The Last Summer of Us (17 page)

“But you never said…”

He smiles sadly. “I didn't want to talk about it as it was – never mind talk about the talking about it. I'm just saying. If
you
wanted to…”

I can't answer. Not quite. Not without sounding like a hamster on speed. So I do the only thing I can, and I rest my head against his shoulder. He tips his head sideways so it rests against mine and we stare out at the water.

“Do you have to go, Steff?”

“Yeah. I have to go.”

“I don't want you to.”

“Course you don't. Who the hell's going to teach you to drive?”

“Oh, I don't know. Someone who can
actually
drive, maybe?”

“Aren't you scared?”

We're sitting back at the side of the cliff. The tide has come in further, and because
someone
made us move, we no longer have to worry about getting cut off. The sun is starting to dip towards the water, but there's still time before it sets. We've been here all afternoon, but somehow it feels like it's only been an hour.

Steffan considers my question. He's peeling the label off his beer bottle; slowly shredding it and scattering the pieces onto the sand. “What's the point?” he says after a while. “It's like Mum said – the only things worth being scared of are the things you can do something about. Then there's a point to it – you can be frightened of doing the wrong thing, you can be frightened of making the wrong choice – but when you don't have a choice, why waste your energy on worrying about what you can't control?”

It sounds like the kind of thing his mum used to say. She was always so calm – even when she was dying.

Especially when she was dying.

And look what she's left him – look at her legacy. Words he can live by, words he
believes
in. Something that keeps him looking ahead and stops him from getting lost. Even now, she's his lighthouse, his beacon.

I envy that, I think. Alone in the dark.

I know he wants to help – is trying to, because that's who he is – but I think he only has enough light for one, and I won't be the one to take it. Like I said, I want to find the way myself – not just try to retrace his steps.

Jared is leaning back on his elbows, his legs stretched out on the sand in front of him. “You know what scares me?”

“Earwigs.” Steffan and I say it together. Jared pulls a face.

“Other than earwigs.” He takes a swig of his beer – the only one he's had – and narrows his eyes. “That deep down, I'm just like him.”

There can only be one “him”. Jared's dad. It's in the tone of his voice – even in the way his lip curls when he says the word. Everything you need to know about the way Jared feels about his father you can read right there on his face.

I don't think it was always that way – I mean, I know enough to know that Jared's love of cars comes from his dad, so there must have been
something
between them. Not that you'd know it now.

He leans across to Steffan and hands him what's left of his beer. There's at least two thirds of the bottle left, and I can see Steffan's torn between taking it and not. He's had a few of his own already – which is why Jared's not even finished his first. Someone's got to drive the car, haven't they?

“Sloppy seconds?” Steffan shakes his head. Jared shrugs and, with a flick of his wrist, he upends the bottle. Beer pours out onto the sand and drains away.

It feels like they're waiting for something. It hangs in the air. They're waiting…for me. It's part of the game, isn't it? Where they go, I follow. What are we afraid of? Steffan answers the question by avoiding it. Jared gives you a piece of a puzzle you didn't even know needed solving. And I…

Well, I'm the talker, aren't I? But this, even I can't say – not out loud. This is one of those things you keep to yourself and you turn over in the quiet, dark hours and you bite your lip and wish it would go away.

What am I afraid of? Anyone could tell you that; the list goes on and on. Spiders, snakes. Flying. Being hit by a falling satellite. Car crashes. Exams (specifically
failing
them). Being late. Being forgotten. Being lost. Cannibals. Serial killers. Axe murderers. (Although those last three quite often overlap, from what I can gather, so if we count those as one thing the list looks a little more respectable…)

But what scares me – what really scares me – is the thing I can't get out of my head. It's the one single thing that bothers me more than anything else – more than anything else ever has – and of course it's to do with my mother.

My greatest fear, my one
real
fear, is that she was awake. I am so afraid that she was awake as she died; that she knew what was happening to her. That she was afraid, and horrified, and helpless.

Steffan's mother may have been able to separate fear and death. She had time. She had months of staring them both in the face – what else could she do? She found strength in meeting them head-on and if she was afraid she hid it from her son, because that's what a mother does.

At least, that's what a mother does if she knows what's coming.

Did
mine
know what was coming? I wonder. In the end, did she? I hope, with every piece of me that she didn't. I hope that there wasn't time for her to know. I hope that it was over before she could even know it had begun.

I hope.

Steffan has hit the dozy phase. It's one of his most annoying habits. A couple of beers and he turns into a cat. Not literally, obviously. That would be weird. But he starts yawning and getting bleary-eyed and looking for a quiet spot to settle down and…yeah. It's annoying.

It's especially annoying when you're in a small metal shoebox of a car and he's trying to rest his head on your shoulder and use you as a pillow. As he is right now. Why he climbed into the back seat with me, I'll never know. The other half of the seat's covered with all his junk, but it doesn't seem to bother him; he just sat himself down on top of it all, and now he's doing his best to fall asleep.

“Jared?”

“Mmm?”

“Stop the car, will you?”

Jared pulls over as far as he can on what's essentially a single-track lane – he's almost in the hedge. It's the only road in or out of the Havens and if anyone else comes along we're screwed. I could have stayed there until it got dark, but we can't exactly sleep on the beach, can we? Besides, there wasn't any more food, so.

Jared turns round in the driver's seat to look at me. “You alright?”

“Do I look alright?” I point at Steffan. He's snoring. That took about a minute and a half. He's moments away from starting to dribble on my shoulder.

“Mmm.” He waits while I slide out from beneath Steffan's head (why's it so heavy, anyway? It's not like he's got a brain in there) and clamber forward into the passenger seat.

I can open the window here. You have no idea how exciting this is. I wind it all the way down, then halfway back up again. And then all the way back down.

Jared stares at me with barely disguised amusement.

“Window,” I say as nonchalantly as I can. “It goes up and down.”

“You done?”

“I'm done.”

We both glance into the back, where Steffan has arranged himself in the corner, draped over a sleeping bag, mumbling slightly.

“Shall we leave him behind?” Jared asks, not entirely joking.

“Tempting,” I say, watching him snuggle more closely into the crumpled sleeping bag. “Could just take a photo of him and put it on Facebook…”

“He'll love that…”

“Serve him right, won't it?”

“You're still pissed he dropped you in the sea.”

“Yes, I am.” I hold up my phone, framing him in the camera screen and pressing the button. There's a fake shutter noise and a tiny version of Steffan shrinks until he's smaller than my fingernail, then spins off down to the left-hand corner of the screen. Steffan, frozen in time. Asleep, just as he is now. That version of him will remain, always. No matter what happens to him or to me or to Jared. No one can take that away. (Well, obviously they can take my phone or something, I suppose. I mean more that the moment's there. If you catch my drift.)

I am settling into my seat – front seat, no less – when there's an ominous “clonk” from somewhere in the car. Jared's eyebrow shoots up. He looks at me. I look at him. The snoring in the back continues.

Clonk.

“Was that the engine?” I ask.

“I'm…not sure.” But he turns the ignition off anyway, killing the engine. We sit quietly, listening. Waiting.

I can hear Jared breathing; the steady, slow rise and fall of his breath. I can see his chest moving up and down, in and out. If I put my hand flat against his skin, just there, I would be able to feel his heart beating under my palm. Would it be slow and rhythmic like his breathing? Or would it race and skip like mine has taken to doing every time I look at him? Would his heart speed up beneath my touch, or would he step back, step away and give me that shuttered-eye look that I've seen him give so many other people? Would Jared let me in? I wonder. Is that what I want, or am I just flailing around in the dark, reaching for the first thing I can hold on to?

Jared is, after all, Jared.

There's a loud snort from the back seat, making us both jump…and immediately afterwards, there's another clonk.

“Is it him?” I whisper, pointing back towards Steffan. Jared frowns; shakes his head. He points up. He's pointing to the car roof.

I left something off my list of stuff that I'm scared of. Along with the serial killers / cannibals / mad axemen, there's Men With Hooks From Urban Legends. You know the ones. In particular, the Maniac With A Hook Who Bangs On The Top Of The Car And Then There's A Head There And Oh My God We're All Going To Die Screaming. That one.

Clonk.

I look up at the roof. “Do not like.”

“You realize that if it was a psycho with a hook, he'd have hauled you out through your window already, right?” Jared laughs, pointing to the open window.

Please, oh please, just let it be that he knows me well enough to know I'm thinking about Hook Man, and not that I'm actually saying everything that crosses my mind out loud. Because with the heartbeats and the breathing and the…oh god, that would be embarrassing. I'm embarrassed just contemplating the possibility.

I wind the window up.

Clonk.

Jared is out of his door before I can blink. He moves around the front of the car, and I can see the grin spreading across his face. He bangs on the bonnet and mouths something about getting out of the car. He's pointing at the roof.

So, no Hook Man then?

Clonk.

This one's loud enough to startle Steffan awake, and through the windscreen I can see Jared starting to laugh. He's waving for me to come and look.

“What the hell was that noise?” Steffan's gone from snoring to wide awake and stroppy in about three seconds, and is trying to haul himself into the front between the seats. That can't end well.

I get out of the car, clambering across the driver's seat to the door. There's no way I'll get mine open.

I stand in front of the car and look at the roof.

“You have got to be kidding me.”

An elephant this morning…and now this?

Two large round eyes blink back at me. There's also a beak, and a very long neck which is attached to a body on the other side of the hedge.

It's an ostrich.

Steffan follows me out of the car, takes one look at me and then at the enormous bird peering over the hedge at us and says (with characteristic charm), “Holy shit.”

The ostrich responds by pecking the roof of the car again.

Clonk.

“Oi!” Steffan's voice goes up an octave.

Clonk.

“Stop hitting my car, would you?”

Clonk.

I can't hold it back any longer. I am utterly, hopelessly, helpless with laughter. There is an ostrich peering over the hedge at us on a tiny little road just up from the beach and it is pecking Steffan's car and he's getting angry with it. He's shouting at an ostrich.

Another head pops up just along the hedge.

“Umm, Steff…?” Jared's pointing at it.

And then there's another one. And another. They're all blinking at us – except the one pecking the roof of the car, which seems to have entered into some kind of furious stare-down with Steffan.

“Where are we?” I ask, looking from ostrich to ostrich. It feels like a perfectly sensible question.

“Look.” Jared has spotted the sign, hanging there casually above the fence just up the road. “Seaview Ostrich Farm,” he reads.

An ostrich farm. Seriously?

Then it clicks. “Loads of the hotels round here have ostrich meat on the menu in their restaurants, don't they?” I ask. Jared shrugs. Steffan's still busy glaring down a really big bird. “There was a thing in the paper about it. This is where it comes from!”

“Ostrich farm? Are you messing with me?” Steffan doesn't even blink. His opponent, however, appears to be backing down. The head disappears back behind the hedge. The other ostrich heads follow it.

The hedge isn't especially tall, but it's growing on a steep verge. Which means the top of it's well above our heads – but the idea of there being an entire field of ostriches on the other side of it is, frankly, too wacky to pass up. I smack Steffan on the arm.

“Give me a boost, would you?”

“Not bloody likely, Lim.”

“Well, I can either sit on your shoulders or I can climb on your car. Which would you rather? Either way, I'm looking over that hedge.”

He takes a moment to weigh up his options.

Two minutes later, I'm balanced precariously on his shoulders, wobbling towards the hedge.