20. Unnatural Habitats #2
Briar drags their cart to the Hawthorn entryway and accidentally catches the post-chapel rush, when scholars are dashing to grab forgotten things from their dorms and thundering back down the stairs two at a time.
It’s five minutes of pure hell as they manoeuvre everything down the hall and into the accessible lift, which only goes up to the first floor; when the doors open again, it’s like the dazed quiet after a stampede, just the last few gazelles hopping away and out of sight.
Briar has to manually drag the cart up the next flights of stairs.
When they reach the third floor, they’re pink and damp at the temples, sweating through the back of their white T-shirt, disproportionately annoyed at having to go back for a dropped mop.
They unlock the first dorm room, and the day they’d imagined ahead of them is sucked into a black hole, replaced by unforeseen and wide-ranging horrors.
Ben mentioned dusting, wiping, polishing; for any of these actions to be possible, there’d have to be a square foot of visible surface not covered in gummy teenage detritus.
One desk is all crisp packets and chocolate wrappers, library books left with their spines cracked and their pages bent, illegible handwritten notes strewn about in drifts as if they’ve fallen from a tree.
The other is mostly tidy, except for the freshly spilled puddle of pale coffee, which has been left to soak so that it really sinks into the wood.
The floor is knee-deep in dirty clothes, the beds unmade, mugs and glasses on the windowsill sticky-filmed and coated in dust.
Briar snaps on some gloves and starts with the rubbish, sweeping it all into a black bin bag.
They can’t spend the entire day traipsing downstairs to the kitchen with mugs and glasses, so they just gather them and leave them huddled together in a flock.
The clothes have to be picked up; Briar approaches this task with the stoicism they employ while dealing with mountains of cow manure, although this is somehow so much worse.
Cows don’t surreptitiously wank into dirty rugby socks and then leave them crumpled under the bed.
That first room is the low point. Briar leaves it with clean surfaces and floors, belongings in neat piles, clothes bagged up for the laundry, eternally thankful they haven’t been instructed to strip the beds.
Afterwards, a kind of steady, useful violence takes hold, and they make it all the way down the hall and halfway back again on the other side by the time the bell tolls for first lunch shift.
Briar eats in the staff dining room. One of the office ladies has baked, and she insists that Briar takes two carrot cake muffins frosted with inches of cream cheese and a third for later, because they’re ‘still a growing boy’.
This isn’t entirely accurate, but the muffins are good. Briar just thanks her, retreats to a corner and spends the rest of lunch reading a thriller about a murdered nanny while they graze one-handed.
Up on the third floor, there are five dorms left to clean. The first is easy, and Briar is feeling good, mind already jumping ahead to dinner, maybe going to Robert Parker’s tower afterwards to sit by the fire. They’re totally unprepared for what they find when they open the next door.
Bastian is standing by the window, looking out.
He’s got a blue-striped dust cloth clutched loosely in one hand like a knightly favour, and he’s wearing his impractical crisp white school shirt and trousers.
His hand is injured from the other night, his knuckles standing out pinkly against his pasty skin.
‘Hello,’ Briar says stiffly, pulling the cart to a stop behind them.
Bastian doesn’t even have the grace to jump. He just turns and takes Briar in, gaze travelling from the gloves on their hands to the mess of their face, and then seems to get stuck there.
He’s got a black eye. It’s just a little purpling of the inner corner, a downward sweep from deep plum to bright burgundy, like somebody took his face in their cupped palms and painted it there with the pad of their thumb. It makes him look young and tired, and horribly breakable. Briar did that.
They should still be furious, but they reach for that feeling of righteous anger and can’t access it any more. Maybe the fight helped. It can’t have been the kiss; that, along with the letter, has just confused things further.
It’s easy to tell the story that goes: I had a friend, I loved him, he left me. You can’t add ‘and he sent me a letter, and I didn’t reply, and he left anyway’ without muddling the roles somewhat. A kiss turns the whole thing on its head.
‘You’re the one on reprimand,’ Briar says. Bastian looks down at the cloth in his hands and back up at Briar, and nods.
‘I . . . didn’t know it would be you,’ he says, having to wet his lips halfway through, his voice sounding dry and disused.
‘Okay. Well. It is.’ This room is unbearably small. Briar clears their throat and unholsters the mop. ‘There’s no point both of us doing this. Take some stuff, do the next room.’
‘Fine,’ Bastian says. He moves hesitantly, and Briar gets out of the way, turning their back so that he can avail himself of the cleaning supplies, only facing the room again once Bastian’s gone.
It’s hardly fair for him to act like the kicked puppy.
Briar almost wishes they were at each other’s throats again instead of navigating this weird post-storm calm, each littered with the other’s fingerprints.
Briar mops and scrubs and dusts, and when the room is done they grab the cart and drag it back out into the hall, intending to go straight past the next doorway without looking.
They look. Bastian is on his knees, surrounded by reams of blue cloth, the dorm still a disaster in all directions. He’s frowning at a stain on the floor, dabbing at it dry and then checking to see if it’s magically vanished.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
Bastian doesn’t look up. ‘Cleaning.’
‘Have you ever cleaned anything before?’
‘Hard to recall.’
‘So - no, then.’
‘There are cleaners here, and the pips and first-years . . . and at home I had a . . . well, you know.’
Briar does know. The Wolfes had a housekeeper, a woman in her fifties called Mrs Curtis who didn’t like children and made that clear strongly and often.
She’d thrown away Briar’s battered copy of The Hobbit, and afterwards told them that she’d assumed it was meant for the bin, because the pages were so worn and tea-stained.
Briar tried to explain that this was what books were supposed to look like when you loved them, but she was unrepentant.
‘Use the supplies,’ they say now. ‘Get stuff wet before you start scrubbing. It tells you on the bottles what each thing is for. Don’t huff the fumes.’
Bastian picks up a bottle of floor cleaner and starts examining it like it’s a puzzle he’s trying to solve.
Briar rolls their eyes, takes a dusting cloth and starts on the shelves.
They know Bastian has turned to watch them, irritatingly attuned to the movements of his body.
At Grove House, on the rare occasion they hadn’t been within touching distance, Briar had known that Bastian was back in the room even with headphones on and their eyes closed.
In a game of blind man’s bluff, Briar could walk straight over to him and place their hand squarely on his chest. Something to do with how the air felt when he was in the room versus out of it; the displacement of molecules, shifting aside to make space for their reunions.
Or maybe he just had a particularly noticeable smell. Whatever.
He’s actually scrubbing now, and when Briar has finished the windowsills, they turn to see him staring down at the unblemished floor as if he can’t believe cleaning actually yields results.
Briar grabs the mop and bucket, and Bastian stops them by taking hold of the handle.
His fingernails, once heavily bitten, are now neat and perfect.
Briar imagines him cutting them alone in his bathroom and feels sad for some reason.
‘I’ll do it,’ he says.
He probably thinks he’s doing something very magnanimous, offering to mop the floor like a plebeian.
‘How did you end up with detention? Or . . . demerit, or whatever it’s called?’ Briar says, not relinquishing the mop. ‘I thought you were the untouchable king of the dicks.’
Bastian lets this slide. ‘Ward is sending a message. He’s not supposed to notice the Trials are happening at all, and he keeps . . . hearing about them. Not that it’s my fault.’
‘Christ,’ Briar says, ignoring how pointed this is. ‘That’s the only thing worth punishing. This place is fucked up.’
‘Yes,’ Bastian replies, which isn’t what Briar is expecting.
Brutal as it is, he’s made something of himself here.
Shed that little kid who struggled to make friends, turned out to be more powerful than either of them ever could have imagined; become someone feared, instead of fearful. Someone monstrous.
Briar shouldn’t even be talking to him. I’m undercover, they tell themself, and that sits better.
Bastian clears his throat. ‘Well. Anyway. I’ll mop.’
Briar lets him, and moves on to the next room, wondering how long it’ll be before he catches up.