The Otherlife Read online

  ‘What’s necrotising fasciitis?’ Simon asked nervously, coming to sit down opposite me.

  ‘It’s a disease caused by flesh-eating bacteria,’ I said, brandishing a piece of ham in his face.

  I reckon I could’ve made him cry, but the bell was about to ring for the end of lunch.

  In the afternoon we had English, and Mr White made us read out our Free Creative Writing homework. Mine was about a man that was addicted to drinking blood and eating car parts, which I’d basically culled from a couple of magazines and then added some INTERESTING IMAGERY to, such as ‘his hunger was as lethal as a computer virus’ etc. Mr White said I needed to tone down my imagination and be more subtle. I don’t get that. Frodo had written a poem composed entirely from haikus about the decline of autumn and the slow, inevitable onset of winter, which the Nicholson Twins instantly recognised as having been ripped off from some famous poet. The lesson dragged on and on and I couldn’t hear myself think for polysyllabic alliterative phrases about multicoloured flowers and so forth. If that’s being subtle, I can’t see why anyone would want to be.

  Finally it was Ben’s turn. He shuffled to the front of the room, looking positively green in the face, and proceeded to read so quietly that Mr White made him start again. As he read his voice got louder and stronger until he sounded totally confident. It was like he was a different person.

  This is what he said:

  The Gods lived peacefully at Asgard. Among them was Baldr the beautiful. He was a handsome and gentle God, but he was no longer as happy as he once had been, because of his nightmares. He went to the other Gods.

  ‘I see a fiery red that prickles my dreams, and an overwhelming blackness,’ he told them. ‘Misty and dark, it covers my mind. Roots pierce my body.’

  Now the Gods were very upset by this, but most anxious of all was Frigg, because Baldr was her son and she loved him dearly. So she went on a journey across all the lands and seas, and she extracted an oath from anything that could harm Baldr – the rocks, the trees, the plants, even the men from Midgard – that they would not hurt him. She went home to Asgard, happy that Baldr was safe.

  The God Loki was unlike Baldr in every way. His smile was as crooked as Baldr’s was open, and he was as mischievous as Baldr was kind. He was determined to harm Baldr if he could. He disguised himself as an old woman and went to Asgard to talk to Frigg. All the Gods were throwing stones and arrows at Baldr, which fell against the invincible God and dropped to the ground like feathers.

  ‘What are they doing?’ asked Loki.

  Frigg told Loki what she had done to protect her son.

  ‘Every growing thing has sworn an oath not to harm Baldr,’ she told him. ‘And every metal too, and every stone.’

  ‘Every single one?’ Loki asked, his eyes wide.

  ‘All,’ replied Frigg, ‘except the mistletoe. It’s such a young, tender plant. I don’t see how it could trouble him.’

  Loki went away gleefully, knowing what he had to do. At once, he returned to Asgard, to find Tyr and Thor and all the other Gods engaged in their usual pastime of hurling heavy rocks at their beloved Baldr.

  Loki caught sight of Hǫdr, who was blind, leaning against a tree and listening to the cries of merry laughter.

  Loki went to Hǫdr, and said, ‘Why don’t you join in?’

  He handed blind Hǫdr a dart of mistletoe, smiling wickedly all the while. Taking the dart, Hǫdr threw it, trustingly, and Loki guided his hand.

  Baldr looked up, and was stirred by the memory of the fiery red from his dreams – the exact same colour as Loki’s hair. It was too late. The dart pierced his heart and he fell down, dead.

  The Gods stared, shocked. They turned on Loki.

  ‘It was Hǫdr who threw the dart!’ he protested.

  But he knew he would not be forgiven.

  When he’d finished Mr White said, ‘Ben, that’s very moving. Boys, what do we think?’ And everyone said things about adverbs and dialogue. Frodo, the pretentious gaylord, commented that ‘the visual symbolism of red, the colour of danger, worked really well’. Ugh.

  ‘Hobie?’ said Mr White. ‘Did you want to say something?’

  I said Loki sounded pretty cool. I wondered if he got away with it. It seemed to be part of the same story as the war that Ben had been writing about in his history essay. For some reason it was obviously Ben’s favourite thing, a bit like how Jean-Jacques feels about Star Wars.

  I don’t know why, but I kept my photocopy of the story. And then later, when I was having tutoring, Jason noticed it on my desk.

  ‘I know that handwriting!’ he exclaimed. ‘That’s young Ben Holloway.’

  I asked him how he knew Ben, and he said that he’d worked with Ben like, three or four years ago. I couldn’t quite work out the expression on Jason’s face as he read the story. He looked sort of happy and sad at the same time.

  ‘He’s even put in the accents,’ he said. ‘Now, Hobie, that’s the kind of accuracy that you should be trying to emulate in your work.’

  I nearly asked Jason if he knew about Ben’s tattoo. But I didn’t.

  I really need to know though. What’s it for? If it’s a wolf, why is it a wolf? Who or what is Skǫll? What does it mean? Is it connected to the story?

  Maybe I’ll do some research.

  Or maybe I’ll just ask Ben.

  BEN

  In my dream I’m swimming. It’s unending tropical water, the sort I’ve never seen, let alone swum in – the kind of water you see in ads in the backs of magazines for all-inclusive island holidays. I’m floating, rotating this way and that, drifting further and further away from a palm-tree-lined, diamond-sand beach on the horizon. A yacht bobs on the surface, some way away. As I float backwards, the water darkens and hardens, becomes dense and heavy, like paint. I am swimming now, or trying to, struggling to pull myself back to the surface, but the paint is getting everywhere, and it tastes metallic and bloody. Powerless, I begin to sink. And through the darkening waves I’m dimly aware of a shadow coming towards me: a mass of scales and coils, a monstrous shape on the ocean floor, its jaws ecstatically wide. As it closes in, bent on the business of devouring me whole in the painted water, it hisses, almost conspiratorially, ‘It’s great to see you again, Ben.’

  My eyes snap open.

  My room is bright. It feels late, dead-of-night late, but I’ve only been asleep for an hour. The open window lets in waves of chill air. I stumble over and bang the window shut, draw the curtains. I realise that I am still holding the photograph of me and Hobie. It’s a little crumpled at the edges. I smooth it out and lay it flat on my desk. Then, going back to the wall beside my bed, I slowly take down my poster of Cliff Burton. And then I take down the rest of the Late Greats. Dimebag Darrell, Randy Rhoads, Gar Samuelson, Layne Staley. As they come away from the wall, they expose, inch by inch, a vast, painted landscape. The mural I did when we moved into this house, shortly after Mum lost her job and Dad left. I trace my fingers over the ridges of acrylic, which stand out in relief because I laid it on thickly, with a palette knife. My hands are shaking, the way Dad’s sometimes do in the morning. The paint is filmy with dust. I force myself to step back, so that I can see the whole of it. At the bottom, the sea. Grey-tipped waves, a deepening blue-black suggesting impenetrable depths. The World Serpent, Jǫrmungandr, just visible, a glimmering smear of green at the edge of the painting. Oceans of white cloud, with great cliffs behind, and then a stretch of rocky landscape studded with stones and lone trees. A longship appearing through the mist.

  There were many windows into the Otherlife, but this is one I made myself. Gradually, as my collection of metal posters expanded, I covered up my mural, but – seeing it again, for the first time in a long time – I’m reminded of how deeply I cared.

  And how truly I believed.

  Now the air in my room swirls, shifts, changes, and – seeing, unseeing – I become aware of a different light. Not Hermódr, this time, but Frigg. Each of the Gods was a different
colour, and Frigg’s colour was probably my favourite of them all. She was a kind of lemony-green. The colour you’d pick for daffodil stems, or a meadow in spring. She was the gentlest presence, always, and the saddest, too, for she loved Baldr very dearly.

  Silently she weeps, a nugget of light against my mural. I just can make out the curve of her jaw, the blur of a single tear on her cheek, the folds of her shining hair.

  Then she says, softly and urgently, ‘Hjálpaðú …’

  And this verb I know: I don’t need to check it.

  Help.

  Shaking a little, I reach for my laptop. I’m not a fan of social media, but I’ve come to find that if I exclude myself from sites like Facebook entirely I end up resenting not being invited to certain events, even if I wouldn’t have gone to them anyway. Also, it’s a good way to keep up with metal gigs. I key in my usernames and passwords to Facebook and Twitter, getting them wrong a couple of times before finally getting them right. And I scroll up and down, flicking from tab to tab, while my laptop – which is too old, really, to handle even browsing the Internet – wheezes and complains.

  But there’s nothing. No mention of anyone being dead. Not anywhere I can see. And Facebook is always the first with this kind of information.

  Probably because I can’t stand to focus for too long on flickering screens, my head begins to ache. My hand travels automatically to my pocket. Nothing. I kneel, reach under the bed, remember that the bottle I had under there is empty. So is the bottle in the bathroom. I pull a shoebox from the bottom of my wardrobe and rummage through it. Finally I unearth a small brown bottle full of triangular pills.

  I’ve had a problem with headaches for years. I was hit on the side of my head with a cricket bat when I was nine; the headaches started pretty much immediately afterwards. They weren’t constant: they were worse when I was tired, or unhappy. I tried to live with them, since I couldn’t seem to find anything – ice water, prescription medication, darkened rooms – that could make them go away. But then, one day, I discovered that Mum had these pills. Found a bottle in a drawer, maybe. There’s nothing on the bottle – no prescription, no price, no dosage. I don’t know what the pills are, or if they’re legal; I don’t know if they’re meant to keep you ageless and unwrinkled or load your blood with iron. I don’t remember when I took the first one.

  Whatever they are, they are excellent at killing pain.

  There’s plenty of dealers in the sixth form at school; there’s plenty of other things I could take, if I wanted to. But I wouldn’t be able to afford them: the drugs people buy in the alleyway behind the tube, the powders they inhale at the weekend or the hothouse cannabis they smoke in the mornings before school. Anyway, I don’t need to buy anything. The house is riddled with bottles of these triangular pills, buried like tiny Easter eggs in sock drawers and biscuit tins and laundry bags. I’m not sure what Mum takes the pills for. If she’s noticed that I take them too, she’s never said a word about it. Nowadays I need one a day.

  Sometimes more.

  I tip a pill into my palm and swallow it with the dregs from my cup. The softened corners hit my tongue with a glaze of sugar; then the bitter coffee washes the pill down my throat. I wait for the pain to subside. Sometimes, when it’s bad, it’s like a sign flashing in my head. Amber at first: warning. Then a sickly neon red. Emergency, it says. Emergency. These days I have a lot of emergencies, but today has been especially problematic.

  Mistily, through my dissolving headache, I glower at my reflection in the wardrobe door. I am weird-looking; I know that. Girls don’t notice me particularly – or, when they do, I imagine them getting round the corner and then turning to each other and saying, ‘He’s so weird, isn’t he?’ My skin is as dead white as the Late Greats, who, as Solly once commented, most certainly weren’t getting their vitamin D. My nose is turning into my mother’s: a wonky hypotenuse of bone. My eyes are all right, but generally puffy from sleeplessness, with an odd, pinched look just beneath them. My hair is longish and dark brown. I do not have any kind of interesting haircut. I shake my head a lot; it’s a habit I picked up when trying to stop my head from hurting. When I was younger I used to hide beneath my fringe. Mum would cut it with the kitchen scissors, and I’d beg her to let me keep it as long as possible. I was the kid who made dens behind the washing line, in the old fireplace, behind the garden shed. I loved to hide.

  When I was at Cottesmore House and they suddenly moved me into 8 Upper, I was horrified by the free-for-all yelling, the chaos. The verb chants and war re-enactments and cut-throat debates. I was disorientated by the amount of work we had to do. Unyielding deadlines and unending past papers, each one denser and more challenging than the last. The kids in 8 Upper were like a different species: supremely confident in their opinions, forever training themselves to achieve fearsome academic feats, each with their own particular talent, like a set of cerebral superheroes. Norville … the Nicholson twins … Frodo.

  But Hobie was the one who unsettled me most.

  Finding the photograph hidden in my Old Norse grammar brings him to the forefront of my mind. It’s so strange, to think of him now. Strange, and a bit confusing – that’s why I don’t often do it. As I sit back on my bed, still waiting for my headache to clear, I remember – I’m not sure why – going to the British Museum to an exhibition about a Roman emperor in the first week of September. It must be one of my earliest memories of Hobie. At first I don’t want to let it unfold in my head. If it was one of those old-fashioned projectionist’s reels, I’d try to halt it somehow. But, like the stories of the Gods, it seems to want to tell itself, and so I pull my knees close to my chest and let it.

  Who was there that day? It was 8 Upper, 8 Middle and 8 Lower, and I think some of the Year 7 kids too. Miss Atkins was ordering us to walk in silence, not that anyone was listening to her. Miss Flower, who taught history, was also there, and one or two parent volunteers. Between them they just couldn’t keep order. Hobie and Archie had managed to buy six cans of Coke from a vending machine and drunk the lot. They were running around the domed concourse, crashing into tourists and screaming hysterically. Eventually, under the threat of suspension, they allowed themselves, mutinously, to be led into the exhibition.

  ‘Hadrian was a massive gaylord,’ Hobie was saying loudly to anyone near him. ‘Everyone knew that.’

  ‘Don’t be homophobic,’ said Norville, who was copying all the writing on the walls into a Moleskine notebook. ‘It’s uncool to be prejudiced.’

  I wandered away from the group. Over by the door, Miss Flower was surreptitiously checking her phone. Miss Atkins had the harassed, frantic look she always got when she was teaching our class. Trying to keep her voice down, she ordered us into a vague procession around the room. Each of us had a worksheet attached to a clipboard.

  I watched Hobie mimic Miss Atkins’s way of walking. She used to swish her hair from shoulder to shoulder in an eminently copiable style, her feet turning slightly outwards, like a duckling’s. Behind her back, he was doing a very good job. Everyone was sniggering. I turned my worksheet over and drew a little sketch of Hobie on the back. Crouching behind a plinth, mouth wickedly wide in a blissful grin.

  Planning mischief.

  I stole a bit closer. Hobie was murmuring to Archie. With Miss Atkins and Mr Keynes occupied on the other side of the Reading Room, they crept over to where several small children, dressed in pink and grey uniforms, were dutifully looking up at an enormous marble head.

  ‘Gosh, this is a really tremendous bust!’ said Hobie, making his voice even posher than it already was.

  ‘I simply must agree with you.’ Archie was trying not to crack up.

  Then, as if on some prearranged signal, they set off in opposite directions.

  I peered at the small children. Some of them seemed disorientated, as though they’d been surprised by an ambush. One of them was beginning to cry, his face suffused with magenta.

  Hobie bumped into me on his way back towards our
group. He was choking with laughter.

  ‘What were you doing?’ I asked him. I was interested. Nothing, at the time, interested me about Cottesmore House, about any of the people in it. But there was something about the freedom of the way Hobie moved. I liked the look of it.

  For a moment his eyes burned into mine. They were extraordinarily blue. His canines, when he smiled, were slightly pointed. It made him look like a wild creature.

  ‘Farting on little kids,’ he said shortly. ‘You should try it. Their faces are just the right height.’

  That’s what Hobie was like, when I first knew him. There was no one quite like him really.

  I go back to the window. I’ve always wished I could see the cemetery from my bedroom, but it’s on the other side of the house. From here I can see the garden – or what passes for a garden – and the backs of the houses in the next street along. For the moment, the Gods are gone. But I know they will be back. I hear their voices again: the delicate whisper of Frigg; Hermódr’s velvety lament.

  Hjálpaðú.

  Hann er dauðr.

  Someone is dead.

  And the Gods are asking for help.

  HOBIE’S DIARY

  Saturday 20th September 2008

  Today it pissed with rain and I went to Football anyway because I don’t care about getting wet. Mum drove me in our 4x4 and we picked up Archie and his mother too. Archie lives near us, the other side of Notting Hill Gate. He’s almost as good at Sport as I am, which I don’t mind because it gives me someone to try really hard to defeat. Archie’s little sister Polly is the same age as Zara. His mum has the same red hair that kind of explodes off her head, but she isn’t as ugly as Archie is. If she was I don’t suppose anyone would’ve wanted to shag her.

  Archie and I sat in the back taking turns on my Sony PSP while I listened with one ear to the conversation in the front.

  Mum said, ‘How are you doing with your 11+ preparation then? Is Polly finding it all a bit much?’