What I Was by Meg Rosoff
But only a serious death wish could get me into the water now. With no clouds to muffle the wind, it flew round us, smashing waves against the ancient walls with a deep hollow boom. It was hard to believe those walls still held up against the sheer weight of cold black sea. The sea had been hurling itself at the masonry minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, for more than a thousand years and it made me wonder about the Romans, how they had managed to build walls so strong. And how had the barbarians breached the defences so easily? ‘Easily’ was how the history book described it, and I wondered if the person writing those words had ever seen a Roman fort close-up.
‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen enough.’
Finn swung the boat away. The wind was behind us now, and he let the sail out all the way, cleating the mainsheet, and sitting back with the tiller under one arm. We flew over the water; our speed wonderful and terrifying. ‘Changed your mind about exploring?’ He had to shout to be heard.
‘It wasn’t what I expected.’ I was glad the wind made conversation difficult.
‘Do you want to have a look at the lost city? It’s still early.’
I nodded and watched the smooth muscles in his arms as he brought the boat about. He was neither big nor particularly muscular, but agile and deft, able to convert the power of the sea, the wind, and the momentum of the boat into acceleration. Physics made easy.
I stared down into the water, hoping to catch sight of a fish swimming past. Finn slowed again and pointed at the shore. Through the scrubby trees growing out of the cliff, I could see the remains of what had once been an abbey perched high above the beach.
‘We’ll have a look around here,’ he said, leaning over with his face a few inches underwater. Half a minute later he surfaced, spluttering. The water was freezing, and it took a few tries before I managed to get used to its murky density. I plunged my head into the dark silent world, holding my breath till I thought my lungs would burst.
I saw nothing. Not a thing. No ruined city, no piece of a ruined city. No church or town hall or burgher’s manse, not even a bloody fish. Just the cold, cold depths of the dark, dark sea. I felt sick with disappointment, worse than sick when I remembered what the witch had said about my future. Look more carefully? At what? I was searching with every fibre of my being and there was nothing to see.
Bugger the city, I thought, and bugger Finn’s witch.
I was about to haul myself back up into the boat when I thought I glimpsed something. There wasn’t much air left in my lungs but I turned my head to where the image appeared. Whatever it was or had been, it was gone. Yet something lingered on my retina like a photographic negative, a pale oval with streaming hair, fleeting and bright as the moon.
Jerking out of the water, I ducked my face into the crook of one elbow for warmth. ‘Let’s go,’ I mumbled, without looking up. But then I heard Finn laugh, saw him soaked and dripping, and realized I’d been had. No mysterious vision then. Just him.
I growled and he made a ‘hmph’ noise like a camel, unaccustomed to any show of defiance by his lackey. But when I lowered my arm and raised my eyes, and he saw the blotchy face, the comic twist of mouth, the dripping hair and red nose, he smiled. It was a smile that might have expressed affection or amusement or something entirely else.
With the wind blowing full across the stern, we sailed for home.
18
I studied Finn the way some other boy might have studied history, determined to memorize his vocabulary, his movements, his clothes, what he said, what he did, what he thought. What ideas circulated in his head when he looked distracted? What did he dream about?
But most of all, what I wanted was to see myself through his eyes, to define myself in relation to him, to sift out what was interesting in me (what he must have liked, however insignificant) and distil it into a purer, bolder, more compelling version of myself.
The truth is, for that brief period of my life I failed to exist if Finn wasn’t looking at me. And so I copied him, strove to exist the way he existed: to stretch, languid and graceful when tired, to move swiftly and with determination when not, to speak rarely and with force, to smile in a way that rewarded the world.
Of course in the most basic of ways, being Finn didn’t suit me. I was slow and clumsy; uncomfortable in my own body. I lacked the ability to tolerate silence. I was lazy. Self-conscious. Unspontaneous.
There were twelve days left of Easter break.
Very early on Wednesday morning, well before sunrise, Finn headed up the beach with his ocean fishing rod to the mouth of the river, where wheeling seagulls the night before had informed him that the minnows were running. The courageous throwing off of blankets didn’t faze him, but I hated it. It was bad enough on a cold morning in a miserable dormitory room. But in the early spring cold of a hut where you know that even the ordinary pleasure of an early morning visit to the toilet will bring your nether regions into direct contact with the wind off the North Sea? Practically impossible. So while I lay in bed, warm and snug and utterly content not to be dragged up and out by breakfast or chapel or lessons, Finn chose his lures and set off.
It was nearly an hour before I joined him, lazy and slow, but in the end unwilling to allow him any fragment of a life without me. In the grey light of early dawn, he cast his line off the beach where the river spat tiny fish out into the sea to flounder and die, attracting bigger fish to an easy meal. Patient and silent, he flipped his lure out over the water and reeled it slowly back in. I listened to the precise soft whir of the reel, watched the painted wood and feather decoy with its deadly armour of hooks become invisible, imagined it sinking down, languid and false, as Finn waggled it slowly back towards land. Hour after hour he repeated the exercise, patiently thinking his thoughts. It wasn’t the most exciting form of entertainment, but I didn’t mind. I was hypnotized by the simple grace of whatever it was he did and however it was he did it.
Huddled down into my jersey, dreamy and absent, I sat and watched the sun glow pink and rise out of the sea, when unexpectedly there was a hand on my arm and a nod of the head in the direction he’d been casting.
I looked up, startled. The surface of the sea scrambled and boiled in a circle about thirty feet across, and I wondered if it heralded the appearance of our own private leviathan. As my eyes grew accustomed to the scene, I could see the outlines of fish and parts of fish, tails and fins and whole bodies occasionally hurtling out of the water and falling back again with a little splash.
‘Herring,’ Finn whispered happily, substituting a lighter rod for the one he’d been using, baiting it quickly and flipping his hook so it landed in the centre of the teeming circle. On his third cast, the rod twitched and bent over and he reeled the line in carefully, producing a shining silver and blue fish as long as his forearm. It fought like a weasel all the way to the beach.
I watched him kill it, watched him catch six more in quick succession before the boiling circle moved out of range. With great care and precision he gutted and cleaned each fish, slitting the belly and sweeping out the insides, then scraping the scales off backwards with a rasping noise. They flew off, landing on the beach where the rays of the half-risen sun made them glitter like sequins. They looked so beautiful that I picked one up, but in my hand it became a lifeless thing, slimy and disgusting.
He concentrated on his work and never once looked at me.
Finn made money selling fish in town, so we didn’t eat them, but wrapped them in seaweed to be delivered later that day. In the meantime, we collected clams for lunch from a tiny cove in the estuary where they lived deep in the muddy clay. We waded barefoot and felt for them with our feet, reaching into the icy water to dig them up. My hands and feet quickly went numb as I dug the fat little creatures out and tossed them into a bucket. The blood from various scrapes and cuts ran unnoticed down my hands, leaving long pink streamers in the sea. Later I scrubbed the clams clean, and Finn threw them in a pot to steam with seawater and handfuls of bright green sam
I kept waiting for the effect of this castaway existence to mark me somehow, make me more of a man, but as the hours and days slipped away I felt the distance between us increasing. The longer we spent together the more difficult it became to engage him in conversation. His silences grew, it seemed to me, became deeper, more remote. By Friday I had come to the conclusion that I was crowding him, so I made myself as small as possible, stifled the desire to burble over with enthusiasm for each new discovery or to follow him around like the adoring hanger-on I was.
An image of Reese crept into my brain and I cringed.
I became furtive, a silent, dismal being with nowhere to go and no permission to stay. This wasn’t how I had imagined our time together, and whatever vision I’d had imagined for myself – heroic and handy, living rough off the land – was countered by the reflection I saw in his eyes.
Next time, I stayed behind when he went to market with his fish. I huddled in a corner, staring at the huge old history book, my eyes glazed with tears. I dozed for an hour or so, and it was cold and nearly dark when I heard the scrape of the kayak behind the hut. Jerking into a seated position, I threw off the blanket and opened the book to a random page, studying it with enough false intensity to pretend I hadn’t heard him come in. Not that such posing was likely to have fooled him. My face, creased and flushed with sleep, betrayed me like a beacon.
He entered without greeting, and began stowing supplies in the kitchen.
‘How was town?’
He looked up as if noticing me for the first time, considered the question and shrugged.
‘I just meant…’ And then the real words burst out, all in a rush. ‘I’ll go if you want me to.’
Finn looked up at me, silent and closed, and I heard a horrible noise, wet and hollow, as something inside of me collapsed. Finally he shrugged, and in a tone more puzzled than hostile, said, ‘Go if you want to.’
I turned away. ‘I don’t want to.’
‘So?’ He frowned.
‘You want me to go.’ My voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I’m sorry, this isn’t how I meant to be.’ Halfway through this confession my voice broke.
Finn stared and shook his head. Then he left the room and went into the kitchen to build up the fire. Though unable to see and unwilling to wipe my eyes on my sleeve (the too-obvious gesture of a crying person), I could follow his movements as he chose a dry log and placed it carefully on to the bed of hot embers. Once the log began to crackle, he filled the kettle and placed it on top of the stove.
I turned away and began to gather my few belongings blindly, wondering what I would do and where I would go, imagined myself stooped and stumbling like Adam, wreathed in sin and expelled from paradise.
The riveting nature of my own self-pity distracted me so thoroughly that for a moment I forgot about Finn. When I looked up and saw him standing in front of me, I jumped a little.
There was a moment of silence during which he just stared: at the rumpled bed, the open history book, the socks and jersey and gloves scattered on the floor of the tiny house. His house, inviolate and solitary until now. I flushed and bent over like a supplicant, scuttling around to gather up the signs of habitation, to stuff them into my schoolbag, to erase myself completely from the scene.
Finn exhaled what might have been a sigh, then crossed over and began to climb the narrow staircase to his little room under the eaves. Halfway up he stopped and turned back to me.
‘Actually,’ he said, with an expression that was not meant to reassure, ‘I quite like having you around.’
19
In the Dark Ages, most of life took place out of doors: the planting, herding, cooking, the buying and selling, the weddings, births, deaths, wars. In Finn’s version of life in the twentieth century, not much had changed. Despite the cold, we walked and fished, lay on the beach and stared at the sunlit clouds or the stars in the night sky, pulled in the traps, messed about in boats. We walked to market with his fish or his bag of crabs and, like the Angles and Saxons, exchanged these commodities for things we didn’t have – a hammer, a loaf of bread, a pair of woollen socks.
After only ten days at the hut I could appreciate the advantages of such a world, a world with nothing extra or unnecessary in it. A cooking pot, a place to sleep, a friend, a fire – what more did I require?
I loved the simple richness of our domestic life, the overlapping rhythms, the glancing contacts, the casual-seeming but carefully choreographed dance played out through the rooms of a shared house. I even learnt to accept Finn’s silence for what it was and not read it as a reproach. It was a lesson that has proved valuable in later life, this acceptance of another person’s silence, for I am more the silence-filler sort of person, hopeless on birdwatching expeditions. Despite the effort required to adapt, I became accustomed to whole days or parts of days during which we barely spoke, just drifted side by side in what for me was a dreamy silence, filled with unspoken words that slipped out of my brain and floated up to dissipate in the cold blue sky.
I began to pick up some of Finn’s jobs, shovelling sand into the latrine, fetching water from the open tank at the far end of the huts. Neither of us commented on my expanded role, but I could read expressions on Finn’s face that I might not have noticed before, slight shifts of the eyes or movements of the corners of the mouth. Pleasure. Displeasure. Impatience. And very occasionally: interest, amusement. Sometimes I believed I could chart the passage of thoughts across his face, though the content of those thoughts remained a mystery to me, as if written in another language.
For the rest of my break we lived together in a boyish ideal (my boyish ideal) of perfect happiness. I became used to the feel and the taste of my own salty skin. My face turned brown from exposure all day to the April sun, and for once in my life my hair felt thick, textured with salt. There was no mirror in Finn’s hut, so I could look at him and imagine myself each day growing taller and slimmer and bolder. It was a lie in ways I already suspected, and ways I hadn’t yet imagined. But it made me happy, and even then I knew that happiness was something in which to plunge headlong, and damn the torpedoes. Our time together would have to end, I knew that, and knew also that the pain of leaving this place would be intolerable, like death.
In all the years that followed, I have longed, sometimes quite desperately, to ask Finn about those weeks, to ask whether they were happy only for me, whether they remained vivid only in my head. I have wanted to ask whether my presence caused any change for the better. Any change at all. But I couldn’t ask. It was once again the supplicant in me, the endlessly repentant me who wanted somehow to know that it had all been worthwhile, that destruction and ruin wasn’t all I brought to the little house by the sea.
20
I returned to school, hoping I’d managed to get away with my Easter adventure, but there was a niggling sense of not-quite-rightness from the very beginning that stank of Reese. He skulked around, more malevolent and cringing with each passing day, and there was something about his Gollum act that struck me as too knowing. But like Reese himself, it was more convenient to ignore. So I did.
We were studying the four forces in physics, and as I pretended to grapple with these concepts, my mind wandered first to Finn, most graceful and mysterious of forces, then to rumour, which is a force in a league all its own.
Rule number seven: All rumours are true.
If you have the patience to wait and watch, history will reshape truth (weakest of all forces, and weightless) in the image of opinion. What really happened will cease to matter, and eventually, cease to exist.
The rumours claimed sightings of me in town and at the beach while I was meant to be on holiday with my family.
The interesting thing about these sightings is that they were, in the main, invented. No
It was the hackneyed quality of the tale that gave it credence; after all, it was well known that many of our schoolmasters were middle-aged bachelors with a yen for the extramural companionship of younger boys, and many perfectly respectable married gentlemen in town thought back on the sexual peccadilloes of their own schooldays with something closer to nostalgia than unease. Add this to the frustrations and privations of an all-male boarding school, a small town no longer connected to London by a train line, a part of the world in which winters were long and lonely and devoid of more wholesome distractions, and you had the perfect setting for perversion – of truth, at the very least.
The accusations began as whispers, and most were so far off the mark that I didn’t bother to deny them. I might have missed them altogether if it hadn’t been for Reese, reporting back on all the latest stories as if he had nothing to do with bringing them to life. But by Wednesday of that first week, the jeering had emerged from the closet (so to speak) and come to the attention of my housemaster. A summons was duly made and received, and at 2 p.m. the following afternoon, in the break between cadet drill and RE, I trudged over to the Gothic brick gatehouse where Clifton-Mogg kept an office, and knocked (with a forthright, innocent knock) on the door.