The Last Summer of Us (23 page)

I start coughing.

Steffan stops talking, looks at me suspiciously and then whips round to glare at Jared. Jared flutters his eyelashes at him, blows him a kiss and collapses into laughter.

Steff looks wounded. Jared elbows him as he slips past and wanders off down the wall towards the slipway, patting down his pockets as though he's looking for something.

“Heard from your aunt?” Steffan's watching me watching Jared.

“I need to text her and let her know I'll be back tomorrow.” The thought of going home fills me with a dull ache. Here, I am through the looking glass. Here, everything makes sense.

“How's stuff at home?”

“I don't know. I mean, I
do
know, but I don't know if it's home any more; if it'll
feel
like home. You know?”

“I basically don't
know
anything. Especially not what that question meant.”

“You're so annoying.”

“It's why you love me.”

“‘Love' is such a strong word, don't you think? I'd go with something more along the lines of ‘tolerate'.”

“Alright, then. It's why you tolerate me.” He winks at me.

“Dad's gone into treatment.”

“You mean rehab? Thank Christ for that. It couldn't go on.
You
couldn't go on with it like that.”

“He didn't want to go.”

“I bet he didn't. I bet he was happy just to leave you to deal with all the shit that needs doing.”

“Don't, Steff.”

“You listen to me. Your father's selfish. Mine might be a bloody long way off perfect –” he rolls his eyes – “but when Mum died he was there, and
he took care of me
. You had to plan a funeral, Lim.
You
had to do that. That shouldn't be.”

I turn away, and he ducks back into my field of vision. “No. You need to hear this, and if nobody else will tell you, then I
will
. He's a selfish bastard and he's put all this on you—” His eyes widen at my expression and he draws his head back. “And shit on a stick, he's made you feel like it's your fault, hasn't he?”

I didn't move fast enough, did I?

I dropped my guard, I slowed down.

And Steffan…Steffan, of all people, has seen.

His voice when he speaks again is soft but somehow hard at the same time – and when I meet his eyes they are fiery with anger. Not at me, I think, but at the perceived injustice he's discovered. He's angry
for
me.

“You are not responsible for your mother, Lim. Not the way she lived, not the way she died. Not one bit. And if your father – your
father
– is letting you think otherwise, then he doesn't deserve to call you family.”

“It's not that easy…”

“It really is, you know. Your mother. Not your fault. See?
Easy
.” He drops into a crouch in front of me and grabs both my hands, closing his around them. “Don't you dare let anyone tell you any different. Least of all him. He needs to handle his own bullshit. Don't let him try and offload it onto you.”

I sniff.

I am not going to let this win. This sadness, this guilt. This everything, which threatens to drag me back down into the dark every time I think I've buried it.

Grief is unpredictable, they said; everyone feels it differently. They made it sound like a piece of art: an abstract painting that everybody sees something different in, something unique to them.

Grief – my grief – is an animal. It stalks me and I set traps to catch it: traps to cage it and shatter it and starve it of air. I want to see it wither away to nothing, until it's less than a memory, less than a ghost. But it has claws and it has teeth and they are deep in me – and the worst of it is that sometimes, sometimes I forget. I'm so used to the barbs that I forget that they're there, and every time I forget I think I can move on – and then suddenly, I remember. And each time I remember it's like someone has reached into my body and torn out my insides all over again. Because, you see, I know everything that Steffan tells me is true – of course I do. And this grief, this animal, this
thing
…it isn't just for my mother. I lost more than my mother that night. My father is still here, but somehow he's not – not quite. He isn't who I thought he was, and it took all this for either of us to know it. At least we have
that
in common…

When she stopped, everything stopped – and more than her, that's what I'm mourning.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's not an animal after all. Maybe my grief is a parasite.

It will not bleed me dry.

I won't let it.

Steffan's smiling at me.

“There it is,” he says. He squeezes my hands.

“There what is?”

“The moment when you told all the bad, all the shit,
all
of it, to go to hell because you don't want it any more. I remember it.” He grins.

Maybe, just maybe, he does understand after all.

Steffan makes a point of not driving past the ostrich farm again. I think one stare-down with an angry bird was probably enough for him – and I'm still not sure who actually won. If you pushed me, I'd probably give it to the ostrich. It scares me more than Steffan does.

Instead, he takes the winding road back inland, which is, apparently, being used by every caravan in the western hemisphere. And a lot of tractors. And some hay lorries. Just because.

We don't go anywhere fast.

The road meanders through fields and along the sides of hills. There are steep rocks on one side, and on the other a sharp drop to an old railway line – the sleepers long since pilfered to mark out beds for vegetable gardens – and the beginnings of a river. It sparkles in the shifting light. A quarry cut into the hillside has a thick, rusty chain wrapped through its wire gates. Someone's spray-painted
JESUS SAVES
in big red letters on the rock. Someone else has painted
DON'T TRUST THE BANKS
in thick black letters underneath it. Yet another person has drawn a huge white flower through both of them. I'm not even going to try and figure out what that's supposed to mean.

The further we follow the road, the thicker the trees become; the more they overhang and box us in. Even with the little row of caravans tootling along in front of us, it's spooky – like driving deeper and deeper into an enchanted forest. Steffan pushes his sunglasses up onto his head as the darkness thickens.

The canopy of the trees has formed a tunnel; cut through by the traffic, the branches arch over the road and turn everything green. Even the air coming in through the windows smells green: damp and mossy. It's like being in the middle of a huge leafy cathedral. Spokes of golden-white light punch through the greenery – so thick and bright that I could almost reach out and take hold of one. Dust motes dance up and down them.

I don't even mind our being stuck behind the caravans; anything to make this last a little longer. I could stay here for ever. It's cool and calm and so peaceful. It's beautiful. Nothing can touch me in here.

And then, without warning, the canopy drops back and away, and we're in a car and on the road to the chapel, chugging along behind a bunch of sunburned holidaymakers and what looks like
all
their worldly goods, snail-like in their caravans.

It's Jared who spots the bikes. All neatly parked up on the grass verge, with fading cow parsley and nettles spilling out of the hedgerow over them. And they're not just any motorbikes; these are the real deal – the big cruising bikes that thunder up and down the American highways of Jared's imagination. Of
course
it's Jared who spots them.

Dozens and dozens of them, all lined up; their riders' helmets beside them or balanced on their seats.

“Uhhhh…” Steffan makes a noise.

“Must be a thing,” says Jared. I can see him looking around.

“It's the dual carriageway, isn't it?” says Steffan – and with his usual carefree attitude to road safety, he swings the car straight across the road and pulls up on the opposite verge.

He's right. Up ahead, on the bridge where this tiny little country road crosses the dual carriageway (the one all those caravan drivers
should
be on, according to Steff, so they don't clutter up the blah-blah-blah boring…) there's a little crowd.

A surprisingly large crowd, come to think of it.

It lines both sides of the bridge, pressed up against the railings. It's dressed in black leather, in jeans, in T-shirts, in jackets…

It's all the bikes' owners.

They're waiting for something.

For Steffan, it's the most natural thing in the world to walk up to a massive crowd of bikers and ask them how it's going. Jared wanders up after him, his fingers turning his lighter over and over and over.

I hang back. I'm not as much a fan of people. Not really. I mean, they're fine; I just don't always want to be around them so much. They're hard work. Tiring.

Steffan's chatting away and they're pointing down at the carriageway and nodding – and he laughs. They nod some more. He gestures along the bridge. Several of the bikers look round. They're looking at me. Steffan waves me over.

“You'll like this,” he says, and he shoves a puffy envelope into my hand, shuffling me towards the railing. Two enormous bikers – one with a beard the size of a small dog – edge sideways to make a gap. Steff manoeuvres me into it. “These guys are all from the same bike club, right? And two of their friends just got married and they're leaving for their honeymoon.”

“That's…nice.”

There's probably a point. I'm just not quite there yet.

“They're coming this way on their bikes. In convoy with the rest of the club. So this lot have come on ahead to wait for them…” He waves his envelope at me, opening the flap and pinching out a load of white and pink tissue paper cut into shapes. I see bells and horseshoes and other wedding-related things.

Ah. Confetti. Got it. Told you I'd get there.

It doesn't take long; I've barely even slotted into my (tiny) gap between two vast leather shoulders – Beard Man on my right, Tassel Jacket Man on my left – while Steffan and Jared have found gaps further up and down the line, when someone says, “Here they come!”

We hear them before we see them. It's a loud, low, gurgling roar that builds and builds. It's like thunder, only more…engine-y. A lot more engine-y. They're moving slowly, side by side. They even have a police outrider escorting them as they head up the carriageway. The chrome sparkles in the sunshine and several of the bikes are decked out with white ribbons that flutter in the slipstream. As they come closer, everyone on the bridge starts to cheer and clap – and then the clapping stops and everyone starts emptying the confetti-filled envelopes.

As it falls, the confetti looks like it's dancing. Pink hearts and white stars are caught on the breeze. They rise and fall as we lean over the railing and throw them by the handful. The bikes passing beneath us – already deafening – sound their horns. The riders wave up at us and we wave back at them and everybody's cheering and laughing. Down the line, Steffan is upending his envelope of confetti; he shakes it to make sure every last scrap is out. Up the line, Jared is watching the bikes. I can see him through the cloud of little paper shapes as they tumble and spin.

The last of the convoy passes underneath to a final cheer – and suddenly our new friends are all hurrying for their bikes, pulling on helmets and kicking their stands away as the engines start. Big Beard Man pats Steffan on the shoulder as he walks back to his bike and yanks his helmet back on.

One by one, the bikes pull out onto the lane and roar off towards the next village and the slip road onto the carriageway to join the rest of the convoy.

The last of them pulls away with a blast of his horn as we walk back to the Rust Bucket – and as Steffan holds the door open for me to clamber in, he picks a bit of confetti out of my hair. A crumpled heart flutters to the ground.

Steffan turns the key and switches off the ignition. The car's engine stops and we sit in silence. His fingers stay on the steering wheel, holding on to it like it's a lifebelt.

“You don't have to come,” he says after a long pause.

Jared blinks at him and shakes his head.

In the back, I unclip my seat belt. “You're kidding, right?”

“No, funnily enough.” He swivels in his seat, turning to look back at me. “I'm not. It's not like it's a big deal, not now. And you've…” He stops, bites his lip and frowns. He's trying to figure out the right way to say it, whatever
it
is. Eventually, he hits on something he thinks will work. “I can't ask you—”

“That's just it, you idiot,” I say, cutting him off. “You never
have
to ask. Now shift your arse so I can get out of the car, would you?”

He looks at me for a moment longer; long enough for me to see something that might be gratitude in his eyes.

Maybe
.

Unlike my mother's grave, fresh and cold and double-deep in the cemetery on the edge of town, Steffan's mother is buried beside the chapel in the village where she was born. It's high on a hill, and in one direction you can see the fields laid out like a cloth. In the other, the sea shines silver in the distance. Come the winter, the air smells of woodsmoke from all the open fires in the village, and everyone huddles around the hearth in the pub with their pints. Now, in the summer, it smells of the honeysuckle in the hedges, of the pollen rising from the fields, of the jasmine that Steffan planted beside his mother's headstone.

I was with him when he did it, all the while quietly talking in Welsh to someone who could no longer hear him. His dad, not quite understanding why he needed – not just wanted, but
needed
– to do it, paced the boundary of the little graveyard. I understood back then, because Steff was my friend. I understand now because I've seen how very deep a freshly-dug grave becomes the second your mother's coffin is lowered into it. He simply couldn't bear the thought of his mother, who loved flowers and baking, of this person so full of life, lying alone in the ground. He couldn't stand the idea of the only flowers she ever got being a bunch of petrol-station carnations wrapped in noisy cellophane, left to rot and shrivel to nothing and adding death to death. So he bought a jasmine plant from the florist in town and he dug a little hole at the side of her headstone and he planted it.