The Boy in the Smoke (2 page)

“I mean it,” she said. “You can’t go. I have to stop it.”

“What?”

“You know what it’s like there,” she said.

“It’s just school.”

“It’s not just school and you know it.”

Stephen actually did know what she meant. Eton produced Society’s Monsters—everyone knew that. Politicians, mostly, and occasionally people who ran banks and all the other institutions that stole the world’s spoils for themselves. Every once in a while Eton produced someone who made up for it a little—an actor, usually. Maybe a scientist. Usually an actor. Stephen couldn’t act, so he saw no particular hope in that direction. By going, he might easily join a line of privileged, heartless people who thought the world was a system to be owned, to be beaten, to be won.

It was also the best. Everyone knew that too. And Stephen was competitive. Many people from his school had sat the Eton entrance exam. He was the only one who’d made it.

“You’re so good,” Gina said. There was a sleepiness to her voice. A sad, dreamy quality. “You’re so good. You’d do anything for anyone. They don’t deserve you. None of them.”

In a completely unexpected move, she made a sudden pounce at the wall and attached herself to one of the heavy floor-length curtains. She was slight enough that she could hang from it for a moment even with her full weight on it.

“Gina, what are you  … ”

The curtain rod pulled free of the wall and the curtain crumpled to the floor, landing like an injured ballerina.

“Know how much these curtains cost?” Gina said. “Mum told me. They cost five grand apiece.”

She wrapped herself around the next curtain, and Stephen felt his fear building. He had seen Gina get erratic before, but this was a new level.

“You don’t need to do this,” he said. “They’re just curtains.”

“They forgot you,” Gina said. The second curtain fell to the ground, along with the rod it hung from. She stood up and walked to the desk, where she got a large pair of scissors.

“Gina  … ”

“Stephen,” she said, sounding very calm, “they forgot you. I need to help them arrange their priorities. You are more important than these curtains.”

She used the scissors to point at the curtains.

“I understand, but  … ”

Gina got to the floor and began to cut away at the fabric. Stephen sat down on the edge of the sofa and nervously watched her make ribbons out of the material. The curtains were heavy, so she had to chop hard. Unsure of what to do, he turned to the television and flipped through the channels until he found a police show he knew on one of the constant repeat channels. He put it on mute and watched it for a moment to steady himself. When he turned back to Gina, he realized she was crying. This sent a new wave of panic through his system. He got up and crouched near her, then sat down on the edge of the curtain and put a tentative arm around her shoulder. She continued to cut the curtain as if nothing was happening.

“I have a plan,” she said. “Would you like to hear it?”

He nodded, albeit a bit warily.

“I’m sixteen now, so I could leave school, but Mum promised that if I made it through this year without any trouble, they’d get me a flat in London.”

“You’re joking.”

“I’m not. They know I’m never going to university, so they’re going to have to make some provisions now. In fact, they’ve already looked at a few places. It’s an investment, right? You know they love buying property.”

“But you just left school without taking any exams.”

“I got close enough,” she said. “And anything to get me out of the house. It probably won’t be an expensive flat, but it will be enough. It’ll be in London. I have friends here. This is where I want to be. As soon as I have that flat, I’m coming for you. You’ll come and live with me.”

“And just leave school?”

“You can go to school in London. There are loads of comprehensives in London. I’m going to get a job at somewhere cool like Vivienne Westwood or something. And you’ll live with me, and neither one of us will ever go home again.”

This was madness. This plan had no relationship with reality. It was possible that after a few glasses of wine his parents had told Gina that if she got through the year they’d get her a flat. They said things like that sometimes, but they never meant them. And even if they had, they certainly wouldn’t buy her one after she ran away on the eve of her exams. There was no flat. There would be no running away from Eton and living together. Gina said crazy things sometimes, but not like this. Not seriously—not like she really meant it.

“You just can’t go to Eton,” Gina said calmly, still cutting away. “It’s my job to save you. So we’ll live in the flat.”

“There’s nothing to save me from,” Stephen said. “Whatever you think they’ll turn me into, they won’t.”

“You won’t be able to help it.”

“Yes, I will. Don’t you trust me?”

At that, Gina started sobbing properly. She threw her arms around his neck and held him close. He felt her heart beating wildly against his chest and had no idea what to say to make her stop crying. So he just sat there with her until she calmed down and detached herself.

“I have a bit more to do,” she said, getting up and wiping at her eyes. “They’ll be here in a few hours.”

She went into the kitchen, and Stephen heard the sound of glasses being dropped, one by one, on to the floor. He got up and went into the kitchen and watched her break every bit of glassware and crockery in the room, including a complete set of Viennese crystal and bone china. He could have stopped her—he was bigger and stronger—but he would not touch her.

He’d never felt so helpless.

When she was done with that, she took a steak knife and tore apart the fabric in one of the sofas until the stuffing popped out of the slashes. She seemed satisfied with that and dropped the knife.

“I’m going to take a nap now,” she said. She did look drowsy, her eyes at half-mast. “Wake me when Mater and Pater arrive.”

Stephen looked at the scene of destruction around him. Gina had said they were getting on a plane now, but it wasn’t clear where the plane was from—Barbados, a connecting airport? His time window was a few hours, enough to sweep up the glass and throw away the shredded curtains. Nothing could replace the curtains or fix the sofa. He did what he could. He tried to put the rails back up, but they’d been ripped from the walls and the screws had bent and left gaping holes. He swept up the glass and closed all the now-empty cabinets. He flipped the sofa cushions.

Then he sat and waited for the inevitable.

His parents arrived just after midnight. They were very tanned. There were no hugs. The two of them came in and surveyed the room.

“Where’s your sister?” his mother asked.

“Asleep. I did this. All of it.”

“No you didn’t,” his father said. “Be quiet.”

In reply, Stephen reached out and slapped a vase right off a table. It landed on the wooden floor and broke fairly cleanly into a few large pieces. He would have preferred a grand shatter, but this would have to do.

Gina laughed and clapped from the doorway of the bedroom. She had woken up.

“Shut
up
, Regina,” their mother said. “You know you did this. Whatever it is, it’s always you. Stephen is just trying to protect you and is making a fool out of himself. Do you want to ruin everything and make your brother into a fool?”

“Stephen is the only one of us that isn’t a fool,” Gina said. “And you
left
him at school.”

“Stop being dramatic.”

“Does ‘dramatic’ mean saying what actually happened?” Gina replied. “I’m going to make sure everyone knows you forgot him. Everyone will know what utter, utter tossers you are.”

“Stephen,” his father said. “Gather up whatever you’ve brought. We’re leaving.”

Unsure of what else to do, Stephen obeyed. He hastily threw everything into a bag and came back to find a silent stand-off still going on. Gina remained in the bedroom doorway, smirking, arms folded.

“Stephen, go to the car,” his mum said.

“Come on, Gina,” Stephen said.

“I’m staying here,” Gina replied.

“Not in this flat, you’re not,” his father said. “You’ll leave this flat, but you’re also not riding home with us. Here.”

He dropped twenty pounds on the floor.

“That will get you a ticket home. Your cards are cancelled.”

“Oh, you think that’s scary?” Gina asked. “Making me take the train?”

But Stephen knew whatever was coming next was much worse than Gina simply taking the train. He saw it in his parents’ faces. When you spend your life watching other people fighting, you learn the language of the silences and the pauses, because that’s where all the really terrible decisions are made.

In the silence that followed Gina’s statement, Stephen knew that something particularly bad was coming. When you live with a bomb, you should know that at some point it will go off.

“You think you’re making a statement,” Stephen’s dad said, utterly calm. “Let me clarify. You’re sixteen now. We’re not paying for any more school, or anything else for that matter. You are not our problem. We’ll see you at home, or we won’t. Preferably the later. Come along, Stephen. Go to the car. Now.”

At first, Gina laughed. Stephen almost staggered. He mentally begged her to apologize, but Gina would never do that. She kept her chin up and nodded to him, letting him know it was all right—he could go.

He should do something. Yell. Stay with Gina. Anything.

But if he did anything, said anything, he’d only make it worse. He looked to her, and it felt like the earth was ripping open between them. Why did Gina look like she’d won? What was wrong with
all of them
?

He went to the car.

Gina never came home. She moved in with some friends in a flat in Shoreditch. Later, she would tell Stephen that their parents sent her a small sum every month just to ensure that she would stay away, enough for a flatshare and some groceries. She would phone, but the calls were erratically timed—weeks of silence followed by a two a.m. call. There were lots of largely incomprehensible texts. The house was filled with pictures of Stephen in his Eton uniform, and all those of Gina were removed. In the autumn, Stephen was shipped off to start his new life.

At the time, he believed things had gotten as bad as they ever could. He was wrong.

II

Most of Stephen’s life at Eton was spent running, often physically. The days started with a 7:30 breakfast, then chapel, then a sequence of divs—the Eton way of saying classes—then lunch, then sport, then more divs, then study. Very little time was provided to get from place to place, and the school sprawled for two miles, so he ran. Everyone ran. It was like a constant relay. You left your books between railings in town, in pigeonholes, on steps, and as you raced past, you picked up one set and dropped another. The entire town was littered with stacks of them. Maths to Latin to German to Divinity to Geography to French to History  … 

If you were late (and you couldn’t help but be late sometimes), there was always a price to pay. The beaks always had something ready to go. Maybe a hundred lines of Milton to copy. Maybe a problem set or a translation. There was a brutal heartbeat about the place, a constant sense of movement and pressure. There was a reason the exams were called trials.

One Thursday in March, Stephen was moving swiftly between Latin and Geography divs when a prefect caught up with him and told him to go back to his house, immediately. He’d never been called back to his house before, and such a callback never meant anything good. It meant you’d done something seriously wrong, or something seriously wrong had happened somewhere in the world outside and the news would be dropped on you from a great height. Stephen had done nothing seriously wrong that he could think of, so something had to have happened. He went through every possibility he could think of as he ran.

The news could never have been predicted, and yet, somewhere in his mind he already knew it had to do with her. The universe would never be so kind as to spare her, the only one of them that was worth anything.

The Master was nice enough. Stephen was taken into the family living room and sat on the floral sofa, and the news was said gently, but with an unequivocal tone—“
your sister  …  overdose, it seems  …  nothing could be done
 … ”

Overdose, it seems.

For the first minute, those words echoed in his head. What killed Gina? Overdose, it seems. It
seems
that way, as if it might have been something else, like malaria or bad vapours or dragons, but it was an overdose, it seems. There was a roaring in his ears that obliterated all other noise. He spoke to his parents briefly on the phone, right there, in the sitting room. His mother sounded like she was crying. His father did not. If anything, he sounded angry. Stephen was given the option of going home for a bit, which he decided not to take. There was no point in going home now. After that, he was permitted to return to his room or speak to someone at the San. He went outside instead and walked up and down the high street. He had no thoughts—nothing he could remember later. His mind was a void. All he could do was walk. One of the prefects came to find him and bring him back.

Life continued, which was strange. Aside from the funeral, which took a half-day, Stephen didn’t leave Eton. His parents must have been relieved, as this gave them the opportunity to work out their grief at a resort in Switzerland. Other people generally took it easy on him and the beaks were kind enough. Death, after all, was not a taboo subject at Eton—as long as it didn’t get too personal. Every Etonian was constantly reminded that most people who had attended the school were, in fact, dead. When your school is almost six hundred years old, this is inevitable. The dead were all over the place—in statues and in the hundreds of portraits that bore down their gazes from every wall. Their names were etched onto every possible surface.

So for the first few weeks, there were allowances. The beaks tended to let it slip if he was a minute or two late. The Master and the Dame looked in on him, and he was always encouraged to go to the counsellor, and he always said he would think about it. One night he accidentally heard the Master say “how well Dene was getting on, after, you know, that awful business with his sister. Terrible for the family, but there’s always one, isn’t there? Luckily they have him.”

Stephen didn’t know if he was doing well. For those first days, he wasn’t aware of much of anything. He opened books and closed them. He rowed. He ate some food. His body moved him around until term was over. When he returned home, Gina’s room was empty and had been turned into a small home exercise studio. He wandered the house, looking for anything he could find, but the culling had been complete. Her clothes, her bike, all her furniture  …  even the attic and the cellar had been cleared. The best he could do was recover several books that had wound up on the common shelves that he knew to be hers. His sister, for all her partying, loved to read. He gathered up her fantasy novels and romances and books of poetry and volumes of Shakespeare, and he put them in his closet, under a carefully constructed pile of clothes.

It turned out it had happened at a party. Gina passed out on the far side of a bed. Whatever she had taken stopped her heart almost at once, and she lay there, between the bed and the wall, for eighteen hours before someone thought to look. Stephen learned this after hearing his father relaying the story over the phone to someone. This was weeks later, when he was home for one of the short breaks in the Lent term, and his father spoke casually, as if describing an investment that didn’t quite perform as hoped.

It was an image he couldn’t get out of his head—Gina stuck between the bed and the wall while the party went on. He saw it when he closed his eyes at night. Sometimes he would dream about seeing a bed, hearing her voice calling to him from the space just beyond the bed, asking him for help, and he’d wake up with his heart pounding. He’d get up and open his window and stick out his head and breathe in as much cold air as he could and try to understand how there could be a world without Gina. How was it that the trees hadn’t died? How was it that anything continued on? How did he continue to live? It seemed wrong and unnatural, and it would take great effort to calm down and get himself back to bed, to refocus. There was no time for grief. No time to curl into a ball and remain motionless for days. No time to explain to everyone that the world was now broken.

He often had the impulse to go and find the flat this had happened in and burn it to the ground.

In many ways, he appreciated the gruelling schedule for keeping him sane. Eton would push him forward. Onward, onward, onward. The school that seemed so fanatically rooted in the past wanted him to just move on. He progressed through Eton, keeping his head down and his marks up. He became a member of Sixth Form Select and had silver buttons on his waistcoat. He took several prizes in Latin and History, and became a very good boatman—not good enough to be in the Eight, but the next tier down. He could tell that everyone regarded him as serious and sensible, if they regarded him at all. He had no desire to stand out. Being at Eton was his job, and he intended to do it. He didn’t have very much fun—he wasn’t social. This was fine, as he regarded the most sociable and striving people at Eton to be a pack of sociopaths, doomed for parliament.

Everyone, of course, had their own secret interest hidden behind the closed doors of his room. Stephen still watched his police shows. It was less of a fun pastime now and more of a compulsion. The ones about real police were best, and he didn’t care what they were doing. They could be chasing a murderer or dealing with a noise complaint. He just liked how useful it was, how simple and clear.

On good days, he kept the shows on in the background, often on mute, while he revised. On the bad days, he thought about chucking it all in and joining the force. The force itself might accept him. He could pass any exam they put in front of him. But the people who actually worked that job would laugh him away. Eton? What did someone from
Eton
know about normal people and dealing with things like broken windows and chasing down some drunken teenager who had a knife in a shopping plaza?

He’d probably end up behind a desk.

So he applied to Cambridge. He had no particular idea what he wanted to study, but he applied for English Literature and got in. This was enough to enrage his father for several weeks. Still, he could go into banking yet with that, so the matter was forgotten.

So it went, until the very end of Stephen’s last year at Eton. It was the Fourth of June, which at Eton was the name of a holiday, and often not actually on the fourth of June. This was the largest celebration of the school year. The grounds were manicured, chairs set out, everything polished and practised and prepared for the show—that’s what it was, a show. This was when everything Eton did was put on display. Speeches, art, music, prowess. Families came and had picnics and admired their fine Eton boys.

As a boatman, Stephen had a special role to play, as the boats were an integral part of the Fourth of June. Boatmen wore large boater hats all day, which would be decorated with flowers purchased from vendors who came out solely for this purpose. So all through the morning Stephen had what amounted to a small flower shop on his head. This, as so many Eton things were, was one of those unlikely badges of honor. A hat full of flowers, checked trousers, silver buttons on your waistcoat, winged collars, bow ties  …  everything signified who you were and, more importantly, why you were better.

His parents came, which did not surprise him. The Fourth of June was when you showed up to preen and see what your money got you. They brought a hamper of champagne and a cold lunch and an oversized blanket to sit on the lawn by the river. After lunch came the Procession of Boats—one of the major events of the day, and the reason for the large hat of flowers. This was when ten boats would be rowed by ten groups of eight, with every member wearing nineteenth-century naval attire (and the hat with the flowers). As each boat passed in front of the spectators, the crews would have to stand up—a tricky business, as the boats were extremely unsteady at the best of times—and take off their hats in salute. Of course the Eton Boating Song was sung:

Those lines tended to go through his head a lot as he pumped away, pressing the oars back into the water, staying so carefully in rhythm. They were just, perhaps, a little too on the nose.

What everyone on the lawn wanted to see, of course, was one of the boats tip over as the boys inside stood to attention. If one started to fall, the entire boat would generally go over. This was considered the height of hilarity, boys falling into the water as they held their flower-heavy hats at their sides.

Stephen was determined not to fall, not in front of his parents. He ground his jaw as he stood, and the boat wobbled under him. Two people up, Maxwell looked very unsteady. Stephen felt the judder underneath as the boat began to wobble. There was an expectant mumble from the crowd. But Maxwell steadied, and they sat back down and rowed on.

When the show was over, Stephen rejoined his family on the lawn. His father appeared to be having some kind of informal business meeting on a neighbouring lawn blanket with some people who worked either at or with his bank. His mother was just finishing up a conversation with a few other women, and they were briefly left alone, sitting in the sun.

Maybe it was the beauty of the day. Maybe it was because, in theory, this was his day and his moment to be the object of attention. There was a gravity and import to the event. Maybe, just maybe  … 

“I want to do something for Gina,” he said.

He actually had no plan to go along with this. He simply wanted to say her name. His mother tucked an empty champagne bottle back into the basket, her downturned eyes suggesting that he had done something just a bit distasteful.

“Stephen.” She lowered her voice. “Not here, not today.”

“If not here, where? I live here. And if not today, when?”

“I am not discussing this.”

“Her. You are not discussing her.”

“Correct,” his mother said.

“She was your daughter,” he said.

“I know perfectly well what she was. Just stop it. Stop making a scene.”

Stephen looked around at the complete lack of a scene. They were still surrounded by picnics and light chatter and soft laughter and champagne and the gentle slosh of the river.

“What scene? I just wanted to talk about her. Because  …  she should have been here today.”

“Why are you doing this?” his mother asked.

“Because she matters.”

His mother actually rolled her eyes at this expression, and he felt himself tense. Of course, his parents wouldn’t respond to a phrase like that—one that sounded like it had come right off a television programme. But Gina
did
matter and he didn’t know how else to express that fact.

“Why don’t you talk about her?” he said. “Don’t you think we should?”

“No,” his mother answered. “And I won’t have today ruined. Why must you ruin everything for me?”

“
Ruin
everything? What have I
ever
ruined?”

He kept his voice low, but even still, one or two people turned to look. His mother stiffened. His father must have picked up on the fact that something was going on, because he concluded his conversation and rejoined them.

“Stephen,” he said. “Help me get something from the car, won’t you?”

They walked over the green fields to the cars. There was no one around but the attendants, and they were reasonably far back. Stephen folded his arms, expecting a minor dressing down. To his surprise, he felt a push on his shoulders that knocked him against the side of the car.

“What the hell are you doing?” his father said in a low, threatening voice.

“Talking about my sister,” Stephen replied. “
Your daughter
. Remember her?”

“You always were a bit soft, weren’t you? I thought they would knock that out of you here. I’ll do it myself, if I have to.”