Authors: Fiona Shaw
All this changed for both, the evening last November that they were left behind. It was a tradition with the upper years to visit the theatre before Christmas, a two-hour journey each way by motorbus. Ice creams were bought in the interval, and on the way home fish and chips, by prior agreement with the chippie who had his heaps of battered fish and newspaper ready. Unfortunately, or so it seemed at first to them, both Benjamin
and Will were ill that day with the fever that had swept through the school; and though each, separately, protested his fitness to go, each was over-ruled, and so lay that afternoon next to one another in neatly-turned sanatorium beds.
The sickness was a pleasant one, as sicknesses go, and the school nurse had seen enough of it in the last month to be familiar with its course. So she left the two boys to their own devices in the evening and went to visit her daughter in the village for an hour or two.
The boys fell to talking – the fever made it hard to read and there was little else to do – and soon found much more than a slight pleasure in each other’s company. Far from finding their differences as obstacles to friendship, as they might have even a year earlier, they found them exhilarating. And although they knew how it had happened, they wondered that they had attended the same school these four years without finding one another out.
But the vital change between them occurred not in all this talk, but in the heat of fever, and it was Benjamin, all unknowing, or so he claimed later, who was responsible for it.
‘There seemed nothing more natural,’ he said laughing. ‘I was burning up and you were shivering. It made sense to me to share the fever.’
Will was already laughing.
‘It made sense to you because you were feverish,’ he said. ‘Delirious.’
‘But it did. If you were too cold, and I was too hot, then you would cool me, and I would warm you through.’
‘That’s another fine mess, Stanley,’ Will said, laughing so hard, he was crying. ‘Best bit of sense you ever made.’
So at Benjamin’s fevered bidding, Will climbed in to his bed and what began as an imagined exchange of humours – the hot for the cold – quickly became a very different kind of encounter.
Till now Will had given no thought to whom he might love. Other boys bragged of their success with girls – how far they had gone with them, mostly. Though sometimes when they talked about the future – careers and universities – they would add into the mix the kind of girl they wanted for a wife, even sometimes a particular girl. And Will would listen and agree, assuming that he must want this too. But now he had met Benjamin, he knew what he wanted, though he never dared name it, even to himself, and girls played no part in it.
‘We’re like Crusoe on his lonely beach,’ Benjamin said. He lay back, shielding his eyes from the sun, his body soft, curved now. ‘If only he and Friday … Would’ve been perfect then.’
‘Or Achilles and the boy he loved,’ Will said. ‘What was his name? I’m famished.’ He hunted in the rucksack, and then let out a whoop.
‘She’s put in the just-in-case food.’
‘Who’s Justin Case?’
‘Look, Ben. Buttered bread, and more apples, and chocolate. There’ll be cake somewhere. There’s always cake.’
‘Your mother loves you differently from Henry and Emma,’ Benjamin said, running his finger softly down Will’s spine.
‘Not more; I don’t mean that. But differently.’
‘I’m older,’ Will said. ‘Do you want something?’
Benjamin shook his head. Will folded some bread into a sandwich and ate.
‘Henry’s only eleven,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t even gone away to school yet.’
‘Tell me the story you asked your mother to,’ Benjamin said.
‘What do you mean, she loves me differently?’
‘I don’t mean anything,’ Benjamin said.
‘But she’s going to tell it tonight.’
‘Tell me anyway. I want to hear you. I won’t let on to her. I promise.’
‘Why?’
‘Please?’
‘I’ll tell you if …’
‘What?’
Will laughed. ‘I don’t know what. I’ve got it all, right here and now. The whole damn lot.’
The sun was high and hot, and the boys moved the groundsheet into the shade. Benjamin fetched two bottles of beer from the rock pool and Will lay back.
‘I don’t remember when she first told me,’ he said. ‘But in the war she was on a ship sailing to marry my father in Africa and it got torpedoed. She saw lots of people die, lots of her friends, and some of them because they hadn’t got their life jackets on. That’s why she got so exercised about the life jackets this morning.’
‘But she likes telling the story?’
‘Actually not that part of it. The story she’ll tell tonight will be about how she put my father’s photo in one pocket and her mother’s in the other when she knew the ship would sink, and that’s all she arrived in Africa with; and how my father was told she was dead but wouldn’t believe it and kept going back to the harbour; and how he didn’t recognise her when she did arrive finally because she was so sunburnt and unwashed. They married the day after and I was born nine months after that. That’s the story she’ll tell tonight.’
Will stopped and thought. When he spoke again, it was haltingly. There was something he wanted to understand, but it was slippery, elusive.
‘You know in the dormitory how boys would say things when the lights were out that they would never have said in the day? My mother drove me to school for my first term, and during the drive she talked, but she couldn’t look at me because she was driving. So it was as if she spoke with the lights out. That’s how I’ve always thought of it.’
‘What did she tell you?’
‘First off she told me she ate most of her mother’s cake on the ship because she was hungry, and how sorry she was. I didn’t understand everything, but I didn’t want to ask in case she stopped talking. Turned on the lights. Anyway, it was the cake that got her started, and that was because of the one she’d baked me, the one in my school trunk. I’d asked her if it had cherries in it.’
‘Cherries?’
‘I love cherries, the sugary ones that go in cakes; so she said of course it did. And how my grandmother had put cherries in the cake she baked her for her wedding and she didn’t know how she’d got hold of them, because it was the war. Anyway, the end of the cake went down with the ship and that still made her feel very sad. So I asked her why.’
‘You asked her why!’ Benjamin swiped him. ‘You moron.’
‘I was only thirteen.’
‘Bet you understood soon enough, first term away at school.’
Will nodded.
‘So what else did your mother tell you?’
‘That the ship was full of soldiers. “Not much older than you are now,” she said, and it made something go through me, don’t know what it was. She’d watched the soldiers parading once; told it like it was an adventure, that she’d had to escape to do it. Climb ladders, duck under ropes. The soldiers reminded her of boys she’d known; she said one of them especially reminded her of someone.’
‘Sounds like a boyfriend,’ Benjamin said cautiously, ‘but perhaps not your father.’
Will shrugged.
‘Maybe. I don’t understand why she married my father. I don’t know why anybody would. But the thing was, so many of those soldiers died when the ship went down. She said one of them died leaning against her in the lifeboat. She thought he was only sleeping.
‘There was a moment when she stopped the car. She’d been
talking, telling me all of this. But then she stopped the car and turned round and put her hand on the back of my neck. It was quite strange. She hadn’t done anything like that since I was about five. It tickled a bit. It felt as if she was trying to get hold of my hair, but I’d been to the barber’s the day before, so there was nothing there. Anyway, she turned and she said: “The people you love, they just slip away. There one minute, gone the next. I won’t let you do that, William.” She was so fierce. I remember those words exactly. But whenever I think about it, I don’t know who she was talking to, or what she was talking about.’
Will fell silent, then stood up, dizzy with telling. Benjamin put on his trunks and piled the driftwood into a bonfire.
‘Didn’t feel safe, lighting a fire without them on,’ he said.
Will laughed. He fetched four mackerel and put them on the griddle, nose to tail. He pushed the dry grass underneath Ben’s pile, making sure it had enough air and enough small driftwood to catch to. He wouldn’t have built the bonfire this way, but he was happy. From the rucksack he took out his cigarette lighter and a penknife. The penknife was looped onto a string and Will put it around his neck so that it hung on his chest like a medal.
‘Fine lighter,’ Benjamin said. ‘A lover’s gift?’
He lit the fire and the driftwood, dry as bones, blazed at once. The flames were invisible in the sun, like ghosts in the air. But the heat they put up was ferocious, and the boys stepped back to watch.
‘Once it’s died back we can cook the fish,’ Will said.
‘Patroclus,’ Benjamin said. ‘He was the one Achilles loved.’
Stropping the penknife blade on a stone, Will picked up the first fish and with a soft stroke, he slit it gills to tail. Then two cuts top and bottom, and he slipped his fingers into its belly, tugged out the innards and threw them on the fire. Swiftly he gutted the other three.
Benjamin said: ‘What will happen? We haven’t got a battle to disguise things and anyway, England isn’t Greece. Your mother hopes you might meet a nice girl at the dance.’
‘My mother likes you, Ben.’
‘She wouldn’t like me so much if she’d seen us on this beach.’
Will stood, cradling the fish in his hands.
‘Need the water,’ he said.
The boys walked down to the falling sea. The sand was packed and dark underfoot. Will rinsed the fish, swirling them to and fro, and their bodies muddied the water for a moment.
‘I don’t know,’ Will said. ‘I don’t know what will happen.’
The flames had died back now and Will made a level place for the griddle. Carefully he laid out the fish.
‘Why can’t we go on as we are?’ he said. ‘Go to university. Get jobs. You want to be a lawyer, follow your father. I don’t know what I’ll do. Something unlike mine.’
‘I think your mother wants you to break the mould,’ Benjamin said. ‘Do something daring, or inventive. She’d be disappointed if you followed your father.’
‘So why don’t we do that?’ Will said. ‘And we can share a flat, have our own kind of life.’
‘But she doesn’t want you to break that kind of mould. Your mother can’t order you to dances forever, but she’s no fool.’
‘But she doesn’t want me to disappear,’ Will said. ‘And I would if I did as she asked. Found a girl, got married. I’d be like these fish, just the shape left, just some flesh, but no heart, no guts.’
Using two small stones, Will turned the fish on their rack.
‘Don’t your parents want you to marry a nice Jewish girl?’ he said.
‘Eventually, I suppose. But my brother’s done it already; it’s taken the heat off.’
They talked on a little till the fish were cooked, their electric blue skins blackened and the flesh turned grey. But the discussion had run its usual course and both were relieved to stop. They ate – mackerel and sandwiches, apples and cake – both boys famished, eager to fill their senses with what was here and what was now, to push away the smell of the future. The mackerel was as delicious as hunger and fire could make it, and after they had eaten their fill, they made love gently. Then Benjamin read his book, and Will lay beside him, curled against his lover’s thigh. His limbs felt heavy, his mind drifted, and soon he slept.
He woke with a start. The air had changed. Benjamin had placed a sweater over him as he slept but still he felt cold. The wind was gusting fitfully, chopping at the water first here and then there. Benjamin stood staring at it. The sun still shone, but hazily, as though something were draped over it, like a piece of the muslin his mother used for making marmalade.
He looked out to the shoal of rocks. There was no question that they looked less distinct. But he didn’t want to give up the languor of their day just yet and he glanced at Benjamin, standing there in just his shirt and sweater. It would only get colder now, though, and the fret would get denser, and after a minute he stood up and got dressed.
He called out. ‘Sea fret. We’ll have to go, soon as we can. You remember, the old man?’
Benjamin turned, as if from a revery, his thoughts still drifting on the water.
‘But you said there wouldn’t be one.’
Will shrugged. ‘I was wrong. It’s OK. We’ll be out of here as soon as the tide’s high enough. Shouldn’t be too bad. And we’ll keep close to the shore heading back. Once we’re round the point and in to the estuary, we’re home and dry.’
Benjamin gathered up the gear while Will gutted and sluiced off the remaining mackerel.
‘She’ll be pleased,’ he said, wanting to reassure. ‘Plenty for supper.’
‘It’s safe, though?’ Benjamin said. And with a stab at the jocular: ‘After all, we haven’t got an
A to Z
. It’s the only way I can find my way anywhere.’
‘I’ve been in one of these before,’ Will said. ‘They can come in very fast, take you by surprise. But I do know what to do.’
Benjamin nodded. ‘OK.’
‘We’ll put on the oilskins now, and cap and plimsolls.’
‘They’re sodden,’ Benjamin said.
‘Keep your feet warmer than nothing at all,’ Will said, but
Benjamin drew the line at soggy plimsolls, and wouldn’t wear the damp cap either.
‘If you catch a chill, my mother will blame me,’ Will said.
‘And she’ll be right.’ Benjamin’s voice was partly amused and partly not.
By the time the tide was high enough for the boys to leave, the fret had grown denser. Will rowed them through the channel and into the open sea and within moments the beach, the rocks, the very land had disappeared and he could see no further than three pulls of the oar. They were no distance away and yet it was as if nothing else existed in the world beyond this boat in its circle of water. Everything was silenced: gulls, wind, even somehow the noise from the oars. They dipped and rose into a silent sea.
The fret was set right in now, a wetness in the air that was not rain and yet it had soaked Will’s trousers and was gathered in Benjamin’s hair like a spray of dull stars.