30. Breakfast for Dinner
By the time Briar gets back to the tower, everyone’s fast asleep.
Briar’s fully aware that this will cause problems, probably sooner rather than later; Dames will discover three beds empty, raise the alarm, start going from dorm to dorm in search of lost charges.
They’re so tired they almost don’t care, but they dutifully start shoving shoulders. Nobody wants to get up.
Briar cranks their laptop’s volume up to full, scrubs the file back to the start and presses play on the opening credits of Casablanca.
The Warner Brothers fanfare jolts everyone rudely awake: Hadley swearing immediately to kill Briar in a number of increasingly creative ways, Tate’s face crumpling tragically, like a prematurely awoken baby.
‘Where’ve you been?’ Westby says, instantly and completely awake.
Briar can’t tell the truth. Hadley would be thrilled. The other two, not so much.
‘Just went for a walk.’
Tate’s eyes go from Briar’s dishevelled hair to their swollen lips, but he says nothing.
‘And did you . . . have a nice time?’ Hadley says meaningfully, sitting up straight, her phone dropping to the floor with a crack.
‘I did,’ Briar says. ‘Might . . . do it again, tomorrow.’
Hadley raises her eyebrows but says nothing, retrieving her phone. They all disperse sleepily, Tate putting his arm around Westby as they walk out of the door, with that warm familiarity borne of many years spent casually touching.
Bastian and Briar would probably touch like that, if they’d not lost their teen years together. Instead, everything feels new and dangerous, every brush of lip and skin like it might be the thing that fatally crosses the line.
Briar follows the boys until they all reach Griffin and Tate peels off, and then exchanges a grunt of goodbye with Westby at his floor.
Upstairs, they dig out their contacts and get wearily into bed, thinking of bruised knuckles and blood on the grass, the thought like a shadow on an X-ray, before they dredge up the old fantasy again: the first week at Temple, this time with Bastian by their side.
Bastian and Briar glued to each other as they navigate campus, discovering the secrets of Temple, delighted and horrified; facing the Trials together, debriefing at the end of each agonising day, whispering back and forth before lights out; Bastian coming to the Work, realising he’s stronger than everybody else, not knowing why, and Briar . . .
That’s where Briar draws a blank. Honestly, would they have been pleased for Bastian? Supported him? Fallen into step next to him as his happy sidekick, an afterthought - a footnote in the story of Bastian’s great and confusing power?
No. That doesn’t sound right, not even to Briar.
It might have had its own, different ugliness: the jealousy, the feeling that Briar would be pushed aside.
Alistair Buckingham probably would have marched right up to Bastian in that reality, too, and maybe Bastian would have been sick of Briar by then, their griping, their envy, and would have taken that proffered hand all the same.
Or maybe not, some part of Briar thinks, with flat rationality. Maybe if he hadn’t been alone and sad and frightened, he would have been someone completely different. But optimism loses both the battle and the war.
On Monday, Briar opens a trunk tucked into the northeast corner of the attic and discovers, carefully wrapped in plastic, two vintage suits that look bold and expensive. The trunk is worn monogrammed scarlet leather, and the date on the train ticket inside is 1968.
On their lunch break, Briar leaves a note on the board for Tate, and at three o’clock they furtively let him into the dark of the stairwell, locking the door behind them.
‘Oh my God,’ Tate says when he sees the suits, dropping to his knees in reverence, peeling back the plastic. ‘These are Mr Fish. He dressed Bowie! Who the fuck came to Temple with Fish in their luggage? Maybe that’s why they hid them. Shit, Briar, I owe you like . . . everything. Are you sure?’
‘If anyone ever asks,’ Briar says, ‘which they won’t, I’ll say they must have been in one of the many mouldy old cases I threw out at the tip.’
Tate’s hands pause on the lapels of a suit, like he doesn’t quite want to believe it’s his yet. ‘You could sell them, though. These could be worth a couple of grand.’
Briar swallows down a couple of grand and pushes past it. ‘Nah. They search the car every time I leave. I wouldn’t even know where to start, and they’d technically be stolen goods. You take them. Just don’t wear them here.’
Tate snorts. ‘As if I would. People here call me a bender when I’m wearing joggers, why would I bother dressing up for them? God, these are so good. Thank you.’
Briar expects him to leave with his plunder, but he starts looking through the rest of the pile.
It’s Briar’s ‘maybe’ section: furniture that looks salvageable, long-lost belongings.
Next to it, the stacks of books in good condition.
Then a much larger pile of books in partial decay, followed by books that are rotten, or already half-eaten by Westby’s nemesis, the ancient and deplorable silverfish.
Texts that seem to contain Workings have their own special section, although some of them are obviously defective or incomplete.
Irreparably broken things are on the other side, with the rubbish bags full of stuff that’s either illegible or slimy.
There are vast swathes of floor visible now, a mishmash of various shades of hardwood, parts bleached by the sun from the windows, parts stained dark black where Briar has attempted to wipe up miscellaneous sludge.
Tate unearths a heavy, ominous-looking metal box in military green and cracks it open to reveal a large compass as Briar drifts back to the nearest mess and picks up a book from a partially collapsed bookcase, so used to the rhythm of cleaning and tidying by now that their hands move without thinking.
This book is bound in dark-green leather with intricate marbling on the sides - green is probably the fourth most popular choice in this attic, after brown, scarlet and navy - but it doesn’t have any of the fancy gold leaf or other flourishes that seem common in thaumaturgical texts.
Briar flips it open. It looks much newer than some of the others they’ve found, the hand-lettering harder to read.
‘Why don’t they mass-produce these for all the scholars?’ they ask, as Tate turns in a circle, trying to find north.
‘Doesn’t work. You have to put the work in, and sort of .
. . reproduce the Working as you make a copy, like with translation, and that’d be way too hard.
You can actually learn an entire text by somebody reading it to you, explaining the meanings, that seems to count as putting in the graft - it’d just be agonising.
The audiobook from hell. Man, I thought north was just like .
. . up. But I guess I’m just imagining that the main school entrance is south, for no reason. The sports hall is actually east.’
Briar starts reading the introduction, but it’s nearly incomprehensible with legalese.
They skip ahead a few pages - there’s something about repair, although it then seems to digress into a long section about specifications of quality.
Half the words feel made up, but it’s similar enough to Westby’s Working that Briar gets the gist. It’s only when they reach the end of the second page that they realise what they’re doing.
‘Oh,’ they say to Tate, who’s holding up a pair of very tarnished ruby drop earrings to his face to check the effect, using his camera’s phone as a mirror. ‘I think this one’s another fake.’
‘Really?’ says Tate. ‘Maybe it was just an attempt, like West’s. Weird that they bothered to bind it, though.’
‘Yeah,’ Briar says. ‘I’ve found a few like that. What’s force majeure?’
‘I’ll lend you my legal dictionary, if you want. Although Workings use a very bastardised version of the English legal system, so you’d also need my notes. Some of it’s contextual. It’s not really worth it, to be honest, especially if what’s in there is wrong.’
‘I want to read it,’ Briar says, so Tate shrugs, and later, after Briar’s done for the day, they pick up the legal dictionary and a neat folder of Tate’s handwritten first-year notes and then sit on their bed with the smuggled book, trying to make sense of it all.
It’s so hard it’s all-consuming, which is what Briar needs, to stop them from probing the gap in their memories like a missing tooth.
At seven, Briar is waiting in the driver’s seat of Eugenia’s truck, convinced Bastian isn’t coming right up until the moment he opens the door.
He’s holding a fancy travel mug, and he’s got his hair up in a low bun; he’s wearing all black again - soft open-knit polo, dark cardigan, loose trousers nipped in at the waist with a designer belt - and Briar looks down at the cargos, tank and short-sleeved shirt they’re wearing and wonders if they should have dressed for a date.
‘Hi,’ Briar says.
Bastian takes a sip of what smells like herbal tea, his eyes on the gate ahead of them. ‘Can you please just drive?’
Briar drives. It’s tempting to head for the pub after security, but the ones nearest to Temple are risky, and the ones they know further out are too close to home.
The radio roars into life as Briar heads for the A-road, and Bastian reaches out and stabs at the buttons, stopping when he finds some inoffensive classical music.
Briar wonders if he’s chosen it because he likes it, or because he thinks Briar will like it, or if it just feels like safe neutral ground.
Bastian watches the evening slip by past the window, and only turns to look at Briar when they’re indicating to turn into the car park of their destination.
‘Good God. Seriously?’
‘I’ve never been,’ says Briar. ‘I want pancakes.’