The Other Side of Summer (19 page)

Later, I went out the front to sit on my porch bench. But Wren was already there, drawing again. I was about to go back in when she patted the seat beside her without even looking up. I sat down and watched Wren’s face as she drew. Her eyes were dark and intense and her mouth twitched, as if to show the decisions she was making as she worked.

When I looked at her sketchpad I gasped.

‘What’s wrong?’ she said.

I pointed to a charcoal face, with its breathtaking detail and the smudge of white chalk across one eye.

‘You know him?’ I asked.

She frowned and looked at the pad. ‘Summer, it’s Floyd. Don’t you think it looks like him?’

‘Not Floyd. The other face.’

She held the drawing to her chest. ‘Don’t get upset. It’s just a drawing.’

‘What do you mean? What do you know about him? Why are you drawing him?’

‘Summer, don’t yell.’ Her voice cracked. Her eyes filled with tears.

‘He is real, isn’t he?’ I asked. I knew my face was a mirror image of hers, crumpled and sad.

‘Of course!’ she said in a high-pitched whisper. ‘Of course he’s real. I met him, but only once. I just can’t stop drawing the two of them. I’ve been doing the same drawings every day, lately.’ Suddenly her eyes were strong and wide, a warning, a flash of fire. ‘Don’t tell Dad. He’ll just worry about me.’

‘I promise I won’t.’

‘But how did you know him?’ she said. ‘He came to our house, but you weren’t there.’

‘I know him from somewhere else.’

I don’t think she believed me, but she carried on.

‘No one ever talked about it because it was Floyd’s last night. We were writing a song in Floyd’s room. After dinner.’

‘All three of you?’

‘They just needed someone to sing some harmonies.’

‘I didn’t even know you liked singing.’ I thought of
Floyd teaching me guitar and how I’d always thought that music was a thing for him and me and no one else.

‘We had different times together, Summer. Me and Floyd were actually good mates, even if it looked like we were fighting a lot of the time.’

All this time I’d had Floyd in my head, thinking he was mine to hang onto. But he was Wren’s, too.

‘What was he like? Floyd’s friend, I mean.’

‘The strange thing is, I can’t even remember his name but I remember the feeling of him in the room. That sounds weird, right?’

‘No, it doesn’t.’

‘He had a kind of … presence. He seemed older than fifteen. Kind of wise. And solid. Like there was a lot going on inside. Floyd said they hadn’t known each other long, but they felt like brothers.’

‘What else?’

‘Why?’

‘Please, Wren. I missed that night.’

‘All right. Well, I remember they went skateboarding after dinner. And Dad was cranky because –’

‘Stop. I know this. Was it because they marked the wall? In the hallway by the cellar?’

‘That’s it. And he was really polite. Good-looking. Had an Aussie accent … Hey, I’d forgotten that bit until now. Oh, and Floyd had only been teaching him guitar
for a couple of weeks but he was already amazing. I think Floyd was a bit jealous, but you could tell he was fighting it because he liked this guy so much.’

‘They met in a skate park.’

‘Oh, so Floyd did tell you about him?’

‘Yes. Sort of.’

‘Summer, you’re being kind of weird. Are you okay?’

‘I will be.’ I put my arms around Wren and leaned closer until my face was covered in the forest of her magnificent hair. She smelled of lavender and moonlight.

When Dad and Wren went to sleep that night, I tried to bring Gabe back with the Ibanez Artwood. I wanted to speak to him, to see him, to tell him I was still looking. I didn’t care if he appeared in the garden or my bedroom or on the roof, as long as he came. But every time I thought he’d appeared, it was just a shadow moving on my wall, or a breath of air through the window. It wasn’t working anymore.

This must have been what it was like for Mal, I thought. I’d disappeared out of her life, just like that. Gabe and Mal were now both holes in mine. So, that night before I went to sleep, I wrote down more of my story for her.

The indoor skatepark is heaving. We’ve just finished an intense session and now we’re sitting to the side on our boards, passing a drink between us. I hand the bottle back empty to Floyd and wait for him to elbow me. He does, and when I laugh the lemonade in my mouth spills down my chin. And then
he
laughs.

This is where we first met. We’re underneath Waterloo Station. Soon we’ll head up there to the trains and I can’t believe it’s nearly time to say goodbye.
You’re going home.

I feel the adrenalin of the last few weeks in every muscle. The whole place seems electrified and I feel like the source.
You’ve come to the other side of the world. You’ve met Floyd, who feels like a brother. You never had a brother or a sister before, just Mum.

‘Check this out.’ I hand a piece of paper to Floyd.

‘Is this what he left you? “This will be good for you.” Unbelievable.’

It’s the note from Dad. He packed up and left in the night. He always leaves you first, even when you’re planning on leaving him.

‘Will you be all right, G?’

‘Yeah, I’m good. This break has made me feel a lot better about looking after Mum. I can do it.’

‘I’ll come visit you as soon as I can. Dad’s always said we’ll go to Oz one day.’

‘Cool. That’d be awesome.’

We bump fists without looking at each other.
You wish your worlds weren’t so far apart.

Floyd stretches out his arm and grabs the Ibanez Artwood. He hands it to you and grabs his spare.

‘Final jam?’

‘Here?’

‘Yeah, here.’

I see Floyd smiling shyly at someone sitting further along the wall.
It’s a girl you were skating with. She knows more tricks than the two of you put together.

I chuckle discreetly, into my chest, because it looks like the usually cool Floyd is in love. I lean forward and see that she has the exact same look on her face.

I play some chords very lightly, making sure I’m in tune. This guitar is beautiful. The sound is like nature and magic.

Floyd made you borrow the Ibanez Artwood for the last few weeks, even though you didn’t want to at first because you were so worried you’d scratch it. You’re going to miss this, too. Floyd has been playing his old one, which he says you can take back home with you. He said, ‘Don’t tell my sister. We’re buying her a new one for her thirteenth, anyway.’

Floyd starts to play ‘Waterloo Sunset’ by The Kinks. He’s note perfect. I want to be as good as he is, one day. I try to play it too, singing the worst sha-la-las anyone’s
ever heard and all the bits about Waterloo sunset being fine. I sense bodies gathering near us to listen, but I don’t look up or I’ll lose my nerve. This is a moment I’ll never forget.

Floyd’s girl is gazing at him. They’re smiling like they have a secret.

When I flick the final note of the song, time flicks too. I’m standing in the station. The guitar is still in my hands; the Ibanez Artwood. Floyd is walking away from me with the girl and his other guitar, the spare, the one he was going to give me. They’re heading towards the clock and I realise I’ve missed something. We’ve already said goodbye. It’s over. But then, why am I still holding the Ibanez Artwood? This can’t be right. He’d never give this up. He loves this guitar.

I can still see them, winding their way through the crowds. I’m not sure if I’ve thanked him enough for the last few weeks. For everything. Has he really given me this guitar?

‘Floyd!’ I yell, at the top of my voice. ‘Hey, brother!’

He turns around, and even from far away I can feel his smile. I hold up the Ibanez Artwood and he holds up one hand: It’s yours.

When I woke, I felt like every particle of the dream was in my bloodstream. I counted back the hours to see what time it would be back home. The house was quiet and I crept downstairs to the kitchen table, where the laptop was always plugged in.

I don’t know how long I stared at the screen. I was wiggling my fingers lightly, trying to keep the pictures from my dream circulating and at the same time working up courage. I couldn’t put into words what I was scared of.

Call her, Sum.

She might not want me to.

You know she does. You know Mum.

Not like I used to.

The old Mum is still there. Just like the old Summer.

So the old Summer tried to call the old Mum, and Floyd was right. It was awkward at first, but suddenly Gran appeared in the background and leaned over Mum’s shoulder.

‘How’s my Summer?’ she said, gruffly and affectionately like only Gran could.

‘She’s all right, Gran. How are you? And how’s Charlotte?’

‘That dreadful cat keeps leaving dead mice in my slippers.’ She suddenly straightened up so I couldn’t see her head anymore. ‘I’m off to get some wood, now. Be good!’ And as Mum and I laughed, I think we both relaxed.

Mum had been searching for Gabe like I asked. She’d called forty-eight out of sixty London hospitals, and not one of them had admitted a boy called Gabriel de Souza in the past year. She’d been to the local police station, too, but they’d been no help. They couldn’t search for an allegedly missing person who wasn’t even related to us. And she couldn’t even tell them his dad’s name, because de Souza was his mum’s and I’d never thought to ask.

Mum had also gone through every piece of news about the bomb. When she told me that, I started to cry.
I was terrified of what this might be doing to her, but she held her hand out to the screen and said that she was doing well and that she wished she could hold me.

‘I can’t look away from what happened to our boy, can I?’ she said.

Then we both cried, and it didn’t feel one hundred per cent like sadness.

The next time, Mum called me. But the news wasn’t any better. She’d called all sixty hospitals. There was nowhere else to try.

‘It’s not adding up,’ said Mum. ‘Maybe you’ve got your story wrong, darling. Didn’t you say that Gabriel had been travelling with his father? They could have gone anywhere. He’s probably perfectly well, walking around Rome or Paris, seeing the world with his dad.’

‘He’s not! I know he’s not.’

‘
How
, Summer?’

‘I just do. And I promised him! You promised
me
!’

All of a sudden the rage was there again. Mum tried to reach out to me with her hand as if she could touch me through the screen, but all she managed to do was block the camera so that everything went black. This time it didn’t seem cute or funny, it made me angry. I couldn’t stop myself. I slammed the laptop shut before her face could reappear. I regretted it as soon as I’d done it, but that just made the anger grow hotter.

I spent hours on the internet researching how to find missing people. There were more than eight million people in London and more than sixty-four million people in the UK. Searching for Gabe was like looking for a particular grain of sand on the beach. But that didn’t mean the grain of sand wasn’t there, did it?

Even though every day I felt like giving up, the thought that I was responsible for another person stopped me from curling up in a cocoon again.

The next dream I had made me do something the minute I woke up. Because for the second time I remembered every detail of it.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

I’m in a bed. My eyes are closed and too heavy to open. I hear a voice. ‘Check the monitor.’ And then another. ‘Pulse good, blood pressure good, temperature spike last night but it’s come down now. He’s doing well, doctor.’ A pause, then a different voice. ‘Yes, it’s true that he’s recovered well from the internal injuries. But the longer the coma continues …’

The voices fade and I think that the people they belong to are leaving the room. All I can hear are the beeps. I picture the lines on the monitor I must be attached to.

The dream skips like someone nudging the needle on a record player. Now my eyes are open and everything’s bright. I’m not in a bed, I’m inside a room that smells sweet like wood. It’s dark and small and there’s a perfectly circular window. There are lines across it, like bars. Are they what’s keeping me inside?

The bars suddenly move up and down. They vibrate and the room is filled with sound. These aren’t bars, they’re strings. This is my life support. And I need to come off it, now.

I woke in the garden, curled up on the grass with the guitar. I knew what I had to do. Leaving the guitar there, I went inside and found Wren’s art supplies that she kept in an old wooden toolbox. The house was quiet apart from the sound of me rummaging and the clock on the kitchen wall ticking. It was two o’clock in the morning. Breathing hard, scared that I’d lose my courage, I finally found her large metal scissors. Back outside, I knelt down next to the Ibanez Artwood. Under the moonlight I guided the scissors around the first string and pressed the blades together with both hands, using all my strength.
Snap!
And the next string.
Snap!
I cut them all, one by one.