It feels as if he’s going to walk off the cliff edge into thin blue air. He can’t see the narrow rough path zigzagging down the cliff until the very last minute. Someone’s tied a rope to a wooden fence post and placed some old sacking over the barbed wire. You’d crack your head open on the rocks below if you fell.
But he’s so hot, and the sea below is a beautiful turquoise. The tide’s so far out he can see there’ll be sand in the cove soon. It’s perfect timing. He starts to climb down, one hand grasping the coarse fibre of the rope, the other steadying himself on the rock. He feels for footholds without looking down. Already there’s more wind, the air’s cooler.
The path takes him on to a platform of layered rock, with rock pools in the gaps. Simon can’t resist; he lies down next to one of the pools so as not to cast a shadow and cups his hand round a small speckled fish, lets it squirm and tickle his palm before he releases it. The fish darts under a rock. The edges of the pool are studded with sea anemones.
This was as far as he came, that time before with Nina, but it’s too hot today on the rocks; he’s determined to swim. He lowers himself down the other side of the spine of rock sticking out into the sea, dangles precariously, drops the last few feet on to another flatter rock. He strips off his clothes; no one can see him. Then he jumps.
Ahhh! Simon gasps at the shock. The water’s freezing! It’s nothing like its Mediterranean colour. He gulps air, ducks his head under, shakes his hair as he surfaces again, then swims fast, overarm strokes into the cove. He turns on to his back, floats, rests his head back into the water. The sun shines full on his face; he has to screw his eyes up against the brightness. Where the water’s shallow enough he puts a foot down on to wave-ridged sand. The water comes up to his armpits. If the tide goes down a bit further there might eventually be a sandy beach. But it’s much too cold to keep still for long. He kicks out again, right across the cove and back to the rock. It’s hard to get enough grip to pull himself out. The rock is slippery, sharp with barnacles. He hauls himself up and over, and stands up, water streaming off his body.
He’s trembling with cold, with the effort of swimming and pulling himself out. A thin trickle of blood seeps down one leg where he’s snagged it. He struggles back into his clothes, the fabric sticking to his wet legs and torso, then he sits back for a minute. His whole body feels glowing now, truly alive, even though his teeth are chattering. He glances up at the cliff to check that no one has witnessed his naked swim, but of course there’s no one there. Probably no one for miles.
Barefoot, he climbs back up to the flat platform and stretches out to warm himself in the sun. He dozes. His ears are full of the sound of hundreds of seabirds, swooping and diving and squabbling over the cliff face. There’s the chug of a boat engine, and then a small ferry boat comes into view, taking trippers round the coast to see the seals. They might have thought he was one, had they been there only minutes earlier, his wet head sleek like the dark shape of a seal’s.
Gradually he warms up. Several times he hears small showers of soil and stones trickling down the cliff-side. He frowns slightly. Must have loosened the rock with my feet when I was climbing down. Or perhaps it’s a small animal, or a bird. He watches for a while, slightly uneasy, but there’s nothing there as far as he can see. Unless there’s someone right at the top of the path, out of view…
After a while he stops thinking about it. He dozes in the sun and studies creatures in the rock pools, and wonders which of the shellfish are edible. He’ll have to look it up later. He starts overheating again, so he clambers down a level and dangles his feet in the sea, but he doesn’t swim. The tide seems to be coming back up. No sandy beach ever appears. When he finally clambers back up the cliff and along the coast path for home his face is burning from too much sun and wind, but he feels amazing. He’s thirsty. He finds a clump of wild strawberries at the edge of the footpath. Each tiny fruit bursts on his tongue with sweetness.
The girl is sitting on the front wall. She watches Simon as he trudges up the hill and when he’s almost level with her she speaks.
‘Hi.’
Her voice jolts him out of a daze.
‘Hi,’ he mumbles. It comes out wrong, a sort of grunt. He bows his head lower, crosses the road and dives into his own front garden.
‘What the hell’ve you been doing, Simon?’ Nina stands at the back door, hands on hips like a cartoon mother.
‘Nothing. Just been for a walk.’
‘Where?’ she asks, suspicious. ‘And couldn’t you have left us a note?’
‘You didn’t. You weren’t here when I got back from town.’
‘I was gone for a few minutes, that’s all. I took Ellie down to her friend’s. Anyway, what am I doing, justifying myself to you?’
‘You don’t usually mind. I only went over the fields.’
‘Who with?’
‘No one. Just me.’
She scrutinizes his face. She always used to know when he was lying, when he was little. Not any more.
‘Anything could happen, Simon.’
‘Like what?’
She glares at him. ‘ I need to know where you are. You know I don’t like you going off by yourself. It’s different with friends. There’s all sorts of dangers. Different ones, here. The sea, cliffs, mineshafts… you know.’
Yes. You go on about it enough, he thinks. She even has the statistics. ‘ By the age of fifteen boys are three times more likely than girls to die, from accidents, violence, suicide…’
‘Go and have a shower. Your face is red as anything. Didn’t you take a hat? Sunscreen?’
Here we go. Doesn’t she realize no one his age wears hats, or sunscreen for that matter? Get real, Nina. But he doesn’t say anything. Just dumps his bag in the scullery and runs himself a glass of cold water.
His mother follows him. In the darkness inside he can’t see her properly. He shrinks back as he feels her reach out to touch his face.
‘We were so close once, Si. You never used to mind telling me things.’
Simon turns away, closes his eyes. ‘Leave it out, Mum.’
He can feel her watching him as he tramps upstairs. He goes into the bathroom, locks the door, sits on the closed lid of the loo seat, head in his hands. If she’d guessed he’d been swimming in the sea by himself at that cliff place, she’d have gone mental. She lives in terror of something happening to him or Ellie, as if his father’s awful accident has somehow made it more likely that something will happen again.
He doesn’t really remember much about it. His clearest memory is of Ellie, a tiny baby then, crying in the night, on and on, sounding more and more desperate, and Mum still not coming. He knew then that something was up. He had to get out of bed and go into his parents’ room, and there the baby was, bawling its eyes out, but his parents’ bed was empty, the covers half pushed back. He stroked Ellie’s little back and said things, and when she quietened down a bit and started sucking her fist he could hear noises from downstairs. Low voices, and a weird sobbing noise like an animal.
His dad died in a motorbike accident. Came off the road; no one could work out why or how. ‘I never wanted him to have the bloody bike in the first place,’ Nina tried to explain much later, ‘but he clung on to it. It reminded him of being younger and freer. That’s what I think, anyway. He liked the risk. But then…’ She had started to cry, even though it was years later.
Simon doesn’t often think about it, but lately he’s started up again, for some reason. Maybe because of what Nina has started saying. ‘You’re getting so like him, you know. Sometimes it gives me such a shock. I think it’s him standing in the shadows.’
He can’t help what he looks like. Can’t stop himself growing up, can he?
Leah has spent all afternoon in her garden, turning herself round as the sun moves across the sky, like a spit-roast pig. She’s turning a beautiful shade of golden brown all over. She started in the run-up to the GCSEs; all that extra study leave, and the weather was gorgeous. Her hair’s gone lighter too; gold highlights for free: you’d pay thirty pounds at the salon (‘Naughty ’n’ Nice’ – stupid name. What’s naughty about having a haircut?). Two girls from her old tutor group have Saturday jobs there, sweeping up and doing shampoos, but the money’s terrible. You won’t catch Leah working her socks off for that sort of rubbish. She’s got more sense. She’s been looking about for something interesting to do, something that pays more than the minimum wage. She hasn’t found it yet, but in the meantime it’s just fine lying in the garden all day, perfecting her tan, with the radio on to drown out the rows from indoors. Her mother’s ‘not well’ again, and getting worse. They never talk about it. Dad’s mostly out. They won’t be going on holiday like everyone else from school. It’s been so long since they did anything together that she hardly notices any more. And she can’t invite anyone round, not with her mother in such a state. The girls in her class stopped bothering about her years ago. It’s easier like that really. Not having to think up excuses all the time.
The new boy across the road looks cute. Too young for her, of course, but it’s fun to make him squirm. His mother’s called Mrs Piper but there doesn’t seem to be a Mr Piper around. She’s probably a single mum, one of those women who have children on their own and think men are redundant these days. Leah knows differently.
Since the Piper family moved in (21 May: she wrote it in her diary) they have painted the front door, and had the old carpets taken away, and tidied up the garden. They still haven’t put up curtains in the front bedroom. You can see right in when the light’s on at night. It’s the boy’s room. It’s got blue walls and stuff hanging from the ceiling – like model aeroplanes and other kids’ things. There’s a wooden boat propped up on the window frame, its sail filling one half of the glass. Perhaps he thinks it stops her seeing in.
They’ve all got bikes, even the little girl. It’s too hilly for bikes round here, they’ll soon find out. The boy goes off on his own a lot. Doesn’t hang out with the football gang down the park, or the surfing crowd at the town beach.
Where does he go?
Leah opens her eyes. The late afternoon sun is still hot enough to burn. She carefully oils her shoulders, tucks in the straps of her top so she won’t get white lines. Sometimes she wonders why she bothers: who’s to see? Who cares? But there’s somebody out there who’s just about to. She can sense it: he’s out there, somewhere, and moving closer. It won’t be long now. She closes her eyes. He’ll have dark hair and blue eyes, and hands with sensitive fingers. She’ll know him when she sees him. The warm sun on her arms spreads through her body. That’s what it will be like when he touches her for the first time.
For the last half-hour Simon has been lying upstairs on his bed reading the survival guide. ‘Chapter Four: Living from the Land’. It’s made him hungry. He picks up the book, takes it with him down to the kitchen, opens the fridge and scans the contents. He takes three slices of salami, a hunk of Cheddar cheese and a slab of fruit and nut chocolate. He leans against the back door frame. Nina is sitting in a deckchair under the tree, reading a book. He watches her for a while. It’s unusually quiet without Ellie around.
‘Did you know,’ Simon says, ‘that there is no known antidote to eating a deadly fungus? The most deadly are the Amanita genus.’
‘Mmm.’ She’s obviously not really listening. She turns the page of her book.
Simon carries on regardless. He reads aloud about the Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria) through Destroying Angel (Amanita virosa) to Death Cap (Amanita phalloides), the most deadly fungus known.
Nina stops reading and looks at him. He’s got her attention now, but she evidently hasn’t heard a word he’s said.
‘You look lovely,’ she tells him. ‘Your hair like that. With the sun on it.’
He rolls his eyes, but there’s no stopping her in mid-flow. ‘When you were a little boy, people used to stop me in the street to say how lovely you were! “He’ll break a few hearts, won’t he, with eyes like those, ” they’d go, and I’d smile and nod, and say, “He’s got his father’s eyes, actually. ” You do, Si. You’re even more like Jason now.’
Simon doesn’t want to think about all that again. He carries on reading out bits from his book instead. ‘Many fungi are useful for medicine, food, or other purposes, such as dyeing and firelighting. Edible fungi often have very similar poisonous cousins,’ he reads aloud, ‘so care in identification is essential.’
She’s listening properly now.
‘I don’t want you picking fungi, Simon,’ she says. ‘It’s too risky.’
‘It’s not, if you know what you’re doing,’ Simon says with relish. ‘That’s why I’m reading this. For when we go camping. We’re going to hunt and collect all our food and cook it. You can live off the land completely, you know.’ He looks at her defiantly, waiting for her to react.
‘I absolutely forbid it, Simon! No fungi. You know how dangerous they can be! And that’s my last word on the matter. Subject closed.’
Simon smiles. It’s so easy to get her going.
He gets his knife out of his pocket and starts carving his initials in the bark of the plum tree. She hates that. She picks up her book again and settles herself back in the deckchair without speaking.
Simon kicks the tree trunk and an unripe plum plops on to the grass. Nina frowns.
He walks down the garden away from the house to the bit they still haven’t cleared. It’s full of brambles and bindweed with huge white flowers like trumpets. Tight red berries are already forming on the brambles. He started making a den in there when they first arrived, but Ellie wanted to join in and turn it into a playhouse, so he gave up. If only he had a brother. He could have asked Johnny, maybe, but he’s pretty sure it’s not OK to make bramble dens when you’re fourteen (almost definitely not) and he can’t risk it. For some reason that makes him think about Rick Singleton again, and he shivers. What was Rick doing there in the town? Supposing he’s around all summer? Finds out where Simon lives?
His mother’s voice drifts over. ‘Going to fetch Ellie. Won’t be long.’
He doesn’t reply. When she’s gone, he fetches his catapult from the bag he left in the old scullery, fishes a handful of stones from his pocket, does target practice on the fence at the bottom of the garden. He’s getting better: almost 100 per cent accuracy now. As soon as he’s saved up enough he’s going to get an air rifle. He’s chosen the model: seen it in the magazine he borrowed from Pike. He’s looked up on the Internet about the law too. And trespass, and poaching and the Wildlife and Countryside Act. He’s thorough like that. Then he can hunt properly. Rabbits, pheasants, that sort of thing.
That girl’s still watching him. She’s always there. She’s standing a bit further along the pavement, next to the hedge, trying to see what the noise is: small stones hitting wood at close range. Simon flushes. He puts the catapult away again before his mother gets back. She doesn’t like him to use it with Ellie around.
He goes back inside to wait for something, anything, to happen. On his table there’s a jumble of school books and old PE kit, untouched. The thought of having to do homework fills him with despair. Perhaps he won’t bother. It’s nearly the end of term, isn’t it? It’s not as if it does any good. He hates school, everything except art and sometimes geography, when it’s about interesting places, like the Skeleton Coast. Or Canada. He likes to read about how people used to live too. Like hunter-gatherers, tribal people, people who knew about the land. But you don’t do that in school.
Ellie bounces upstairs.
‘Hello, Simon. Look what I’ve got —’
‘Go away.’
Her face crumples.
He knows he’s being mean, but he can’t help it. Something about how joyful she is, how unencumbered, brings out the worst in him.
In her hand she’s holding four little figures. She lets her hand droop.
‘What are they?’
Immediately she brightens again, oblivious to the sneer in his voice.
‘They’re for my doll’s house. A new family. They’re the same as Amy’s. Her mummy got them for me.’
Nina calls up the stairs. ‘Get your school work done tonight, Si, and then we can have a day out all together tomorrow. I’m cooking supper now.’
Simon lies on his bed, legs crossed, head resting on his interlaced hands, eyes shut. Ellie’s still chatting away to her miniature family, putting them in the doll’s house, making them do things. She counts them out: Mummy, Daddy, big girl, baby. She’s written him out, then. No room in the doll’s house for a mean older brother.
It’s half past eight. In the house opposite, Leah sits at the dressing table in her room, peering at herself in the dusty mirror as she strokes black eyeliner along her lids. Her eyes look huge. She pulls down her top slightly to see the white line of flesh which shows her how brown she is now. She wishes there was a place she could sunbathe with nothing on. Then she could be that colour all over. The light is on the boy’s room opposite. She goes and stands at the window. After only a few minutes, the boy comes over to his, as if he knows she is there, as if he’s been pulled by some mysterious, invisible thread. It is this same irresistible magnetism which will pull her true lover to her, Leah believes. She only has to wait. For now, she’s just practising her powers. She lifts her hand and beckons to the boy to come down, outside. She walks downstairs and out to the path to meet him. Now she just has to decide what she’s going to say.
Did he imagine it? She sort of waved, didn’t she? And made out that she wanted to speak to him. Simon’s heart thuds.
He must have imagined it. Why would she want to speak to him? He knows his face is red again: part sunburn, part – mostly – embarrassment. He runs his hands through his hair. Finds himself walking downstairs and out into the garden.
She’s leaning over her gate, her hair falling softly on to her tanned, smooth shoulders. She smiles.
‘Come here a minute, you,’ she says in this confusing way. ‘What’s your name?’
She talks as if he’s a small child. But, then, that’s exactly what he feels like at this precise minute.
‘Si-Simon,’ he stammers.
‘I thought you should know, Simon, that when the light’s on people can see right into your room.’ She still smiles.
‘So?’ He shrugs, as if he doesn’t care. Inside, he’s curling up with something he can’t name.
‘So get some curtains, Simon!’
He turns away, walks back across the road.
She calls softly after him, ‘Just some friendly advice, that’s all.’
He’s hot round his neck and up to his ears. Burning.
‘Don’t you want to know my name, then? Since we’re neighbours?’
He hesitates.
That soft voice at his back, almost a whisper.
‘It’s Leah. Leah Sweet.’
Is she having him on or what? Sweet? Can that be a surname?
‘Pleased to meet you, Simon Piper.’
How does she know that? Simon makes a run for the back door and almost collides with his mother, who is carrying a colander of vegetable peelings out to the compost heap.
‘Whoops! Careful! Where’ve you been? I thought you were upstairs working.’
He pushes roughly past her, hears her greet Leah. ‘Didn’t realize you two know each other!’
He runs up the stairs two at a time. Throws himself back on the bed. Turns off the light. His heart’s still pounding.
His head feels like it will burst.
Don’t think. Hold your breath. Count. Imagine you’re in a cave. The tide’s rising. Only way out is by swimming underwater into the next cave. There’s a narrow tunnel through rock. No air. Count. Getting better. Over a minute now.
His pulse begins to slow down. Better. Back in control now. Just count.