34. Bad News for Your Least Favourite Finger
Everyone is tiptoeing around Briar at breakfast the next morning, like they’re liable to explode.
Briar, who awoke to find Bastian gone and feels bone-weary, is in no mood to placate them.
They can’t explain that the memory Working is now reversable without context, and they’re not willing to provide it.
Besides - the others should have warned Briar what was coming, if they’d known all along.
They’d just accepted that at the end of Briar’s time here, they’d be erased. Gone forever.
Hadley is the only one who seems completely impervious to the blanketing effect of a bad mood, but perhaps that’s because her baseline is to be generally aggrieved.
She piles food on her plate and then sits staring at her phone, bluetoothing messages across the refectory to girls at other tables.
It’s been so long since she painted her nails that they’re almost entirely unblackened.
‘Did you hook up with someone?’ Tate asks suddenly, when Briar reaches for the salt shaker.
‘What?’ Briar says, but their hand goes to their neck, fingers covering the damning bruise there. ‘No.’
‘Okay, liar,’ Tate says, frowning when Briar doesn’t smile back. ‘You’ve been kissing someone here.’
‘You know I kissed Hadley,’ Briar says. Hadley dismisses this with a flutter of her fingers.
‘Ha. We did not hook up, we kissed very briefly on the mouth. I’ve kissed my own aunt sluttier than that.’
‘I seriously hope that’s not true,’ Tate says. Hadley is about to retort when she glances over at Westby, who’s been completely silent since they all sat down, and freezes. ‘West! For fuck’s sake, no.’
He’s got a cigarette in his mouth, and as they watch, he absentmindedly lifts his heavy silver lighter and flicks it into life.
Tate and Hadley throw themselves on him hands-first like he’s a fizzing grenade, confiscating both cigarette and lighter, Hadley stubbing the former out on her plate while Tate pockets the latter.
‘Can’t a man smoke in peace?’ Westby says, doing his best and most natural impression of an elderly curmudgeon.
‘Not in the fucking refectory,’ says Hadley. ‘Don’t get kicked out with only a few weeks to go, West. And you’ve got to start going to your classes, they’re still monitoring absences.’
‘Oh, they can’t help me any more.’
‘I understand that,’ Tate says slowly, ‘but you should go anyway. Get through the exams. Just play their game for a bit longer, and then you can do what you like.’
Westby just absent-mindedly pats at his pocket, looking for his cigarettes again.
Briar pulls out their own notebook and lets the sound of the others arguing with a completely nonplussed Westby wash over them; there’s a particularly tricky bit of the green book that they’ve been trying to crack, the perfect excuse to detach from the conversation.
When they lean over to Westby and point out a carefully copied line, Westby glances at it and says, ‘That would negate itself, you wouldn’t have to worry about that. ’
‘Excuse me,’ Hadley says to Briar. ‘Can you not interrupt? We’re literally yelling at him right now.’
‘It’s not yelling,’ Tate insists. ‘It’s a pep talk. We’re pepping.’
Briar sighs and leaves them to it. Back upstairs in their bedroom, they pull the collar of their T-shirt down, looking in their small, circular shaving mirror for the evidence of Bastian’s mouth on their skin, and find absolutely nothing at all.
Briar understands, now, why they’d spent weeks in bed after that fateful Christmas.
They want to retreat there now. They’d thought of it as just more of the same from that fateful summer, devastated by losing Bastian, the feeling redoubling after a December without him confirmed what they’d suspected, that he was never coming back.
This is something completely different. The agony of knowing; the inescapable weight of themself.
Yes, Briar has always known that they’re too quick to anger, and that they express that anger the way they know best, with their fists.
It has always felt like a reasonable reaction to the world they live in, one where people can’t decide whether to call them a fag or a dyke, and settle on whichever feels right in the moment.
But admitting how much they like it? The moment their anger becomes force, and then pain, transformed, almost divine? That’s new.
As is the image of Jason on the ground, moaning through bloodied lips, and the knowledge that luck is the only reason Briar isn’t guilty of manslaughter.
‘Hello, miserable,’ Hadley says, when she catches up with them after lunch, letting themself back into the attic stairs. She’s got her hair in a ponytail; it makes her seem deceptively perky.
‘Not now, Hadley.’
‘Look, I’m sorry we didn’t tell you about the memory wipe,’ she says, like it’s a minor inconvenience. ‘Thought you’d have figured it out by yourself. Anyway, I need to talk to you about tomorrow - were you with Wolfe last night?’
Briar’s hands in Bastian’s hair; the way he’d woken in the night with a start, breathing hard, jolted from a nightmare, and then turned his face into Briar’s chest, instantly soothed by their arms around him, and fallen back asleep.
‘No.’
Hadley smacks her gum and squints. ‘Are you lying?’
‘I just . . . I don’t want to do this any more,’ Briar says, fumbling for the right key. ‘Sorry.’
‘What?’ Hadley straightens up, and when Briar gets the door open and hurries inside, she stops them from closing it again with her foot. ‘Are you chickenshit now, Jones?’
‘I’ll help you fuck up the Trial,’ Briar says, patience frayed. ‘I’ll help the pips, whatever you want. I’ll hold the camera, or the door. But from now on, I’m leaving Bastian out of this.’
‘Bastian,’ Hadley repeats, his name sounding bitter on her tongue. ‘You know he’s probably Working on you, right? In ways you can’t even understand. Whatever you’re feeling for him, it’s not real.’ When Briar says nothing, her eyes narrow. ‘Don’t tell me you’re falling for Fuckhead Revisited.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Briar says, and Hadley raises her eyebrows, removes her foot, and lets the door swing shut.
Any pride Briar had felt in their work before is gone. It feels meaningless, in the shadow of everything else. A waste of the limited time they have here.
They pull a side table out from the wall where it’s been awaiting appraisal, grab a Queen Anne dining chair that’s shedding horsehair from its torn upholstery, and sit down, spending the afternoon poring over the little green book.
It’s a miniscule, one-person protest against the cruelty of Temple, furious and futile, knowing that this will be useless and irrelevant once the gates lock behind them, and choosing to turn the page anyway.
When Briar strikes out towards the refectory that evening, wet-haired and hungry despite a day distinctly lacking in manual labour, Alistair Buckingham is waiting for them by the front door in his stupid cape.
‘Ah,’ he says, almost pleasantly. ‘There you are, Briar Jones. I think you should come with me. Don’t make a fuss.’
And Briar does. Alistair doesn’t even look back over his rugby-broadened shoulders to see if they’re following, just saunters along, past groups of laughing and chattering scholars, most of whom spot him coming and give him a wide berth.
It’s a truly beautiful evening. Cloudless and bright, illuminated by the pearly gleam of the nearly full moon.
As much as Briar hates Alistair - and they do hate him, even as they keep their eyes trained on him with a fervour that feels simpler than anything else they’ve felt recently - it’s not an unpleasant walk.
The destination is likely where the problems will begin.
Eventually they reach a small, circular tower, only one storey high, and Alistair says, ‘Hold this, will you?’ and hands Briar a large bottle of dark liquid, while he fishes in his pocket for a key.
The door unlocks with great reluctance, and then Briar follows Alistair into a gloomy, dank stairwell, not unlike the one that bypasses the lawn on the way to Eden.
Fear rattles through Briar then, as the door closes behind them and Alistair locks it, but the idea of turning back is unthinkable, so down they go.
They only spiral briefly, and then the corridor straightens out, and after less than a minute Briar is walking briskly into a room so cool and damp that the air seems to leave their lungs waterlogged, an amphibious sheen on their skin.
Alistair takes the bottle from Briar and slips it inside his cape.
Someone’s put a few of those LED-powered lanterns in a cluster in the middle of the stone floor, and Briar can see a couple of caped figures skulking in the shadows.
Their heart leaps, searching for Bastian - but if he’s there, he’s not making himself known.
‘Kneel,’ Alistair says, gesturing to the flagstones. Briar drops hard, the impact jarring, the cold from the floor immediately seeping through their jeans. They shiver, and Alistair smiles.
‘What do you want?’ Briar asks. They think of gunshot wounds and live rats and pencils thrust through eyelids, and feel so nauseated by fear it’s hard not to let it show on their face.
‘Right, well, the thing is,’ Alistair says, hands in his pockets, coming to loom over Briar with the foreboding presence of a deeply disappointed father, ‘I’m not fucking stupid.
Busy, but not stupid.’ Now he’s standing too close, Briar can see exactly how tired he looks: sunken and dehydrated, badly shaved, grey-faced under his tan.
Briar had been picturing meetings with the board of governors as dull formalities.
Now, they wonder if they’re something far worse.
‘I know Bastian,’ he says, his voice dropping to a menacing hush. ‘And I know what he would and wouldn’t do, and . . . this’ – he gestures at Briar’s general person – ‘would be beneath him.’
‘Thanks,’ Briar says, idiotic with nerves.