by Chris Vick
“Anyone got any ideas?” said Big G.
No one did. After a minute of eating in silence, Big G said, “The St Wenna lot smoke that shit like you, right?” He looked at Rag. “One of us goes up there, next weekend, gives them a big bag, says I was out of order and we don’t want any hassle.”
“Did you say ‘smoke that shit like you’?” said Rag. “Like, all of five minutes ago you couldn’t get enough.”
“Cutting down. Gets in the way of my surfing. You should give it a rest too. Look at Ned. He ain’t exactly an advert.” The others laughed but Rag sighed, and pushed the bowl of chips away, like he’d suddenly stopped being hungry.
“Handy right now though, eh? Now you want a bag of it. And say I give them a load of weed. I didn’t do anything. My guitar’s screwed and I’m out by… what, quarter or half an ounce?”
“We’ll all pitch in,” said Big G.
Rag threw two chips at G, to let him know just how bad an idea he thought that was. It wasn’t the kind of thing I thought Big G would take, but he didn’t get angry; he just picked one of the chips off his jumper, and ate it.
“Anyone got any better ideas? Ones that don’t involve us getting our heads kicked in?” He waited. “No? That’s sorted then.” He picked up two chips from his own bowl, and threw them at Rag.
After a bit more talking about options, we settled into uncomfortable silence. Big G had a lame plan, but the only one we had that would get this sorted, and keep Ned happy. And everyone knew it.
“So who goes?” said Jade. “Rag?”
“If Rag goes, Billy’ll be a bastard to him,” said G, “and that isn’t happening. I’m the one that decked Billy. I’ll go.”
“Yeah. Sure,” said Skip. “You’ll say sorry. Billy’ll make some smart-arse comment, you’ll knock his teeth out and then they’ll put you in hospital.”
“Skip,” said Rag. “It’s you or me, mate. Both of us?”
Skip stuttered, panicking. “It could kick off. They might not want to make peace, they might fight, we might…”
“I’ll go.” Me and Jade said it at exactly the same time.
“I’m a girl; it’s less likely to end up nasty,” said Jade.
“And they don’t know me,” I said.
“Fight you for it?” said Jade, winking at me.
“We’ll both go,” I said.
“You up for this then, Kook?” she said, daring me, like ‘this’ could mean any kind of mischief.
“Yeah, why not.”
Big G glared at me. I don’t think he liked the idea, but even he knew it made a horrible kind of sense. Jade couldn’t go alone. And if any of the others went, it could go south quickly.
He looked around the table, to see if anyone else was going to say it should be them. Then to see if anyone had a better idea. Then to see if anyone thought it was even a bad idea. But Rag and Skip were nodding and smiling at me, more than happy that I’d take the bus to St Wenna instead of them.
Rag had a sneaky look over his shoulder to see if the woman at the counter was watching, then he magicked a half bottle of cheap brandy from his bag and hid it under the table.
“’Scuse me,” he shouted to the woman at the counter, putting on a poncey voice, “six more of your very fine hot chocolates, please, Madame.”
Everyone sat back, relaxed. This was going to get sorted, and me and Jade would do all the work.
“This’ll be fun,” said Jade, grinning.
IT WAS A WEEK before we got up to St Wenna to see Billy and his mates.
Nights that week I sat at my desk in my attic bedroom, with the dark outside and the wind and rain knocking, like they were trying to get in. Me staring at my school books. Not working.
Why was I getting involved? What was I getting involved in?
I asked myself that again and again. I still hadn’t told Jade about the chart, about the Horns. Something in me was holding back. Because once she’d seen that chart…
Why was I getting involved? Why?
Because fear makes the wolf look bigger. Just like it said on the graffiti on Rag and Ned’s garage wall.
These thoughts went round my head like a dog chasing its tail and never catching it.
The only other thing I thought about was Jade. Jade in her jeans and T. Jade’s skin. Jade’s lips. Jade’s body … in a wetsuit that showed every curve and muscle, hugging her like a second skin.
It didn’t take much to imagine her without a wettie. And I did imagine. A lot.
*
Jade came round Thursday, after tea, with Tess.
“Coming for a walk?” she said, standing at the door. She’d never asked me on a weekday before. I guessed maybe she wanted to talk about the trip we had planned.
“It’s getting dark,” I said. “Anyway, Mum’s working. I’m looking after Tegan.”
“She can come too.”
Teg appeared, squeezing between me and the door, and heading straight for Tess.
“Yes, Sam. Let’s go. Please,” said Tegan.
Grey clouds and hard rain had swept through the sky for days. But that evening the sky was clear, with a bright full moon, shining on the moors.
“Yeah, Sam. Please,” said Jade, joining in. Lots of girls wouldn’t have wanted a tag-along-Teg, but Jade liked my sister.
“Okay,” I said. We put on coats and hats and wellies, and headed up the hill, towards the tor.
Tess had a split-open old tennis ball. Tegan threw it for her, but couldn’t chuck it far, so they played throw-fetch every few seconds. The thing was covered in dog slobber, but Tegan didn’t seem to mind. It didn’t look like either of them would get tired of the game any time soon.
Then Jade found a big stick. She threw the ball in the air and, using the stick as a bat, belted the ball for miles. Tess ran off to get it. Teg followed.
“Been stormy, Sam,” said Jade. “Proper swell’s coming now. Could be a good winter. Your first.”
“Yeah,” I said. There’d be bigger waves. More hold-downs. More danger. The storms were coming. And God knows what else too. A lot had happened. Quickly. It had all got a bit heavy. All because Jade couldn’t stop herself booting Billy up the arse.
The trip to St Wenna. The chart. They sat in my thoughts all the time. More dogs with tails. And how Jade had been on the tor. How she’d been in town. How she changed, quicker than the weather.
Could I trust her? Did I even know her? I thought maybe I’d just come straight out and ask her what was going on between us. Something? Nothing? Maybe tell her about the Horns.
But then Teg reappeared, with Tess, panting. The moment was gone.
“Can we have a dog?” said Teg.
“Ask Mum,” I said. Teg took the ball out of Tess’s mouth and ran off giggling, with Tess following, trying to get it off her. Jade stared at them, studying them like she did waves.
“What’s it like? Having a sister?” she said.
“Pain in the arse.”
“Don’t believe you. I see the mums with their brats in Aldi. She’s not like them; she’s cool.”
“I guess so. Dunno how it would be if it was just me and Mum. Not very peaceful. You reckon your family’s messed up? Me and Teg are from two different dads. Mine’s dead. Teg never sees hers. Mum’s stressed all the time. If she didn’t need Grandma’s money, we wouldn’t even be here…”
Jade jolted at that. She glared at me. She spoke in almost a whisper.
“And how is it, Sam? Being here.” She was a bit accusing, like maybe I was saying I was forced to be here, like I was just making do.
“It’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” I said, looking straight at her. She smiled at that. She shone with how much she smiled.
“Good,” she said, looking away.
Teg and Tess came back, panting even harder.
“Jade, can I come for a walk with you and Sam and Tess again?”
“Sure. Any time you like,” said Jade. Then she turned to me. “You’re lucky, Sam.
Really.”
*
When Saturday came, it was a massive relief to finally get on the bus to St Wenna. I had a bag of Rag’s finest, heavily wrapped up and stuffed down my underpants. It felt like a nasty weight to carry. A possible criminal record. I couldn’t wait to be rid of it. But apart from that, I was looking forward to the trip. Me, Jade, surfing (we had our boards and wetties with us, plus boots and hoods). It’d be a good day once we’d done the business.
The road ran along the coast. The moors weren’t spattered with colour any more. Now there was nothing but dull brown and green, carved into squares by the old stone walls, and on the other side, the sea, the same flat grey as the sky.
The bus was empty, apart from an old woman and kid up the front. Me and Jade landed our bags and boards on the back seat. I stared out the window, looking forward to getting rid of the weed. She sat on the other side painting shapes on the steamed-up window with her finger.
“Why’d you come?” she said after a while. “You didn’t have to.”
“Something to do,” I said.
“Naaaaah. Don’t believe you. Was it cuz of me?” She stopped finger painting and turned to look at me.
I couldn’t say yes. I didn’t want to say yes. But saying no would have been a lie. So I didn’t say anything.
“Why?” she said, pressing me.
I folded my arms, kept my eyes on the sea.
“You weren’t afraid of this, were you?” she said. “Rag was. Skip too. You went for it.”
“I would have felt lame if I hadn’t.” I shrugged, to let her know it was the only answer I was giving.
“Okay, Kook. Will you tell me something?”
“What?”
“Anything.”
That was a weird thing to say. What did she mean, anything? Then I noticed what she’d drawn on the window. It wasn’t a picture. She’d written something:
E=MC2
It clicked. She’d remembered what I’d told her on the tor, about energy and matter. She’d been interested. In physics.
“You remembered!” I said, grinning helplessly.
“I googled it,” she said, “after what you said about mass and kittenic energy…”
“Kinetic.”
“Whatever. I didn’t understand it. I must be thick.” She stared at her feet.
“E=mc2? There’s about five people in the world who understand it.”
“And you.”
I laughed. “No. I’m just interested… it’s mind-blowing, some of that stuff.”
“Yeah, proper fascinating … I like you, Kook… I like that you’re into that stuff.”
“But you’re not like that,” I said.
“What I am and what I like’s two different things. You want mind-blowing? Do you like the Chemical Brothers? They’re old school, but their music… that’s mind-blowing.” She pulled her iPod out of her jean-jacket pocket. She put one ear in. My heart dropped. We’d only just got talking and now she was going to put her headphones in? Great.
But that wasn’t what she was doing. She offered me the other earphone. And the only way I was going to listen was by coming and sitting right by her, wedged in between her and the boards and bags.
My heart thumped in my throat.
I climbed over the stuff and squeezed in. We sat, with our legs just touching, and our heads close, connected by this tiny white cord. If I looked at her, or she looked at me, we’d be almost kissing, and if I moved away, the earphones would come out, so I sat there feeling her body next to me, like it was radiating sex.
The music started. A whooping sound, not music at all really, electronic, and soft and strange, like hippy tunes you’d hear in a crystal shop. Then the drum started, and the bass. It was dance music, but not like any dance music I’d heard. It took ages to get going, but when it did it had this heavy power. Deep, pulsing waves of music that swam in and out of my head. Music that got into my bones.
“Like it?” she said.
“Yeah, loads.”
“Great. You should download some.” With one ear in each, we could listen and talk at the same time. “Now tell me some more science stuff. Something. Anything.” She turned her head to talk; I felt her breath on my cheek.
I had no idea what to say. So I just opened my gob and started babbling.
“You can’t really destroy anything. You can’t destroy the atoms stuff’s made from… You can only recycle stuff… Everything there is… everything… is made up of bits of other stuff that’s always been around… The amount of matter in the universe is the same as it’s been since the big bang…”
“What’s that?” She knew I was uncomfortable. She was enjoying it.
“The birth of the universe, when everything there is now was crushed into something smaller than a ping pong ball, a pinhead, infinitely small, infinitely hot, infinitely dense and it… exploded…” I almost cracked up.
“Everything there is was squeezed into a really hot ping pong ball?”
“Yeah.”
“Holy fuckerama. No wonder it went bang.”
We laughed, turned our heads, took a sly look at each other. We were both nodding in time to the music. We laughed some more.
She took my earphone out and whispered into my ear. “We should have some of that weed. Payment, like. We can get bombed on the way home.”
I looked down the bus, to make sure the driver wasn’t checking us in the mirror, then got the weed out. The packet was really warm from being down my pants. She took it off me, opened it, took some of the weed, wrapped it back up and handed it back. I had to put it back down there, while she watched. It was more than awkward, because I was showing that I was pretty physically pleased about sitting so close to her.
Just feeling her there was like having this liquid energy running out of her and straight down to where I was hiding the weed. And she had this badass smile on her face, like she’d seen the growing lump in my trousers and was stopping herself laughing.
Shit, I thought. How’s it possible to be this awkward and happy at the same time?
THERE WAS NO ONE in the water at low tide, so we went hunting for them around the town, carrying our boards under our arms and our wetties in rucksacks.
St Wenna looked like it would be packed in summer. Lots of rent-out cottages on a hill, with fudge shops and cobbled paths, too steep and tight for cars. There weren’t any tourists now though, not in autumn; just seagulls crying and the wind howling. Somewhere near I could smell a Chinese start its day’s cooking.
It was so empty, it was kind of creepy. And every time we went round a corner I was expecting to see the police waiting with a pair of handcuffs, which was bonkers, but my heart believed it and was thumping the whole time.
We found a gang of them in The Raven, a skanky pub, with a fag-yellow ceiling and beer-smelling carpets. They were out back in the ‘garden’, a walled-off area with a patch of grass, benches, a couple of tables and one lonely looking palm tree in a pot. Billy was there, and his mate Mick, the guy we’d seen at the beach who’d had been so nice to Jade. Billy sat up, tensed, making ready for whatever was coming. But he relaxed when he saw it was just me and Jade.
All the rest were in their late teens, or older. Girls as well as boys. It hit me how pretty the girls were, California style with long blonde hair, shining teeth and brown legs. Not as pretty as Jade, but honestly, not that far behind.
There was one guy who stood out. He was old, maybe in his forties. Wiry and tanned, with wild brown hair and watery eyes. He sat by himself, with a couple of empty pint glasses in front of him.
The others – the younger ones – were really friendly, and that knocked me sideways. Not what I was expecting at all. The girls swarmed around Jade. Kissed her, hugged her.
“Hey, Jade.”
“All right, youngster.”
“Nice beanie. Where’d you get it?”
“Who’s this?”
“This is Sam,” said Jade.
A guy, maybe ninet
een or twenty with short blond dreads, stepped right up. He wasn’t friendly like the girls were to Jade. But he wasn’t unfriendly either. He wasn’t giving anything away. He looked me up and down.
“I’m Tel. That Old Faithful?” he said, nodding at my board.
“Yeah.”
“I nicked it from under the lifeguard hut at Gwynsand once. For a bet. That caused a scrap.” He smiled, and nodded, like it was a good memory. “Whatcha doing up this way? Surf’ll be better at Gwynsand?”
“We’ve come up to talk about Big G.”
“Oh, that. Right.” He rolled his eyes. “You’d better come and sit down.”
Jade was getting all the attention, but as I walked over to the bench with Tel, I knew I was being watched. I don’t know if Billy even recognised me. I ignored him, but I could feel him staring. And I was thinking any one of the others could be the guy who’d run his hand across his throat. The guy who’d slashed the tyres.
“You want a drink, Sam? I can get you one,” said Tel, starting to roll a cigarette.
“No, thanks.” I didn’t want us to hang around longer than we needed. But over the other side of the garden, I saw someone had handed Jade a pint of lager.
“Billy told me about what happened in PZ,” said Tel. “That G’s asking for it, isn’t he?”
This wasn’t right. I didn’t want this just to be about G. He wasn’t the only one that had done wrong.
“Did Billy tell you about Ned’s tyres?” I said.
“Ned… Ned the shaper? What’s this got to do with him?”
I told Tel about Ned’s slashed tyres. Tel didn’t know about that, or did a good job of pretending. He let out a long breath and lit his roll-up.
“Dude, I seriously don’t think that had anything to do with Billy, or any of us. I’d know about it.” He blew out a stream of smoke. “But let’s say, if, for any reason, it did have something to do with Billy, then he’s a tit, because we do not want any of that kicking off again. Know what I mean?”
He looked me hard in the eyes. It was like he was saying we had a choice. It could go either way.
“Ned told us to sort it,” I said. “G started it, and we’ve come to say sorry.”
“Billy’s extremely pissed off, Sam. Sorry might not do it.”