Our Picnics in the Sun (24 page)

Adam pushed his tongue through the gum to test it for stretch and blew a pathetic bubble. He gazed at the first rising bend over to his left and imagined it all: some tosser coming down with a caravan in tow, going too fast, squeal of brakes, caravan swings, car veers, skids, loses it—
wham!
Car’s crumpled in the ditch, caravan’s on its side.

What would he do?

He runs to help, obviously. What if the tank’s burst? Whole fucking thing could go up in flames! He takes charge, gets them all out.
There’s three of them, a pair of stupid arguing parents and their daughter. She’s about sixteen, but he’s so tall everybody takes him for sixteen too, or older. The parents are tossers. They ignore him, they’re too busy shouting at each other. The girl’s slightly hurt but it’s only a bump on the head. Mainly, she’s pissed off. He knows this because the moment he sees her he understands her. For once he’s not afraid (this is new, this has never happened before). He tells her
Look, you don’t have to take any more of this. Fuck, you could’ve been killed! This is their shit, not yours. Mine are just the same and I’m not taking any more, I just fucking walked out
. Then over her shoulder he’d see another car approaching down the hill.
So can you. You’re sixteen, aren’t you? They can’t stop you
. And she looks him hard in the eye. Just as he’s waving down the car he notices properly how gorgeous she is—long hair, long body, short skirt, great tits, golden skin—and what’s more, she sees him noticing, and she’s cool with it. Now he, cool but determined, talks to the driver. His voice does not yodel like it sometimes can in real life. The driver talks back to him like he’s an equal, not a kid.
Yeah mate, lift to Exeter? Sure, no problem, get in
.

You coming or not?
he says to the girl. She really is gorgeous. She gasps
Oh, yes
, he grabs her hand, and they’re off, laughing.

Adam spat the ball of gum across the road. It landed short of the first. He had no more gum and now his thing was swelling in a familiar way; the girl had been featuring in his daydreams for a few months now, though she was occasionally displaced by more pressing memories of some pictures Kevin had showed him in a magazine he’d found crumpled in the storage box under the seat of his dad’s tractor. Maybe there was something wrong with him, the way the same girl kept appearing, but mostly what felt wrong was the emptiness he was left with when she went away and ordinary life took over again. How then he almost hated her for real for not being there, like she actually did exist or something.

He was feeling the emptiness yawn open right now. He let out a minty belch, stood up, wiped his hands down his backside, and wandered a few yards along the shoulder, kicking methodically at the heads of drenched cow parsley and showering the air with seeds and
cold drops of rainwater. He heard a car coming, turned, and stuck out his thumb. It didn’t even slow down.

In the next hour a dozen more passed him in the same way. When he wandered back and hunkered down again, he found a snail on his backpack. He picked it off and kicked it across the road, enjoying the intimate tap it made against the toe of his sneaker, the tiny rattle as it rolled. In the grass next to his foot he found another one and kicked that after it. Then he remembered a joke Kevin once told him about a snail getting kicked off somebody’s doorstep and couldn’t help smiling as he went hunting for more along the shoulder. But already he was sickened by what he was doing to them, and he was sickened by the rain, and most of all he was sickened by the knowledge that he was so wet and pissed off that if he hadn’t stolen his mother’s egg money from the box on the hall table he would probably go back up to the house. The thought of stepping out of the rain into the warm, empty kitchen wouldn’t leave him alone. But fuck it, as if he could. Anyway, the kitchen never was empty, and if ever it was warm enough the Rayburn stank.

He slid his fingers over the notes and coins in his back pocket, trying to make them feel like his. Because they should have been. He’d asked specially for a bit of money (he knew it couldn’t be a lot) for his birthday. Just a bit to do what he liked with, to go and buy something normal with. A wooden seagull carved by his father out of a twisted bit of dead tree was what he got instead, together with another scarf knitted by his mother with wool from the manky sheep.
You can hang the seagull from your bedroom ceiling
, his mother said, when the crap presents lay unwrapped on the table.
And the scarf’s from Celestia, her wool’s got a lovely touch of auburn, hasn’t it?

Fuck Celestia. Fuck the seagull. Adam pulled the money from his pocket and counted it, a month’s worth of egg money, just over twenty pounds. A lot to his parents. They were always going on about money. How it wasn’t important, but also how it wasn’t important that they didn’t have enough of it to buy the things other people did. Making out it didn’t matter, as if the things weren’t worth buying in the first place, the liars.

He wasn’t fooled. Since he was a kid he’d been clearer about
money than they were. To begin with you needed it to get stuff you wanted, and yes, he did want stuff. Normal stuff. He wanted computer games and a video player, never mind that they didn’t have a computer or a television. But beyond that he understood money in a way he couldn’t put into words. He just knew there was a feeling that having money would give you, a safer, nicer feeling than the excitement of wanting and getting stuff. You wouldn’t even have to spend the money, you’d just have to know you could. Maybe it was a feeling of freedom—the wanting freed from the awful, dragging ache of not getting. However you defined it, Adam knew that money was a kind of enchantment that could settle over a person’s life like a magical form of dew. It was impossible that his desire for it, a feeling so pure and yearning and private—so spiritual—could be the ugly impulse his parents called greed.

He put the egg money back in his pocket. Serve them right. It wasn’t like he’d been expecting a PlayStation, never mind an airgun, he knew they weren’t rich. The bit of birthday money he’d asked for wasn’t even the point either, not the whole point anyway, because more than anything what he’d wanted was for them just to listen. Just for once hear what he was saying. Then they’d see he was different, that he wasn’t like them. Actually, nobody else he knew (apart maybe from Callum and Fee but they’d gone away) was like them.

Kevin and Kyle’s mum and dad weren’t rich either and Kevin and Kyle still got normal stuff, they had a PlayStation and a telly and computer games. They had takeaways and holidays and their house had proper carpets, and radiators that got warm. And their farm had sheep and stuff but it didn’t make their dad weird like his dad, their dad didn’t go on about fucking earth harmonies all day.

He had to get out of Stoneyridge. And it was only twenty quid, for fuck’s sake.

By the time a car stopped for him nearly two hours later—a white Volvo estate with two slavering dogs in the back, steaming up the windows—Adam was almost tearful. He was damp, shivering with cold, and also miserable with hunger. He’d thought of bringing some food but the idea of standing in the kitchen making sandwiches to run away from home with felt stupid and weird, the kind of thing his
mother would think of. He’d left the house with only a hunk of bread, which he’d eaten on the way down the track.

The man driving the Volvo didn’t speak but the woman was nice. She said, “Oh, look at you, you’re simply drenched, are you heading for Exeter?”

Adam said yes and climbed in. As the car drove off, he turned back to look at the hillside but could see nothing through the steamed-up windows. He thought about his parents going on with the day at Stoneyridge, unaware he’d left home for good. He pictured his father too busy counting sheep on the moor to notice the absence of his only son, his mother rolling out brown pastry to make three disgusting pasties lumpy with potato and carrot, her face a blank. He couldn’t eat his mother’s pasties unless they were smothered in ketchup, but nonetheless his cheeks watered at the thought of them. She’d be looking out at the pouring rain and hoping it would ease off enough to let her insist on the birthday picnic. Well, there wasn’t going to be a fucking birthday picnic, and for the first time that day Adam felt a wave of joy. He sat back in the Volvo and tried to concentrate on the journey.

He couldn’t. The joy didn’t last. His parents would notice he was gone sooner or later but what if they never
got
it, what if they never really grasped how infuriated he was? He was angry not only with them, but also because it felt so bad to be invisible to them
and
on his birthday, and he was afraid that caring about that might mean he was still a child. He didn’t understand why, when he was the one who had left, the thought of them up at Stoneyridge without him made him feel so locked-out and lonely. Most of all he was angry that once again (and it kept happening) he found himself unable to feel the same way about anything long enough to know what his true feelings were.

When the woman turned and beamed and said she’d made her husband stop, she just couldn’t think of driving past him in this weather, he gave her a faint smile and said nothing. He was horrified that tears were rising in his eyes. She asked him if he was a student and did he live locally, and he told her he was a bit hungover from celebrating his seventeenth birthday and didn’t mean to be rude or
anything but he wasn’t really up to conversation. The man cast his wife a look and they drove on in near silence for over an hour. When they stopped for petrol at a service area seven miles from Exeter the husband told him this was as good a place as any for him to hop it. Adam took his cue.

There was a café, where he wolfed down the all-day breakfast. Afterward he sat on, unable to think of moving without wanting to cry. He tried, and failed, to bring back the dream girl from the overturned caravan and place her in the seat opposite him and looking at him with love, trusting him to know what to do. Outside, the rain had stopped and beyond the canopy over the forecourt the sky was turning pink and silky with sunset clouds. Adam stared through the window as cars pulled in at the fuel pumps and drivers filled up, paid at the kiosk, and drove on again. He envied everyone he saw. They were all people who, he could tell by their careless way of walking back to their cars, had proper destinations, places they wanted to go and where they were expected. Next to them, his plan to find Callum and Fee’s house and stay with them began to look really stupid. He remembered how great they were, much younger than his parents and always nice to him, but suppose they’d changed? Or suppose they hadn’t: they’d done the same kind of smallholding stuff on Exmoor until they gave it up and went to live in Exeter, so were they really going to understand why he couldn’t stand it at Stoneyridge? They weren’t expecting him. They could be on holiday. They could be dead.

Eventually he had to get up from the table to go and pee, and afterward he wandered into the games arcade, where he wasted money on Ace Driver. Feeling even more stupid and wretched, he latched on to three lads who came in and started playing some war game. They were loutish and friendly, and over the thumping of simulated rocket fire and planetary annihilation he learned they were on their way back to Exeter after a day delivering white goods in a radius around the city. Their van was empty now and the one who was driving told Adam he was welcome (“welcome” meaning it didn’t matter to them one way or the other) if he wanted to string along with them.

The journey was raucous, the driving alarming, and when they
reached the outskirts of the city the lads were in too big a hurry to go and get drunk to bother with him and left him in the car park of a floodlit, red-brick pub on a roundabout. It was a humiliation to Adam that they didn’t invite him along for a drink because that could only mean he looked his age. And he was slightly shocked they didn’t ask where he was going or if he’d be all right. He had a line ready about looking up old friends, a spur-of-the-moment thing. But they hadn’t even asked his name.

He watched the pub door long after the lads disappeared behind it, trying to find the courage to follow them. But he couldn’t, and after a while turned away. He wasn’t in any part of Exeter he’d been before, and the picture he’d had in his mind, of arriving in an understandable, familiar sort of place that was somehow ready to welcome him, was suddenly absurd. It hadn’t occurred to him to buy a street map—he wasn’t sure how good he was at reading maps, anyway. If he’d thought about it at all he’d sort of imagined jovial strangers giving him directions to Bouvier Terrace, as if everybody he encountered would be friends of Callum and Fee’s. He hadn’t seen them himself since he was about ten; now that he thought about it, maybe there’d been no more than a couple of visits after they gave up their Exmoor place. And supposing he found the house, and even if they hadn’t moved, the idea of them taking him in would dissolve on the doorstep. How would they even recognize him? Why couldn’t he have seen all these problems earlier, when he was copying their address from his mother’s address book? His belief in the past was evaporating, the mirage of a welcome at Callum and Fee’s house vanishing before the hard churn of traffic on the roundabout, the garish pub, the dark pavements. In its place he saw how complete the world was, how perfectly well it turned without him—he wasn’t at the center of anything except his own failures. He saw with horror how childish he’d been. It was another example of how his mind changed itself, without his consent, and how he never thought things through in time to stop himself from fucking up.

He left the roundabout behind, and making zigzag turns through the streets, headed deep into a suburb of terraced houses bordered by low hedges and shallow front gardens. It was dark now and curtains
were drawn across lit rooms, and he thought of home with dreadful, false longing. He thought of telephoning. Do that, he told himself fiercely, and you’re stuffed. Give up now and it will
matter
. This night was going to be a test, it would prove something or other. How he handled it would be important for other nights to come, maybe for the rest of his life.