The Otherlife Read online

  And Archie’s mum said, ‘D’you know, it’s not as bad as I thought it would be. I mean we’ve been doing all the VRs and the NVRs since Year 4, so in a way it’s taken some of the strain off this year.’

  (VR and NVR stand for Verbal Reasoning and Non-Verbal Reasoning. A lot of it is saying which cube cannot be made from this net and which picture of a square with some squiggles coming out of it should be the next one in the sequence, etc. Presumably there are some vital life skills contained in there somewhere.)

  You could hear Mum thinking for a while, and then she said, ‘And are you getting any help?’ By which she meant, tutoring.

  ‘Actually, not at the moment. We think Poll is all right for now, though we might get someone in just before the exams.’

  Then Archie’s mum explained that she’d heard from the headmistress of a girls’ school somewhere that statistically girls who were ‘plump’ tended not to do so well in the 11+.

  ‘Really!’ said Mum. ‘What could she possibly have meant?’

  Archie’s mum said she wasn’t sure, but it was something to do with being hungry for success. After that they talked about fish pedicures.

  We won both our matches, 3–1 and 4–0. I did an epic slide tackle and mashed the other team’s defender into the mud. He came off the pitch, and the kid they replaced him with was rubbish. When I came home I ate three pitta breads with Edam, blasted in the microwave for ten seconds. If you do it for longer the cheese goes hard and dimply like when women have cellulite. It must be so boring being a woman, always fretting about things like that. Mum said that Zara should wait until dinnertime because I’d been running around playing football and she hadn’t. I reckon I know what Mum has started thinking.

  I checked Facebook out of habit. 8 Upper was conducting a debate about the longest Latin word, with Hobbitboy holding out for the imperfect passive of appropinquo and someone (Jean-Jacques maybe) freaking out below that we aren’t supposed to know the passive yet, or are we? I was about to start harassing them in simple but satisfying ways (picking on each of their most obvious physical defects until they all buckled under the cyber-strain) when I noticed that Ben was online.

  He doesn’t have a profile picture. Not of himself anyway. It’s just a kind of blob of multi-coloured ink, spreading outwards in rings of blue and purple.

  I clicked on the ink blob and composed a message.

  I want to know who Skoll is.

  Not a chance that he’d reply to that, I thought. Ben loathes direct questions of any kind. He won’t even go up to the interactive whiteboard in class.

  But he did. This is what he wrote back.

  I have no idea what you mean.

  Yes, you do. Skoll. You wrote it in your calculator case, I messaged, thinking I wouldn’t bother explaining how it was that I happened to have seen that. I didn’t want to come across like some kind of lame stalker.

  There was a long pause.

  That is not the correct way to write it, wrote Ben.

  Jesus H. Christ, as my dad likes to say on occasion. What kind of loser puts accents in their Facebook messages? But I could see that I wouldn’t get anywhere unless I made more of an effort. So I fiddled around on my MacBook Pro, typing and deleting a whole series of messed-up Skôlls and Skølls and so on and so forth until I was almost thinking of giving up completely when I finally managed it by doing a kind of copy-and-paste job.

  Skǫll! I messaged in triumph. Now tell me.

  Why?

  Because I want to know.

  There was another, impossibly long pause, and then:

  It’s none of your business.

  Fine. So I went back on the Internet. There wasn’t much on Wikipedia, but after some trawling through different pages (there’s some kind of foundation called SKOLL and a satellite of Saturn which was mildly diverting) I found the right one. Skǫll was/is a creature from Norse mythology, a wolf, son of another wolf called Fenrir (and that’s what Ben had written, wasn’t it? Skǫll, son of Fenrir, only in some weird other language, not English.) It didn’t mean much to me, but there were some pictures showing these fiendish-looking, spookily elongated wolves racing across the sky, chasing the sun and the moon in their horse-drawn chariots. I thought the pictures were quite impressive.

  Tuesday 23rd September

  This afternoon, as we were running out onto the pitch for Rugby Training, I waited until Ben and I were the last pair (he runs pathetically slowly, so I had to lag a bit) and then I tackled him to the ground. He gave a cry, which I muffled with my sleeve, we rolled over onto the grass and I pulled up his rugby shirt. He was kicking my legs and trying to push me off, but of course I’m much stronger than he is.

  I ran my fingers over the black mark. It really was a wolf. It was facing inwards, in profile, as though it was in mid-stride. The lines were quite jagged so it looked like its fur was sticking up.

  ‘Get off me!’ he hissed, his face blooming scarlet. Then he said something in another language which I couldn’t understand, but it sounded like swearing.

  I felt victorious.

  ‘That’s not a transfer. No way is that a transfer.’ To prove it I slid my finger over the wolf’s head as if to peel away the plastic and he squealed. I always think it’s funny when other people have things that hurt.

  ‘It’s a tattoo,’ I said.

  He didn’t reply. He looked the way Zara does when I knock over her Barbie house and watch it collapse like flat-pack furniture. Silent and furious.

  Mr Voss yelled at us to get up and rejoin the group, so we climbed back onto our feet and set off at a jog.

  ‘That must have really hurt. Where did you get it done?’

  He was silent for a while, then muttered, ‘Did it myself.’

  ‘How could you even see what you were doing?’

  ‘I used a mirror.’

  ‘What did your parents think?’

  ‘They don’t know.’

  ‘What about when we have swimming?’

  ‘Yeah, well … that’s not till the summer term. Maybe I’ll stick a plaster over it.’

  He threw an angry glance at me as if to say, Why do you care anyway?

  What is it that grown-ups say? He’s a dark horse. I can’t quite believe he has a proper tattoo.

  Wednesday 24th September

  Today Dad returned from his business trip and we all had dinner together. Sometimes we have a chef who comes and cooks. Today he’d made roast chicken and a brown rice risotto and asparagus and watercress salad. Zara folded the napkins into ballerina slippers, or that’s what she said they were meant to be. Mum mostly doesn’t eat carbohydrates, and she prefers us to have wholegrains because they are better for you, but often she just lets us have what we want. It’s like she hasn’t really made up her mind what the rules are. I ate everything and I was still hungry and in the freezer there were six tubs of ice cream and Zara and I ate nearly the whole of a Spiced Cinnamon tub between us and I could see my mother looking at Zara and trying to decide whether she should say anything. She was probably thinking about what Archie’s mum had said, about being hungry for success.

  Then she made Zara do a timed Bond Assessment Paper in the playroom.

  Mum and Dad asked me if I’d made any new friends in 8 Upper. I thought about Ben with his black eyes and spidery writing, his skinny shoulders and his home-made tattoo and wondered whether he counted as a friend.

  ‘There’s a new guy called Ben. Ben Holloway. He was moved up from the middle set.’

  ‘Darling, not with your mouth full,’ said Mum.

  Dad said suddenly, ‘Oh yes. His mother worked at Carrisford – you know, the legal firm that’s just let go of half its employees. I once met her at the RAC.’

  The RAC is the Royal Automobile Club. I always used to imagine a car showroom, but actually it’s just a very expensive gym/hotel/restaurant place and they don’t like it if you play cricket on the roof terrace, which is what I tried to do when Mum had her 40th birthday party there.
r />   I said Ben was quite weird but then everyone else was too. I didn’t say he had a tattoo that he’d done himself (surprisingly well) with a pot of ink and a sewing needle, though I really couldn’t stop thinking about it. I told them Ben needed to get a Scholarship because he wouldn’t be able to afford to go to a private school next year without one.

  ‘He must be working awfully hard,’ said Mum, pushing salad leaves around with her fork. ‘You must have him over, Hobes, and then you can study together. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Did you hear,’ she said to Dad, ‘they’ve given him an Assisted Place for the whole of Year 8? Thoughtful of the school, isn’t it? Apparently it was a dreadful divorce. Did you know that—’

  And then Dad said: ‘Elsie, pas devant l’enfant,’ which is what they always say and means not in front of the child in French, and they really should say it in Urdu or Swahili or something if they don’t want me to understand. Plus Dad’s French accent is really awful.

  We heard Zara crying and she came trailing in saying she couldn’t remember the difference between reported and direct speech and I groaned and said if she did Latin it would be incredibly easy, but Mum and Dad had already both rushed into the playroom to help her. They shouldn’t stand over her so much. But they can’t help it.

  I pulled all the books off the bookshelf on the stairs trying to find the one about the Norse Gods that someone gave me a couple of years ago. Then I sat on the top step and read it and finished the ice cream. It was really more of a picture book. There was nothing about Skǫll, but there was a bit about his father, Fenrir, only the book called him Fenris-Wolf. The illustrations were quite good. I read the whole thing. Then I went on Google and found out that Skǫll had a brother called Hati. I loved how Fenrir died, with his jaw ripped apart by some guy at Ragnarok, which I realise now is the great battle that Ben was writing about before. The Day of Reckoning, when Skǫll and Hati chase the sun and the moon through the sky and devour them.

  When I slept I saw wolves in my dreams. Giant wolves stalking the aisles of Hamleys, stacking their baskets really high with raw meat and Action Men. And when I woke, I’d decided something in my sleep.

  I wanted one too.

  Thursday 25th September

  We had Art last lesson and we were looking at woodcuts by lots of different people. I was sitting with Ben. We had to draw portraits of each other on A4 paper, in pencil, to turn into woodcuts next lesson. Mrs Ottoboni lets us talk while we work, but sometimes she plays classical music, like stupid monk chants or the Planets thing by Holst, to keep us from getting too loud. Ben drew me first. He concentrates so hard when he works, like he’s figuring out the hardest sum known to man. He’s actually really good at Art for someone so malco and disorganised. He made me look like one of those Italian angels they put on greetings cards.

  ‘You could have used one of these things, couldn’t you?’ I said, fingering one of the cutting tools that Mrs Ottoboni had laid out on the worktop.

  ‘What for?’ he frowned.

  ‘You know what for. Your t-a-t-t-o-o.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  When it was my turn to draw him, I made his head too round and his eyes too small. I reached for a rubber and dragged it across the page, snagging it into a crease.

  ‘Ben,’ I said, ‘I want a tattoo too. Can you do one for me?’

  He made a gormless what? face at me.

  ‘I want a wolf, like yours. Skǫll had a brother, right? Hati. Hati eats the Moon when Skǫll eats the sun.’

  He looked surprised. ‘How do you …?’

  Mrs Ottoboni came wobbling over with her too-large boobs bobbing under her art apron.

  ‘That’s not bad, Hobie,’ she said. ‘You must try not to rush your work though.’

  Then she clapped her hands together and told us to pack away our things. I reached for Ben’s elbow.

  ‘I’ll pay you,’ I said. ‘How much d’you want?’

  His eyes went dark again.

  I mean, it’s not like I want to be his twin or anything, but it’s cool. Those Norse wolves, I like them. I like how powerful they are. How they’re the end of everything.

  When I see something I want, I usually work out how to get it.

  Zara has a tutor now on Wednesdays. She’s called Rebecca. Mum and Dad think that Zara has some issues with working under timed conditions, so Rebecca is supposed to hold a stopwatch and get her to do all these 10-minute tests and also mark full-length papers which Zara does at other times. Zara really likes Rebecca, but she’s starting to hate all the comprehensions and creative writing with rubbish titles like ‘A Strange Journey’ or ‘A Winter’s Day’. There’s these particular questions which she just can’t do where you have to find the missing three-letter word. The clue will be something like ‘The prince fought a fire-breathing DON’ and Zara will look at it blankly, and even though it’s totally obvious, she just sees the word DON and she can’t see any possible words other than that one and then Rebecca will make it easier, like this:

  The prince fought a fire-breathing D _ _ _ ON.

  And then Zara will start getting stressed out because she’s worrying that she can’t do it and by that stage she will never, never get that the missing word is RAG because the whole thing is DRAGON and if I’m in the room I will say, ‘Za, for God’s sake, what else d’you think would be fire-breathing?’ And she’ll look at me as if to say, Shut up, Hobie, just shut up and go away.

  Mum and Dad blame themselves and think they should have started the tutoring in Year 5.

  Sometimes Zara cries at breakfast.

  Friday 26th September

  I asked Mum earlier this week if Ben could come round this afternoon so we could study together, and she looked really pleased and said I must be taking my work very seriously if I wanted to sacrifice my Friday playdate. But all we ever did on those playdates, me and whoever, was go on Facebook and eat Hummingbird cupcakes and maybe go to the cinema or to Byron Burger. And quite a few of the kids can’t have refined sugar or hydrogenated fats and don’t eat anything apart from chicken breast and salad, which is dull.

  So Mum got Ben’s mother’s number from the class spreadsheet thing and she texted her and then didn’t hear back for ages, but I explained that Ben’s mother actually has a proper job – I don’t know what it is but I think something involving the Citizens Advice Bureau or whatever she could get after losing her job at the law firm. Mum on the other hand is just a housewife or femme de ménage as I wrote in my French Oral Presentation last term. Thus (I said) Ben’s mother might be too busy to check her BlackBerry every two minutes like Mum does.

  And Mum hugged me and said, ‘Hobes, I wouldn’t swap being able to spend time with you for any job in the world,’ and then she had to run upstairs in her high heels because her cab was waiting to take her to Pilates.

  Ben’s mother eventually replied and she said that was great and Ben could come home with me and then get a bus back to their house whenever we wanted to get rid of him.

  And Mum, who has never allowed me or Zara out of the house without Clothilde or some other responsible adult practically carrying us over uneven paving stones, said she was surprised they let him wander around by himself, particularly when it was getting dark. You never know who’s lying in wait, apparently.

  And I thought, Lucky Ben. If anyone was lying in wait for me, I’d be quite interested to meet them.

  So today, when Clothilde picked me up from school, Ben came home with us. I don’t think he would’ve had anything else to do.

  ‘Ben, as-tu un snack?’ said Cloth-head, winding my scarf around my neck in a really irritating way that she has borrowed from Mum. I pushed her hands away.

  ‘Non, je n’en ai pas besoin,’ he replied.

  I rolled my eyes at him. ‘You don’t have to answer her in French,’ I said.

  I ate a Pret pecan slice and a bag of dried pineapple rings. You aren’t meant to bring nuts anywhere near the school because so many child
ren have allergies. Once I put a peanut down the back of someone’s shirt and was excluded for two days, which was convenient because my godmother was visiting and she wanted to take me shopping.

  When we got home Clothilde made Ben a cup of tea and me a hot chocolate with special flakes from Melt, which sells the most expensive chocolate in London, I've heard.

  ‘Did you use to live in a house like this?’ I asked him. (Our house has got five bedrooms and is just off Kensington Church Street.)

  He shrugged. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘It was smaller. And we didn’t have any of this sort of thing.’

  He waved his arm, and I expected him to be pointing out the Bose speakers embedded in the skirting boards, or the triple fridge with the glass door, or the marble worktop in the kitchen and the sink with the tap that runs boiling water.

  But no: he was pointing at the walls.

  ‘You have so many photographs,’ he said.

  It’s true. There’s loads of me and Za, all in white frames. On beaches, in gardens, in uniform, in churches, in colour, in black and white. Hundreds and hundreds. Who gives a shit? They’re not especially expensive or interesting. They’re just pictures of me and Za.

  ‘My parents don’t take a lot of photographs,’ said Ben, almost to himself.

  ‘Let’s go upstairs,’ I said.

  ‘Obie!’ Clothilde called after me. She can’t say the H in my name so it sounds like the guy in Star Wars.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I go now, quick, to pick up your sister. Tu veux dîner à quelle heure?’

  ‘Whenever.’

  I asked Ben if he had a nanny, and if so whether she spoke in a tedious foreign language, but he just shook his head and looked embarrassed.

  We got up to the top landing, where mine and Zara’s and Clothilde’s rooms are. I pulled down the ladder that goes up to the loft, which is incredibly easy to do although Mum and Dad haven’t realised I know how, and then climbed up it, telling Ben to follow me. The loft is quite an awesome space that hasn’t been messed up yet with Farrow & Ball paint with a stupid name. Just unpainted floorboards, crooked ceilings and a bunch of boxes with ‘The Gentleman’s Moving Company’ on the side. Mum wants to convert this into another bedroom, but what would be the point?