Dad starts it off with me and Shane.
I know he feels sorry for him, after the accident. Everyone in Calcot knows about it. Everyone knows Shane’s Dad, Derrick, can’t have looked. Was probably drunk. Everyone knows about the lorry that pushed them onto the verge of the Darvington Road, crushing the side where Shane sat. He was unconscious for days. Every day Mum would say, ‘Poor Sheila. Poor Sheila.’ And Dad would say, ‘It could happen to anyone.’
It didn’t stop Shane’s dad driving, but he left soon after that. Now Shane and his mum never go anywhere. Poor buggers.
‘Why don’t you go and see that boy down the road, Joanna?’ Dad asks. He knows Shane’s older than me, bigger than me, but that doesn’t seem to bother him. ‘Why don’t you go and cheer him up a bit? He’s been through a lot.’
‘He’s bloody backward, that Shane Pearce, Dan,’ says Mum. ‘Don’t go on at her.’
‘He’s not backward,’ says Dad. ‘I know he’s not.’
Then there’s an argument about what backward means, with Mum saying you can’t trust Shane, everyone knows what he gets up to. Nicking stuff from Old Buggery’s shop, hanging about late at night down the pools, scaring other kids. ‘Someone saw him with a flick knife,’ says Mum.
‘I’ve never seen the boy leave the house,’ says Dad.
All summer Dad encourages Shane to come over. Shane doesn’t actually come in the door. He always stays outside. Dad pays him to help clean our car or paint the gate or clip the hedge. They work in silence, and from the living room window I watch Shane’s arms move as he throws buckets of water over the Cortina. Every week his skin’s browner.
Shane doesn’t talk to me. If I walk out there, he looks at the ground. His black curly hair hangs over his face. His fat lower lip moves as if he’s chewing the cud.
On a wet Saturday morning in mid-July, Dad announces he’s going to Heaton’s Scrap. Mum says, ‘Are you taking Shane too?’
‘Why not?’ asks Dad.
Shane sits himself in the car before me and Dad have even got our shoes on. ‘I’ll stay here,’ says Mum. ‘But you go.’ She’s
probably itching to get to Old Buggery’s place. As if I don’t know that they have a thing. She’s always popping up his shop
for a sliced white, full make-up and earrings. She’s gone hours. And Dad knows about it. ‘Your mother’s a trollop, Joanna,’
he said to me one day when we were sitting on the front step in the sun. He likes to have his tea on the front step if the
sun’s out. He always takes his shirt off, too, and fingers his hairy nipples. ‘Your mother’s a trollop.’ Slurp of tea. Finger
of nipple. ‘Don’t you be like that, will you?’
Heaton’s Scrap is full of puddles with bits of car and gate and fireplace sticking out of them. The scrap’s everywhere. Skeletons of machines and odd wheels and bike handlebars and bits of engine lie about. And there are loads of men, calling to each other. ‘Nice bit of stuff here’; ‘How much for an exchange?’; ‘Look at the rust on that. Completely buggered.’ Stuff like that.
‘Don’t touch anything,’ says Dad. ‘Hold her hand, Shane. Make sure she doesn’t hurt herself.’
‘Dad!’ I protest. But Shane gets to my fingers before I can put them in my pocket. And Dad just laughs.
Shane’s hand is big and heavy, and I keep running my finger over a wart on his thumb. I want to pick it but I don’t. I just rub the edge of my nail over it, scratching at the ridged skin.
We walk through puddles and round bits of machinery. Shane’s silent. He holds my hand tight. He’s got holes in his grey plimsolls. His feet must be getting wet but he doesn’t say anything about it.
‘Look, Shane.’ Dad points to the remains of a motorbike on the other side of a puddle. ‘That’s a Norton frame.’ He jumps over the water. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’
Shane nods.
‘Want to touch it?’ Dad runs his hand over the rusted metal.
Shane looks at me, then he steps into the puddle and reaches out to pat the frame. He keeps one hand holding tightly on to mine, so I have to lean over the puddle with him. My feet teeter on the edge of the muddy water. My fingers are crushed in his grip.
Dad smiles. ‘You’ll have to let go of her eventually,’ he says.
August is so hot that the underneath bit of my hair keeps sticking to my neck. I lift it up and fan it around, trying to get air on my skin. Mum says I should put it up, but I’ve always hated ponytails – who wants to look like a horse? And besides, elastic bands give me a headache. I like to feel my hair there, around my face. Except today it’s like an itchy blanket, it’s so hot.
We’ve brought Shane to Shotton Hill for a picnic. Mum has a big tin with a whole chicken inside. Grease seeps through its kitchen-towel wrapping. Chocolate slides off the Penguin biscuits.
The heat seems to slow everything down. Usually it’s green everywhere you look up here. But today the grass is yellow and trodden-on. Even the leaves on the trees look tired. There’s just this hot wind, blowing dust up from the patches of dirt where the grass has given up.
Shane walks behind Dad. He’s wearing cut-off denim shorts and new black slip-on plimsolls, like the ones I’ve got for PE.
We sit beneath a tree and eat the chicken. The knobbly dirt sticks into our bums. Mum passes round warm orange squash in plastic cups. Shane watches me as I lick chicken grease off my fingers.
‘Look at that. It must be a bird of prey,’ Dad points into the sky.
Every other bird is a bird of prey, according to Dad.
‘What do you think, Shane?’
Shane doesn’t reply. His legs are long and tanned, covered in shiny black hairs right down to his ankles.
‘Let’s play a game,’ says Dad.
‘It’s too hot for games, Dan,’ says Mum, lying back so her head’s in the darkest bit of shade. ‘My head’s thumping.’
Dad looks at us. ‘You’re not too hot for a game, are you?’
‘What are we playing?’ I ask.
He thinks. ‘I’ll tell you what. We’ll play find the clue.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You go and find something unusual in the woods, an unusual object. And then you bring it out to me.’
‘What kind of unusual object?’
Mum smirks. ‘I’ve never heard of this game, Dan.’
‘That’s because it’s a new game. You bring me anything that you wouldn’t expect to find in the woods. I decide whose is the most unusual, and the winner gets… a Penguin biscuit.’
‘They’ll be melted by then,’ I say. But I get up anyway. The sun bears down on my shoulders. I’m wearing a strapless dress with an elasticated top, red with white stripes running from my armpits to my knees. The elastic sticks to my ribs. I like the tightness, the feeling of it holding me in.
‘Go on then,’ Dad lies back in the grass. ‘Shane’s already got a head start.’
I look over towards the woods. Shane’s nowhere to be seen.
It’s a bit cooler in the trees. The sunlight comes down in patches. The leaves make an occasional swish in the occasional breeze. I run until I find a piece of dead trunk, crouch behind it and look around on the ground.
What can I find that’s unusual? Everything in the wood is exactly as usual. Trees. Dirt. Twigs. Nothing else. Except the heat.
I sit and wait for Shane. I decide I’ll let him win the game.
A line of ants marches across the wood in front of my nose. A spider runs over my sandal, but I don’t cry out. Everything smells fresh and warm. My thighs begin to ache from crouching, so I kneel down. Twigs dig into my knees, and I know they’ll leave a mark, like the sheet does when you’ve been so deep asleep that you’re all twisted round in the bed.
Where is he?
I clutch the trunk with one hand and peer round. Plenty of leaves and twigs and ants. But no Shane.
Then there’s a shuffling sound. A twig snaps and the shuffling stops. Then it starts again. I see him in the distance, walking carefully through the trees. He looks like a ballet dancer. Picking his feet up and putting them down, holding his arms perfectly still, his head balanced on his shoulders like a rock.
I duck down behind the trunk. I ball my fingers into fists. I tuck my chin into my chest and try to breathe very slowly through my nose, imagining the hairs in there moving with the air. I close my eyes. Everything has to be as small and tight as possible.
It all goes quiet.
I stay still for the longest time. Breathing in, breathing out.
Eventually I open one eye and peep round the trunk.
A hairy tanned knee is right there, almost touching my nose. I let out an awful squeal, like a little pig. I have to put a hand over my mouth to stop it.
‘I can see you,’ says Shane.
I try to grip the trunk so I can pull myself up, but a piece of bark comes off in my hand and I fall backwards.
Shane smiles.
‘Did you find anything?’ I ask from the ground.
He nods.
I stand up, brush myself off. ‘What is it?’ I step out from behind the trunk. My nose is parallel with his nipples. The sun lies in stripes across his bare chest. His hands are behind his back. He steps closer to me, and I sit back down on the trunk. He’s so close, I can smell him. He smells like new grass cuttings on our compost heap.
‘Close your eyes and put your hands out,’ he says.
‘What have you got?’ I reach behind his back but he twists away from me.
‘Close your eyes and hold out your hands.’
His lower lip hangs down like a soft pink slug.
‘What have you got, Shane?’
‘Close your eyes.’
So I close my eyes. Let my hands go limp in my lap. ‘Go on then,’ I say. ‘Show me your unusual thing.’
I wait.
‘Show me,’ I say again.
And Shane puts his hand on my head. It’s heavy and warm. He just lets it rest there, not moving.
Then he starts to move his fingers. Very slowly, and right across my scalp. And it’s like I can suddenly feel everything: the dampness in his fingertips, the roughness of the trunk against my legs. He keeps swirling my hair round, digging his nails into my scalp, pushing his fingers up my neck and round my ears. The hoop of my earring catches on his nail, giving the flesh of my earlobe a tug.
I open my eyes but don’t move. I can see all the dark hairs on Shane’s thigh. The trees above us rustle. The earth smells
ripe. My elasticated top feels tighter than ever.
In the car on the way back we have all the windows open. Mum keeps saying she’ll die of heat exhaustion, she’ll surely die. Dad says nothing. Hot wind blasts round the car, battering our heads. It’s like a hairdryer has been let loose on the back seat. Shane lets his knee rest against mine. Every time we go round a corner I feel its pressure. A drip of sweat crawls past his dark eyebrow and into the hollow of his cheek. My hair blows everywhere, strands of it brushing against Shane’s shoulder. I keep laughing and hooking it back with my hand, but he doesn’t look at me, he just keeps his knee there, sweating against mine.