Leah lies on her bed, carefully positioned so that the moonlight shines directly on to the open diary she’s been writing for the last half-hour. Her parents have long since gone to bed, but she doesn’t want to put the light on. The silvery light through the open window is so much more romantic. The bedroom, with its plain walls and cheap furniture, is softened and smoothed by the deep shadows. She reads back what she’s written so far.
Just got back from the Pipers’ place. Read Ellie (sweet!) loads of stories. Her room has shelves full of books! And this really cute night light, with a moon and stars that glow. When she was asleep (took ages) had a good look round. Went in Simon’s room. Weird, looking at this house from over there. Nothing much to see in S’s room. Boys’ stuff like old models and junk. Air-gun magazines. A horrible smelly old sheep skull and lots of smaller ones. Birds or mice? And lots of drawings of dead things. Mrs P’s was more interesting. Photo of a man by her bed looks like Simon: maybe his dad? Lots of rings and bracelets and earrings in the chest of drawers, but no letters. The room looks tidy and a bit bare, but inside the drawers it is a real mess!!! Tried on some of her shoes but they were too small.
Mrs P says call her ‘Nina’. Nina came back before Simon, who was supposed to be in by ten but wasn’t. Where was he? I think she is too soft on him. A man drove Nina home, but I didn’t see whether they kissed or not. She said she was over the limit but she didn’t seem pissed to me. She gave me extra on account of being later than we said. I have made almost twenty quid and all for just having a nice time snooping about and reading a few stories!!!
While she was there she’d pretended it was her house, and she’d planned how she would decorate it. Simply, with just a few colours, like terracotta in the living room, and a sort of lilacy lavender for the main bedroom. White sheets and white duvet cover, and fine white gauzy curtains to blow in the breeze.
Leah sits up; she can hear a woman’s voice shouting. She creeps to the open window to look out. In the house opposite, Simon’s window is also open. Nina’s raised voice echoes through the still night air. She’s yelling something at Simon. He must have just got home. Nina sounds furious, although Leah can’t hear the actual words. She glances at the clock. Twenty past eleven. Where has he been all this time?
He seems quite nice really. Pity he’s so young. He’s good-looking in a shy sort of way. Tongue-tied. He needs drawing out of himself.
Leah considers making him her summer project. She’s so bored. It will fill in the time while she waits for the real man to come into her life. Yes, a project will be fun. Look out, Simon Piper!!!
Briefly, just before she goes to sleep, she wonders about the man who drove Nina home. She’s seen him somewhere before, not just around the town like you do, but somewhere else. The telly? On a poster?
It’s as if she has some special power, as if by thinking about him she has conjured him up. Leah’s shopping for her mother, who’s ‘ill’ again. The town is crowded; it’s Saturday morning. Local people doing ordinary shopping for food rub shoulders with holidaymakers looking for something to do on a damp morning. It starts to drizzle more heavily.
Leah wants to get out of the rain, but she hasn’t enough money to spare for the cafe. And then, ahead of her in the street, she sees him. At least, she’s almost certain it’s him: a man with dark hair, short-sleeved linen shirt, blue shorts, leather boots. He pushes the door open into the bookshop on the high street and Leah just follows.
She has never been in here before. There are two rooms, full of bookcases. Her shoes squeak on the wooden floorboards. There are comfortable chairs and a patterned rug in one corner, as if it’s someone’s sitting room. A bowl of sweetpeas stands next to the till. A carousel of postcards, art cards, to one side. Leah absorbs it all as if it’s in a magazine.
The young woman behind the till looks up and smiles a greeting. ‘Hello, Matt.’
She smiles at Leah too.
Matt. That’s his name, then. It’s definitely him, the man who brought Nina home last night. She follows him through the arch into the second room, to shelves labelled ‘Art and Architecture’.
This room is smaller. Standing so close (she’s at ‘Fiction by Author A-H’), Leah can detect a faint delicious smell, not aftershave or soap, something more unusual, like earth. Clay, perhaps, or charcoal. Something arty.
Leah picks up a novel at random and pretends to read the blurb on the back.
His dark hair curls over his collar at the back. Not trendily short, but still attractive. His hands, holding a large hardback book with a shiny black cover, are tanned. Strong, capable hands, with thin fingers. Artist’s hands, sensitive to the shape of things, used to carving out figures from stone or clay or wood. Leah feels a sudden tingle run right down her spine. Her heart pounds. She tips her head slightly, so that a curtain of hair sweeps down over one side of her face and covers up the spreading flush.
She moves further away, takes the book over to one of the chairs near the window. Rain beats against the glass. Self-consciously she opens the book and reads the beginning. Words swim in front of her eyes, dance, blur. Nothing makes sense. She’s aware of the man really close, flipping pages of the book in his hands. Every so often he seems to glance in her direction.
She gets up abruptly, pushes her book back into its space on the shelf and rushes out of the shop into the wet street. The woman at the till says something as she leaves, but she doesn’t stop to listen.
Rain trickles down her neck, beads her eyelashes. The cool air feels delicious. She glances back through the bookshop window as she passes and there he is, watching her. She goes hot again. It’s a new feeling, a mix of confusion, excitement and curiosity. What does it mean?
She forgets the shopping and makes her way instead down the high street and through the alley into the lower street and then down the stone steps on to the road that runs along next to the main beach.
Leah finds an empty bench in one of the shelters. A seagull lands right by her, squawks for food. Above the sea, the clouds are thinning. The rain will stop soon. Already there are more figures down on the beach. A dog races round and round after gulls, and two small children chase after the dog.
The seagull has perched itself on one arm of the bench. It watches her with its beady eye. Leah flaps her arms at it. ‘Shoo!’
It flaps back, moves off for a moment and then returns. There are notices all along the seafront admonishing tourists: ‘Do NOT feed the seagulls’. People tell stories about the things they do. ‘They’ll take your sandwich right out of your hand.’ ‘A mob of seagulls pecked a baby and killed it.’ Leah watches the gull back. Its beak is huge when you see it close up. Hooked, vicious.
She could do with a drink. Something to eat. The kiosks along the front sell ice creams, chips, greasy burgers that make your stomach turn. She could get something from the town, but she can’t be bothered. What will Matt be doing now? Bought that flashy art book, perhaps, and then gone to a cafe for an expresso.
Simon scuffs along the town beach. His jeans are soaked; the legs act like a sort of wick, sucking up water from the puddles he makes no effort to avoid. He’s seen her, the girl. Leah. In one of the shelters. He keeps his head down, but she’s already spotted him. She’s waving. She does that flick thing with her hair.
‘Hi, Simon!’
He grunts. Keeps walking, head down.
She slides off the bench and picks her way over the wet sand towards him. Heat prickles along his neck. What does she want now?
‘All right?’ Leah asks.
‘Yes.’
‘You were late last night. Where were you?’
Simon can’t trust his voice to come out right. It might be a squeak, it might be unnaturally deep. Or both at the same time. So he says nothing.
‘Where is there to go round here?’ Leah persists.
Simon shrugs.
‘Well?’
‘Just out.’
‘Where are you going now?’
Why does she want to know? What’s she playing at? Simon can’t imagine why she’s speaking to him like this. She’s so close up he can smell her hair: a clean, sweet smell. Apples. He’s expecting her to laugh at him at any minute.
‘Can I come with you?’
Simon is so shocked he looks directly at her. She’s not laughing. Her blue-grey eyes stare right back at him.
‘Please?’ she says, as if she really wants to.
‘OK,’ Simon says, as if he doesn’t care either way. ‘If you really want. I thought I’d just go along the cliff a bit. There’s this place —’ He breaks off. Don’t tell her about that! Idiot! It’s supposed to be secret.
‘Are you hungry?’ Leah asks. ‘I’m starving. Can we get some chips or something first? I’ll buy yours if you want.’
He stands behind her, a few paces back, while she orders and pays. She hands him the polystyrene pack and he helps himself to vinegar from the bottle on the kiosk counter. They eat them walking along. It means he doesn’t have to speak, although Leah keeps up a steady stream of observations and questions.
‘I’ve seen you out on your bike, and with those boys you hang out with.’
‘Your mum was pretty mad with you when you got back, wasn’t she? She’s nice, Nina. And your little sister is really sweet.’
It’s as if she’s been watching him the same as he watches her. He can’t quite believe it. He tears the empty chip tray into strips as they walk, then crumples the bits in his hand.
The sky is clearing fast now the wind’s got up. Blue sky stretches over the sea and the sun’s almost out. At the end of the town beach they take the concrete path up over the Island. It’s concreted over so people in wheelchairs can get up there to see the view from the top over the bay. It’s not really an island, of course.
‘Let’s sit for a bit,’ Leah says.
Simon perches himself at the other end of the bench. He’s hopelessly out of his depth now. What next? He’d been planning to walk along the cliff as far as the rope and the swimming cove, but he can’t go there with her.
‘Who’s your mum’s boyfriend, then?’
‘She hasn’t got one,’ Simon mumbles.
‘Well, who was that bloke who drove her home last night?’
‘What?’
‘Matt someone?’
Simon blushes. ‘That’s just some teacher from my school. Not her boyfriend.’
‘Oh.’ Leah smiles.
What does that mean?
And what was my art teacher doing driving Mum home, anyway? She went in her own car. Simon doesn’t want to think about any of this.
‘I’m going on. See you around.’ He gets up and starts walking fast up the path to the cliff.
‘Hang on. Wait!’
He doesn’t. His heart’s hammering and he just wants to be by himself. He can hear Leah panting behind. She doesn’t give up easily, does she? She’s wearing the wrong things for a rough walk along the cliff. It’ll be muddy. Wet grass and gorse brush your legs all the way along this first bit. He hears her stumbling along, trying to catch up with him. Eventually he softens, turns, waits.
‘I’m not used to going so fast,’ Leah says, as if she hasn’t cottoned on that he’s deliberately trying to leave her behind. ‘And the path’s really slippy.’
‘You should go back. It gets worse,’ Simon says.
Below them, the sea crashes and foams on the black rocks. Further out, it sparkles in sunshine. The path dips and curves along the steep cliff edge. You can get giddy just looking down. He can’t get the thought of his mother and Mr Davies out of his head. What the hell is she playing at?
‘If you slipped,’ Leah is saying, ‘you could fall right down there on to the rocks. You’d die.’
‘Possibly,’ Simon agrees. ‘But there’s bushes and stuff to break your fall.’
‘Why isn’t there a fence? Signs saying how dangerous it is?’
‘It’s the countryside, isn’t it? Anyway, how come you’ve never been here before? How long’ve you lived here?’
Leah shrugs. ‘Years. Always. We don’t do walks, my family. We don’t do anything for that matter.’
They walk in single file along the narrow path. Simon starts thinking back to last night. The dead magpie. Drinking Johnny’s cider. Nina going on and on at him when he got back so late. He hadn’t realized how late it was because of the moonlight.
‘Last night,’ Simon says out loud, ‘there was this amazing moon. So bright it was like daylight.’
‘I know,’ Leah says. ‘I saw it.’
‘Everything was silver. The grass, the trees, the sea even.’
‘Magic,’ Leah says. ‘So that’s what you were doing last night. Walking.’
She still hasn’t turned back.
‘And other stuff,’ Simon says. ‘My mate’s got an air rifle.’
‘Does he kill things?’
‘Oh yes. Crows, and a magpie.’
‘That’s unlucky,’ Leah says. ‘One for sorrow. What do you kill? With that catapult thing?’
She has been watching.
‘Not much,’ he says. ‘A rabbit once.’
Leah screws up her face, but she doesn’t say anything. Not like Simon expects her to. Like Ellie or Nina, going on about the poor sweet baby bunny. He likes her better for that.
‘It’s hot now,’ Leah says. ‘The path’s steaming! Look!’
The air is heavy and full of the stink of wet vegetation. Slightly rotten, with the strong coconut smell of gorse flowers overlaying it.
Simon turns away as Leah tugs her sweatshirt over her head. Not soon enough, though: he can’t help glimpsing the taut smooth flesh of her stomach as she pulls up the hem of the sweatshirt. He looks down at the black rocks, the waves crashing in. Feels dizzy.
She follows him along the path, up and down, in and out of each dip and rise of the coastline. He’s thirsty, and hot now too. As they scramble up the next hill, he stops to cup his hand in the flow of a tiny spring trickling out of the rock. Leah copies him.
‘Is it OK to drink?’
Simon nods. ‘It’s just out of the hillside. Not as if some sheep’s been peeing in it or anything, which is what happens in a stream.’
Leah leans and stretches herself, hands on her back. ‘Isn’t there a place we can sit? I’m tired.’
‘Not yet.’
He walks the next section of the path more slowly, even though he’s not tired at all. It isn’t that far now till they reach the place where the path opens out into a steeply sloping green field, and then there’s the rope, and a way down. He’s going to do it. Take her there. It’s too late to turn back now.