His dad was a local postman of nine years’ experience, a man with a tendency to sweat in all seasons, and having his son appointed to the role of Head Prefect seemed to give him more vicarious pleasure than any of the pursuits on track and field ever had. This was confusing, given how much emphasis the family had previously placed on sport.
Soon after the prefect appointment letter from the headmaster arrived he glimpsed, one night, through a crack in the kitchen door, his father sitting at the scuffed pine table on which they always ate their family meals. The memory of this moment is clear even through the veil of drugs. Everything quiet and well lit. His father alone and holding the document in both hands. His lips were moving minutely as he studied it.
Several days later, The Finch’s father was chatting to the Carrs. The Carrs were neighbours with whom the Finch family shared a small front garden, a love of films, and absolutely nothing else. On this particular day, as The Finch and his father stood in the driveway and Mrs Carr clutched her garden shears, Mr Carr asked Mr Finch what being Head Prefect at a school like Varndean actually involved. It was astonishing to witness the manner in which his father — known throughout the village as being punctual, taciturn — responded to this question. He stood tall. He draped one warm arm across his boy’s shoulders. He relayed, with faultless fluency, the entire inventory of responsibilities which came with the role. He had memorised the letter verbatim.
Did they have money? Not much, not really, but always a penny for an iced bun. You could get it delivered with the milk each morning. He was never one of the unwashed kids at school who wore plimsolls even in winter or was always being sent to the nit nurse under suspicion of infestation. Sunday mornings at the Sunday school, drawing miracles and parables on unevenly sized pieces of paper, wondering what the point of prayer was, and then there would be home-made lemonade in the church hall, bitter zest that clung to your gums, and wonderfully involved periods of paper-aeroplane construction, games that made all the worship stuff worthwhile, and after that everyone would stop at the old air-raid shelters on the way home, jumping off them in increasingly complex ways, touching ankles twice or thrice, cutting their hands and grazing their knees, all to summon some brief blaze of adrenalin to resurrect their lives from the stupor Father Simon’s words had induced. On one such air-raid-shelter stunt he landed awkwardly, feeling the shock that normally crept up his shins advancing further than before, all the way up to his right knee. Pain grinding there. Pain sending him home in stages, limping and pausing, limping and blinking, limping and hoping he’d done himself no permanent harm.
Twinges of pain would resurface when, in his final summer at the school, he donned the Varndean athletics vest for the very last time — but only on the home straight, and it was nothing a post-race bag of ice could not correct. He still won the 200 by a clear two seconds.
His cousin Elizabeth was into gymnastics. Seeing her do a cartwheel during the family performance segment of Christmas Day celebrations, he asked his parents if he could join one of her classes. His father and mother discussed this over subsequent weeks and then informed him that they loved him unconditionally, regardless of whatever his preferences might be. What exactly did they mean? He could go to gymnastics, yes.
Gymnastics made him feel whole in a way that all the other sports he was pursuing didn’t. It tightened his arms and back, gripped his stomach muscles. In mid-air every part of him felt hard. He was something cleverly put together, complete. His coach told him to start swimming twice a week as a way to improve core strength.
One winter’s morning when he was nineteen and still living at home, deciding what to do with the rest of his life, or deciding at what point he had better decide it, he took a bus to a pool a few miles away with the intention of swimming his usual lengths. When he got there, he was told he’d have to wait until eleven. The pool was being used by the Brighton & Hove High Dive Club. From a cafe on the second floor of the leisure centre building he watched the training down below. A man in suffocating swimming trunks teetered on the edge of an absurdly high platform. He flipped himself into the air and twisted and flipped again. The certainty of the process. The fearlessness. Gymnastics with higher stakes. Masculinity and daring. The adoring glances of girls.
Only one swimsuited witness seemed immune to the exhilaration. She was sitting on a fold-out chair by the pool’s edge. The tiled floor around her was splodged with coloured towels. She had her arms crossed, her legs crossed, and her skin from this distance looked cold but lively, shimmering, a source of cool light, all but a few dark hairs tucked under a rubber cap. She had a graceful nose, long shins. A few years older than him? The training session seemed to be wrapping up. Time to hurry downstairs.
Her toenails were painted green. She took a pair of glasses from on top of a towel. Wearing these massive black frames, and still also wearing her swimming cap, she looked like some kind of exotic insect, or a librarian from the future. This was Viv, his eventual wife. She had no head for heights, she’d later say. She was only there to support a boyfriend. Didn’t seem at all fussed that the cap and glasses made her look uncool. Therefore, clearly, she was cool. She was the coolest person he’d seen. Lack of self-awareness had its own perfect appeal.
Those downturned lips, though. The unmoving mouth. He didn’t consider back then that a sullen look might be the sign of a sullen person, or that she might be a person whose defining characteristic was sullenness, or that this alluring young woman’s inner tonnage of glum might be sufficient to send her sinking, throughout her twenties and thirties, into hot black holes of depression. Or — here was an idea — he did consider all this. It was exactly what drew him to her.
He stopped staring. Located a man in a tracksuit who was issuing directions. Said to him: teach me how to do this. Thought to himself: forget the gymnastics, forget the football, forget the possible trial for Surrey CC. Probably he was realising, at this time, that he wasn’t getting significantly better at these sports. He’d improved at a faster rate than his peers but had then begun to plateau. He was living in a town where he was once revered, and was now well liked, and where he feared he would soon be simply recognised. He needed a new challenge.
The decision not to go to university. It took a while to begin to regret it, and to feel bitter about his parents discouraging him. Having not been to university themselves — having known no one except Fancy Harry who had — they were suspicious of what three years of no income might achieve. They pushed him to accept an offer of a teaching job at Varndean. Headmaster Perkins had included within this offer — Maths for the younger pupils, Physical Education for the seniors — a harrowingly sensible-sounding line: ‘It’s always prudent to have a fall-back plan.’ No mention was made of the risk factor inherent in this philosophy. A person with a fall-back plan is actually pretty likely to fall back on it.
Years later, a scrapbook in one of his mother’s cupboards. It was with a smile that he located the article he remembered so well from his youth, the one with the headline ‘BEST YOUNG SPORTSMAN BRIGHTON’S EVER SEEN’. But looking at it now, wrinkled and yellowed, he saw that there was a question mark after the ‘SEEN’. And how had he missed it, this question mark? What sort of mind failed to spot the rising intonation, the air of qualification, the tentativeness of the whole headline? A punctuation mark, you told yourself. Just a way to end a sentence.