14. Small Declarations of War
On Monday, Briar fills Eugenia’s truck with furniture broken beyond repair and makes their much-anticipated trip to the tip bright and early.
The countryside soars today, the sparrows swooping over the hedgerows as if they’re racing the car, the sky wide and clear.
On the way back, they pick up two bags of ground coffee at a farm shop and then stop at the tiny pharmacy, where the card machine refuses to work no matter where the very exasperated blonde pharmacist waves it.
In the end, Briar pays with cash, and leaves with a paper bag full of sertraline labelled for Crispin Charles Yeats Westby.
They’re planning to stop when signal is strongest so that they can run a few searches on Temple with fresh eyes, but a couple of miles from the school, their phone starts to ring. Briar pulls over next to a field full of baleful brown-and-white Hereford cattle to answer.
‘Oh my God, you picked up! Sean, I’ve got Briar.’ Some shuffling as Sean is retrieved and Briar is put on speaker. ‘How are you? Why won’t you text me back? Are they nice? You forgot your raincoat!’
‘I’m okay,’ Briar says, fiddling with the fan vents. ‘I’ve got no signal. I told you.’
‘But there must be somewhere you can go to make a call?’ There is, of course, but she doesn’t need to know that. Briar loves her, but loving her and wanting to call her are two completely different things. ‘Where are you now?’
‘Out. Running errands.’
‘What sort of errands? What’s the school like? I know you signed that contract, but you can tell me.’
Legally, Briar definitely can’t tell her, and they don’t think much of what’s happened would go over well with her even if they did feel like bending the law. Seb is here. He’s evil now. They’ve been torturing me for fun. I’ve got three stitches in my face. Don’t worry, I’m planning my revenge.
‘I really can’t. But it’s fine. You saw the ad, just lots of heavy lifting. How’s home?’
She sighs. ‘All right, keep your secrets, but when you get back, I’ll hold the cat hostage until you tell me.
’ There’s a pause, and Briar can imagine her sharing a look with Sean.
She worries about Briar too much. There’s always an edge to her well-meaning questions.
It irritates Briar in ways they can’t explain. ‘All fine here.’
This doesn’t quite ring true. ‘Yeah?’
‘Well, Mick has to leave next week because they called him offshore sooner than he was expecting, but we’ve got a couple of neighbour kids learning the ropes and they’re . . . mostly useful.’
This sentence conceals a vast drama that must have been unfolding over the past few days, and Briar feels a tug of guilt, not just for taking this job and ditching the farm for the summer, but because of the university offers squatting like landmines in their inbox.
They had applied with the vague hope that maybe the financial and logistical situation at home might have changed by the time results came in August. Maybe Sean’s back would magically heal; maybe some distant relative they’d never heard of would die and leave Briar’s mum enough money to keep everything ticking along indefinitely.
It’s not looking particularly likely. So maybe Briar will have to take that gap year.
Maybe they won’t get the grades for any of their uni offers anyway, and the decision will be taken out of their hands.
It all seems so inconsequential at the moment.
At Temple, it’s easy to forget that most people make do with an ordinary life.
In a few weeks, reality is going to hit hard.
‘I can come back if you need me,’ Briar says, because that’s what they’re supposed to say.
‘Don’t be silly, we’re fine,’ Briar’s mum says firmly. ‘The cat keeps leaving decapitated mouse heads on your pillow, it’s very sweet. She misses you.’
‘Lovely.’
‘And the cows miss you too, of course.’
Briar glances out of the window at the heifer standing by the gate, her pink nose wet with dew as she chews the cud, and hates the stab of revulsion they feel for their life.
It’s not fair. There’s so much to love about it, parents and friends and even the cows - who had loved Briar just the same before and after certain cataclysmic gender revelations - but once again it’s as if they’re seeing it through the eyes of a scholar. Sad. Meagre. Small.
Briar says, ‘I’ve got to go,’ and ignores the disappointment in their mum’s voice when she says ‘Okay’, then says hi and bye to Sean in one breath, and drives back to Temple a little faster than they’d driven away, all research plans forgotten.
There’s no answer at Westby’s dorm room, but the door is unlocked, so Briar leaves the paper bag on his bed and throws a discarded jumper over the top for privacy.
They make their coffee on the dresser in their room with the care and precision of a religious ceremony, settling down on the bed to drink it, savouring every dark drop.
Afterwards, Briar feels imbued with purpose. They need to make the most of their time here. Hadley’s got a plan. The job listing had said four to six weeks. One week down, but Briar’s not muddling through any more. Their eyes are wide open. A lot can happen in a month.
Upstairs, the attic is actually starting to look like somebody’s been actively trying to clear it. Briar might even go so far as to say they’ve made a dent.
They’re sorting through some loose papers with single-minded determination when something occurs to them, and they spend too long searching back through the piles, panic rising as they worry they might have already thrown it away.
Eventually they find it: the briefcase that had held the key to the abandoned office.
Everything inside is just as had been, but this time it all has fresh significance.
The half-empty packet of disintegrating tissues.
The box of mints. The handwritten notes, still illegible.
The threadbare wallet, which contains one credit card, the ID tag from a cat’s collar and one very faded driver’s license belonging to Robert Michael Parker, born in 1961.
The picture is just a blurry outline of a man now, the suggestion of dark hair and glasses.
Briar can’t tell if they’re the same ones now lying broken on the floor of the office.
The lack of instant internet access grates once again. They think about asking Eugenia, but when she appears later that day to ask Briar for a favour, the driver’s license sits unmentioned in their pocket.
Five framed oil paintings Briar uncovered stacked together under a blackened sheet on their second day have apparently been greeted with much excitement by the headmaster, Mr Ward.
He’s had them cleaned, and asked that they be hung in the Eden common room.
This means that Briar is forced to awkwardly angle a stepladder through the door and shuffle it around the scholars, who have finished their lessons for the day and are lounging, perching and hanging off every surface in the room, chattering at full volume.
Briar has to ask one scholar to move three times, and is soundly ignored. Finally, they give up and just start pushing the chair he’s sitting in out of the way.
‘Do you mind?’ the boy says plummily, looking almost nauseated with disdain.
‘Not at all,’ Briar says, continuing to push until they can fit their stepladder through the gap.
Most of the paintings are of elderly white men wearing velvet capes and pointing at things in their laps, but there is one nice pastoral piece with an air of Constable about it that Briar enjoys staring at while they measure, hammer and hang.
It’s impossible not to eavesdrop. Most of the noise is rowdy background clamour, but occasionally Briar catches a sentence that makes sense.
‘We might have to reshuffle the slut rankings for the year,’ one of the boys says, sitting only a few feet from Briar’s ladder, his legs dangling over the edge of the once-red armchair. ‘She had long odds, but I think she’ll win by a nose.’
‘By a leg,’ one of the other boys adds, and they all titter approvingly. Oh, how Briar hates them.
‘I’m not sure. I don’t think it can outdo fucking faculty.’
‘Well, the thing is, mate, I don’t believe that actually happened.’
‘Believe what you like, it’s true. Actually, Macaulay will know. Macaulay! Come here. What was it you were saying about Watson?’
Briar stills, the hammer going slack in their hand so rapidly that they almost drop it. Hadley Watson?
‘Watson? Oh, right. Yeah, she’s going out with a plod,’ says Macaulay, a red-haired, freckled boy with cherubic features and a nasty, pleased slant to his mouth as he speaks.
‘I know she is, because Derbyshire told Lucy, and Lucy told me. You didn’t hear it from me, though, because I swore to Lucy I wouldn’t tell anyone, and I’m on my last chance with her as it is. Have you got a quid? I want a Fanta.’
‘No.’
‘Tightwad. Don’t tell Lucy. I mean it.’
Briar makes too much noise dragging the stepladder away, a shrill scrape of metal against floor, and the scholars clap their hands to their ears and complain loudly as they pass.
Tate had said that Hadley’s boyfriend was older, but Christ. Briar thinks of the faculty they’ve seen in the dining hall, walking to class - more than half of them are grey-haired and stooped, at least triple Hadley’s age.
Is she even eighteen yet? Or is this just one more rule from the outside world that doesn’t exist within these walls?
Later that evening, Briar walks into the refectory at the very end of the last dinner shift at the exact moment Seb is leaving. It’s a coincidence of such dramatic and unfortunate proportions that Briar’s instinct is to laugh. They keep it in check.