Frozen (21 page)

Adam was behind me. “Come on, Harry.” His voice was edged with excitement. I didn't move, so he spoke louder. The whole gang could hear. “Come on, mate, forget her. She's not even good-looking, daft old slapper.”

The gang laughed, and Verity blushed. Her lips were trembling.

“Oh, Verity,” Adam called, his voice mocking, sing-song. “Oh, little gi-irl. Show us your knickers, then. Go on.”

The gang joined in, getting louder as they realised they had hit on something. Even the girls were laughing. Encouraged, Adam sauntered over to her and made a grab for her skirt. Verity screamed something at him and ran away, her eyes squeezed shut against the tears. Both gangs jeered until she was gone. Oba wolf-whistled.

I didn't stop them. If I had tried, I would have become a target too, back at the bottom of the heap. I didn't want that; what else did I have except the gang? Verity had already rejected me. My friends from my old school had long since vanished. I needed a place to belong. The moment passed in a kind of fugue. It was the pecking order of the playground. Verity had clawed her way up over the term; now she had fallen again.

But I saw the hurt in her eyes as she ran. She thought I had led them to the treehouse. She knew that I had watched as they mocked her. The sounds around me faded. If I had been able to, I would have crawled away and wept. But the boys were on their bikes already, wheeling in wide circles, waiting.

I didn't dare go after her. And perhaps that was the greatest betrayal of them all.

So now, Verity, decades later—now that I am someone different, and now that it is too late—now I can say it.

I am sorry, Verity.

So sorry.

*

They loved the treehouse. Of course they did. They whooped and yelled, they dive-bombed each other. They hung from the edge of the platform and attacked each other with hammed-up karate kicks.

For the most part, I sat on the platform and looked straight out, past them, at the tattered brown curtain of leaves. As the boys clambered and swung and banged about, the leaves detached and spun down, light and lifeless, one by one; and another tiny patch of the cold autumn sky stared in at me. From time to time one of the boys would make me join in. They grabbed my foot, tried to pull me over the edge, they swung round the trunk to land on top of me. And I would wrestle my way out of their tumble and scramble back to my remote vantage. Their yells got louder as fun took over from caution. The warnings Adam and I hissed at them were ignored. Adam sat and watched, too, away from me, perched on one of the higher branches beyond the reach of the rope or a boisterous leap.

It was Oba's idea to see how many of them could get on to the swing. He hung twirling in open space, giggling maniacally, and one boy after another made the leap to catch the rope. Poor Jules Waters missed and landed badly, but no one cared. When four of them were on it, with Jules still out of action nursing a twisted ankle, they started to yell at me and Adam to jump. I ignored them, so they focused on Adam, who yielded with a grin. He swaggered down on to the platform and nudged me aside with his foot. He was moving slowly, relishing it. This was the moment when they all remembered that coming here had been his idea. He spat into his hands and rubbed them together. The rope was swinging and spinning, slow and heavy under the weight of bodies. I couldn't even see where he was going to find a place to hold on. They were yelling encouragement at him, telling him to hurry. He grinned even wider. There was a muffled complaint from Oba that some bastard was sitting on his face, and the mass of bodies rippled as he yanked himself into a better position under the pile—and Adam lost his chance to jump.

It was a mixture between a crack and a howl. The branch above them split and the rope swung sideways, the boys yelling now and kicking to get free. Then the branch gave way and dumped them four feet straight down. Some fell off, screaming and cackling. The others were pulled short with a jerk that ripped the branch from its socket. They spilled to the ground, and the foot-thick beam landed atop them, cushioned by its smaller spars and twigs. There was a hiss and a crackle, then silence. Then there was hysterical giggling, as the boys wrestled their way out.

Adam was in fits. Even I broke out of my mood.

It was funny. On the ground, they were all leaping into the cushion made by the twigs, or taking turns to throw each other in, four boys each holding a leg or arm. Adam stood on the edge of the platform and yelled encouragement, until Oba lunged up to catch him. He missed, which made Adam laugh harder, and gave Oba an idea. He grabbed the fallen spar, and rammed the thick end into the underside of the treehouse like a battering ram. Adam giggled and clambered to the next level. I jumped down. Oba enlisted the others to help him, and they smashed the spar repeatedly into the underside of the deck. Eventually one plank came loose, and then another. Then, they dropped it, and Adam scrambled down, yanking at the loosened board. After a few tugs it came away in his hand, a few curling black nails showing beneath it. He launched it outwards across the hornbeam's vault. It took forever. It seemed to glide. Then it lodged itself in the veil of branches.

The others whooped, and scrambled up to have a go themselves. One by one they dragged and hauled at the boards until they came free. The game was to try to dislodge Adam's plank. When they succeeded, the next game was to try to lodge another in the tree. When all the planks were gone, it was who could throw one furthest. And that slowly became a mock-war: Wayne went to collect some of the planks and took it on himself to throw them back. A couple of the others took his side, and the air was soon thick with flying, nail-embedded planks.

From an adult perspective, this might seem crazy, but it was no different from the rest of what we did. The games we played were dangerous.

The game warden must have heard us from miles away. None of us noticed him arrive, though. When he yelled at us, we ignored him. When he yelled again, someone threw a plank at him. When he pointed his shotgun into the air and fired, we ran—at first terrified, and then whooping with fear and exultation.

*

It was two weeks before I dared tell her. The last time I had spoken to her, she had walked away. So the days passed, and we sat next to each other on the bench in our usual silence.

“They smashed the treehouse, Verity,” I said eventually.

She stayed. She didn't reply, but she stayed.

“It wasn't me,” I pressed. “I didn't show them. I didn't break it. I wouldn't, honest. It was—”

And at that moment, I made the connection. With the feeble and purely emotional logic of a thirteen-year-old, I was suddenly sure. It had to be the truth; I knew why she hadn't wanted to see me. I knew why Verity and Adam made a show of avoiding each other, and why Adam's teasing had upset her. I saw again the look in Adam's eye the day we took the photographs, relived every flirtatious moment.

“You're seeing him, aren't you?” I blurted. “You got off with Adam, didn't you? That weekend.”

And for the second—and last—time, Verity slapped me. This time it was hard. Then she hit me in the chest with both fists, over and over. Savagely. She said not a word, made not a sound. She threw her books at me. Then she ran away.

I sat very still, not physically injured, but swept by a numb ache to which I was already accustomed. If you live with hurt for long enough, you get used to it. It becomes a part of your life. You come to need it. I knelt by the bench and carefully gathered Verity's books together, scraps to offer her, to beg for conciliation—though I knew now that I had lost her forever.

Across the playground, I could see the gang. Oba, Greg, and Adam were watching me. And laughing.

I returned to the treehouse two days later, early one morning, before school. There was a frost on the fields, and the wood lay blackly beneath a pale, cold sky. The edges of dead leaves were traced in ice. Below the hornbeam, the fallen branch had been sawn into manageable chunks; the planks were ranged in neat piles. Where parts of the treehouse had survived the gang's assault, there were now white gashes in the tree's trunk, the black scars of nails. The leaves and twigs had been swept into heaps, and the clearing was bare and frozen, dark except where the frost had touched it.

I stood in the middle, where Verity had once leaped for joy, and gazed at the neatly stacked remnants of my wild, dead summer.

SAM BROUGHT ME coffee and aspirin at eight. She shoved me over to one edge of the bed by wriggling her bottom until there was enough room for her to sit next to me, fully clothed. I was tousled and dazed, and still hiding all but my forehead under the duvet. I felt dreadful. My third hangover in two weeks. Not clever. But the only moral I could find in it was this: never, ever, let your closest friend fall off a cliff. Not under any circumstances.

Sam fitted comfortably against me, and put her arm round me when I slumped against her side. Her T-shirt was loose, and my nose just touched the skin of her waist. It was cool and clean. It smelt of laundry.

She had drawn the curtains and opened the window. The air carried the scent of dew and grass, and the distant chatter of birds, the burr of busy wings. I could hear Mum in the kitchen, directly below: cutlery tinkling in a drawer, plates being stacked, the cupboard door that had squealed for the last twenty years. Sporadic sounds, mostly silence. Life as normal.

“Morning,” I groaned.

Sam squeezed my shoulder and wriggled a bit. “Morning,” she said cheerfully. “How bad are we?” She sounded like a nurse.

I didn't answer. I was going to, but then I couldn't think of a word horrible enough, and while I was trying to think of one I drifted into a kind of limbo where I really wasn't thinking at all—which was a blessing. “Sorry,” I croaked at last.

I felt her shrug. When her T-shirt settled back, its edge was teasing my lashes. It made my eyelids flutter. With a dramatic moan I hauled myself upright and rubbed my face, which didn't help much. Matter-of-factly, Sam handed me the painkillers and a glass of water. I slugged them down and nearly threw them straight back up. Eyes watering, I mumbled, “Thanks.” Then: “Bad. Very bad.”

“I'm not surprised.” She wasn't gloating. If anything her tone was sympathetic.

“Was I dreadful?”

“No, not really. Just drunk.” She dimpled and her eyes flashed. I hated to think what she might be remembering, so I closed my eyes and didn't think at all. “You said Gabriel had you on the whisky.”

“Did I? Yeah. Whisky.”

I didn't remember anything I'd said. I suspected that my memory was at least fifty per cent dramatic reconstruction.

“And then wine with supper. Poor you,” Sam said. I groaned again. “So are you up to going out?”

“Out?”

“To the woods, remember? Where the treehouse was.”

I groaned again and huddled back down against her. “Do we have to?”

She curled over and round me with a satisfied “Mmm,” and pressed her cheek on to the top of my head.

“Take your time,” she said.

*

We walked, with me hunched as though it was about to rain, hands in my pockets, eyes sliding over the road barely a yard ahead of my feet. Sam linked her right arm through my left. It was a strange and uncomfortable sensation, and it put me off my rhythm. I kept rigidly upright, not giving against her at all; and after a minute or two, when I self-consciously scratched my nose, she had to disengage. When I shoved my hand firmly back into my pocket, she didn't try again. We hardly spoke; she pointed out the weather, made comments about the size of the village, and I replied with grunts. Eventually we ducked on to the farm track, and down the hill (a slight slope, really, now that I saw it as an adult) to the wood's edge. We clambered over a bank, jumped a ditch, slipped through the barbed wire fence beyond. We were scratched and stung, but in.

“Wow,” breathed Sam.

Wytham Woods. Huge, ancient trees and bare dappled ground. Sunlight dancing in blotches, and birds, and the scent of warm earth.

I saw it differently. I saw dark narrow spaces. It stank of loam, heavy from the dew. There was moss on fallen boughs, fungus gripped and probed. Roots clutched at thin soil.

But, then, I did have something of a hangover.

Sam squeezed my hand. “Which way?” I pointed, and we set off.

It took us an hour to find the hornbeam. There were familiar landmarks, a hollowed tree, a stream with just one crossing point, but I couldn't remember the way. The route had never been marked in my head, just in my habits. At the time I had known the way without thinking about it, just doing it. Now, thinking hard, navigating my memories, I found myself following false hunches. That tree had been at the centre of my childhood—and I didn't even know where it was.

When I found it, I wasn't even sure it was the right one, until Sam pointed to a few boards scattered below it, rotted and tinder dry. The tree had changed. There were new branches, and stumps where old branches had once been. Gradually, though, it took shape again in my mind, the way it had been, and I began to tell Sam about it. This was where the platform started, and it went all the way round to there. And you got to it up this branch, you couldn't do it now, of course, but you could then, easy. That's where the rope went. And here—you could reach all the way out to here if you swung hard enough. You landed with a hell of a thump though, nearly broke my ribs the first time I tried it...

Sam stood behind me, chin on my shoulder, and hugged me as I brought the past back to a thin kind of life.

“She's still here,” I said. “Kind of.”

She turned me round and kissed me. Beneath the tree's arch, below the healed wood where once there had been a treehouse, we made love.

The ghosts didn't seem to mind.

*

Mum cried when we left. She stood in the doorway with a hankie pressed to her lips, although it was her eyes that were streaming. Sam craned round to keep eye contact as long as possible. Then she turned to face forwards, and settled herself into the car's uncomfortable seat. She reached over to touch me, but stopped short and withdrew. I hated leaving Mum's. It made me tense.

“You're lucky, Harry.”

“Hmm? How?”

“Your mum. She really loves you.”

True—but to me, that sometimes felt like a burden.

Sam looked at me quizzically. “You should see mine some day,” she said. “She's a dragon. Mum flogs horses and children to within an inch of their lives, thinks it's character-forming. She eats corgis for breakfast. Believe me, Harry, love's not so bad.”

The hangover had made me sorry for myself; I didn't need this as well. I concentrated on driving. Sam took the hint.

We ripped along the Oxford ring-road, which was dangerously crowded, and spilled out on to the M40, which was strangely empty. Sam found some music on the radio—golden oldies, they claimed, but the songs were all of five years old. Then, half an hour later, she switched it off sharply. “How many cameras, did you say?”

“Huh?”

“At the treehouse. How many?”

“Oh... eleven.”

The motorway flicked by. Wind thumped through the open window, the scent of the fields mixed with burning fumes.

“Strange.”

“Hmm?”

“Are you sure?”

“Well, I
was
there...”

“'I'm not trying to be funny, Harry.”

“I know.” I stroked her knee. It felt good. “Hmmm. Eleven. Definitely.”

Sam mouthed, “Oh.” Two miles later, she turned towards me again. “Look, are you really sure?”

I ticked them off on my fingers. Eleven.

She frowned. “Well, it's not that many now.”

I must have looked confused. “The zoetrope,” she explained. “I mean, I didn't count exactly, but there's definitely not eleven shots on it. More like six or seven.”

“Six or seven?” I gaped at her until she calmly pointed forwards. I had to veer sharply because I was straddling two lanes.

“Six or seven, trust me. Or ring the hospital.”

“I trust you.”

In my mind I spun the zoetrope again, held it to the light. It was too quick, too jerky—not enough pictures. Sam was right. She reckoned six or seven; I might have guessed eight—but she was right. Between three and five photos had been cut out of the circle.

Another mystery. I felt terrible. My eyes stung; the wind from the open window, perhaps. We were going fast. She put her hand on my thigh and rode out the tears, her expression unreadable. Patience, it seemed, was one of Sam's virtues.

“Sam, I'm—”

“Don't.”

“But I
am
. It's not you, honest. Not really.”

“Not
really
? Great!”

But her laugh was gentle, and her hand was still on my thigh. She leaned over and kissed me. “We'll get there, Harry.”

I put the radio back on, and pressed harder on the accelerator. The wind became a buffeting roar. I gripped the steering-wheel tightly, and wondered what I was getting myself into.