nearby branch. Around his head, Zara saw a fire-red light, faint, like an afterglow. (It was this light that she was reminded of, years later, when she began to see the coloured lights of the Otherlife for herself.)

  Hobie looked straight at her but – she is sure of this – as if she wasn’t really there. He looked through her. She wondered what it was that he could see.

  He said, ‘Ben …’

  His expression changed, from a primal baring of teeth, an elated, ecstatic snarl, to surprise, outrage, shock.

  And he fell.

  They moved him from place to place, bringing in specialists, changing his treatments. He spent a long time in intensive care, and for a while it was hoped that he would recover. But Hobie Duvalle, the fastest, the strongest, the most vigorous and energetic of people, was trapped in a coma, as Loki was trapped in a net by the angry Gods. His brain function minimal, his body inert, his hands and feet unmoving. It was this that I couldn’t bear to see, on the couple of occasions that I visited. People offered to go with me – Mum, Dad, even Frodo – but I just couldn’t bear to look at his hands. In all the time that I’d known Hobie, his hands were always busy – stuffing things into his mouth, catching and throwing, scribbling, fiddling, fidgeting. I could not bear to look at hands so still.

  Hobie stayed in a coma for three years, seven months, and one day. And then, on the night that I crossed the bridge to Duvalle Hall, on the night that Ragnarok suddenly appeared in the sky, he died.

  When Hermódr came to me, in the Stonehills’ garden, it was not He is dead, or He has died, that he said to me. It was not hann er dauðr, as I’d thought it was, or hann er dáinn.

  It was hann deyr.

  Not past, but present.

  He is dying.

  It was not Jason that he meant, but Hobie. Although I can’t help but wonder if perhaps I was supposed to interpret it the way that I did, because only by finding out that Hobie killed Jason could I have ever forgiven Hobie. And I think he needed to be forgiven.

  He may have pretended he di
dn’t, but he did.

  I think Ragnarok means different things for different people. As far as the story goes, it spelt the end of the Gods but the beginning of a fresh, clean world, ruled over by Baldr, under a newborn sun. It was an end, but also a beginning. Sometimes things need to be destroyed in order for changes to take place. Ragnarok is not a bad thing or a good thing. Just an eventual thing. But I also think the Ragnarok that took place on the great rugby pitch at the top of Duvalle Hall had a specific meaning, a purpose.

  It was the last few hours of Hobie’s life.

  It really was, as he said, the end of everything.

  And I’m glad that I got to see him, one last time.

  ‘Do you think we’ve got it right?’ says Zara, interrupting my thoughts.

  ‘What?’

  ‘About Jason, I mean.’

  ‘Hobie said he was sorry,’ I say. ‘When I saw him on the roof, that night. He knew he was guilty.’

  ‘But what you saw … you can’t be sure that was Hobie. You can’t be sure it wasn’t your imagination.’

  Even though she’s seen the coloured lights, I don’t think Zara will ever fully understand about the Otherlife. There’s seeing, and there’s seeing. Things don’t always have to be physically there to be real. I know it was Hobie – some part of Hobie, at least. Even though his actual body was hundreds of miles away, in some secluded, bleached unit of a private clinic, I know it was him. Even though there was, of course, no enormous bridge when I looked for it the next day, I will always remember the way it glowed in the rain, the feel of it under my trainers. And even though by the time I peeled away the bandages the following evening the marks had faded to a soft, irritated pink, there was still the evidence, ever so slight, of the wolf-bite on my arm. There is more than one kind of real in the world.

  I look up at the mighty tangled branches wreathed in rich dark leaves. Last time I saw this tree, it was bare. I half-close my eyes, try to remember. I can think more clearly now. My mind’s my own again. I haven’t taken a painkiller since Download, and I’m sure that I never will again.

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t the mushrooms that killed him,’ says Zara, for what must be the thousandth time. Her perfectionism is so extreme that she cannot allow for errors, especially when it comes to building a story that holds water. She still hates to think that any worthy coroner would allow himself to be swayed by the promise of money, even though she can see how it might have happened that way.

  ‘What then?’ I say. ‘If not the mushrooms, then what?’

  ‘Something that wasn’t poison. Something else.’

  ‘Like what?’ I say again.

  ‘I don’t know. You knew him better than me. You knew him better than most people. What if it really was an allergy? Did he ever say anything to you about allergies?’

  ‘If he had, I’d remember,’ I say. But even as I’m thinking this, that hidden part of my brain – the part that was mired in a drugged slumber for year upon year – starts flashing, alert and awakened. There was something … something he once told me. Or was it something he told Hobie?

  Opening Hobie’s diary, Zara reads out a passage again, in her measured and thoughtful voice.

  ‘I attacked the mushrooms with a breadknife, just enough for them to crumble into pieces, and even though there were still a few leaves and things I gathered up the whole lot and stirred them hastily into the mulled wine.’

  My gaze travels upwards to the nest of branches where Hobie and I used to sit.

  And I see.

  I remember.

  And, in my heart and stomach and bones, I know.

  ‘Zara,’ I say. ‘Zara – look.’

  Following my line of sight, she peers upwards. At the wiry clot of mistletoe that clings to Yggdrasil.

  ‘When Hobie picked the mushrooms, he pulled up some leaves and twigs from the ground,’ I say. ‘We know this. You just read it out. And in among the leaves and twigs, there was some mistletoe. You’re right: Jason didn’t die of poisoning. He did have an allergy, a really obscure one. He was allergic to mistletoe. He didn’t die of poisoning. It wasn’t the mushrooms. It was the mistletoe.’

  Zara breathes out, slowly.

  I go on: ‘He did tell me once that he loved the Norse tales because he had something in common with one of the Gods. But he never told me that the God was Baldr. Maybe he ate some mistletoe when he was small and had some kind of reaction to it; maybe that’s how he knew.’

  ‘Yes, like with wasps and penicillin and oysters. People know they’re allergic and they know that it’ll be worse the next time,’ Zara says. ‘But do you think he knew he could die from it?’

  ‘I just don’t know. He never mentioned mistletoe to me, not in so many words.’

  ‘And isn’t mistletoe poisonous anyway?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s that poisonous,’ I say. ‘I don’t think it can kill people. Also, maybe that explains why my dad said he felt a bit ill the next day. He might have had mild mistletoe poisoning. But Jason wasn’t poisoned; it was definitely an allergy. And that’s why it doesn’t say anything specific in the report. How could they have known that he was allergic to mistletoe?’

  ‘Hobie knew,’ says Zara abruptly. ‘He mentions it in his diary. Near the end. He says Jason’s allergic to something bizarre. But he doesn’t remember what it is.’

  She knows the diary practically off by heart by now. But I think I remember the bit she’s talking about. It makes me incredibly sad that the only person who knew that Jason was allergic to mistletoe was the person who caused his death.

  For a while longer we stand there, not touching, not talking.

  Then: ‘It’s just like the story,’ says Zara. ‘The story of Baldr and Loki.’

  Later, as it grows dark, Zara and I go down to the lake. We have brought the model ship. Zara is carrying Hobie’s diary. It’s time for the diary to be put to rest. It’s time for Hobie too. I’m sure that his funeral was very nice, in an English sort of way, and his memorial was grand and splendid, rich with organ chords and perfume. But we know what he wrote in his diary. I’d want what they had in the Otherlife. We owe him this much.

  Today is good day for a ceremony, besides.

  Today would have been his sixteenth birthday.

  We stand on the narrow platform, gazing out across the flat placid surface. The Japanese bridge arches across the middle, as brittle, as artificial, as papier maché.

  I do not think Hobie wanted to die, though I cannot be sure. I think he went to Yggdrasil that morning for the same reason that we always went there together: to escape. I think he didn’t know what to do, or where else to go. It’s possible, though, that by killing Jason in the way that he did – with mistletoe – that by acting like Loki, he somehow found his way into the Otherlife, and that when he climbed the tree on that last morning it reached out a hand for him – a fire-red, grasping hand – and dragged him away. Either that, or he found some way of seeing it, in his unconscious state, more clearly and more vividly than I ever could. Certainly that would explain the things I kept glimpsing, all through May and June, that weren’t the Otherlife I knew as mine, and the mysterious, twisted version of Duvalle Hall that I came to on the night of Metallica’s show at Download. It was Hobie’s Otherlife. And I wonder, sometimes, whether I started to see the Otherlife – both his and mine – again, after so long, because Hobie, in his hospital bed, wanted me to. After all, Zara saw something too. Perhaps he was reaching out to her as well.

  But some things there will never be an answer for, and we will have to accept that.

  We kneel down, side by side, at the water’s edge. Gently Zara wedges the diary between the masthead and the curved side of the hull. On top of the diary she places a small plastic Tyrannosaurus rex. Then she takes a packet of Sun-Maid raisins from the pocket of her jeans. A Bounty bar. Adds them too.

  ‘Snacks,’ she says.

  Lastly, a loose-tasselled pompom, sad and bedraggled. She puts it on the deck.

&
nbsp; ‘I’m throwing the clown suit away at last, but I want him to take something of mine too,’ she says.

  I hesitate a moment, and then take a fold of material from my back pocket. I open it out slowly.

  ‘What is that?’ says Zara.

  ‘A vintage Metallica T-shirt,’ I say. ‘Probably my favourite-ever piece of clothing.’

  I imprint it on my mind one last time. The blackened scar and frayed hole from the Stonehills’ party look almost right now, as though they’re part of the design. I can’t believe I minded as much as I did. And even though this T-shirt is incredibly rare, and I’ll never be able to afford another one like it, I’m glad that I’m giving it to Hobie. Wherever he is, I think he’ll appreciate the gesture.

  I break a firelighter in half; it reminds me of the time I gave Hobie my sandwich. I hand a piece to Zara and we sprinkle the chalky crumbs onto the funeral mound, wiping our fingers on our clothes.

  ‘OK. Ready?’

  ‘Ready.’

  I hand her the lighter. She flicks, neatly. A narrow tongue of fire licks the air. Slowly she holds it near the crumbled firelighter, the corner of the raisin box, the diary. Hungrily, like it’s jumping at the chance, the paper snatches at the newborn flame. The edges take on a darker gilt.