There were so many memories, but some were more precious than others. Some Jen relived over and over, taking them out like a polished stone to turn in the light. Every time she discovered something new.
When she was twelve, her mum let her go camping with Danny. They set off on their bikes after school on a Friday. It was May and the evenings were getting longer. Danny had the tent strapped to the back of his bike and she had the frying pan, some tins of beans and sausages, eggs, bread and butter. They both had a sleeping bag and a bottle of water.
They cycled out of the town along Queen Adelaide Way. After a couple of miles they met the Great River Ouse which lay still beside the road, its water dark, broken by squabbling ducks and afternoon sunlight. Jen often cycled to Rebecca’s house or across the town to school, but she’d not been this far before. After Prickwillow the lane was long and straight. A ditch ran alongside the road, its water reflecting the bright sky in a line of silver. Every now and then there would be a row of trees, tall and straight, their trunks slicing the light. Danny said they were poplars. Jen’s legs ached.
“We’ll stop and rest for a bit,” said Danny. “We must be about halfway.”
They sat at the side of the road and drank some water next to a sign for pick-your-own strawberries.
“I love all the straight lines,” said Jen.
Danny looked left and then right. The land stretched away, flat in every direction. “Sometimes I wish we lived somewhere else,” he said. “Somewhere with mountains or cliffs.”
Jen screwed the top back on her water bottle. She lay on her back and stared up at the sky. She could see tiny bubbles in the air, but she knew they were actually in her eyes.
When her legs were rested, they got on their way again. By the time they reached Isleham, she was starving.
They found a spot and put up the tent. They often had the tent up in the garden, so they knew exactly what to do. But when Jen crawled inside, she knew this was different. At home there was the sound of traffic on the road, people talking in their back gardens or in their kitchens with the windows open, and it didn’t seem much removed from the house.
There were other people here on the campsite, but there was no traffic. The air seemed heavier. When she breathed in, she thought of it as clear and green. She crawled forward on her belly so her head was sticking out of the entrance. Danny had gone to collect firewood.
Jen flipped over onto her back so she could look up at the sky. In her peripheral vision she could see trees lining the rim of this upturned bowl of blue. Some crows were arguing nearby, and someone was strumming a guitar. She could feel warmth in her leg muscles. They would ache in the morning.
Danny returned with an armful of wood, and together they built a wigwam shape which they stuffed full of newspaper Danny had brought with him. But when they tried to light it, the wind blew out the match. After a few attempts, they managed to get a flame going in a corner of the paper. It flared orange, then green, then died to a line of black, having only burned a bite out of the paper. Danny sighed.
“Have you got a lighter?” asked Jen.
He shook his head and started rearranging the screwed-up balls of paper. Jen crouched next to him, peering in between the pieces of wood.
“Hiya.”
They both looked round. A person with long hair and a guitar slung over their back was smiling at them. Jen couldn’t tell if they were a boy or a girl.
“You OK?”
“Yes,” said Danny. “Well, no. We can’t get this fire going.”
“Come and share ours.”
“Well…”
“We were going to cook on it,” said Jen. “We have sausages.”
“Bring them. We’ve got a barbecue going. I’m Stan, by the way.”
Danny looked at Jen. She knew he was thinking that she was only twelve and that their mum trusted him to look after her.
“We’ve got beer,” said Stan, “and music.” He patted the side of his guitar.
“Erm… OK,” said Danny. “For a bit.”
An alley of trees led from where Danny and Jen had erected their tent and opened out at the other end into a field. Jen looked at Stan as they walked. She wasn’t sure he actually was a him. He was wearing eye makeup. He had no facial hair and his voice was very light.
His friends had three tents and a camper van in a circle. The fire in the middle was bright, and Jen realised the light was beginning to fade from the sky. There were nine people sitting on chairs and blankets around the fire, and to the right a barbecue was smoking meaty fumes into the evening air.
“Hey, shove up and make room for these guys,” said Stan.
Someone took their sausages and put them on the barbecue, handed them burgers dripping with ketchup, butter melting out of the buns. Someone else handed them both a bottle of beer, and Stan started playing his guitar. A few of them sang along softly.
Jen and Danny sat on a blanket and Jen leaned against her brother. The light was fading fast now and the fire crackled. Bits of papery ash floated up on hot currents of air, and the heat made Jen’s face glow. These people were all older, even than Danny, grown-ups just about.
She took a sip of the beer. It tasted disgusting, but she was careful not to react. She swallowed and quickly took a bite of her burger to get the taste out of her mouth. Stan was playing a song she knew by Green Day and she found herself humming along under her breath. I hope you had the time of your life.
Later, when the sausages had been cooked and shared around, when she’d managed to swallow the last dregs of bitterness from the beer bottle, when the stars began to appear in the sky and Danny had disappeared behind the hedge for a wee, someone took out tobacco and rizlas and something else in a small plastic bag. They rolled a long cigarette, lit it, took a couple of drags, then passed it around the circle.
Jen looked into the darkness behind the tents, but there was no sign of Danny. The person next to her had the cigarette now. She held on to the empty beer bottle, breathed in smoke from the fire, breathed out again. Then the cigarette was in her hand, and she lifted it to her lips and sucked.
She’d never tried smoking… anything. The hot smoke hit the back of her throat and she coughed.
“Breathe it in slow,” said the guy who’d handed it to her. “Into your lungs.”
She tried again, felt the smoke trickle down the back of her throat and her chest seemed to expand, her eyes grow larger.
When Danny came back a few minutes later, the joint had moved on. Another was being made by the person sitting next to them, and Danny frowned.
“I think we should probably get back to our tent,” he said.
“Do we have to?” Jen watched as leaves were sprinkled along the line of tobacco, then then rolled between expert fingers.
“Yes,” said Danny. “Come on.”
Stan waved across the circle before returning to his strumming. They walked along the alley of trees, and the sounds of the party moved into the distance. The hedge blocked out the firelight and they were in darkness. There was a crescent moon and the stars were bright.
“This isn’t like the campsite we went to last year,” Jen said.
“No,” said Danny.
They’d rented a static near the beach on a site where the caravans were in straight rows into the distance. In the centre of the site were a shop, a café and a nightclub. Dad had put the TV on as soon as they arrived and Mum tutted about the people in the neighbouring caravans. Danny and Jen had escaped to the beach as much as possible, sometimes climbing around the headland at low tide to the next beach that the tourists didn’t quite reach.
“Don’t tell Mum you had beer.”
“OK,” said Jen. Her limbs felt loose and heavy and when she turned her head quickly the stars left streaks across her vision. “I like it here,” she said. “It’s quiet. Can we stay up all night and watch the stars?”
Danny laughed. “You’ll be asleep in five minutes.”
They snuggled into their sleeping bags but left the tent open so they could lie on their backs looking at the sky.
Danny knew her well; she was a sleeper, always dropping off the moment her head hit the pillow, and tonight was no different. But later she woke up. Danny was on his side, breathing softly through his nose. The party in the next field had fallen silent. Clouds covered the sky so the moon and stars had disappeared. The world was heavy and dark.
Jen wriggled out of her sleeping bag. She needed to wee, but there was no way she was walking to the toilet block on her own. She went to the back of the tent and crouched on the grass. She could barely make out where the canvas was, it was so dark. She didn’t remember ever being in such silence.
An owl called out and made her jump, and she realised she wasn’t alone. There was someone crouching beside her. She looked. The person was wearing dark clothes, but Jen could just make out her face. It was her cousin.
She stretched out her arm towards Jen and took her hand. The owl called again, and then flew out from the tree behind them, a dark shadow against the black of the sky. Jen could hear Danny’s breathing in the tent, a rasping sound that was almost a snore.
Her legs began to ache from crouching. The cousin stood, still holding Jen’s hand, pulling her up to standing next to her. Jen felt her nightshirt fall back against her skin, and the touch of the night breeze on the inside of her thighs.
The cousin began to walk. She moved very slowly, and Jen, in her bare feet, shuffled along beside her. They circled the tent, once, twice, three times. Jen remembered a word she’d read in a fairy-tale – widdershins – which meant anticlockwise. In stories, if things went widdershins, then magic might happen. It might or might not be good.
The third time they reached the mouth of the tent, the cousin vanished. One minute she was holding Jen’s hand, the next she was simply not there.
“Jen?” Danny’s voice in the dark was scratchy with sleep.
“I just went for a wee,” said Jen.
She snuggled back into her sleeping bag and lay down. She listened for the owl. It called once, and then she was asleep.
After a morning reading Baudelaire in the library, Jen was walking across the campus past the lake when her phone buzzed. It was Finn.
Would you like to go to Whitby?
When? She typed.
Now?
He told her he was at the station and there was a bus in twenty minutes if she could get there in time.
I’ll do my best, she texted.
There wasn’t time to go to her room to drop off her books. She raced up the road and reached the stop just as the bus to the town centre was pulling in. Twelve minutes later she jumped off at the station. Finn was leaning against a pillar. He saw her and waved.
“I already bought the tickets,” he said.
The bus to the coast was half full of passengers. Finn and Jen made their way to the back. Jen could feel sweat on her top lip and between her breasts. It was a warm day and the dash across town had been unexpected.
“What if I hadn’t made it?” she said.
Finn shrugged. “We could have caught the next one. Though we might not have got there until the evening.”
“Is there a bus back?”
“I hope so.”
“Bloody hell! What if there isn’t?”
“Sleep on the beach?”
Jen laughed. She suddenly felt much lighter than she had for ages. The nausea which was almost constant had vanished. Finn offered her a mint and she popped it in her mouth as the bus started to pull away.
It was a long bus ride, calling at numerous villages along the way, and then across the moors where the heather was blazing purple in the sunshine.
“I’ve not been to Whitby before,” she said.
“It’s where Lucy Harker met Dracula,” said Finn.
“I’ve not read Dracula.”
“Oh, lucky you! You’ve got a treat in store.”
The bus crested a hill and there was the Abbey standing on a clifftop. A line of fuzzy blue marked the horizon, darker than the sky.
“The sea,” said Finn.
It was mid-afternoon when they got off the bus. They visited the museum, then walked over the bridge to the old part of town and climbed up to the Abbey. The steps started at the end of a row of shops, but quickly lifted them above the buildings. Jen looked across the rooftops, red, orange and black, jostling together. Higher up, they reached a churchyard with graves going back hundreds of years. They walked amongst them, reading the inscriptions.
On the seaward side, the path was separated from the drop by a fence and a few yards of grass. Finn told Jen to sit on a bench.
“Pretend you’re a Victorian young lady,” he said, “and something has called you out into the night.”
Jen looked at the sea. Sunlight was sparkling on it, so it looked as though someone had scattered it with newly minted coins. There were boats far out on the water. The sun was warm on the bare skin of her arms.
Finn approached the bench and sat down beside her.
“Hello Lucy,” he said in a fake Eastern European accent. “Your neck looks beautiful in the moonlight.”
Jen leaned her head slightly to one side, exposing it.
Finn leaned in and she felt warmth and wetness where his lips met her skin, the slightest graze of his teeth.
She closed her eyes for a moment. She could hear the shouts of children climbing the steps, the calls of seagulls circling above.
Then she turned her head to meet Finn’s.
While they were kissing, she thought – I wonder if he planned this. It’s pretty cool for a first kiss.
And – I shouldn’t be doing this.
And also – God, this is so nice; I could stay here kissing in the sunshine for ever.
After a while, Finn drew away and looked into her face. He tucked a stray bit of hair behind her ear. He said, “Do you want to see the Abbey?”
At the top of the cliff there was nothing to stop the wind. Jen and Finn lay on the grass next to each other in the middle of the ruined Abbey. When it was whole, this would have been the aisle up the middle where the monks walked. Jen imagined them gliding slowly across the grass, straight over her and Finn where they lay. She looked up and all she could see was sky. All she could hear was the wind and the crashing beat of the waves below, the seagulls. There was a sweet smell – grass maybe, or some other plant. For a moment she missed Danny so much that her lungs hurt. She squeezed Finn’s hand hard.
They walked back into town after that. When the shops started to close for the day, they bought chips and ate them sitting on a wall near the harbour.
“We could get a B&B,” said Finn.
He’d kissed her again at the Abbey when they’d walked out beyond the fishpond, and they’d been holding hands all around the town.
“I think I should get back,” she said. “I’ve got to get this essay finished.”
“We could get the first bus in the morning.”
She smiled. “It would be lovely. But not this time.”
On the bus, Finn put his arm around her and she rested her head on his shoulder. She thought about the evening she’d given up, where they booked into a B&B together, and found themselves suddenly standing side by side in room where a double bed filled up most of the space and all of their thoughts. Where chintz curtains framed a view of the Abbey and the church, where a kettle stood on the bedside table with two cups, teabags, tiny cartons of longlife milk and gingernuts in individually wrapped packets of three. She thought about lying in bed at dawn and listening to the screams of seagulls welcoming the light, of watching Finn’s naked back as he slept, his shoulders rising and falling with his breath.
“You OK?” asked Finn.
“Just feeling a bit travel sick.”
“Do you want to move to another seat?”
“No, I’ll be OK.”
When they reached York, Jen rushed to the toilets and threw up. That’ll teach me. She washed her face in cold water and popped a mint in her mouth. Took five deep breaths.
Walking back out of town to the campus, she made sure there was space between them. When Finn moved his hand as though to take hers, she adjusted her bag on her shoulder and pretended she hadn’t noticed. Near the library she said goodbye, kissed him on the cheek and hurried away without looking back. She knew he was wondering what he’d done wrong. She wished she could tell him, nothing. She wished right now they could be lying on that double bed, on top of the floral quilt, shyly tugging at each other’s clothes.
She flung her bag in the corner of her room, lay on her bed, and cried.