23. Won’t Somebody Think of the Golf
Briar is in a strange mood for days. They tense for an encounter with Alistair around every corner, but when they finally do spot him from across the lawn, he simply mutters darkly in one of his friends’ ears and keeps walking.
Whatever Bastian has said to him to keep him at bay must be holding - but Briar still feels nervous and out of sorts.
It doesn’t help that the weather continues to be miserable and the third Trial is already underway, the pips in full servitude, signs of it everywhere. Briar’s indignation flares ten times daily, but there’s nothing they can really do about it - it’s too broad, too far-reaching.
Hadley was right. What they’ve already done to disrupt this madness is nowhere near enough.
Prospective scholars, practically infants, strain under the weight of other people’s things - sprinting down corridors with pure terror on their faces, clearly late to carry out some humiliating task for the upper years - and cry.
So much crying, even though they’re obviously trying to hold back their tears.
It’s almost impossible to pass an alcove, windowsill or niche without discovering one or a whole bushel of pips red-faced and wary, flinching when they see Briar approach, not fully able to relax even after they’ve realised that Briar isn’t about to start hammering them with demands.
On Wednesday evening, Briar walks past a boy on his knees, cleaning the stone steps outside Eden with a toothbrush.
‘Toothbrushes are nothing,’ Westby says at dinner. ‘Although it can be hard to get a new one, once you’re here. I was brushing my teeth with my finger for a month. I hated the human footstool. They cracked one of my ribs, I only found out much later when it was still giving me trouble.’
‘The human footstool?’ Hadley says. ‘That’s baby stuff. Bottom tier. Sometimes I forget how easy you had it, West, and so do you.’
‘Sorry, but there was a crack in my rib, and if you remember correctly—’
‘This guy from seventh year told me to come and serve drinks at a party,’ Hadley says, ‘and when I showed up, there was no party.’ She picks up a chicken drumstick and splits it violently in half.
‘It was just him, and he was in bed under the sheet, and he was definitely . . . look, he was fucking touching himself, and when I tried to leave, he just told me he’d called me to serve drinks, so I’d better pour him a drink or else. ’
From the expression on both Westby and Tate’s faces, this story has never been told in quite this configuration before.
Briar sucks in a breath. ‘That’s—’
‘Yeah, I know what it is, thanks.’ Another drumstick bites the dust. ‘But I wasn’t . . . I don’t know, I didn’t actually see him, I just knew what he was doing. I mean, I was eleven, obviously, but I knew enough.’
‘Who was it?’ Tate says, and Hadley shrugs and abandons her chicken massacre to chug some Diet Coke.
‘How, exactly, would that information help now?’
Westby seems quite outraged. ‘Well, maybe we could pay him a little visit after graduation.’
‘Oh, yeah, I bet he’d be so scared. I don’t need your pity. People’ve had much worse. Tate had it worse.’
‘Oh, come on. Worse than . . . that?’
‘I never said worse,’ Tate says, shaking his head.
‘But . . . you can tell how much they love it, when it’s a Black kid.
Probably anyone who’s not white. They can pretend it’s all a level playing field and that everybody’s treated just as badly, but there was this fucking .
. . glee on their faces ordering me around, getting me to do the most demeaning shit.
Looking at each other in this . . . happy disbelief, like they were getting away with telling a racist joke right in front of me.
Which, obviously, they were doing too, constantly.
There’s a huge difference between telling some .
. . some rich white kid that he’s ugly, and lazy, and stupid, knowing that when he’s done being a pip the world is going to roll out the red carpet for him, and saying that shit to somebody who survives that week and this school and then gets told all that and worse for the rest of his life. ’
Into the silence that follows this, Westby pats Tate on the arm, and says, ‘No, you’re right. It’s horse shit. I’m sorry.’
‘I’m not asking you to apologise,’ Tate says. ‘I’m just saying. It’s different. But it’s different if you’re queer, too, as you well know.’
‘Ha. First year, I heard slurs the human mind can barely comprehend,’ says Westby. ‘I heard slurs that hadn’t even been invented yet.’
Hadley jabs at her broccoli. Briar expects her to say something about the next Trial, to try to rally them back into action, but instead she says, ‘This school really is populated by the sickest of sick fucks.’
Briar knows better than to tell any of the children crying in the hallways that perhaps they should call their parents and ask to go home, but they have started carrying around tissues and bars of chocolate, to parcel out silently as needed.
On the way back from dinner Briar bumps into one pip - the blonde girl Briar had seen in the pool at the second Trial, short and pointy-chinned - standing in the hallway of Eden with a glazed look in her eyes, unmoving, like she’s posted sentinel outside the door.
‘Hey,’ Briar says, waving a hand in front of her face. ‘What’s up?’
She glances up at Briar with an expression of unmitigated fear.
‘I - I don’t know,’ she says, glancing back towards the dorm. ‘I don’t think I’m supposed to leave, in case they want me to go back in.’
Inside, Briar hears loud, boyish laughter, and bristles. ‘Come on,’ they say. ‘You can go. If they get angry later, tell them a guy in a cape needed you for something. They can’t be mad about that.’
‘Oh,’ the girl touches her wrist, then the collar of her dress, her eyes shining. She doesn’t let the tears fall. Briar wonders if she actually can leave, or if she’s being compelled by the Work. ‘Are you sure?’
Briar wants to march into that room and bloody the noses of every boy still laughing. They want to keep hitting them until they learn their lesson, until they can’t get back up.
Instead, they say a very firm ‘Yes,’ and then stay until it’s clear she can move, and she’s scurried out of sight.
After that, the girl - whose name turns out to be Evie - starts sidling up to Briar every time she sees them coming.
‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ she says one day, mouth full of chocolate, as she follows Briar down the crooked hallway of the main building.
She’s got another friend in tow, a very skinny boy with a bandage on his hand and a haunted quality around the eyes.
Briar thinks his name might be Orpheus, poor dude.
‘Because I think you’re a girl, but he says you’re a boy. ’
‘Neither,’ Briar says. ‘I’m a janitor.’
‘Oh,’ says Evie, nodding seriously. ‘Okay.’
On Friday morning, Briar is in the attic taking a break from sorting through books to check for mould and damp damage, watching a spiky-legged false widow spider eat a mummified ladybird in the corner of the windowsill.
They’re admiring their handiwork - at least two thirds of the attic sorted, the enormous pile of detritus shrinking by the day, finds neatly sorted into sections and sub-sections - when Eugenia appears, slightly out of breath.
‘I hate coming up here,’ she says, followed by a loud and ostentatious sneeze. ‘It’s too hot. You are needed at the counsellor’s office.’
‘The counsellor?’ Briar says, wiping a lovely sweat-and-dust mix from their hands onto their very practical knee-length cargo shorts, which Westby had called ‘boner killers’ when they’d passed each other in the refectory at breakfast.
‘Mmm. I don’t know. They asked me to find you, I have found you.
It’s by the front office. Now I will go back downstairs and drink an iced coffee to celebrate.
’ She pauses to glance around the attic.
‘This is looking good, by the way. How long has it been, three weeks nearly? So maybe you will have it done in four.’
Briar needs to slow down, then, or their stint at Temple will be over before it’s even really begun. Not too much. They’ll maintain plausible deniability. Stay helpful, just not at full throttle.
They find the counsellor’s office, helpfully marked with a polished bronze plaque, and then hover outside. The door is closed, voices murmuring within, and it feels rude to knock. What if somebody’s having a breakdown in there? What if Briar’s knock is the thing that really tips them over the edge?
In the end, the door opens a crack, and Briar realises that Tate is standing on the other side of it.
He opens it wider so that Briar can step inside, and Briar discovers that Westby is sitting in the chair opposite the counsellor, a grey-haired woman with a ponytail, who’s on the phone.
Hadley is leaning against a bookcase, looking at the floor.
‘Hold on,’ the counsellor says, glancing up at Briar. ‘I believe the . . . the cleaner is here now.’
The cleaner. Right.
The phone is handed to Briar without explanation, and there’s a woman on the other end, her voice both round and clipped, like every word is a balloon she’s tying off violently at the end.
‘You’re the driver?’ she says, and Briar glances up at Westby, who’s gazing into the middle distance and doesn’t notice. ‘But you also clean?’
‘I can drive,’ Briar replies uncertainly, like they’re suddenly not sure.
‘Right. I would usually send a car, but apparently we’ve maxed out the service . . . I don’t know the business pin, and none of his lot want to make themselves useful. Pay is three a day and I won’t negotiate, so please don’t try my patience.’
‘Three,’ Briar repeats, still lost.
‘Yes, three. Three hundred. Don’t talk to me about London rates, because we’re not in London, more’s the pity, and I assume you’re driving some sort of . . . van.’