21. What Have You Got Against Windows #2
‘I saw your mother last summer,’ Bastian says after a while, clearing his throat as he sweeps, jabbing the brush completely at random. ‘Holding a chicken.’
‘Yeah? What colour?’
‘Black.’
‘That’s Rudy. She likes to take herself for walks.’
Bastian nods again, serious, like Briar’s imparting deeply precious knowledge about Rudy the black chicken. ‘She was down near our drive. She said - well, she was . . . nice.’
‘She talked to you?’
‘Mmm.’
Briar can’t help but find this - the fact of the conversation, and the fact of it being hidden from them - annoying. But then, what could their mum have said about it that wouldn’t have sent Briar into a spiral? Basically nothing.
‘She said you were doing well,’ Bastian says, sweeping harder.
‘I am.’
Is this true? Briar’s not been doing terribly.
Sure, it was hard to get out of bed after Bastian left for Temple, and there have been quite a few incidents involving fists and fingernails over the years - mostly hidden from their mum - but they haven’t been getting into quite so many fights of late.
They have friends, although it’s not like they’re going to win any awards for being open-hearted and forthcoming any time soon.
Sometimes at night they lie awake imagining a dull, ordinary life stretching ahead of them as far as the eye can see and feel so sick their head spins.
Sometimes they turn an after-school altercation that would have petered out after a few exchanged insults into something physical, just because they can, and walk home with split knuckles feeling wildly, desperately alive.
Sometimes when their friends text on a Friday afternoon, they turn off their phone for the whole weekend, spend it watching films in bed after farm chores or walking the fields in no particular direction until they start to lose the light, and on Monday, lie through their teeth about all of this.
These things are probably normal. Hormonal, or something.
‘Right,’ Bastian says. ‘I mean, I didn’t ask. She just decided to tell me.’
He looks unbearably sad. Briar tortured themself with images of Bastian at Temple so many times over the years, but now they can see the grim reality: shuffled into underground caverns and half-drowned.
Publicly humiliated. Terrified. Alone. Briar can picture it so vividly - Bastian eleven and skinny and silent, mouth always set in a nervous little line, perpetually frowning, soft in all the wrong places.
The older scholars would have pegged him for an easy mark straight away. It makes Briar’s lungs ache.
Then he should have stayed at home, with me.
They keep going. At the next dorm, Briar goes to pull the cart in, but Bastian moves ahead to get to the door first.
‘This is my room.’
‘Oh,’ Briar says. ‘Okay. We’ll skip it.’
‘No, it doesn’t matter.’
Briar doesn’t understand, but they want to see Bastian’s room, so they don’t question it. Bastian unlocks the door himself, then steps back to let Briar enter, almost nervous, like he’s ushering an important guest into a hotel suite.
It looks like every other dorm in this corridor: cream walls, dark wood, the furniture chipped and scarred from many years of use.
The main difference is that it’s an enormous single, just the one bed and what looks like a working fireplace on the west wall, which Briar supposes is a perk of being a Mon - plus the fact that it’s spotless and utterly bereft of personal belongings.
No framed photos of family, no decoration on the walls.
The bookcase is neatly full, but you could have pulled it from a generic image search, bookcase.jpg.
There certainly aren’t any of Bastian’s mum’s romance novels here.
It’s eerie. His bedroom at Grove House had been full of Seb-flavoured miscellanea: a pond net for catching newts, a velvet cloak he wore to play Dracula in their two-man plays, chunky, brightly coloured books about bugs with built-in magnifying glasses, a plastic bust of Poe, photos of him and Briar Blu-Tacked onto every surface.
He’d learned to crochet from the grumpy housekeeper, and covered every surface with wonky granny squares and doilies.
This is a life wiped clean.
The desk is the only place that looks like him, albeit a much neater iteration. It’s covered with stacks of notebooks, a freshly polished green banker’s lamp residing over them. Briar wanders over to look without embarrassment. Bastian invited them inside, after all.
‘Wait,’ he says, when Briar reaches the desk. ‘There’s . . .’ He gets ahead of Briar, rummages in a drawer until he pulls out a battered copy of Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea.
It’s Briar’s copy. They hadn’t even noticed it was gone.
‘No idea why it’s here, but I certainly don’t want it.’ Bastian hands it over, and Briar looks down at the purple-clad wizard on the cover and feels a strange tightening in their throat.
‘You can keep it. I can’t read this shit any more.’
Bastian shakes his head. ‘I can’t either.’
The silence between them could stretch on and on.
Briar could pick up the mop and get to work, not that anything in here really needs cleaning.
Bastian could take the book, put it back in the drawer and carry on as if the conversation had never happened.
It would be easier to let it lie, to leave it all unsaid.
So it feels like a great physical effort - pushing too hard with a muscle too small - for Briar to break that silence and say, ‘Why?’
Bastian doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself, even in his own room. He goes to sit down on his bed, then thinks better of it. ‘Oh, I don’t know. For the same reason as you, I’d imagine.’
‘Not quite how we dreamed it.’
‘Yes,’ Bastian says, drumming his fingers on his own arm and wandering to the window.
‘Not at all. I . . . brought a tank with me. A terrarium. Because we thought . . . I’d thought that maybe I could choose a familiar.
Ridiculous, obviously, but . . . I was in such a panic over it, had to have one, couldn’t get to school and have nowhere to put my toad.
Drove Mrs Curtis mad. Knew I’d made a mistake as soon as I got here.
Or . . . it was made very clear to me, anyway. ’
Briar can’t think too hard about an empty frog tank. It’s too much.
‘The Trials—’ they start to say instead, but Bastian shakes his head.
‘I know how it must look. But they’re a test of will.
You can’t thrive in this world until you understand exactly what you’re capable of, and you can’t expect to know your limits until you’ve .
. . until you’ve been brought as low as you can go, and found the strength to come back.
I realised . . . during my first year, it made sense .
. . it was what my father had been trying to teach me all along. ’
‘Bastian. That’s stupid as fuck.’
‘No it’s not.’
‘But you used to be—’
‘You weren’t here,’ Bastian snaps, the words landing like a clean cut. ‘What else was I supposed to do?’
Briar takes a while to answer. ‘Not this.’
Bastian laughs this time. ‘It truly amazes me that you think you have the moral high ground now, after everything.’
‘What does that mean?’
Bastian’s whole face shutters. ‘You always thought you were the hero,’ he says quietly. ‘But that’s not how I remember you.’
Outside the dorm, the rare dazzling sunlight has been gradually dimming like somebody’s got their fingers on the switch. Now, the last of it blinks out.
‘I remember everything,’ Briar says. But that’s not quite true; the letter, sitting stripped of its envelope beside their pillow, tells a different story.
They finish the rest of the top floor dorms in a deeply uncomfortable silence.