The Last Summer of Us

by Maggie Harcourt

  “Socks, mostly. And as for the ‘menfolk’ thing? I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.” I wink at him.

  “Careful. I might have you taken off the guest list…” He wags a finger at me, and I stick my tongue out at him.

  “You mean at your big gig? Wow. You’ve changed, man. Oh, how you’ve changed.” I place my hand over my heart and shake my head in mock-sadness. He flicks his middle finger up at me.

  Jared has stood back and is taking all this in with his usual half-amused smile. Just as he always does. I realize with a pang of something like regret that this is what I will miss the most: the ease of being around Steffan. I can’t imagine how it will be without him here, without this. Without one or other of us slinging insults at him and him slinging them straight back again.

  What are we without Steffan? Will we be the same, or will we be different? Will this – whatever it is, because I thought I knew but now I realize I didn’t – will this evaporate like a vapour trail when he leaves, or will it remain? Will there be anything more than an echo; the ghosts of the three of us forever running up and down the beach?

  Time ticks past and the stars look down on us and the waves move in and out, and what is it all for?

  Moments, suspended in snow globes. That’s what it’s for.

  Having made a big fuss about being ready to go, once the bags are in the car, Steffan loses all his enthusiasm.

  Part of him wants to go and get ready for his big rock star moment (even though at this time of day, he’s mostly going to find an empty field – and I know Steffan well enough to know that he wants to Make An Entrance) but before that, there’s the other thing. The graveyard. It’s a solemn enough thought to take the shine off his festival plans, even if we all knew it was coming. Both inland from here, on the same road: the graveyard halfway between the beach and the festival site. It’s almost like it’s fate. He has to go through one to get to the other.

  He’s dreading it, I think, but he also wants it to be done. To be over. A bit like when you’re sitting an exam and there’s weeks and weeks before it, but you get to the point where you just wish it would hurry up and be over so you can get on with the rest of your life. You see, until he says goodbye, he can’t really move on. The fact his mother can’t say goodbye back doesn’t make any difference.

  I get that. Of all people, I get it. If I’m honest, I was worried about it, when he said he wanted to go and see her – and it’s selfish, but I was worried about me more than him… No, that’s not quite right. I guess I was worried that I would dissolve into tears or something, leaving him with this soggy, weeping creature to deal with, when what he really wanted – what he needed – was to get some closure. I couldn’t let him do it without me, either: that’s not how we work, is it? But, oh. The pressure.

  What I don’t really get, on the other hand, is why this whole festival thing is such a big deal to him. He’s played in concerts before. He’s performed at complicated things that have been on television and everything. This will just be a bunch of the kids from school, and the kids like us from every other school for miles around, drinking warm cider and pretending it’s just the same as Glastonbury.

  Maybe that’s why it’s so important: because it’s here, in our little corner of the world, the place where we’ve all grown up together. It’s all part of the same thing: his goodbye. His swansong. Just like this whole trip – all his idea, casually tossed into the conversation like it didn’t matter. The driving, the camping, the visit to the grave: it’s his way of shutting up shop, pulling down the blinds. The Steffan Show will give one last performance and then the circus moves on.

  And what about the people he leaves behind?

  Will he miss us?

  I sit cross-legged on the wall opposite the pub while they fiddle with the car radiator – and as I do, a woman walks past me. She doesn’t stop, doesn’t even give any sign she’s noticed I’m there. But I notice her. I notice her because of her shoes.

  I know those shoes…or a pair just like them.

  Blue suede flat shoes. Nothing special. Just pale blue shoes you shouldn’t wear in the rain.

  I remember the inside of the shoe shop; the smell of all the new shoes. The feel of the carpet squishing beneath my toes as I put my trainers back on and my mother turned away from the racks of school shoes and pointed at another shelf.

  “Look at those!” You’d have thought it was Christmas by the way she sounded.

  I remember her trying them on, putting her shopping bag on the floor. I remember the way she sat on the little shoe-shop stool and held both her feet out in front of her; my mother, who I thought believed in sensible shoes above all things.

  “They’re alright,” I said. Sullen. Bored. I wanted to go home. “When are you going to wear them, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll save them for somewhere exciting?” She considered her feet again. “You know what? I don’t care if I don’t wear them. They make me smile. I can just…get them out of the cupboard and look at them from time to time, can’t I?”

  And I remember the look in her eyes as she said it – and how, for only a second, I saw someone else smiling out from behind them.

  “You aren’t the only one looking out at the world, you know.”

  But I didn’t, did I? I didn’t know. And now I’ll never have the chance to know who that person who loved the pale blue shoes was. What else did she love that I’ll never know about?

  Those blue suede shoes.

  The last time I saw them, Amy and I were handing them to the undertaker along with the clothes she was to be buried in.

  They’d never even been worn once.

  The woman walks on, and I spin round to look down to the sea. The surfers are having what I assume counts as an amazing time, falling off their boards. I don’t understand. I mean, what’s so great about falling over? Even if you are falling into water, you’re still falling over. Again and again and again. And then you have to get back up and get back on the board and wait for the next time you fall over. It looks like hard work. I say as much out loud, to nobody in particular.

  Of course Jared hears me – well, he would, wouldn’t he? Nothing gets past him. I can suddenly feel him standing behind me, looking over me to the sea, and I find that I’m almost waiting for his hand on my shoulder, on the small of my back. Something. Anything. Because he’s standing so close and yet he feels so distant and I can’t even begin to puzzle him out. Is he my friend? Is he something else? Are he and I simply in orbit around Steffan’s star – and when Steffan goes, will he go too, drifting off into the dark?

  I never used to be afraid of the dark.

  “You’re thinking about Steffan.” It isn’t a question.

  “I don’t want him to go,” I say, and my voice sounds tight. Weak. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without him around.”

  “Don’t let him hear you saying that. He’s already bad enough this morning with this festival shit happening. Imagine what he’d be like if he heard you!”

  “He’d never get his head in the car…” I shake my own head, and turn to face him, looking up as he stands over me. “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  I wait for the shutters to come down behind his eyes, for the distance between us to grow as he steps back from the question. But he doesn’t. Instead, he sighs. His forehead creases a little. I wait.

  “I’ll be fine. It’s just life, isn’t it? You keep your head down and you just… I don’t suppose rugby…?”

  “No sports analogies. Because, sport.”

  “Fine.” His frown vanishes and he smiles down at me, his eyes locking onto mine. “You put your head down and you run.”

  “No sport.”

  “That wasn’t sport. That was life!”

  “Then you may continue.” I tear my gaze away from his. I can’t hold it any longer: there’s so much in his look. Too much. He’s as afraid as I am, and I can see it. He’s letting me see it
because he can’t say it out loud. The walls that he’s built around himself, the ones he built as protection, they’re pinning him in. And while he’s locked out at least some of the bad, some of the pain, there are other things he’s locked out too. The good things.

  High walls and small windows may keep enemies out, but they’ll keep friends out too. You build yourself a fortress to keep you safe and you retreat inside it and, before you know it, you’ve made your very own prison and thrown away the key.

  Which one of us is right? Jared, who decided that no one was going to hurt him again? Or me, who tries to let everything in and ends up missing the things that matter? Or are we both as wrong as each other?

  What will he do, now that his dad’s back? The rumours and the talk will pick up and follow him round like litter caught in the wind. Everywhere he goes, there will be whispers, and I already know how that makes him feel. Words like arrows aimed for his heart. His walls are too high now to be breached – but every well-chosen missile will leave a mark.

  He hasn’t spoken again.

  “Are you going to stay at your grandparents’ when he comes back?” Of course, this is the catch. Jared might trust them, might even be happy to live with them…but so is his dad. When he’s not in jail, that is.

  He scrunches up his nose. “I don’t know. I don’t want to. I don’t like him and I don’t trust him. But…” He tails off. But. Exactly. That wasn’t there before, was it?

  “What about your mum?”

  “She’s got a new family now. I hope they make her happy.”

  “Wow.”

  “I want her to be happy, you know? I really do. I just…I just wish that being my mum didn’t make her so unhappy.”

  How do you follow that? What do you say? What can make that feel better? My mother’s dead; she doesn’t have opinions any more. She can’t do anything, say anything. I’m free to think what I want about her, and to construct my own versions of what she thought of me.

  Jared doesn’t get to do that. His mother has made it abundantly clear what she thinks of him. No wonder he imagines what his life would be like if he could change places with either me or Steff.

  I do the only thing I can. I reach out to take hold of his hand…

  “Figure we might as well go anyway…” Steffan slams the bonnet shut and strolls towards us, and I drop my hand. My fingertips ache from the need to touch Jared; my blood throbs beneath my skin.

  The wind catches my hair, whipping it round into my face, and as I turn my head to brush it away I see Steff pause. There’s a hitch in his step – as though he’s afraid he’s interrupting something but has realized too late and now he’s committed. I feel Jared move back.

  Whatever there was between us then, at that moment, it slips away. No snow globes here.

  Steffan carries on. “Gethin reckons…”

  And on…and on…and on… Gethin this, Gethin that. Bloody Gethin. Behind his back, Jared is making heart shapes with his thumbs and forefingers every time Steffan says “Gethin”. Sometimes, he doesn’t even have time to pull his hands apart from the last gesture before he has to make the next one. And every single time, he bats his eyelashes and puts on a dreamy face.

  I start coughing.

  Steffan stops talking, looks at me suspiciously and then whips round to glare at Jared. Jared flutters his eyelashes at him, blows him a kiss and collapses into laughter.

  Steff looks wounded. Jared elbows him as he slips past and wanders off down the wall towards the slipway, patting down his pockets as though he’s looking for something.

  “Heard from your aunt?” Steffan’s watching me watching Jared.

  “I need to text her and let her know I’ll be back tomorrow.” The thought of going home fills me with a dull ache. Here, I am through the looking glass. Here, everything makes sense.

  “How’s stuff at home?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I do know, but I don’t know if it’s home any more; if it’ll feel like home. You know?”

  “I basically don’t know anything. Especially not what that question meant.”

  “You’re so annoying.”

  “It’s why you love me.”

  “‘Love’ is such a strong word, don’t you think? I’d go with something more along the lines of ‘tolerate’.”

  “Alright, then. It’s why you tolerate me.” He winks at me.

  “Dad’s gone into treatment.”

  “You mean rehab? Thank Christ for that. It couldn’t go on. You couldn’t go on with it like that.”

  “He didn’t want to go.”

  “I bet he didn’t. I bet he was happy just to leave you to deal with all the shit that needs doing.”

  “Don’t, Steff.”

  “You listen to me. Your father’s selfish. Mine might be a bloody long way off perfect –” he rolls his eyes – “but when Mum died he was there, and he took care of me. You had to plan a funeral, Lim. You had to do that. That shouldn’t be.”

  I turn away, and he ducks back into my field of vision. “No. You need to hear this, and if nobody else will tell you, then I will. He’s a selfish bastard and he’s put all this on you—” His eyes widen at my expression and he draws his head back. “And shit on a stick, he’s made you feel like it’s your fault, hasn’t he?”

  I didn’t move fast enough, did I?

  I dropped my guard, I slowed down.

  And Steffan…Steffan, of all people, has seen.

  His voice when he speaks again is soft but somehow hard at the same time – and when I meet his eyes they are fiery with anger. Not at me, I think, but at the perceived injustice he’s discovered. He’s angry for me.

  “You are not responsible for your mother, Lim. Not the way she lived, not the way she died. Not one bit. And if your father – your father – is letting you think otherwise, then he doesn’t deserve to call you family.”

  “It’s not that easy…”

  “It really is, you know. Your mother. Not your fault. See? Easy.” He drops into a crouch in front of me and grabs both my hands, closing his around them. “Don’t you dare let anyone tell you any different. Least of all him. He needs to handle his own bullshit. Don’t let him try and offload it onto you.”

  I sniff.

  I am not going to let this win. This sadness, this guilt. This everything, which threatens to drag me back down into the dark every time I think I’ve buried it.

  Grief is unpredictable, they said; everyone feels it differently. They made it sound like a piece of art: an abstract painting that everybody sees something different in, something unique to them.

  Grief – my grief – is an animal. It stalks me and I set traps to catch it: traps to cage it and shatter it and starve it of air. I want to see it wither away to nothing, until it’s less than a memory, less than a ghost. But it has claws and it has teeth and they are deep in me – and the worst of it is that sometimes, sometimes I forget. I’m so used to the barbs that I forget that they’re there, and every time I forget I think I can move on – and then suddenly, I remember. And each time I remember it’s like someone has reached into my body and torn out my insides all over again. Because, you see, I know everything that Steffan tells me is true – of course I do. And this grief, this animal, this thing…it isn’t just for my mother. I lost more than my mother that night. My father is still here, but somehow he’s not – not quite. He isn’t who I thought he was, and it took all this for either of us to know it. At least we have that in common…

  When she stopped, everything stopped – and more than her, that’s what I’m mourning.

  Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s not an animal after all. Maybe my grief is a parasite.

  It will not bleed me dry.

  I won’t let it.

  Steffan’s smiling at me.

  “There it is,” he says. He squeezes my hands.

  “There what is?”

  “The moment when you told all the bad, all the shit, all of it, to go to hell because you don’t want it
any more. I remember it.” He grins.

  Maybe, just maybe, he does understand after all.

  twenty-three

  Steffan makes a point of not driving past the ostrich farm again. I think one stare-down with an angry bird was probably enough for him – and I’m still not sure who actually won. If you pushed me, I’d probably give it to the ostrich. It scares me more than Steffan does.

  Instead, he takes the winding road back inland, which is, apparently, being used by every caravan in the western hemisphere. And a lot of tractors. And some hay lorries. Just because.

  We don’t go anywhere fast.

  The road meanders through fields and along the sides of hills. There are steep rocks on one side, and on the other a sharp drop to an old railway line – the sleepers long since pilfered to mark out beds for vegetable gardens – and the beginnings of a river. It sparkles in the shifting light. A quarry cut into the hillside has a thick, rusty chain wrapped through its wire gates. Someone’s spray-painted JESUS SAVES in big red letters on the rock. Someone else has painted DON’T TRUST THE BANKS in thick black letters underneath it. Yet another person has drawn a huge white flower through both of them. I’m not even going to try and figure out what that’s supposed to mean.

  The further we follow the road, the thicker the trees become; the more they overhang and box us in. Even with the little row of caravans tootling along in front of us, it’s spooky – like driving deeper and deeper into an enchanted forest. Steffan pushes his sunglasses up onto his head as the darkness thickens.

  The canopy of the trees has formed a tunnel; cut through by the traffic, the branches arch over the road and turn everything green. Even the air coming in through the windows smells green: damp and mossy. It’s like being in the middle of a huge leafy cathedral. Spokes of golden-white light punch through the greenery – so thick and bright that I could almost reach out and take hold of one. Dust motes dance up and down them.

  I don’t even mind our being stuck behind the caravans; anything to make this last a little longer. I could stay here for ever. It’s cool and calm and so peaceful. It’s beautiful. Nothing can touch me in here.