Winters are when people disappear. One minute you’re elbow to elbow on the street, the next you walk along sidestepping nothing but the wind. Cafés put down their blinds. Houses are locked and dark. The car parks slowly empty and all that’s left on the beaches are a few forgotten shoes. Waiters and waitresses go away to work the ski season, cleaning chalets in a bright glare of snow. Lifeguards pack their tents and dented surfboards and get on planes, following the sun like a flock of migrating birds.
I wait for Gina by the door, my coat and trainers on, and the old, dried-up Christmas tree leaning against the wall. It’s not even four o’clock, but the sky is already dim – one of those days where it never really gets light except for a pale streak above the sea. Gina lives a few streets away in a bungalow that’s almost identical to mine, except hers has a hole in the wall from where her mother once tried to decorate and then gave up halfway through. There’s a TV in front of it now but you can still see the cracked edges. It takes two minutes to walk between our houses; one and a half if you take the alley with the mattress and the bin bags. Down the sides of each street there’s clumps of sea beet, burdock, grass that knots into sandy bouquets. The grass is sharp and tough. We used to take turns ripping out handfuls and seeing who would get cuts across their fingers. There’s sand everywhere around here. When you walk in the wind, grains crunch against your teeth. We’re out on the edge of town, where the cliffs start to crumble and turn to sloping dunes. The dunes are heavy and soft, like flour in a bowl. They never stay still. They slip and shift around; sometimes growing, sometimes flattening out. When the gales come, loose sand blows down the road and heaps at our front doors.
Gina finally knocks and I go straight out, dragging the tree behind me. ‘I thought you were coming earlier,’ I say. I prop the tree up and lock the door, then start hauling it down the steps. We always bury the tree together first thing in the new year, but somehow it’s already halfway through February. The tree’s almost bare, except for a few brown needles clinging on.
‘You look like you’re moving a body,’ Gina says.
‘I thought you were coming earlier,’ I tell her.
Gina turns and looks back up the road, as if she’s seen something, but there’s nothing there. ‘How late are your parents working tonight?’
‘Late,’ I say. The care home they manage is full and low on staff. ‘Mr Richards is sleepwalking again. He’s started getting out and trying to hitch-hike at the side of the road. No one’s stopped for him yet.’
Gina picks up her end of the tree but doesn’t move off the step. ‘Late,’ she says.
I start walking backwards, then turn and hold the tree behind me so that I can walk facing the right way. We cross the street and cut across a few front gardens. A cat follows us, then yawns and sits by somebody’s door. We pass the last of the bungalows, with their banging shutters and wind-cracked paint, and come out onto the road. The dunes spread out ahead of us, humped and dark. We start down the road towards them. Every year we take our tree down to Salthouse and bury it along with everyone else’s, to try and stop the sand moving and the dunes disappearing. There are rows and rows of old trees. Gina and I always find the best place, and dig ours in the deepest. We do it with my tree because Gina’s is plastic and has flashing lights and a singing snowman on top.
The wind slaps into us. I pull up my hood and button it under my chin. I wait for Gina to do the same, then realise she isn’t wearing her coat. She’s had the same one since we were about seven – a parka with a broken zip and sand in the pockets, which used to come down past her knees. Once, we both fitted into it at the same time. Instead of her coat, she’s wearing a white jumper that looks too small for her, and instead of trainers, she’s wearing long brown boots that must be her mother’s. They’re too big for her. She keeps stopping to wedge her feet in tighter.
‘Where’s your coat?’ I ask. I have a loose tooth and I keep touching it with my tongue. I’ve lost all the others – some have grown back, some are halfway through – and this is the only original tooth I have left. It should have come out weeks ago. Usually I would bend it until it makes a gristly, crackling noise, and twist it at the root, but with this tooth I push downwards, into the gum, until it settles back in place.
Another gust of wind hits us, and Gina rakes her hair out of her mouth. Her hair is very pale and so is her skin and the tips of her eyelashes, like grass that has dried in a heatwave. Her mouth is small and dark and she smells sweet and sour, like a vinegary strawberry I once ate and spat back out.
‘You need to pull that tooth,’ she says. ‘I’ll do it for you if you want.’ I can feel her shivering – it goes down through the tree and into my hands.
We come to the crossroads and I start following the path down to the dunes, but Gina stops and puts her end of the tree down. She picks at a dry needle in her finger. By now our palms are stippled. The lights of town are in the distance. A bus goes past, its insides lit up like an aquarium. There is the sound of the wind, and the sound of the sea, and something I can’t place, a low beating that isn’t the wind or the sea.
‘The fair’s back,’ Gina says.
I can just make out a small, hazy glow past the hotels. ‘Remember the dodgems?’ I say.
‘You rammed that old woman until she almost got concussion.’
‘She did it to me first.’
‘They still have them,’ she says. ‘And they have this pendulum thing now, where you get tipped upside down.’
I watch her pick at her finger. ‘You’ve been,’ I say.
She gets the needle out and drops it. ‘It’s been here all week.’ Again, she turns and looks down the road, at nothing.
The beat of the fair surges in, louder for a moment, on the back of the wind. I start dragging the tree towards the path.
‘Evie,’ Gina says.
‘We need to get going with this.’
‘Evie,’ Gina says.
‘We’re almost there.’
‘We could do the tree after.’
‘It’ll be too dark after.’
‘We’ll get covered in sand if we do it first.’
‘It’ll be too dark after,’ I say.
‘Remember that time you broke your parents’ window, kicking that stone, and I told them it was me?’ Gina says. ‘Remember when I taught you how to go really hot and dizzy, so you look too ill for school?’
I keep my eyes on the ground and push at my tooth. If I look up that’s it; especially with her reminding me of all the things I owe her like that.
‘Remember when we were five and we found those flies on top of each other and we pulled off their wings, and afterwards you couldn’t bear it, so I stuck them back on with superglue?’
I look up. ‘It didn’t work,’ I say.
Gina picks up her end of the tree. She knows we’re going. ‘What didn’t?’
‘The glue,’ I say. ‘You told me they flew away but I found them later, on the windowsill.’
The beat of the fair gets louder as the road slopes into town. Every time the wind hits, the tree loses more needles. They scatter along the pavement like hair on the floor of a hairdresser’s.
‘Look at Mrs Bradley’s house,’ Gina says. ‘She got another ornament.’ She points to a hare by the front door. There are moths attached to the wall, and a few hunched gnomes on the grass. Mrs Bradley taught us for years, before we moved to secondary school last September. She showed us how to dissect a frog. All I remember are the thin, splayed-out hands, how they looked like they were asking for something. Behind her desk she had a shelf of jars with frogs’ legs and fish and something small and twisted, all floating around in salty water. They looked like the pickle jars in Gina’s mother’s kitchen – gherkins, silverskins, shredded beetroot – and once Gina made us eat some and pretend we were eating whatever it was in Mrs Bradley’s jars. I threw up first. One time, Mrs Bradley brought in a pair of calf’s lungs and inflated them by blowing with a straw and one kid fainted and smacked his mouth on the wall and his two front teeth slid right out next to my shoes.
As we go past, Gina glances round, then climbs over the wall and puts the hare in the middle of the driveway. Then she moves a weird baby gnome so that it’s nestled behind the front wheel of the car. We don’t like babies and swore a long time ago that having them was nothing to do with us.
As we get closer the music thrums up the road and into my stomach. The fair’s in a car park that belongs to a hotel that’s been boarded up for as long as I can remember. There’s a pile of beer cans at the entrance, and ticket stubs scattered over the ground. Lights throb like something painful. Someone lets out a long low howl. It’s still only the afternoon but suddenly it feels dark and late. A kid runs past wearing a crash helmet, chasing a balloon that’s been wrenched away by the wind.
We go through the gate, then Gina stops and I almost trip. I can see that she’s trying to smooth down her hair and her clothes without me noticing.
‘What are you doing?’ I say.
‘Do I look OK?’
There’s sand on her boots and her hair has gone curly in the salty wind. Her cheeks are pink along the top of the bone. I haven’t noticed those bones before. They make her face look narrower, as if a new one is slowly being chiselled out. How haven’t I noticed them?
I put my hand up to my own face and feel the same soft, puckering skin that is already flushed and burning under the hot lights.
‘OK for what?’ I say. I say it stiffly, my mouth suddenly dry. I start backing in with the tree, but Gina doesn’t move.
‘We have to put this somewhere,’ she says.
‘We’ll just hold it.’
‘Put it under this van.’
‘I’ll hold it.’
‘Just slide it under here.’
There are a group of vans with the fair’s logo on parked near the wall. Gina crouches down and slides the tree under one of them. ‘We’ll come and get it later,’ she says. ‘OK?’
She doesn’t wait for me to answer. I turn back one more time to check the tree as she disappears into the crowd.
There are people everywhere: families moving too slowly, stopping at every stall for candyfloss, flashing bracelets, bags of bright yellow sweets. There’s the smell of burnt sugar, sweat, fat, the tang of hot metal, like overheated brakes. A group of older girls almost walks into me, then veers off, laughing, towards the big wheel. Cigarette smoke blows in and out. Music blares at each ride – disco, jazz, and the fair boys whistle and call out that there are two minutes before their rides start, one minute, then gates clank, more music starts up and someone screams.
Gina threads her way through everything, looking from side to side, past the stalls, past the rides, out to where the generators and cables thump.
I finally catch up with her. ‘Let’s go on the waltzer,’ I say.
She looks at me as if she’s forgotten I’m there. ‘The waltzer?’
‘We always go on that first,’ I say. I don’t ask why she’s gone all the way out to the back of the fair, what she’s looking for. Instead I turn and make my way over to the ride, pushing through the crowds, hoping Gina is following behind. Just as I get in the queue I realise I don’t have my purse with me. I’m almost at the front and I search my pockets but all I have is a crumpled tissue and a decoration I found that was still hanging on the tree. Just as the woman ahead of me finishes paying, I remember the five-pound note I keep in a tiny, inner pocket in my coat. It’s meant to be for emergencies. I’ve never used it. It’s my turn in the queue and the man on the ride asks how many I want. I take out the money and pay for two tickets.
I get on and sit back in the sticky seat. After a few minutes Gina climbs in next to me. Our seat is already tilting at almost a right angle and my stomach starts to feel very light, like it’s rising above me. I lean forward and put both hands on the bar. The music starts and the ride jolts. Gina is still sitting back, not even holding the bar, but I can tell she’s braced.
We circle around once, the cup spinning slowly on its axis as we go. Gina still isn’t holding the bar. Her arms are crossed in front of her. I catch her eye and she gives me a small smile, the kind where only one corner of her mouth rises up. It’s her pretend smile – the one she uses for parents or people she passes in the street and doesn’t want to speak to – but there’s hardly any time to take it in because suddenly the music surges, the lights flare, and we’re tipping forwards, spinning backwards and being flung around the ride, our hair whipping across our cheeks. Gina’s mouth snaps open but no sound comes out. I shut my eyes. Colours bleed and distort in front of me. The music pulses. Gina slides across the seat and bangs hard into my hip. She grabs at the bar and ends up gripping my wrist, her nails in my skin. We spin three times and I know I’m going to fall out, I’m lifting upwards, my hands are clutching the bar and I open my eyes and see a row of pale, blurred faces. I bang back down. The ride tips then slows. The music cuts out and we come to a shuddering halt. Someone unhooks our bar and we stumble out, the ground rolling under our feet.
‘I need to eat something,’ I say. I try to walk, but it comes off more like lurching. I follow the smell of onions and burnt coffee. If I don’t eat something I’ll throw up, I know it. There’s a queue. A man at the front doesn’t want sugar in his coffee but they’ve already put sugar in. I have to stop myself pushing him out of the way. Finally it’s my turn and I buy a hot dog and a bag of doughnuts. The hot fat seeps through the paper bag, turning it translucent.
I offer the bag to Gina but she shakes her head. I offer again and she takes a doughnut and nibbles at the edges. She wipes her mouth with a napkin after every bite. I eat a doughnut, then half the hot dog, then another doughnut, making sure I don’t chew anywhere near my loose tooth. I finish the rest of the hot dog, then lick my fingers one by one to get the last of the mustard and the sugar. Just as I’m about to start on my thumb, someone puts their hand on top of my head. I turn around. It’s Mrs Bradley. Her hand is strong and stiff, like a tree root.
‘Are my girls having fun?’ she asks. There’s a wisp of candyfloss trailing from her sleeve. ‘Have you been on any rides?’
I finish licking. ‘Just the waltzer,’ I say.
‘With your parents?’
Gina stops eating her doughnut. ‘Why would we do that?’
Mrs Bradley smiles quickly. At school we always sat at the front, right by her desk. She gave us gold stars to stick on our books when we got the answers right. ‘I saw the merry-go-round earlier,’ she says, ‘and it reminded me of my girls. Remember when all you wanted to do was be horses? You’d gallop into class and when I asked you a question you’d neigh the answer.’
I nod, but Gina shakes her head. ‘I don’t remember that,’ she says. She looks around and then freezes. The top of her cheeks go even pinker, just for a moment, then fade back to how they were. ‘I have to go,’ she says. She thrusts the half-eaten doughnut at me. I catch a glimpse of her jumper as she vanishes back into the crowd.
I turn to follow then stop, but Mrs Bradley waves me on. ‘You go,’ she says. ‘Have fun, OK?’
‘I’ll look at the merry-go-round later,’ I call back, but I don’t know if she hears or not.
I walk fast. The fair is even busier now. Queues spill into the walkways and I keep having to stop and go round them. I see a kid from school and then another, bigger group of people I half-recognise. They’re sitting on the steps by the big dipper. I almost walk past them but then I see Gina sitting at the top, next to a boy who has his arm slung over her shoulder. I stop. Someone’s shoe bangs into my heel. I don’t cry out. I don’t move. I’m about to back away when Gina sees me and beckons me over. I go slowly, not looking at anyone, and stand near her, at the edge of the steps. I stand very still, like a hare that’s caught the scent of something. They’re passing a can around and when it comes to me I shake my head, then can’t stop watching while Gina drinks. The boy next to her takes the can and finishes it. He has a very thin nose and bloodshot eyes. His hair is so dark it has a blue sheen to it.
I keep licking my lips to make sure there’s no sugar left on them, but they taste salty, not sweet, and they sting in the cold.
Gina looks over at me and smiles, properly this time.
I don’t smile back.
The group watches everything and everyone that goes past. They watch and then someone says something, or does an imitation, and laughter ripples out, as if a stone has just hit water. No one talks to me and it gets colder and later, until one of the boys turns round suddenly and asks if Gina and I want a ride on anything, we can have a go on anything for free.
Everyone sniggers and the colour comes again into Gina’s cheeks, darker this time, more like when she was ten and she grabbed a teacher’s hand instead of mine and pulled him around the playground.
I lean in and say something, just to her. She doesn’t hear. I say it again. ‘Let’s go on the dodgems.’ I wait for her to get up and come with me, but then everyone is standing up and moving and the boy with his arm around Gina says, ‘Good idea. Let’s go on the dodgems.’
‘Evie,’ Gina says. She jerks her head for me to follow. There’s nothing else to do except follow. Gina gets in a car next to the boy and someone presses a ticket into my hand and puts me in a car by myself. The music rolls. My car powers up. The man running the ride shoves me off the side. Sparks crackle on the ceiling and I drive.
I circle the edge slowly, looking for Gina. We used to pick someone and follow them mercilessly, ours hands overlapping on the wheel. This time I can pick for myself. I see Gina’s car and start following. The boy isn’t driving properly. What you’re meant to do is go round in a circuit, but he’s zigzagging across the floor, ramming into everyone, throwing Gina back in her seat, then reversing and going the other way. His friends are all doing the same. One of them smacks into me from behind and I jolt forward, then spin into the wall. I try to reverse but another car rams me back and my steering locks. I reach out and push off the wall and the wheel turns. I slam my foot on the pedal and aim for Gina’s car. I’m almost on them when another car comes in and knocks me sideways and I spin again. I curse and turn the wheel hard. By now I’m leaning my whole weight against the pedal, circling the floor, sparks chipping off above me. I see Gina ahead and I lean forward. She hasn’t seen me and I bear down on them, gritting my teeth. Her head is resting on the boy’s shoulder. I turn my car so that I can hit them from the side. I’m almost there. I’m already imagining her face, the way she’ll look at me when I send them slamming into the wall. I’m five metres away, four metres, and I pump my foot down on the pedal but it feels different, lighter, there’s no traction. I pump again but my car is slowing, the music’s stopped, the sparks are dying away and I’m stranded in the middle of the floor.
I sit there, my hands still on the wheel, until I’m told I have to get out unless I want to pay for another go. I get up and make my way off the ride. There’s a white line across my hands and my knee almost locks from where I’ve been leaning so hard on the pedal. I go down the steps and stand on the concrete. Behind me, the dodgems start up all over again.
I walk back through the fair. By now it’s completely dark and more lights have come on. I step over a crumpled balloon, candyfloss sticks and spilled drinks, which spread across the ground like the fair’s tideline.
I can see the vans ahead and I speed up. All I want to do is leave. I try to remember which one we put the tree under. I think it’s the middle one and I head straight over. There are two people ahead of me and I realise that it’s Gina and the boy. They’re walking towards the vans. Gina tilts her face up to look at the boy and for a moment I don’t even recognise her. The ground tips and rolls under me. I watch as they disappear round the back of the vans.
A dog barks somewhere behind me – it sounds strange and far away.
Then Mrs Bradley walks past. She’s walking towards the exit but the way she’s going will take her right between the vans. I take a step forward, stop, then take another. Mrs Bradley keeps going, swinging her arms, stepping over all the sticks and bags. The candyfloss is still stuck to her sleeve. My skin burns under the hot lights. She’s going to see Gina, any moment now she will see Gina, and somehow I know that, if Mrs Bradley sees Gina, she’ll never call us ‘my girls’ again, and she’ll never touch the tops of our heads or tell us that we used to pretend we were horses.
She’s almost there. She’s at the first van and her head is about to turn, and suddenly I’m rushing forward, my hand is at my mouth, my tooth is out and there’s blood and I must have yelled because now everyone is turning and looking at me instead.
Mrs Bradley comes straight over, and then Gina is there adjusting her jumper. Someone hands me a glass of warm, salty water. Blood swirls back into the glass.
The pain comes suddenly, sharply, and I move my tongue around the gum, feeling the rough, fleshy socket. Someone passes me my tooth – I think it’s the boy – and I put it in my pocket because I don’t know what else to do with it. It’s big and black with dried blood.
Gina puts her mouth to my ear – all beer and doughnuts and bubblegum shampoo – and says, ‘Let’s go get the tree.’
We slip away from the crowd, away from Mrs Bradley, who is explaining to the boy about the best way to remove teeth. We slide the tree out from under the van and go.
The wind has picked up. It’s blowing the sea into white water that gleams in the dark. The fair music throbs behind us, and my mouth throbs in the cold, so I keep it shut.
We take the turning to the coast path, past the fence that marks the edge of the cliff. The path is narrower now, because some of the cliff has fallen away. It’s too dark to really see anything but we keep going, following the fence and feeling for when the path turns from gravel to the sand at the start of the dunes. We know the path so well that we automatically step over the cracks and stones and then our feet hit packed sand and we’re there.
The dunes have spread since last year. They’re lower and flatter, and seem to go on further than I can see. We start walking down, our feet sinking with each step. The sand is very cold and the beach is very quiet. The marram grass rustles, like a group of people waiting for something.
Gina stumbles and puts out her hand. ‘Shit, that’s sharp,’ she says. ‘I think I’ve found the trees.’
We stop and look. I can just make them out – rows of small dark shapes standing stiffly against the wind.
We follow the line until we find a gap. The trees are bare, skeletal, no more than husks. Gina stops and lays our tree down. ‘Shall we put it in here?’ she says.
I watch the dark blowing sand. It blows over my face and my hair. Suddenly it doesn’t seem to matter so much where we put it, or if we put it in at all. The sand will move and bury the trees, the dunes will spread and heap up and flatten again. The trees seem too small; there will never be enough of them.
‘I guess so,’ I say.
Gina crouches down and starts digging with her hands, scooping out handfuls of sand and piling it up next to her.
I can feel the dunes moving under my feet – big, shifting movements, like an iceberg creaking.
Gina digs hard. She kneels in the sand and leans right into the hole she’s making. She works at it steadily, scooping and piling the sand. After a while I kneel down next to her and dig too. The damp grains clog under my nails. We find a rhythm – Gina scoops, then I scoop, one hand after the other. There’s just the sound of the sea, and the grass, and our hands in the sand.
The hole is already deep enough but we keep digging anyway, just more slowly. Neither of us stops. But after a while I say, ‘That’s deep enough now,’ and then there’s nothing else to do except stop. We stand up and put the tree in the hole and I hold it upright while Gina pushes the sand back around it and stamps it down to keep it in place.
We stand there, not moving, watching the tree.
‘Does it hurt?’ Gina asks.
Usually I would say something about primary versus secondary lesions – I know all about them from the care home. I would talk about how Mr Samuels, who has been in the home since before I was born, has a gold earring so that, if he’d ever drowned at sea and washed up in another country, he would have had enough money to pay for his own burial. But I don’t feel like saying any of that.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It hurts.’
The sand blows around us. It’s cold and dark. The lights of a fishing boat move past in the distance. I am the first to turn to go. I brush the sand off my hands and start making my way across the dunes. Gina follows me, then, just as we’re almost back on the path, she darts away and runs up the side of the highest dune. She runs slowly, fighting against the toppling sand, the way it falls back under her feet. Then she’s at the top. I wait on the path. The lights of our bungalows glint in the distance. They look as small and far away as the boat. I think of the sandy streets and the shiny clumps of sea beet. The shortcut down the alley. The cracks in the wall of Gina’s front room. I think about those lungs – how they rose up, so full of air, that it was impossible to imagine they didn’t really work any more.
Above me, Gina spreads her arms out wide. I look once more at the lights, then I run up the sand and stand next to her. The rows of trees are somewhere behind us. I spread my arms out just as Gina starts running down, and I run too, flying so fast that sand rises up everywhere and we are lost in it; it whirls and kicks up and it’s in my eyes, my mouth, it’s so loose under my feet that it seems as if there’s nothing there.
Gina is ahead of me. She’s running so fast that I lose sight of her – one moment she’s there, the next she disappears in a scatter of sand. I see an arm, a leg, her pale hair streaming as she moves away, and I am right behind, I am almost right behind, as the dunes below us creak and shift and catch in the wind, like they always do, like they’ll always keep doing.