The Party: The thrilling Richard & Judy Book Club Pick 2018. Elizabeth Day
right,’ I said. She looked surprised, then led me off to the staffroom which smelled of instant coffee and fig rolls and had old copies of the Guardian and a single dog-eared issue of Horse and Hound stacked up on one of the bookshelves. I confessed without much trouble. I glossed over the finer details of how I’d dispatched the creature, saying simply that I felt it should be put out of its misery. Mrs Love’s face turned from red to white to shiny as a sweat broke out across her upper lip. I could see that she didn’t know what to make of me. She actually tried, at one point, to reach out and take my hand.
The headmistress summoned my mother and said that I was suspended with immediate effect.
My mother was not as furious as I had expected her to be. She refused to talk to me for the rest of the day and sent me to bed without any food, but that was pretty much par for the course. The next day, she didn’t go to work but sat waiting for me in glacial silence at the breakfast table. I came down in my pyjamas and dressing gown, having not known what clothes to get dressed in. My school jumper lay wrinkled and empty: a shed skin over the back of my desk chair. I wondered if I would ever wear it again. I was intrigued, more than anything, to know what would happen next.
‘Well, Martin,’ my mother said as I took a seat and poured milk over a bowl of cereal I did not want to eat. ‘I can’t say I’m surprised.’
She looked at me over the rim of her coffee mug. There was a chip on the upper edge of the handle: a white arrowhead against the red.
‘You’ve always been a wrong ’un.’
Her lips pressed together in a tight, crooked line.
‘I’ve tried my best for you, I have, and it hasn’t been easy, all on my own, but I’ve tried to raise you like a normal boy. I’ve given you a roof over your head and everything you could ever want. But you’re not, are you? Normal, I mean.’ She broke off and then added, more to herself than to me: ‘There’s something missing.’
I willed myself not to cry. Until this point, I’d felt powerfully immune from any kind of emotion. But my mother had always possessed the ability to wound me at the most tender point.
I nodded.
‘Yes.’
She drained the last of her coffee.
‘Yes,’ she repeated. ‘There we are.’
We lapsed into silence. My cereal became lumpy. I sipped at my orange juice. Outside, it started to rain, droplets of it trailing down the window in a race of their own making. After a while, my mother pushed back her chair and came round to my side of the table and then she did something I could not remember her ever having done before: she reached out and squeezed my shoulder.
They let me back into their drab little school. My mother spoke to the headmistress and, I suppose, gave her some guff about my dead father and how hard it had been for me. I returned after a fortnight’s purdah. Jennifer never spoke to me again and the others kept their distance. But, I confess, I found relief in my exile rather than torment. The time passed peaceably enough. Events merged into each other; a soupy fog. Nothing interesting happened.
And then, one springtime morning, I found myself sitting the entrance exam for Burtonbury School. I think, from what I can recall, that my mother had been speaking to someone in the cafe about my predicament and they had told her I should try for Burtonbury. The customer in question had a troubled relative who had gone there and prospered. It seemed as good an idea as any. In any case, I liked exams and was good at them, and I knew about boarding school from Enid Blyton books so I was in favour of the idea. I wanted so very much to get out of Epsom. The only exciting memory I have of that place is of once having seen Lester Piggott fall off his horse while competing in the Epsom Derby.
I passed the Burtonbury exam, as we had both known I would, and was offered a full scholarship. My mother sewed name tapes into socks for what seemed like weeks. In the welcome pack sent to me before the start of the autumn term, there was a shopping list of necessary items for boarders. I was required to come with one full-size umbrella, one complete rugby kit in the school colours of brown and green (with three changes of Aertex shirts), a shoe-polishing set, a supply of stamps and – most bizarrely – a stiff straw boater with a ribbon which I would be expected to wear for formal occasions.
My mother ignored the approved outfitters and uniform suppliers, seeking out instead the cheaper bargains in charity shops. As a result, my school jumpers were always faded and my P.E. shorts were never white enough and the Aertex shirts had immoveable off-yellow stains under each armpit. The smell of other people’s sadness lingered in the threads.
To this day, I have a profound aversion to second-hand clothes. I can’t abide the new trend for ‘vintage’ outfits, the nipped-in 50s dresses sported by overweight ladies who live in east London running Scandinavian coffee shops and the rolled-up chinos favoured by bearded hipsters who work in digital marketing. I have a minimal wardrobe but I invest in key, tailored pieces that last. Although I can’t really afford it, I have my suits made to measure by Ben’s tailor, purely for the pleasure of knowing no one else has ever shrugged their shoulders into my jacket.
Despite my mother’s obsession with cutting costs, the requisite Burtonbury boater defeated her. There simply wasn’t an available supply of them in Oxfam, which must have been terribly frustrating. In the end, she was forced to go to Ede & Ravenscroft and spend an inordinate sum on a hat I would only wear three times a term, before consigning it forever to a cardboard box shoved in the back of my wardrobe.
The evening before the first day of my new school, my mother and I took the bus and then the tube to Paddington, armed with my boater and a suitcase full of clothes. My luggage was so heavy that the only way I could board the train was by mounting the stairs, grabbing hold of the suitcase handle and leaning back as far as I could without falling over. In this way, I managed to leverage my body-weight against its bulk before sliding it up into the carriage.
My mother did not wait to see me off. She stood on the platform and watched me take my seat. I glanced at her through the window: a broad woman in a shapeless beige coat buttoned all the way up to her neck. Her face was set. I raised a hand halfway to the window. I was going to wave but then didn’t. I thought it might, for some reason, make her cross. She gave a little nod of acknowledgement, then turned and walked away, the low heel of her shoes sounding dully against the concrete.
As she left, I felt a wave of relief, as if a curtain had been lifted from my field of vision. The light flooded in. I blinked and allowed this new sensation to settle. I was on my own, for the first time in my thirteen years on this planet. Entirely, blissfully, permissibly alone.
The train pulled out of the station. The carriage filled with the sound of schoolboy voices and the pop of fizzy-drink cans and crisp packets being opened. I kept staring out of the window, unwilling to speak to anyone. The graffiti and bricks and metal of London slid past and gave way to suburban hedges and children’s swings and washing lines which in turn transformed into an unspooling ticker tape of green fields and church spires.
As the train pressed on, I was aware of the importance of the moment. I watched myself, squashed in that train seat, with my untouched sandwiches still wrapped in tinfoil on the table in front of me, and I realised that my life was in the process of taking a different direction, plotted according to a new constellation. At the age of thirteen, my boat was setting sail across the beating tides of a different ocean. I would be starting a new school, one more befitting my character. But perhaps I also had some intimation that a more profound shift of fate awaited me.
Because, although I didn’t know it yet, I was about to meet Ben and nothing would ever be the same again.
Tipworth Police Station, 2.40 p.m.
I REACH ACROSS THE TABLE FOR MY COOLING TEA. My throat is dry from all the talking. My eyes, too, feel scratchy. I wonder if I could ask for some Optrex drops but one look at Grey Suit’s downturned