We’re drinking cider from a big bottle that Banks has. It’s a bit like apple juice, except apple juice doesn’t make the tension melt out of my body like this does. Banks sits there looking so unconcerned I could whack him, but he’s all I have right now, which is a bit pathetic when you think about it. He makes no excuses as we pass the bottle back and forth, but I can tell he wants to say something. It’s all backed up ready on his tongue – the excuses and sorries and I promise I’ll nevers. I talk instead, so I don’t have to listen.
‘I haven’t forgiven you,’ I tell him. ‘I’m here because I don’t want to go home, that’s all.’
He shifts and opens his mouth to talk, but a low rumble of thunder swallows his voice, saving me from having to hear it.
‘There’s going to be a storm,’ I say. ‘I love lightning over the sea.’
Banks huddles up into his coat, swigging from the bottle and coughing on and off through a second roll-up. I imagine his lungs, as black as the clouds that are barging their way right now into the darkness of the beach, covering the low moon. The air is full of damp and freshness, and then the rain starts like a sudden round of applause, smacking off the ground until it’s a mass of grey dots in the glare of yellow neon.
‘God’s doing Pop-Art,’ I smile. ‘When I was a kid, I used to think rain was his paintbrush dripping water.’
Banks swears and flicks the bottle behind him into the corner of the shelter. ‘There is no God,’ he growls. ‘It’s just rain, same as it’s always been. You’re too old to make up silly stuff.’
His scorn burns. I remember the party and all those people – my age but so much older. I hunch into my jacket and say nothing. Banks coughs again, with a horrible, wrenching, body-shaking force, and huddles into his coat with a drawn-out groan. We sit in silence listening to the rain with its long slow sighing, and the thunder growling somewhere off towards Hove.
‘How could anyone believe in God?’ he says at last. ‘With your brother and all? I bet you prayed and asked, didn’t you, for him to get better? I did that for me once, but seems like I’m stronger than God, ’cos here I am.’
‘I don’t know if I believe in God,’ I say. ‘It’s you who talks about Heaven and white stones, not me. Anyway, if some god changed everything we asked for, we’d just be like puppets he was jerking around.’
Banks lets out a loud laugh – the sort you make over dinner when someone says something really funny. ‘Oh hell,’ he says. ‘Don’t talk to me about being jerked around – story of my flaming life.’
‘Well, why do you let yourself?’ I say. ‘Why don’t you get hold of the strings and do something. You can’t want to be here, but here you are.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Banks says, sitting up straight now. ‘Sure – here I am. Must be I want it, right? It’s so much fun I don’ wanna change it. Just like your brother, eh?’
I jerk upright. ‘Oh yeah,’ I say, ‘like you ever knew my brother!’
‘Oh,’ says Banks. ‘But I did.’
His words crash into my mind so hard that for a moment it feels numb. ‘Don’t say that!’ I hiss at him. ‘You never did.’
‘Didn’t I?’ he says. ‘I know everyone round here who likes a drink. Dogs always sniff each other out.’
Even in the dimness he must see my expression, because he sighs and his voice softens. ‘I knew him,’ he says. ‘But I only worked it out the other day, honest. Otherwise I’da said before. Stoner Sam we called him. He was a crazy one.’
It’s like I’m frozen. I can’t believe what he’s saying. Banks knew Sam. Maybe they even sat here on this bench together. Maybe he’s the one who lost the chess set.
‘Did you play chess?’ I blurt out, and to my amazement, Banks smiles.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Yeah we did – how’d you know that? I always beat him, and one day he threw half the pieces into the sea. Didn’t like losing I guess.’
We sit for a long moment in silence. I remember the lonely little knight on the floor of Sam’s room and my brain feels numb with the thought of the two of them trying to play chess – with my chess set.
Banks seems unconcerned, like it means nothing.
‘Did he talk about me, Banks? Ever?’
He looks at me like I’m nuts. ‘How would I know?’ he says. ‘He used to go on sometimes – about his ma and pa and his snotty little sister – but how could that be you, right?’ He grins, trying to turn it into a joke. For once, his eyes are focused, his long lashes blinking like a baby’s in the dusky half-light. They sweep his grimy cheek – lashes wasted on a man. His grubby hand, shaking a bit on his leg, is wrapped in a bandage almost as black as the shadows behind us.
‘It was a long time ago. It’s taken all this time to put you two together. You’re so different, but there can’t be two Stoner Sams, can there? I gave him a stone once – a stone for a stoner. Told him about them, like I told you.’
I stare at him. Not that stupid business again. And he laughs at me for talking like a kid. ‘Where is it then?’ I say. ‘This stone.’
Banks stares at me, rubbing the side of his face and squinting. ‘He chucked it,’ he says at last. ‘Lost it, dumped it, I dunno. He was just ranting on one day. I had other things on my mind.’
We sit the rain out in silence. Banks smokes and coughs and I sit and remember the time when Sam was my brother instead of a disruptive force.
‘He used to like fossils,’ I say. ‘When we were small and Mum and Dad were planning a holiday, he always wanted to go somewhere where there used to be dinosaurs.’
‘Now he’s a fossil himself,’ Banks says. ‘Everything set in stone.’
We sit back in the falling dark and I remember how carefully Sam used to wrap the fossils to take home, and all the time he spent showing me pictures of what they used to be.
Banks is staring at me, then out in the darkness, someone screams. I get up with my heart racing, but there’s no follow up cry. I feel stupid now. ‘I wish I had it,’ I say. ‘That stone.’
Banks laughs. ‘Why?’ he says. ‘It was just two pissed blokes clutching at straws. Anyway, I thought you hated him. If you want it so much go and find it. It’s out there somewhere, on the beach. It would be a bloody miracle – then I’d believe in God for sure.’
I look at him, but he’s laughing silently, head tilted up to the grotty ceiling of the alcove, his neck all dark with dirt.
‘There aren’t any miracles,’ I say. ‘And don’t talk to me like I’m some kid.’
Banks opens his mouth to speak but then stops and just looks at me – up and down, slowly. He doesn’t say a thing, but he stops smiling.
The rain quietens and he walks me back along the beach, stumbling along right by the water, even though it’s freezing cold and the sea is throwing itself up onto the stones. He picks things up and throws them as hard as he can, out into the darkness where we can’t even hear them fall. The dusty pebbles shine when the water washes over them. Like Banks after his bath, all clean and shiny new.
He’s fallen behind me now, lost in the gloom until I hear him shout. Then he comes up, still talking though the wind grabs each word, balls it in a fist and hurls it back into the sea.
‘Whaat?’ I bellow back. ‘I can’t hear you!’
He crunches up the incline and falls into step beside me, cutting off the cold with his big black coat. ‘I said I found one,’ he bellows, even though I can now hear perfectly well. ‘A special one.’
I squint in the gloom, searching his face to see if he’s still laughing at me, but his eyes are on mine; serious.
‘What put it there then?’ I ask him. ‘You don’t believe in God, so what?’
He doesn’t answer, just walks along, arms out sideways like he’s balancing on a beam.
‘That,’ Banks says, ‘out there.’
I follow the direction of his pointing finger. It’s turning in a big circle showing me the angry sea and the clouds, and the gulls hidden away somewhere but still screaming into the dark sky.
He turns back and opens his hand so I can see what he found. At first it’s just another stone, but then I see. Where the water has touched it, it gleams like marble and there’s a hole right through it that you could thread a chain through. I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.
‘What was your question then?’ I ask him, and he goes silent. His lifted coat encloses us in a cathedral quiet.
‘That would be telling,’ he says.