The five of us end up as a sort of advance guard to set up for a party—a wake, more like it. It turns out that all of them are students at New College, which makes me a bit nervous. I’ve seen what it’s like there, the kind of life they must be used to: the affluence and ease, the heady debates and disputes. They’ll grow up to be politicians and lawyers, renowned scientists and artists. It’s intimidating. But they don’t treat me like a kid at all. They include me in their jokes and stories, Martin holding back to explain the bits I don’t understand.
Redmond is in the lead. He takes us over Magdalen Bridge, where we can see the Cherwell floodwaters still lapping up the school playing fields. I hang toward the back as Redmond parts what’s left of the tourist crowd.
It turns out this part of town’s mostly cosmopolitan grunge, a lot like the Annex in Toronto where I used to live. The sticky sweet scents of curry and frying chips pour out of open shop doors and there’s a heavy bass line coming from the speakers mounted over a vintage record shop. As evening starts to lay on, the street fills up with clutches of girls in stiletto heels and thigh-cut dresses heading out to the clubs. Only a couple of hours until curfew, but Redmond and his friends don’t seem bothered, so I tamp down my worry.
“Call it a dispensation for those of us with special privileges,” Martin tells me. “Sometimes the police show up to tell us off for being too loud but that’s it. Say what you want about the university, but they look out for us. On College grounds we can mostly do what we like.”
Some of the girls we pass have white paint smeared on their faces, not like Goths exactly, more like a Greek chorus—elegant, composed. Each of them has a little crystal skull winking in her ear. Liv has the same.
“What are those?” I ask her.
“These?” She tucks strands of sorrel-coloured hair behind her ears to show me. The skull, roughly cut, glitters and reflects the streetlights. “Just reminders. Some of us have started to wear them.”
“It’s a way of knowing death,” Martin says. “Remembering that it’s always close by.”
“You don’t want to forget?”
“We can’t, can we?”
Redmond interrupts. “This’ll be like the last days of Pompeii. We’ll play at a bit of filthy hedonism, shall we? Eat, drink, and be merry—then—then—”
“Arrivederci, citizens,” says Martin.
We head down a narrow footpath and eventually come to an old churchyard on private grounds belonging to Oriel College. Ahead of us looms Bartlemas Chapel, a fragment of the fourteenth century tucked away behind the busy main road. Its walls are the colour of parchment, adorned with slender arches.
“It was a leper hospital, would you believe it?” Martin says quietly while he pours wine for me into a plastic cup. He twists the bottle to prevent the last drop from catching, just like the waiters would at the fancy restaurants Dad sometimes took us to. It makes me laugh.
“Pilgrims came from miles around to touch the relics. Apparently, they have the comb of Edward the Confessor, which cures headaches. They’ve also got the crosses of St. Andrew and St. Philip, and a piece of skin from St. Bartholomew…I saw them once when we went to mass here. I always thought it was strange what they did with the bodies of saints. Collecting the bits that were left over after these horrible things had happened.”
The pale violet dusk is settling into indigo and there is a handful of early stars in the sky. The air is warm even now, redolent of grass and peat and old stone. Liv has laid out a felted blanket for us, settling in next to Redmond. Others have begun to filter into the clearing, faces I recognize from the funeral. More blankets appear and the gloom gives way to a party atmosphere, the sound of Redmond laughing as he uncorks another bottle. Bryan, sitting nearby, glances in my direction and I want to let some part of me lean against him. What if? But I don’t. Instead, I smile, and he smiles back.
Martin passes us a bottle of thirty-year-old scotch that burns as it goes down. This helps. “That cost two-hundred quid,” he moans as the liquid disappears, but no one seems to care.
“Enough of that now, Paisley.” Redmond slaps him on the back. Martin looks back owlishly, but then he shrugs. Someone murmurs to me that his grandparents were landed gentry. I guess two hundred quid doesn’t mean so much to him.
Bryan seems happy enough to be here but a bit uncomfortable too.
“It’s just that they’re students,” he whispers to me when I ask him what’s wrong. “It’s all a bit posh, isn’t it?”
This last makes me start to laugh until I realize he’s serious. I’m still getting used to living in a city like Oxford where so much is controlled by the university and geared toward students. It must be hard for him, not being a part of that.
“So what am I doing here?”
“It’s different for you. You’re not from here. Your accent doesn’t give you away, where you were born, who your parents were and how much money they had. You can be anything you want.”
“And them?”
“They were Jamie’s friends. And—Astrid’s.”
“She was a student?” I peer at him, surprised he’s willing to talk about her. But the wine and Martin’s scotch have left him relaxed.
“She started a year ago. With some of this lot. She was young for it but clever.” A note of pride creeps into his voice. “Sorry,” he says after a moment. “I don’t mean to go on about her.”
“We don’t have to stay, not if—”
“It’s fine. Jamie would’ve been glad for me to be here. And Astrid too.” He touches my hand. “Besides, it’s good to see you smile.”
After another pass of the scotch, it seems as if we’ve all been friends for ages. Liv has us all playing a drinking game where we take a swig holding the bottle with our left hands. The rules are complicated, and anytime someone screws up we have to beat our fists against the dirt like maniacs as a penalty.
The world has gone bright around the edges. Redmond has taken a gulp with the wrong hand and now we’re all crashing our palms into the ground and hollering loud enough to wake the dead.
Faces and bodies blur, and I remember parties in the Rosedale Ravine in Toronto, me and Jaina and the others laughing and drinking beneath the overpass. Time slows and I close my eyes, lean back against the chapel’s wall. My body seems made up of a different composition than before. It floats and sinks.
Bryan nudges me awake. “It’s not so bad,” he whispers or maybe he doesn’t. Maybe that’s just what I’m thinking. A weird sense of déjà vu like all this has happened already.
“Remember how Jamie ran to the Porter’s Lodge starkers in January?” Redmond has made a scarecrow of a nearby sapling with his jacket. “His cock had shrunk down to the size of a pencil stub and there was Rowena Higgs laughing her head off! Thought she was gonna piss herself! And Mysie Ardrey chasing him across the quad, screaming ‘That’s not how the French do it at all!’ ”
“Mysie Ardey!” Martin laughs. “Everyone told him she would be trouble.”
“Aye, but Jamie was crazy for her. Serves him right.”
“A fool in love, our poor James,” says Liv.
Lit cigarette tips punctuate the darkness, as they trade stories back and forth. Their voices go softer, an incantation to call up the ghost of the dead boy.
The crowd has thinned out, about thirty or so left in small pockets, tangled together on blankets. Redmond croons a filthy song to a trio of dishevelled girls who add their own discordant tooraloomaloomas to the chorus. Bryan is lying near me, his head propped up on his elbow. “It’s past curfew. Your aunt will be wondering where you’ve got to. I should get you home.”
Home. The word has the mass and weight of a stone. “Soon. Not yet. Besides, she’s gone for the weekend. No one’s waiting for me.”
Now Redmond has left off singing so he and Martin can join an animated argument with one of the girls, Caitlyn, a pug-nosed brunette sitting opposite them. “I swear it’s the truth,” she’s saying. “All those tunnels beneath the Bodleian Library? They’ve emptied them out completely. They’re being used for storage. Body storage.”
“Nonsense.” Martin pushes his glasses back up his nose. “How would you even know?”
“Terrence Arbon told me so. His brother, Westie, works in the archives. He used to fetch and carry the books they kept in storage. But he says they’ve cleared them all out.”
“It could be just because it’s a flood risk,” he argues. “You know what it was like over the winter. All those tunnels? They must’ve moved the books somewhere above ground. Terry needn’t have pretended it was anything so drastic.”
“That’s what I said, but Terrence said that Westie’d seen people. Not the library staff. And they had the old conveyance system up and running again, the one that was supposed to be used for carting around loads of books. Terrence said they were using it to move these bags, right? Like so.” She sketches out her own height. “He said the whole place smelled like it had been scrubbed in vinegar.”
“But they’d have to keep the bodies cold, wouldn’t they? I don’t understand how they could do that beneath the Bodleian. Besides, it’d be illegal.”
“They have to keep them somewhere, don’t they?” the pug-nosed girl retorts. “If they’re experimenting on them.”
One of the other girls breaks in. “Do you remember that study in bio?” I haven’t caught her name but she reminds me of Jaina, the same bob haircut. “About the origins of certain hormones in insects, you know? These blood-sucking things. You remember, Liv, we did that tutorial on it together. What was it?”
“Rhodnius prolixus,” Liv supplies.
“That’s right. They cut off their heads with little bits of waxed thread. And then they did it with caterpillars too. And blowflies. To see where it was the hormone was coming from and what exactly it did. To see if the body would moult if the brain wasn’t attached. Then they stitched them together, body to body, two bodies to one head. Just to see what triggered the changes.” She shivers.
“You think the Centre is doing that legally? Come off it,” Martin says.
“Enough now,” Liv sniffs. She rests her head against Redmond’s shoulder. “Of course they wouldn’t. The Centre is taking samples for testing, that’s all they’d be legally allowed to do.”
“All I’m saying is that maybe it’s good, that James, you know, that they cremated him.”
A long silence falls until Liv breaks it. “I don’t understand all of you.”
“What?” says Redmond.
“You all walk so softly around this. Death.”
As Liv speaks, we all lean in to listen.
“When I was a very small child,” she says, her accent thickened with alcohol, “I developed rheumatic fever and I had to stay in bed for weeks. My father brought me a kitten to keep me company. She was very sweet, very soft, with grey fur like a cloud. I loved her. But just as I began to recover the kitten got sick. Eventually she died, but I didn’t know. So I went looking for her—and then I found her.”
A burst of laughter floats across the churchyard. A slim boy in an unbuttoned dress shirt struggles to keep his seat atop his friend’s shoulders, as they charge toward another pair in the same position.
“I cried all day and all night too. Then my mother said to me, ‘That’s enough crying now. Your kitten has gone to heaven!’ But my father didn’t believe in God, so my mother had to tell me. ‘Heaven is the place where everything is nice for the kitten. From now until forever it will be nice for the kitten, so don’t cry.’ I said to her, ‘Forever? My kitten will wake up and it will be the same forever?’ My mother didn’t understand why I was so upset. But I was upset because I don’t like forever, the idea of it. Tomorrow is good. Maybe I’ll be happy or maybe I’ll be sad. But being the same? All the time? I didn’t want it to be forever for the kitten. Not even in heaven! I didn’t like that idea, the attempt to turn death into something it wasn’t. Death is simple, the end of one set of biological processes. Our bodies disappear and the cells that once we were made of decompose and feed new life. It seemed beautiful to me. So when I grew up, I followed my father not my mother. I didn’t want to be bound by superstition. I wanted to be a scientist too, so I could understand why nothing in the world stays the same forever.”
“What’re you saying, Liv?” Martin asks. “Do you still think things are as simple as that?”
“Life, death—we’ve always thought those were fixed concepts. But what if they aren’t? Biologically speaking perhaps they never were. Think of conception and childbirth. Energy transferred from thing to thing, the cellular material passed on from generation to generation, never truly dying. We privilege one form—our form—simply because we’re hardwired that way. But science is always showing us the world is richer, more fantastic than we believed possible.”
“They’re like monsters,” whispers the pug-nosed girl. She pushes herself upright, then stumbles to her knees. “I saw Clara Brewes. She died in College from a pulmonary embolism. I was the one who found her. She was shaking, just like that other boy.”
“We can’t be afraid all the time,” Liv insists. “The world is changing and we have to find a way to adjust. This is how nature works. Progression, change, destruction—or self-preservation. One thing changes and another responds, again and again and again.”
“Bullshit,” Bryan interrupts. “What about the ones who die? What about James and all the others? Astrid? She was, what? Just debris? It doesn’t matter that she died?”
A pained expression comes over Liv’s face. Her voice is tender. “I don’t know, Bryan. I wish I did. All I know is—”
But Bryan isn’t listening anymore. No one is. Because Caitlyn has begun to scream.