Free What I Was by Meg Rosoff Page B

over etchings of two-thousand-year-old breasts for most of the afternoon. I stretched, desperate to get out. ‘Might go for a walk,’ I muttered. Having checked the tides.
    Reese jumped up. ‘Can I come?’
    Pulling on my coat, I avoided his eyes. ‘No dirty pictures in nature.’
    ‘You might get lucky, Kipper.’ Gibbon, ever the optimist. ‘Might see deer fucking.’
    I ignored him. ‘Come on then. It’s going to be a lovely sunset.’
    Gibbon erupted with laughter, prancing around the room cooing, ‘A lovely sunset! A lovely sunset! ’ while Reese joined in nervously, not entirely sure whose side he was on. In the end, he chose the unambiguously heterosexual majority, as I knew he would. He had his own secrets, did Reese.
    As I left the room, I could feel his eyes boring into the back of my head.

14
    ‘So, what do you know about the Dark Ages?’
    I’d been nervous. About returning to the hut, about seeing Finn. Even remembering our afternoon at the cave made me nervous. The longing to see him did not diminish with the passing days, nor did the feelings sort themselves into tidy strands of information in the way of geography or English grammar. None of what I felt could be explained by what I generally understood about sex. The ceaseless tangle of emotions confused me, forced me to wonder what I was. There was no one to ask.
    But I couldn’t stay away. And so, on a cold afternoon in early February I lay, one leg propped on the bookshelves at the bottom of my narrow bench, the other hanging over the side, asking about the Dark Ages while the fire in the stove crackled and Finn hunched over tiny scraps of feather, metallic foil from cigarette packets, and steel fish hooks, wrapping them securely with cotton to make lures. His cat glared and hissed at me whenever Finn wasn’t looking, and when he chirped to it and stroked it absently, I could swear it sneered.
    Finn answered after the usual pause. ‘What do you know already?’
    I told him my version of the first millennium and he snorted and shook his head in disbelief. ‘How much does your education cost? You could save everyone a fortune by reading a book once in a while.’
    I ignored him, reached out to the cat and received an ugly scratch for my pains. I took a swipe at the beast but it was already comfortably out of reach, grinning back over its shoulder.
    ‘If you don’t mind, I didn’t exactly choose to be sent to the back of beyond to be bullied and buggered and starved.’
    He appraised me. ‘You don’t look starved.’
    I thought of the disgusting sausages filled with gristle and glue, the tasteless suet puddings, the stinking vats of boiled cabbage.
    Finn walked over to the bookcase and pulled out an old-fashioned leather-bound book entitled A Short History of Britain. It smelled strongly of damp and must have had nine hundred pages. I groaned. ‘Really. I don’t need to know all that. Ten pages would be more than enough.’
    ‘No, it wouldn’t,’ he said, dropping the huge book in my lap. ‘You’re amazingly ignorant. Especially with all your advantages.’
    ‘Advantages?’
    ‘A proper education is a privilege,’ he said, a touch primly.
    I laughed my best sardonic laugh and Finn looked at me sideways. ‘You’re actually quite proud of having failed so often, aren’t you?’ He turned away and behind his back I pulled a face.
    This line of discourse infuriated me. For one thing, his imaginary version of school life bore no relation to reality, and he resolutely denied all my attempts to impart the truth. He imagined a world of frock coats and good manners, a respect for intellect and the individual, the mature exchange of ideas seasoned with healthy outdoor pursuits. I don’t know how or where he came by this vision (it sounded like something out of ancient Greece to me), but he clung to it in the face of all evidence to the contrary, perhaps charmed by the idea of the social and economic gap between us. He was, after all, a