Thursday 30th October 2008
Ben has the most amazing mural in his bedroom. He painted it himself. On the first day he gave me a guided tour, and I tried and failed to imagine what it would be like to live in a house that small. I mean, no gym, no home cinema or dedicated TV room, and just a bedroom each for him and his mum and then a minuscule one she uses as a study. I don’t know if I could cope with that. How would I get away from Zara? Ben’s room was at the back of the house overlooking the garden and about 19 other gardens as well, and from his window I could see loads of falling-down sheds and laundry lines with pegs dangling half-heartedly in the wind and cats slinking up and down the walls.
But when he opened the door to his room I was fairly knocked out by the painting that stretched all the way along the end wall. In the foreground are all these flat rocks and marshland and then there’s a big stretch of sea the colour of slate with white tips on the waves and in the background massive mountains with snowy peaks, but the whole thing looks kind of grainy like it’s covered in mist. And somehow, even on, like, three or four metres of wall, Ben’s created this incredible sense of space like it goes on for miles and miles. And, best of all, there was a Viking longship just visible through the puffy white cloud. Ben knew enough to just suggest that it was there. He told me he painted it mostly with bits of sponge dipped in acrylic and a palette knife. His mum went ballistic at first, but in the end she said they’ll paint over it when they move to a bigger house.
Ben says he likes to just sit in front of it, watching. Sometimes, he says, it moves. The longship changes position. Berserks appear and disappear. And the sky changes colour, meaning that the Gods are there. I’ve tried a few times, but all I can see is paint.
Frodo’s Halloween party has been a major source of comfort all through the first week of half term. Now, I don’t like the guy, and I can’t imagine he likes me all that much given what I’ve done to him over the years – drawing a penis on the back of his blazer in chalk before the school concert (at which several minor members of the Royal Family were present), putting rocks and live snails in his sleeping bag on the Geography Fieldwork Trip, making that Facebook group called Stupid Fat Hobbit with his face as the profile picture … I forget what else, but a fair amount. But the rule at school is on pain of torture you always invite your entire class to your parties. And everyone was going apart from Matteo who was in Florence and they’d taken one of those Super Tutors with them, whose catchphrase was ‘Motivation, kid, you get me?’ I know because one time I saw them in the park, sauntering up and down with a pile of History notes. The guy was smoking roll-ups. I’ve asked Matteo whether he’s actually learning anything from this dude, but Matteo seems to be completely blown away by the Super status and is unable to recall what they do in their tuition time.
I’ve been trying to persuade Ben to go with me to the party, which will involve trick-or-treating around all the streets nearby followed by supervised games and a frenzied consumption of collected loot. After five days of work, side by side in his dismal kitchen with only an endless supply of cheese pitta breads and microwavable M&S pasta meals to sustain us (or rather me – the quantity of food I brought with me increased daily), I think even he saw the benefit of an outing.
Both our mothers had spent all week using the party as a bargaining chip. Any insubordination was instantly greeted with a ‘Listen, Hobie, if you do that to your sister again you will not be going to Frodo’s on Friday night,’ etc etc. But I don’t think we gave anyone a reason to deny us the right to go. Jesus, I got into the minicab every morning at precisely 9.35 a.m. like a veritable angel.
Over the course of the week, we’ve done the following:
Eventually I made the decision to treat what we were doing as a kind of drawn-out version of super-intensive physical training, like I’d do in Tennis Camp, or before a really important match. Remembering that I’m a kinaesthetic learner, I started charging into Ben’s garden (which is the size of a five-pound note and mostly paved over, but at least it’s outside) and doing press-ups and star jumps every half-hour. The blood rushed around my body and jarred my brain into gear, and it felt really good. Ben would come and sit on the rickety picnic table and call out verbs so that I could complete the principal parts.
‘Cado …’
‘… cadere, cecidi, casum.’
‘Meaning?’
‘I fall.’
‘Caedo …’
‘… caedere, cecidi, caesum.’
‘Meaning?’
‘I cut, beat, slaughter.’
As we ran in and out, kicking the kitchen door shut and slamming our textbooks down, I caught myself, to my horror, enjoying the charge of adrenaline that I was experiencing from getting things right.
I was becoming a swot. Jesus.
But I couldn’t really piss about all day and distract Ben. He genuinely needs to get a Scholarship for financial reasons, so it wouldn’t be fair. That’s my excuse. As soon as these bloody exams are over, I’ll go back to normal. Jason can do my homework and I’ll coast by on the bare minimum and they won’t be able to do anything about it. Anyway, they say Scholarship is harder than A level, don’t they, so it’s possible that I’ll never really have to do any proper work ever again.
By Wednesday I felt confident enough at predicting the unannounced visits of Ben’s mother to risk smoking on their doorstep. (They do have a teeny-tiny loft but Ben wouldn’t let me go up there because there was definitely no way of getting on to the roof plus he was worried I’d put my foot through the ceiling. Since I’d already broken not only the arm of the kitchen chair but also a table lamp and two mugs, perhaps it was a fair point.) I’d bought a packet of Lucky Strikes at the very dodgy but quite cool corner shop next to lots of similarly random shops: one that sold chainsaws and big bags of compost, one that sold really hideous furniture and second-hand ovens, a couple of really cheap-looking hairdressers. I had no idea you could get a haircut for less than forty quid. I’d also bought an awesome magazine called It’s My Life; on the front cover it said ‘Cannibal Ate My Mum with Ketchup and Peas’ in orange italics. And I was sitting reading and smoking and thinking that for some reason I didn’t resent not being in the Bahamas as much as I’d thought I would, when I realised I could hear Ben on the phone to his mum.
I listened.
‘I dunno,’ he was saying. ‘Yeah … no. Not too bad … Hobie’s helping loads. We’ve made a list of things to do with the tutors … Jason and Rebecca … I dunno. Oxford or Cambridge, I think … OK.’
Was his mum questioning Rebecca’s qualifications? Ridiculous. Shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, as they say. Is that to do with the Trojan horse? I wonder.
‘Mum, I really can’t tell you whether I’m going to get a Scholarship or not … I don’t know what the other candidates are like, do I? I just don’t … OK, yeah. Yes, I will. See you later.’
Then silence.
I made a point of shutting the front door quite loudly to let him know I was coming back inside. It was nearly time for lunch and I was thinking about what to put in the microwave.
Ben was slumped down, his head resting on his arms. I prayed he wasn’t going to cry. I don’t know what to do when people cry, except make fun of them. Then he raised his head and looked straight across the kitchen, through the glass door and over the garden wall, past the line of houses backing onto it and towards a little chink of pale sky between the chimneys.
‘Dude, are you OK?’ I asked.
He didn’t speak for a while, and then said, ‘Ragnarok.’
I sat down beside him.
‘The mountains are shattered. The World Tree shakes,’ murmured Ben.
‘The stars disappear from the sky,’ I joined in.
‘The monsters break loose,’ he said.
‘Tell me about it,’ I said. Ben likes nothing more than telling stories. And I quite wanted to hear this one. I’d read about Ragnarok, but even so. Eventually I managed to persuade him. He fetched his Free Creative Writing book from his bag and fumbled around for a while. Then he cleared his throat a couple of times, and began.
‘It was the end of everything. Fire and frost giant joined forces on the plain of Vigrid, where the final battle would be fought. Heimdallr sounded his horn. Odin and the Gods rode out from Valhalla. Here God met monster on the massive plain, and all met their death. Thor slew the serpent, and then fell to the ground, overwhelmed by its deadly venom. Heimdallr did battle with Loki, and each killed the other. Tyr met the great dog Garm, who had broken loose from its fetters in the Underworld. Freyr met the giant Surtr. Mighty Odin stood among his fallen warriors as the wolf Fenrir came near, and though Odin fought to the last, he was swallowed up by the furious beast. His death did not go unavenged, however, for Odin’s son Vídarr set one foot on each of Fenrir’s jaws and ripped them apart. Finally, Surtr hurled a wave of fire over the world, so that the race of men perished alongside the Gods. The world sank beneath the sea.’
He finished speaking. The kitchen was quiet. I thought about it: the Gods, waiting for the world to end. The wicked way that each God was paired with an enemy combatant – perfectly matched, like wrestlers or fencing champions. I was just sorry that Loki had to die too. Though, as Ben has tried to explain to me, the way the Otherlife works is that it’s constantly beginning and ending, and that sort of cheers me up because in one way Loki will live on forever.
‘Awesome,’ I said. ‘Dude, you read that really well.’
His eyes were almost back to a normal colour, I was glad to note. Sometimes that frozen look of his sort of chills me.
Then I had an incredible idea.
‘Hey!’ I said. ‘Hobbitboy’s Halloween party on Friday! We should go as wolves. Hati and Skǫll. Why the hell not?’
Ben managed a smile.
‘OK,’ he said.
I still had my envelope of cash from the sale of Mum’s gear and I hadn’t spent much of it. Normally I spend everything I have on me sort of automatically. For example, if we’re abroad and I have some euros I’ll just go into the nearest cafe or newsagent and buy a random selection of sweets or pastries or whatever. Or if Mandy, my godmother, comes to stay, sometimes she’ll give me a Hamleys gift card and we’ll go together and I’ll make sure I’ve used it up completely. But somehow I still had about £120 and I had it with me in my rucksack, just in case.
It took some real skills on my part to get Ben to leave the house, but since his mum had just rung up it wasn’t very likely that she’d come back any time soon. And she doesn’t mind if Ben goes out on his own, not the way my mother does. My mother thinks the world is one big nest of murderous kiddy-snatchers.
‘Come on, Ben,’ I said. ‘We need some air anyway. Let’s just leave a note saying we’ve gone for a walk.’
Ben was looking really stressed out. He’s really good at all this academic stuff so I don’t know why he’s so wound up at the moment, but maybe it’s because his mum keeps pestering him about his progress. I basically dragged him out the door and down the road, past all the dodgy shops full of girls with prams and Ugg boots and people muttering to themselves and pushing tartan shopping trolleys. We walked over the canal and through an estate and eventually we got to the Golborne Road, which I know about because Clothilde and I drive past on the way to Ben’s. And there were a few shops along that road that I knew would be perfect.
The first one we tried had exactly what we needed: loads and loads of fur coats of all shapes and sizes hanging up outside or lumped together on rails. I started rifling through them and pretty soon Ben began to see the point and helped me look. And finally we found two coats small enough to fit us. One was grey with white flecks and the other was quite dark, almost black, with a big fat collar, and when we tried them on they came down to about mid-thigh. The shop lady obviously thought we were delightful, and when we explained to her that we wanted to be wolves for Halloween she pointed us in the direction of this massive bin full of hats and gloves and scarves, and we pulled out big hats with flaps that could cover our ears and were nearly the same colour as our coats. I wanted the black one, of course, because it was cooler, and Ben said he didn’t mind which one he had. And we got black gloves for me and white gloves for Ben that were made of really thin material like suede or something. And the woman told us that if we went into a couple of other shops we might be able to find some wolf masks if we looked hard enough. So I paid her £90 for everything and she threw in some moth-eaten old fur wrap things she said we could cut up for tails. Then we trailed about poking around in all these different shops until we found a proper fancy-dress place that had loads and loads of masks; I mean you could get a rubber head of Prince Charles if you wanted, or about fifteen different clown ones that made me think of Zara. Perhaps I could make her wear that enormous clown suit when she goes trick-or-treating with her pathetic little friends. That would amuse me loads.
‘Here,’ said Ben, chucking what appeared to be a piece of black leather at me. I looked down and saw that it was half a wolf’s head with holes for eyes and all over it this amazing spidery design in patches of shiny silver. Awesome! He’d found one for himself too, in red and gold. Last but not least, we bought a couple of packets of fangs. We were sorted.
Like I said, once I start spending I honestly feel like I can’t stop. I made Ben go via the newsagent’s with me on the way back to his house (I’m starting to like the man behind the counter who blatantly doesn’t care that I’m under 18) because I wanted a can of Coke, something I’m routinely forbidden from drinking at home. Just as we were going inside Ben sort of froze and I asked him impatiently what the matter was, thinking he’d had a sudden vision of Odin descending from the dusky clouds or whatever. But he stood totally still and I followed his gaze, which led across the road to this cafe place, and there, sitting in the window, was Ben’s mum.
And sitting opposite her was Ben’s dad.
I stared from them to him and back again, trying to figure out what might be going on in his head. I know Ben hasn’t seen his dad (who is a novelist, apparently quite a crap one according to the reviews on Amazon, but then they’re probably all written by Ben’s mum or something) for like weeks and weeks. I think he misses him, although he never says so. If I was Ben, I’d definitely miss living in a bigger house and going out for dinner and stuff. But Ben’s weird. Who knows what he thinks about anything?
A solitary tear, like one of those glass beads Zara puts in her dolls’ hair, trailed down his cheek. I thought of Freyja, twin sister of Freyr, who wept tears of red gold when her husband disappeared.
I didn’t know what to say.
Then Ben took off across the street, sending two cyclists and a 228 bus skidding to a standstill as he went. I looked on as he tugged open the cafe door and waited for his parents’ heads to turn. I felt like it just wasn’t right to watch what happened next, a bit like when you walk in on someone changing and you know you shouldn’t stare at their naked body. Normally I don’t care or I think it’s funny. But I went into the newsagent’s, like I’d meant to, and bought my can of Coke.
I hung about in there for a while, figuring that Ben’d be embarrassed if I loomed into view while he was talking to his dad who he hasn’t seen for so long, and who appears to be meeting his mum without bothering to come and see Ben as well. I cast around for something else to buy, something else to do. And my eye lit upon the super-cheap photocopier in the corner of the shop.
Now that was an idea.
Although the corner-shop guy seemed bemused by my desire to photocopy the same page 200 times, he was perfectly happy to let me get on with it.