Nowadays, of course, little trace remains of my mother’s handiwork. My own is more sophisticated and definitely less showy. My French is fluent, thanks to my years in Paris, and although I never quite made the grade as far as my mother was concerned, I like to think I have acquired a certain style. I also have an abnormally high sense of self-esteem, or so my analyst says, which at times verges on the pathological. Maybe so; but in the absence of parents, where else is a child to seek approval?
By the time I was fourteen, my mother had realized that I would never be a beauty. I wasn’t the type. Un style très anglais, as the beautician (the bitch!) repeatedly pointed out. The little skirts and twinsets that looked so pretty on the French girls simply made me look ridiculous, and I soon forsook them for the safety of the jeans, sweatshirts, and trainers of my earlier youth. I refused makeup and cut my hair short. I no longer looked like a little boy, but it had become clear that I would never be Audrey Hepburn, either.
My mother was not as disappointed as she might have been. Despite her high hopes, we had failed to bond. We had little in common, and I could tell that she was tired of making the effort. More importantly, she and Xavier had finally achieved what they had hitherto thought impossible—a miracle baby, born in the August of the following year.
Well, that clinched it. Overnight, I became an embarrassment. The miracle baby—they called it Adeline—had basically priced me out of the market, and neither my mother nor Xavier (who had few opinions of his own) seemed interested in a sullen, awkward teenager. Once more, in spite of everything, I was invisible.
Oh, I can’t say I cared. Not about that, anyway. I had nothing against Adeline—who looked like nothing more to me than a squawking lump of pink putty. What I resented was the promise; the promise of something that had been barely offered before it was snatched away. The fact that I hadn’t wanted it was irrelevant. My mother’s ingratitude was. I had made sacrifices for her, after all. For her I had left St. Oswald’s. Now, more than ever, St. Oswald’s beckoned to me like a lost Eden. I forgot how I’d hated it; how for years I waged war against it; how it had swallowed my friend, my father, my childhood at a single gulp. I thought about it all the time, and it seemed to me then that it was only in St. Oswald’s that I had ever felt truly alive. There I had dreamed; there I had felt joy; hate; desire. There I had been a hero; a rebel. Now I was just another sullen teen, with a stepfather and a mother who lied about her age.
I know it now; it was an addiction, and St. Oswald’s was my drug. Night and day I craved it, finding poor substitutes where I could. Rapidly they bored me; my lycée was a dull place, and the most daring of its rebels only dabbled in the most adolescent of misdemeanors; a little sex, a little truancy, and a number of basically uninteresting drugs. Leon and I had covered far more exciting ground together years before. I wanted more; I wanted misrule; I wanted everything.
I was unaware at the time that my behavior had already begun to attract attention. I was young; angry; intoxicated. You might say St. Oswald’s had spoiled me; I was like a university student sent back to kindergarten for a year, smashing toys and turning over tables. I delighted in being a bad influence. I played truant; I mocked my teachers; I drank; I smoked; I had hurried (and, for me, joyless) sex with a number of boys from a rival school.
The crunch came in a most distressingly ordinary way. My mother and Xavier—who I’d assumed were too goggle-eyed over their miracle child to care much about the down-to-earth kind—had been watching me more closely than I had thought. A sweep of my room had provided the excuse they were seeking; a five-gram block of workaday resin, a packet of condoms, and four Es in a twist of paper.
It was kid’s stuff, that was all. Any normal parent would have forgotten all about it, but Sharon simply mumbled something about my previous history, removed me from school, and—the final indignity—booked me in with a child psychologist, who, she promised, would soon bring me to rights.
I don’t think I am a naturally resentful person. Whenever I have lashed out, it has always been after almost unbearable provocation. But this was more than anyone could stand. I wasted no time in protesting my innocence. Instead, and to my mother’s surprise, I cooperated as best I could. The child psychologist—whose name was Martine and who wore dangly earrings with little silver kitties—declared me to be progressing nicely, and I fed her every day until she got quite tame.
Say what you like about my unconventional schooling, but I do have quite an extensive general knowledge. You can thank St. Oswald’s Library, or Leon, or the films I’ve always watched—in any case I knew enough about mental cases to fool a kitty-loving child psychologist. I almost regretted the ease of the task; found myself wishing they had given me more of a challenge.
Psychologists. They’re all the same. Talk to them about anything you like, it always gets down to sex in the end. After an impressive show of reluctance and a number of nicely Freudian dreams, I confessed; I’d been having sex with my father. Not John, I said; but my new father, which made it all right—or so he said, although I myself had been having second thoughts.
Don’t get me wrong. I had nothing (as such) against Xavier. It was my mother who had betrayed me; my mother I wanted to hurt. But Xavier was such a convenient tool, and besides, I made it sound mostly consensual, so that he would get off with a lighter—maybe even a suspended—sentence.
It worked fine. Too fine, perhaps; by then I’d been working on my routine and incorporated a number of embellishments to the basic formula. More dreams—I don’t dream, as I said, but I do have quite a vivid imagination—a number of physical mannerisms, a habit of small cutting picked up from one of the more sensitive girls in my class at school.
Physical examination provided the proof. Xavier was duly ousted from the family home, a generous allowance was promised to the soon-to-be divorcée, and I (thanks in part to my brilliant performance) was stuck in an institution for the next three years by my loving mother and the kitty-wearing Martine, neither of whom could be convinced that I was no longer a danger to myself.
You know, there is such a thing as doing a job too well.
MATE
1
Friday, 5th November, 9:15 P.M., Bonfire Night
“Well, then,” he said. “I suppose that’s that.”
The fireworks were over, and the crowd had begun to disperse, shuffling slowly toward the exits. The cordoned area was almost empty; only the smell of gunsmoke remained. “Perhaps we ought to find Marlene. I don’t like to think of her waiting alone.”
Dear old Straitley. Always the gent. And so close too; certainly he’d come closer to the truth than my mother, or my analyst, or any of the professionals who had tried to understand my teenage mind. Not quite close enough—not yet—but he was almost there, we were in the endgame now, and my heart beat a little faster at the thought. Long ago I’d faced him as a pawn and lost. Now, at last, I challenged him as a queen.
I turned to him, smiled, and said, “Valé, magister.”
“What did you say?”
She had turned to go; in the glow of the embers she looked very youthful under her red beret, her eyes pinned with dancing firelight. “You heard,” she said. “You heard me then, didn’t you, sir?”