‘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
