The Summer Island Festival

by Rachel Burton

  By day Brian Cole worked in the City, but by night he played guitar in a folk-rock band at a club in West London. That was how he’d come to be involved in the Reading Festival in the first place. The owner of the club had come up with the idea back in the late Fifties and the very first incarnation of the festival took place at the Richmond Athletic Ground twenty years ago. Brian had run the front-stage security right from the start and saw the festival move from Richmond to Windsor to Kempton and various other locations before securing its current site on reclaimed landfill in Berkshire.

  Cathy knew that her father was nervous about taking her, understandably so considering the stories he regaled her with every year, but she also knew how important music was in his life, had been since he was a child living in the East End of London. She knew how proud he was of her musical abilities and how much he encouraged her.

  Besides, she’d paid her dues over the years, counting out all those wristbands.

  One of Brian Cole’s biggest security problems, one that had bugged him more than anything his day job could throw at him, was how to make sure everyone who came into the festival had actually paid for a ticket. In the early days the fences had been easy to jump over and people handed their tickets back to friends on the other side so they could get in too. Everything was unregulated and uncontrolled.

  In 1972 Cathy’s little brother, Connor, had been born. Cathy could remember visiting her mother and Connor in the hospital and she could remember the plastic tag around his wrist with his name and date of birth on it. She hadn’t had one of those when she’d been born seven years earlier apparently, and she could remember her dad being fascinated by the wrist band.

  ‘We should have these for the festival,’ he’d said to his wife.

  Cathy’s mum had smiled back indulgently. ‘Even on the day after your first son is born all you can think about is that festival,’ she’d said.

  Cathy hadn’t thought any more about the wristbands, but a few years later when she was ten, she watched her father take delivery of thousands of wristbands, all of which were destined for the wrists of festival goers. For the next several summers Cathy had helped Brian count the wristbands – which eventually got festival branding on them – into piles of a hundred, packaging them up for the next stage of their journey. She had dreamed of the day when she too would be able to go to the festival.

  That day had finally come, and Cathy swallowed her nerves as she settled back into the car seat. Everybody knew how excited she was about today, how excited she’d been about it for years, but she had a secret that she was holding to herself like a delicate package. She wanted what those musicians had; she wanted the fame and fortune and the ability to make music for the rest of her life. She wanted to meet someone today who would help her get that ball rolling. She wanted to be the next Janis Joplin, the next Chrissie Hynde, and she was willing to do whatever it took to get there.

  *

  By the time King Silver came on stage Cathy had already had the best day of her life. When they’d arrived she’d been given a lanyard with her Backstage Pass attached to it and been introduced to a couple of other girls her age whose fathers had worked with Brian on the festival for years. Within an hour they were the firmest of friends and were wandering at will between the stages and the various tents. Brian had told them to keep their passes hidden under their jackets as there were plenty of fans who would try to steal them, and it had become quite a game to walk up to backstage security who would promptly turn them away until they showed their passes at the last minute. Security didn’t find it as funny as they did.

  Cathy had spent the day veering between feeling very young and extremely sophisticated. She’d spotted so many famous people and had tried to act cool about it while inside she felt like a small child at Christmas. She’d eaten strange food, listened to music she’d never heard before and drunk lukewarm beer out of a plastic cup. Everyone else, from the roadies to the drum technicians, from security to the band managers seemed so at home here, and there were moments when she felt out of place, just a stupid kid from a suburb of West London. She had tried and, she suspected, failed to act nonchalant when Ray Davies smiled at her. And she’d tried not to cry when her dad told her off for bitching about someone’s dress, because you never knew who was listening.

  By the time King Silver took to the main stage, to a cheer so loud it vibrated the very ground beneath them, Cathy was in complete sensory overload. But this was the moment she had been waiting for.

  Watching her favourite band from the side of the stage was surreal. For the rest of her life she would struggle to watch any band from the front of the stage again. She was so close to them that she could hear them talking to each other in between tracks. So close that she could see when the lead guitarist broke a string, so close that when King Silver’s frontman, Storm Tyler, played his mandolin she could hear the reverb of the strings underneath his fingers. She could see the crowd undulating as they all jumped up and down in unison. During the acoustic numbers she had tears in her eyes, which she desperately tried to blink away. She didn’t want everyone thinking she was an inexperienced kid.

  She felt her father squeeze her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, kiddo,’ he said. ‘Storm has that effect on us all.’

  King Silver were a band right on the brink of becoming stratospherically famous. They’d met ten years earlier at university and had gone from strength to strength, citing their various eclectic influences as anyone from Led Zeppelin to Pentangle. Lots of girls Cathy knew were obsessed with them and it certainly didn’t hinder their fame that Storm Tyler was very easy on the eye. Brian had teased Cathy about her crush on Storm, telling her that he would let him know. She hadn’t really believed that her father knew Storm at all until the band came off stage and the singer came over to shake Brian’s hand.

  ‘Neil,’ Brian said. ‘Fantastic gig, mate, you’re just getting better and better.’

  Cathy stared at her father. Who was Neil?

  ‘Storm in front of the fans please, Brian.’ Storm laughed as he looked over at Cathy and she noticed the light catch the gold of one of his teeth.

  Neil? Cathy thought. That’s not very rock ’n’ roll. No wonder he changed it.

  She realised that her father was introducing Storm Tyler to her.

  ‘Cathy’s a very accomplished musician herself,’ Brian said.

  ‘What do you play, Cathy?’ Storm asked. His green eyes were staring directly into hers and Cathy clammed up completely, her mouth dry. So much for playing it cool and talking to people who could help her pave the way into the music business.

  ‘Guitar and violin,’ she managed eventually.

  Storm looked at her for a moment, his eyes moving up and down as though he was appraising her. She couldn’t work out if it made her feel good or uncomfortable.

  ‘You should try the mandolin,’ he said. ‘If you can play guitar and violin then the mandolin will come easily to you.’

  Cathy didn’t say anything as Storm bid her father goodbye and walked off to join his bandmates with his mandolin tucked under his arm.

  4

  Willow

  The morning after Luc Harrison walked back into her life, Willow was in The Music Shop restringing a mandolin for one of her mother’s customers – a job that Cathy had given her while she stayed at home to go through the festival paperwork.

  She was surprised by how quickly she worked, surprised that she still knew how to do this after all these years. At the same time she was reluctant, not wanting to go back to being the person she used to be. She didn’t want to be here at all but where else could she go?

  For the first forty-eight hours that Willow had been back on the Island, she hadn’t set foot outside of her mother’s house, embarrassed and ashamed about what she’d done. Instead she sat on the sofa in her pyjamas eating Heinz tomato soup and ignoring her beeping phone.

  ‘If you’re not going to talk to me about what happened,’ Cathy had said on the third
day, ‘you can help me out in the shop. I’m sure you still know what to do.’

  Willow had worked in the shop on Saturdays when she was a teenager and little had changed. It wasn’t a case of whether or not she could do it, but whether or not she wanted to.

  ‘It’s up to you,’ Cathy had said when she protested. ‘You can talk or you can work, but you can’t sit around here doing nothing all day – it’s not good for a person.’

  She’d known her mother was right, so she’d chosen the lesser of the two evils – working in the shop.

  The Music Shop had always been Cathy’s pride and joy and Willow knew how much her mother must trust her to leave her in charge. She had forgotten this place, this shop she had spent so much time in when she was younger, and the recording studio next door where so many bands had come and gone over the years, where some world-acclaimed albums had been recorded. She’d forgotten the peaceful ambience, the plate glass window near the counter that looked out over the sea, the rows of guitars and ukuleles, the racks of sheet music and brightly coloured guitar picks. She had forgotten the smell of the guitars and mandolins that her mother made by hand.

  Musicians came from all over the world to commission one of Cathy Cole’s handmade instruments, and people said that nobody could tune a mandolin like her. Don used to joke she must have made mandolins in a previous lifetime.

  Customers trickled in and out all morning, greeting Willow as though she’d never been gone. Nobody asked any awkward questions and nobody made her feel anything other than at home. She could easily have allowed herself to slip back into this life, but she’d worked too hard at getting away to let that happen.

  The shop wasn’t busy enough to distract her overthinking mind and nobody was in the recording studio today. She picked up her father’s mandolin again and allowed her fingers to begin to pluck out a few chords. She immediately felt the tension in her shoulders and jaw release as a fleeting sense of contentment washed over her. But as soon as she put the mandolin aside again the embarrassment and shame of walking away from her wedding returned.

  Her phone was full of messages from her friends asking her about it, asking her what had happened and where she was. She still hadn’t replied. What could she say when she didn’t know what had happened herself?

  Not one of those messages had asked Willow how she was feeling. Nobody had asked her if she was all right. Not even Kate.

  She hadn’t heard from Kate at all.

  Willow wasn’t used to being alone and had forgotten the quiet, slow pace of the Island. She was used to spending long days working in the City, with barely a moment of silence, barely a moment to think. The solitude of her mother’s shop was almost overwhelming and at lunchtime she shut up The Music Shop and walked down the street to where Skye’s shop was based.

  She’d been thinking about Skye since Luc and Cathy both mentioned her, wondering if it was worth going to see her, wondering if it was worth digging up the past. In the end that strange feeling of loneliness drove her to it. The more she thought about the friends she’d left behind in London, the ones eager for salacious gossip and the ones she hadn’t heard from at all, the more she thought about the friendship she’d had with Skye – the friendship she walked away from because of Charlie, because she’d been embarrassed about where she came from and who she’d been before she met him.

  There was only really one main street in Seaview and it was an easy place to find your way around. That’s why the Seaview Folk Festival had always been so successful: all the pubs in which the musicians played were so close together that you could see every act if you timed it right.

  It was a street full of shops and hotels, of coloured awnings and ice-cream carts. Seaview felt as though time had forgotten it sometimes – a chocolate box town by the sea, the sort of place you’d read about in children’s stories from the 1950s.

  Willow passed the old sweet shop, surprised to see Mrs Cartwright behind the counter still – she must be ninety these days – and resisted the temptation to go in for a bag of lemon pips. She was determined not to get lost in nostalgia while she was here. She wanted to focus on moving forward, not back, and she was beginning to wonder if the only reason she’d been drawn back to the Island was to make amends in some way.

  Was that the reason she walked away from Charlie on their wedding day? Because she couldn’t move forward until she’d made amends with her past?

  On the other side of Cartwright’s sweet shop there was a gap between the buildings and a small side street with direct access to the sea. Willow stopped in her tracks and peered down towards the beach where she could see the corner of the beach huts and the coloured parasols stuck into the sand. It was still early in the season and the beach was relatively quiet. She was tempted to forget about Skye and walk through the gap and down to the beach, tempted to dig her toes into the sand, dip them in the sea.

  This small passageway between the shops was the way she used to come down to the beach with Luc and Skye when they were teenagers, the way they walked back at night stumbling a little after drinking too much of the cider that Skye’s dad brewed in his shed. They’d hung out in the old beach hut a lot that summer. Skye’s dad had let it fall into rack and ruin so he’d no longer let it out to holidaymakers. Skye had managed to convince him to let them use it and they kept a kettle and an old radio and Luc’s stash of weed there.

  The passageway was also the way Luc had walked her home from the beach on the last night they were ever together and she could almost taste the fermented apple on her tongue, the sensation of seawater washing over her skin.

  For a moment the memories hovered thickly in the air around Willow and she turned away before they trapped her. She walked on determinedly towards Skye’s shop.

  Skye owned a tattoo studio, which might seem an odd thing to do in a small place like Seaview but, according to Cathy, she had built up quite a reputation since moving back to the Island, having tattooed some of the legends of folk and rock music. When Willow was growing up, everyone she knew had tattoos. Don was covered in them and she even had one herself. Charlie hated it of course and had made her promise to have it removed once they were married, but what Charlie thought probably didn’t matter anymore. Willow and Skye had got matching tattoos done just before they both left for university. It had been one of the last days they had spent together on the Island.

  She stood outside Skye’s shop for a moment remembering. The two girls had parted on good terms, full of big intentions to stay in touch through university. But once Willow was at Cambridge and Skye was at art college their emails and phone calls had become increasingly sporadic until the point they barely heard from each other at all. Willow suspected the fault lay with her. As the months had passed and she’d read the emails from Skye’s exciting, bohemian London life, she felt as though she were drifting away, as though she and Skye had nothing in common anymore. They’d never discussed it because Skye’s parents had moved to Bournemouth not long after Skye left for art college so the two girls didn’t even see much of each other during the summer vacations from university when Willow came back to the Island for a few weeks.

  Now Willow wondered if Skye had been another reminder of the life she used to have, the life she had been trying to distance herself from even before she met Charlie.

  She had missed Skye though and had tried to rekindle the friendship. Eight years ago, when Willow and Charlie had moved to London they had met up with Skye for lunch in a pub. It had been such a delight to see Skye again that Willow had slipped back into being the person she used to be and Charlie hadn’t liked it. He’d been so rude and Willow hadn’t done anything to stop him. Would Skye be able to forgive her for that afternoon? Willow knew she had to find out, because she still missed Skye as much as she ever had.

  She pushed the door to the tattoo studio open and heard the bell tinkle – it made exactly the same sound as the bell in The Music Shop, and the same sound that the bell in this tattoo studio used to make whe
n it was under previous ownership.

  Skye and Willow had been tattooed by an artist called Darren who had a dubious and mysterious past. Skye had confided in Willow on the day they’d had their tattoos done that, after her degree, this was what she wanted to do – create living pieces of art on people’s skin. Despite everything it was wonderful to see her living her dream.

  There used to be a red and black sign reading ‘TATTOO CRAZY’ in gothic script above the door of the shop. Now the sign was hand-painted and read ‘Clouds in the Skye’. Willow stepped inside.

  The last time she’d been here the shop had been dark and smelled of disinfectant and incense, and thrash metal had been playing on the stereo. Now it was light and airy, the walls were painted white and there were fresh flowers on the reception desk. Paintings by local artists, including Skye herself, hung on the walls and Willow could smell the calming fragrance of lavender and rose essential oils.

  A big cream sofa covered in brightly coloured cushions sat next to the reception desk and it all seemed so welcoming that Willow felt as though she could curl up there and sleep all afternoon.

  She called out a greeting.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Skye’s voice called back. It sent a shiver down Willow’s spine to hear her again in the place where they had spent their last full day together.

  Willow turned to look at the paintings on the walls, an eclectic mix. There were seascapes in watercolours and oil and some more modern abstract paintings in charcoals, pastels and acrylics – mostly by artists whose names she didn’t recognise. Back when Skye’s mum owned the local art gallery, they’d known all the local artists. Willow didn’t know what happened on the Island anymore.

  ‘Willow,’ Skye said as she came out into the reception. Willow turned around to look at her but before she could take her in, she saw Luc following Skye from the room at the back of the shop, ducking his head slightly as he came through the doorway.