13. Nada, Zilch, Nought #2
There’s a blanket and a pillow on the largest sofa, and Briar finds slippers under the desk.
Robert slept in his office sometimes. From the look of his books, he seems to have been an anthropologist with wide-ranging interests: language, borders, war.
The longer Briar spends in the room, the less they feel as if someone is about to walk in and tell them off for disturbing it; emboldened, they open drawers, discover a few notebooks, AA driving maps and old packets of mints.
The most surprising find is behind the closed gilt Edwardian doors of the lower reaches of one of the bookshelves, the tiny key sitting ready in the even tinier lock: fantasy novels.
Tolkien, Le Guin, Pierce, Pratchett, Jacques.
Briar slides a well-thumbed copy of The Light Fantastic off the shelf and discovers that it’s signed, dedicated To Robert.
Briar touches the signature gently. It’s been so long since they even allowed themself to hold a book like this, as if whimsy might be a surface contaminant.
Briar has warmed to this stranger immediately, thinking of him settling down by the fire with a book about elves or magic schools in this forgotten corner of the actual magic school where he teaches.
They take a seat in the scarlet-and-cream wingback armchair, the mess of the room out of view, and carefully turn the yellowed pages until they reach the book’s first sunrise.
Briar doesn’t mean to read for so long. It feels like they’re doing something deliciously illicit, falling back into an addictive habit that must be bad for them if it feels this good.
Eventually a crow caws throatily close by, and Briar is startled into sense, puts the book hurriedly back on the shelf and closes the cabinet doors.
On their way out, they step on something that crunches underfoot, and when they look down they see what it is: a pair of round glasses, not unlike Briar’s own beside their bed.
For some reason this turns their stomach as much as if they’d stepped on some small, fragile animal.
They quietly exit the room and lock the door behind them, making sure that the OUT OF ORDER sign is still stuck firmly in place, and get lost again twice on their way back to Eden.
Hadley sounds confused and a little sleepy when Briar calls on Sunday, despite the fact that it’s past midday.
‘Jones?’ she says, as if she’s not sure she’s heard them right. ‘You’re calling me?’
‘Yes,’ says Briar. Then their confidence falters. They’d wanted to speak to someone who would tell it to them straight, but Hadley’s directness often scalds. ‘Sorry.’
‘No, it’s whatever, I was just . . . I was asleep, and Sophie thought it would be funny to wake me up by putting her gum in my mouth, so I sucked it down my chute and nearly died.’
‘Right. I just wanted to talk to you about some . . . school stuff.’
‘Talking? Ugh,’ she says. ‘Look, fine, I do owe you one, but you get . . . an hour, and then we’re square. I don’t even like any of this scholarly stuff, you should ask West - he’s the one wasting his life thinking about it.’
‘Westby’s in a bad mood.’
‘He’s depressed, Jones, you don’t have to be such a baby about it. Meet me here in about an hour. I’d rather die than go outside today.’
Briar hasn’t been inside Cavendish yet. It’s nice; bland on the outside, more blatantly modern than the other buildings because the concept of girls clearly hadn’t occurred to the faculty until quite recently, but the interiors are actually quite chic.
The floors are warm herringbone wood, the walls painted tasteful off-white that’s intentional rather than just grubby like in some of the other houses.
The common room has been better looked after, too; some of the cream and berry-coloured furniture is fuzzy with use, the walls a bit scuffed by the door, but otherwise it’s neat and cosy.
There are small groups of girls gathered in the seating areas, outfitted in leggings and tracksuits and Uggs, but there’s a Sunday sleepiness to everything, so that even the laughter and the chatting is muted. When Hadley walks in with Briar, everybody glances up, and Hadley rolls her eyes.
‘You know you’re not allowed to bring . .
.’ one of the scholars, a soft brunette with impeccable coppery highlights, starts to say - but then she clearly falters, trying to categorise what Briar is and why exactly they should be barred from the building, and gives up.
Briar wonders if they should be flattered.
Categorised as an oddity by both the girl and boy scholars - a great and inconvenient success.
‘I can do what I like,’ Hadley says. Nobody seems inclined to disagree with this.
The younger scholars look scared of her, the older ones mildly disgusted.
She flops down in one of the ribbed velvet tub chairs in the corner, set apart from everybody else, and Briar takes the floral one next to it.
Hadley’s wearing an enormous, faded men’s rowing jumper and a pair of sci-fi looking leggings with toothy cutouts webbed over with fine mesh.
Yesterday’s eyeliner is smeared soft and grey under her lower lashes and gathered in clumps by her tear ducts.
Her slinky chain necklace could either be outrageously expensive or cheap tat; as she’s such a contrarian, Briar suspects the latter.
Conversation resumes. Somebody turns on the radio, the reception patchy, and immediately lowers the volume when the hungover contingent protest.
‘God, your face looks like shit. Okay, go. No, wait.’ Hadley gets back up, goes to the vending machine and comes back with a Diet Coke. ‘Okay, now go.’
Briar barely knows where to start. ‘So . . . I know what the Work can do now.’
‘Ha,’ says Hadley. ‘Yeah. Well, you know how some people use it.’
‘It’s fucked up.’
‘Not always. But . . . almost always.’
‘My first day, Tate said it wasn’t actually very powerful. He said the best he could do was make someone happy to see him.’
‘Tate was lying,’ says Hadley matter-of-factly, taking a long pull of her Coke.
‘I mean, not lying, he’s just - look, people choose their specialisms, and even after that there are different kinds of powerful.
You have to prove you’re willing to put the work into something to be let into the advanced classes in your final years.
I mean, some people work so hard for some reason, and they’re still not allowed in.
There are supplementary texts in this school that only about ten people will have read in every graduating class. ’
‘But . . . what’s in them?’
‘I don’t know. You’re not allowed to know the details unless you make it into those seminars. Like you said, it’s fucked up.’
‘So Alistair Buckingham—’
‘Oh, yeah, he’s in them. They call that specialism Conduct, which is hilarious. Guess they couldn’t exactly call it Evil Bidding. Lasseter is too, for Magnetism, as you found out. Tate should be in them, he’s really good, but his specialism is Ease, and none of the plods care much about that.’
‘Oh,’ says Briar. ‘So what’s your specialism?’
‘That’s a very personal question.’
‘You just told me everybody else’s.’
‘That’s different. Those weren’t personal to me, specifically.’
‘Well, what are some hypothetical examples, then?’
‘Conduct is like . . . when someone tells you to do something, you think it’s a good idea.
Magnetism is a general attraction to a person.
They’re both really tricky. There’s Attention, which is self-explanatory, means people listen to you; Example, which means people will follow your lead - I mean, it does what it says on the tin.
But within each speciality, you can interpret things slightly differently.
Attention can mean you pay better attention.
Recollection makes you memorable, although there’s the inverse of that, too.
Westby tried to be a generalist and it’s completely fucked him over, so now he’s spending all his time trying to write a new Working - which is crazy - instead of getting particularly good at one that already exists. He’s going to fail.’
‘What happens if you fail?’
Hadley picks at the tab on her can, pulling and releasing so that it makes a dull, aluminium plinking sound.
‘Depends on what he wants to do next. But he’s an actual scholar.
Most people are just interested in how much the Work can help them; they’re all heading off to Oxford or whatever to do something normal.
West doesn’t care about that. He really wants to understand how it’s all put together, poor idiot lamb. ’
‘What’s he writing?’
‘Doesn’t matter, ’cos it won’t work. It takes more than one lifetime to write one of those things.
You have to hope somebody wants to pick it up after you, keep it going, and that they’re perfectly aligned with your scholarly vision.
West says people used to live like monks, working on them in their cells.
And even after all that it might end up all shitty and broken.
It’s not an exact science, no matter how much West wants it to be.
Did Alistair Buckingham try to fuck you? ’
‘What?’ Briar startles out of academic reverie to stare at her. Hadley shrugs.
‘I don’t remember much about Friday, sorry. Just taking a stab.’
‘No,’ Briar says. ‘I mean. I really don’t think so. He just wanted to humiliate me.’
‘Little baby,’ says Hadley. ‘Those things are so not mutually exclusive.’
‘I know,’ Briar says. Anger flares, and they say, slightly too loudly, ‘But I mean, fuck isn’t really the word, is it? Considering the fact that I literally couldn’t say no.’
‘All right, calm down,’ Hadley says, glancing over at the nearest cluster of girls. ‘I get it. Obviously I get it. I’ve been here for seven years.’
‘So how do you stop them from . . . ?’
‘I carry a knife.’ Briar can’t tell if she’s joking.
‘And what about when Alistair tells you to drop your knife? Could you stop him?’