The Otherlife Read online

  We are loitering in the lunch queue. No one is ever in a hurry to get through the dining-hall doors, into the steam-puffed air and the starch-and-chemical smell of the Pasta King machine.

  ‘Do you know a tutor called Jason?’ I ask him.

  Solomon has a different tutor every day. Like day-of-the-week underpants, he once commented. He doesn’t need them any more, but his parents can’t let go.

  ‘Nope. Never had a Jason,’ he says, polishing his watch with his shirt cuff. ‘Any good?’

  ‘Yeah. Pretty good.’

  ‘I must wash my hands,’ he says.

  Solomon shoots off in the direction of the toilets. He’s a hygiene enthusiast. My headache is back: a stubborn squatter in my burnt-out head. Reflexively I shake a pill out of my sleeve, ready to take with my drink when we sit down.

  ‘Holloway. What’ve you got there?’

  Chadwick bears down on me, enormous in his three-piece suit and preposterous ‘comedy’ waistcoat, emblazoned with picnicking teddy bears. Like a six-year-old caught with something disgusting in the sandpit, I stare blushingly at his shoes. Open my fingers. Hold out my palm. Neatly he removes the pill.

  ‘’Fraid I’ll have to hand this in at the office.’

  ‘It’s just for migraines, sir.’

  Chadwick looks at me closely.

  ‘The only people authorised to dispense medication are the school nurse and the secretary. Personal supplies are strictly forbidden; you know that.’

  His voice bounces off the marble floor. Amid the crush of bodies I sense eyes on me. Watching. Quietly condemning. Solly slips back into the queue, making a point of looking fixedly at the vast mixed-media collage of the Last Supper that a group of Year 9s did about twenty years ago.

  ‘Ah, Green. Just the person I was looking for. You and Holloway are both due in after-school detention from four till five.’

  ‘What for?’ says Solomon weakly.

  ‘Plagiarism is the most atrocious of crimes, Green. Even auto-plagiarism. Your attempt to disguise your distinctive writing style with cheap spelling mistakes and misplaced semicolons was easy to see through. Especially since you happened to use the same watermarked paper for both your essay and Holloway’s. Holloway, if your migraines are impeding your ability to put pen to paper, you have only to show me a note from your mother. I’ll see you both later.’

  And off he goes, wobbling from side to side like a carnival float.

  ‘Busted!’ hisses a voice from behind Solomon’s back. It’s a kid called Lawson in Year 10, indulging in a moment of Schadenfreude.

  Solomon hates being late, ill or rebuked. These things disturb his core philosophy, which he claims is a Japanese mode of thought called kaizen. According to Solly, everything must exist in a state of perpetual, gradual improvement. Or else it falls apart. Once he asked me what my philosophy was. I thought about it. And I realised that I just … didn’t know. Yet, once upon a time, I remember standing on Hobie’s roof, hair turning in the wind, and telling him that everything has to have a meaning. Truly, surely, I believed in something once.

  I believed in the Otherlife.

  ‘I’ll miss Scrabble Club. Dammit,’ says Sol. ‘God, Ben, cheer up.’

  He shoves me in the ribs as the space ahead of me in the queue opens up. I drag myself forward. I fix my gaze on the Last Supper, a mosaic of weathered glass, torn fabric and ripped-up newspaper, surprisingly effective because of its size. It’s easy to make out the long table studded with wine glasses and plates, the central figure of Jesus among the bent heads of his apostles. Solomon is chatting to me, some anecdote involving his French exchange partner, a Westfield gift card and a lost iPhone. I’ve heard it before. I keep staring at the collage.

  As I’m about to go in, something draws my attention back to the Last Supper. I catch a final glimpse of Judas Iscariot, and see, indistinct, shimmering beneath it, the flame-red hair and secretive sneer of Loki. Judas Iscariot catches my eye, and winks.

  ‘I’m starving,’ he mouths conspiratorially. ‘My nanny was supposed to drop off my snack. But she didn’t.’

  Shaking my head, I push through the doors of the dining hall.

  Lunch today is some kind of curry with rice and green beans. Baked potatoes. A salad bar with sad folds of lettuce, hard-boiled eggs and wedges of beetroot, leaking an artificial fuchsia juice. My head vibrates. They report you if you don’t take any food, so I ask for a piece of bread and throw a couple of foil-wrapped cheeses onto my tray.

  ‘Is the pill that important?’ asks Solly as he holds out his plate for grated carrot.

  ‘What pill?’ I say. I take an apple from a bowl.

  ‘The one you were clinging onto like some kind of panic button. What are those things?’

  ‘Nothing. I just get these headaches during exam time.’

  ‘You shouldn’t take painkillers.’ Solly is pious about healthcare; his mum’s a homeopath or something. ‘Try vitamin B3.’

  We make our way over to our usual corner table. As we edge past a particularly rowdy group of Year 12s, Solomon stops and says, ‘Oh, I know who you should ask about your tutor.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Friedman, of course.’

  Friedman. He’s right. Solomon always figures out the answer to things. When he warns me that my blood-sugar levels will crash if I skip lunch, I tell him I’ll get hold of some vitamin B3.

  Friedman is our age, but so smart they moved him up a year. The sixth-formers have small studies all along the top corridor in the south wing of the main building, and I imagine I’ll find him there, proofing the next edition of the school magazine, or revising for one of his five AS levels. It’s hard to say how he found the time, but alongside these activities and others – the model United Nations he organised among the other London day schools, the Pearl Fishers aria he performed so touchingly in assembly last week – Friedman has also designed an app which he is reportedly about to sell to a software company for a fantastical sum. Called TutoReal, it uses something like a combination of GPS software and a vast and intricate database to match clients with a suitably qualified tutor who lives or works within close proximity. Solomon’s right: if anyone can tell me where Jason is, Friedman can.

  I knock on the door. ‘En-ter,’ says Friedman, in his famous baritone.

  He doesn’t swivel round immediately, so that – even though we ought to be in the same year, and have known each other since we were nine – I’m forced to stand in the doorway like Oliver Twist until he’s ready. I watch his broad back, hulking over his laptop, the bulk of his curly head. Finally he turns around.

  ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘it’s you.’

  ‘Hi, Frodo,’ I say.

  ‘It’s Alexis now, if you don’t mind.’

  To the horror and fury of his mother, Friedman decided a while ago that his first name didn’t have enough gravitas for someone of his intellectual standing and plumped for his more appealing middle one.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ he says, turning back to his computer, where I see among the tabbed pages a property search engine, the FTSE 100 index and a couple of sites that he must have broken through the school firewall to access.

  ‘I was wondering if you could look up a tutor for me.’

  ‘I’m incredibly busy at the moment, Ben. Try Google,’ says Frodo, taking a swig of bottled Frappuccino.

  ‘I’ve done that already. His name’s too common to search for, and he didn’t have a website. Not one that I can find anyway.’

  Without looking, Frodo throws the empty Frappuccino bottle in the general direction of the bin; I remember that he was never much of a sportsman. Not like Archie, say. Or Hobie.

  ‘Well, come back tomorrow, why don’t you?’ says Frodo.

  I take a step further into his hallowed sanctum.

  ‘I’ve never really seen your app, you know,’ I say. ‘Solomon says it’s perfectly optimised for OS X.’

  I’m actually not sure Solly ever said that, but it sounds plausible
.

  ‘Of course it is,’ says Frodo loftily. ‘I built it.’

  ‘Please,’ I say. ‘Just one search and then I’ll leave.’

  A shrill staccato bell rings out from the courtyard: five minutes until lessons.

  Frodo sighs huffily and then says, ‘Fine. Actually I’m quite excited by some new features. I want to incorporate a secret search parameter for the female tutors, like Hot or Not, you know? So you can get a really fit tutor instead of some hideous dog, but in order to access the function you need to pay for an upgrade.’

  ‘Wow,’ I say. ‘That sounds like an amazing idea.’

  He clicks on an icon in the dock of his laptop; a royal-blue screen pops up.

  ‘Tutor’s name?’

  ‘Jason.’

  ‘Jason what? I have over five thousand tutors; I expect a good many Jasons.’

  ‘Young.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘I … I don’t know.’

  ‘Specialisms? Qualifications?’

  ‘Maths. Science. Some other stuff. He was doing a PhD.’

  The royal-blue screen shuffles and reshuffles its results. Frodo scrolls through the square photographs – it’s a little like a dating site, the ones I’ve seen Mum use sometimes – of pink-cheeked girls and serious-browed boys, sorting and resorting with his many intelligent filters, but we come to the second-last page of Jasons, and Youngs, and then the last, but there is no Jason Young.

  Jason is not there.

  ‘Sure you’ve got his name right?’

  ‘Pretty sure,’ I say. ‘I used to know him quite well.’

  Frodo stares at me with what looks like a flicker of interest. ‘Wait, wait. Not the guy who tutored you at Cottesmore House? That Jason?’

  ‘Yes, that Jason,’ I say, my arms twitching. ‘Why?’

  There’s a pause, and then Frodo says, ‘Nothing. Don’t worry about it. But he’s certainly not on my database. He must have got a real job.’

  By the way he swivels back round to face his desk, I know that I have been dismissed.

  I find Solly in the library, where he is writing a long, alliterative letter of apology to Chadwick. It is very like Solly not to blame me for the detention, even though it is sort of my fault.

  ‘Any luck?’ he asks.

  ‘No. Jason wasn’t on the app.’

  ‘Questionable piece of design work, that app,’ says Solly, who is possibly jealous. ‘Frodo probably misspelt the name on the database.’

  ‘Doubt it. I guess he doesn’t tutor any more.’

  Solly folds his letter into perfect thirds and slides it into an off-white Conqueror envelope.

  ‘Well, do you have any mutual acquaintances?’ he asks.

  My thoughts flicker at once to Hobie. But I can’t ask Hobie. I think briefly of his sister, Zara. But she was only little when we were in Year 8. I can’t imagine she’d have a contact number for Jason. And I wouldn’t know how to get in touch with her anyway. I suppose my mum must have a number for Hobie’s parents, but I don’t want to go down that particular avenue.

  ‘Not really,’ I say.

  ‘What about his alma mater?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘His university,’ says Solly, with dwindling patience. ‘Didn’t you say he was doing a PhD?’

  When I call Imperial College from the payphone outside the dining hall (my phone, as usual, has no credit), I find myself in a maze of a switchboard. I don’t know which extension I require, and the operator is possibly having lunch or something, because I keep getting put through to some kind of answering machine. With the last of my fifty-pence pieces, I try once more, and this time instead of holding for the operator I press a sequence of random digits and somehow end up talking to a human being – a kind-voiced woman, whose gentle vowels remind me a little of Frigg.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she says, and it seems almost as if she’d like to. There’s so much warmth in the way she says it.

  ‘My name’s Ben,’ I say. ‘I’m trying to find a contact number for someone who was doing a PhD at Imperial about four years ago.’

  ‘Well, he may still be studying here,’ she replies. ‘Let me check.’

  I give her Jason’s full name. I’m sure he was doing something scientific, so I tell her that as well, and then I listen to the woman breathing, and typing, and then typing some more.

  ‘Bear with me,’ she says. ‘I’m just getting into the system. It takes a while to load.’

  Then there is a pause.

  ‘From our records it seems that Jason Young did not complete his studies,’ she says, her voice growing fainter, and heavier. ‘Computational Biology, it says here.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I say, remembering.

  ‘I … wait a minute, I … there’s a note in his file. Oh. It seems that, oh dear, I am sorry to be telling you this over the phone. Are you a friend?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘I’m afraid that Jason Young is dead,’ says the woman, in her slow, kind voice.

  My insides have been scooped out. Liquid cement has been poured in. It has solidified, filling my cavities, blocking my tear ducts. My blood has stopped. How can Jason be dead? He read the Norse tales to me, taught me about fractions, held my hand when we crossed the road. It is not possible that Jason is dead.

  At the nurse’s station I am offered a single paracetamol and a glass of water. I am sick on her apron, and she offers to call my mother.

  ‘Don’t,’ I say. She knew. My mother knew, and didn’t tell me. It’s Reg of Putney all over again. It’s the what you don’t know won’t harm you school of thought she keeps on subscribing me to, even though I didn’t ask to be a member. I hate her.

  Jason’s not available, she texted this morning. Right. Of course he’s not available, because he’s dead. Just as Hermódr said. He is dead, he said, when I saw him and his horse in the garden. I just didn’t know who he meant. When did Jason die? How? Chadwick lets me off the detention and I take the tube home, listening to the whole of And Justice For All for the second time today. It’s the album James, Lars and Kirk wrote after the death of Cliff Burton. Some people say you can’t hear the bass on it at all, because they couldn’t bear for it to be there, played by the newly recruited Jason ‘Newkid’ Newsted instead of their beloved Cliff. I turn it up so loud that my pulse reawakens and pounds brutally in time to the down-tuned moan of ‘Harvester of Sorrow’. Several Italian tourists glance at me in horror and change carriage. Wedged into a corner seat like a hunted-down animal, vibrating messily, my headache spelt out in pain marks on my forehead and bleeding Metallica from my earphones, I must look terrible.

  Mum’s already home when I get back. The kitchen clatters with the sounds of tidying and food preparation and never-silent Radio 4. She’s laying the table, setting the cutlery exactly perpendicular to the edge.

  ‘Ben,’ she says. ‘How was your day?’

  And then: ‘What’s the matter? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Mum,’ I say, measuring each word out carefully, like I’m doing an experiment with them, ‘you didn’t tell me that Jason was dead.’

  She looks at me, surprised. I watch her, suspended, a fork hovering in the air. I watch her trying to decide which lie to tell next. I watch her wrestle with them, sifting the quick and easy lies from the dark and heavy ones.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I can see you’re upset. Try and stay calm.’

  ‘How long have you known?’

  Now she crosses over to the sink, where she decorates the stacked plates from breakfast with economical bursts of Fairy Liquid.

  ‘I rang the tutoring agency at the start of the Easter holidays,’ she says, her words flat, like hockey pucks. ‘I was thinking of getting him to come and do some revision with you. They told me then. Pass me those mugs, will you?’

  I don’t move. She fetches them herself and holds them under the tap. A coil of steam rises.

  ‘But when did he die? How?’

  ‘He … I don’t kn
ow. Why don’t we talk about this after your exams are finished? I don’t think it’s the right time to be—’

  ‘What’s the name of the agency?’

  ‘I don’t remember, Ben.’

  I almost feel sorry for her, which is weird. She’s lying; she’s lying again. She can’t stop. Jason never had an agency. He worked for himself. He always had.

  Head on fire, nerves chattering, I go back upstairs and sweep the contents of my desk into a rucksack. My revision notes, my set texts. I swallow another pill. Mum appears at the doorway, her face dark.

  ‘Ben, where are you going? You’ve got maths tomorrow; you need to rest!’

  ‘Dad’s house.’

  She doesn’t try to stop me.

  HOBIE’S DIARY

  Monday 13th October 2008

  Mum made the most of my inability to go to Saturday Football Club by getting Jason round for an extra couple of hours of tutoring.

  ‘Been in the wars?’ he asked me. I had a staggering black eye as well as the sling.

  I explained about beating the French exchange students and he did his little laugh that sounds more like an embarrassed sneeze and asked me if I had any homework.

  Now, quite surprisingly, because I could easily have got Jason to basically do it for me, I had already done my creative writing homework. The instruction was to ‘write about a powerful moment in your life’. Inspiring stuff. We were of course meant to write some kind of weepy bollocks full of similes and things about the death of a beloved grandparent, but I couldn’t think of any more powerful moment recently than last week’s Rugby match. A moment when I literally felt so full of power that it took an entire evening of lying flat on the sofa, watching television and getting Clothilde to microwave me popcorn, to calm down again. I think I like writing more than I used to because of this journal thing, which seemed so irritating at first and is now just a way of putting things down and is sort of automatic, like breathing or blowing your nose. Anyway, it was the first creative assignment I’ve ever wanted to complete, voluntarily, without two or three gentle reminders and a parent or tutor breathing down my neck.