Box 88 : A Novel (2020) Page 10

  ‘Jesus.’ Martha was holding the rolled joint, as if it would be disrespectful to light it while Kite was speaking so candidly. ‘Was he drinking when your mum met him in Ireland?’

  ‘Dunno. Maybe. Maybe not. Are you going to light that?’ Martha clicked the lighter, the paper burning fast so that the end of the joint briefly flamed, sending up a plume of smoke. ‘When he was a young man he was quite political apparently. Not IRA, but definitely on the side of the Catholic Irish, the Republicans. Then he married Mum, an English Protestant girl, which is basically why they decided to leave Dublin and come to Scotland. Dad had been running a pub in Temple Bar so he knew the hospitality business, how to change a keg, find waiters, chefs, that kind of thing. Somebody told me a pub is perfect cover for an alcoholic. Everything you need is right at your fingertips. So they bought a hotel together in the back of beyond, near Stranraer on that little peninsula that sticks out like a haemorrhoid from the south-west corner of Scotland.’

  Martha laughed at that, giggling as she took a second hit on the joint. Kite asked if he should open a window, but Martha said no, it was too cold, and anyway she didn’t want her neighbours smelling the hash.

  ‘We’ll have to go there one day, drive up,’ said Kite, bending over and kissing the inside of her thigh as he took the joint. ‘It’s such a beautiful place. There’s new owners now; apparently they’re doing up all the rooms. The nearest village is Portpatrick – nothing but a harbour and a crazy golf course where I’d go a lot after Dad died just to be on my own or hang out with a friend who worked at the hotel.’

  ‘Gary the waiter,’ said Martha, remembering that Kite had mentioned him in the summer. She seemed to be able to recall everything he told her: every name, every anecdote, every detail.

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. Gary.’

  He took a long draw on the joint, held the smoke deep in his lungs and passed it back. Martha set it in a scallop shell ashtray by the bed and stared at him, huge eyes drawing in Kite’s words.

  ‘The hotel is called Killantringan. It’s a beautiful old country house with a lawn in front running down to the sea. Surrounded on all sides by steep hills at the end of a long, isolated road. There’s a cliff walk to the north which eventually takes you into Portpatrick. One night, in 1982, Mum and Dad had an argument about his drinking and Dad took off into the garden, ended up walking along the beach with a bottle and then somehow up over the rocks in the darkness and onto the path leading to the cliffs. He fell. Lost his footing at the top. Somebody found his body the next morning. And that was that.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Lockie.’

  ‘Mum closed the hotel for three weeks, took me out of school and we went to stay with my granny in Sligo. When we got back, everything changed. I was expected to be the man of the house from then on, to work behind the scenes, helping out in the kitchen, turning down the beds at night, unloading deliveries with the other kitchen staff, chatting up the guests. I hadn’t even turned twelve. I feel as though I went from being a child to a grown-up in the space of six months, you know? Then one day Mum announced that I was going to boarding school. No discussion. It wasn’t anything either of us had ever talked about or mentioned – it would never have occurred to Dad. Not one of the big Scottish schools, either: Glenalmond or Fettes or Gordonstoun. No, she was sending me to Alford College, the most famous school in the world, five hundred miles away in the south of England. Turned out the head of admissions was an old boyfriend of hers. He arranged for a bursary, the rest of the fees would be paid by Dad’s life insurance. I’d be starting in September ’84, which was less than a year away. She said I was too clever to go to one of the local schools and she didn’t want me to feel trapped by the hotel, by how provincial things were up there. She said it would mean I’d have more of a life, more opportunities, play sport, meet interesting people …’

  ‘Interesting people like Xav,’ said Martha. Kite couldn’t tell how serious she was being.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Like Xav.’ He took another hit on the joint and passed it back.

  ‘Were you upset?’

  ‘Don’t think so, no.’ It hadn’t occurred to Kite that he might have been. ‘Actually, I remember being quite excited. Alford sounded a bit of an adventure. Being stuck in Scotland reminded me of Dad all the time and I was sick of feeling that way. If I was on the beach, just going for a walk, I’d think of him on the cliff or remember making dams with him in the stream that ran into the sea from the hills. We’d build these huge sand walls, massive blockades strengthened with rocks and driftwood and bottles. Great lakes of water would build up behind them. Dad would hum the Dambusters tune and say in his thick Irish accent: ‘It’s like the fockin’ Aswan, Lockie!’ Then we’d throw stones at the top until the dam started to break, bit by bit, until finally it gave out and a torrent of water would rush down to the sea carrying all the sand and seaweed and beach crap we’d used to build it up.’

  Kite could feel the joint working through him. Martha took another hit and sat up against the headboard.

  ‘It was the same if I was in Portpatrick or Stranraer or up in the hills behind the hotel. Dad was everywhere. He’d given me an air rifle for my birthday. We used to go shooting together, looking for rabbits. Just Dad and me, walking for hours. The first one I shot had myxomatosis. Usually the rabbits would run away as soon as they heard us coming, but this one was so ill it just sat there, stock-still, waiting for me to kill it. I was ten. Dad lay beside me in the heather, showed me how to load the pellet into the rifle and line up the telescopic sight. When I hit it, he reacted like I was the Sundance Kid. He was so happy for me! For days afterwards he would refer to me in front of the guests as “the Red Baron”. I didn’t know what he was talking about. So that’s what it was like once he was gone. Just this big absence, this hole where his gigantic personality used to be. I was so confused and angry with him for dying, you know? I felt like he’d let me down, let Mum down, made all of us so sad, the staff at the hotel, his friends. There were probably four hundred people at his funeral, mourners who came over on the ferry from Ireland, friends who drove up from England or flew into Glasgow and Prestwick. He touched a lot of lives.’

  ‘What about your mum?’

  Kite waited, weighing up the most diplomatic response. Martha had yet to meet his mother; he didn’t want to tip the scales against her in advance.

  ‘It hardened her, no question,’ he replied. ‘Here was this glamorous woman, married to a man she loved more than any wife had ever loved any husband as far as I could tell, but he’d loved alcohol more than he’d loved her. More than he loved me, come to think of it. Dad’s true friends were Smirnoff and Gordon’s and Famous Grouse. Those were the half-bottles I’d find in the pockets of his jackets in the cupboard where he hung his suits. Twice a week a van would come down from Whighams of Ayr carrying six dozen cases of wine and another of spirits for the hotel. Dad would be waiting to greet it like Joanne Whalley was going to jump out in a nurse’s uniform.’

  ‘She was the one in The Singing Detective?’ Martha asked.

  ‘Yeah. That’s her.’

  Martha climbed off the bed, came over to the window and hugged Kite. When they kissed he could smell the smoke on her breath and felt dizzy. The next thing he knew she had put Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me on her record player and they were making stoned love to ‘Catch’. Afterwards they went downstairs to the kitchen, made ham and cheese sandwiches in a Breville toaster and brought them back up to Martha’s room with a bottle of Bulgarian white wine stolen from the fridge.

  ‘So how did you do Common Entrance if you were going to a local school in Portpatrick?’

  Kite was now in bed wearing a pair of boxer shorts, watching the naked Martha flicking through her record collection.

  ‘Put the other side of the Cure on,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a double album,’ she replied, removing the record from the sleeve and putting it on the turntable. Lowering the needle, she hit the vinyl in the wrong plac
e so that it scratched midway through the first song.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked as the song began again. He was looking at the bright red lips on the album cover.

  ‘“Just Like Heaven”,’ Martha replied. ‘You’ll love it.’

  ‘Mum hired a private tutor,’ he said, answering Martha’s question about Common Entrance, the exam every boy had to take if he wanted to get into Alford. ‘Name was Roger Dunlop, as in Green Flash. He was a colleague of Billy Peele’s from Alford with no wife, no family, made extra money in the holidays cramming boys for Oxbridge and A levels. He came up to Killantringan three times, stayed for free, taught me eight hours a day then arranged for me to sit all the exams at the hotel with a retired headmistress from Castle Douglas invigilating to make sure I didn’t cheat.’

  ‘Did you?’ Martha asked, climbing into bed beside him.

  Kite was drunk on his share of the Bulgarian wine and still slightly stoned.

  ‘Cheat?’ he said. ‘Moi? How could you even ask that question?’

  In France, Xavier had told Martha that he and Kite had been less than model schoolboys, constantly in trouble with Lionel Jones-Lewis and permanently in the headmaster’s office on one charge or another.

  ‘You cheated,’ she replied deadpan.

  ‘Fine.’ Kite raised his hands in mock surrender and looked around for more of the wine. ‘I’d never studied Latin,’ he continued when he had found and poured it. ‘My dad was a working-class lad from Dublin. My mum was an ex-model who went to parties with Jean Shrimpton and left school at sixteen. They didn’t exactly read The Odyssey to me as a bedtime story.’

  ‘That’s a good job,’ said Martha. ‘The Odyssey is Greek.’

  ‘Smart arse.’ He pinched her shoulder. ‘Anyway, Latin was what nice prep school boys from Sunningdale and Ludgrove were taught from the age of eight. They didn’t go in for it at Portpatrick primary in 1982. Probably still don’t. We had Miss Mowat, who was brilliant at maths and science, but not so good when it came to dead languages which hadn’t been spoken in Scotland for two thousand years.’

  ‘So poor Lachlan felt justified in cheating?’

  Kite laughed at how much she was enjoying teasing him.

  ‘Fully justified,’ he said, and this time pushed her over so that she almost knocked the butts and ash out of the scallop shell. ‘Alford insisted that all boys needed Latin, so I had to sit for hours and hours with Roger declining amo, amas, amat and translating endless paragraphs describing Hannibal crossing the Alps. I was actually all right at it, just couldn’t remember a lot of the vocab. The night before the common entrance was a Sunday and the chef decided to walk out because Mum hadn’t given him a pay rise. She’d stepped in and was cooking for a full dining room of thirty-odd people. I was chopping onions and carrots in the kitchen and fetching stuff for her from the fridge. Didn’t get to bed until eleven and had no time to revise. Did you see The Godfather on TV the other day?’

  Martha, who was straightening out the bedclothes, shook her head.

  ‘OK, well Dad had rented it on video from a shop in Stranraer and never taken it back. The shop had given up on the fine, so we sort of owned it. I’d watched it at least six times without Mum knowing. There’s a bit where Al Pacino tapes a gun behind a cistern in the bathroom of an Italian restaurant so that he can go in there, grab it and shoot the two people he’s having dinner with. I just stole that idea. On the Monday morning I stuck a Latin dictionary behind the cistern in the staff toilet where the headmistress wouldn’t see it if she went in after breakfast. Then, halfway through the exam, when I’d memorised all the words I didn’t recognise, I asked if I could be excused. She said fine, no problem, I went into the staff toilet, stood up on the seat, pulled the dictionary down, quickly looked up all the words I didn’t know, flushed the toilet and went back to the exam.’

  ‘How did you do?’ Martha asked.

  ‘Got four points out of five,’ Kite replied.

  ‘Smart arse.’

  The next day, Kite and Martha slept past one o’clock and went for lunch at Pizzaland. Back at the house, Martha’s mother rang from Chicago, where she was giving a lecture at Northwestern University. Martha made no mention of Kite staying with her. Her parents knew she had fallen for a boy over the summer, but they had yet to meet him.

  Returning to the bedroom, they put on Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me for perhaps the fifth time in twenty-four hours, got back into bed, smoked another joint and opened another bottle of wine which Kite had bought in Swiss Cottage. Martha was seventeen and looked her age; Kite was eighteen but could pass for twenty-three or twenty-four. Telling her about his childhood, he had felt released from a straitjacket of secrets and shame. For years, Kite had kept the nature of his father’s death hidden, even from Xavier, telling nobody that Paddy Kite had been an alcoholic. At Alford, to survive was to remain concealed; to thrive was to put on a mask, projecting nothing but confidence and strength to the outside world. It had occurred to Kite that, in many ways, the school was the perfect breeding ground for a career in intelligence. During five years at boarding school, he had learned how to vanish into different versions of himself: how to survive on charm and intuition; when to fight and to take risks; when to impose himself on a situation and when to melt into the background.

  Martha took out two Marlboro Reds, lit both of them and passed one to Kite. She asked how he had felt when he first arrived at Alford. Kite considered his answer for some time. Martha was at a crammer in North London after a brief stint at boarding school had ended in expulsion. He knew that, like most people, she thought of Alford as a nightmare fusion of If … and Another Country.

  ‘You must have missed your mum,’ she suggested.

  Kite felt the bump of his mother’s absent love and deflected the question. ‘Yes and no,’ he said. He tugged distractedly at one of the hairs on his chest. ‘Every house at Alford has a matron in it who’s supposed to be there to look after the boys. They call them “dames”. A kind of surrogate mother.’

  The cigarette hadn’t lit properly. Kite took the lighter from her, trying again. One of the best things about leaving Alford was the realisation that he would never again have to set eyes on Joyce Blackburn, the ghoulish, humourless spinster who had been his ‘dame’ for five long years. A mean-spirited ally of Lionel Jones-Lewis, she had been widely loathed by every boy who had passed through Kite’s house.

  ‘So she looked after you?’

  ‘In the way that Nurse Ratched looks after Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, yes.’

  When he saw that Martha looked shocked, Kite reassured her. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It was OK. Alford was fine.’

  ‘That’s it? Fine?’

  Martha stubbed out her cigarette in the scallop shell and climbed out of bed. She suddenly seemed angry.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Your father dies, your mother decides to send you five hundred miles away to boarding school, you effectively leave home at the age of thirteen – and you’re telling me it was “fine”?’

  She wants to protect me, Kite thought. She wants to know everything about me so that she can be my secret sharer and confidante. If I tell Martha about my life, she will accept the decisions I have made, the insecurities I have felt, and she will love me. The realisation came to him in a euphoric moment, rushed through his mind by the joint and the wine and the constant, repeating pleasure of making love to her. Looking back, that was the moment when Kite knew that he wanted to be with Martha Raine for as long as she would take him.

  ‘OK,’ he said, with a degree of uncertainty. ‘It wasn’t always “fine”.’ He stubbed out the cigarette. ‘I’ll tell you the truth if you like. I’ll tell you the whole story.’

  12

  If Lachlan Kite had been strapped to a rocket in the back garden of the Killantringan Hotel and fired into the night sky over Portpatrick, he could not have landed in a stranger place than Alford College
in September 1984.

  The thirteen-year-old Kite had never been further south than Hadrian’s Wall. Edinburgh and Glasgow were the only large cities he had visited. He had met guests at the hotel from all over the world – Paris, Toronto, Melbourne, Chicago – but had never set foot in England.

  His mother drove him there, across country via Castle Douglas to Carlisle, then seven hours of motorways all the way to London. They arrived in darkness. Kite peered out of the windows at the mass of people and cars, expecting to see Big Ben and Buckingham Palace, punks with needles of red and purple hair. Cheryl Kite had friends in town, but they took a room at the Penta Hotel on Cromwell Road where she sewed the final nametapes onto his socks and pants and took him for spare ribs at the Texas Lone Star.

  ‘It’s going to be so interesting, darling,’ she said, lighting a Silk Cut. ‘Are you looking forward to tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ Kite replied and felt his stomach turn inside out.

  He was still a boy, his voice unbroken, his body pale and slim. He felt that he was on the verge of being cast into a land of vast hairy giants with chauffeurs to drive them around and butlers on call to ferry glasses of orange juice to their studies. That night Kite didn’t sleep a wink. All he could think about were the photographs of Alford he had seen in a book Roger Dunlop had given him as a present for passing Common Entrance. Boys in tailcoats and top hats, lining the funeral route outside Windsor Castle following the death of King George VI; great men of yesteryear who had attended Alford in the Victorian era and gone on to run every corner of the British Empire; oil paintings of Alford’s magnificent cathedral and cloisters, built by Henry VII to stand for a thousand years. To Kite’s young eyes, the school promised to be a black-and-white time warp of ritual and convention so far removed from the life he knew in Scotland as to be almost incomprehensible. Kite’s father had given him a small silver box as a Christening present, engraved inside the lid with the simple message: To Lachlan, from Da and the date of the service. Kite clutched it in his hand all night, whispering to his father as Cheryl snored in the next-door bed.