There’s a God in the Stonehills’ garden.
I’ve been out here for a while now, waiting for my T-shirt to dry. About a quarter of an hour ago I made the mistake of going into the library, where some girls were making Flaming Sambucas, cackling with drunken hysteria. Clear liquid splashed on the carpet; shot glasses cracked underfoot. Someone pushed past me. I staggered, and somehow, as one of the girls was waving a long-handled lighter like a malevolent wand, the hem of my T-shirt caught fire. Not just any T-shirt: my vintage, ’94, Pushead-designed Metallica T-shirt, and the most precious item of clothing I own.
Pushing my way through the crowd, I drenched it in the downstairs bathroom, where a genuine Matisse stands watch over a shell-shaped sink. I lamented the scorch mark, a dark scar on white cotton. Then I retreated to the terrace, where the wicker furniture is set out in a mathematical arrangement and every potted plant is so beautifully maintained that it could have come straight from a gardening catalogue. Normally when the Stonehills have parties, there’s a handful of people out on the terrace, drinking and smoking and shouting, and maybe a few people here and there on the lawn. But for the moment, I’m the only one.
The low drone of guitars and drums surges in waves from the basement, where a jam session is going on. In a bit, the Stonehills will let off fireworks. More and more people will come, alerted by social media. Sooner or later the police will turn up. They always do. It’s definitely time to go home, but I’m slightly too drunk to make the decision to leave. I’ve had three Coronas: too many, considering that it’s a Wednesday night, and I have an exam in the morning. Nobody here cares about exams. Money will get them wherever they want to go. I don’t have much in common with any of these people, apart from a love of metal.
I shouldn’t have come to this party.
All day I’ve been feeling different. On edge, my head full of unwanted electricity. I’ve been feeling like something unusual is about to happen.
Now I think maybe it is.
Eyes unfocused, I look down the stretch of polished lawn. The garden is lit by solar lights, glowing like half-buried stars from the flowerbeds. Counting them, I let my gaze travel further and further back. And that’s when I see it. Another light. A different light. Right at the end of the garden, past the fishpond and the organised ranks of roses and miniature lemon trees. Up where the yew trees grow tall and close together and the ground rises higher as it reaches the wall. There’s an old treehouse that the Stonehills used to play in when they were younger, custom-made by some bewilderingly expensive company. That’s where it is, this other light. Just under the treehouse. But it can’t be a solar light. For one thing, it’s the wrong colour. Also: it’s moving. Fading in and out, circling, dipping … as though it’s looking for someone. I have seen this kind of light before. I know what it means.
There is definitely a God in the Stonehills’ garden.
And that means the Otherlife is back.
Down the terrace steps and along the path, past shadowy flowers and silent sprinklers. Tennis court to my right. I walk like a ghost, my feet light. The sides of my vision are soft. The nerves in my palms are glittering. I look for the light as I draw closer to the bottom of the garden. The early May night air is cold on my skin; my T-shirt clings to me wetly. There’s a slight wind; the leaves rustle, as though the trees are breathing. I hesitate for a moment. Then continue.
Now I hear another sound. No more than a whisper: so slithery, so silvery, that it could almost be just a sharp breeze dragging a crisp packet over a scratchy surface. It’s an old sound, an oceanic sound. A familiar sound.
‘Skǫll …’
I slow down, still looking for the light. The treehouse looms just ahead, with its peaked roof and shuttered windows. The trees are dark statues against the ivied wall.
‘Skǫll …’
Now I see the light. No: lights. There’s more than one. Trickles, like the residue of fireworks, leaving gilded traces in the pre-dawn sky. One, two … there are seven, eight of them, flickering, assembling in front of me, pixelated against the trees. The eight lights are lengthening, gradually, into tensile, supple legs, and above them a body blooms: pale grey, pearlescent, itself made up of hundreds of filaments of light, rippling and pulsing. An elongated head. The suggestion of teeth. Now I am aware of enormous strength and vigorous movement; I know this is Sleipnir, the horse, and I am aware of his rider, too – not pale grey, but greenish bronze, and also formed of filaments of light.
Hermódr, the messenger God.
He presses his knees into Sleipnir’s sides and the great grey horse takes a couple of steps towards me. A wall of movement pushes through the air: particles are displaced, hot and cold at the same time. Hermódr reaches one hand down, as though to beckon me closer. I cannot see his face, but somehow I know that he is sad.
He calls me again, by the name I used to call myself, and finally I hear myself, throat dry and corrugated, replying, in English: ‘Yes. I am here.’
Hermódr speaks to me. I can’t make out what he’s saying. It’s been so long since I read anything in Old Norse. He says it again – the same words, three times, four. But I can’t understand him. In the presence of the Otherlife, this grand London garden and this mock-Tudor house with its palatial halls and staircases no longer exist. My burnt Metallica T-shirt no longer matters. Nothing matters but the messenger God and his eight-legged horse, and whatever he’s trying to tell me. A little pulse begins near the old scar on the side of my head.
I wish I could understand him.
Hermódr turns away, and I feel the air move again, like an ethereal tide.
‘Wait!’ I call out. ‘Please, wait!’
But the lights grow smaller, fainter, melting into the ivy at the back of the garden. Then, just as they are disappearing altogether, Hermódr turns his head to speak to me one last time. And finally there’s something I think I recognise: a couple of words I think I know, something I must have learnt a long, long time ago.
‘Dead. He is dead.’
Mum opens the door in her running gear. ‘Oh no, Ben,’ she says.
I avoid her eyes.
‘Forgot my key,’ I say.
‘Not today. Not when you’ve got exams. I should put you on a lead.’
‘It clears my head. Walking.’
‘Plenty of daylight hours for that. I must say, though, your head doesn’t look especially clear at this moment. Don’t tell me you’ve been out all night.’
I follow her into the kitchen.
‘No, not all night,’ I tell her. ‘Couldn’t sleep. Went out about an hour ago, that’s all.’
The kitchen is aggressively bright. There are too many shiny surfaces, reflecting too much light. On Radio 4 the presenter is snapping at the heels of a defensive politician, demanding answers to some unanswerable question. They always sound so angry on Radio 4. Mum manages to fill the kettle, throw bread into the toaster and clink the milk bottle so hard against the table top that I worry the glass will break, all at the same time.
Bright lights, loud sounds, sharp corners. It’s impossible to sit comfortably in the plastic kitchen chair. I blink at the table top, my brain in soft focus. Mum puts a plate of toast in front of me. A cup of tea. The bag floats sadly, a shipwreck, at the top. Then, because I don’t move, she digs a knife into the Lurpak and plasters butter over my toast. If she could eat my breakfast for me, she would. She’s that kind of mother.
‘And today, when we’ve got the French Listening paper.’
‘We don’t have a French Listening paper,’ I say through buttered toast.
She ignores this editorial adjustment.
‘It’s a Big Day. Go and have a quick bath and I’ll drive you to school.’
‘Mum …’
‘Not now, Ben.’
Another Big Day: one of so many. My life is a series of small days leading up to magnificent, do-or-die, all-singing, all-dancing Big Days. And my mother is probably right: it wasn’t especially smart of me to go out the night before a Big Day such as this one: the first of my GCSEs. But I find, sometimes, that I can’t help myself. I need to go out at night. Not generally to parties, unless, like last night, they’re going to be playing metal. Most of the time it’s enough to be out and about, looking with different eyes at the buildings I see by day. Usually I’ll find a park, or – even better – a cemetery, and stay there, like a soft-footed zombie, until I’m tired enough to go home. I don’t really know why I do it; perhaps I feel like it calms me, in some indescribable way. I even have a name for it.
Nightwalking.
I make the bath as hot as I can stand. While it’s running, I open the bathroom cabinet, and rummage around in the rubble of old bandages and nail-varnish bottles. I check in the woven baskets perched on the edge of the bath, where rolled-up flannels compete for space with those miniature shower gels and see-through caps that you get in hotels. I look in the medicine box, remembering that things are often in the likeliest place, and, sure enough, find what I’m looking for. A small brown bottle, with a single triangular apricot-coloured pill inside it. Filling a tooth mug with water from the tap, I tip out the pill and swallow it neatly. Then I climb into the bath.
He is dead. That’s what Hermódr said, or what I think he said. I wonder about my grandfather, who hasn’t been that well. But no: Mum would have said something, if anything was wrong with Granddad. Sometimes I think she hides things from me, but not about anyone as special as him. In the shallow water I watch my skin turn from blue and white to white and red, like a changing political landscape. I slide down, feeling the crack in the ceramic glaze scrape my shoulder blade, until only my nose remains out of the water. Now I listen for hidden sounds: the buzz of the fluorescent strip over the mirror, the gurgle of the radiator.
Why has the Otherlife come back now? That’s what I can’t understand. It’s been gone for so long. I wish I knew what Hermódr was trying to tell me.
I hope nothing bad has happened to any of the members of Metallica.
‘Be-en! Ben!’
I climb out of the bath. For a moment I’m surprised by a black smudge on my ribs, shimmering in the corner of my vision. I close my eyes, and it’s gone.
My room is a small gallery. The Late Greats of metal adorn the walls, the ceiling, the cupboard doors. Most of them are vintage posters, found online or in Portobello Market. There’s something almost holy about them. Flailing limbs and leather and halogen hair. Microphones and guitars and drumsticks, wielded like weapons. Under the stage lights, the faces and limbs of the Late Greats are ghostly, glowing green and blue.
My mother hates my posters. ‘These people glorify death,’ she’ll say, wincing. As though she’s imagining being there in the mosh pit, enduring the feedback and distortion and screaming. She finds metal distasteful, like the smell of drains. I don’t agree with her. True: the Late Greats are, by definition, dead. There’s Dimebag Darrell of Pantera, who was shot onstage by a gunman. Layne Staley of Alice in Chains, whose tale of addiction and self-neglect never fails to make me sad when I listen to his music. There’s Randy Rhoads, Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist, who was killed in a plane crash. Gar Samuelson, drummer for Megadeth, whose reported cause of death was liver failure, at forty-one. And my favourite: Cliff Burton, who died in a road accident aged only twenty-four. Bassist in the best metal band of all time: Metallica.
But it’s not death that makes them special. They died doing what they loved, and that’s what matters.
I put on a white shirt. My hands shake. I unbutton it, do it up again correctly. Black trousers, a black and grey tie. Grey socks, black shoes. If my uniform was all black I’d like it more.
‘Benjamin! We’re going to be ridiculously late!’
I shut the door and run downstairs, avoiding the broken floorboard. Mum is holding my blazer out, an arm aloft, like a signpost. I take it from her. She hustles me out of the house.
‘Do you have your revision folder? Do you have your keys? Do you have your—’
I tell her yes, yes, yes. I climb into the car and can’t fit my legs in the space between the seat and the glove compartment. The early morning traffic rumbles and roars: a procession of lumbering beasts. Mum slams her door.
The drive to school is sluggish, fraught with roadworks and ill-timed traffic lights. Mum bangs the steering wheel and shouts at a lorry that pulls out in front of us. She fiddles with the radio until she finds a French station, and we listen to a discussion about the Olympics and the prospects of the French athletes. I have to get A*, or A at the very least, in all my subjects: I’m a Scholarship kid, ninety per cent of my fees paid by the school. The conditions: good behaviour and academic achievement.
‘What do you think your grades will be?’ Mum asks as we speed along the Westway. It’s a question she’s asked before. Many times. I watch the blur of houses, bus depots and railway lines, deliberately allowing my vision to distort so that they become a mishmash of line and colour.
‘I dunno,’ I say. She doesn’t know this, but I’m predicted Bs in all the sciences and a C in geography. My standards seem to have slipped.
‘Should we … perhaps we can find a tutor?’
I had lots of tutoring when I was little, and lots more in Year 8 to get me through Scholarship. It was great. I learned things I’d never have known about; I was taught to really use my brain. I wouldn’t object to it. But I doubt we can afford it. Tutoring is a way of life for most of the people I know.
‘I’ll be fine,’ I say.
‘Well, it’s good for you to be independent,’ says Mum, pausing mid-flow while she negotiates a roundabout. ‘Best not to turn out like your father. He can’t do anything for himself.’
I only see Dad on alternate weekends. He and Mum split up a while ago, when I was twelve. She’s probably right. He isn’t much good at getting things done. I wonder if he goes on nightwalks too. I’ve never asked him.
‘But, Ben, honestly – if they kick you out … I don’t know what we’re going to do with you.’
My school has a habit of rounding up the potentially lower-grade GCSE students and ‘asking them to leave’; there are league tables and reputations to be considered, and it’s a competitive world. Last year a boy was framed, in most people’s opinion, for stealing a digital camera. He’d been predicted a handful of imperfect grades. Sometimes I think being kicked out would be a relief. But I doubt my mother would ever get over it. Even Dad, who is typically more laid-back, might be a bit disappointed.
It’s not until we get to school that I find a moment to ask her, just as she’s double-parking the car and wishing me luck with my French exam.
‘Mum,’ I say.
‘What is it?’
‘Is somebody … is Granddad OK?’
Her face at once is a screensaver of perplexed annoyance; then something softer takes over, but only for a minute, before annoyance returns.
‘Of course he is,’ she says as she switches on the ignition. ‘You must learn to manage your anxiety better, Benjamin.’
School rises up out of the early morning mist: a ghostly monument in ochre stone. The giant clock in the courtyard never tells the wrong time. Shoals of boys in grey suits and black coats stream beneath it, dwarfed by the architecture. It’s a lot like the courtyard in The Shawshank Redemption. Schools and prisons: not so different. The first couple of years I was here, I barely spoke to anyone. No one bothered me, and I bothered no one.
Solomon is in the locker room, doing Rosetta Stone on his laptop, waiting for me. He’s one of those people whose face really lights up when they see you. He is one of the nicest people I know.
‘Bennikin. What’s up?’
I open my bag and tip it upside down. Books and papers clatter to the floor. My English file breaks apart, revealing a Seamus Heaney essay that is both unfinished and late. Chadwick has already issued several warnings to our set for shoddy work and unmet deadlines. It’ll mean a definite detention. And a letter home.
Solly scrutinises me as I gather up armloads of index cards.
‘Let me guess: another nocturnal perambulation?’ he enquires. ‘Such extraordinary things you choose to do with your time.’
‘Not exactly. I went to the Stonehills’.’
‘Partying on a school night! That’s even worse,’ says Solomon, in the exact tone of voice he used to play Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest last year. But he doesn’t go on.
I sit down on the bench, resting my head against the locker behind me.
‘I haven’t revised for French. And I’ve not done my essay,’ I say.
‘Relax,’ says Solomon. ‘I’ve done a spare. Just in case. Just for you. Different font, different line spacing, and some of those unmistakable Ben Holloway malapropisms. You always get infer and imply the wrong way round.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, taking it.
‘As for the French, just take a few calming breaths now and again, centre yourself and it’ll all come back to you.’
Solomon will make an excellent counsellor one day, though I think he has his heart set on running the country. He always knows when people are upset. He helps me sift through the debris from my bag, picking out unfiled A4 pages and stacking them together.
‘Ben. What’s the matter?’
‘I have this feeling … I think someone’s died,’ I say.
Solomon replies, ‘I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: you listen to too much heavy metal. Songs about death, by people who are mostly dead, or who probably will be soon. Small wonder you’re unduly preoccupied.’
For the first time today, I almost raise a smile.
The French listening exam comes and goes. I mark the boxes, indicate the true statements, doodle with inky magnificence on the back of the sheet. I watch the neat nodding heads of the columns of boys before and to the left and right of me. The exam hall rustles with the sound of sleeves and watchstraps catching on paper. In my earphones, solid, deliberate-syllabled French voices declare that they cannot attend the meeting, or explain that their working day begins at seven twenty-five in the morning. Sometimes the voices swim, fragment. Gaps appear. And another sound – a hollow, whipping-wind sound, a low rumble underneath – can be heard. Old Norse. On a piece of rough paper I begin to trace the words I think Hermódr said, the verb I think they came from.
Deyja.
To die.
To stop living.
But I can’t be sure.
After school there’s Cold War revision to do, and a whole set of chemistry notes to hammer into my medium-term memory. On Friday it’s my first maths exam, so I also need to revise for that. I make a pot of coffee and take it upstairs. I’ve always liked coffee. Not for the taste, but because it makes my nerves jangle and roar, my veins surge with caffeinated blood. It’s like a cheap metal gig at the Camden Underworld.
My brain doesn’t function the way it once did. I find it difficult to remember things now. Not, perhaps, surprising, given what I habitually do to my brain. I revise some equations, knowing that I am never again in all my waking days going to need to know what happens when calcium carbonate is heated, or added to water.
The knocking adds a polyrhythm that I don’t notice until my door opens and Mum comes in, putting a plate of oatcakes and hummus near my elbow.
‘Ben,’ she says, ‘your ears.’
I hit the iTunes tab and slide the volume down.
‘Chemistry?’
‘Yep.’
‘Good … good. Don’t let me interrupt you. I’m just off to my ballroom-dancing class,’ she says.
‘Oh yeah. That’s cool. Have fun.’
Mum used to go to kickboxing on Wednesdays. Recently, though, she’s switched to dancing. It’s a good sign, I reckon: she’s got less rage in her now. She explains what I need to do for dinner, right down to the number of minutes the salmon needs to cook in the oven for, the exact amount of tinfoil I need to wrap it in. We both know that I’ll pop down the road and get some chips, if I’m hungry, which I probably won’t be. But she’ll leave the salmon anyway, like a ritual sacrifice.
Mum looks down at the rug. ‘I may not be back till tomorrow,’ she says, almost shyly. ‘Reg is taking me out for dinner afterwards, and we’ll be in Putney, so …’
Although I can’t believe there are still people in the world called Reg, it doesn’t bother me at all that Mum is seeing someone. She hid this from me for months. If I started seeing someone too, ours would be the most clandestine household in W9.
I haven’t met Reg. Mum thinks I’d be rude to him.
‘Mum. It’s fine. I’ll see you tomorrow after school, then.’
She hovers. ‘I don’t want to have to worry about you, Ben. No leaving the house at night. Please. I just … I’d just like to enjoy myself.’
She doesn’t add for once. But we both know it’s there.
As soon as she’s gone, I put Metallica back on at top volume.
I revise for two hours, by which I mean that I listen to music while looking at things. I remember the revision cards I used to make at my old school, the colour-coded charts that logged my progress. I was better at achieving things when I was twelve. I go downstairs, take pity on the salmon and return it to the morgue of the fridge. I’m not good at being hungry: my stomach doesn’t know how to signal when I am, or else my brain can’t read the signals. I have a couple of oatcakes and drink some juice from the carton.
Then I catch sight of the box on the kitchen table.
It’s a mailbox, made of white cardboard. It must have been there all day, and yet I didn’t notice it when I came home. Picking it up – it’s quite heavy – I see that it’s addressed to me. Mum must have forgotten to tell me. Now I am looking at it more closely, I can see that the box has taken a fair beating. Once a perfect cube, it’s now scuffed and bruised and discoloured; the masking tape that secures the top, once white as well, is the yellow of stained teeth. I peer at the date on the postmark; it’s hard to make out. At some point the box has been left out in the rain. I can’t read the place it was posted from either. All I can say for sure is that it’s been in transit for a very long time. The reason why becomes clear once I look at the address: it’s been written in a looping, rather feminine hand, the letters squashed together and difficult to read. Although we live at 9B, it looks more like 98. Our street name’s spelt wrong, and there’s an error in the postcode as well. It’s obvious from the various messages written by Royal Mail workers in irate biro – Not known in Bevington Road. Try Bevington Crescent – that someone’s done a good deal of detective work in order to finally deliver this parcel. If the sender had written their own address somewhere, I suppose it would have been returned to them.
I take a pair of scissors and score the tape. The box breaks open and thousands of polystyrene packing chips, the ones that look like little butterflies, spill out onto the table. I plunge my hands in and pull out a folded sheet of paper with my name on it. It says:
Duvalle Hall
17-12-11
Dear Ben,
Hope all is going well with your studies. I was clearing out some cupboards and came across these books, which I believe are yours. Sorry we held on to them.
Friendly wishes from everyone here,
Clothilde.
With the eerie sense of unpacking an unexpected Christmas stocking, I take the books out, one by one.
My Elementary Old Norse Grammar.
My dictionary of Old Norse.
My book about the Gods, the one I used to take everywhere. It’s warped and bloated, as though someone’s dropped it in the bath.
My green notebook, where I once made language notes, adding bits of vocabulary as I came across them. Bátr: boat. Dvergr: dwarf. Just looking at the notebook, I start to remember them.
My red notebook, where I copied out parts of the poems that particularly appealed to me.
There’s the children’s book with the beautiful watercolour illustrations.
And finally, there’s my Free Creative Writing book, where I once wrote stories of my own.
Once upon a time, these books were my most valued possessions.
Something has risen up out of the box along with the books and butterflies. I wish I knew how to describe it. Something like a pull. An undertow. A slow tide. Something that wants to draw me in, very deeply, and take me very far away. Far back.
To the beginning.
It cannot be a coincidence, that first Hermódr appeared in the small hours of the morning, and now my Norse books – long lost, long forgotten – have suddenly been delivered to my door.
I pick up the Old Norse grammar. It’s a mildewed, disintegrating volume with ancient yellowed pages, full of footnotes and endnotes and tables. I wonder where I got it from originally. Wait: I know this too. Portobello Market. Autumn half term, Year 5. I remember now: fumbling through the massed heaps of old books, tracing my fingers down their spines. Opening the grammar slowly, almost reverently, like a church bible.
And a voice, soft and slightly lilting:
‘It’s your birthday tomorrow, isn’t it, my friend? Here. I’ll get this for you.’
I spend a few minutes flipping to and fro, taking care with its old pages, remembering how gentle I tried to be with this particular book. I look for the paradigm of deyja, but I can’t seem to find it. Eventually, after comparing some different verb forms, and hoping that I still remember what it was that Hermódr said, I take the green notebook – and it’s so weird to suddenly be using it, as though I am twelve again – and write:
Hann er dauðr.
He is dead.
I wonder if that’s right.
There is something stuck between two pages of the Norse grammar. Slowly, carefully, I take it out. It’s brittle and nearly square.
It’s a photograph.
In the photograph I am twelve. In the photograph I am smiling. I did not often smile in photographs. I am smiling through a complicated red-and-gold mask, with a pointed snout and whiskers, and wicked tufted ears. I have a mouthful of fangs that glow with a sickly iridescence. I have something – bubblegum, I think – tangled in my fang-teeth. I am wearing a fur coat. I am a wolf. Next to me, in a similar outfit, is another wolf. Underneath his fur coat his clothes look pricier than mine, and where his mask ends you can see how curly and bright his hair is. Like me, he is smiling. He has his arm around my shoulders.
For a few seconds I sit totally still, holding the photograph flat in my palm. Then, unconsciously mimicking the image in front of me, I smile, unable to help myself. In a strange way I realise I’ve been thinking about it all day: being twelve, being at Cottesmore House, revising for exams. It makes an odd kind of sense that this photograph should have found its way back to me, along with everything else. Although I barely remember the moment the photograph was taken, it was certainly taken when I was in Year 8. And I do, for sure, remember the other person in the picture, though I haven’t seen him for a long, long time.
It’s my old friend Hobie.