You Are Not A Stranger Here Read online

  No one translated for the audience after the singing ended. Boys and their parents filed from the chapel into the courtyard. The women from the kitchen removed cling wrap from platters of sandwiches and began pouring the tea. M R . J E V I N S H A D died only a month into the school year. The headmaster conducted the Latin classes until Christmas, doing a poor job of hiding his shock at how little the students had been taught. After the holiday, there was a new man, younger than Kinnet he looked, and not easily fooled. 146

  By the time Samuel came home for the summer, his parents appeared to have forgotten his teacher's death, as though it were just another term-time event, a cricket match won or lost. He spent a week lying around the house, then at last Trevor returned.

  He was sixteen now, five years older than Samuel. He seemed taller and thinner than he had at Christmas, his acne a bit worse. Usually when they returned from school they would spend at least a few hours rigging traps for the cat, books pulled off tables by strings soaked in tuna water or obstacle courses of cosmetics items taken from their mother's cupboard and arranged on the stairs. But each holiday Trevor seemed less interested and this time he didn't want to do it at all.

  He'd got his learner's permit and three mornings a week he had driving lessons. The rest of his time he spent in his room at the computer, programming in some machine code, the screen covered in lines of numbers and symbols. Newsletters from American software companies and product literature covered his desk and floor. Samuel watched his brother work, or just hung out in his room and read or played on the game station.

  It didn't matter that Trevor only half listened to him or that when he did listen he often made fun of him. His brother being there, the sound of his voice, it was enough. The distance from things he'd kept experiencing during the year, that odd retreat from the physical world, it diminished with Trevor around. Lying on the floor beneath his brother's window, staring up at the sky on those summer afternoons, 147

  listening to Trevor's fingers on the keyboard, Samuel understood with a secret embarrassment that he loved his brother. One afternoon, their mother banned Trevor from the computer for three hours and told them both to go outside. Under a tree in the orchard, Samuel sat cross-legged while Trevor lay closer to the trunk in deeper shade, his eyes closed, trying, as he'd told Samuel, to retain in his mind the next line of his program.

  Samuel watched huge clouds float on the horizon, taller than churches, vacant palaces in the sky.

  "Trev?" he said. "You know that teacher of mine that died last year?"

  "Hmmm." An American baseball cap shaded his

  brother's face; he wore trousers and long sleeves, determined that if he had to be outside he would at least prevent himself from getting a tan.

  "When he died?" Samuel said. "I knew. Right when it happened."

  "Huh-uh."

  "But it was before anyone else. We hadn't been told. The school didn't even know. Not till the next day."

  "Hmmm," Trevor said. "Maybe you dreamt it. Like Dad and that cousin of his."

  "I wasn't dreaming, Trev, I was playing football . . . What about Dad's cousin?"

  Trevor pulled tufts of grass from the orchard floor and threw them down over his feet. "We were on holiday up at the Morlands'. You were still a diaper-ridden little rodent, shitting huge volumes of refuse."

  148

  "Come on, Trevor."

  "Don't deny it. Anyway, it was when those fat Morlands used to give us that bit at the back with the door between where we slept and Mum and Dad's room. Dad had this dream his cousin William had died. I woke up and he was sitting at the edge of the bed, speaking with this funny little quiet voice, saying it was sad William died, going on about how the two of them used to play in the back of Granddad's rope factory. Creepy, really. Then he got up and went back in the other room. Mum tried telling me the phone call had come the day before, that they just hadn't told me yet, but I knew he hadn't been on the phone, and I saw him talking on the cordless the next morning out in the garden before breakfast, looking all worried.

  "Anyway, we left so they could go to the funeral. I'm probably not supposed to tell you. They give you flack about your whatsit with that teacher last year?"

  "Dad swallowed."

  "Typical. He needs to develop a new subroutine for anger, that one's dated."

  "We're going back to the Wests' for holiday, aren't we?"

  "Yes. Again. Same thing three summers running. Oh, but you like boats, Trevor, and don't tell me you and Peter don't have enormous fun, because you do," Trevor said, imitating their mother's matter-of-fact reporting of their inner lives. "Peter West is a rugby-crazed Nazi. He should be taken out and shot."

  Samuel waited but Trevor said nothing about Penelope, the sister. Last time they'd gone up, it seemed like Trevor disliked her the way he did with girls he liked. 149

  Samuel himself hated going to Wales. He had to sleep in what seemed more like the cabin of a ship than a bedroom, under a duvet that smelled of seaweed. The Wests' kids were both around Trevor's age; they treated Samuel like a neighbor's dog their parents had sworn them to mind.

  "Why do you think Mum and Dad tried hiding it from you like that?" Samuel asked.

  "Dad having dreamt it first, you mean?"

  "Yeah."

  "I don't know, Sam." Patches of bare earth were left where he'd torn up the roots of the grass. "Who knows?" He looked up with a crazed smile. "Maybe you should try bending spoons. I bet you'd get on TV for that." He chuckled, rolling his head back onto the grass. Samuel grabbed his foot and started pulling him across the ground. He kicked back and shouted that Samuel was nothing but a child and then Samuel let go and they wandered into the barn looking about for something to do.

  A F E W D AY S later, sitting in the car on the motorway north, Samuel studied the back of his father's head, his shoulder, the thick branch of his upper arm, the dark-haired forearm, his hand gripping the knob of the gearshift. The tired look on his face when he came through the back door from work, the distracted way he ate his dinner, the blur of weekend afternoons when he napped on the front hall couch, all this disappeared when he got behind the wheel of the car. He spoke more, seemed alive in a different way. Samuel thought of this as his 150

  father's real self that for some reason only appeared in between places. Whenever he got picked up from school at the end of a term and they reached the head of the valley--just the two of them--his father would press the car up to ninety miles an hour on the straight country lane and then cut the engine as they swooped onto the downhill. They'd plummet faster and faster, fields whizzing by, the car freewheeling, slowly losing speed as they glided along the valley floor, until eventually they crept at fifteen, ten, five miles an hour, engine still off, seeing how far they could get on initial speed plus gravity: to the Southers' farm or the pub or one time all the way to the foot of the humpback bridge. In the car his father seemed like a magician, in control of everything. Not a man in the middle of the night speaking in a quiet voice of dreams. They arrived at the Wests' as darkness fell and ate their dinner on their laps in the living room. The house was modern, built onto a cliff on the isle of Anglesey just across the Menai Strait from north Wales. A summer home made for boating, a dock down below. One wall of the living room was glass and through it you could see the lights of houses on the far shore and the lights of a yacht traveling back against the channel's current, returning from a day at sea. P E T E R T O O K T R E V O R and Samuel out in the canoe the next morning. He was a year younger than Trevor, co-captain of his rugby team. He had a helmet of thick blond hair, a wide neck, and he didn't wear any socks with his trainers. 151

  "Faster!" he called over his shoulder as Trevor and Samuel paddled furiously on the right side of the canoe, their two strokes trying to balance the force of Peter's one to keep the boat on course for the beach out where the strait opened onto the sea. The three of them were racing ahead of Penelope and the adults, who followed behind in a rowboat and a little Sunfish, lade
n with provisions for lunch and umbrellas for the sun.

  Each time Trevor leaned forward to pull his paddle through the water, Samuel could see the muscles in his brother's neck straining. He was thin and had never been particularly strong.

  "Move it along, you two," Peter yelled, and Trevor's face went red with exertion.

  When the others arrived, towels were handed out and the volleyball net set up. Penelope lay in the sun reading a book. She was two years older than her brother and quieter. The only sport she ever spoke of was sailing, which she did with her father. While the rest of them played volleyball, Trevor and Samuel sat next to her, under the shade of a nearby umbrella, Trevor in his long sleeves.

  "What are you reading?" he asked.

  "Camus," she said. Her hair was very short and seemed unnaturally pale, a nameless shade between blond and white. There was something very adult about her hair.

  "What's the book about?"

  "A plague."

  "Cool," Trevor said, nodding.

  152

  Samuel dug a large hole in the sand in front of him. He felt certain their conversation had something to do with sex.

  "You still live in Devon, right?" his brother asked.

  "Yeah, it's awful. The point of life in a place so small escapes me."

  Trevor seemed to have no reply to this but started talking instead about a software application he had in development that charted people's moods over time. For a year you entered data on your mental state along with thirty variables of diet, weather, geographical location, et cetera, and then the program used the data to predict your mood on future days. When it was done he would try to get the Weather Channel's Web site to offer a link to the download.

  "Right," Penelope said, returning to her book.

  "Do you ever go to parties?" Trevor asked.

  Samuel imagined disappearing into the hole he'd dug in front of him.

  "Sometimes," she replied, not looking up from the page. Then Mr. West came by and said it was time for lunch. That evening a band played at the pub in the village. You had to be fifteen to go, so Samuel stayed behind while the others went. They didn't get back until late, and Peter and Trevor woke him, turning on the light and making noise. They smelled of smoke and beer. Peter got straight into bed and rolled onto his side. Trevor just sat there for a long time on the edge of his bed, staring about.

  "Turn the light out, would you?" Peter said. "And while you're at it, stop gawking at my sister."

  153

  Trevor made no motion for the lamp. He sat with his elbows on his knees, his chin resting in his hands. With a disgusted huff, Peter got out of bed and switched off the light, leaving Trevor sitting in the dark. Samuel tried to close his eyes and go back to sleep but he couldn't. He lay on his side looking at his brother's outline against the barely visible square of the room's only window. He couldn't think of anything to say. Eventually, Trevor climbed under the sheets, and Samuel kept listening until his breathing went quiet. I N T H E M I D D L E of their second week, the two families took a long hike up Mount Snowdon. The day was hot, the air thin and dry. It was nearly six by the time they returned to the cars. Samuel rode in the back seat with his brother, drifting into sleep along the way. Something heavy was pressing against the side of his head. He saw Giles kicking a football up against a copper beech tree. From all around, in the air, down through the earth, all through his body, Samuel felt the crumpled pity he'd felt that evening on the lawn, but now it was as if Jevins were still alive, were only about to die, as they stood there doing nothing, Giles smiling. But then Jevins was under the white sheet, he was dead, and the pity, that pressure in Samuel's head, became stronger, thick as water all round him. He saw a triangle of sunlight on the water's surface, blackness either side. Trevor was there. The light was blinding him. Samuel heard his brother yell. He stood on the deck of the Wests' house, roofed now in glass. Somewhere behind him a boat's hull shattered. Beneath the glass roof it was no longer 154

  the deck, but Trevor's room, clothes tidied into drawers, books piled neatly on the floor by the hard drive, dust on the stacks of twelve-inch singles, a weeping coming from under his mother's door. He saw his father tied to a chair and gagged.

  ". . . blubbering like a fat infant," he heard, waking to find himself with his face pressed against his brother's shoulder, mouth half open against his shirt, his own body hot with sweat. His mother looked back over her shoulder and smiled.

  "Having a sleep, are you?"

  He turned to the window and saw that they were rising onto the bridge, the sun-dappled waters of the strait running beneath them.

  All through supper, his mind remained captive to the dream. The sights and sounds of people at the table reached him from the distance he'd experienced for the first time at school that morning in the dining hall. When coffee and pudding came round, Samuel's father said he was going to fetch a map from the car. Samuel asked to be excused and followed him out the back door into the drive.

  "Not having cake?" he said when he turned the corner round the Peugeot and noticed Samuel standing there. He'd spent most of the holiday chatting with Mr. West, napping in the afternoons, encouraging his sons to take up Peter's offers of pickup rugby with his friends.

  "Dad?"

  "Yes?"

  "You know how Mrs. West said Penelope should take Trevor out for a sail?"

  "Did she? Right. What about it?"

  155

  His father had his hand on the door of the car but hadn't opened it yet.

  "You can't let them."

  "How do you mean?"

  Samuel felt his face go red in the darkness.

  "What are you talking about?" his father said.

  Clutching his hands into fists, Samuel said, "It's like you and cousin William."

  His father stood very still for a moment. Then he walked quickly round the car, coming to stand directly in front of Samuel. He was tall and Samuel only came up to his chest. He wore one of the same blue Oxford shirts he wore each day to work, only rolled at the sleeves and without a tie.

  "Now you listen to me," he said in a tone so severe it frightened Samuel. "I suppose it's your brother who saw fit to tell you some story about me and William. It is not true. Do you understand me?"

  Samuel could hear the roar and toss of waves against the rocks. Above the line of trees, stars were visible.

  "I asked you a question, young man."

  "You never believed me when I told you about Mr. Jevins," Samuel said, thankful it was dark enough that his father couldn't see the water welling in his eyes.

  "So that's what this is about."

  "No!" Samuel said through gritted teeth. "You can't let them go sailing."

  His father's hands gripped Samuel's shoulders, his fingers digging into his flesh to the point of pain.

  156

  "I'm going to say this once," he said, "so you had better listen. You're twelve years old and you have a lot of ideas in your head, but nothing will wreck you quicker than if you let yourself confuse what's real and what isn't, you hear me? I don't know what it is you're dreaming, or what you dreamt about that teacher, but that's all it is--dreams. Your life's got nothing to do with those shadows, nothing at all.

  "If Penelope and Trevor want to go sailing, that's exactly what they'll do. And I don't want to hear you've gone frightening your mother or brother about this nonsense, you understand? You're a perfectly normal boy. Everyone has nightmares. They're tough sometimes. You wake up and you get on with things. That's just how it is. Now you go on into the house and forget about this. Go on." He turned Samuel around and aimed him at the back door.

  T H E Y R E T U R N E D F R O M the beach earlier than usual the next day, in the middle of the afternoon, people scattering into various parts of the house to shower or nap. Samuel wandered out onto the deck and found his mother reclining in a chair reading her book. The sun had gone in behind some clouds. She looked up from the page and smiled.

  "It's not so bad he
re, is it?" she said.

  Samuel shrugged.

  His mother gazed out over the water. "You looking forward to being a prefect next term? You know your father was quite proud when he heard that."

  157

  "It'll be all right, I guess."

  "Well, I think it's quite something." She turned to admire him. "Aren't you going sailing?"

  "Mr. West said he'd had it for the day."

  "No, Penelope's taking the boat out, she and Trevor are going. You could probably tag along if you wanted."

  He felt a tingling in his hands, the air suddenly live with current. He'd tried to forget his dream as his father had told him to. But he felt sick to his stomach with the memory of it now, and it didn't matter what his father thought.

  "You can't let them," he said, nearly whispering.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Mum. You have to listen. Trevor, he's going to die out there. You can't let them."

  His mother leaned sharply forward, the muscles of her jaw tightening. "How dare you say that," she said. "How dare you say your own brother is going to die. You should be ashamed! What's the matter with you?"

  "I know about cousin William, Mum--Trev told me--

  and you can believe whatever you want about Mr. Jevins, but I knew, I fucking knew--"

  "Samuel!"

  "--and yesterday in the car, I dreamt, I did, I dreamt he was dead and there was a sailboat, and I heard him yell. God, Mum, why won't you believe me!"

  His words seemed to push her back into her chair.

  "You dreamt it?" she asked, her tone suddenly flat.