He tilts his head. ‘Tempting. I think I’ll go for the murderous rampage, though.’
I click my fingers. ‘Damn.’
We’re both quiet for a minute. A colony of bats screeches past overhead. We tilt our faces up, watching their shapes cut across whitening sky.
‘What’s up?’ I ask.
Len swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing for a beat. ‘I didn’t mean to go off yesterday. I know you can handle yourself, or whatever.’
‘Are you … apologising? I don’t think you’ve ever apologised to me about anything.’
He looks uncomfortable, digging his hands into the pockets of his skinny jeans. ‘Yeah, well – don’t be annoying about it.’
I fold my arms. ‘I’m annoying, now? I think I need another apology. I can’t work under these conditions.’
He rolls his eyes. ‘You know what? I take it back.’
‘No, I forgive you. I’ll live to fight through the maltreatment another day.’
He looks up at me with such a sardonic expression that I laugh.
‘I mean it,’ I say. There’s light in my limbs, now that he’s here. ‘It’s fine.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. You should come inside.’ I want, suddenly desperately, to just hang out. ‘Have dinner.’
I pull him to the back patio, where the outside light bathes us in warm. Ham catches sight of us and rushes over to blow bubbles against the glass sliding door.
We slip inside and Dad whips around from where he’s standing at the stove; the movement causes brown liquid to slosh onto the floor.
‘My main men! I haven’t seen you in a while, Vladimir Lennon,’ he says.
‘Hey, Reuben.’
‘Where’s Mum?’ I ask.
‘Working. No matter – you’re just in time to taste this culinary masterpiece.’
‘What is it?’ Len asks, eyeing the solidifying stain at our feet.
‘Noganoff,’ Ham says helpfully. ‘With human meat.’
‘Mystery meat, Hambam,’ Dad corrects. ‘First one to guess what it is gets a prize!’
‘Is the prize not having to actually eat it?’ I say, dumping my schoolbag in the hallway.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Dad says. ‘That would be a punishment, a travesty. Not a prize.’
‘LEN!’ Ham shouts. ‘Come look at my drawings.’
‘Sure thing, little man,’ Len says.
‘Do you need any help, Dad?’ I call.
‘No, no. I’m almost done dishing up.’
He appears a moment later, arms laden with plates of what looks, at first glance, like deep-fried balls of drain hair.
After fifteen minutes of pushing our ‘food’ around with our forks, Dad gives up.
‘I’ve stuffed it up again, haven’t I?’
‘Yes!’ Ham says.
‘What am I doing wrong?’ Dad whines. ‘I followed the recipe exactly.’
We murmur sympathetically. Over the years, Dad has developed several truly odd, verging on poisonous, dishes that he pulls out when Mum’s busy at work and he’s feeling guilty about ordering takeaway. Always, it ends with the food going in the bin.
‘I mean, let’s start with the concept of “mystery meat”,’ I say. ‘Why does it have to be a mystery? Is the mystery whether it’s meat at all?’
‘We should have had chips,’ Ham adds. ‘I love chips. Mummy makes good chips.’
Dad glares at me. ‘Betrayed by my own sons. What did you think, Len?’
‘Leave me out of it,’ Len says. ‘I’m just here for the …’ He looks down at his bowl uncertainly. ‘Hair.’
‘It’s shaved zucchini!’ Dad says. ‘I think, anyway. I’m not sure actually, but the guy at the deli gave me a really good deal on it.’
‘I’ll bet he did,’ I say, prodding the congealed mess one more time.
‘You know what? You two can clean up the kitchen. Come on Hambalam, bath time.’
I don’t protest. Honestly, I’m relieved. In the past, he’s insisted on watching us eat every bite. This is far more preferable to dying of salmonella.
Dad carries Ham upstairs and Len and I survey the damage, scraping plates into the bin and tipping the contents of the crockpot out. I fill the sink with hot sudsy water and we set about doing the dishes.
I wash and he dries. We’re a well-oiled machine born of years of similar forced labour.
‘You sure you’re fine?’
‘Why’d you get so mad at Clarkson?’ I ask before I can stop myself.
His face gets very complicated. ‘I didn’t want you to get in the shit. It was my dare. The … you know.’
‘Since when have you not enjoyed me getting in the shit?’ I joke, even though I’m being set on fire by the words he didn’t say.
Then he reaches for the plate at the same moment I move to hand it to him. Our hands smash into each other.
I pull back as if he’s shocked me. It feels like maybe he did.
‘Jumpy much?’ he murmurs.
I spin away from the sink. ‘Dad can deal with that,’ I say, referring to the mess that used to be Mum’s good crockpot.
‘Dad can deal with what?’ Dad asks, bounding downstairs.
‘The monster from the black lagoon that’s on the stove,’ I answer, my voice only slightly too high. ‘It’s probably full of E. coli.’
Dad pokes his tongue out at me. ‘Len’ll help me, won’t you mate?’
Len looks back at me for a moment, another unfathomable expression on his face. ‘Sure.’
‘I’m gonna go have a shower,’ I say, jumping the stairs two at a time without waiting for a response.
I shower meticulously, washing my hair twice with Mum’s expensive shampoo even though it makes it go all wiggy. It smells like her, a temporary distraction from the riot in my head.
My heart is beating double time, the blood being ferried around my veins with palpable heat. I lower the water temperature until it’s close to freezing, but even that doesn’t stop the burn.
I close my eyes tightly, concentrating on the feeling of the water streaming over my skin.
This is fine.
Everything is fine.
As long as I stay in the shower forever.
‘Henry!’ Ham bangs on the door a little later. ‘I need to brush my teeth.’
I turn the water off and scrub my face dry, wrapping a second towel around my waist.
‘HENRY!’ Ham bangs again.
‘I’m coming!’ I shout back, throwing open the door. ‘God.’
Ham’s lip quivers like he’s about to cry; I almost never shout at him. He pushes past me into the bathroom.
(How do people function like this?!)
‘I’m gonna go,’ Len says suddenly. He’s leaning against the banister at the top of the stairs, all the warmth and normality from dinner evaporated.
‘Wait!’ I say frantically. ‘I’ll, uh, walk you.’
His forehead scrunches. ‘Why?’
‘Just – give me a sec.’
I slip into my room and pull on clothes in a frenzy – jeans and a green hoodie and sneakers that are too small – then draw a deep breath, trying to centre myself the way Mum does with Ham during his tantrums.
Len’s eyebrows are in his hairline when I emerge.
‘Okay,’ I trill. ‘Let’s go!’ I grab my keys and swing the door shut behind us.
It’s one of those nights you can drink, late enough for stars to stretch out from the top of the hill. We wander in unwieldy silence for a bit, him on the road and me balancing on the edge of the footpath.
‘Do you think,’ I ask, needing to fill the silence with something besides my rapid heartbeat, ‘that alien life forms would be impressed by us, or horrified?’
Len shoots me a look reminiscent
of Vince in English.
‘What?’ I stumble a bit and hold my arms out for balance. ‘I had a dream about it. Or wrote something about it – I can’t remember. But I realised we don’t know, do we? What we look like from the outside. No-one does.’
He hesitates, pushing up the sleeves of his jumper. ‘What, like, the human race “us”, or us specifically?’
‘Both, I guess.’
Len stares at the clouds, thinking. ‘I don’t know. Purely from a scale perspective, modern life is pretty unbelievable. But if you go beyond that, there’s too much suffering for it to be impressive in any real way.’
‘Our lives, or the human race?’
He stops under a street lamp, momentarily washed gold. ‘Both.’
‘Hmm. I still think blob-people would be at least a bit intimidated by the three and a half badges on my blazer.’
Len shakes his head. ‘Especially the half.’
We turn down the top of his street. It’s cold in a lazy kind of way, still but with a breeze tweaking our hair and making white spirals of our breath. A train horn sounds in the distance, fanning out across the quiet.
‘So,’ he says. ‘Are you gonna tell me what that was about, back there?’
My insides contract. ‘What was what about?’
‘Your little meltdown.’
‘I didn’t have a meltdown. I had a shower.’
Len raises one eyebrow, as if to say seriously?
I turn away from him, examining the deserted street, half of it lamp-lit and the other half blanketed by trees. My body temperature skyrockets under my hoodie.
‘Henry,’ he says. ‘Stop.’
I’m so surprised by my real name that I forget not to look at him. ‘Stop what?’
He chews his lip, eyeing me like I’m a startled animal. ‘Just … Stand still, for a second.’
Len steers me sideways, under the cool canopy of a fig tree. He props one leg up against the trunk. ‘You’re freaked.’
‘I’m not. Is that why you came over?’
Len looks down the street. He takes two breaths, both of them winding up into the air. Shrugs. ‘I wanted to make sure you were okay.’
He’s looking at me, and is so close I can smell him. His eyes are wide in the half-light. His hair’s as perfectly styled as ever, but with one strand coming loose at the front. I wonder what it would feel like in my fingers if I pushed it back.
‘I’m not,’ I say, sharp and sudden.
Len frowns. ‘What do you mean?’
I pull at my own still-wet hair, enraged suddenly. By my life, myself, the world.
He waits.
‘I just,’ I start. ‘I mean, do you ever feel like you’re not who you’re supposed to be? Like, people have this idea of you, but it’s so different from the truth you can’t correct them?’
‘All the time,’ he says.
‘Ha. Right. I’m serious.’
‘So am I.’
I tug at my hair some more, raking my eyes out over the night. ‘Everyone thinks I’m this model student with this perfect bright future. Study something pretentious. Marry Good Woman. Have 2.5 perfect children with similarly ridiculous names to mine. Make terrific mark on the world.’
He doesn’t ask, what’s wrong with that? I answer it anyway.
‘It’s not me. At least I don’t think so. I don’t even know who that is anymore. Or … yet. It’s like I’m on this constant spin cycle with no off switch, every single day.’
I’m rambling, which should be embarrassing but oddly isn’t. It’s just us and the dark.
‘I get that,’ he says eventually.
‘You do?’
He nods like it should be obvious. ‘Perfect Lennon Cane with his perfect life and his perfect girlfriends? It’s not real, not even half of it. People think what they want.’
I digest that for a minute, narrowly stopping myself from asking, WHICH GIRLFRIENDS? ‘And we thought this year would be boring.’
‘With you present? Unlikely.’
‘True.’ I tip an imaginary jaunty hat. ‘I am the original triple threat entertainer: writer, debater, neurotic mess.’
He pats me on the shoulder. ‘Whatever you say.’
It happens again, the shivery feeling when he touches me. I shrink back out of reflex, surprising him, and his hand slips down my arm. It’s warm even through my hoodie.
My breath catches. Audibly. His eyes shoot down to my mouth.
I think, this is going to be so embarrassing when he pulls away.
Except he doesn’t. We both stand there, inches apart.
I lean in, gravitating towards his warmth despite myself.
Len does too.
My hands hang uncertainly between us. His are moving, reaching across to hover over my wrists. Holding them there.
Our foreheads touch. Then our noses.
I bump my chin into his, too hard. He cups it with one hand and bumps back, unyielding, the rest of us winding together like the roots under our feet.
It’s slow and soft but so hot, even though my fingers are cold. For a minute, my jangling brain goes radio silent. I just grip him by the collar, both of us breathing the same air, until his mouth glances down on mine.
He pulls back to look at me after a second, red-lipped with his pupils blown wide, and asks, what are we doing? with his eyes.
I want to tell him not to stop, but I can’t make my voice work. My limbs are concrete. It’s like I want it so badly it freezes me solid.
Len steps away.
It’s a blink and five years before he says haltingly, ‘I should go.’
My head’s doing that thing where it’s so full it’s almost blank. Mostly there’s just this feeling, right in the pit of my stomach. Of having been running, away from and towards this, for the longest time. Pelting-downhill running. The kind where you don’t realise you’re even doing it until you try to stop.
‘I … Um. Yeah – okay.’
We cross the road without looking at each other.
‘I’ll … see you tomorrow.’ He disappears into the wet-denim black.
And then I’m standing on the street and it looks the same as ever, sleeping-tablet still. Traffic light spots flash across house fronts.
Green. Red. Green.
Nothing’s changed except all of it.
13
I don’t know why North chooses to hold its forced team-building camp in the twelves’ penultimate school term, when we truly have enough problems to contend with. It’s sadistic.
Most of us have been together for seven years by now, anyway. It’s the same people in the same classes. But still the year twelve form teachers gather each year and plot our last peppy hurrah, chucking it in whichever week is sufficiently close to The End and doesn’t clash with any assessments.
I usually look forward to these types of things, but this year the timing is uncanny.
I can’t stop thinking about last night.
It’s making my jeans very uncomfortable.
I need time to digest. To figure out what the hell’s going on with me. Us. Instead I get three days in the wilderness, under the watchful gaze of our entire year. (Bar the guys who’ve had too many detentions, including, thank God, Clarkson and Burrell.)
‘At least it’s in a good spot,’ Harrison says when we’re clustered outside the bus at six thirty, jumping up and down to keep warm.
This year’s camp is on Fraser Island, a decision I’m sure came straight from Mr Lewis, who arrived from the UK at the start of the year and has been talking about ‘sunbathing’ for the last month.
I wait for the guys to notice some fundamental difference in my face, but they’re as crabby and sarcastic as always.
The rickety NGS bus is the same. School is the same – red brick and vine covered exactly
as it was yesterday.
Nothing’s changed except all of it.
Vince arrives late, dressed in mourning black. Len pulls up a few minutes after him in charcoal tracksuit pants and my My Chemical Romance shirt from the concert we went to last year.
My eyes pop a little and heat rushes over my skin. I’ve been asking him to give that back forever.
‘Bollocks to this,’ Vince grumbles, dropping his heavy bag down in the dirt. ‘What is the point?’
‘Come on, you lot,’ Ged says. ‘An entire weekend with no homework, no Sniffer and no worries. Get excited!’
Len and I throw unimpressed eyes at him in unison. Other than the shirt, he’s giving no indication that this is anything other than a normal day. I don’t know what that was, last night (LAST NIGHT) or what it means from here.
I don’t know anything, except that this is going to be a long-arse three days.
Mr Lewis saunters over to us. He’s wearing a bright-red NGS tracksuit and an Akubra hat with actual corks dangling from it.
‘Morning, boys!’ he chirps in his Yorkshire accent, slathering pink Zinc all over his nose and cheeks. ‘Glorious day to be heading off to see some of Awe-stralia’s majesty, isn’t it?’
‘Sure is, sir,’ Harrison says.
‘Glorious day to see some of the Adele’s girls’ lovely bunch of coconuts,’ Ged mumbles under his breath.
It’s a long-standing tradition that NGS and our esteemed sister school hold their senior camp in the same week. Of course, this invariably results in anarchy and depravity; Lacey swears a girl in her year conceived her baby in the dingo sanctuary.
‘What was that, Gerrard?’
‘Glorious day to see some coconuts, sir.’
Mr Lewis frowns. ‘I don’t know whether they’ll have any, I’m afraid. Not quite tropical enough. Should be lovely weather for some sunbathing, though.’
We all agree with false enthusiasm until he moves further along the line to chat to another group.
‘You’re not really gonna try to get into the girls’ camp, are you?’ I ask Ged once sir’s out of earshot.
‘Jess a stone’s throw away and no parents walking in on us? Of course I bloody am.’
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