by Rhys Thomas
Sarah shrugged.
Next up for the BMX was Kristen.
“Be careful,” Eloise warned her.
“So what are you thinking?” said Sam, wishing he could be a more confident person.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, you’ve been going on these nights out with him, so maybe he thought...”
“I wasn’t trying to lead him on.”
“No, of course not. So...you don’t like him?”
“What do you think, Sam?” she said, suddenly testy. She stared at him for a bit too long, and when Sam didn’t reply, she said, “Sure.”
He watched the disappointment on her face.
“Of course.” She changed her tone. “He’s nice. He’s a good person.”
There was the sound of splashing and everyone laughing again as Kristen went over the log.
“He’s made a big effort to get here,” she said.
He wished he knew what to do, what to say. But he did. He knew exactly. So why couldn’t he just do it?
“Sam.”
Kabe was smiling at him. Somehow, the BMX was already back.
“You having a go, bud?”
“I think I’ll leave it for a second,” he said, his mind clouding.
“Give it here,” said Sarah. “Hold this.” And she passed Sam her phone.
“You sure?” he said, quietly to her.
“Yes, Mum,” she said, climbing on the BMX and holding her arm out. “Whiskey,” she demanded. She took a slug and set off down the track.
Why was he always so pathetic? Why couldn’t he ever say what he was really thinking?
Sarah got up a surprising speed. Something about her small frame on the BMX reminded him of how Kermit the Frog rides a bike.
“Go on, Sarah!” someone shouted.
She veered off the track and Sam’s heart leaped into his mouth as she hit the log and flew over the handlebars into the air. Everyone gasped as, midflight, instead of putting her arms out to cushion the blow she tucked them behind her back. It was so dangerous it shocked Sam, gave Sarah a new angle. “My glasses!” they heard her shout at the last second, which were still on her face. As everybody else laughed, Sam felt a stab of fear as she face-planted the water.
“She’s so funny,” said Kabe, clapping Sam on the shoulder. “She deserves a great life.”
Sam turned to Kabe. That was a weird thing to say.
“After what happened,” Kabe continued.
The reeds behind Kabe swayed in the breeze.
“What do you mean?”
Sarah resurfaced, pushing herself up, her glasses somehow still on her face, arms in the air with her fingers extended into the peace sign, making everyone cheer.
“You know,” said Kabe. “All that shit with Zac in Edinburgh, and everything after.”
This was too much. Her ex?
“Yeah,” said Sam, watching her climb out of the lake absolutely drenched. Next to the water he noticed Francis watching the scene without any emotion on his face.
This was of course the problem with awesome people, he was quickly understanding. Everybody else wanted to be with them too.
* * *
Sitting on the saddle, Sam concentrated on the log.
Kabe put his hand on his shoulder. “Just let go,” he whispered into his ear.
Sam pushed off and was on his way.
“Go on, Sam!”
Sarah’s voice sang into his brain. Well, they’d already seen that he was stronger than they thought; he decided to go for it. He went as fast as he could, plowing toward the log, legs pumping, going so fast he almost lost control. He swerved off the path and toward the log.
Just let go.
The force of forward momentum was like a great hand grabbing hold of him and dragging him up, up, up into the cold winter air, the water sinking away below him. He was flying. He knew how far everyone else had gone, and he was well beyond that.
He heard the sound of cheering.
The hand. It wasn’t dragging him into the air. He felt it now. It was dragging him into the future.
* * *
As they filed up the lane back to the house, freezing and shivering, it was almost dark. The windows orange with candlelight, the slate roof indigo with moonbeams. And the sound of the piano in the drawing room drifting in and out on the freezing air, sliding crystallized across the molecules of winter.
“It’s Claude,” said Kabe.
The piece was melancholic and beautiful. It made a sadness with its passages of minor runs that turned and melted major, blooming into a spreading joy, unstitching the fabric of the sadness and reforming it. Sarah and Francis were together again, at the rear of the group.
It made Sam feel like, no matter what he did, he would never be happy.
“He writes them himself,” Kabe said of the music, his words barely audible.
“It’s beautiful.”
“I think true beauty still has a lot to say in this world,” said Kabe. “Or any other.”
* * *
After his shower, Sam made his way along the corridor back to his room. It was freezing, the cold making his skin burn. A door opened and Sam jumped. It was Francis.
“Oh,” said Francis. “Sam.”
There was a moment. This was the first time they’d spoken since he’d arrived, and the tension was immediate.
“You’ve come here,” Sam stated.
“Listen, Sam,” Francis said, ignoring him. “I think it’s great what Sarah’s doing for you, but...you know...I’ve come all the way here, and it’s cost me a shit ton of money. Do you think you could, like, give us some space?”
It felt like a little thundercloud floating above his head was rumbling. What Sarah was doing for him?
“Just a few hours. You know how I feel about her.”
What about what I feel for her? he thought. It was like being back at school, like he was a ghost, a side story.
“What if she wants to hang out with me?”
Francis leaned against the door frame of his room and grinned.
“Look, Sam, be real for a second. Everybody cares about you, including me. But think about other people as well, yeah?”
Sam stood there, unable to speak.
Francis shook his head. “I’ve gotta get showered,” he said. “I’m sorry to be so blunt, but, you know, help a brother out.”
He patted Sam on the shoulder and sidled past him to get into the corridor. He disappeared off into the bathroom, leaving Sam in the darkness, freezing cold, feeling the size of a blade of grass.
* * *
On the last day Sam spent in his family home he stood in the empty living room, clutching the box of family heirlooms, the only thing he’d kept. Among them were his grandfather’s MBE for services to nursing, his grandmother’s writing box with her old pens and papers inside, a gilded key gifted to his great-grandfather for setting up a library on behalf of a nearby town’s working people after they elected him their union representative, resulting in him taking a penny of their wages for years to create a space for books and learning and advancement. His father’s England cricket cap that he’d got as a schoolboy, a crocheted flower his mother had made for him as a baby. All the family photos.
It was dusk, and it was time to go. But he didn’t take the box to the car. Instead, he found himself in the deserted swimming pool again, the cats watching him from the overgrown bushes and unruly trees. The sky was a fire red, a dry wind whipped his face. He opened the box and removed his parents’ wedding album. He flicked through the pages, not thinking much, pausing on one image of his mum and dad standing on the steps of the church with confetti drifting. He was in the photo too. In her belly. You couldn’t see any evidence of an unborn Sam, but he was in there.
He placed the box in the center o
f the pool and took out the canister of lighter fluid, spraying it wildly and chaotically all over. He made a path of it to the far side of the pool, where he struck a match and waited, his hand protecting the flame from the wind. He closed his eyes and even from that distance felt the heat of the fire against his face as he dropped the match.
Then he took out from his back pocket the card his little brother and sister had made—the last thing they’d given him. He opened it and read the message and remembered sitting outside Frankie & Benny’s, Steve opposite him, his head leaning to one side.
Don’t you wish it could stay like this forever and ever?
Sam had turned his face away from the fire and thought, I can’t believe I’m doing this. But he did anyway. He dropped the card, and everything burned.
* * *
The spindly Christmas tree with a string of colored lights stood guard in the corner of the drawing room, behind the beaten-up grand piano, next to the French windows with black night looking in. Claude, rake thin, pale as bone, wearing an ill-fitting pair of pajamas, played slow versions of Christmas carols to the twenty-odd people gathered on the sofas and the large threadbare rug. The huge fire in the hearth burned bright, laser sparks spinning bird migration patterns up the flume.
Francis had gone outside to make a phone call, and when Sarah came in Sam grabbed her and they found a quiet corner of the rug where the heat of the fire just about reached. A wind rattled the French windows, flames sidled, shadows bent.
“Here,” he said, pushing a glass of cider into her hands.
“You’re not trying to get me drunk, are you?”
“Aren’t you already drunk? I am.”
She laughed. “Where’s Francis?”
“Outside on the phone.”
They took a sip of their drinks. Claude was playing “Winter Wonderland.”
“Hey. I just wanted you to know something. Thanks for bringing me here.”
“Sam, I told you yesterday—”
“I know, I know. But still...it’s been a good Christmas. So thanks for looking out for me.”
“Looking out for you?”
“I just don’t want to get in your way.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I mean, you and Francis.”
“What about me and Francis?”
Just as she said that, he appeared at the doorway and looked around the room. He saw Sam and Sarah but didn’t come over. Instead, he went to the piano and spoke quietly to Claude, who gave up the stool for him. He started playing a piece of music and, of course, it was amazing. As Sam listened, his heart sank. He had no skills, no talents, he wasn’t even very good at being a superhero.
“It’s his first Christmas without his girlfriend,” said Sarah.
Half his face was in shadow.
“He’s very talented,” said Sam.
“He is. And he’s super hot and clever and funny.”
Sam nodded.
“But I want to be here with you.” The suddenness of the words made his heart feel melted, and when he glanced up she glanced down. “I know you’re not interested in me in that way, but—”
“Wait. What?”
“Like, you and me. And I can handle that. It’s fine. Friends is fine. But I didn’t ask Francis to come here.”
“Sarah, what are you talking about?”
This felt completely weird. The atmosphere had suddenly flipped.
“I mean Francis is great, he really is, and maybe another time I—”
“No, before that.”
“You and me. I get it. I tried and you...”
“Whoa. What?”
“All the chances you had...”
An awful realization dawned. The colors in her irises seemed to be shifting, different shades swirling like the thickened atmosphere of some alien world, her pupils expanding black holes in the dim and flickering Christmas lights. He hadn’t even noticed that the sound of the piano had stopped. She thought he didn’t like her? An image flashed, of two hands reaching for each other in the darkness and missing.
“Sam.”
Francis loomed over him. All the dread washed right back in.
“Can I have a word with Sarah?” he said.
Sam was frozen to the spot.
“It’s fine,” Sarah said, nodding to him. It was like in slow motion. “I’ll see you in a sec, okay?”
She was sending him away. Her eyes darted across Francis’s body.
Despite every muscle, every impulse trying to root him to the spot, to stay and fight, Sam found himself on his feet. “I’ll—” His breath failed him. “I’ll go fetch some more drinks,” he said. And as he walked away, he could feel the presence of Francis like a pulse.
He went into the kitchen. At the sink he poured himself a glass of water. He felt hot and disoriented, so he went out to the terrace at the back of the house. It was misty and the disc of the moon was a large circle.
“Samson Holloway.”
Sam turned to find Kabe smiling at him. He swayed drunkenly in the night. Standing next to him was a girl of extreme beauty, the kind of beauty you’d throw away your life for, with thick, dirty-blond hair parted right at her temple. She wore a pair of mirrored aviators, her head tilted gently skyward, the lenses reflecting crisply the swirling mist.
“Your zen is disturbed,” said Kabe.
The girl next to him slanted her head to one side and bit her lower lip.
Kabe spoke, but this time more quietly, with a lilt in his voice. “Do you know about Shangri-la?”
Sam could see through the windows into the drawing room, could see Francis lean in toward Sarah, creating a space that was cut adrift from everything else.
“Shangri-la?” he said.
“A mystical paradise.”
It felt now like they were entombed by the mist, and that the outside world had evaporated. He watched Francis’s lips move, his hands gesturing, Sarah’s eyes fixed on him.
“I know of a Holy Man who went looking for it in the high mountains of Nepal, and the villagers told him Shangri-la is not a place but a knowledge. The secret of happiness.”
Inside, they had stopped speaking now.
“And they told the Holy Man he would find it at the top of the mountain next to their village. And do you know what he found when he reached the top?”
Sam shook his head, and as he did this Sarah leaned in toward Francis and put her arms around him. He couldn’t look. He was falling apart.
Kabe said, “A mirror.”
Even through the aviators the girl’s stare burned a hole right through him.
“Everyone is looking for Shangri-la, Sam,” said Kabe. “But they’re always looking the wrong way.”
The girl stepped forward and lifted her hand. Sam felt his breath leave him as she pushed a long finger into his chest.
“It’s in here,” she said.
The cold of the night pressed against his body and he remembered something his father had once said.
The two most important things in life are to be brave and to be good.
His father was not spiritual, and his maxims were said half in jest, sarcastically, but now, when he thought about them, Sam realized they were almost all completely true. He looked at Kabe, and the girl, their breath turning to silver, and he went inside.
* * *
Claude played something like snowflakes falling on a glass roof. The music now had taken on strange properties. It was no longer a purely sensory thing but, mixed with the adrenaline, a physical one as well. It brushed against Sam and put a vibration in him with its touch, a far-reaching vibration moving inward, a conducting force setting all the atoms that made Sam into a rhythmic beat. It snaked through him, gliding and sliding, making tingling glissades up his arms and legs.
His hea
rt beat so hard it felt like it might break. Sarah was right there, in the hallway. Light ran across her lower lip and, behind her, the others in the room were all prone, like people sleeping in a plane that’s lost its pressure and is gliding uncontrolled to Earth. Francis was there, walking toward her from behind.
Sam took her hand. “I want you to know that I think you’ve saved my life,” he said.
“Sam—”
And then he leaned in and pressed his lips against hers. He just did it. He could sense her shock, then felt it slip away as she relaxed and pushed back into him. When they broke apart, she fixed him with one of her stares.
Behind her, Francis had stopped.
He pulled her away, out of sight, and she kissed him again, mouths opening and joining to form a black space that was their mouths sealed tight against one another.
“I have a—” he wanted to say something “—very deep affection for you.”
Sarah laughed and shook her head.
“Come on,” she said, and kissed him again.
He couldn’t believe this was happening. They ran upstairs and down a long corridor to his bedroom and she kissed him again and he felt her tongue move into his mouth.
“Wait,” he said. “What about Francis?” Then he cringed for saying it.
Sarah pulled her top off and pulled him toward her as they collapsed on the bed.
“I don’t care,” she said. “It’s you.”
On the ceiling a patch of damp the shape of Africa. She moved her hand down his body and took off her glasses; long lashes, white spaces. There was no thinking now. He pushed her off and removed his top and jeans, all so easy, as if this happened all the time, no thought of folding them into a neat pile as she climbed on top of him and whatever this was turned into a great surging of emotion. He ran his hands from her hips upward and felt his perspective heighten, as though her body went on forever and, no matter how far he moved his hands, he would never reach the end of her. She met his eyes and kissed him again as she unhooked her bra. It didn’t feel like two people but one, like they were melting into each other.