3. What Exactly Constitutes an Attic Person
The job listing had been sparse in detail. The only Temple giveaway had been the local postcode.
Responsibilities include: cleaning, small repairs, organising, filing, handling delicate objects, heavy lifting. Rural academic location. Enhanced DBS check required. Accommodation and meals provided.
Discretion a must.
Discretion was such a must that once Briar had been aggressively interviewed over the phone, they were asked to sign an NDA, printed out in the quietly humming vestibule of the tiny library in Herring Bridge and then reluctantly brought to the Worth Herring corner-shop-slash-post-office, where Elizabeth and her work husband Gee had put down their tea and custard creams and asked Briar what exactly they were sending in such an expensive envelope.
‘I don’t think you’re allowed to ask,’ Briar said, flustered, trying desperately to hand Elizabeth the money for a stamp while she pretended not to notice.
There was a rotating stand of gift cards slanting at an angle next to the counter, some of them faded, as old as Briar.
Sean had definitely given them the gurning frog one once. HOPPY BIRTHDAY.
‘I am,’ Elizabeth said, so affronted that she almost smudged her raspberry lip gloss. ‘What if you were sending a battery? Batteries are on the list of prohibited items.’
‘It’s a flat envelope.’
‘Some of the batteries they’re making these days are ever so flat,’ said Gee, unhelpfully. He had approached the counter with his glasses swinging from their chain, his hands clasped officiously in front of his argyle sweater vest. ‘You’d never know how they get all the electricity in.’
‘Or it could be a biological weapon,’ said Elizabeth.
Briar’s mum always reminded them to be nice to her - her grandson Jason had been in a terrible accident when Briar was eleven.
A freak thing, sad and unpredictable, the whole village coming out to watch the ambulance take him away.
Everyone was supposed to have unlimited patience with Elizabeth, and conveniently forget that Jason had been uniquely horrible.
One of Seb’s tormentors, back in the day, tracking him down like a heat-seeking missile.
Briar had never been able to feign disappointment when he never returned.
‘You know,’ Elizabeth continued. ‘A disease. Sent from another country to start a war.’
‘It’s a letter,’ Briar said desperately. ‘Applying for a job. It’s just a letter.’
Gee licked his forefinger and thumb and flicked through the folder of stamps, then brightened. ‘You know what you can send? Ashes. Human ashes. But only fifty grams. After that, you need to get another envelope. You’d probably need a few. Multipack.’
‘Multipack,’ Elizabeth agreed.
They continued in this fashion for another five minutes before Briar was allowed to pay and flee.
When their mum found out about the NDA she’d been worried, as she always was, and Sean had shaken his head and said lots of things about ‘the establishment’, his midlife nemesis.
Neither of them had ever understood Briar’s longing for Temple - they called it insular and elitist, didn’t believe it played host to any real magic, and said Briar would do perfectly fine without it - and their bewilderment back then had made Briar feel even more desperate.
They certainly hadn’t understood why Briar would want to go now, seven years after the rejection of a lifetime; seven years since Briar and Seb had last spoken, and the black hole of a week after the acceptance letter came when Briar pretended to be laid up with flu to avoid Seb’s calls and knocks, followed by the even blacker hole of no calls or knocks at all.
‘Are you sure?’ Briar’s mum had asked a thousand times after Briar accepted the job, hovering in their bedroom doorway, her eyes roving around the film posters, the open dresser drawers and pile of clean laundry, the mess of dumbbells in the corner.
‘It just . . . it took you such a long time to feel okay again when you were little, Briar, and it feels like this might . . . start it all up again.’
It was agreed with some reluctance that they’d manage on the farm without Briar for a while, and that Sean’s cousin Mick, a burly offshore rig worker currently between gigs, would come and pitch in over the summer, but Briar felt bad about leaving anyway.
There has just never been anything magical about Briar’s life.
They’d waited to see if that spark might find them even without Temple - an inciting incident, a calling - and instead: Sean’s slipped disc, their mum’s struggle to find regular employment and unfounded belief that things would always come right.
Briar had no choice but to set 4 a.m. alarms to help with the first milking, to hurry home at the end of the day to make the most of the remaining daylight, or pick up shifts mucking out horses for pocket money when time allowed, while everybody else their age loitered in playgrounds or went to find a field to drink plastic bottles of cider in.
They tried not to fixate on it, but even so, there must have been a hundred times they’d been standing in the yard in the ungodliest hours of the morning, boots already caked in manure, thinking about that nasty break in the timeline, the point at which their life and Seb’s had diverged, wondering what mornings might look like at a school of Thaumaturgy.
Briar had accepted that they clearly weren’t meant for extraordinary things, but still: they just had to know what lay beyond that fence.
The answer right now is a dark stone spiral stairwell, cavernous in climate, musty and damp.
They climb higher and higher, past squat wooden doors on half-cut landings carved with thick braided reliefs and knots of flowers, until Briar is sure they must have bypassed absolutely everything interesting in favour of the roof.
It’s not quite the roof, though, when Eugenia finally stops and opens a door.
It’s the attic. A vaulted, churchlike space crisscrossed by huge wooden beams that look soft with woodworm, impossibly dark in the corners, and crammed from the warped floor to the cobwebbed ceiling with junk as far as the eye can see.
Papers, instruments, crates, blankets, trunks, an abandoned wheelbarrow, ancient furniture . . . and above all, books.
Books that look as old as the building. Books that have fossilised over the years into solid bricks. Books that have been half-eaten to pulp by enemies small and hungry.
‘This is your job,’ Eugenia says, waving around at the room, her bracelets ringing against each other like bells.
‘A hundred years of this. Maybe more. The teachers use it as a dumping ground. Lots of heavy lifting, but you look like you probably have the muscle. There might be some interesting things, if the scholars found them, but they would never bother with a dirty place like this. And some very boring things. Mostly boring, I think. To you it will all be boring, because you cannot do the Work.’
Briar reaches out to touch a stack of thick, dusty books as tall as their head, and then thinks better of it. It might cause an avalanche. ‘The Work?’
‘That is what they call it here. The Work. Thaumaturgy. Thauma-turges. They don’t want to say it’s magic, abracadabra and bangs and whizzes, because that does not sound so smart, and also there is not so much of the abracadabra or the rest. You are normal like me, so a book is just a book, even if you cannot read it.
There are not many of us here. You, me .
. . the caretaker, the cleaners. Some of the Dames.
Your work is to sort, categorise, and then we will put everything in its right place, and I will no longer have the headmaster always asking me if I’ve made a start on the junk rooms, which is very annoying, because I always haven’t.
We are always understaffed. Anyway. Make sense? ’
Briar’s fingers are itching to touch everything.
Magical rubbish! Or thaumaturgical rubbish, they suppose.
It’s real. There don’t seem to be any cauldrons and wands, as Briar might have expected, but it’s magic nonetheless.
It doesn’t matter how old and broken it all is.
To go from a painfully ordinary life of cheap school blazers, waiting at bus stops, power-washing the milking shed, crisps from the vending machine as a treat on Fridays to this is so wild and unbelievable that they almost smile.
‘You look happy,’ says Eugenia. ‘It won’t last.’
A sensible thought occurs, and Briar grabs the trailing end of it before it floats away. ‘How will I know how to sort it all? I don’t know anything about . . . thaumaturgy.’
Eugenia shrugs. ‘You don’t need to. Not for most of this stuff. You know what a chair is? You can read the title of a book, yes? Yes. Okay - now I will show you the rest.’
Briar’s mind conjures medieval classrooms crammed with potions and spellbooks, grand dining halls, a well-stocked library.
Instead, Eugenia leads them down another set of stairs, just as dark and cramped as the first; they reach what Briar guesses must be the ground floor and then keep descending, the space constricting, the air taking on a marshy, slightly fetid quality.
There’s a constant trickle of water here, the source unidentifiable.
It clicks: they must be under the moat. It’s not as exciting as a spellbook or a library with ladders, but there’s something about secret tunnels that must appeal to the rabbity part of the brain, because Briar is one happy rabbit.
‘Sorry about the shit tunnel,’ says Eugenia. ‘It’s the fastest way. There are hundreds of them down here, for escaping in a siege or something. Don’t get lost.’