‘You told us yourself,’ says Mum. ‘She took a suitcase.’
‘Haven’t you noticed what day it is?’
Mum and Dad look at one another blankly.
‘Last day of term,’ I say. ‘She waited till the end of the school year, didn’t she? Then she made her move. And she clearly planned it. So maybe this is her version of a summer holiday.’
I watch this idea, which was obvious to me from the moment I saw her trundle across the road, slowly percolate into my parents’ slow-moving brains.
‘A summer holiday?’ says Mum. ‘As in … a week or two?’
‘Or longer. Who knows? She’s been hanging out there a lot recently, so she must like it.’
‘Has she? Since when? Why didn’t you tell us?’ says Mum.
‘You didn’t ask.’
‘But she told you?’
‘No, she never tells me anything. I just saw it. With my eyes.’
‘When?’
‘Often. Last few weeks mainly.’
‘But … she can’t move in there without even asking us. She’s supposed to be looking after you. She promised. We’re both working,’ says Mum.
If Mum is thinking this, of all things, is going to keep Rose at home, she really does live in a dreamworld.
‘I don’t need looking after,’ I say.
‘We can’t just leave you on your own.’
‘Of course you can! I’m thirteen. And Rose is one minute away. I’ll be fine.’
‘What do you think?’ says Mum, turning to Dad. ‘Are we going to have to hire some childcare?’
He furrows his brow, pretending to be conflicted for a few seconds, then says, ‘Well, I suppose he should be OK on his own … if he promises to be responsible.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ I say, trying to stop myself going saucer-eyed with glee at the idea of all the uninterrupted, unobserved, un-nagged hours of free time that are about to fall into my lap. ‘As long as there’s stuff to eat in the fridge, I can look after myself.’
‘You’re not to just gorge on snacks all day. You have to have proper meals,’ says Mum, attempting to sound stern, though we both know her words are totally pointless.
‘Of course,’ I reply, attempting to sound sincere.
‘Well – OK, then,’ says Mum. ‘Just for a while. Until we can talk sense into Rose and bring her home.’
‘I’ll go and have a word with her,’ says Dad.
‘What do you think that will achieve?’ asks Mum.
‘We have to try. Maybe there’s a different approach.’
‘Such as?’
‘I don’t know. How about we let her stay there tonight, and we leave her to do whatever she wants tomorrow, then after work I pay a visit and try again with something a bit less confrontational? It won’t be long before she wants a hot shower and home comforts. She’ll be back soon enough.’
‘She can come here during the day and have a shower whenever she wants, then just go back,’ I point out helpfully.
‘It’s late. You should go to bed,’ says Dad.
‘Or maybe I could stop her using the bathroom if you get me a Taser. But that might be a bit of a mixed message.’
‘Bed!’ says Dad.
I head upstairs, with a smile spreading across my face. Until now I’ve been strictly forbidden from crossing the road to see what the protesters are up to, but I can’t exactly be prevented from going to visit my own sister, can I? Particularly with nobody watching over me every weekday. Besides, as of this evening, thanks to Rose, my parents’ ability to stop me doing anything suddenly looks a lot shakier.
I’ve wondered for months about what it is that goes on in there, but up till now I haven’t been able to satisfy my curiosity. All I know is that everyone on my side of the road seems to hate the protesters even more than they hate the airport expansion.
Helena, our next-door neighbour, is the one who seems most agitated about the whole thing. Every time I pass her on the street, I hear her complaining to someone about smells, behaviour or noises, and sometimes she goes suddenly quiet as I approach, as if the activities she’s discussing are so twisted they can’t be mentioned within earshot of a child.
All of which, of course, just makes me more curious.
What goes on in there that upsets Helena so much? What can a group of seemingly peaceful hippies get up to that makes people like Mum and Dad so frightened of them? How did those people become the enemy?
Soon, I’ll be able to find out. The question of why Rose has gone over there is less of a mystery. Obviously it’s to annoy our parents.
And it’s worked.
By the time I wake up, Mum and Dad are long gone. There’s a note on my bedroom floor, which I can see from a distance is a numbered list of instructions in Mum’s handwriting. I step past without picking it up, making a hazy mental note to myself that I should probably make an attempt to read it at some point before she returns.
I head down to the kitchen in my pants, gaze into the fridge, then eat a few fistfuls of Frosties straight out of the box. I slug some orange juice from the carton, dig out a packet of chocolate digestives that Mum has hidden not nearly well enough and wolf one down in a couple of bites, allowing the crumbs to land where they land, musing on the fact that already, just a few minutes into my new life of independence and self-reliance, I am in heaven.
Who would have thought that something so simple (being alone in the house) could be so amazingly and immediately enjoyable?
I stare out at the garden for a while, how long I have absolutely no idea because, after months of having my life parcelled up into a rigid hour-by-hour slog from lesson to lesson, time suddenly seems deliciously irrelevant, like a distant yapping dog, a dimly perceived irritation that is someone else’s problem.
Gazing mindlessly at this view which is so familiar I barely even see it any more, I work my way slowly through the packet of biscuits, relishing the sensation of the summer holiday stretching ahead of me, as inviting as a perfectly soft, infinitely large mattress.
I check the fridge again, sample a few forkfuls of each of the various pots and tubs of leftovers, then head to the living room and power up my Xbox.
Gaming and snacking fill up the next few hours, until the point where my eyeballs begin to actually hurt, and I notice that a slice of crisp sunlight is leaking in through the crack down the middle of the living-room curtains. I decide to head outside with the carton of orange juice and get some sun while my eyes readjust to three dimensions, after which I figure I might be able to summon enough energy to put on some clothes and go to visit Rose.
I haven’t been in the garden for long when Callum from next door pops up at the fence and asks if I want to come over and hang out.
I’ve known Callum all my life, and everyone thinks of us as friends, mainly because if there’s a kid next door who’s roughly the same age as you it’s almost impossible to avoid spending time with them, but the truth is that it’s been years since I’ve actually enjoyed his company. He’s the sporty, competitive type, and being with him usually involves playing whatever game is his latest fad while he gloats about how thoroughly he’s beating me.
I shrug at him, making only the briefest eye contact, knowing he’s not going to leave me in peace until I’ve caved in.
‘Come on, I’m bored,’ he says.
‘I’m busy,’ I say.
‘You don’t look busy,’ he points out accurately.
‘Dunno,’ I say.
‘Just for a bit,’ he says.
I shrug again, but he nags and nags until eventually I agree to go over for a short while ‘to see his new Swingball’, because this is the only way to shut him up.
I reluctantly go back into my house, pull on a T-shirt and shorts and head next door. He thrashes me at Swingball with predictable ease, thumping every shot with the focus and force of a butcher wielding a cleaver, then digs out a rugby ball and says, ‘Let’s practise passing,’ even though rugby is a sport I’ve never pl
ayed. The ball flies at me like a torpedo, and each time I drop it (which is almost every time he throws it) he says, ‘Don’t flinch. You’re dropping it because you’re flinching.’
When I throw it back to him, he says, ‘Throw it harder. As hard as you like. You have to spin it.’
This is Callum trying to be nice – he’s not actively telling me I’m useless – but his conviction that I am a disappointingly feeble excuse for a male is somehow even more apparent in his attempts to coach me towards improvement than in his usual goads at my sporting failure.
I’ve always found it hard to walk away from Callum. There’s something weirdly magnetic about his relentless determination to make me stay with him, while he simultaneously keeps up a running commentary on how substandard my company is. Again and again, over the years, I’ve found myself in his garden without wanting to be there, unable get away from him. But today feels different. While he rattles on about how he’s going to be in the First Fifteen next year, my mind glazes over, and that vision of summer as an infinite mattress stretching to the horizon comes back to me. I’m not sure why, but it suddenly feels clear that a large empty vista of time without Callum in it is right there, in front of me, and all I have to do is walk into it. I can leave him behind.
I look down at the rugby ball in my hands, feeling its rough, dimpled surface under my fingertips, and instead of throwing the ball back to him, I drop it at my feet.
His anecdote tails away. ‘What are you doing?’ he says.
‘I’m off,’ I say.
‘Why? Where are you going?’
‘Nowhere,’ I say, walking away.
‘But … wait! We haven’t finished!’
‘I have.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he snaps.
‘Who knows?’ I reply with a shrug, pausing at the patio doors to take one last look at his face, which is crumpled in bafflement and annoyance. This isn’t how I’m supposed to behave. My role is to bend to his will, and it’s obvious he can’t understand what has just happened.
I go into their house, closing the doors on his droning, haranguing voice, walk through to the hall, and just as I’m about to leave, his cat, Blanche, appears at the bottom of the stairs. She looks up, greets me with a quizzical ‘Brrrmow?’ and yawns. Blanche is white, ridiculously fluffy, and isn’t allowed outside because, according to Callum, she’s ‘too expensive’.
Every month or two there’s a panic because she has escaped, and my family always gets roped into looking for her, even though we all secretly hope she’s made a break for freedom.
Blanche figure-of-eights herself between my ankles, rubbing the whole length of her flank and tail across my skin. I kneel down and stroke her, feeling her spine push up gratefully into my hand, then I bend right over her and whisper in her ear, ‘Make a run for it.’
‘Summer holidays, then!’ comes a perky voice right behind me, making me jerk suddenly upright, sending the cat skittering away. It’s Helena, Callum’s mum, wearing her trademark outfit of fleece and ironed jeans. Her concession to the sweltering heat is that today her fleece is sleeveless. I didn’t know sleeveless fleeces even existed until now, but you learn something new every day.
I nod and tell her I’m just leaving.
‘Rose looking after you, is she?’
‘Yeah, kind of,’ I answer.
‘Mmm,’ says Helena sceptically. ‘Do tell your mum I said hi.’
‘OK,’ I reply, letting myself out of the front door.
My step is light and my heart is full as I walk out into the street. I’ve spent so many long and unhappy hours in that house, for as long as I can remember, but now I’m struck by the realisation that if I don’t want to, I never have to go there again.
I turn my head left and right, taking in the familiar but always strange sight of a row of semi-detached houses with neatly tended front gardens and family cars in the driveways, directly opposite a row of identical buildings, all empty, abandoned and boarded up.
On the derelict side, only one house is different: the one everyone now refers to as the commune. Whether it really is a commune, or what that actually means, I don’t know. As usual, the sound of enthusiastic but unskilled drumming is drifting from an upstairs window, or, rather, from where the window would be if there was one. A yellow and red sheet is draped across the space at night and for most of the morning, but the rest of the time there’s just a cavity, through which I often catch glimpses of mysterious activity.
Just outside the front door, a girl with long, ragged hair is dangling by the backs of her bent knees from the lowest branch of a tree, upside down, staring at me. She’s often there in that front garden, hanging around alone, reading, sketching in a little notebook she seems to carry around with her everywhere, or just looking bored.
I gaze back at her, wondering, for a moment, what she does all day. There’s no sign of her ever going to school, even though she looks roughly the same age as me.
‘Hi,’ she says, with an upside-down wave.
At this moment, Mrs Deacon from a few doors down appears, pulling her ancient floral-patterned shopping bag on wheels.
‘Awful, isn’t it?’ she says to me in a semi-whisper, which is an odd greeting, but more or less what you expect from Mrs Deacon.
‘Isn’t what?’ I ask.
‘Those people,’ she mutters, wrinkling her nose and wafting a wrist in the direction of the commune. ‘Such a shame.’
Then off she goes, inching away down the street at the speed of a dawdling earthworm.
‘You’ve got a squeaky wheel,’ I call after her. ‘Would you like me to oil it for you?’
‘Maybe another time,’ she replies. ‘I’m in a terrible hurry.’
I look across the street again and the girl is still there, still hanging from her tree, staring at me. I’d been about to visit Rose, but now I feel like I can’t cross the road to the commune without this girl thinking I’m going to talk to her, and I can’t think what I’d say, so I turn away and head back into my house.
Mum returns from work full of questions about my day alone in the house, and seems disappointed that I don’t have anything to report beyond, ‘It was fine.’ If I tell her the truth, which is that apart from the interlude at Callum’s the whole thing was total and utter bliss from start to finish, she might get suspicious, so I decide to say just enough for her not to worry that I’m unhappy, and no more.
I know I’ve pitched it right when she stops her litany of anxious questions and starts telling me to sweep up the Frosties from the kitchen floor.
Dad doesn’t return from work at his usual time, so as Mum and I sit down for dinner she sends him a text asking him where he is, and reminding him about his plan to visit Rose. He replies straight away, saying he’s already there.
‘What’s the news?’ she texts back.
Her phone pings almost immediately. She stares at the screen for a few seconds, then reads aloud in a flat voice, ‘All cool. I’ll tell you later.’
‘Your dinner’s gone cold,’ she writes.
‘No probs. Eating here with the XR crew,’ comes the reply.
Mum looks up from her phone and frowns. ‘The XR crew? What’s he talking about?’
‘XR is Extinction Rebellion,’ I explain.
‘Is it? How do you know that?’
‘How do you not know?’
‘How does he know?’
‘Everyone knows.’
‘Do they?’
‘Yes. Except you apparently.’
‘Why’s he having dinner with them?’
‘Maybe that’s just who lives there.’
‘So is that what Rose is now? She’s in the XR crew?’
‘Mum, don’t you know anything? XR means Extinction Rebellion – climate protesters. Crew is just a Dad word. That’s him being clueless.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘Because I don’t live with my head in a bucket.’
‘I … just … I’m very
confused.’
‘You don’t say.’
When the doorbell goes, we both jump up, forgetting there’s no reason why Dad would ring the doorbell of his own house. Turns out it’s Helena from next door.
‘Hi, Amanda,’ says Helena. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m fine,’ says Mum frostily. She doesn’t like Helena.
‘Just thought I’d pop over and check you’re OK.’
‘I’m fine,’ she repeats, with an additional frosting of frost.
‘I heard what happened to Rose,’ says Helena, in a sing-song voice halfway between sympathy and gloating, reaching out a hand to squeeze Mum’s forearm.
‘Oh, really? What have you heard?’ says Mum, taking a half-step backwards.
‘That she’s been … turned.’
‘Turned?’
‘By that lot over the road. They’ve got their claws into her somehow or other.’
‘I don’t think any claws were involved, Helena.’
‘Is it true she’s actually moved in there? That’s what people are saying.’
‘Which people?’
‘Nobody in particular. Just …’
‘You don’t need to worry,’ says Mum after a pointed silence. ‘Everything’s under control. But thanks for your concern.’
Mum begins to close the door, but Helena steps forward on to the doorstep.
‘Do you think we should have a street meeting?’ says Helena.
‘About what?’
‘Well … there are obviously safety issues. Regarding the other children on the street.’
‘Rose isn’t a child. She’s seventeen.’
‘Yes, but maybe this is just the thin end of the wedge. We can’t all look the other way and pretend it hasn’t happened.’
‘What is it you’re worried about?’
‘Callum’s fourteen. It’s a very impressionable age.’
‘I can’t see him wandering across the road and joining a climate rebellion, somehow. Not unless they put together a rugby team, which I don’t think is really how they operate.’
‘Oh, it’s not my family I’m concerned about! I just think that as residents, we should stand together. I’m thinking of starting a petition to the council demanding that they’re evicted.’
The Summer We Turned Green Page 2
