The Last Summer of Us (7 page)

I look at him looking at Steffan again and I catch it; it's only there for a second, flashing across his face and disappearing in a heartbeat, but it's there. He's jealous. Steffan's taking Jared's escape plan…and he doesn't even want it. The wrong one of us is going to America and we're all as trapped as each other. All stuck in lives that are determined by other people. Other people's choices. Other people's mistakes.

Steffan puffs out a long, slow breath and throws the middle of a daisy at me. The white petals are scattered around his knees. “Still,” he says, dangerously close to smiling at me, “I bet that's taken your mind off your hand.”

“It had. Until you brought it up again. Thanks for that.”

“What? You think you're going to be allowed to forget that one? Just wait till school starts and Becca kicks off again.”

I hadn't thought of that. School, without Steffan.
Becca
without Steffan.

How much can one person take? I wonder. How much can we carry before we break? How much more for Jared, with Marcus and his mother and now his dad back again? How much more for me? Becca's comment was cruel and it was meant to cut…and how many more will there be? How much can we take, and how much more can we lose?

Steffan knows I'm thinking it. He's thinking it too. “We're pretty screwed up, aren't we?”

I laugh. “Speak for yourself. I'm perfectly adjusted.”

“Yeah, right.” He dusts his knees off and clambers to his feet. “
Adjusted.
”

“That's all I've got, I'm afraid.”

“That's all any of us have got.” He smiles at me, and I grin back.

Jared shakes his head at the two of us. “You two are mentals, you know that?”

Steffan throws his arm around my shoulder and I lean into him. We both pull faces at Jared, who shakes his head again and laughs as he hauls himself to his feet and rubs bits of grass from his hands.

They're ready to move on. They're probably right. Places to go, things to see, people to…

On second thought, maybe it's better if we
don't
bump into anybody else for a while. Either way, we've got to find somewhere to camp tonight before night actually rolls around.

Steffan tosses his car keys to Jared, who snatches them out of the air without even breaking his stride.

“Spock, you have the conn,” he says, and Jared rolls his eyes.

“The original series? Really? Like I said: mental.”

“Listen, mate, Kirk was cocking
amazing
.”

“And you're Kirk, clearly.” Jared pockets the keys. This is an old argument and we all know how it plays out, but they do it anyway. Who'd have believed that the pair of them are closet
Star Trek
nerds? Or that they'd have sucked me into it too? Honestly.

“Bang right I am. And you…” He raises his hand, thumb extended and fingers splayed in the Vulcan salute as he pulls a mock-serious face and raises an eyebrow.

It's my turn. “You're both rubbish.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Bones is the best. It's always Bones.” I shoot them a grin back over my shoulder. “The reboot version of Bones, obviously.”

And, predictable as the moon rising, the tide turning and the clouds bursting on the one day you've not got an umbrella, I can feel them thinking it. If I turn around, they'll have the same soppy look on their faces that they always do, and they say it in chorus.

“Uhura.”

Like I said:
predictable
.

Mothers. Our mothers. Steffan's baked. Jared's is…best left out of the discussion.

Mine?

Mine likes…
liked…
to control things. Events. People. She was the one who
did
everything, organized stuff and ran things. When I was little, she always said it was because that's what she was trained to do, what she'd learned in her management course at college, and it was just easier for her to do everything. As I got older, it changed to being because nobody else could do it as well as she could. We're talking about the small stuff: Sunday family get-togethers, barbecues. Dinners – not for thirty or forty people or heads of state, but for a couple of my parents' friends. People who had never cared whether the bookshelves in the hall were dusty, and never would…but she still spent three days getting everything perfect for them.

Gradually, it started to wear her down. I didn't see it at the time, and maybe I should have. But you kind of assume your parents are…well, your parents. They're the ones in charge, right? They remind you of it often enough, so it must be true. They've got it all worked out. You're the one who's stuck figuring out how the world fits together and what the hell you're going to do in it, and why you shouldn't be so terrified of the thought that it sets your teeth on edge. They've already
had
their turn.

I wrote my mother's eulogy at three a.m. and I told myself it was just like any other piece of homework I've ever been given. But it wasn't. How do you catch someone in words? How can you trap a complete soul in a handful of pages and bring them back to life in front of the people who've known them their whole lives? People who know them as someone
else
. I only ever knew my mother as my mother…but they knew her long before she became that. How do you tell them who she was and not lie? How can you?

One way or another, everyone lies at funerals.

Jared has spent a good five minutes adjusting the driver's seat and we're still parked by the bridge. (Thankfully, alone now. Because Becca'd love this.) Five minutes. I've watched as the hands on my watch ticked round. Five minutes of shuffling the seat one click forward, two clicks back. Twiddling the cracked plastic dial on the side of the seat to tip it forwards and back. The Rust Bucket being what it is, most of the car's held together with hope, faith and chewing gum, so when it's fiddled with too much, the seat mechanism has a strop and bangs the whole thing back onto my knees right as I'm sliding across the back seat.

“Oi!” I shout and Steffan glances over his shoulder at me from the passenger seat as Jared sighs and yanks his chair forward again.

“Remember: not my fault,” Steff says pointedly.

“It's your bloody car,” I snap.

“And who wanted to bring it? Hmm? We could've—”

“No. We couldn't.” Jared's finally happy with the seat. And now he's started on the steering wheel.

I do not remember a time when I wasn't stuck in the back of this car in the hot sun – a car, I might add, with no air con and with windows that barely work – waiting for Jared to be ready. Eons have passed. When they find me, I'll be nothing but a pile of dust, still waiting in the back seat.

Dust to dust.

I know.

Suddenly, it comes to me. The sunroof. There's a sunroof. It's closed. Hot air rises, doesn't it? So if I open it, the car can't possibly get any hotter. It'll get cooler, because of physics. Or something. Not even the Rust Bucket can argue with physics. Of course, getting to the handle is going to be tricky, but the pair of them are too busy bickering about the sun visors to listen to me…

I slide forward as best I can and lean in between the seats, twisting around so I can reach the handle. That's how old this car is – no electric sunroof here. Like I said: hope, faith and chewing gum. Steffan looks up, poking me in the ribs as I grab the handle. It turns and the roof creaks open and suddenly there's fresh air on my face, and I'm looking up at clear blue sky framed by green leaves. It looks so blue you could dive into it.

It's not elegant, but I twist some more and manage to stretch far enough to poke my head out through the sunroof. It's just wide enough, I think… I wriggle, and my shoulders scrape up through the hole too.

“What the…?” Jared's finally noticed what I'm doing.

“It's boiling in there!” I don't know whether he hears me. I don't care. The sky is sapphire and the breeze is on my face…and the engine starts.

I'm not rushing for them. I wriggle my arms through the gap and rest them on the roof. My palms tingle on the hot metal.

“Would you sit down already? I get it, okay?” Steffan's getting antsy. I'm still not rushing. The air tastes different here. Up by the pillbox, it tasted of summer and parched grass and hot stone. Here, back by the river and without Becca to spoil it, it tastes clean and clear – although that might be because the car still smells of cheese and onion crisps, with a hint of banana going off in the heat. I knew I should have made Steffan check under the seats.

I'm just about to slide myself back into the car when I hear the click, and then the groan of the suspension…and the car creeps forward.

They wouldn't.

Would they?

The car keeps on creeping. It pulls away from the side of the road.

They would. They have.

Bastards.

The breeze picks up as the car moves – still slowly – along the road. There's no traffic here; past the bridge and surrounded by the fields and the trees, there's no one left to see me but the ghosts of POWs. We pass the memorial at the crossroads and I feel the breeze pick up and the wind tug at my hair, and without knowing why I'm doing it, I throw open my arms and close my eyes and I'm flying.

“Faster!” I shout down to Jared, but I can hear him telling me to get back inside.

“You've had your fun, Lim. Sit down.”

“No!”

“I'm not kidding! Sit your arse back down, would you?”

The car sweeps to the left, then back to the right. It's gentle, but deliberate. I take the hint and slide myself back in through the sunroof, dropping into my seat. Jared's fingers are gripping the steering wheel and even behind his sunglasses I know he's frowning.

“You could have just waited, you know,” I say.

Steffan's pale when he swivels in his seat to stare at me. “What was that?” he asks.

“Forgetting,” I say, and fasten my seat belt.

The boys are learning that pop-up tents don't actually pop up. I did warn them about this when they were yammering on about how easy it was all going to be and wasn't the whole “camping” idea so amazing. I think they were expecting to just unzip the bags and a tent to magically appear out of each one, all ready to go. Ha. But you can't tell them – really, you can't. So I've been sitting here on this tree stump for the last twenty minutes, while they wave a bunch of metal rods around and get tangled up in a load of fabric, generally getting themselves into a hell of a mess. They also seem to have invented a couple of brand-new swear words. They're surprisingly original.

We've driven a while, and they've argued over which station to tune the car radio to (not that it matters because, round here, it all disintegrates into static and white noise every few minutes anyway). And Jared has complained about the Rust Bucket's clutch a grand total of forty-three times. I counted.

There are bags piled up on the ground beside them. The Rust Bucket's a few minutes' walk back through trees and a couple of fields, parked in a lane where it won't get in anybody's way. Basically: the arse-end of nowhere.

“Better get used to roughing it, Lim,” Steffan had laughed as Jared turned off the ignition.

“You're not serious.”

“Course I am. The great outdoors, isn't it? Sleeping under the stars…”

“Naff off.”

“Cooking food over a campfire. Washing in the river…”

“You're definitely not serious.”

“Says who?” He'd blinked at me with such sincerity that he had me believing him.

The horror. It was only when his face crumpled and he burst out laughing, shaking his head and saying “Your face!” over and over again that I realized he was messing with me.

“I hate you both.” I tried not to pout. “When you said ‘camping', I kind of pictured an actual…campsite. Some of them have shower blocks. Some of them even have – shocker –
pools
.”

Steffan shook his head. “Round here. In this weather. Like there'd be anywhere with space in the summer holidays.”

Jared snorted. “And like anywhere would let us in.”

Fair point.

He carries on. “See that shed over there?” He pointed through the windscreen to a low, white-painted building squatting at the far side of the nearest field. “That's the St Jude's changing rooms. And over there?” He pointed the other way. “A mile or so down the road, there's a pub. No cooking over a campfire. Promise.”

Everyone knows what happened at St Jude's. At the start of the year, the young PE teacher got accused of…well, doing something he shouldn't have been doing with a Year Ten pupil in the changing rooms after a football match. Needless to say, he didn't stay a teacher at St Jude's very long. I don't know what happened to the kid, but the teacher was gone pretty sharpish and no one's seen him since. That's the thing about small towns and reputations. They're like tinder, dry as anything – it only takes a single spark, and before you know it the whole forest's burning. Anyone who's ever lived in a town like ours could tell you that.

The upshot of this particular conflagration, however, is that the St Jude's changing room building no longer has a lock on its front door…

“You're a genius!” I said as I figured it out. No lock means that a hot shower is there for the taking.

“Not so hateful now, is it?” Steffan grinned. He's not quite right; it's just that I'll probably hate them less after a shower.

“You're holding it upside down.”

“Bollocks I am.”

“Might as well be holding those, all the good it's doing you,” Jared mutters out of the side of his mouth at Steffan, who makes a rude gesture with the rod he's holding.