The Last Summer of Us (3 page)

I remember sitting in the chapel, looking down from the gallery as he followed his mother's coffin in his own pair of brand-new shoes – the ones I've only seen him wear to funerals now – and I understood that one day it would be me in his place.

I never thought I'd be doing it so soon after him.

Is it better to lose someone slowly, or fast? Is it better to see them fade – knowing you're helpless to hold on to them and watching them slide into the darkness – or is it easier to have them torn away from you in the night? Easier to say goodbye a hundred times, never knowing for sure which will be the last, or to say goodnight and never speak again? Which hurts the least? I don't think either of us could tell you.

That first morning, when the coroner's officer and the police and the body had gone, when I'd thrown the sheets in the dustbin, when my father was locked in the bathroom with his mobile and a bottle of Scotch, calling what seemed like everyone he'd ever met to tell them his wife had died, and when my aunt was in her car, driving as fast as she could towards us… That first morning I knocked on Steffan's door and he opened it and took one look at me, and just like that he knew, and he put his arms around me and held me tight. He didn't know
all
of it then – there are some things you just can't say out loud at times like that, not even to your best friend – but he knew enough. He always does.

There's always Steffan. There always has been, always will be.

There's always Steffan, and up until this moment, I never realized just how much that means.

Amy nods and rubs her eyes, and I guess the conversation's closed. She looks tired. So tired. But I can't take on any more – not right now. So I push away from the table and slouch back up to my room and wonder whether I've actually got any clothes that count as clean enough to be worth putting into a bag.

From downstairs, I can hear snatches of my aunt's voice: she's on the phone, and although I'm trying not to listen – because, dear
god
, I don't want to hear – I make out the words “doctor”…“treatment”…“Steffan”.

I switch the radio on, and start picking T-shirts up from the floor.

Amy's too distracted to be worried about my plans for the next few days. I'm a big girl, right? I'm suitably vague – and so is she.

I find my phone and send a hopeful text to Steffan: hopeful because it
might
occur to him to come and pick me up, him being the one with the car, rather than leaving me to walk all the way across town with a bag full of clothes. I know town's not exactly big, but that's not the point, is it? I carry on slinging things into my bag (toothbrush, deodorant, flip-flops, shorts, a jumper that probably needs a wash but which is just going to have to do) until my phone beeps. His reply is typically Steffanesque.

You've been watching too many sappy films. It's two, three nights, tops. How much stuff do you need?!

Right, so no chance of a lift, then. My second text is maybe a
touch
on the passive-aggressive side.

What time shall I bring all my stuff over to yours, then?

He pings back:

Whenever. We're set. Just waiting for you
.

The sound of something being dropped in the kitchen – and Amy swearing – makes me jump. I'd almost forgotten that she was here. Almost forgotten…but not quite. I shove the last of my clothes into my bag – which is probably twice as full as it needs to be – and make my way downstairs. Amy's listening intently to someone on the other end of the phone line. She holds up a hand asking me to wait, but I just want to be out. I want to go, to get away from here, this house and everything it means. Tapping my watch, I make the international sign for “I've got to go,” and she nods. She smiles and points at me, then at her phone, and mouths the words “Call me.” I nod back. As I pass the closed living room door, I think about knocking. But I don't.

When I walk out of the door, I can't stop myself from looking back over my shoulder. I don't know what I'm expecting, exactly: maybe to see a big black cloud hovering over my house? Whatever. It's not coming with me. I take a deep breath and set off down the street.

The sun's not as hot as yesterday – not yet, anyway – and there are birds singing, and the river's rushing under the bridge and there are cars on the bypass and everything feels obscenely
normal
. I guess this
is
normal now, though. The new normal. Everything that's happened in the last two weeks has been a kind of limbo: shifting from one normal to another. Now the funeral's done, it's all over and it's time to move on.

Steffan's car is parked in the driveway in front of his house, the bonnet open and a pile of bags on the ground next to the boot. There's no sign of either Steffan or Jared (who, living a hell of a lot closer than I do, must be here already – I'd recognize the tatty red rucksack with graffiti all over it anywhere) but the front door is open, so I dump my bag with the others and head inside to find them, following the sound of a radio.

They're in the kitchen and between them on the table is the biggest plate of bacon I've ever seen. I'm not kidding: this is Mount Bacon. Explorers could lose themselves on its lower slopes for a month; it must have taken at least fifteen pigs to make this much meat. And Steffan and Jared are cheerfully ploughing their way through it. It's either impressive or disgusting – I'm not sure which. Could go either way. It's not exactly a shock, though – I mean these two can
eat.
Jared's been banned from the school canteen for repeatedly finishing not only his own lunch but everyone else's too. In his defence, he did ask first – it's not like he swiped a handful of fish fingers from some starving Year Nine's plate – but apparently it's “inappropriate” from a senior. (If you ask me, I think the flirting with the canteen staff to get a third helping of cake every Friday lunchtime was probably the last straw.) As for Steffan, I've seen him put away an eight-egg omelette and still be hungry.

Sticking your arm into the middle of all that is a bit like sticking it into a bowl of cartoon piranhas: you kind of expect it to come back gnawed to the bone. However, I am brave. And I like bacon. I emerge triumphant, clutching two whole rashers and having my hand slapped at only once by Steffan. Feeling mightily pleased with myself, I perch on the closest worktop.

“Sure you want to eat that? You know it had a face once, right?” Steffan sniggers at me.

He's referring to my infamous vegetarian period, which happened when I was thirteen and lasted precisely a week and a half (and ended when I realized that almost everything I like to eat had, at some point, eyes, ears and a tail). You'd think by now he'd be bored of bringing it up. You massively underestimate Steffan's love of taking the piss.

I pull a face and they chew and the local radio DJ waffles on about the temporary traffic lights on the bypass and, dear god, does he not have anything better to talk about? This is the thing about living in a small town: however small it is, it might as well be the whole world. As far as some of the people who live here are concerned, the universe stops just past the end of the dual carriageway – and it only goes
that
far because the garden centre's off the roundabout, and if you lose that, you lose your begonias and your coffee shop with Sunday carvery. Mrs Davies who lives at number 32 in our road? She's never left town. Not at all. Not even for a holiday. Can you imagine? She's so comfortable here that she doesn't want to be anywhere else, to go anywhere else. She's content to simply be where she is; where she's always been. What a thought.

The bacon is gone. I know this without even looking at the plate, because Jared's pushing his chair away from the table and no way does Jared leave a table with food still on it. I don't know where he puts it all: “hollow legs”, my grandmother used to say. If that's true, then Jared's hollow all the way down to his toenails.

“What's the plan?” he asks, looking from Steffan to me and back again.

“Don't ask me,” I splutter back at him. They've worked their way through the whole pile of bacon, and I'm still chewing my second piece. “This is his party.” I wave my hand in Steffan's general direction. He responds by stealing the last bite of bacon from between my fingers and eating it, winking at me.

“No plan, is there?” he says. “Just us, in the car. Driving.”

“Driving where, though?” I slip down from the worktop and wipe the bacon grease off my fingers with the kitchen towel. “You can't just…
drive.
”

“Why not? That's the whole point of a road trip, isn't it? It's all about…” His eyes glaze over as he stares into the distance… “The journey.”

“During which you usually see stuff. Or
do
stuff. World's biggest ball of string, Grand Canyon, that kind of thing? Hence it being ‘A Journey' and not just ‘three of us sitting in a car, listening to your dodgy taste in music'.”

“I resent that. I have excellent taste in music.”

“Yeah, right. Keep telling yourself that.”

“Oi! I— Woah there. No.” Steffan breaks off from insulting me and darts across the kitchen, slamming the fridge door shut. While he was busy Not Having A Plan, Jared's started poking around the cupboards. Honestly, he'd eat the furniture given half a chance. “Not the fridge,” says Steffan firmly.

“Get in trouble for the beer, did we?” Jared doesn't sound even the least bit sympathetic.

“Not exactly.” Steffan looks sheepish for a second. “Might do for this, though.” He grins and jerks his head towards a flat, oblong box sitting on a shelf near the door. It looks like it's made of cardboard, and I haven't the faintest idea what's in it. There are what look like flowers and women in flouncy dresses printed on it, and some kind of gold sticker sealing it shut. The seal's been broken.

“What's that?” I ask, but neither of them pays me any attention. Of course they wouldn't: it's two-plus-one. Two in the know, one not, in this case. Mechanic's Paradox, remember? Always the bloody way.

Steffan yawns louder than he needs to and stretches, tossing the box into a carrier bag. “Are we going then, or what?”

“Seriously. The plan?” I say. I'm not daft enough to buy this all-about-the-journey bollocks he's trying to sell me. In fact, I'm vaguely insulted that he thinks I'm thick enough to believe it – wrung out and messed up as I might be. I step between him and the door. “The. Plan.”

He looks shifty. “Just, you know, driving… The usual places. All that. A couple of nights, like we talked about…”

“And the rest of it. Come on.”

He gives me the same look Amy did.
Fragile
, it says.
Handle with care. Danger: stay back two hundred feet.

And then he gives up and ruffles his hands through his hair, which he knows makes him look about nine years old, and he meets my gaze and says: “I want to go see Mum. I need to. I just thought, you know, it would be good to do something else too. Go other places on the way. Have some fun. Not make it all about…” He clears his throat again and sticks his hands in his pockets, the way he always does when he's nervous or uncomfortable. Or both.

Ah. I see.

He doesn't need to finish the rest of his sentence. I already know what he didn't want to say. It's not like I can deny him, is it? After all, this is what we do. We hold each other's hands (metaphorically, not literally – god knows where his hands have been…) and we pick each other up. I never thought that hanging out at our respective mothers' graves would become an integral part of our friendship, but life has a way of surprising you. So does death.

He doesn't visit his mother's grave often: her birthday, the anniversary of her death… The usual, I guess. Now is neither of those things, but given the circumstances I can't say it's a shock he wants to go – and while every single fibre of me hates the thought of it, I can't let him go alone. Hasn't he just done the same for me?

“You don't want to go with your dad?” I ask.

“No.” His voice hardens, just for a second. He's angry about something, even if he's trying to hide it. There's something going on here. “No,” he repeats, more softly.

“Are you…is everything okay?”

“
You're
asking
me
that? After yesterday? Come off it.” He grins at me. “I just… Mothers and stuff. You know?”

I do.

“A tent?”

“Where'd you think we were going to be sleeping?”

“I don't
do
camping.”

“Bye, then. See you in a few days.”

They're enjoying this far too much.

To their credit, they have at least managed to scrounge a couple of tents: the kind that just sort of pop up, provided you put the right tube into the right hole. Or something. As you can tell, I'm an expert.

The last time I went camping, I was five, on holiday with my parents – back in the days when we still did that. Seems like a long time ago. All I can remember is having a plastic baby doll that I liked to bathe in the washing-up bowl. It rained. There was mud. And as we started to drive out of the campsite, my dad (who, thoughtfully, had packed the car the night before and put the inflatable dinghy on the roof rack) tapped the brakes and a tidal wave of rainwater sloshed out of the dinghy and down the windscreen of the car.

Like I said, I don't
do
camping. I know, I know. I should have thought about this more, but I didn't. I mean, it's not like I've had anything else on my mind, is it…?

So. Tents. Tents which are currently rolled or folded, or whatever it is you do with tents to make them go small again, and sitting outside the kitchen door. I'm feeling an attack of The Incompetents coming on.