Frozen

by Richard Burke

  He stood with his back to a rotten oak tree on the outskirts of the village, at bay after a quarter of an hour of yelling and poking by us both. We had his confession, we had his apology and we had him pinned; and Verity had surprised me by not following through. I had thought the idea was to warn him off—after all, the treehouse was our private domain and it had been Verity who wanted to keep it that way—but here she was, telling him he could be part of the treehouse gang (she'd made up the “gang” there and then, I'd had no say in it) on condition that he could get us four cameras. I can't say I was happy about it. And to make matters worse, through a mixture of threats and will power, it was looking like she'd won.

  Secretly, I think I understood why Adam wanted so much to be allowed to use the treehouse. I can't say I was happy about it, but the sympathy was real whether I liked it or not. When I looked at Adam, I saw a boy a little like myself. Adam was lonely. He craved solitude, but he was also desperate for friendship. He wanted to be alone and he wanted to belong. Verity's “gang” was perfect for him. And although I hated the prospect of his intrusion, I also felt sorry for him—and for that, I loathed him.

  I wanted a private world that only Verity and I inhabited, a world of secrets and intimacy and mad fun. I was happy and I hadn't been for ages, and what had changed was that Verity was there and that she liked me and I liked her. She was half a friend and half an object of hopeless desire, and I wanted nothing to stand between me and either. But she had made up her mind and I couldn't stop her any more than Adam could.

  Adam never stood a chance. At first he had denied that he had been anywhere near the treehouse. The photos had soon put paid to that. Then he admitted he had been there and told us that it was none of our business. Verity told him that the treehouse was ours and ours alone. He said that it wasn't, because it had obviously been there forever, and we couldn't have built it. Adam was big, but that didn't stop Verity. She screamed and pummelled him with her tiny fists. He had no idea how to deal with it. That was when he'd started the slow stagger backwards that finally put his back against the rotten oak. At that point, Verity stopped hammering him and the stand-off began. She told him that the treehouse was now booby-trapped with far more lethal weapons than milk cartons full of water; she said that her dad had a pistol and that it was set up to shoot anyone going near the treehouse; she said there were big wooden spikes that would impale him if he crossed a trigger wire. And he believed her—or, rather, he didn't have the spirit to question her.

  And then Verity had dropped her bombshell about the cameras. I don't know who was more startled, Adam or me.

  “I can't,” Adam whimpered.

  “No treehouse, then,” Verity said. “Come on, Harry, let's go.” She yanked at me with a nod and we turned to go, both of us scuffing at the field's long grass, the tips of the stalks tapping tartly at our shoes. There was a dusting of pollen on her thin gold shins, evidence of the hairs there too fine and short for me to see. As we turned she looked up at me: her eyes were wise, her face was solemn and full of thought. And suddenly I was powerful again, because Adam was banished, it was just me and her, and we'd triumphed.

  Then Adam yelled, “Wait! Wait. Please!” And she smiled to herself and turned back, and suddenly I felt as low as before I had been high. I had lost, after all.

  “Four cameras,” Verity said firmly. Adam nodded. He looked terrified. Verity clapped her hands and laughed. She hugged my arm and held herself close to me, a small comfort. Through the thin material of her dress, a small breast was pressed against my bare arm. I tried to stay as still as I could, desperate not to break the connection. “When we see the cameras,” she said, “we'll let you join.” I stared woodenly at Adam. He stared woodenly at her.

  *

  The next day, he had a camera.

  Verity and I were in the garden at my place. We had reclaimed the sling from the treehouse and were experimenting with firing nails and marbles, which we planned to smash first to sharpen the edges. We weren't actually serious, but it was delicious to be so analytically gruesome, working out the most effective way possible of causing grievous bodily harm. Mum called that someone was here, and ushered a nervous-looking Adam into the garden. He was clutching a school satchel, the straps ripped and loose. He came hesitantly, the bag clamped defensively against his chest, and stopped a good ten feet away. He flashed a glance at the pile of rusting nails and the sling, and licked his lips before he spoke.

  “I got one,” he said nervously. He rummaged in the satchel and pulled out a scuffed brown leather camera case. The poppers were open and I could see brushed chrome and black dials inside. He held it out in one hand, leaning as far forward as he could, as though he was afraid to come closer. Verity made no move to take it.

  “One?” she said caustically.

  Adam nodded. “It's my sister's. She'll kill me if she finds out.” He cleared his throat as unobtrusively as he could.

  “No treehouse, then,” Verity said briskly, and turned back to the sling. “Harry, if we added an extra bit of inner tube, d'you think it would be too lethal?”

  I squatted beside her, and glanced appraisingly at Adam. “We want to maim him, not kill him,” I agreed.

  “Three! I can get three!” Adam blurted. He was nearly crying. His eyes were shiny and unclear, his eyebrows raised imploringly. His podgy lips were trembling. “I can't do four,” he said. “Honest. I can't.” He slumped in the long grass with his grubby knees up near his shoulders, and wept. I immediately felt guilty. All I sensed from Verity, though, was excitement. Adam still had the camera in one drooping hand. She took it.

  “Three? You swear? Before Friday?”

  Adam nodded, without lifting his head. “I'll try.” His voice was muffled because his head was still buried.

  “All right,” she said flatly. And my world changed.

  She plonked the camera back down in front of Adam and headed for the gap in the hedge calling, “C'mon, Harry,” over her shoulder. As I wriggled through the spiky gap behind her, I heard her whisper, “Yessss!”

  Behind us, I heard Adam sniffle, collect his single camera, and trudge back down our garden towards the street.

  That afternoon I went to the library in Summertown and took out three books on photography and studied them whenever I could. I had competition.

  *

  When we had eleven cameras, Verity announced that it was enough.

  Long after the event, it dawned on me that this was extremely odd—how did three children manage to get hold of eleven cameras? So, as an adult, I did some research. The answer was even odder than the puzzle. Almost every grown-up appeared to own at least one unused but fully working camera—and no one could say why. Camera manufacturers must have wet themselves with glee. It was our gain as well as the manufacturers', though, because without other people's surplus cameras Verity's plan would have foundered. The lineup went something like this:

  Verity – 2 from Gabriel, one old, one new

  – 1 she'd conned Gabriel into buying, and she wasn't saying how

  Harry – 1 from Mum's loft

  – 1 from Dad, broken but he agreed to fix it

  – 1 from Dad, which he'd bought when the other one broke

  – 1 from Mum

  – 1 from Mum's oldest friend, Mrs. Scobie, an elderly and slightly scary woman, on condition I visited her once a week for the rest of the holidays—a painful sacrifice, but needs must...

  Adam – 1 pilfered from his sister

  – 2 others, origin obscure

  I once asked him where the other cameras had come from. He just stared at me and said, “I got them for you, didn't I?” I could understand his bitterness. He had only provided them under duress.

  The project began, under Verity's direction.

  She rushed around in an excited daze, aware only of the camera set-up she had in mind, and not at all of me or of Adam. She ordered us about with total confidence—and with total submission, for our separate reasons, we did a
s she said.

  She was brilliant. She was sharp and intense and astonishing. She had a vision of what she was trying to achieve and she had no doubts that it would succeed. She flitted between her own work and ours, hopping excitedly; her words were so hurried that she never seemed to complete a thought before the next ran over it. It thrilled me every time she squatted next to me, her knee touching mine as she leaned in towards me, so close that I could smell the warmth of her skin.

  Occasionally we stopped and played for a while, swinging out into that wonderful green space, crashing back into the tree's warty trunk. A favourite trick was to sneak away while someone was wrestling with twigs and string, clamber aloft, and dive-bomb them from the rope. The aim was to get as close as you could without hitting. Often one of us would cut it too fine, but the bruises never seemed to hurt. Sometimes Verity would join in, and other times she would snap at us to stop mucking around, her eyes sparkling with that strange mixture of excitement, anger and urgency I remember so well. And we would stop, of course—for a few minutes.

  Once he was sure that he was allowed to join in, Adam turned out to be fun to have around. He was shy but he told good jokes, and whenever we stopped work and fooled around, he was vigorous and creative. I enjoyed having someone my own size to wrestle with and compete against—and if he ever got too competitive, there was always the unspoken threat of banishment. He wanted to belong, and Verity had allowed him to; conditionally, to be sure, but nevertheless he was in. It wasn't the treehouse Adam cared about; it was us.

  I liked him, but I was also jealous of him. With Adam on the scene, I had far less time alone with Verity. There were occasional days when he had to stay at home—because his relatives were visiting, or because some family outing had been arranged. On those days I did everything I could to remind Verity of how it had been with just the two of us. I brought biscuits and bottles of Coke, I'd sit and reminisce about building the sling, or how she had not wanted to come here at first, or how we'd hated it when we found out there'd been an intruder. Sometimes she would come and sit beside me, so close that her dress would brush my arm, and I would think that perhaps... but her eyes were always on the cameras in the clearing below, and after a few minutes she would shin down the rope and get back to work.

  And, of course, for every day that Adam was away, there was another day when I was. There were weekends at Dad's, there were pub lunches where Mum dragged me along to meet people she hoped might turn into friends—lunches where I would spend hours in the pub garden, rocking disconsolately on a rickety swing, and when we got home, Mum would bustle and fuss and be busy over the washing-up, the laundry, the cleaning, and then cry. I would comfort her, but only half-heartedly, because all the time I was gazing out of the window towards Wytham Woods, and Verity—and Adam. Those days were torture.

  Worse, even when we were all together, Verity flirted with him. I knew that she was only using him—he was with us because of the cameras, that was all—but it was obvious that she liked him, too. She liked his devotion to her, his eagerness to please. She liked his roughness when we played; I was always hesitant to touch her, scared of the intimacy, what it might betray, what would happen if she hated me for it. Adam had no such inhibitions. If the game was physical, he was physical. So I reassured myself that she was only flirting with him because it made her feel good. Much to my relief, Adam didn't respond in kind. If anything, her play-acting seemed to annoy him. I think he understood that she joked with him because he was not a threat; it reinforced her control. I was only half-aware of it, but those rare moments meant a lot to me. They meant that, in the way that mattered most, I still had Verity to myself.

  But the truth is, we were mostly too busy for these subtleties. We were simply glad to be there, each in our own way. We allowed Verity to sweep us along. She was doing what she wanted to do—and that made her happy.

  Verity, happy. I do not know if I can describe to you what that was like. She glowed. Her skin was like rough gold. She squealed as she laughed. When she worked on the cameras her whole being bent to the task, and her face was still and calm as a picture. Her skinny body was graceful as a deer's. And her knees touched mine when we squatted as we worked. Her clean breath mingled with mine. Verity was beautiful when she was happy. I think we would both have done anything for her.

  *

  One day it was ready.

  It was late afternoon, six-thirty or so. The sun was gold and low. The wood was full of birdsong and strange rustles. The air was thick and it moved in warm, drowsy currents. We stood together, Verity leaning against a drooping branch, me next to her, Adam on the far side. We looked at our work.

  The contraption—I can't think of anything else to call it—was eleven cameras in a circle, all primed to fire at the pull of a string. They were each perched on their own small mound of earth or rock or wood, carefully arranged in a ring nearly twenty feet across. Each camera pointed in towards the centre of the clearing beneath the tree, and each had a cable release wedged to precisely the right position, so that the plunger itself pointed upwards and outwards. Carefully lined up above each plunger was a weight—logs or stones—held up by the lightest twig possible. The plan was that strings would yank away the twigs, and the weights would fall on to the plungers: all eleven cameras would fire at once. The strings were to be pulled from behind the tree, where someone could crouch without appearing in any of the shots. Two mounds flanked the hornbeam's broad bole.

  “So, who goes first?” Adam asked. Verity tutted impatiently.

  “Verity,” I said piously. “It was her idea.”

  Verity squealed, held my arm, and jumped up and down. Then she gave Adam a contemptuous glance and handed the strings to me. I had to give one bunch back for her to pass to me round the other side of the tree trunk. It was a tricky operation, because the strings had to be held almost taut, ready to be triggered. I crouched against the bark, and gestured with my head for Adam to stand behind me. He did so, stepping over the strings, then leaned out to peer at Verity. He seemed as excited as she was, focused and tight.

  “Okay.” Her voice came from the clearing. I could not see her. She giggled. “I'm going to count down from five. You fire on zero. This is brilliant!” Then she yelled at the top of her voice, “BRILLIANT!” and whooped. It was so loud I half-expected an echo—but woods don't do that. All that came back was a nervous, insistent “Ssssh!” from Adam and me.

  “Ready?” She was still talking loudly, but at least she had stopped shouting. I tensioned all the strings.

  “Ready,” I whispered. “Verity, sssssh!”

  “Okay.” She was still loud. “Here goes... five, four, three, two, one, go! YAH-WHEEEE!”

  I tugged as sharply as I could. There was a sort of crackling-crumpling sound as (I hoped) all the twigs flew away, the weights fell, the plungers sank home, the camera shutters opened. The noise seemed to go on forever—a second, at least. I hoped it was just the sound of twigs and strings settling, not the cameras firing too late, or tipping over before the shot was taken. If it had gone wrong, the pictures might be seconds apart. There was no way to know until we developed the films.

  Adam and I rushed round the trunk. Verity was collapsed, giggling in a tangle of skinny limbs. She bounced upright.

  “That was brilliant!” she said. “They all went! It worked, I know it!” And she threw her arms round me and pressed her cheek against my neck. Hesitantly I put my arms round her, afraid she would move away. Instead I felt her take a deep breath, then sigh it out happily. Adam hunched a few paces away with his arms folded, trying hard not to look. I nuzzled Verity's hair. I could feel my groin stirring—and panicked in case she pulled away. She squeezed closer. Her cheek rubbed against my skin where my shirt was open, and her hair smelt of woodbark and grass.

  And hope.

  *

  We took photos until the light failed, and then we sat on the edge of the treehouse, legs dangling, Verity sandwiched between us clutching eleven rolls of f
ilm. We shared the silence and the birdsong.

  “Where'd they come from, then, Adam?” Verity said, after a while.

  “What?”

  “The cameras. You nicked one from your sister—”

  “Not nicked. I'll put it back.” His tone was pleading.

  “Yeah,” she said simply. “But what about the others?”

  Adam drew his knees up and hugged them. His face tightened.

  “They're your dad's, aren't they?”

  “Shut up! Just shut the fuck up!”

  He swung himself down off the platform, hanging by his arms and then dropping to the ground. I thought he was going to leave—and I felt guilty and excited at the same time, because if he left it would mean I was alone with Verity, and I remembered that embrace—but instead he crouched against the tree trunk, out of sight because he was immediately below us, but still there. You could glimpse him through the cracks in the boards.

  We sat in our own private worlds as the dusk thickened around us. A gust sighed through the leaves, and then faded.

  “What would he do if he found out?” Verity called quietly. “Does he hit you?” There was no answer. “Scare you, then?”

  I heard him sniff away tears and shuffle himself into a new position.

  “Mine does. Sometimes,” Verity offered.

  I looked sharply at her, but she didn't seem aware that I was there. Her legs kicked back and forth in a slow rhythm, and she whistled absently, a sound like the wind. The silence was something between the two of them.

  “My dad took his belt to me once,” I said. They both ignored me. The silence persisted.

  I tried to imagine Gabriel beating her: a belt, or a slipper, maybe, his wise eyes full of fury, his thick brow knotted. The image didn't fit. I decided she must be lying; she was doing it to get something out of Adam. It was another hook. She was wielding her power. I felt inadequate; I think I came as close to hating her as I ever could. I didn't hate Adam for it; he was as much a victim as I was. And, of course, I didn't hate her either, not really. But I felt bitter and defeated. Today, of all days, with the labour we had put into her crazy camera plan, the reward for success should not be rejection.