The Other Side of Summer (10 page)

‘Who are you?’ said the boy across the water. But that was
my
question. ‘What is this place?’ He looked more terrified than I was, as if he honestly had no idea where we were.

‘It’s called Wurun Creek.’ I felt for Milo’s map but decided not to show the boy I had one. The uncertainty of being new around here suddenly hit me. ‘It’s only a minute from the road on this side. I don’t know it very well, I’m from … somewhere else …’

At first I thought he hadn’t heard me but then he looked right at me again. ‘I’ve heard of it. But I don’t think I’ve ever been here before.’ He sat down on the rock and put his head in his hands.

This spooked feeling I had reminded me of all the times I’d seen the spitting images of Mum and Gran and Mal since we’d been here, and that pocket of time in which I’d truly believe it was them. Why did this boy at the creek make me feel that way? If I had seen him before, he’d just be someone I’d seen on a tram, at school or in the supermarket. I’d seen a thousand new faces since we’d arrived.

My brain still said run. But adrenalin had drained down my legs and into the rock I was standing on, gluing my feet to it like stubborn whelks. My heart was pounding. Bee lay down on her belly, panting happily. Some guard dog she turned out to be.

‘Do you go to Fairfield High?’ I said.

The boy was still looking down when he muttered an answer, so I didn’t hear it.

‘What did you say?’

He looked up as if he’d forgotten I was there. ‘I said no. Is this a dream?’

‘Um, n-no?’

He looked around again and started swearing under his breath. Then he got onto his knees and crawled to the edge of the rock. He looked as if he was going to scoop up some water, but instead he just stared at his hand.

‘Be careful,’ I said, surprising myself. ‘It could be deep.’

I couldn’t explain why I was worried about him. It was stupid. I got up again. What was I even doing here? Dad would go spare if he could see me. ‘Come on, Bee.’

‘Wait! Please! Don’t go.’

He looked so scared again. But what did he think
I
could do about it? My brain kept winding back through memories to find where his face fit in. Train station, swimming pool, the queue for the cinema …

‘This
is
a dream, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m lost. I don’t know …’ He bent over and rested his hands on his knees. ‘I don’t know where I am.’

‘I can’t help you. I’m sorry. I only know how to get back to the main road from this side.’

I had to stop talking. This boy might be crazy. Otherwise why would he think he was dreaming? He could be on drugs. Look at him, I told myself, he has wild dreadlocks and his clothes are shabby and … I stopped that thought, angry with myself for sounding like an adult full of prejudices. It didn’t matter how this boy was dressed. The reason I needed to leave was that he was a stranger acting strangely.

‘What’s your name?’ he said.

I panicked. ‘Sophie.’

‘Where are you from? You sound different.’

‘London.’

He sat down and started shivering. ‘Why is it so cold here?’

I couldn’t feel the cold at all. ‘I’m going,’ I said. ‘My dad’s waiting for me up this path.’

‘No! I don’t know how I got here. I know how strange that sounds, but I was asleep. I think.’ He held his head again. ‘I don’t remember. Then suddenly here I am. It doesn’t make sense.’

I turned. ‘I can’t help you!’ I shouted back. At first my feet seemed to stick, but then a sudden rush of air hit me from behind, and I found I could run as fast as I wanted. I looked back once but couldn’t see him. Was he hiding? Would he jump out at me someplace else? I ran clumsily up the side of the bank. The brambles tore lines into my skin as I pulled out Sophie’s bike.

The fear went deeper than seeing a stranger across a river. It felt like my heart would never slow down.

The journey back to the house had none of the fizz of the journey to the creek. I wasn’t an adventurer after all. Bee ran alongside me. When she looked at me her eyes seemed reproachful but I didn’t really trust what I was seeing. She barked once and it unnerved me; I almost fell off the bike. Then I felt betrayed. I’d finally let her in but she hadn’t been on my side back there.

I noticed different things on the journey this time. The way the trees held out their bare arms like old wicker chairs left out in bad weather. They looked helpless, like they’d been unravelling slowly. Unravelling was what could happen to me if I wasn’t more careful.
I made a fresh promise to stay coiled up tight, not to go out, and not to let anyone in.

Floyd? Are you there?

Always. You know that.

But you weren’t with me back at the creek, were you? You didn’t see the boy?

Calm down, Summer. Just get home.

Finally the roads became familiar, and then I hit Lime Street. ‘
Sensationally positioned! The family home of your dreams.
’ That boy had thought he was in a dream …

A pair of pink rollerblades lay abandoned on the pavement but a moving object caught my eye: a grasshopper girl bouncing on a giant trampoline enclosed in high mesh walls.

‘There you are!’ Sophie whined through her cage. ‘You were
aaages
!’ She stopped bouncing and pressed her face into the mesh like a tiny bank robber.

I propped her bike against the fence.

‘You stole my bike, Summer. You went really far. I timed you – you were thirty minutes and forty-six seconds exactly. I’m telling.’

It was hard not to snap at her but I had to keep her on my side. ‘But you’re coming over to my house tomorrow, aren’t you, Sophie?’ I wished I’d given the boy anyone’s name but hers. Not that it mattered now.
‘If you tell on me, Soph, I’ll be grounded and I won’t be allowed to have friends over.’

‘Am I your friend now?’

‘If you keep my secret safe you are.’

‘Deal!’ She went to the middle of the trampoline and became a happy grasshopper again – star jump, spin, backwards flip – shouting ‘Secrets! Secrets! Secrets!’ with every bounce. ‘Watch me, Summer!’

‘Very good, Sophie.’ I gave her my best fake smile but my mouth felt crimpled inside like a snail wrenched off the ground. I watched her for a few more seconds to make sure I was still in her good books. Hating her was becoming like a bitter medicine, and the feeling that she didn’t truly deserve it made the dose stronger.

Once I’d escaped and made it back inside our house, I took the guitar off. The back of it had all my warmth while my own skin was cold and clammy. It was as if the guitar were alive while I had turned into a bloodless thing.

I went straight to the kitchen sink and stuck one side of my face underneath cold running water. The feeling that the boy was familiar wouldn’t go away. I switched sides, letting the cold water run into the corner of my mouth and gulping hard. The thought of him went straight to my heart and made me too aware of its beating, like when I thought of my brother.

‘You’re back,’ said Wren, walking in. ‘Where’s the milk?’

I went straight past her as if she didn’t exist, and ran up the stairs.

It was a surprise to find Bee in my room. She was already stretched out and snoozing. I wondered what Dad would think, now that Bee had switched sides and become mine.

‘I wish you could talk, Bee.’ Because it struck me what Sophie had said back there: that I’d been thirty minutes. Thirty minutes? That was impossible. It was ten minutes there and ten minutes back just from our house to the sign that said ‘Wominjeka’. Then there was finding the rock, practising the four chords, and that conversation with the boy.

I reminded myself that she was only nine years old. She probably couldn’t even tell the time.

That night, sleep covered every part of me like an oversized blanket. It was strange because usually sleep was like a too-small blanket and my feet would poke out of the end and get cold or the sleep would fall off me completely and I’d wake in the dark. There was nothing as lonely as being awake in the night when no one else was.

The next morning I woke slowly and peacefully. Still with my eyes closed, I stretched out and flexed every muscle. An orange sherbet light had snuck under my window blinds and settled in my eyelashes. I could feel that it was very early. The melody from ‘Let It Be’ was caught up in a breeze somewhere in the back of my mind.

Suddenly my eyes snapped open. Floyd’s music: I’d left it at the creek, abandoned it on that rock like a piece of rubbish.

You’ll remember the chords, Summer. It’s okay.

No! No! It’s not okay! It’s a piece of you.

I checked the time. School wasn’t for another two hours; I could make it.

I couldn’t get dressed fast enough. I ran down the stairs and through the house in my socks, Bee’s paws tapping against the floorboards behind me. I opened the front door and put my shoes on standing on one leg on our prickly welcome mat. Bee ran out, peed on the grass, then turned around to show that she was waiting for me. It was as if she knew exactly where we were going.

Sophie’s bike was in the same place I’d propped it the day before. Things were left outside much more here than in London. Here they trusted people not to steal bicycles, scooters and all sorts of things. Dad was always going on to the neighbours about how great that was. Then a conversation would start up that turned London into something out of a Charles Dickens book: dark backstreets teeming with robbers. I hated it when Dad did that. Maybe that was why I decided I’d take the bike without asking.

‘Ready?’ I whispered.

Bee wagged her tail.

‘Good girl. Let’s go.’

This time I didn’t need Milo’s map. Bee remembered the way. It was colder today, though; the sherbet light had been a tease and now the sky was flat grey. The wind had a vicious whistle in it but wet leaves stuck stubbornly to the ground. If it had rained all night, what would that have done to my music sheet?

We found the bush with the bike-shaped hole and I shoved Sophie’s bike into it. I scrambled down the slope to the rock but I could already see that the paper wasn’t where I’d left it. The stone I’d used as a paperweight had stayed put but now all it was pinning down was a pulpy white corner. I scanned the area for the rest of it. The creek tumbled relentlessly past with the leaves and sticks and bits of rubbish that had slipped into it along the way.

‘It’s not here, Bee,’ I said. ‘It’s lost.’ The volume of the river was twice as loud.

Bee went to the water’s edge, wagging her tail as she looked across to the other side.

I stormed back up the bank and grabbed the bike roughly, feeling so angry with myself for not taking better care of something Floyd had given me.

I was relieved when Bee caught up with me and looked at me in a way I was starting to rely on.

School was even worse than usual that day. The noises were louder and the hundreds of bodies towering over me were even higher. I felt further away and like I understood even less about this place than when I first got here. Loneliness had shrunk me to a painful dot. My head was throbbing and I couldn’t concentrate.

Becky noticed, of course. During Maths in the afternoon she walked up to Ms Kumar and talked quietly to her while looking in my direction.

‘Becky will take you to the nurse, Summer,’ Ms Kumar said kindly.

But I’m not really sick, I thought. And I don’t want anyone’s kindness, like gentle fingers trying to tear into my hard skin, trying to open me up.

Becky’s hand touched my back as we walked out of the classroom. I walked faster to make her touch go away and only shrugged when she tried to talk to me.

The nurse checked my temperature, looked at my tongue and asked me if I’d eaten that day.

‘I think I’m just homesick,’ I said.

‘That’s not really a sickness, Summer.’ She said it so gently I wanted to scream.

Part of me wanted to tell someone about the creek, the lost music sheet and the strange boy, but what could
anyone do with that information except laugh at me? The nurse said I was to go along to my next class after drinking the cup of tea she’d made me. I looked at it. It was pale beige like ladies’ tights and lukewarm like most of the ways people tried to make you feel better when they didn’t have a clue what was wrong with you.

At the end of the day, on my way out of school, I thought I heard Becky calling my name, but I didn’t turn around.