Dad comes to the door on the third ring of the bell, rubbing his eyes, his hair sticking up like unmown grass. I used to have a key, but Dad locked himself out a few months ago and cabbed up to Kensal Rise to borrow mine and I haven’t got it back yet.
‘Fell asleep in the garden,’ he says ruefully. ‘Had lunch in Soho. Came back and went out like a light. Christ Almighty. I thought it was Thursday today.’
‘It is Thursday.’
He gives me a proper Dad-hug. He’s much better at hugs than Mum. Every time he hugs me, I feel the waves of sorry, sorry coming off him. He will never stop being sorry about the cricket bat. But I’m sorry too, because sometimes I think if it hadn’t happened my parents would still be together.
‘Is it OK, me being here?’ I say. ‘I’m not due until tomorrow.’
‘Of course. You’re always welcome.’ Dad smells of damp grass, salt, something sweet and pungent. His hand rests against the side of my head, a protective gesture he’s done for years.
The landline rings and I know it’s Mum.
‘Let the machine pick up,’ I say curtly. ‘I’ll text her, let her know I’m here.’
So he does. I spread my revision out on the beaten-up oak table. It’s Maths tomorrow. English next week. Dad tells me he can help with poetry and short stories.
‘Ted Hughes,’ he says. ‘“The Rain Horse”. I remember reading this when it first came out. I was a little older than you are now. It made me pathologically afraid of country walks.’ He laughs, peering at where I’ve highlighted words, underlined things.
I tell him it’s too obvious the horse is a figment of the man’s imagination. I’d prefer it to be more ambiguous. The strange black horse that roams around, tormenting the man for forgetting about this isolated farmland – it seems so … surreal. Not horse-like.
‘Don’t you think it’s real because he believes in it though?’ says Dad.
I shrug. ‘Maybe.’
When it’s getting on for 9 p.m. Dad begins assembling dinner. He’s a random, haphazard cook. When I was little he’d make sculptures for me out of toast, ice-cream puddings with faces splodged onto them in almonds and chocolate sauce. The faces used to scare me a bit, but I ate them out of politeness. Today’s ingredients, unearthed from the back of the fridge: feta cheese, green olives, red peppers, black-edged mint and half a pomegranate. Dad decides to make a rice salad. He puts the radio on, gives me a knife and a couple of peppers; for a while the kitchen is filled with vintage rock and roll and chopping and slicing, and Dad opening and shutting the fridge. And I feel something slip a bit inside me, like I’ve been holding on to something, clenched in my chest, and I’m finally allowing it to give. I almost feel … calm.
Then I remember that Jason is dead.
The rice, when we open the jar, is seething with weevils. Tiny insects that writhe, rice-like, causing the surface to shift so subtly that for a moment I think it’s the Otherlife, wriggling its way into the dry goods. Dad roars with laughter and rings for pizza.
We eat in the sitting room at the tiny fold-out table, while the TV flickers on mute in the background. The room is crammed with falling-apart books, woven rugs hanging on the walls, wooden carvings of things Dad’s found on his travels or in antiques markets.
‘So, they’re going well then, are they?’ says Dad, a bit awkwardly. ‘The exams, I mean. Aeneid book twelve and E=mc2 and all that.’
I dropped Latin as soon as I could, but he never seems to remember that.
‘Fine, I guess,’ I say. ‘I need to get A stars though.’
Dad pours himself a tumbler of water. I’m drinking apple and raspberry juice, which he buys if he remembers, because he knows I like it.
‘I suppose you’ve been through it all before. When was it, three years ago? When you did Scholarship?’
I nod. ‘It felt more intense then.’
It may have been more intense when I was thirteen, but I’m just not as clever now. I’ve addled my brain. It’s tired, like a machine that needs servicing. I’m tired. What’s the same is the expectation. The desire for me to do well. It’s a desire that’s so strong you can properly see and taste it: a thick, amber, oily desire that leaks from the bricks at school. Infusing the membranes. Bewitching the parents.
‘Ben. What’s the matter?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Well, you show up here out of the blue. You’re white and shaking. You’ve been on autopilot since you got here, and I may be a terrible father but I’m perfectly aware that something’s up. So why don’t you tell me? Is it something to do with your mother?’
I start to cry. It feels awful and quite good at the same time, and then awful again because I don’t want to feel good. I don’t want to feel anything. My head aches, and there’s an exam tomorrow, and Mum’s a liar, and the Otherlife keeps coming and going and it’s been gone for so long that it doesn’t make any sense that it’s here now, and Jason is … Jason is dead.
Jason is dead.
Dad just lets me cry, his hand with its funny signet ring that he never takes off resting lightly on my arm. He doesn’t speak.
Eventually I do.
‘I didn’t know,’ I say carefully, ‘that Jason died. You remember Jason, right? My tutor.’
His phone squirms on the table.
‘Dad? Did you know?’
‘Who told you he was dead, Ben?’
‘I wanted to get in touch with him. I didn’t know how. I ended up calling Imperial College. They told me.’
Dad pours himself another glass of water. ‘I suppose you would have found out eventually.’
A mosaic of small memories of Jason begins to form in my head, like goldfish rising to the surface of a pond. His beard: always midway between patchy stubble and a triangular goatee. I don’t like my chin, he’d once told me, when I asked him about his obsession with facial hair. His Rotring pen poised like a surgical tool in one hand, while the other played a scale on the desk, thumb to little finger and back again. His voice, ash-grey from smoking and coffee and long hours of study, telling me always, Take your time, Ben. No rush.
‘How long have you known, Dad?’
His hand twitches reflexively, just touches the edge of his phone. I reach out and move it away.
‘A while, I suppose. A few … a few months.’
‘But Mum says she found out a couple of weeks ago.’
This is a lie, but I’ve learned from professionals. It’s the right thing to do. It catches him out, and I watch his face collapse, as if the structural supports, spillikin-thin, have given way, taking his skin down with them. He couldn’t possibly know anything related to my life, school, the world of revision and tutors and certificates, before Mum. It’s as impossible as dinosaurs on Mars.
‘Ben,’ he snaps, ‘sometimes you’re not told things for your own good. Have you never considered that possibility?’
‘She lied to me. And you’re lying too.’
‘We just emphatically couldn’t tell you at the time. Maud was worried about your exams. She was so desperate for you to pass them—’
‘Which exams? My GCSEs?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘Your Scholarship exams.’
The room has too many details in it suddenly. Too many books, haphazardly stuffed onto slanting shelves. Too much red, too much blue. The carpet swirls and heaves and buckles.
‘You’re saying Jason died before I took Scholarship? That was in May 2009! That’s three years ago!’
His phone beeps again, urgently. Dad is starting to get that helpless look, the one he used to get in airport queues, busy galleries.
‘I don’t know how to do this,’ he mutters to himself, emptying his glass in one quick swallow. ‘She won’t want me to say anything.’
‘When did he die? When exactly?’ I say, the skin around my nose and mouth blistering, seizing up.
‘He died at Duvalle Hall, Ben. Hobie’s house. That November. The night of the fireworks.’
The room finally stops its evil merry-go-round spinning complete with headless horses and flashing strobes, and I say, ‘OK. Just tell me whatever you know. Tell me everything.’
It’s funny. I know that I was there for a week, during half term, revising with Hobie. I remember, vaguely, parts of Duvalle Hall – the airing cupboard on the landing, for some reason. A patchwork quilt pinned to a wall. A bridge over a lake. I know my parents were there. My mother was a house guest, and my father turned up unexpectedly. But so much of that week I just don’t remember at all. People say, sometimes, when they cannot remember, that things are a complete blank, but that is not the way I’d describe it. A complete dark would be more appropriate.
Dad leans back in his chair, bringing his glass to rest softly against his chest in contemplation.
‘I came to Duvalle Hall, Ben, because I wanted to see you. I’d missed your birthday, and I knew where you were.’
‘So … you were only pretending you turned up by mistake.’
‘Your mother wouldn’t let me see you! You may have forgotten, Ben, but as soon as she found out about Marti she wouldn’t let me within a hundred metres of you.’
I frown.
‘Is that true?’ I say.
‘I swear to Almighty God. Ask Maud.’
‘She never told me that. I thought you just vanished.’
‘She was incredibly angry with me, Ben. For leaving and being generally useless, the good-for-nothing waste of space that I indisputably am. It’s only been in the last year or so that she’s let you come to stay with me. The timing was bad. The divorce, her losing her job …’
‘Because of the financial crisis, right? The firm downsized.’
‘Actually, no. She was in a hearing and lost her temper with another solicitor. She slapped him. They had to restrain her.’
I never knew that. Thinking about Mum though, it kind of makes sense.
‘You were in bed,’ he goes on. ‘Maud was spitting with rage … there was no reason for me to stay. But the Duvalles insisted, and I was starving hungry, I remember. I avoided Maud’s eye and talked mostly to the girl tutor; what was her name?’
‘Rebecca.’
‘Ah yes. Rebecca. The little girl was there too. Hobie was holding court, telling some outrageous anecdote about a chap called Bilbo—’
‘Frodo,’ I say, my eyelids hot.
‘Frodo – yes. Dinner was spectacular. Some kind of casseroled beef, creamy potatoes. A cheeseboard. Pudding of some kind. I had quite a lot to drink, out of nerves more than anything else, and I’m fairly sure the room was spinning a little by the end of dinner. The walls of the dining room were a dark plum colour and hung with tapestries, and all along the table were silver bowls of pine cones and guttering candles.’
He’s doing his writer thing, adding unnecessary amounts of description, but I don’t want to interrupt him.
‘It all became rather Gothic and haunted after a while, and I remember starting to feel a strange sense of dread, as if something terrible was going to happen. After dinner we all put our coats and boots on and went out onto the lawn and watched the fireworks. It seemed horribly lavish for just a few people, but I suppose that’s what they were used to. There were more drinks: some mulled wine or cider, even champagne. Ike kept opening bottles, doing a kind of Lord of the Manor act. And then your mother dug me in the ribs and said wasn’t it time I went home before I embarrassed myself. So I took the hint and wandered back to the Braithwaites’ cottage.
‘I actually phoned Maud the following evening, to apologise for turning up the way I did. And to see how you were. That’s when she told me that Jason had been found, dead, in the rhododendrons or the roses or somewhere, early that morning. I wasn’t to tell you.’
‘But I was still there in the morning!’
‘She drove you home straight away, before anyone could tell you. Remember, you really weren’t well at all. What did you have? Pneumonia, or bronchitis, no?’
‘Pneumonia,’ I say. I’d forgotten about it entirely too. Now I remember. I was in bed for four weeks; there was even a suggestion of hospital at one point. I missed the November mocks, not that I cared. For various reasons, exams were the last thing I wanted to think about. I was barely capable of thinking in any case. Being so ill was almost a relief in some ways. For months I felt a jagged scrap of scar tissue in one of my lungs. I remember the lengths I went to – the fixed obsession I developed with staying in my pyjamas, with bathing on my own, even when I was coughing so hard I could hardly breathe – so that my mother didn’t see my tattoo. By Christmas I was almost better, but I remained, I guess, for the rest of my time at Cottesmore House, in that curious, cotton-wool, invalid state, where words hover unheard in the air and nothing seems particularly real. Even the Otherlife took on a faded, patchy quality. In fact – and I can’t believe I’m only remembering this now, but then, how easy is it to remember the point of forgetting? – I think perhaps that by the New Year the Otherlife had pretty much vanished completely. I papered my room with Late Greats, and I began to worship them instead. From one set of Gods to another.
‘I believe the police were quite annoyed about Maud taking you away like that,’ says Dad. ‘She had to go back later in the week to talk to them.’
At his mention of police, I remember something else that I’d forgotten, somehow, until this moment.
‘They came to see me in London,’ I say slowly. ‘When I was better. But they didn’t say that Jason was dead. Mum must have asked them not to. They just wanted to know … they wanted to know what he was like as a tutor, if I’d got on well with him, if I thought Hobie liked him. That kind of thing. I didn’t understand why they were asking me questions about Jason. I thought … I suppose I thought they were asking me more about Hobie, considering …’
But I can’t quite finish what I’m trying to say.
Dad begins to clear our plates, with hands that are not quite steady.
‘How did Jason die?’ I ask. ‘Didn’t they do an autopsy?’
‘I imagine they must have done, but I never heard what they found.’
‘Isn’t that … isn’t that a bit strange?’
Dad pauses, a plate in each hand.
‘I’ve always thought,’ he says slowly, ‘that it was something we weren’t meant to find out. Something – I don’t know – something that the Duvalles would have considered a scandal of sorts. They both sit on the boards of various organisations, some political, some cultural. You know.’
‘I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, Dad.’
‘I mean that they’re a prominent family. They couldn’t have afforded to have a suspicious death on their doorstep, could they?’
‘Suspicious how?’
‘Well, Ben, come on. Jason was a young man, a student. He looked … vaguely alternative, with that goatee and so forth. He was rather emaciated. I’ve always been absolutely sure that Jason took an overdose of something or other.’
‘That is not possible,’ I say, fighting to articulate the words. My breath comes quick and uneven; my hand aches to retrieve my painkiller from my pocket. Dad is wrong. He is completely wrong. He’s doing what he always does, which is to take some small scrap of truth and embroider it, make up something many-coloured and brash and shouty. Something fictitious.
He pats me clumsily on the shoulder. ‘Look, Ben,’ he says, ‘it’s a sad reality that more people are grappling with addictions than we know about.’
Then he walks into the kitchen, where the radio is still blaring away. While he’s out of the room I quickly tip a pill into my palm and swallow it. In my haste, I drink from his glass, not mine. I nearly spit it out in surprise.
It’s not water in Dad’s glass.
It’s neat vodka.
I freeze as he comes back with a plate of truffles. As though he’s caught me, when actually it’s the other way round.
‘Someone gave me these. They’re wheat-free, or dairy-free, or something. Try one,’ he says. ‘It’ll cheer you up; chocolate always does.’
‘Dad,’ I say, and it comes out sounding more accusatory than I meant it to, ‘I thought you’d stopped drinking.’
His eyes dart sideways, a swift flicker that I only notice because I’m expecting it. It means he’s about to tell a lie.
‘I have. More or less.’
‘You’ve got vodka in the water jug.’
‘Look, Ben,’ he says, ‘I know you’ve got a lot of revision and exam stress and the like, and this must all have come as a terrible shock to you, but I wish you wouldn’t waltz over here and give me a hard time. I told you what you wanted to know, didn’t I?’
He gets up and hunts for the remote, un-mutes the TV and makes a show of going through every channel. A jarring sequence of sound-snippets crowd the room: newsreaders, weather girls, detectives. He sits in the armchair, the twin of the one we’ve still got in Kensal Rise. They looked better as a pair.
I make up the bed in the spare room, digging around in the airing cupboard for clean sheets. There’s no bulb in the bedside lamp, so I leave the overhead one on. I sit on the bed, next to the radiator, which is turned up far too high for May. Dad’s socks are drying on it, tragic-looking grey-white things, unravelling at the ends. I’m not unwelcome here, but I never feel totally at home.
A knock.
‘Come in,’ I mutter.
Dad is bringing me a replacement light bulb.
‘Forgot. Sorry. I know you need the light on,’ he says.
He sits down on the bed, like I’m in hospital and he’s been allowed into the ward for a visit. He has a tongue-tied, tactful look about him.
‘Ben,’ he says, ‘I’m sorry we didn’t tell you the truth. To say there was never a good time feels like a poor excuse.’
‘There is no excuse.’
‘But you have to admit that, given the circumstances … I’m sure your mother meant to tell you. But, well, after everything else that was going on at the time, don’t you think it’s understandable that she tried to keep you from becoming too distressed? You were very ill, besides.’
There’s nothing to say to that.
‘Is there anything you would like to talk about, Ben? Because I’m here for you, you know that. We both are. Or if you ever want to go and see Hobie. You know I’d come with you. If you wanted.’
There’s nothing to say to that either. I do not want to see Hobie. I used to, at first, but … it was just too difficult. I did go, but only once, or perhaps twice. I remember I went on my own, shunning my mother’s attempts to drive me. I stayed no more than a quarter of an hour or so each time, hating each minute.
For a while my father and I sit in silence.
‘You’re wrong about Jason,’ I say. ‘He wasn’t a drug addict. He worked with children. He was … responsible.’
But Dad doesn’t reply to this. Perhaps he is thinking about something else.
‘Dad,’ I say, ‘what happened to Marti? Why did she leave?’
He looks taken aback.
‘My nanny,’ I say deliberately. ‘The one you disappeared with. The one you were going to marry.’
‘Yes, yes,’ says Dad. He gets up and ruffles my hair. ‘You’d best get some sleep. Your mother’s left three messages about your exam in the morning.’
‘But why did Marti leave, Dad?’
He turns off the overhead light, becomes a black silhouette against the doorframe.
‘She left,’ he says quietly, ‘because she knew I still loved Maud.’
And this, oddly, doesn’t sound like fiction. It sounds like truth.
Before I go to sleep I stand at the window, just as I would at Mum’s house. The forget-me-not curtains Dad bought on eBay do not fit the frame, because he didn’t know how to measure up properly. The wood of the sill is rotten: if I clawed at it, I’d be able to rip it away with my hands. I’ve taken more painkillers today than I have all week: very bad news, especially with maths tomorrow. The narrow Battersea street is lamplit and silent; a cat crosses the road, its tail waving lazily, as if to acknowledge ownership of the night.
I close my eyes. I listen for hidden sounds: an owl, a lone car.
When I open them, he is there.
Haloed by the streetlamp, he stands in a long dark coat. His hair is golden, white-gold on yellow-gold. The threads of light are honey-coloured and slow-moving. I lean out of the window and call to him.
‘Baldr!’
He raises a hand in a half-wave. He smiles: a kind of soft rearrangement of the currents of light in his face. I know that wry, almost-embarrassed smile. I’d know it anywhere. He doesn’t speak, but I can hear him: Everything in your own time, Ben. No rush.
‘Jason …’
And I’m out of the room and down the stairs before I’ve had time to think, pelting down Dad’s boot-cluttered hallway, to throw myself into his arms and tell him it’ll be OK. I will find out what happened, Jason, I promise. The cat is washing its face on a jasmine-draped fence over the road, pausing only momentarily to look at me in surprise as I hurl myself at the gate.
‘Jason!’ I yell, holding my hands out as if there are threads of gold still floating in the aura of the streetlamp. ‘Jason!’
But he’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone.
Hermódr Visits Hel
By Ben Holloway
22/10/2008
The grief of the Gods was terrible, and Odin was saddest of all, for he knew Baldr’s death foretold their doom. It was the first of the dark prophecies to be fulfilled. Now the Gods had no choice but to realise that, after Loki’s cruel trick with the mistletoe, their world must inevitably come to an end. Ragnarok, the day of reckoning, would be upon them soon.
Frigg longed for someone to ride to the kingdom of death to bring Baldr back, and Hermódr, another of Odin’s sons, offered to make the journey. He rode Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged horse. As he approached the bridge, he saw Heimdallr, the crooked-backed watchman. There he sat, with the rain trickling down his face, gazing into the distance. Hermódr crossed the bridge of glowing colours and went down, down, down to the gates of Hel.
He cantered through the iron gates and plunged into the bleak mists of Hel’s kingdom. There he found Baldr, sitting on a high chair, with Hel, Loki’s daughter, at his side. Baldr’s face was white and his eyes were dull.
‘Release my brother,’ said Hermódr.
‘I am willing,’ said Hel, ‘on condition that every living thing weeps for him.’
Hermódr rode back to Asgard, bearing this news.
‘Cry, sob, weep for Baldr! Weep, weep, weep for him!’
His call echoed around the woods and mountains, towns and valleys. And every living thing did indeed shed tears for their dear Baldr: the birds and beasts, the men and women, even the silver and gold that lived in the earth.
All wept, except one.
There was a giantess who dwelt in a cave. She refused to weep for Baldr. ‘Alive or dead,’ she said, ‘I’ve no use for Odin’s son. He’s nothing to me. Let Hel keep him.’
The Gods, knowing that the giantess was none other than Loki in disguise, were furious. Loki fled and built himself a hut with four lookouts, where he thought he would be safe.