by Nick Gifford
Liam stopped in front of his desk, and waited for the Principal to continue.
“You came to the Academy late,” said Willoughby. “Normally we like to enter new students on the Talented and Special programme well before Year Ten. But that’s by the by. We’re going to move you up to Senior House, Connor. I know you’ve only just started to settle in, but after lunch I want you to pack your bags and take them over to Senior House. You know where it is, don’t you? Miss Carver is the house tutor on duty today. Ask for her and she’ll sort you out. Okay? Good. That’s all.”
Willoughby turned back to his computer screen and tapped something on his keyboard to kill the screensaver.
Liam turned and left the office.
They had really meant it when they talked about fast-tracking him. He wondered what it meant. What was so special about him? Why were they treating him this way?
~
He walked.
He was still new here, and while everyone had been friendly, he couldn’t really claim that he had made any proper friends yet. Coming here halfway through term, he was stepping into established routines. People had the things they did, the friends they did them with. He hadn’t quite found a way to fit in.
So he walked.
He could have gone back to his room, he supposed. Pack his suitcase ready for this afternoon’s move. But he had only been here a week, and he’d barely had time to un-pack. It wouldn’t take him long to throw everything into the case again for the short walk through the trees to Senior House.
He skirted around the playing fields. There was a cricket match going on. The scoreboard read 84 for 5, but he didn’t know who was playing. He had always done well in team games. Never the star player, but still he had been a popular pick. When Liam was in a team everyone around him seemed to play much better. He seemed to have a knack for getting the best out of people.
He cut through the gorse on one of the many trails without really thinking. It was only when he recognised the three trunks of a lone tree ahead that he realised he had headed for the old pine Anders called Three Trunker. It just seemed natural to come here, even though it was Anders and Hayley’s place, not his.
He considered turning back, but decided against it.
If they were here they might be okay about him wandering by. He could tell them about Senior House. Anders would probably be pleased that the double room would be his own again. Or his and his hamster’s, at any rate.
And if they weren’t here ... well, there was something special about this place. Something that reached deep inside Liam: a sense of peace, of belonging, a sense of memory.
Still, he hesitated as he came to the edge of the clearing where Three Trunker grew. He looked carefully, and felt a surge of relief when he was sure that he was alone. He remembered how twitchy Hayley had been this morning at breakfast. Maybe she and Anders had argued.
He sat on the low, horizontal bough, with his back to one of the three trunks. It was funny how boarding school could be such a lonely place, when you were almost always surrounded by people.
This memory thing was bothering him, he realised. He seemed to have spent the last week stuck completely in the present time... Everything was short-term: he could remember lessons on Friday, he could remember the surprise when his father had walked through Mr Willoughby’s door on Thursday, he could remember climbing out of the taxi on Monday after the journey down from Norwich.
But before that?
Suddenly everything became fuzzy, vague. He had stayed with Aunt Katherine for a few weeks, but that was exactly how he remembered it: he remembered having stayed with Kath. He couldn’t remember the detail. He couldn’t remember any incidents, any things they had done, any place they had gone, even anything they had watched on TV or any music they had listened to. It was almost as if someone had told him about it, rather than that he had actually experienced it.
And now... This was what disturbed him, he realised. Now most of yesterday was a similar blur: sketchy outlines of going with the Elites to Wolsey Point, but no detail, no substance.
Was he ill? Was he suffering some kind of mental decay that had eaten away at his more distant memories and now was taking chunks out of even recent events?
He remembered Hayley’s questions, when he’d found her here a couple of days ago. She had asked if he felt like he was being watched, if he felt like his head was being messed with. Maybe his feelings were normal, then. Maybe everyone felt like this about how hard it was to hold on to memories. It was stupid of him to worry about it.
He tipped his head up. The sun had broken through now, and it was hot on his skin. Everything seemed better when the sun shone like this.
Teething problems. That was all it was. Settling in. It was only natural that he should feel disoriented, confused.
A little time later, a gull swooped in low and landed on the sandy ground a short distance away. It was a smart bird, with sooty grey wings, yellow legs and beak, and a pure, crisp white body. It stared at him with beady yellow eyes, then threw its head back and gave a long, drawn-out screeching cry.
Liam felt a dizzy lurch.
Ruined building ... broken roof ... sand piled up on a concrete floor ... a gull peering in through the gap in the roof, then throwing its head back to cry out to the world.
And he remembered this place, too, the three-trunked pine. A sudden flash, a crystal clear memory: sitting down there on the ground with Hayley, with Anders up here in the tree, watching them both. Hanging out here with the two of them. Their place. All three of them.
Other fragments came to him, then. A row of white cottages, lined up at a jaunty angle across a shingle beach. A man with balding silver hair and thick-framed glasses in one of those cottages. Fire. Something to do with fire. London’s burning. Children’s voices, singing that song as his father betrayed him...
Liam felt dizzy.
All those fragments, locked up in his head. He had saved them. He had saved these memories when someone had been doing things to his mind. He had clung onto them, desperately.
Why?
There was something awful, a deep, deep dreadful fear, wrapped up with those memories, or with the act of clinging onto those memories – the memory of those memories. Some terrible threat.
He looked around the clearing, but he was still alone.
They can get into your head and do things... But who?
And why? Why did he have memories of some past life, buried away deep in the layers of his mind?
~
“You okay?” Anders strolled into the room, and Liam flinched, like a startled rabbit.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m okay.”
“You seem jumpy, that’s all.”
Liam shrugged. There were shapes in his head again and he tried to visualise himself pushing them away. “I suppose I am,” he said. “I saw old Willoughby this morning. Looks like you’ll be getting this room back to yourself again.”
For a moment, Anders was thrown. “You mean...?”
Liam gave a short laugh. “That’s right,” he said. “They’re kicking me out.” Then he added, “All the way to Senior House.”
Anders laughed, too. “Blimey,” he said. “You don’t hang around, do you? You make the rest of us look like Grunts.”
Suddenly, he became serious. He came over and held his hand out for Liam to shake. “Well, old man. Looks like you’ve made the grade. Good for you. Wait till the others all hear at lunch!” With that, Anders wandered off again. Spreading the word, Liam presumed.
He finished packing, gathering his school things off the desk and slipping them into the elasticated, external pocket of his big case.
He took his phone from the desk drawer and flipped it open, remembering that odd message. Things are not what they seem. Perhaps it had been some kind of warning about Senior House?
A reminder had popped up on the screen. He opened it. 13th June. Mum’s birthday. Today was the 11th: it was his mother’s birthday in two days’ t
ime.
He sat at the foot of his bed.
Mum had died nine years ago.
He didn’t know her. He hardly remembered her. She was just a hole in his life, a space where other people had someone but he didn’t.
So why would he have entered her birthday on his phone’s calendar? Why would he have set it to remind him like this?
He tried to picture her. Tried to remember the things they must have done together. It was so long ago, and he had only been young.
It was all so vague.
There was a phone number included in the reminder.
His thumb hovered over the keypad, but he didn’t dial it.
He wasn’t ready for this.
He couldn’t key the number.
He just couldn’t.
15 Another new beginning
Senior House was a community on its own, isolated within the larger community of the National Academy for the Talented and Special. Those who were talented enough, and who passed all the tests they were set, were marked out as special, and Senior House was where they were destined to end up.
Fail the main school and you would be sent back out into the so-called normal world.
Fail Senior House and ... you had to be dealt with in other ways.
~
Miss Carver was waiting for him outside Senior House. “Liam,” she said, as he trudged through the trees, dragging his suitcase along the sandy trail. “Welcome!”
She turned, and he followed her up the steps and into the house.
Immediately he was struck by the intensity of this building, the sense of other minds occupying this space. He felt the strong need to guard himself, to protect his own mind from the intrusive presence of these others.
“It’s okay,” said Miss Carver. “Most of us are hit by the atmosphere of Senior House. So many of our kind all together under one roof. You’ll get used to it.”
Liam stared at her, struck by the openness of her words. Our kind.
“Halls are up here,” she said, heading up the stairs. He followed her to the first floor, and along a corridor. “There are only eleven students in Senior House right now,” she told him. “We’re very selective. There’s always at least one house tutor on duty, usually me or Mr Pullinger.”
She pointed at a door as they passed. “Bathrooms,” she said. “Mixed, so remember to lock the door.” She pushed the next door open and waved a hand. “Kitchen,” she said. “For tea and coffee and the like.” There was a girl in there watching over a boiling kettle. She looked up and smiled.
“Your room’s along here.”
They came to the end of the corridor and Miss Carver knocked on one of the two doors there. There was no reply. She took a key from her pocket and opened the door. “That boy,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re sharing with Luc. I told him we were coming, but it looks like he’s off wandering again... You’ll get used to him.”
The room was a little larger than the one he had shared with Anders in Sherborne House. The furniture was the same, although the layout was a little different, with the two desks side-by-side along the far wall. The other boy’s belongings were spread about across one desk, and one of the beds. There were pot plants, too. A spider plant was up on top of one of the wardrobes, baby plantlets tumbling down towards the light from the window. Other plants grew in pots on his room-mate’s desk, and from a plant-stand by the window.
“You’ll be okay?” said Miss Carver from the doorway. “Dinner downstairs at five. I’ll leave you to settle in.”
Alone, Liam hauled his case across to the foot of the unused bed.
He went to look out of the half-open sash window.
And there, climbing up an iron drainpipe towards the window, was a tall, blond boy, maybe a year or so older than Liam. Liam recognised him instantly, as just about the only Senior they ever saw in the main part of the school, usually wandering around as if he was lost.
The boy looked up, and paused, grinning.
“Hello,” he said. “I am Luc Renaudier and I am to be your new room buddy.”
~
Liam sat back on his new bed, as Luc tumbled in through the window, all arms and legs, and then stood, brushing himself down.
“Please, excuse my strange entry,” he said. Luc spoke with a thick French accent. “I like to climb. I like to practise. I can climb a flag-pole. Do you believe that? I have climbed both flag-poles on the Academy towers. You believe me? You can verify my claim. You climb those poles, you will find my initials carved with a pen-knife, right there at the top of the poles. Both of them. I am good, you see. But...” He shrugged. “I practise. You practise, you get better, yes?”
“Yes,” said Liam. “Yes, of course.”
Luc nodded towards the suitcase. “Yours, yes? You have all that you need? You must ask if there is anything, yes? You want to talk? Okay, outside. I see you there?”
He sprung up onto the window ledge, then pivoted out on his hands. It looked as if he had just jumped clear, but when Liam went across to look he saw that his new room-mate was shinning down the drain-pipe again.
Liam took the corridor and stairs, locking his room’s door with the key Miss Carver had given him.
He found Luc sitting on the trunk of a fallen pine, deep in the shade of the trees. He had a fir cone and was prising the scales off one by one. He peered at Liam as he approached. He seemed more wary now, out in the open.
“You must forgive me,” he said, as Liam sat further along the fallen tree. “I show off. It is a bad way of pretending I am not nervous.”
Liam waited for him to continue.
“What kind of freak are you going to be, eh?” Luc laughed. “The people in this place...” He leaned towards Liam and continued in a stage whisper, “There are some strange people here, no? I get around a lot. I see them. I do not know what kind of strange person they will be putting in my room with me, so I am nervous and I do some showing off. You will forgive me?”
Liam shrugged. “You don’t know how strange I am yet,” he joked.
“And you me, no?” Luc laughed. “So. You tell me yours and I will tell you mine, yes?”
Liam must have looked blank, because Luc continued, “Our aptitudes. The gifts we have in our heads, yes?”
Liam shrugged.
“I go first, then,” said Luc. “My most special gift is that I get past people. I deflect. I would make a very good cambrioleur – robber of houses. I can get in and out of places and if anyone is there I can send their attention the other way. They seek him here, they seek him there, that most elusive Luc Renaudier! Yes?”
Liam remembered Miss Carver’s reaction when she had shown him to the room he was to share with Luc. That boy. “Must come in useful,” said Liam.
Luc nodded seriously. “It is a thing in my family,” he said. “I come from a small village near Guérande. We harvest salt, you know. But also, my people, we do not like to be pushed around. When the Nazis came to my country in the Second World War my grandparents fought against them. They were in the Maquis, the Resistance, and the family gift was very important to them. It kept them alive. But they did not have the opportunities of self-improvement that we have here. The gift was as it was, a talent that was ... unripe. Here, we ripen, no?”
“I’ve seen you about the place,” said Liam. “Last week. You’re the only Senior I’ve seen in the main school.”
“They like to keep we seniors apart,” said Luc. “But I do not like to be fenced in, so I slip away from time to time. I told you: we do not like to be pushed around, we Renaudiers. So: you. What is yours? Why is it that you are here in Senior House? What is the gift in your head?”
Liam thought. Somewhere deep down he knew, but like so many of his memories that knowledge was deep, obscured. He couldn’t quite reach it. “I don’t know,” he said, finally. He remembered Willoughby telling him he had been selected for Senior House this morning. “I don’t know what it is, but I think it might be something very special.”
/>
~
That evening, they ate in a dining room on the ground floor of Senior House. Liam sat at a table with Luc and a younger boy called Morton.
They swapped stories of their past. Both Luc and Morton had been at NATS for about three years, each progressing from the main school to Senior House after only a term.
“One week?” said Morton, after Liam told them how recently he had arrived at NATS. “That’s a record, isn’t it? Hey, Luc, we’re in the presence of greatness.”
“A week?” said Luc, eyeing Liam curiously. “I think... I think that it must have been someone else like you I saw before, then...”
As they talked, the memory thing bothered Liam again.
Luc told them of his home in the heart of the Marais Salants, a landscape of lagoons where families like his own hoed the clay up into ridges to make channels and shallow pools where the sea-water would evaporate in the sun, giving up its salt to be harvested. He told them of the avocets and stilts, spindly legged wading birds which specialised in feeding in these pools, and of the terns that would swoop and dive at your head when you were out working the brine.
Morton talked of growing up in the heart of a northern city, the posh kid who was always picked on. Trying to avoid getting beaten up by the Asian gangs, or the skinheads, or by his older brother’s smack-head friends. His brother hadn’t been able to cope with his own talent, but Morton had used his to defend himself: he discovered he could hurt people, fill their brains with pain. He didn’t like to do it, but sometimes it had been his only defence.
These memories were intense and vivid for Luc and Morton. They had substance, detail, passion.
Liam had only a few sharp memories from before the last week, and these were fragments: Three Trunker, that gull on the Point, some white cottages, children singing...
He went to bed early. It had been a long day and he was tired. He wondered when anything would seem normal again.
~
Lessons in Senior House were organised differently to those in the main school. Classes were small at NATS, usually no more than a dozen pupils at a time, but here in Senior House even that wasn’t possible.
