27. What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You—???
At the party they’re playing something with a beat, the bass pounding through the flagstones of the courtyard on the other side of the water.
Briar is leaning against the crumbling stone wall of the moat, watching the dark heads of ducks sail by, a silent flotilla only visible when the light catches them.
Bastian is standing just far enough away that only Briar’s fingertips would brush against him if they reached out an arm. He’s not said a word yet. Briar forces themself to wait.
‘What do you remember?’ he says eventually. He also seems to be watching the ducks - or maybe he’s not looking at anything at all.
Briar has spent such a long time trying not to think about this that it feels like a physical effort to drag it all up from the depths of their heart.
‘I remember that summer. You got your acceptance letter. You came over to my house to show me, because you thought . . . you were sure I’d have one, too.
But I didn’t. And it never came. You called me a few times, came to the door, but I .
. . wasn’t ready to see you. And then you left.
I thought you’d decided to stop talking to me, I didn’t know that you’d already gone to school. ’
Bastian pauses, nods. ‘And . . . that winter?’
Nothing, really. The vague impression of a bad Christmas, sitting in the playground alone, sulking over the roast. Going to bed and staying there.
Briar’s mum standing in their bedroom doorway, asking them to come and play cards, then depositing the cat on the covers and quietly walking away.
A hint of something else; wet grass and a grey sky.
‘I don’t know. I don’t remember you.’
Bastian is worrying at a jagged chip of stone in the wall, pressing the pad of his thumb into it again and again. ‘Do you know what the board of governors does here?’
Confused, Briar says, ‘Yes. Sort of.’
‘And did you know that my father is on the board?’
There’s a tightening of his voice as he says my father, familiar to Briar from their childhood. ‘Sort of. I knew he was involved in the school somehow. But . . . what does this have to do with Christmas?’
Bastian takes a deep breath, and finally turns to face Briar.
The intensity of his expression is frightening, like he’s about to deliver life-changingly bad news.
‘The board has access to a suppressed text that allows them to alter memory.’ He’s watching Briar closely as he speaks, but Briar still doesn’t understand, until Bastian says, ‘You can’t remember that Christmas because my father took it away. ’
‘Took it . . . away?’ Briar repeats. They barely even knew Bastian’s father. None of this makes sense. ‘But why would he—?’
‘Because I asked him to.’
‘But . . .’ Briar’s thoughts are a maelstrom; they feel like they might actually be falling, a nauseating lurch of vertigo like getting a drunken case of the spins, but they’re still standing upright, holding on to the wall. ‘Why?’
‘Because you were very upset,’ Bastian says quietly. ‘And I think you’ll be very upset again, now, if I tell you what happened. I . . . I know you think I’m completely depraved, but I did it for your own good. I knew you’d be happier this way.’
‘What the fuck?’ Bastian has clearly talked himself into believing this bullshit, but it won’t work on Briar.
‘You had no right to do that . . . Your father had no right.’ They think of Mr Wolfe probing into Briar’s mind, rewriting their history.
Taking something from them, without their permission. ‘Tell me. Right now.’
Bastian clears his throat and looks sharply down at his shoes, and that fear rises again in Briar, all their anger deflating.
‘I hurt you,’ they say eventually, their voice hoarse. ‘Didn’t I?’
Bastian’s forehead creases. He takes a half-step in Briar’s direction, puts his hand on the wall next to theirs, not quite touching. ‘What? Briar. No.’
‘But I thought . . .’ Blood on the grass, on Bastian’s palms. On Briar’s. A look on Seb’s face that Briar had never seen before: like he was scared of them, of what they might do. The clifftop. The twisted, pink body of a lamb born too soon. Seb had been crying. Seb never cried.
‘It was that horrible older boy,’ Bastian says grimly. ‘Jason Page. Do you remember him?’
Jason. Yes. Of course. Tall, brown hair, broad scowl.
He liked to follow Seb around town, to come up behind him in the shop and whisper slurs in his ear; to take his things, ruin them, then leave them in the dirt like they were nothing.
Seb’s favourite jumper. His sunglasses. A necklace of his mother’s.
‘I hated him,’ says Briar. ‘I remember that.’
‘Yes, well. So did I.’ Bastian speaks each word delicately, like the wrong combination might cause a dangerous chain reaction.
‘That Christmas, I saw you. Day after Boxing Day, the first time my mother let me out of her sight. I was in the village on my way to your house, hoping we could talk, and you came marching over to me and handed me a letter. I was so happy to see you - na?ve idiot - I asked if we could take a walk together and talk. You were silent the whole way, so I just kept talking, hoping you’d forgive me.
We were up in the back fields, and I was upset, and unfortunately .
. .’ Bastian pauses, clears his throat. ‘Unfortunately, Jason followed us. It was very poor timing on his part. You were not in the mood. He ambushed us, started taunting us with the usual . . . we were freaks, we were queers, you know how it went . . . and then he started hitting me. I wondered if you’d just let him. But . . . you didn’t.’
Briar still can’t remember. They still feel sick with nerves. ‘So there was a fight?’
Bastian takes a deep breath. ‘Yes. You . . . you tackled him. Punched him. A lot. It was . . . There was a lot of blood. And then I got involved, and . . . I could do the Work by then, a little, anyway, not that I had much control over it. He got hurt. Badly. You remember that?’
Blue flashing lights, the whole village watching. Briar’s mum consoling Elizabeth, who was absolutely beside herself. Briar was told later that it had taken them a day to find him, and he had no recollection of the incident. Nobody knew how Jason had ended up lying there, broken, on the ground.
He’d never come back to Worth Herring.
Briar’s fault. Seb’s fault. What the fuck. It would be so much easier to think all of this a lie, but Briar believes him. Their tongue feels thick as they ask, ‘What did you do?’
Bastian’s jaw is working, the tremor in his hand betraying his emotions even as he tries to sound blasé.
‘Look, it was an accident. It really was. We just wanted to get him away from us.’ We.
The last time Briar and Bastian had been a we, and Briar can’t even remember it, and a boy had nearly died.
‘And afterwards . . . I don’t know. You were ashamed of what we’d done.
We argued. You took it very badly. I think it was just all too much.
I went home with two black eyes and a bruise all the way down my back, it looked much worse than it was, but my mother screamed when she saw me.
Sent me to my father’s. And I told him what had happened.
’ His mouth twists. ‘In retrospect, he obviously used the Work to get the truth. But . . . I asked him to take it away from you. All of it. And he never . . . he hated us being friends, he thought you made me weak. He told me it would be a clean break, as if I’d gone to Temple and we’d never spoken again. Easier for everyone.’
Briar laughs hollowly.
‘So he did it. We came to the farm. I knew you’d be alone that early in the morning, in the yard.
I watched him do it. I regretted it, afterwards, I asked him to take it back, but he said no.
I . . . broke into his office and read the Working, trying to understand.
I thought maybe I could undo it. Stupid.
But then . . . I opened the letter you’d given me. ’
Briar doesn’t need to retrieve it from their pocket to know what it said.
I guess you’re a liar then Seb and you didn’t mean anything you said in your letter because you left anyway.
That’s okay because if I got in and you didn’t, I would have gone without you.
Nobody really stays friends forever it’s just something you say.
And I’m really happy now without you. School is great and my friends are great and my life is so much easier, and I don’t miss you at all.
Briar’s stomach squeezes unpleasantly, but it’s more like hearing a horrible story, an unpleasant piece of gossip that doesn’t involve them.
This version of themself who would write that letter, hurt someone that badly - Briar doesn’t know them.
There’s a distance that renders the whole thing unreal.
‘I want them back,’ Briar says. ‘My memories. All of it.’ Maybe there’s some piece of this puzzle missing, something that Bastian isn’t sharing.
Something to make it make sense. Briar couldn’t have sent Jason Page to the hospital, onto life support.
Because Briar isn’t the bad guy here. Never has been.
Bastian shakes his head. ‘I don’t think it’s possible.’
‘Aren’t you meant to be the most powerful scholar for decades?
’ Briar says, their voice rising to a shout.
‘Give them back. You had no right to do that, your father had no right, it’s a total fucking violation of - everything.
You can’t mess around with people’s minds, you can’t use everybody who can’t do the Work like they’re your fucking playthings. How could you do that to me?’
They’re standing too close to Bastian, and even though Bastian has height and the Work on his side, he looks almost . . . frightened.
‘I know,’ he says. ‘I thought I was doing the right thing. I was a child, and I was scared. I thought it was . . . what you would have wanted.’
‘That wasn’t for you to decide, Bastian! Fix it. There has to be a way to fix it.’
‘I’m sorry. I really am.’ His voice catches. ‘But I don’t think I can.’