Once near enough to Will, I see that there is a balloon tied to his wrist, frantically trying to escape behind him on the wind. Eventually it turns so I can read the message, an anagram, two words in black marker pen.
Dead Edict.
His chest isn’t moving, but I don’t want to touch him to feel for a pulse. I already know he’s dead. At his feet is an open but empty Evian bottle.
Rupesh is starting to make noises, and Jen lifts his upper body onto her lap and strokes his hair. I feel Steve beside me and this time let his arm come around my waist and pull me to his shoulder.
“Why has he done this to us?” Jen says, her cry like an infant’s.
I can’t reply then. But later, when we are waiting for the police, I understand Will’s last message to us is not only an anagram, it is the answer.
Dedicated.
Part IV
All shadows, behind us, waiting.
Adeline, 1998
Everyone settled back into an uneasy rhythm of hanging out at Steve’s, including Adeline. As much as Steve was being a cock about the outcome of The Dedication, she couldn’t fight that she still found herself wanting to see him. She tried to avoid things getting physical, wanted to be angrier for Will. But turning up to watch the occasional film with the others, pretending like everything was normal and that at some point she could convince him to let Will back in, soon led to more kissing. And not long after the other stuff followed. It was amazing, and unsettling, to discover that she could compartmentalise the good and bad of Steve almost at will.
Once, they had come close to going all the way, one television-illuminated evening when Jen and Rupesh hadn’t been over on the sofa having thumb wars and kissing, and she ended up straddling his lap without her underwear on. His trousers and boxers were down to his knees, only then, as always seemed to happen, they stopped. She fell into a brief and frustrated sleep on his bare chest, then woke up, still confused. Instead of asking him why he kept stopping things, she started a fight about Will. Told Steve she thought he was being a prick.
It was stupid, though Adeline believed everything she was saying. When Steve wouldn’t even listen to her points, she threatened to leave but couldn’t find her knickers. That’s when he told her that he was moving back to London at the end of the summer. She ignored him, thought he was saying it to be spiteful.
She stormed off in a rage, knickerless, her earlier excitement feeling like it belonged to an entirely different summer.
One afternoon she noticed Will outside from her bedroom window. She’d seen him around once or twice in the week or so since The Dedication, although felt awkward about saying hi in case Steve saw. He was ambling in the direction of the farmhouse and the fields, head down and gait more stooped than usual. His feet slipped off the edge of the kerb every now and again and he would stumble into the road. Was he drunk? That was a worry.
By the time she reached the road he was already turning down Dead Man’s Alley. She followed him, holding back so that he couldn’t see her. She didn’t want anything bad happening to him, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to speak to him like this either.
He vanished into the first maize field. She followed, and once inside, when the path straightened, she realised he wasn’t in front of her. She stopped to listen; perhaps he had taken a sideways path into the stalks. She bit her thumbnail without thinking, then shook her head. She needed to stop this stupid habit. Her nails looked—
“Aghhh-deline.”
She screamed. Hands settled on her shoulders from behind. She spun around, ready to lash out on behalf of her thundering heart, but now he was laughing, and when she saw his red eyes, that sound became a mournful donkey bray that filled her with pity.
“I couldn’t resist,” he said, smiling in a way even goofier than usual. “Oh, I need to sit down.”
He fell backwards and landed on one hand, then settled onto his arse.
“Are you high?” Adeline asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve got more if you want?” Will reached into the pocket of his coat. The badges on his lapel rattled together like castanets.
“No, Will. I’m okay.”
He shrugged and started rolling another spliff on his leg. She sat down with him.
“How are things?” she said. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Why would you?” he said. “I’m out of the group now, aren’t I? And to be honest. I can’t be bothered with it all. We might be moving anyway. And, you know, it’s not even like we’re all going to the same sixth form.”
“You reckon you’ll get the grades?” He nodded and lit up his droopy spliff. “Even more reason we should all see out this summer the way we started it. Send it off with a bang.”
He took a long drag this time, and the glowing end ate up over half the length of the cigarette. He held his breath, and after nearly twenty seconds he broke into a coughing fit.
“Shit, Will. You’re going to kill yourself.”
He chuckled. “Maybe I should. Or maybe Steve.”
Adeline watched him, waiting for his punchline.
“Steve thinks he’s doing what you want, you know?” she said. “Sticking to the rules because you insisted he did. That’s what’s fucking dumb about all this. He is doing this because he respects you.”
“You think he’d be doing this if you’d come last?”
How to reply to that? No, if she’s honest, probably not. He’d have concocted some bullshit to change the rules somehow.
“You know what he’s like,” she said. “There are no rules in his life, so he sort of grabs onto the ones he finds like they’re really important. Like how sentimental he is about birthdays and Christmas. It’s because of his parents, you know that. It’s not personal.”
“Boys without rules turn into donkeys.”
“Pinocchio,” she said. “Yeah, he’s fucked up.”
“He’s annoyed at me because of Strachan,” Will said.
“Maybe he is,” Adeline said. And rightfully so; Steve was probably on to something about Strachan. “We all find that a bit weird, to be honest. I don’t think it’s connected.”
“You’ve got him wrong,” Will said, shaking his head. “Strachan’s no worse than any of us. He reminds me of Steve sometimes. You can love him and hate him depending on what he’s doing. Some people are like that, though, aren’t they? No middle. I don’t know whether the world needs those people to make things interesting, or if it’s a shit place because of them.”
Given he was so fucked, there was something to that, enough that it made her smile.
“Also, if this is just about the game, why is he trying to get me out of the photo for the pot?”
“What do you mean?”
“Jen and Rupesh are rubbish liars,” he said. “They’ve been saying I shouldn’t go along as it will be stressful, trying to make out it’d be better for me. They just don’t want Steve to ban them from the house. Fair enough.”
“You found that pot,” Adeline said. “If anything we shouldn’t be in the photo, you should. This is getting ridiculous.”
He shrugged. “None of it matters really. Do you ever think about time, Adeline? That rhymes. Ha! Sometimes, when I drink a lot, I can’t even remember that I’m upset. Is it really all that… all that… ghostly, all this stuff we do, that it can just vanish if we forget it?”
“Well, the rest of us all remember it,” Adeline said. “So we can put it all together later to make it whole.”
“Patchwork quilt. Hmm. And if you didn’t remember?” Will picked up a stone from the ground and held it in front of his face, his eyes crossed, and said: “Sometimes I can see what it is we really are. Not memory, not bodies—all shadows, behind us, waiting…”
Will wasn’t good, worse than she’d feared coming out here. He’d done the mental equivalent of her bike coming off its chain.
Surprising her with a sound that made Adeline nauseous, Will turned and threw up.
She wanted to
walk Will home but he wouldn’t have it. So instead, she went to the farmhouse and let herself in. The other three were sprawled around the television. None of them looked up to acknowledge her entrance.
She marched to the television and switched it off to a chorus of protest.
“I just saw Will,” she said to them, and they went quiet.
“How was he?” Rupesh said.
“So high he threw up.” She looked at Steve. “We need to talk about the photograph again.”
“It’s already been decided,” Steve said without even looking at her.
“No, it hasn’t, Steve,” she said. “Because I think everyone here has been too polite to call you a dick to your face, which is what you’re being about this. The game was supposed to be fun, a laugh. I didn’t realise we were literally supposed to be showing our dedication to you.”
Steve’s face remained unmoved, though he did finally look at her. No one else spoke. Instead they all stared like cattle.
“Can we speak in the kitchen?” he said.
“No,” she said, hating the way he was trying to control the situation. “We all need to decide this. I don’t think any of us knew how serious you were about kicking—”
“Please, Adeline. Can I just talk to you in the other room?”
The revolution she wanted to spark depended on her remaining here in the lounge, with the others. They were looking away from her. Were they embarrassed?
Steve stood up from his chair and walked to the kitchen. Asserting his control. His power. No choice now, she followed.
When she walked through the door she was ready to unload on him. Maybe even break up with him if necessary, not that either of them had ever called what they had anything as formal as boyfriend and girlfriend. Steve was far too fucking cool for—
“What?” she said. But his cool demeanour had shifted into something softer. Gone was his straight back and severe glare from the lounge; it was replaced by a slight hunch and big eyes. Something else became apparent in the harsh light of the kitchen, a red mark across his neck.
“I’m so sorry, Adeline,” he said. “You were right, I realised that when you left the other day after our fight. I’m going to go and speak to him, okay? I was waiting for Rupesh to speak to him first for me, just to soften things, you know? And then I was going to tell you.”
“So you’re going to lift the ban?” she said.
“Yes,” Steve said. “I just… Got carried away. I was so pissed off with him. I’m going to find him now. Where did you last see him?”
All this doubt, all this thought. Where had this boy been the other day? In any of the days since his Dedication? She wanted to touch him, wanted to smile, because suddenly the boy she liked was here again. As if a button had been pressed.
“I’m not going to make an excuse,” he said. “I just always try and be in other people’s heads and sometimes when they don’t try and be in mine I get upset and lash out.”
He came towards her and touched her arm. She didn’t move away. “Also, you know, I’m leaving soon. And I realised that I want to make the most of you while we’re here. I don’t want everyone at odds.”
“So you’re really going?”
He nodded. When he went to kiss her she pulled back her head slightly. Was he letting Will off the hook because he knew it was wrong, even insane not to? Or was he just performing, having realised that perhaps Will’s exile wasn’t quite as important as remaining on her good side?
There was an important difference here, one that she wanted to think about. Only then his lips were so close, and thinking didn’t matter that much any more. So she kissed him back.
Whatever Steve said to Will had done the job, although when the two of them returned nearly two hours later Steve didn’t look entirely happy about it. It went unspoken that it had all been resolved, but Steve’s downcast eyes when he entered—how defeated he looked—told some other story. He was pale, and for the next hour he barely spoke. When it turned cold later he poured far too much petrol onto the wood while gazing off into the middle distance, then nearly burned his face off when he lit the match.
About the conversation with Will he said nothing at all, and even left them all in the lounge and went up to bed because he wasn’t feeling well. He clearly resented doing it, but at least he’d done the right thing.
The photo shoot was arranged for the following week, the day after Adeline’s birthday and the week before GCSE results. Steve now had the date of his move back to London brought forward by his dad, and it didn’t give them as long as they’d hoped together.
Mr. Strachan, the idiot, had let a bonfire at the bottom of his garden get out of control and set fire to his shed the night of Adeline’s birthday. It had needed a fire engine and everything, and the whole street came out to watch: quite the birthday present.
Adeline’s mum told her that Mr. Strachan kept a lot of valuable things in that shed, and suspected he hadn’t shown his face because he had just accidentally blown his retirement fund. Everyone but Will found it funny. He still hadn’t quite got back to his old self, although neither had Steve really—two things that were surely connected given the way they barely spoke to one another.
Once the photo shoot was concluded—the photographer taking all of a minute before informing them that, being perfectly honest, the article might not be large enough for a photo—they lugged large chunks of wood from Steve’s house to the base of the pylon over three trips, and built a campfire there in the fading light. Despite his shaking, Rupesh insisted that he was fine when the five of them began sharing out the booze; he needed to keep challenging himself, he said, and it really was a great place for them to keep out of sight.
Will started smoking, and was almost instantly on better form, his confidence buoyed. Jen handed around a bottle of awful-tasting liquor called Pernod, which none of them were able to sip without squinting. Steve was still acting a little distant, but was doing a better job of hiding it, even if he couldn’t stop staring at Will.
“Dad reckons that The Nag’s Head were thinking of changing their name soon, and they think they might make it something Roman related,” Jen said. “How cool is that?”
“The Bored Centurion,” Will said.
“Why is he bored?” Jen said.
“I don’t know. Because he was stuck in Blythe.”
They all laughed, and Will gave a sly smile and took a drag on his extremely large spliff. He offered it to the others, but they all declined.
“It’s all a bit silly, isn’t it?” Will said. “History.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Jen said. “You love history.”
“When you think about it, that pot might have been something he didn’t want. Maybe it was his bog or whatever. He leaves it behind and then time happens and then—suddenly it’s the most important thing in the world. I could do a shit in those bushes, then millions of years later it’s worth a gabillion pounds.”
“Gabillion?” Jen says with a laugh tinged with disgust. “That’s not a word.”
In Adeline’s experience, with Alexa and her other old friends, when drunk and excited and sad, the empty promise of meeting up again would always be chucked out at times like these. But this time it didn’t happen, perhaps because all of them had always known that their friendship was situational, a semi-permanent arrangement. The closest they came to such a thing was when the fire was dying, but no one was quite ready to leave yet. Jen asked the group now they were all sixteen, what did they think they’d be doing in another sixteen years’ time.
“I hope I’m an astronaut,” Will said.
“Really?” Rupesh said.
Will shrugged. “Dunno. I don’t really like heights.”
“What will you be doing, then?”
Will gave this some thought, then turned the question back on Rupesh.
“Dad wants me to go into medicine like him.” He shook his head. “I’ve got on to do science at A level so that’s probably my whole
life decided.”
“A good, safe choice, Rupesh,” Steve said.
“Yeah, well, I don’t know really,” Rupesh said. “I’ve got two years and science keeps my options open. What about you, anyway, Steve? I suppose you’ve got it all planned out.”
He nodded. “Astronaut.” Once the laughter died, he said: “I don’t know. At school everyone talks about the City. Going to the City. Working in the City. I don’t like cities, so maybe I’ll just move back here and do something like write film reviews.”
“You bloody like everything,” Adeline said. “You’d be giving Scooby Doo meets the Boo Brothers five stars.”
“Fuck off,” Steve said. “I have excellent taste.”
“Maybe you could write me a nice review,” Jen said. “I wouldn’t complain.”
“Is that what you want to do, then?” Adeline said.
She nodded. “I wasn’t sure, but that A star for Drama made me think it was possible, you know?”
“An actress?” Rupesh said.
“What? Don’t you think I could?”
“Of course you could. It’s just really hard, isn’t it? More luck than anything else.”
“I think you can do it,” Steve said. “You make your own luck by trying harder than anyone else.”
“You would say that,” Rupesh said. “But some people have better luck with luck than others.”
Jen was shaking her head, smiling defiantly. “Thanks, Steve, at least you believe in me. I’ll prove you wrong, Rup. You’ll see. Just don’t come crying to me for backstage passes to the Oscars.”
“What about you?” Steve said to Adeline.
“I’m not being a fucking astronaut,” she said. “That’s what I do know. It’s a bit of a waste of money, isn’t it, space, when there are people starving in Ethiopia?”
“Not if the moon is made of cheese,” Will said.
“Good point,” Adeline said. “Basically, I don’t know what I want to do. I think you can’t know really, and anyone our age who says they do know exactly what they want to be is a liar. I know what I don’t want to do, though, and that’s a start.”
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