The Last Summer of Us

by Maggie Harcourt

  And then, without warning, the canopy drops back and away, and we’re in a car and on the road to the chapel, chugging along behind a bunch of sunburned holidaymakers and what looks like all their worldly goods, snail-like in their caravans.

  It’s Jared who spots the bikes. All neatly parked up on the grass verge, with fading cow parsley and nettles spilling out of the hedgerow over them. And they’re not just any motorbikes; these are the real deal – the big cruising bikes that thunder up and down the American highways of Jared’s imagination. Of course it’s Jared who spots them.

  Dozens and dozens of them, all lined up; their riders’ helmets beside them or balanced on their seats.

  “Uhhhh…” Steffan makes a noise.

  “Must be a thing,” says Jared. I can see him looking around.

  “It’s the dual carriageway, isn’t it?” says Steffan – and with his usual carefree attitude to road safety, he swings the car straight across the road and pulls up on the opposite verge.

  He’s right. Up ahead, on the bridge where this tiny little country road crosses the dual carriageway (the one all those caravan drivers should be on, according to Steff, so they don’t clutter up the blah-blah-blah boring…) there’s a little crowd.

  A surprisingly large crowd, come to think of it.

  It lines both sides of the bridge, pressed up against the railings. It’s dressed in black leather, in jeans, in T-shirts, in jackets…

  It’s all the bikes’ owners.

  They’re waiting for something.

  For Steffan, it’s the most natural thing in the world to walk up to a massive crowd of bikers and ask them how it’s going. Jared wanders up after him, his fingers turning his lighter over and over and over.

  I hang back. I’m not as much a fan of people. Not really. I mean, they’re fine; I just don’t always want to be around them so much. They’re hard work. Tiring.

  Steffan’s chatting away and they’re pointing down at the carriageway and nodding – and he laughs. They nod some more. He gestures along the bridge. Several of the bikers look round. They’re looking at me. Steffan waves me over.

  “You’ll like this,” he says, and he shoves a puffy envelope into my hand, shuffling me towards the railing. Two enormous bikers – one with a beard the size of a small dog – edge sideways to make a gap. Steff manoeuvres me into it. “These guys are all from the same bike club, right? And two of their friends just got married and they’re leaving for their honeymoon.”

  “That’s…nice.”

  There’s probably a point. I’m just not quite there yet.

  “They’re coming this way on their bikes. In convoy with the rest of the club. So this lot have come on ahead to wait for them…” He waves his envelope at me, opening the flap and pinching out a load of white and pink tissue paper cut into shapes. I see bells and horseshoes and other wedding-related things.

  Ah. Confetti. Got it. Told you I’d get there.

  It doesn’t take long; I’ve barely even slotted into my (tiny) gap between two vast leather shoulders – Beard Man on my right, Tassel Jacket Man on my left – while Steffan and Jared have found gaps further up and down the line, when someone says, “Here they come!”

  We hear them before we see them. It’s a loud, low, gurgling roar that builds and builds. It’s like thunder, only more…engine-y. A lot more engine-y. They’re moving slowly, side by side. They even have a police outrider escorting them as they head up the carriageway. The chrome sparkles in the sunshine and several of the bikes are decked out with white ribbons that flutter in the slipstream. As they come closer, everyone on the bridge starts to cheer and clap – and then the clapping stops and everyone starts emptying the confetti-filled envelopes.

  As it falls, the confetti looks like it’s dancing. Pink hearts and white stars are caught on the breeze. They rise and fall as we lean over the railing and throw them by the handful. The bikes passing beneath us – already deafening – sound their horns. The riders wave up at us and we wave back at them and everybody’s cheering and laughing. Down the line, Steffan is upending his envelope of confetti; he shakes it to make sure every last scrap is out. Up the line, Jared is watching the bikes. I can see him through the cloud of little paper shapes as they tumble and spin.

  The last of the convoy passes underneath to a final cheer – and suddenly our new friends are all hurrying for their bikes, pulling on helmets and kicking their stands away as the engines start. Big Beard Man pats Steffan on the shoulder as he walks back to his bike and yanks his helmet back on.

  One by one, the bikes pull out onto the lane and roar off towards the next village and the slip road onto the carriageway to join the rest of the convoy.

  The last of them pulls away with a blast of his horn as we walk back to the Rust Bucket – and as Steffan holds the door open for me to clamber in, he picks a bit of confetti out of my hair. A crumpled heart flutters to the ground.

  twenty-four

  Steffan turns the key and switches off the ignition. The car’s engine stops and we sit in silence. His fingers stay on the steering wheel, holding on to it like it’s a lifebelt.

  “You don’t have to come,” he says after a long pause.

  Jared blinks at him and shakes his head.

  In the back, I unclip my seat belt. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, funnily enough.” He swivels in his seat, turning to look back at me. “I’m not. It’s not like it’s a big deal, not now. And you’ve…” He stops, bites his lip and frowns. He’s trying to figure out the right way to say it, whatever it is. Eventually, he hits on something he thinks will work. “I can’t ask you—”

  “That’s just it, you idiot,” I say, cutting him off. “You never have to ask. Now shift your arse so I can get out of the car, would you?”

  He looks at me for a moment longer; long enough for me to see something that might be gratitude in his eyes.

  Maybe.

  Unlike my mother’s grave, fresh and cold and double-deep in the cemetery on the edge of town, Steffan’s mother is buried beside the chapel in the village where she was born. It’s high on a hill, and in one direction you can see the fields laid out like a cloth. In the other, the sea shines silver in the distance. Come the winter, the air smells of woodsmoke from all the open fires in the village, and everyone huddles around the hearth in the pub with their pints. Now, in the summer, it smells of the honeysuckle in the hedges, of the pollen rising from the fields, of the jasmine that Steffan planted beside his mother’s headstone.

  I was with him when he did it, all the while quietly talking in Welsh to someone who could no longer hear him. His dad, not quite understanding why he needed – not just wanted, but needed – to do it, paced the boundary of the little graveyard. I understood back then, because Steff was my friend. I understand now because I’ve seen how very deep a freshly-dug grave becomes the second your mother’s coffin is lowered into it. He simply couldn’t bear the thought of his mother, who loved flowers and baking, of this person so full of life, lying alone in the ground. He couldn’t stand the idea of the only flowers she ever got being a bunch of petrol-station carnations wrapped in noisy cellophane, left to rot and shrivel to nothing and adding death to death. So he bought a jasmine plant from the florist in town and he dug a little hole at the side of her headstone and he planted it.

  And then we dug it back out again because he’d planted it still in its pot, and it only occurred to us after he’d finished that that probably wasn’t the way to go. She’d have laughed at that.

  For all the views and the honeysuckle and the jasmine, though, the chapel is just the same as I remember it: cold and grey and all hard edges. That’s chapel for you. Even in the sunshine it looks forbidding. I never got how someone like Steffan’s mother could possibly think she belonged in front of a building like this: one which permanently looks like it’s about to tell you off for eating a biscuit, because biscuit equals joy equals bad… Bad biscuit. Bad happy. Bad, bad, bad. But that’s what
she wanted. It’s what she chose, after all. She wanted to go back to where she came from – and I guess we’ve all got to come from somewhere.

  What will we do when it’s our turn? I wonder. Will we want to look forward, or back?

  Jared lurks by the graveyard wall, pretending to read an inscription. Steffan folds himself into a rugby player-shaped heap beside the headstone, picking the faded flowers off the jasmine and curling his fingers tightly around them. The lettering on the stone has started to weather already, her name softening. It’s what happens, isn’t it? Memories soften, stones weather. Names – so important to us when we’re using them – fill up with moss. Time passes and we can never go back, not really – only forward. Forward, and making the best of it as we go.

  I hang back from the graveside. He needs some space, and I need to be not-standing-right-next-to-a-grave-again. Not yet. I’m here if he needs me, which he won’t.

  The next headstone along has a photo set into it. It’s black and white; a woman in an old-fashioned lace wedding dress. Her hair is dark, tightly curled about her face, and she’s clutching a bouquet of flowers. She’s smiling. Of course she is; it’s her wedding day and, looking at all the dates on the stone, she has a good sixty years ahead of her. Sixty years in which she’ll see her children grow up to have children of their own…and then for those children to have children too.

  My mother didn’t get that. Neither did Steffan’s. But seeing him sitting there, jabbering away in Welsh and clutching a handful of jasmine flowers…I don’t know, it seems kind of crazy being angry about it, doesn’t it? What good does it do? It’s not fair, and it’s not fair…and so it goes. Only forward, never back.

  I watch him for a few minutes and when he stops talking and bows his head, I don’t want to give him space any more. Without a word, I sit beside him and put my arm around him. He rests his head on my shoulder and he’s not quite crying but it’s near enough.

  Some goodbyes are harder than others, and the hardest are never quite the ones you expect.

  “She’d understand, you know,” I say after a while.

  “I know.” He sits up, rubbing his hand across his face. He sniffs, just once. “That’s the worst part. She always did.”

  “And you feel bad why? For leaving her?”

  “Kind of. Stupid, isn’t it? I mean, she left me first, right?”

  “It’s not stupid. It is what it is.” I am, momentarily, overwhelmed by my own Zen. Because that’s deep.

  “It is what it is?” He looks at me, mimicking my tone. Apparently Steffan isn’t much into Zen.

  “Yeah, alright. I thought you were being all mournful and sensitive? I liked that better.”

  “I’ll bet you did…” He nudges me and winks.

  “Oh, get over yourself. Seriously.”

  “Mournful and mysterious. Sensitive. Quiet. That’s your type, right?” Another nudge. The bastard.

  “Seriously. I’m trying to be nice here. Shut the hell up.”

  “Whatever.” He holds his hands up, still grinning.

  The quiet Steffan, the one only his dead mother and I get to see, has vanished again. And that’s the way it should be.

  Whatever it was he needed to say to her, he’s said it – and it’s like a weight has lifted from him. Maybe he told her about Jared, about the money. Maybe he told her why they’re leaving, and how he’s tried so hard to suck it up and not show how much it hurts – and how it spilled out anyway and threatened the thing that matters most to him, because however much he wants to protect the people around him, he’s only human. Just like us. Maybe that’s what he said. Maybe not. But whatever it was, it’s helped. She’s helped. Of course she has, because that’s what mothers are there for…even when they aren’t there any more.

  Now all he has to do is figure out where he goes from here.

  He’s not the only one.

  “I do…not…need…a map.” Steffan’s absolutely adamant about that as we bounce along yet another tiny little road, which will almost inevitably end up with us having to do a complicated U-turn in the yard of yet another farm.

  “You have no idea where we are, though, do you?” Many more potholes like that last one and I may well end up being bounced out of the back seat and into their laps in the front. Jared is rummaging in the glovebox for anything resembling a map. What he’s found is a load of old chewing gum wrappers and a packet of what used to be jelly babies, all fused together in the heat. He throws the packet back at me. More out of curiosity than anything else, I peel the plastic back off the multicoloured lump – it’s kind of disturbing. All the little figures have softened and slumped into one another, the colours blurring where they join, but some of the shapes are still there. A green baby’s head is sticking out of an orange one’s stomach, and I’m not even going to think about what the pink one’s doing…

  “I have a brilliant sense of direction, thank you,” Steffan mutters as he shuffles forward in his seat and peers at the windscreen.

  What he’s actually doing, you see, is looking at his phone on the dashboard. He’s looking at his phone on the dashboard and hoping against all hope that his GPS will suddenly start working again and he won’t have to admit that he was following his satnav all this time and that the app’s just crashed.

  Sense of direction, my arse.

  The best part of it, of course, is that Jared and I both know exactly what he’s doing – but it’s much more fun to pretend that we don’t, and see how he gets himself out of it.

  At last, he slams on the brakes and my seat belt yanks me back into my seat.

  “Ouch.”

  “Sorry, sorry.” He taps the screen of his phone. “Why can’t you see the satellite, then?” He’s talking to his phone. Not on his phone, to his phone. “It’ll be in the sky, won’t it? Look!” He jabs a finger at the windscreen. “There’s the sky. I can see it, so why can’t you, you piece of—”

  “Do you two want some time alone?” Jared asks. He’s given up on looking for a map – not that there’s likely to be anything as useful as that in here anyway. As we’ve already established, Steffan’s car is very like Steffan’s head: untidy, full of crap and pretty filthy.

  Steff just glares at him. “I’m stepping outside. I may be some time.” He grabs his phone (which is probably still full of seawater – no wonder it’s being iffy) and shoves the door open, swearing the whole while.

  Jared swivels in his seat to look at me. “You getting out?”

  “Might as well. He’s blatantly got no idea where we are.”

  “I do, though.” There’s the tiniest hint of smugness in his voice.

  “Seriously? And you’re not going to tell him?”

  “It’s more fun this way. Besides, think how proud he’ll be when he figures it out for himself.”

  “You mean when his phone wakes up.”

  “That too.”

  Steffan is pacing up and down outside the car, alternately holding his phone up to the sky and shaking it.

  “This is going to take a while, isn’t it?” I trace my finger along the inside of the window. It feels slightly greasy, and I wonder what Steffan plans to do with the car when he leaves.

  The day he bought it, he drove it round to my house and parked it outside, leaning on the horn until I came out to look at it. It sounded like a wheezy old goat and it looked like shit (and it still does – both of those) but he was so pleased as he stood there with one hand on the roof, smiling and saying “Right?” that you’d think he had actually built it himself. He did buy it himself, with his own money saved from those summer jobs his mum made him take (and the infamous stint as the local paper boy…) so maybe that was it. It was his car. Nobody else’s.

  The thing about the Rust Bucket, though, is that it didn’t matter how it looked. It was – is – more than just a car. It was freedom. It meant no more waiting around for the bus to school. It meant no more sitting in somebody’s room on a Saturday afternoon because it’s raining and there’s
nothing to do and nowhere to go. It meant being able to go places and do things…to do this. This, this last thing with the three of us.

  Who will take our places in Steffan’s new life? Who will sit in Jared’s seat? Who will sit in mine? Will they have the same in-jokes or new ones? Will we simply be replaced…?

  I feel unkind thinking it, but I can’t help myself. Everything is in flux. Everything is changing. The rocks that I stood on are nothing more than sand, washing away beneath my feet. What’s underneath that? I wonder. Is there anything, or is there simply nothing? A yawning black hole. A grave.

  Do we replace people? Not knowingly, perhaps, but do we look for someone – something – to fill a space that has opened up in us? And what does that mean for me? Whose place am I looking to fill?

  I know, right? Where would I even begin…?

  Jared unfolds himself from the front passenger seat, yawning and stretching as he opens his door and swings his legs out. Steffan is now jabbing at his phone. I have no idea whether there’s any practical purpose to it, but it seems to be making him feel better at least; he’s pacing less. Jared leans against the side of the car, his hands in his pockets.

  Well, fine. It’s too hot in here anyway.

  I follow them out.

  We have wound up on the highest hill for miles. All around us, the countryside drops away into a patchwork of sun-scorched browns and yellows, of green hedges and black specks that, up close, would be cows. There are clouds now – almost unfamiliar after endless days of searing blue heat – and their shadows slide across the valley below us. Tiny cars no bigger than toys wind along roads very like the ones we’ve been on the last couple of days. Who is in them, I wonder, and where are they going? Are they going to the beach? To the river? To the supermarket? To a festival or a funeral, or all of the above?

  On the opposite side of the valley there’s a farm, perched on the side of the hill. Built of stone and surrounded by barns, the house looks small and delicate. Fragile, somehow, against the sprawl of the fields and the weight of the other buildings.