The Last Summer of Us (9 page)

“Not a thing?” I manage to get in front of him. He stops – reluctantly – and stares at a spot somewhere just behind me. “How is it not a thing? If it was me—”

“But it's not, is it? It's not your life. It's mine. And that's just what it is. Life.”

“I'm just trying to—”

“I know.” His eyes snap up to meet mine. They lock on to my gaze and hold it, and it's like I'm looking at a statue. His face is that quiet, that cold. “Back off, would you, Lim?” There's an edge to his voice.

I could keep pushing. Jared's the stillest, calmest guy I've ever met – and when he
does
lose it (which is rare) he gets even quieter. I've found a sore spot and I can't help but want to worry at it, worry
about
it. I've always had this theory that if only you could find the cracks in the wall, you could bring it down completely and see who Jared is inside. I could push. I
could
.

I think of all the “And how are you really?”s, the “It's the least we could do”s and the endless questions asked with kind smiles and empty eyes which I've faced over the last two weeks, and I decide not to push. If there's something he's keeping to himself, it's for a reason.

Honestly, him and Steffan are as bad as each other.

We reach the changing block and Jared disappears off round the back, being very careful where he puts his feet. There's a clattering noise and a small amount of swearing and then his head appears around the corner.

“Anything?” he says.

“How the hell am I supposed to know?”

“Try a light switch, maybe?”

“There's no way on god's green earth that I'm going in there by myself. There could be…junkies or axe murderers or…or…” I'm flapping. I'm flapping and he's grinning at me.

“Axe murderers. Plural. Sure – like one isn't unlikely enough?”

“You never know. It's always the quiet towns, isn't it?”

“And even though you're convinced there are multiple psychos in there, you're happy to send me in.”

I think about this for a second, then nod. “Yes.”

He rolls his eyes at me, then steps in through the main door.

It takes a minute or two but then there's a click followed by a buzzing sound as the lights flicker on.

Jared's one of the good ones – despite everything. Maybe
because
of everything. I don't know; you'd think that having that much chaos around him (his dad in jail and his mother being about as much use as a fish lighting a bonfire) would screw him up in the head, wouldn't you? But I wonder whether that's the reason he is the way he is; having been treated like shit most of his life, it makes him not want to treat people the same. Maybe he's just, you know, A Good Guy.

There's a squeak which sounds like a shower tap being turned, and then an ominous clanking sound…and then a sort of spattery-whoosh.

My shower! I can't believe I'm quite so excited about something so incredibly boring – but between the hot car and the trees and the grass, I feel like I've grown another skin. A grimy, sticky, sweaty skin. One I'm looking forward to shedding.

There's another sound from inside the changing block…and suddenly all my worries about junkies / axe murderers / weirdos who want to wear our faces as hats come flooding back. It's a big, heavy sound like someone being thrown around.

“Jared?”

Why am I standing here like an idiot? The lights are on. Why am I still outside while he's probably being dismembered by a family of zombie devil-worshippers?

It comes again – a great big crashing thump of a sound – and I decide I can't just leave him to be savaged by a mummy or eaten by…whatever it is. Something with big teeth.

“Jared?” My voice bounces off the white tiles as I step inside. “You in here?”

“Don't be thick, Lim. Where else would I be?” The voice comes from just behind my right ear. So I do what I do best in these circumstances, which is squeal loudly and emphatically, and leap in the air. Because I am
all
the cool.

The look on Jared's face tells me he's not even slightly surprised by all this.

He's holding out a towel.

I look at him. He looks at me.

He looks at me, and my heart's suddenly in my throat. And it's not just the whole undead-mummy axe-murderer thing. It's something
else
.

“I found the towel locker,” he says, still holding the towel out.

I'm supposed to take the towel, aren't I?

Like I said:
all the cool
.

“So that's what the racket was.” I take the towel. Finally. Well done, Limpet.

“Seeing as you don't seem to have brought one over here with you, I thought you could probably do with a towel. And the locker was, as the name implies, locked.”

“Until you came along and broke it with your man-arms, is that it?”

“Piss off.” He grins and shakes his head at me. “Thought you were desperate for a shower. So why are you standing there giving me a load of grief?”

“I'm waiting for you to
go
, obviously.”

“That's it, is it? You use me, then you—”

“
Out!
”

I am pathetically grateful for my shower. Say what you like about St Jude's (and we do – we really, really do) but they've made my day. The towel's a little like sandpaper, and the weird shampoo-and-bodywash-combo bolted to the wall smells a bit, well, funky, but I'm clean and that can only count as A Good Thing. Shame I also forgot to bring a comb, which means that I'm going to have comedy hair. There's no point in fighting it: I can feel it drying as I get dressed. I run my fingers through it a couple of times but there's really no point. It is what it is. And at least it's clean. Ish.

The air smells cooler when I step out, and there's a hint of smoke, like a reminder that summer's almost done. I'm not sure I'll miss the summer; not this one, anyway.

Jared is leaning against the wall outside the door. I'm a little surprised to see him; I thought he'd gone back to supervise Steffan, and my face clearly says that before I even open my mouth.

He just shrugs. “No lock on the door, is there?” he says. “Thought I should hang around, just in case. Axe murderers, right?”

See? One of the good ones.

The sun's starting to haze by the time we get back to our little campsite: it's almost too late to call it evening any more, but not quite properly into night yet, and the sky is that shade of orangey-yellowy-pink that lasts for all of five minutes and then it's gone. As we walk in silence through the field (if you don't count the other noises: birds calling to one another, the last of the day's bees – dirty stop-outs, the lot of them – cars on the road, every tractor in a fifteen-mile radius suddenly out and about in a last-ditch attempt to get the hay in, the river, just on the edge of hearing…the countryside's noisier than you think) Jared's face is lit in bronze. The setting sun's rays catch in his hair and make it glitter. His eyelashes look like they're made of gold and I swear you could see his freckles from the other side of the field. He's still a statue, but now he
glows
.

Me? I've got sticky-up hair and one of my flip-flops is starting to rub. Natch.

Neither of us speaks. There isn't much to say, is there? It's like all the banter in the changing block took the last bit of energy we both had and now everything's sharp and uneven again. I can tell that Jared is a good guy – I can. It's just that…he's like someone carved from stone, cast in clay, but watching you with living eyes. Watching and remembering – but not judging, not this time. Of all people, Jared knows what it's like to be judged – worse, he knows what it's like to be judged for what someone else has done. And he's got to go through it all over again when his dad comes home. There'll be the same whispers as always.

I don't know who hears it first: Jared stops walking sooner, but my hearing's usually better than his.

It's music.

It's a violin.

It's Steffan.

He's playing the violin and it's beautiful, carrying on the evening air like it belongs there. Like you could breathe it in, swim in it. Drown in it.

I told you he was good.

“Guess this means he's sorted the tents then,” says Jared.

“That or given up on them,” I say, rubbing my toes against the back of my calf. The walk across the field has already speckled my feet with grit and broken grass stalks.

Steffan can play anything; he only has to hear a piece of music once and he can replicate it. “Perfect pitch,” he says. Incredibly annoying, I say – like the time he spent three weeks playing that stupid jingle from a car advert just because he could, and because he knew it drove everybody else crazy. He only stopped when I threatened to take his bow and…well, yeah. He stopped.

I don't recognize what he's playing now. It could be anything, I guess, but there's something sad about it. He's playing fast and the notes pour out from between the trees until they're almost on top of one another – and yet again I wonder how it is that he can do that. How can someone so irritatingly normal be so special? Because he
is
special, even I can see that.

Maybe this move, this music school, will be the best thing that ever happened to him. Maybe in twenty years, when he's rich and famous, he'll look back and say that it was all because his father moved him across the world. And maybe it will be. But all I can think about is how he's being taken away from me when I need him more than I've ever needed him. And if that makes me selfish, then so what? Is that so bad, wanting to keep someone? Isn't it bad enough that I just lost one person, and now I have to lose another? That I get the same say in this that I had in my mother's death? And at that moment, with the music dancing around me and the sun sinking behind the hedges, I realize I'm thinking about him like he's going to die. That's how this feels: as concrete and as heavy as death.

He doesn't look like someone about to die. Which is reassuring, because he isn't. In fact, he looks like he's been busy; obviously Jared was being less helpful than he thought. The disastrous tents I left in favour of a shower have all been straightened and put up properly; they've even been pegged down in a rough triangle, with what looks like the makings of a campfire in the middle. He's also found a couple of chunks of tree trunk and dragged them into the middle of the clearing, arranging them round the little firepit like benches. He's pacing up and down behind the furthest one as he plays and he barely notices us as we walk out of the trees. He isn't playing for us, after all. He's not even playing for himself. He's just
playing
.

He'll play until he stops. There's no other way of putting it: it's like he's in a trance and he just has to get the music out of him. He'll pace up and down and even though his eyes are open he won't really be seeing anything and all he'll hear is the notes. There is nothing else when he does this. There's only him and his violin.

He'll be back in the world of the living sooner or later, and in the meantime, I think I've found the bag with the crisps in.

Dinner is tepid chips, which Steffan has managed to get from the pub up the road, while, from the drinks menu, Sir has opted for the house special: body-temperature beer, the bottles still warm to the touch even now the sun's gone down.

As soon as he stopped playing, Steffan made sure we told him how clever he was for managing to put up the tents without losing either a finger or his temper, and reminded both of us that, yes, he did go to Scouts for a while as a kid and he's really not as hopeless as we seem to assume, despite all evidence to the contrary. I managed to cover my laugh at that with a sort of hiccup, but Jared didn't even try. Steffan threw a stick at him across the clearing. He missed.

Jared is the one who gets the fire going, pulling a lighter out of his pocket.

“Why've you got that?” I ask, peeling the label off my beer. It's sticky and clings to my fingers.

“For lighting campfires,” he says with his back to me. I glance at Steffan, who raises an eyebrow and shrugs before reaching for a new bottle.

“Bollocks. Since when do you smoke?”

“Who says I smoke?” Jared sits back on his heels and blows gently into the beginnings of the fire. If I wasn't so startled by the lighter's sudden appearance, I might even be impressed.

“Nobody carries a lighter if they don't smoke, do they?”

Steffan swallows his beer with a loud gulp. “My granddad used to. It's how he met Nan – he lit her cigarette.”

“So, basically, he carried a lighter as a pickup?”

“Well, yeah.”

“But your granddad was a nutter.”

Steffan ticks his head from side to side. “Not always. I mean, he
was
, but that was something to do with the cancer getting into his brain and shit.”

He takes another gulp. Oh, Steff. His granddad died of cancer a year to the day before his mum was diagnosed. Sometimes you can't help but wonder whether the world's just laughing at you.

“So, Jared suddenly whipping a lighter out of his pocket means he's on the pull, does it? Looks like it's your lucky night, sweetheart!” I wink at Steffan over the top of my beer bottle. He pulls a face.

Jared pretends he's not heard any of it and scoots back to his tree trunk as the fire takes hold of the sticks and little branches he's piled into the circle of stones – and I remember that faint scent of smoke earlier. I'd gone all poetic and thought it was something to do with autumn moving in (or, at the very least, a local farmer burning a load of crap he shouldn't be) but Jared sneaking a cigarette seems just as likely.