19. Drunk
By the time they call last orders at the bar, the pub has filled up, and at the scholars’ table things are getting silly around the edges. The bartender has been openly glaring at them ever since Westby asked him if it was possible for humans to order off the dog menu.
Tate is fiddling delicately with the too-long sleeves of his Coogi cardigan, a multicoloured mash-up of about five different patterns, the knitwear equivalent of a brazen shout.
‘My dad’s got a good house for it, but it’s on Lake Como, and he’d be there asking me to film his social media videos about the power of just one great idea the whole time. ’
‘I could go mad on Lake Como,’ Westby acquiesces. ‘Although it must be said, my Italian is middling.’
‘Maybe you should have taken a language that’s actually useful,’ Hadley says, between mouthfuls of cheese-and-onion crisps, ‘instead of Greek and Sanskrit and Latin.’ She’s ‘popped out for some fresh air’ four times, and is now visibly high.
‘You’re being small-minded, and you smell like onions.’
Briar runs a thumb around the rim of their pint, ordered after the last bottle of wine vanished.
When they’re tipsy, moments start to run together, and single images stand starkly out from the blur.
The logo on the beer glass, degraded from the dishwasher; Hadley’s necklace, a silver shark’s tooth on a fine chain, falling gracefully over the hollows of her collarbones; the way Westby rubs at his chin like an old professor when he talks.
Four was definitely too many drinks, and yet they reach for their fifth and take a sip.
The promised motherburger never did appear.
Food service had stopped by the time they thought to order it.
The guy behind the bar - crew cut, polo neck - is watching something on his phone between pulling his last pints, brief flashes of lurid football-field green visible as he shifts slightly from one foot to the other and back again.
‘Jones?’ Apparently Westby has been trying to speak to them. ‘Anybody home?’
Briar snaps back to attention. ‘Hm?’
‘I was just wondering if you applied,’ Westby says, with unconvincing nonchalance. ‘To Temple, I mean.’
‘Nah,’ Briar says. ‘Not really my thing.’
‘You do seem to have a lot of questions,’ Westby pushes. ‘One might reasonably guess that it is, in fact, your thing.’
‘Anyone would ask questions. Magic school.’
‘And you don’t live too far . . . and your friend was going . . . It seems bizarre to me that—’
‘West, stop being a cunt,’ says Hadley. ‘I didn’t want to come. Not everybody does.’
‘Why did you apply, then?’ Briar asks. They didn’t mean to ask yet another question. It just slipped out.
‘My dad went, and his dad. He said me and my sister had to go, or he wouldn’t fund uni for either of us.
Wanker. She wanted to read English, but after Temple she changed her mind I guess, and now she manages investment portfolios.
’ She says manages investment portfolios like she’s saying beats orphans with hammers.
‘I think dad was banking on me changing my mind about drama, but fuck that - it’s not been the same for me.
Ophelia was popular here. Met her husband like you’re supposed to, wore those cream golf jumpers, laughed along with all the jokes about the school reeking of fish.
Total embarrassing bullshit. I wanted to go home during the Trials, wanted to switch schools in third year, because I’m, like, a normal sane person and not a sociopath, but my parents said they’d at least think about drama school if I stayed the course. ’
‘And the board would have Worked on your memories,’ says Westby. ‘If you’d dropped out. Something to consider.’
‘Yeah, well,’ Hadley says darkly. ‘That actually sounds quite fucking nice. Be much cheaper than the going rate down Jim’s.’
Tate wordlessly dips his pint glass in her direction, a small salute.
‘Wait,’ Briar says slowly, ‘so they really do that? Change your memories?’
The others exchange a glance, and then Westby says, ‘Only in extreme circumstances. And it’s only the board who can do it. They’re very careful and specific. Nobody wants little Prometheus coming home with no idea how to tie his laces.’
Right. Traumatised, fine, but not overly forgetful. Temple logic.
‘If your dad came here,’ Briar says, ‘he knows how bad it is. Why would anyone send their kids, to face the Trials?’
‘Because that’s the deal,’ Hadley says. ‘Trial by fire, worthy of the Work. Worthy of the Work, and a life of privilege awaits. Plus, it’s tradition.
And . . . most people are pretty scared of the board of governors, because their word is law.
I’m sure plenty of parents feel bad about it, but most of them also think we’re all too soft.
Believe me, I tried all these angles. I’m scared!
The boys are horrible! I don’t want to die! No fucking dice.’
‘So if you hadn’t come here,’ Briar says, trying not to phrase this as a question, ‘you’d have needed to figure out the Work all by yourself.’
Westby shakes his head. ‘If you don’t come here, you can’t do it. At all.’
‘All the texts are here,’ says Tate. ‘You can only access them under plod supervision. You’re not allowed to copy them unless it’s an official translation, board sanctioned, takes years to do and they go hard after the people who do it.
It’s a monopoly. I guess you could spend your time scouring antiques markets looking, but . . .’
‘But alumni have been doing that for generations, and making sure everything ends up safely back here, overseen by the board. I don’t think anything new’s been discovered for ages.
About ten years ago there was that auction at Christie’s for some dead polit-ician’s book collection, and it went for .
. . hundreds of thousands. Way over what it was worth.
It was in the news. Someone wasn’t being careful enough; that whole thing should have been managed behind the scenes.
Very, very naughty, of course, to have something like that stashed away at home. Fellow was lucky he was already dead.’
Briar shrugs. ‘What does it matter, though, if somebody who can’t do the Work gets hold of one? They can’t do anything with it.’
‘No, but they like to keep it all in the family, and the real risk is that someone who can do it has access to Workings that nobody else at Temple does, or something too advanced for them to understand. That’d be disastrous.
Depending on what it did, they could hold power over all of us.
’ Briar just looks at him, and he wrinkles his nose.
‘Well, yes, all right, I see your point . . . but it’s not our fault we’re able to do the Work and most people aren’t. Life is unfair.’
Sometimes Briar forgets that Westby isn’t just funny-posh, he’s genuinely posh, and reaps the benefits.
For all his supposedly liberal leanings, he’s ingested too much of that every-man-for-himself, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps poison, and sometimes it shows up in the whites of his eyes or the flash of his teeth.
‘I wanted to come,’ Tate says, to change the subject slightly, because he’s got some tact.
‘My parents aren’t alumni, but I had no problem doing the Work - held my breath a bit during my first class, but it took.
Mum said there’s a link to some old British family back in our line somewhere, and we can all guess how that might have happened.
My dad went to a state comp, but when I was five he invented this industrial wet vacuum thing that he sold to a big corp for millions, and now he’s an entrepreneurial speaker.
Huge social media following, goes around telling people how to do what he did, even though most of them never will.
Suddenly he was obsessed with getting me set up in life or whatever.
He’s been making me intern for free at his company since I was literally nine, running their socials in the holidays.
Anyway, Temple sent him a brochure. Sounded good to me, and they could afford the fees. ’
‘The real price,’ Hadley intones, ‘is one human soul.’
‘I still have my soul,’ Tate says. ‘I think.’
Briar leans back in their chair, chewing this over. ‘Seems like a weird system. Must be loads of people all over who can do the Work and have no idea, because they never applied.’
‘Dunno,’ says Hadley. ‘I think they give you the nudge if you haven’t.
My roommate Derbyshire left it until the last minute, and she said her father got a call.
Most people’s parents came here, or at least one parent.
No idea how they know, if your parents didn’t for some reason.
Maybe there’s a Working for that. A really fucking boring one. ’
‘It’d have to be some variation of Scrutiny,’ says Westby, academic interest sparking behind his eyes. ‘Although how you’d fine-tune that to something so specific, I can only imagine . . .’
‘So it’s basically just the same families coming here, generation after generation?’ Briar interrupts. ‘What’s the point of the application process at all, then?’
What they mean is: What was the point of letting me apply? Dream for years, and wait for weeks, for a letter that was never going to come?
‘Because I suppose you might not know. Say the last connection was . . . I don’t know, my aunt’s nephew’s sister’s brother,’ says Westby. ‘I mean, look at Adams.’
‘West,’ says Tate. ‘Your aunt’s nephew’s sister’s brother is you.’
‘Immaterial,’ says Westby. ‘But yes, I suppose you’re right, Jones, genetics are somewhat limiting. Unfortunate for some, but what can you do? Buck is related to the founder of the school, if you go all the way back to the 1500s, when they uncovered the original texts.’
‘Uncovered them?’ Briar seizes on this. ‘Who wrote them?’
‘Monks,’ says Westby.
‘Saints,’ Tate corrects.