He’s slept in late. He can tell from the angle of the sun on the wall and the sounds from outside: cars, voices, people parking here for free and making their way down to the town or the beach, loaded with picnics and windbreaks and surfboards. He lies with his arms behind his head, adjusting to the idea of being awake. His head’s been full of weird dreams, of knives and blood, and hunting dogs with slavering jaws coming after him all night. And then he was somewhere dark and terrifying, deep underground, and he couldn’t find the way out.
He blinks. The room is shockingly bright. They painted the walls blue, but there aren’t any curtains yet. The first morning they were here, back in May, he was standing at the window in just his boxers and there was this girl in the house opposite standing at her window, staring right in. She’s about sixteen. She’s done her GCSE exams already; hangs about all the time, doing nothing. Mum has got her eye on her as a potential babysitter for Ellie. She’s given up on him, thank goodness. It’s just that he never knows whether he’s going to be in or not. He doesn’t plan ahead. And it’s not fair, anyway. Why can’t she just watch the telly and put herself to bed?
He knows why really. She’s scared of the dark. She’s only six.
Simon pulls on jeans and a T-shirt, keeping well back from the window. He ought to fix something up, a sheet or something, until Mum gets the curtains done. She says she’s too busy at the moment; he’ll have to wait till the holidays. Only ten more days. They’re not going anywhere this summer because of just moving. In any case, this is a holiday place itself. People come from all over. But everyone else will be going away, Johnny and Dan and Pike and – well, they’re the only people who count, really, from school. They’ll be going off with their families. Exciting places like the Picos de Europa (Johnny) and South of France (Dan). Pike will be sailing somewhere with his dad and his million brothers and sisters (well, five).
But they’re planning to go off camping by themselves first, just the four of them: him, Johnny, Pike, Dan. He hasn’t told Mum yet. Nina, not Mum. He’s trying to remember to call her that. It doesn’t sound so… so childish.
Without meaning to, Simon finds himself standing at the bare window. The girl’s there, leaning against the gate. Her hair flops down over her face as she swings with one foot on the half-open gate. Fair hair, past her shoulders. She’s wearing one of those short tops that shows off your stomach. As usual. You can’t help noticing the smooth tanned flesh, the way it shadows towards the hip bone. Simon flushes, looks away.
Johnny, Dan, Pike and him aren’t interested in girls. That is, they never talk about them. And the girls in Year Nine (their year) just ignore them. That’s just how it is. For now.
Mum/Nina yells up the stairs, ‘Are you getting up at all today?’
Simon bangs open his door, stands at the top of the stairs, gives her his cool, calculated look.
‘Been up for hours.’
‘Oh yes? Well then, you can go down the town for me and get some shopping. Take Ellie with you. And there’s washing-up to do.’
He spends a long time in the bathroom, mostly looking at his face in the mirror above the basin. Two spots. His hair looks weird.
Sunlight is flooding through the open back door. Ellie’s sitting on the step, making something with glitter and stones and an old wine bottle, while Mum writes out a list of shopping.
‘Look!’ Ellie holds out her creation.
‘What is it?’ He tries not to sound sarcastic. Ellie looks at him, expecting something more enthusiastic.
He swings his rucksack over one shoulder and picks up the list.
‘Have some breakfast first,’ Nina says.
‘Not hungry. Still full of rabbit stew.’
Ellie looks up; should she cry or not? Not.
He studies the list. Nothing too embarrassing. But he’s not taking Ellie.
‘Please, Si. Then I can get on with things.’
‘No way. She can’t walk fast enough. It takes too long. She moans all the way back up the hill.’
Nina sighs.
He almost relents, but then he imagines what it will be like if he bumps into someone from school, and that does it.
‘I’m going on my bike, anyway.’
‘Don’t forget your helmet!’ Nina yells after him as he disappears out to the shed.
Simon grins to himself. It’s not that he deliberately winds her up, pretending he’s reckless and foolhardy, but she does go on.
The girl from the house opposite watches him get on to his bike, fasten his helmet, freewheel down the hill.
The town’s packed with shoppers, cars bumper to bumper in the narrow streets. Simon weaves in and out, bumps up on to the pavement for a bit, but it’s even more congested. People stop suddenly and unexpectedly to look at things in windows, or to talk to someone. It’s as if I’m invisible, he thinks. They just don’t see me. He ends up pushing the last bit down the cobbled street that leads to the small supermarket where he can get most of the stuff. There’s a girl he recognizes from school at one till, so he goes to the other.
He might as well go all the way down to the sea, since he’s here. He swings the rucksack back over one shoulder, heavy and lumpy with shopping now, and scoots through the series of narrow alleyways and cobbled streets that lead down to the town beach. Already, families are parked with windbreaks and picnics all along the dry sand at the top near the wall; an ice-cream van is dealing out cheap whipped white stuff in cones. There’s a queue at the chippy, and a crowd of boys hanging round the front of the amusement arcade, hands in pockets, hair slicked up. One of them looks a bit like Rick Singleton. Simon gives them a wide berth, scoots further along next to the sea wall, finds a place to lean the bike.
The sea’s sparkling. No big surfing waves, just small ripples lapping on to the sand. Two dogs race in circles through puddles left by the retreating tide, even though this is a No-Dogs-May-to-October beach. They’re chasing seagulls and barking, though the sound is whipped away by the wind. Offshore today. You have to be careful with an offshore wind. That’s the one that whisks you out in your small inflatable: the child’s dolphin boat or the small boy on a bodyboard, and before you know it you’re way out of the bay. Every year there are drownings.
‘Six people last season,’ the fish-shop man said as he wrapped their chips the first weekend after they moved. ‘And mostly strangers, tourists. They don’t respect the sea. They think you can come here and do what you like, but she’s a terrible one, she is. No mercy in her. There was a lad and his father down on the rocks, fishing, and the first wave came and washed the lad off, and the next one got the father. They didn’t think, see.’ Simon wanted to hear the whole story in detail. Nina hustled him out before he could ask about the other four deaths. ‘What’s wrong with you? You’re obsessed,’ she hissed at him.
You’d never imagine it, looking at that tame sea out there now. It’s easier to believe if you walk up along the cliff path for a bit, the way it crashes in on the rocks at high tide. It’s way below, but the spray gets you even in summer. They arrived in May; it’s July now. There haven’t been any big storms yet. He can’t wait!
‘Still soft in the head, eggbrain?’ The words whisper into his skull from close range. A long shiver rattles his backbone.
‘Thought you’d escaped, didn’t you, Simple Simon?’
Simon doesn’t need to turn round to see whose shadow it is that’s fallen over his propped-up bike. He puts one hand on the handlebars to steady himself, waiting for what’s coming next. But Rick’s moving on, hands in pockets, swaggering after the bunch of lads sauntering down the pavement towards the boy who collects money for the deckchairs. Simon doesn’t hang around. He shifts the rucksack on to both shoulders ready for the steep ride home. Sweat trickles down his neck.
He’s red as a beetroot by the time he reaches his house. The girl opposite is still hanging out at the front of her house. She straightens up when she sees him, watches him dismount and wheel the bike to the shed. I’m hot because of the bike ride, he wants to explain. But he doesn’t say a word, of course.
Simon humps the heavy bag on to the kitchen table. A sack of onions rolls out on to the floor, but he leaves them there. Ellie and Nina are nowhere to be seen. He thumps upstairs to the bathroom and pours cold water over his head. Most of it drips over the floor. The sun has moved round; his room is in shadow now. He lies on the unmade bed for a while, waiting for his heart to stop pounding. He imagines himself swimming out into the bay, the feel of the waves slapping over his head.
Then he thinks of Rick, sauntering along the top of the town beach. He can’t swim there, can he? But there’s another place. If he can remember how to get there. Some bloke from one of the farms told Nina about it, when they were out walking: ‘I’ve swum there since I was a boy. You have to watch the tide. It’s only safe at a low spring tide. You know, the extra low ones at full moon. We don’t tell many people about it.’ He winked at Simon and his mother.
Simon checks his catapult’s safe in his pocket. He retrieves his knife from the kitchen window sill. The blade’s clean and shiny and sharp. He leaves the back door on the latch, like they do these days. Back at the old house, they always kept doors locked. Even windows. Since they’ve been here they’ve let all that go. No one locks doors round here.
The girl opposite has disappeared.
It’s so hot the tarmac is melting. It sticks to his boots. The road’s gone quiet, like it often does in the early afternoon on a summer Saturday. He turns left along a small shady lane towards the fields. From there he can cut across to the coast path.
The grass is stubbly and scratchy from where it’s been cut. He watched them last week, cutting the hay and then binding it into rolls and trailering them behind the tractor, back to the farm. The field was covered in crows. He liked the feeling, as he watched, that it all belonged to him now. Not literally, but just because this is where he hangs out, now they live so close. He’s left behind the built-up town where they used to live. The traffic and the concrete, and all the crap: shops and car parks and people crowded like rats into shopping malls and pedestrian precincts. He hates all that. Even the words are ugly.
When he’s older, he’s going to live somewhere really wild. Alone. He’ll build himself a house in the middle of a forest or a wilderness of some kind, and live off the land. Hunting, fishing. That sort of thing. He doesn’t tell anyone this. Not even Dan or Johnny or Pike.
He can see the sea now, a wide blue expanse of the bay, as far as the lighthouse one way, and thinning to nothing the other. It feels like the edge of the world. The air changes as you get closer to the cliff. There are hundreds of gulls. He climbs over a gate on to the footpath and starts walking westwards.