The school buildings were joined by a covered bridge where teachers patrolled reluctantly between lessons.
Seth liked the flow of human traffic that carried him from one class to the next. It relieved him of the need to make decisions. In the form room, where they gathered every morning after assembly, he’d found a desk in the back row between Wilson Kalu and Sadie Liew, two others who kept themselves apart. Wilson was serious and quiet, but met Seth’s eye each morning with a trusting half-smile; at Christmas he’d invited Seth, alone of the class, to come home and meet his family.
They had recently acquired a puppy, a small brindled creature with white feet. Seth sat on the floor with the dog, speaking quietly to it, watching it explore. It was so silent and soft-footed in its white socks it was as if it was trotting through snow. Seth had to be gently dragged away from watching, up to the dinner table.
Here they had not just turkey and potatoes, he told Mary when he got home that night: they had beer and rice with spices he’d never tasted before. Wilson’s parents gave Seth a present wrapped in red paper: a Crystal Palace shirt. Wilson looked on and caught his eye when he opened it. ‘Never seen you laugh like that before, Pedder,’ he said. It was his shortening of Seth’s last name, a way of claiming him.
Sadie Liew had ended up sitting next to him by accident – a new girl joining halfway through the term, assigned the only spare desk – though by Year 10 it was clear to Seth that she loved him. She was anxious in science lessons when he did experiments with another partner; she kept him a place next to her in the canteen. The girls had to wear the regulation skirt or trousers, but, apart from that, anything they wanted. Sometimes Sadie left the buttons of her blouse open so he could see the strap of her underwear when she leant across. Some days it was pink, some days it was very white. He didn’t know if she did this on purpose, so he tried not to look; it made him feel peculiar.
It was thought that he shouldn’t be in Alaric’s class for history, so he was taught by Mr Tainsley, who said his work showed promise. ‘But, Seth, you need to take more pride in what you do. You could be the best in the class if you wanted. I think you remember more than Rubina. You can write as well as Callum. But you never finish the project. Don’t you want to do well in the exam?’
These teacher’s chats were something he just sat through, nodding his head. So long as he said nothing and didn’t disagree with them, they’d soon stop talking and leave him alone again. All the comments urged him to take himself more seriously. But when they said these things, he just felt apart from all of it – separate. He noticed that he looked more grown-up than most of the boys and wished he didn’t: Alaric had shown him how to shave and doing it each morning was a chore.
The best part of the week was football. Outside the forty minutes of PE on Friday mornings, there was no school sport; but when two boys had been given trials by Charlton Athletic it was clear that football was a part of life for many of them. A young English teacher called John Rankin got permission to put together a team to play other schools’ under-16s on Sunday mornings in the park. Seth played in midfield and was able to use his left foot as precisely as his right; an equivalence that had been a drawback in the classroom was an advantage on the pitch. Watching his team on screen had given him a combative attitude; he tackled the opposition players with a grim precision, his eye stuck to the ball. Best of all was what Mr Rankin called his ‘positional awareness’ – the way he made himself available for a pass. Some of the boys were in awe of this skill, but it didn’t make him popular with them; he wouldn’t join their celebrations of a goal, and this led them to distrust him.
A group of children who all lived on the same estate began to pick on him. He’d find his way barred in the corridor by a boy much taller than he was. Two girls emptied the salt cellar onto his spaghetti in the canteen, then walked off laughing. There was something in their eyes, though, that wasn’t just hatred. Seth sensed some fear in them. One day when he went to his locker, he found that the catch had been levered open so the door hung loose. Inside, his Crystal Palace shirt had been cut in half with scissors.
He didn’t tell anyone. He climbed up to the attic, where he talked to Alaric about the track they were building. Sometimes he’d go into the garden and coax Nettle over the wall from next door. If Mary was on the evening shift at work, he and Alaric would have dinner together and watch a film until she got back. Alaric ran seasons of what he called ‘the greats’, introducing Seth to Tom Cruise, Sandra Bullock and others from his own childhood.
Seth seemed to have stopped growing at about five feet six and still slept in the boat bed Alaric had restored. When he lay down, he fell asleep at once, unmoving, and woke only when his mother shook him hard by the shoulders in the morning.
Every six months until he was eighteen he was obliged to go to the Parn Institute for some IQ and verbal tests, followed by an hour’s interview with Professor Delmore Redding, now the senior psychologist. This process had been part of the contract signed by his parents and he’d grown used to it.
The parts he feared were the sensory trials that came first. Everything about them made him uneasy. He was given a chair in front of a screen, where a black plastic hood was lowered over his head. When it was in place, resting on his shoulders, there was no ambient light, only two small holes opposite his eyes. With one eye covered, he had to identify dots in a visual field by clicking on something like a computer mouse. This made him nervous because his fingers couldn’t move fast enough to record all the flashes. This was not because he lacked dexterity but because he saw so many lights. After a time, he was allowed to rest while they lifted the hood and taped some gauze over the other eye.
‘That’s the end of first act,’ said the assistant, a man of about forty in a white jacket, whose name badge said ‘Mike Battista’. ‘Time for an ice cream while the house lights are up.’
Seth was disappointed when no ice cream materialised.
The tests continued, using light from different parts of the spectrum, going beyond a normally visible range into infrared and ultraviolet. Seth felt he was doing badly because he was preoccupied by the idea that there was someone else in the room. Mike’s voice was high-pitched and slightly mocking in tone. Yet Seth twice caught another sound, at a lower level, as if Mike were whispering to someone.
During auditory tests, some noise-cancelling headphones played sounds from a range of frequencies. Sometimes he was asked to click when he heard anything; at other times Mike took the headphones off and asked him to describe the sounds. For part of these trials he was blindfold; apparently they wanted to see how much his auditory and visual capacities were linked.
It was often hard for Seth to explain some of the things he sensed, to say whether they were sounds or pictures. It was the same thing when he had been sure that Nettle was going to appear in a few moments; he simply knew. This part of the morning seemed to go much better, but again Seth sensed the presence of another. It was not that he heard Mike whispering or made out a third voice asking questions; it was more that the air became thicker.
The last part was the smell tests. For this he wore both blindfold and headphones with low white noise that could be penetrated only by the researcher’s direct feed. He was also strapped into a tight-fitting mask, through which different aromas were fed.
‘And this one? What’s your score out of ten?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What?’
‘I can’t smell anything at all.’
‘Really? That is interesting. Nothing at all?’
‘No.’
‘This one.’
‘Eight.’
‘What did it make you feel?’
‘Hungry.’
Seth jumped. He had felt something touch his arm, like a finger testing his flesh.
‘What was that?’
‘What?’ said Mike.
‘Something touched me.’
‘No, no. I’m over here behind the screen.’
He listened carefully and thought he heard breathing.
‘Are you ready to carry on?’ said Mike.
‘I suppose so.’
‘Thank you. Focus now. This is an important one.’
There was a faint hissing in the mask.
He had to think much harder. It was pleasant, yet not entirely.
‘Six?’ he said. ‘Yes, maybe six.’
‘What did it make you feel?’
It made him feel the way he did when Sadie Liew leant forward over his desk. He didn’t want to say so.
‘Strange.’
‘Strange in a good way?’
‘Sort of. But also … unhappy.’
‘What?’
‘Like a puzzle you can’t solve.’
The white noise meant he couldn’t hear Mike Battista’s laughter.
When they’d finished, he could order in any lunch he liked. Most people got salads from Brunswick Square Gardens, but Seth asked them to send out for a double burger, no cheese, from a restaurant called Holborn High Steaks, one of the few places in London that still specialised in meat.
As he was walking upstairs to the lounge on the top floor to wait for the delivery, he overheard Mike speaking into his handset, his voice carrying up the stairwell void.
‘Sure. Of course I’m pleased you’re pleased, Lukas. What? No, I don’t think so. It’s fine. But another time I’d be grateful if you didn’t touch him.’
Half an hour later, Seth was woken from a light sleep in an armchair to be taken down the corridor to see Professor Redding.
The preliminaries – windy chat about his health, his parents – were always awkward until they got down to something more concrete.
‘Right,’ said Redding. ‘Friendships. How’s it going?’
‘I’m friends with all the children.’
‘Any one in particular?’
‘Wilson’s still my best friend. Najma, she’s nice.’ He was thinking of what Talissa had told him about her friend Susan Kovalenko: ‘You need someone real close. Someone you can confide in. Then three or four you can have a laugh with. That’s enough.’
‘You like the girls in your class?’ said Redding, looking through his round glasses with his head on one side.
‘Some of them.’
‘Do they like you?’
Seth thought about the look in the eye of the girls who’d poured the salt on his food. ‘They’re not very kind to me.’
‘Do they say bad things? Do they tease you?’
Looking out of the window, over the square, Seth saw the leafless sycamore that Talissa had seen years before. Eventually, he said, ‘I think maybe they do like me but they don’t know how to show it. They don’t know what to say.’
Redding waited, hopefully. Seth said nothing. The silence lengthened and Redding broke first. ‘Do you have feelings for any of them? Do you feel attracted?’
‘Some boys do, I know.’
‘And you?’
‘I’m not sure. I think I feel scared.’
‘Go on.’
‘I mean, sometimes I look at maybe Osanna or Sangita and they seem … like grown-up women. Their clothes and hair and … They seem powerful. To have something over me.’
‘And?’
‘But I feel they’d want something back. Something I don’t have. A feeling I can’t give.’ Seth looked down at his feet. ‘I don’t know what I’m saying.’
‘These things are complicated.’
‘Yes.’
‘And are you still playing football?’
‘No. I gave up because it made the others hate me.’
‘You gave up? I thought you were the star player!’
‘I told Mr Rankin I was injured.’
‘How long ago?’
‘I didn’t play at all last term.’
‘Didn’t he check on your progress?’
‘He asked a couple of times. But it’s on Sunday. It’s not an official school thing. And anyway, the teachers aren’t meant to be friends with us outside school.’
‘What did your parents say?’
‘Mum’s not interested in sport. Dad was sad about it, but he doesn’t want to interfere.’
‘I see. His position’s delicate, isn’t it?’
Seth breathed out heavily. ‘One of the boys in the football team, he knows about how I was born. I don’t know how.’
‘Did he tell you?’
‘No. But he calls me “Test Tube”. And then in chemistry lessons he says things like, “Look, here’s your dad, Seth,” and holds up a tube.’
‘How does that make you feel?’
‘Lonely.’
‘All the time or just when they’re teasing you?’
Seth looked round the room, then down to the saucer of foil-wrapped chocolates on the table. ‘They’ve made me feel different,’ he said. ‘When I go into the classroom it’s as if I’m invisible. I can’t be part of them, of what they are. It’s not that I envy them or really want to join in with their jokes and things. It’s just that I don’t want to be alone.’
‘I don’t quite understand.’
‘It’s not that I like them,’ said Seth. ‘But I want to have the chance.’
‘What chance?’
‘The chance to belong.’
‘And what would that mean?’
‘It would mean I could make my own mind up about things. About life. As it is, I can’t really get to decide anything. You know, maybe I should ask Sangita or Osanna to come out after school. But I can’t. Because it’s like I just don’t have a way in.’
‘Is it that you feel pushed apart from them?’
‘No, it’s more than that. They think I’m worth less. Inferior.’
‘That must be hard to take.’ Delmore Redding spoke softly, but Seth heard feeling in his voice.
He looked at Redding. Like all the children of his age, he was blind to differences of appearance. But at that moment it occurred to him that Professor Redding might have come from somewhere that his grandparents had been mistreated. They’d learned this in old Mr Tainsley’s history class. Was that why Redding’s voice had a tremor in it?
‘I know they’re wrong,’ said Seth. ‘I know they’re stupid to think so. But if you’re on the receiving end, you can’t prove it. How can I show that I’m as good as they are? Just because my mum had cancer once, a long time ago.’
Redding looked at his pad. ‘Can we change the world?’ he said eventually.
‘What?’
‘Well, Seth. We have one life and we have to decide. If the other people don’t want you, if they think you’re worth less than they are, are you going to let it break your heart?’
There was a silence while Seth thought about it. ‘I don’t want to be the best, I just want to live like other people. To have a chance … to …’ He looked at the floor.
‘To have a ticket to the game?’
‘What?’
Seth didn’t tell his parents about his Crystal Palace shirt. He didn’t want to admit how hard he had tried not to weep. Palace were his club. Although Alaric had painted his cupboard in their colours, it was Seth who’d discovered them, by himself; it was he who’d followed them every day, imagined himself sliding passes through into the stride of the centre forward. It was he alone who’d loved them. What had been done to his shirt – to him – was violent. Perhaps they hadn’t meant it to hurt so much or so accurately. Surely if they’d known that it would be a spear into the heart of his private world, they wouldn’t have done it.
Yet when he sat in the bathtub that evening he felt that in some way he perhaps deserved it. He had secrets, he had pride. He thought he was as good as they were. Perhaps, without admitting it, he believed he was better. But the others had found him out. Now there would be more pain to come and maybe it was right that there should be. One day, when he’d taken his punishments, it would end.
Mary could see something was wrong, but hesitated to intervene. He was such a baffling child anyway – so independent, so assured, yet in other ways quite disconnected from the world she herself worked her way through every day. She had never been a parent before. How was she to know what was normal? In a matter-of-fact tone, she asked one or two mothers at the school gates what they felt about their boys. All of them were surprised by their sons – by how little they seemed to be a mixture of their parents or even a reboot of just one. For religious or cultural reasons, a few of them pushed hard to shape their boys a certain way; but most of them shrugged and let their offspring become whatever they were apparently destined to be. It was like buying a seed packet with no label from the garden centre, one mother sagely told her: whether it turned out to be a tomato or a cauliflower was not yours to question; your job was to help it become the best tomato or cauliflower it could be.
When she’d left Alaric all that time ago, then returned to him, it had taken Mary years to reorientate herself. She felt so guilty for the pain she’d caused that she barely registered the fact that both of them, in different ways, had become more confident in their partnership. She had shown some independence, to put it crudely, and Alaric some staying power. The timing of the Seth adventure had been right for them.
Now, in the light of Seth’s individuality, that sense of purpose seemed to stall. She was filled with love for him, fearful for his future, but troubled in the course of many wakeful nights that she was not doing as well by him as a mother should.