Out of the Woods - 13. Mrs. Harding

The Oxford rejection letter came in the post a week later. I wasn’t even invited to interview.

Seated in the middle of the stairs, still holding the letter, I couldn’t help but concede that it was a setback. It was a rejection. I’d never been rejected before. Everything I had set out to achieve in life, I had done so, and I had delighted in doing it with that languid, artful disinterest that was my trademark. Everything I cared about I succeeded at—everything I failed at, I didn’t care for in the least. I’d won the Art Prize three years in a row.

But I had wanted to go to Oxford, even though I pretended I hadn’t. I hadn’t even been invited to interview.

It felt as if I had tripped, as if I was still in the process of tripping. It felt as if all balance was gone and I was falling, falling through the air. There was no ground to meet me, just that jarring displacement—just the knowledge that I was floating, and I had nowhere to place my feet. I wondered vaguely how many Oxbridge candidates would be seated as I was now, in the middle of the stairs, holding the same letter, frowning as I was now; I wondered how many were holding a different letter, laughing instead. I suddenly realised that school would be filled with the excited babble of kids who’d gotten an interview.

Where was my family in this? Why weren’t they there, seated beside me, my father’s hand on my shoulder, my mother’s hand in one of mine, Victoria making those witty and ironic comments that I knew she could make, that she knew how to make, that she chose to make sometimes, in those fleeting moments when the fog around her was clearer—why weren’t they there with me? It had seemed such an intelligent idea to steal away with the letter before they realised it was there—it had seemed the right thing to do, because I didn’t want them, I didn’t need them, they weren’t good for me, had never been good for me. I hated them.

But it was so lonely on the stairs. They were my family—they should be there. They should have known, without being told, somehow. They should be normal enough to support me.

I shouldn’t have had to do it alone.

A thought wormed its way out of my subconscious; it slithered into the forefront of my mind. I calmly reached for it and squeezed, squeezed until it popped—I threw it away.

It was too late, of course—I’d seen it. I’d seen it and I’d heard it and I’d read it in that fleeting moment before I’d thrown it away, and the present was suddenly tainted by the uneasy idea that nothing was going right lately.

Nothing was going right.

I wondered into Victoria’s room, where she was applying makeup by the mirror. I sat on the bed and watched the progress of the mascara stick around her eyes, allured into forgetting by the interaction between bristle and lash, and that look of concentration, the tip of her tongue poking out of her fierce little mouth like mine did when I painted, the way she barely acknowledged my presence, so engrossed in the activity as she was. Like I was, when I painted.

How much of our similarities, I wondered, were inescapable? How much of it had been decided before even we were born, that we were fated to be, to live or perhaps not to live at all but relive, just mindlessly reenact the lives of countless ancestors, my father, my grandfather, my mother—how much of it was written in heredity? How much of this nightmarish reality of ours was immovable? She glanced at me for the first time and started slightly; said nothing, and attempted to carry on regardless. After a moment she sighed and put down the mascara.

‘I can’t do a good job of it with you watching me,’ she said finally. ‘I’m getting it all over my face.’

She left the room to wipe it off, and I wandered to her old position by the mirror, where my face looked lost, eyes wide and hollow like a clay figure from a Tim Burton film, cheekbones too sharp, skin too tight, drawn, sallow, pale, and my lips fiercely red, red and small and fragile like a rosebud, fierce like Victoria’s lips as she concentrated on the movement of the mascara stick around the crescent of her eyes. I hated that I had her lips, or that she had mine, or that collectively we had our father’s—because they weren’t our mother’s, whose lips were thin—and perhaps it ought to have calmed me, the knowledge that a part of me was unrelated to our mother, but I was dismayed to find that it didn’t. Perhaps I’d even have preferred my mother’s lips, in that moment, her cruel, thin, gash of a mouth, because something within my father had drawn him to my mother, something I couldn't see—and how was I to know that this thing, whatever it was, was not also that very same thing that caused the formation of his small, full, heart-shaped mouth? How was I to know that my lips weren’t of themselves nothing more than a symptom, the flower of a hideous fungal growth, that would cause me to live out my father’s life mindlessly, like an automaton, entirely heedless of the past?

I looked tired, so I went to sit down on the bed. I felt suddenly dizzy. Beside me lay her little pink camera, innocuously enough—it was scarcely visible amongst the girly patchwork of her duvet. I almost missed it. I picked it up aimlessly, feeling the weight of it against my palm; I turned it on and played back the photographs.

When she returned everything was different, and I reeled and recoiled. I dropped the camera but too late, and she saw; and her eyes widened, her fierce little mouth open minutely, moving slightly, uselessly, and her pupils twitched, tiny movements, darting here and there for escape. For a horrid moment we stayed perfectly silent, I on the bed and she stood over me, mascara still in hand; but it felt very much like there was a third person in the room, seated beside me, formerly innocuous in pink. We felt the camera on the bed as if it glowed, or shrieked.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I stood up.

‘We have to get to school,’ I croaked, and she nodded.

‘Okay.’

***

Mr Alders handed me the result of my Oxford entrance examination that morning; he had on his desk a corresponding sheet filled with percentages and ratios, upper and lower quartiles, means, medians and modes; he turned to me and observed me with an expression that, if not sympathy, was such a close relation to it that another person might well have mistaken the two and nobody could have blamed them.

‘You came top in the year for the English exam, Mr Laurence. You should be proud of that.’

I glanced up from the examination script in my hands.

‘But I didn’t even get an interview.’

He frowned. ‘No. I don’t really understand it, myself. I suppose it was your extracurriculars that let you down in the end.’

It wasn’t the occasion for our usual intellectual jousting. I didn’t have the heart for it. He placed his hand on my shoulder comfortingly, and I was made vaguely aware of the enormity of the occasion by that gesture, breaking hundreds of years of strict social norms—but that was it. I barely noted the sincerity of it and the sympathy behind it. I was frowning; I smothered it. I suddenly remembered Sophie’s frown, and how it spread—how it seemed to take up most of her face.

The corridors were longer than I remembered; I waded through them like a river, quietly staggering against the current. I spent the day with my head down, quashing the shame of having been defeated.

I didn’t even get an interview.

***

‘You’re antsy tonight,’ he remarked.

‘I am not.’

‘Yes, you are. You haven’t stopped moving since you sat down. What crawled up your arse and tickled?’

‘“What crawled up your arse and tickled?” Is someone paying you to talk such shit?’

He blushed, and tried to cover it with an eye-roll. ‘I was going to offer you a massage, you know, because you look like you could do with it. But if you don’t want it…’

I almost laughed.

How could I possibly not want it? I knew it would be agony, whether or not he was actually any good at it; every moment would be a nightmare from which I couldn’t wake, misery for me, misery skirting ecstasy all the way. Even if I knew I would hate every minute of it I was still dying for it—how could I possibly not want it?

How could I possibly admit that I did?

‘Of course I don’t want it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you’re a Neanderthal, Tom. You’re the missing link between us and the apes. And I am in the possession of a particularly delicate bone structure.’

He snorted. He stood up with an air of finality and rubbed his hands together. ‘Are you quite finished?’

‘You’ll break me in half.’

‘Well, I certainly won’t feel bad about it.’

‘It won’t be intentional. You can’t help lacking opposable thumbs.’

‘Shut up already.’ He reached me and mussed up my hair. ‘Just you wait. I’ve been told I’d make a good masseur.’ Smirking, his hands manoeuvred me mutely so that I was facing away from him. ‘Apparently I’m pretty awesome.’

‘Who told you that?’ I snorted weakly. ‘Your mother?’

But really, as his hands found their way to my shoulders and squeezed, I was shaking.

He started a rhythm. There was something almost musical about the way in which it grew, slowly, as he dug deeper into my shoulder, into my neck, his strong fingers working so slowly, agonisingly slowly; and fireworks coursed through my veins, fireworks and carbonated water and molten gold; and I flushed and grew cold, and flushed and grew cold.

It’s nothing, I thought. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s vasodilation. It’s blood, and it’s chemicals, and it’s the opening and closing of veins, arteries, capillaries, controlling my internal temperature.

It’s nothing.

‘Is this okay?’ he said after a moment.

No, I thought. I thought it so loud that I was convinced, for the briefest of moments, that he had heard—that he had to have heard, because if he hadn’t I would die, right there. I would lie down, my head buried in his lap, and I would die. Because I couldn’t say yes—I couldn’t, I couldn’t do it, nothing would be worse than for me to say yes, because it would come out wrong. It would come out a squeak or a gasp, or else a low groan, like a yes cried out in the final, fierce, foam-crested wave of orgasm—it would come out wrong. And it was wrong, anyway; it was utterly wrong because it wasn’t good, as he’d asked. His hands on me, gently but firmly, slowly, kneading my shoulder… It was unbearable.

Shudders wracked through me and I found myself suspended somewhere between laughing and crying, the strangest, half-formed place, walking a tightrope as thin as a razor; I burned where he touched me but I was cold, very cold everywhere else, withering and dying everywhere else. He asked me again if it was better, his voice slightly alarmed this time; he stopped altogether, his hand falling away, and I almost leaned to follow it.

‘Elijah?’

I sighed.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing’s wrong. It was fine. Definitely not the best massage I’ve had though. I reckon your mum was trying to make you feel good about yourself.’

He whacked me over the side of my head.

‘You arsehole.’

I stood on legs that shook and I made my way to the bathroom. ‘Hurry up,’ he called as I left. ‘We’ve got work to do.’

I glanced in the mirror, and I was dismayed, because I had never looked more alive. The flush on my cheeks, usually so pallid, that spread over my nose, that made my lips redder, that gave my eyes a bright, fevered look; the faint, glowing sheen on my forehead. I’d never looked better.

I looked like that constantly around Tom, because I was constantly flushed with my feelings for him: I was drowned in them, still drowning in them, utterly submerged to the point where function became difficult, rationalising became difficult, controlling anything beyond the tone of my voice became impossible.

I looked like that constantly around Tom—as good as I could ever look. And it made no difference at all because he’d never notice.

I sat on the edge of the bath; I lifted my legs into the air and focused on remaining balanced. If I fell forward I’d smack my head against the sink; backwards and I’d break my neck on the tiled wall. I stayed like that until the muscles of my torso began to shake, and then I clambered into the bath and lay there, closing my eyes.

I felt the blush leave me, slowly, until I stopped sweating. I flushed the chain and wandered back to his room.

He was texting someone, his back against the bed. His hair was in his eyes, his gaze down, his tongue poking just out between his lips as he did when he concentrated. He was smiling minutely. I wished that I could see his eyes at that moment because their green was so lovely and bright—so unusual, even for green eyes, the colour not even slightly muddy but deep, flecked with blue and yellow and gold, deep like emeralds. They weren’t as large as mine, or as expressive as mine, or as fine as mine, and he certainly never bothered to use them to his advantage like I did, but to me they were utterly beautiful.

But he was smiling as he texted. Why was he smiling?

I sat down next to him, too close against his hip, banging into him and knocking him off balance. He pushed me back as I knew he would—and when he did his hand came nearer and I stole a glance at the phone.

‘Sophie, eh?’ I said, each individual feature on my face working in perfect synchronisation to achieve a mischievous, sly whole.

An uncaring whole.

He blushed.

‘Yeah, we’ve been texting.’

I would have been happy to leave it at that. I was sure, at that moment, that I couldn’t take much more than that—because I could persuade myself of many things, many complex, difficult things that other people could never persuade themselves of, but if he said another word then I wouldn’t be able to persuade myself that he didn’t really have feelings for her, that nothing had happened, that nothing would happen between them. I turned away to end the conversation, but he turned with me.

He wanted to talk to me about it. He was glad I’d noticed. He wanted to talk to me about it, and he wanted me to be his best friend.

‘I really like her,’ he said, slowly, carefully—not because he suspected I liked him but because he suspected I still liked her. ‘Do you… Do you think she likes me?’

No, I inwardly screamed.

And inside I was heaving and groaning; inside a whole universe was violently being born and, violently, collapsing in on itself. Inside a hurricane was raging. Cold hands clawed at me, stealing my eyes, stealing my throat, stealing the lining of my stomach. I’d always known I’d hate it if Tom ever found anyone else—I’d always been well aware of it. But even so, not even in my most convoluted imaginings did I ever believe it would feel like this.

And nothing had even happened yet—but how would I feel when it did? Why did it have to happen today, of all the days it might happen?

Why did it have to happen today?

He was seated on the bed waiting for a reply from me, his bottom lip anxiously between his teeth. I couldn’t look at him. I turned away to the computer and began aimlessly fiddling, saving the document we had written ten minutes earlier.

I needed to smile, I knew. I needed to be able to turn to him, once our work was saved to disk, and grin. But what sort of grin? I’d pick it, as if out of a catalogue, knowing that the control would give me some satisfaction. If I had that, I could push the pain deeper.

Chris’ grin, I decided. Chris’ sly, slippery, couldn’t-care-less grin. That grin that I hated and that grin that made me hard; the grin that said I could do anything, and anything could be done to me, and none of it would touch me—none of it would ever find where I was hiding.

I nailed it perfectly. ‘I haven’t discussed you with her,’ I said. I cocked an eyebrow. ‘Do you want me to put in a good word?’

And he sagged visibly. He collapsed into the bed, his relief spreading from his eyes, over his face, loosening all of his limbs. ‘Would you?’ he asked.

I shrugged. ‘Why not?’

‘But, I mean—do you talk to her?’

‘Yes, Tom. I talk to her.’

He blushed. ‘No, I mean… Even though you broke up?’

Of course I talked to her. I had managed to convince her, as I always did, that the break-up was her fault. She practically believed it was her idea. She was so sure it was all her doing that she texted me every other day just to alleviate her own crippling guilt.

And I answered, despite that speaking to her made me sick.

‘Yeah, we talk. It’s fine.’ I flopped onto the bed and buried my face in his duvet. I wondered whether, the next time I did so, Sophie would have done it too.

I wondered whether I’d flop down onto the bed one day and smell her instead.

God, I ached. It was fast becoming unbearable. I was the cleverest person I knew, undoubtedly, cleverer than anyone else—even those few kids that beat me academically had nothing on me, not really, because I never revised. I delighted in the knowledge of my own cleverness. But why could I not solve this particular problem?

Why couldn’t it just go away?

Because I knew that the opposite would never happen—Tom would never fall in love with me. It would never progress, no matter how I wanted it to; no matter how I inwardly begged him to like me, to love me, to even just hold me, he wouldn’t. So why couldn’t I figure out another way?

Why did it have to happen today?

He took out The Darjeeling Limited and made to play it but I shook my head. I got up and rummaged around in his DVD drawer, and pulled out Apocalypse Now.

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

He frowned. ‘But it’s so…’

‘It’s so what?’

‘Depressing.’

‘It’s not depressing. It’s a mind-fuck, and I can really do with a mind-fuck right now.’

He leered at me. ‘Just a mind fuck?’

This time I couldn’t even pretend it was funny.

***

Before long Mr Harding knocked on the door to inform us that dinner was ready. I thought of how many times I’d watched him do that—seen him perform that very same action from my space besides Tom on the bed. It was such an insignificant little thing, a ritual taking no longer than thirty seconds—and yet it was such an integral part of my life with the Hardings that I couldn’t ever imagine a time in which that little routine might not happen. I remembered the night we got drunk in the woods together on Toby’s alcohol—he had informed us that dinner was ready on that evening as well.

How different I had felt the last time around—how less contorted. Things had seemed simpler only a few weeks ago.

Or perhaps they had never been simple.

I was no company at dinner that evening. I barely ate. He laughed across from me, talking nonsense that I didn’t understand; they all talked nonsense. I didn’t understand a word of it. And yet it didn’t seem to matter that I didn’t understand, and I felt I might cry for love for them, that beautiful family that I would never really be a part of; suddenly I was drowning in it, in both affection and melancholia, sweet and heavy and choking.

How I didn’t want it to change; how I never, ever, wanted it to change.

After dinner we moved to clear the table when Mrs Harding held me back. She directed me to the sofa wordlessly, and the fog was too thick for me to perceive her intention before I’d sat down and it was too late.

‘Elijah,’ she said, coming to sit on the sofa with me, where I could smell her perfume, and that intangible scent of maternity she had always seemed to me to personify. ‘Elijah, darling, what’s the matter?’

I hadn’t realised I’d been that obvious. I looked up to find her hand already on my arm, her expression kind and concerned. In her quiet way she had always been able to lull me, to gently upset my balance, and once I had discovered it I found speaking to her for any great length of time uncomfortable. She was very different from my own mother.

I shook my head quickly.

‘Nothing, Mrs Harding. I’m just tired, I think.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘We’ve known each other long enough for you to call me Claire, dear. And we’ve known each other long enough for me to know that you are not just tired. Tom talks about you all the time, you know. You’re like a second son to us, Elijah, and we’re worried about you.’

I shook my head. ‘There’s nothing wrong, Mrs Harding.’

‘Claire.’

‘There’s nothing wrong, Claire. I’d tell you if there was.’

She snorted. ‘Liar.’

Was I suddenly that transparent? Why was it that I had an off day—an off week, maybe two—and suddenly everyone could see right through me? I refused to make eye contact with her but her eyes found mine, inexorably, and once they’d caught me I was strangely enthralled by her gaze and couldn’t turn away.

‘Are you gay, Elijah?’

I tensed, but didn’t flinch.

‘What would make you think that?’

‘Nothing dear. Tom talks about you, that’s all.’

‘Does Tom say I’m gay?’

‘No.’ She frowned. ‘It’s just… We know about you kissing that boy.’

‘So?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with it—we just think—’

‘We?’

‘You don’t need to worry, I haven’t discussed it with John. He knows, but I haven’t discussed it with him. You know, it doesn’t matter if you are. It wouldn’t change anything in the slightest. Not with me, and not with John, and certainly not with Tom. You mean just as much to us now as you did five minutes ago.’

‘I didn’t say I was gay,’ I snapped.

She sighed and took her hand off my arm. ‘Elijah Laurence, you are a very clever young man. Too clever for your own good. But you have to stop imagining that you are the only clever one, do you hear? I may not be as clever as you but I’m not stupid. It’d be good for you to remember that.’

‘I’m not saying you aren’t as clever as me, Mrs Harding—’

‘Claire.’

‘Claire. I’m not saying you aren’t as clever as me, Claire. I’m just not saying I’m gay.’

‘Are you saying that you are straight?’

‘Why do I have to be anything at all?’

‘You can be anything you want, my darling. By all means. But you should always be yourself, Elijah, and you’re not doing that at the minute—are you? You’re just making it very difficult for anyone to figure you out one way or the other. You have all these faces, Elijah. They’re all very lovely, don’t get me wrong—but one of these days you’re bound to forget what your real face looks like underneath all those others, and then what will you do?’

But that was the thing, you see.

I didn’t really have a real face.

I had been unfolded, layer by layer, lain out on a sterilised table and calmly examined. But it didn’t feel like that. All my secrets… It felt like I’d been shot in the stomach. It felt like my chest was riddled with holes and from one of them my heart was pouring, messily, to soak into the carpet. I felt dizzy and sick and I could feel a bubble of panic working its way with a nightmarish certainty up my throat, that I could barely contain; I looked away, scared that if I didn’t she would force that out of me too, and I’d be heaving in front of her shamelessly; I could feel it becoming a reality at any moment. I stared at the coffee table, shuddering.

‘I didn’t get into Oxford,’ I whispered—and even then I knew what I was doing. Even then, I rallied, or if not rallied then I reverted to an autopilot, to a instinctively manipulative reflex. I didn’t look at her but I felt her frustrated sigh, almost a groan; and then the realisation as it came, as she didn’t just hear but listened; and her agonising indecision, in which she flittered from thought to thought—because she longed to return to the matter at hand but she couldn’t, she knew, and she was vaguely aware that, in jumping to conclusions, in playing her hand too early, she had made a fool of herself.

I had made a fool of her.

‘Oh, Elijah.’

I stood up and she stood with me, her expression panicked; she grasped my shoulder but with shaking hands I removed her. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I have to go. Thank you for dinner.’

‘Elijah—’

‘Thank you for dinner,’ I said again, retreating to the cover of formality, hating the way in which my voice wobbled and the way in which her eyes betrayed her every thought, her every realisation—that when she heard the flutter in my voice her eyes showed it, shamelessly, in their minute widening, and the compassion there was almost as unbearable for me as the conversation. ‘Will you tell Tom I’ll see him later?’

‘Elijah—’

I made my way to the door and was through it, my legs shaking dangerously. I ignored her when she called me back.