The Unmagical Life of Briar Jones

1. The Circumvention of a Fence （Via a Gate, as Is Traditional）

The Temple School of Thaumaturgy is located eighteen miles north-west of the village of Worth Herring, guarded on all sides by a soaring steel and barbed-wire fence.

It’s a mere one hour and fifteen minutes by bike, as long as you’re very cavalier about whether you live to see the school or get smeared across the asphalt by a car en route - but again, there’s that titan of a fence, so it’s not like you can see much of the building anyway.

If you’re ten years old and your best friend is already three inches taller than you, you might glimpse a sliver of Jacobean chimney above the treeline for the three seconds said friend gives you a boost, before he complains that you’re going to break some of his ‘best bones’ - as if any of his bones could possibly be good when he thinks spaghetti is a vegetable.

You might wrestle half-heartedly for a while to defend your honour, a brief frenzy of sweaty hands and skinny knees, and then spend another hour and fifteen minutes watching his corduroy shirt fly up like a cape behind him as you lose the race all the way home.

Briar no longer has a best friend. The fence is shorter than they remember; less imposing.

It’s one of those bright summer days that browns the grass and bakes the asphalt until it cracks.

Eugenia, the businesslike Greek woman who’s been calling and emailing to arrange the particulars, is waiting by the narrow electric gate with her arms crossed as Briar’s taxi pulls away.

She’s wearing acid wash jeans and a crisp white T-shirt, and her dark hair is up in one of those tortoiseshell claw clips that hurt like hell when you let them clamp shut on your nose.

She’s younger than Briar imagined. More polished.

Sharp edges, like a retired model, or somebody you’d lose a parking argument to outside a posh supermarket.

Look: she’s hot, if you’re into that sort of thing.

‘You had Bill?’ she says. Briar rapidly cycles through every possible meaning of this sentence, and then remembers the ID card swinging from the rear-view mirror of the taxi, stained blotchy yellow despite lamination.

‘I think so, yeah.’

Eugenia rolls her eyes. ‘I hate Bill. He loves to tell me about poisoning badgers. He thinks they should poison more badgers, or he thinks it’s not the right poison, or - I don’t know. Never enough dead badgers for Bill.’

Briar shrugs. ‘I like badgers.’

‘Pfft,’ says Eugenia. ‘No. They have diseases, probably. But I would look them in the eye when I kill them. Come on, it’s hot.’

It is hot. Briar is wearing a cheap shirt so white it’s almost blue, smart trousers and a tartan blazer in shades of maroon and bottle green, the entire outfit an ode to polyblend.

The blazer was pulled off the rail at a charity shop last month, and when it turned out to be mid-range designer and up to 50 per cent real cotton, Briar bought it on the spot with hard-earned wages scrimped from mucking out grumpy, wet-lipped horses.

They look like an estate agent on casual Friday, or someone on their way to chaperone a Scottish prom.

Entirely impractical clothes for the job they’re here to do, but it would have felt strange to show up in jeans.

They’d briefly considered dungarees and a bandana, or a new boiler suit untouched by the farm, tools rattling in the pockets to show they meant business.

‘You want to cosplay as that World War II girlboss,’ Briar’s mum had said, which was horrifying on a few levels.

‘Do you mean Rosie the Riveter?’ Briar replied. ‘Also, please don’t say cosplay. Or girlboss. Or talk about World War II.’

‘That’s exactly who I mean,’ said Briar’s mum. She was fondling the dough for scones at the time, and had quite a lot of flour dusted on her elbows and in the soft parts of her ears.

‘She wasn’t girlbossing,’ said Briar. ‘She was disseminating propaganda.’

‘She was multitasking,’ said Briar’s mum.

‘And you please don’t say “disseminating”.

You’re eighteen years old. Go outside and steal a road sign or something, before age fuses your joints and you can’t shimmy up the top of the pole.

’ She’d said it lightly, but there’s always an edge of something serious there, an undercurrent of worry that Briar hates.

Eugenia keys in the code on the door pad, and the gate emits a discordant buzz and jumps open.

The grass has been allowed to grow to knee-height around the fence, and it’s full of bumbling bees and sticky catchweed, crowned with shocks of blue and yellow wildflowers.

Briar is briefly afflicted with whimsy, and imagines wandering through it like a cottagecore waif - making this entrance somehow magical, in spite of the fence - but then remembers about ticks.

They pick up their duffel bag instead, hefting it over one shoulder, and follow Eugenia down the neatly mown path that’s just wide enough for one person.

The phrase ‘I don’t care about Temple’ has become something of an incantation for Briar over the past seven years.

When they were eleven, they said it to reassure others - ‘It’s not a big deal, I don’t even care about Temple.

’ When they were eleven and a half, it grew barbed around the edges.

By thirteen, it was impossible to say it with the right sort of conviction without looking like they were also holding in a bit of sick.

Eventually, they gave up saying the words out loud.

So what if Sebastian went away to magical boarding school, leaving Briar behind to catch the rattly bus to Dunton and Heaverham High in big town, to get into regular fights with farm-toughened, hard-eyed boys and learn about tectonic plates and fractions?

Somebody had to learn about tectonic plates and fractions. Why not Briar?

It’s sort of hard not to care about Temple right now though, descending through the thicket that blocked the school from view whenever Briar and Seb had come to stare through the hot silver bars of the palisade fence all those years ago.

Briar follows Eugenia down the hill, under enormous fir trees that spice the dry air and carpet the path in furry brown needles, past pale lavender bushes and ornamental rock formations, and then, suddenly: Temple.

It’s halfway between a minor castle and a very big house.

The main structure is grand and rectangular, ragstone and Tudor half-timber, surrounded by a cloudy green moat sprinkled with a few ducks.

Behind it there’s a maze of imposing outbuildings, ivy-strewn walls and blackened iron gates that probably lead to neat gardens.

It seems less like a school and more a small town, but one pulled straight from the pages of a fantasy, or perhaps a Gothic romance.

It’s beautiful. Undeniably beautiful, and Briar has wanted to see it for so long, so it makes no sense that the first thing they think, taking in all that splendour, is: I shouldn’t be here.

It’s a gut pull, an instinctual flinch. A trespasser’s foreboding. The feeling that at any moment, someone could release a pack of guard dogs to drive Briar from the land.

Briar shakes this off. It’s not Dracula’s fucking castle.

Really, it looks exactly as it is: a decadent manor once owned by a knight, lost in a bet, sold four times to those intending to better it, before being repurposed for the private tuition of the especially gifted.

At least, that’s what it said on the website.

Temple. Finally. Finally.

For a moment, Briar is eleven years old again and full of unblemished wonder - and then they experience what seems to be a small bout of hay fever, something they’ve never suffered from until precisely this moment.

It tightens their throat, makes their eyes sting and their lungs feel like party balloons being scrunched into sausage dogs; they have to blink a few times and cough to shake it loose.

‘Do you need a hankie?’ asks Eugenia.

‘No,’ says Briar, clearing their throat again. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Good.’ Eugenia marches away at a brisk pace that forces Briar to half-jog down the slope to keep up. ‘Because I do not have a hankie. If you need to send a text or make a call, do it now before it’s too late.’

Briar’s hand clenches reflexively around the phone in their pocket. It’s so sweaty in there now that it feels like they’re smuggling a loose bar of soap. ‘Why? Do you have to take my phone?’

‘No. They just don’t work down there,’ says Eugenia. ‘It’s like a . . . you know.’

‘A ward?’ Briar says, trying not to sound excited.

‘No. Ha! A ward. It’s a signal hole? A pit. The towers are high up or . . . low down. I don’t know, I don’t ask. There is internet, but it is only in the technology suite. I like the landline. I used to twirl the cord around my finger. It was very cool, I think.’

‘That sounds . . . very cool.’

‘You are taking a tone with me, Brian.’

‘It’s Briar.’

Eugenia sighs. ‘It is.’

Briar slips their phone from their pocket, the screen cracked into a near-perfect Y.

A cursory glance at the group chat with their closest friends, other recent graduates from Dunts when her joints are out of commission, she hands her phone to Briar and dictates long sermons and diatribes like they’re her scribe.

Connor will reply in ten minutes with a daddish thumbs up.

Rhys won’t reply at all. He’s baffled by the concept of a group chat, and insists he’ll just get the salient points from Connor, like it’s a team meeting he’s missing at an office job.

Briar’s text to their mum is short and simple. She’ll definitely try to ring, but by then it’ll be too late. Connor surprises with an early salute emoji just before Briar picks up the pace, and their signal flatlines.

It’s easier to look at Temple now, like Briar’s eyes have adjusted to its lustre.

As they get closer to the moat, they can see red valerian sprouting from the walls and slow, florid eddies of duckweed and algal bloom.

At the building’s base there are dark, milky-filmed windows partially hidden below the waterline.

There’s no way that they’re remotely safe in a place as old as this, but as soon as Briar has this thought, it’s followed by another: Maybe thinking about health and safety regulations is why nobody invited you to go to the make-believe school of delight and enchantment.

Eugenia leads Briar across a short, broad, stone bridge that passes under a gatehouse with a faded blue clock face set into it, the hands painted baroque gold.

Beyond is a cobbled central courtyard, the stones grouted with thick, spongy moss.

The building rising up on all sides reveals the centuries like layers of sediment; one side is knobbly, unhewn stone, but it’s shacked up next to bleached black-and-white timber framing, which is leaning drunkenly against the more austere ornate Gothic arches and stained-glass windows.

All the doors are different sizes and shapes, and none of them look like they’ve ever met.

There’s a soaring tower at one end, proper fairy-tale stuff, but it sports an orange-rusted TV antenna halfway up it that sort of ruins the effect.

There’s also a glut of tall red chimneys, strictly regimented in platoons of six.

‘It can be confusing to find your way around,’ says Eugenia, fumbling with a keyring, as Briar tries to gulp down every detail while also appearing casual and unbothered.

‘Why? Do the doors switch places?’

Eugenia shoots Briar a stern look, like they’re a cat that’s jumped on the kitchen counter. ‘No. It was just built by an idiot. Many idiots, over many years. Okay, here we go.’

The door - heavy, oak, studded and barred with iron to keep battering rams at bay - opens very reluctantly, and Eugenia has to lean in with her shoulder and shove. The contrast between bright sunshine and interior gloom is too high to make out any details.

‘Are you afraid of bats?’ asks Eugenia. ‘Or spiders? Or old pieces of chewing gum, stuck in the walls where people think I won’t see it, with little teeth marks in?’

‘Um,’ says Briar. ‘No. To all.’

‘Good,’ says Eugenia. ‘Then I do not think you are going to have any problems here.’

This is unlikely – but that isn’t the sort of thing you admit to your summer employer on the first day of the job.

Briar hovers on the threshold, savouring this last moment where everything inside Temple is still wild and unknown and precisely as fantastical as the limits of their imagination, and then steps inside.