I thought Aidan’s mum’s visit might spark Allie’s conscience, might at least shame her into being more discreet. Not a chance. Two days later it was Lola Nan’s birthday weekend. Lola Nan’s birthday at the beach was a family tradition. So naturally, bloody Aidan had to come too.
It was a stupid tradition to start with, and in the last few years it had become even stupider, even before Allie brought along her imaginary boyfriend. Lola Nan came from a generation that thought it was the best fun imaginable to sit on a bleak beach with sand whisking into your eyes, gulls mugging you for food and the wind-chill factor giving you the skin of a lizard. Dad prodded at the disposable barbecue, as if poking the sausages with a stick would make them cook faster and taste edible. His eyes kept drifting to the cool box, and eventually so did his hand. Needless to say, the sausages got burnt.
Mum was buttering rolls. Shielding her eyes against nonexistent sunlight so she wouldn’t quite have to look at me, she called brightly, ‘Nick, would you like to help Dad?’
I pretended I didn’t hear her. So did Dad. He went on stabbing sausages, and I turned back to Lola Nan. The broad beach was almost deserted but I could get away with selective deafness because Lola Nan and I were higher up a dune, with forest at our back and the whole silky curve of the sea to admire in silence. Mum had wanted her closer to the barbecue, on the flat sand, but I’d insisted they put her here. Lola Nan and I had a nice view. It was only slightly marred by the figures of Mum and Dad and the drifting barbecue smoke.
I was sprawled next to Lola Nan’s folding chair. It was one of those canvas jobs with little pockets in the side for your drink. I had a beer I’d filched from the cool box (not that Dad could have objected to me having alcohol, morally speaking, but he was kind of possessive with it). Lola Nan had orange juice, diluted, in a non-spill toddler cup.
I hated them for it.
She didn’t seem to mind, though. In her floral dress and floppy white hat she looked vaguely happy, murmuring incoherently as she watched the waves tumble in, the gangster gulls squabble and dive. I suppose she was enjoying herself. Her right hand flapped above the chair’s canvas arm, patting her invisible pocket of air. After a while her head tipped back, her mouth fell open and she started to snore.
I was stuffing a folded towel behind her head, to stop it falling off its fragile wrinkled neck, when Allie ran up our dune and waved a sausage on a roll at me. As Lola Nan’s head fell the other way, almost bouncing off her saggy chest, I gave up and took the roll.
Allie grinned. ‘I’m freezing. Bloody freezing. Why does Mum insist on doing this?’
As I sat in the sand, she flopped down beside me and wriggled under my arm. I pulled another towel round us both and ripped another bite of the roll. This was great. Just me and Allie and a comatose Lola Nan. No Mum, no Dad and no frigging Aidan.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘And she’ll insist on Lola Nan paddling. It’ll take all day to get her down there.’
‘I’m going to tactfully wander off. No way am I putting my feet in that sea. How does Mum think we all enjoy this?’
‘Well, Lola Nan does,’ I admitted.
‘Suppose.’ Allie made a face. ‘And allegedly it’s very bonding. Family-wise.’
‘Hah,’ I said darkly, watching Dad crack open another bottle.
She spluttered a giggle, stuffed the last bit of roll and sausage into her mouth and dusted sand and crumbs off her hands. ‘We’re off. Come on, then. See you, Nick. Enjoy your paddle!’
We’re off. We’re off. See you, Nick. Come on then.
Heidcase. Deluded wee cow. Abandoned for a phantom, I threw the rest of my roll towards the sea; a gull caught it in mid-air and was instantly mobbed by three more. Mum had to beat off a couple herself as she wobbled up the beach towards us in sequinned flip-flops.
‘Happy birthday, Lola Nan!’ On her face was a professional warm smile; in her hands she bore a supermarket birthday cake. A cartoon ballerina in lilac icing. The birthday number had been picked off; you could see the pink-stained shape of 5th in between Happy and Birthday.
Well. It was a nice thought. Lola Nan wouldn’t notice.
She jerked awake, mumbling.
‘Happy Birthday!’ said Mum again, trying to maintain her cheery smile.
‘Where’s the boy?’ Lola Nan gripped the canvas chair arms. ‘WHERE’S THE BOY?’
Oh, hell’s teeth. ‘I’m here, Lola Nan.’ I scrambled to my feet and took the cake off Mum. ‘Here. Happy Birthday.’
‘Hmph.’ Like a bumptious toddler she scowled at me, then her face broke open in a big smile. ‘Can I have some cake?’
‘Course you can. It’s your birthday,’ I said. Mum had forgotten the knife, of course. I dug my fingers into the cake and quarried out a big piece. Lola Nan grabbed it, delighted.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mum’s face darken, but she bit her lip and made herself smile.
‘You’re a good boy,’ said Lola Nan through a mouthful of sponge and lilac icing.
Mum’s face darkened even more.
‘You care about me, don’t you?’ mumbled Lola Nan. ‘Not like her. She can’t even –’
‘Wonder where Allie is?’ I yelled brightly. ‘She’d like some CAKE too!’
Mum’s lower eyelids glittered, a row of tears along each. Shit. ‘Allie!’ I shouted in desperation.
‘Where’s the BOY?’ shouted Lola Nan.
‘Here!’ I turned back to her, and she gripped my hands like she was trying to pull them off at the wrists.
‘Sometimes I just can’t …’ began Mum tearfully.
‘ALLIE!’ I yelled.
‘Coming! Hang on!’ She was sprinting along the edge of the water, turning towards the dry sand. Then, just as I thought she was coming to my rescue, she stopped, spun on her heel, hooted with laughter. Crouching, she picked up a handful of sand and flung it.
‘Aidan! Quit it!’
Mum froze. I froze. Dad dropped the barbecue fork in the sand, and Lola Nan just smiled happily at nothing.
‘AiiiDAAAAAN!’ shrieked Allie.
‘Cake,’ said Mum brightly, blinking.
That was the moment I noticed two girls walking along the edge of the sea, and an ugly lurcher-like dog plunging in and out of the waves. I knew that dog, I’d seen it before. Gina’s dog. Which would explain why Gina, and the girl with her, had come to a stunned halt and were staring at Allie. The other girl was Orla. She stood there, rigid, as Allie threw sand at her invisible murdered brother, yelling his name and giggling.
After a few seconds Gina grabbed Orla’s arm and pulled her back the way they’d come, but as Orla turned, her eyes sought out the rest of us. It was me she looked at. I couldn’t see her all that clearly but I felt her laser stare in my spine and the nape of my neck. Swallowing, I took a step towards her. With a dismissive toss of her head she walked away, and I watched her go as I listened to my sister shriek with laughter at a dead boy who wasn’t there to laugh back.
Aidan was dead and gone, but Allie would never let him go and there was nothing I could do to make her. I felt sick with guilt and uselessness and insomnia, because I hardly slept for two nights after the family outing. On the Monday I went hunting for Orla to apologise for my sister’s behaviour at the beach. At least, that’s the reason I gave myself. That was my excuse.
Poor Aidan. We’re all using him still.
Orla wasn’t hanging around the corridors with her posse; she wasn’t outside in the school grounds; eventually I found her just the other side of the wire fence, where we weren’t supposed to go (Health and Safety). She was sitting against a half-dead tree on the sloping bank of the burn (which was indeed unhealthy and not very safe). The same burn trickled soddenly through Allie’s fields, and it didn’t get any more appealing by the time it passed the school. Twenty metres on it was swallowed in a concrete tunnel that was like a whalemouth, jammed with a grille of rusty iron baleen. Plastic bags and fast-food boxes had caught in the hatch, tattered by the sluggish current, laced with dirty foam.
Orla knew I was coming but she didn’t look up. Without the posse she didn’t seem quite so intimidating, so I clambered down the bank, close enough to read the book’s cover. Something by Albert Camus.
‘Has that got pictures?’ I said.
Lame, and she ignored me as I deserved.
‘I saw your mum last week. She came round to ours.’
Orla licked a black-polished fingertip and delicately turned a page.
‘I’ve tried to talk to Allie,’ I said.
Orla snapped her book shut, keeping her place with a finger. ‘What d’you want, Mister Ambassador? A box of Ferrero Rocher?’
I looked at the book with her finger inside it. I could hardly say, Well, no, but I was hoping for some sex.
‘Eff off, Nick,’ she said, as if reading my mind. Except she didn’t say ‘Eff’ either.
I effed off, because I couldn’t think what else to do. I hadn’t even turned away before she’d opened her book again and fixed her attention somewhere in the middle of the pages, where the spine was. I was watching her that closely and I knew fine she wasn’t reading. There was nothing for me to do, though. I climbed back up the bank and it felt like the final ascent of K2.
At the summit waited a smug-looking sherpa.
‘You’re going about this all wrong,’ said Shuggie, falling into step beside me.
I took a breath to tell him to do what Orla told me, but instead I managed to splutter, ‘What?’
‘I said you’re …’
‘Yeah, shut up. I mean, what would you know about it?’
‘Well,’ said Shuggie, ‘she’s not stupid, that Orla.’
I wondered how hard I could hit him without actually hurting him too much. I wondered if I could get him to take his glasses off first. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
Shuggie sighed as though he was at the limit of his tolerance. ‘Women want you to be honest, don’t they? Orla thinks you’re taking the mickey.’
Orla having bagged the only decent quiet and private spot within a mile of the school, I was forced to sit down on the broken tarmac against the wire fence. I was also forced to endure Shuggie, because he sat right down beside me.
‘Honesty,’ he said. ‘That’s what women like. Honesty.’
‘And you’re the expert.’
‘More than you, obviously.’ He took off his glasses and began to polish them on the hem of his shirt. That was a temptation. I could swing my arm back now and catch him in his bare face, but I knew I never would. Not Shuggie. I knew I’d never bring myself to hit Shuggie. I was sort of responsible for him; I’d made myself responsible for him quite by accident, and now, like he relished telling me, I was stuck with him. Anyway, I was his only friend, in some loose sense of the word. And vice versa, I suppose.
I watched him rub his glasses methodically, one lens at a time, breathing on them in a finicky, delicate way that should have bugged the hell out of me, but was actually strangely calming. I liked the way he was taking such a ridiculous amount of care and time when the supermarket shirt fabric must have been scratching the lens surface anyway. I liked it that Shuggie was still enough like the rest of us to lose his special lens cleaning cloth and have to use his shirt. Glancing at his intent face, naked and funny and vulnerable without its highbrow horn-rims, I caught myself smiling, and had to force a frown.
I don’t know why I put up with him. He turned up like some guru whenever I didn’t want his advice. If I did want something from him, such as Allie’s whereabouts, he was the most elusive geek on the planet. Any other time I could be swaggering down the corridor, giving the likes of Sunil the evil eye so that nobody would ever in the history of the world think they could get away with having another go at me, and I’d feel this presence and there would be Shuggie, hugging some manual on rocket science or string theory or God knew what. And that would be him attached to my hip for the rest of the day. It was doing nothing for my image. He was a small planet sucked into my irresistible orbit. So how come it didn’t work this way with Orla Mahon?
I wished I could ask Lola Nan. I wished I’d remembered to ask her this kind of thing earlier, when she was still capable of answering.
‘And how is your nan?’ asked Shuggie now. ‘I suppose she could be worse.’
That was another annoying thing. The little geek was telepathic, but I was in no mood for one of Shuggie’s philosophical lectures. ‘Piss off, Shugs,’ I snapped. ‘What d’you know?’
‘Well, what does she know? Objectively speaking, she doesn’t know anything’s wrong, does she? Really, she could be worse. Look at my dad.’
I was about to open my mouth and say something vicious but I stopped myself in the nick of time. I’d kind of gone off gratuitous cruelty when I heard the first sick Aidan joke within two weeks of his death.
Shuggie told me once he didn’t grieve for his dad, not after he was dead, because he was glad for him and he wished he’d put a pillow over his face in the first place, like his dad asked him to (when Shugs was all of eleven). Maybe it’ll be like that for me. Maybe I’ll be happy for Lola Nan. Maybe I should do the pillow thing for her, not that she’d ever asked …
‘Why don’t you apologise to her?’ said Shuggie.
What? To Lola Nan? In advance? The world swung on its axis. I opened my mouth, then I shut it again. Being with Shuggie was like virtual reality or something.
‘Who?’
‘Orla,’ he sighed, with a martyred air of patience.
‘Why would I apologise to her? I haven’t done anything!’
‘Do you want to shag her or not?’
That did it. I swung round and grabbed his shoulders. I could feel my fingers sinking into his scrawny flesh and I knew I must be hurting him, but I couldn’t think of anything to say to that reproachful, glassy gaze.
‘Look, Nick, you’re not gay or something, are you? Because I don’t fancy you.’
He blinked up at me nervously, while my grip and my jaw went slack even as I wondered how to disembowel him without attracting attention. I suppose nervous blinking was Shuggie’s incredibly clever defence mechanism. I was never going to beat him to death. So I let go of him and put my face in my hands to hide my laughter.
‘Shugs, I swear –’
‘Frequently. Look, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done or haven’t done. Orla’s hard as nine-inch nails. You think anybody ever told her they’re sorry about … um … you know? Nobody would dare bring up … you know. Nobody would mention it. She needs somebody to say sorry. She needs to talk about it. And if it’s you, well … she’ll be so shocked and grateful, she’ll forget to think you’re a dick.’
I clenched my loose jaw in case I started dribbling. What he said made a certain insane sense. Or maybe that was me clutching at straws. ‘Is the atmosphere thin?’
‘Where?’
‘Up there on Planet Shuggie.’
He sighed and hitched his bag on to his shoulder. ‘No one can help a man who doesn’t want to be helped.’
‘You’re mad,’ I said.
‘Whatever you say.’
‘Mad,’ I said again.
‘I have Physics now.’ Dignified, he marched away.
‘Heidcase!’ I shouted after him. ‘Feckin’ heidcase! Think I’m stupit enough to take advice like that?’