The Guest List(49)

‘I’m not at my best,’ I say. Understatement of the century.

‘That’s your comeuppance,’ Will says, ‘for forgetting your suit.’ He’s laughing at me.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I’m such an idiot.’ I’m laughing at me, too.

I went to get my suit with Will a few weeks ago. He suggested Paul Smith. Obviously all the shop assistants in there looked at me like I was going to steal something. ‘It’s a good suit,’ Will told me, ‘probably the best you can get without going to Savile Row.’ I did like how I looked in it, no doubt about it. I’ve never had a good suit before. Haven’t worn anything all that smart since school. And I liked how it skimmed my belly. I’ve let myself go a bit over the last couple of years. ‘Too much good living!’ I’d say, and pat the paunch. But I’m not proud of it. This suit, it hid all that. It made me look like a fucking boss. It made me look like someone I am definitely not.

I turn sideways in the mirror. The buttons on the jacket look like they’re about to ping off. Yeah, I miss that belly-skimming Paul Smith wool. Anyway. No point in crying over spilt milk, as my mum would say. And not much use in being vain. I was never much of a looker in the first place.

‘Ha – Johnno!’ Duncan says, barrelling into the room and looking very slick in his own suit, which fits perfectly. ‘What the fuck is that? Did yours shrink in the wash?’

Pete, Femi and Angus are close behind him. ‘Morning, morning chaps,’ Femi says. ‘They’re all arriving. Just went and accosted a load of old Trevs boys down at the jetty.’

Pete lets out a howl. ‘Johnno – Jesus. Those trousers are so tight I can see what you had for breakfast, mate.’

I hold my arms out to the side so my wrists stick out, prance around for them, playing the fool like always.

‘Christ and look at you.’ Femi turns to Will. ‘Like butter wouldn’t fucking melt.’

‘He was always a bad’un that looked like a good’un though,’ Duncan says. He leans over to ruffle Will’s hair – Will quickly picks up a comb and smoothes it flat again. ‘Wasn’t he? That pretty boy face. Never got in trouble with the teachers, did you?’

Will grins at us all, shrugs. ‘Never did anything wrong.’

‘Bollocks!’ Femi cries. ‘You got away with murder. You never got caught. Or they turned a blind eye, with your dad being head and all that.’

‘Nope,’ Will says. ‘I was good as gold.’

‘Well,’ Angus says, ‘I’ll never understand how you aced those GCSEs when you did no fucking work.’

I shoot a look at Will, try to catch his eye – could Angus have guessed? ‘You’re such a jammy bastard,’ he says now, leaning over to give Will a pinch on the arm. Nah, on second thoughts he doesn’t sound suspicious, just admiring.

‘He didn’t have any choice,’ Femi says. ‘Did you, mate? Your dad would have disowned you.’ Femi’s always been sharp like that, reading people.

‘Yeah,’ Will shrugs. ‘That’s true.’

It could have been social leprosy, being the headmaster’s kid. But Will survived it. He had tactics. Like that girl he slept with from the local high school, passing those topless Polaroids of her all around our year. After that, he was untouchable. And actually, Will was always the one pushing me to do stuff – because he knew he could get away with it, probably. Whereas I was scared, at least in the beginning, of losing the scholarship. It would have destroyed my parents.

‘Remember that trick we used to play with the seaweed?’ Duncan says. ‘That was all your idea, mate.’ He points at Will.

‘No,’ Will says. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t.’ It definitely was.

The younger ones, who it had never been done to before, would lose their shit while the rest of us lay there listening to them, cracking up. But that was how it was if you were one of the younger boys. We’d all been there. You had to take the shit that was thrown at you. You knew that in the end you’d get your turn to throw it at someone else.

There was one kid at Trevellyan’s who was a pretty cool customer when we put the seaweed in his bed. A first year. He had a weird effeminate name. Anyway, we called him Loner, because it fitted. He was completely obsessed with Will, who was his head of house, maybe even a bit in love with him. Not in a sexual way, at least I don’t think so. More in the way little kids sometimes are with older ones. He started doing his hair in the same way. He’d sort of trail around after us. Sometimes we’d find him lurking behind a bush or something, watching us, and he’d come and watch all our rugby matches. He was the smallest boy in the school, spoke with a funny accent and wore these big glasses, so he was a prime candidate for shitting on. But he tried pretty hard to be liked. And I remember actually being quite impressed by the fact that he survived that first term without having some sort of breakdown, like some boys did. Even when we did the seaweed trick he didn’t bitch and moan about it like some of the other kids, like that chubby little friend of his – Fatfuck, I think we called him – who ran off to tell Matron. I remember being pretty impressed by that.

I tune back into the others. I feel like I’m coming up from underwater.

‘It was always the rest of us who got hauled up for it,’ Duncan says, ‘who ended up having to do the lines.’