by Susie Day
I’m pretty sure those are song lyrics, not actual feelings, but the look on Tiger’s face says she means them anyway. Every time she says Catrin’s name her mouth shyly curves up at the edges. I want to take her picture, but she rests her head on my shoulder, and I can feel the glow coming off her pink face, warming me up.
“Just you wait,” she says dreamily, chin on my collarbone, her voice thrumming through my skin. “I know it sounds daft now, but it’ll happen to you. When it does, it’ll be like the whole world was grey before. You’re going to love it.”
“Right. OK. Thanks. That sounds good,” I say, sliding out from under her arm and standing up, ready to exchange eye rolls with Red. But Red’s lying flat, arms back and head resting in the pillow of her hands as if she’s not even listening, gazing up with a shy curvy smile on her face, just like Tiger’s.
Apparently when I’m fourteen, I’m going to get all dribbly and romantic too.
I like that.
“We’re going for a picnic, later,” says Tiger. “You could come too, if you like. I want you to get to know Catrin better.”
I mumble something about having plans tonight.
“Sounds great! What are you going to wear?” She looks me up and down as I smooth my hands down the spotty top, and this time Red is definitely smirking.
Hours later, I’m stumbling down the short-cut path wearing a huge knotty tasselled scarf round my neck, a flappy white shirt, and a pair of Dad’s old jeans, belted so they sort of fit. It’s the sort of thing Tiger wears all the time, simultaneously effortless and intentional. On me, it looks like I got dressed in a crashed aeroplane in the Sahara desert, in the dark.
At the end of the path, the promenade is now covered in sandwich boards, and posters hooked on lamp posts. Penkerry’s Legendary Fifties Fest! Band names fill the space underneath. Kitty Pleasant. Billie Jo and the Jo-Belles. The Vicars of Twiddly. Way down at the bottom are Joanie and the Whales.
They’re in the tiniest writing on the poster, but it’s still a buzz. The Fest is on Saturday. Dad’s already covered the caravan with Post-it notes with song titles on, rearranging them to get the set list just perfect. He might be a rocker onstage, but I got my over-organized brain from somewhere.
I hurry down the steps on to the beach, skidding on pebbles.
Red scowls and trails along behind me, making me nervous.
“So is it a big cave? Will it be cold in there? Are there crabs and things? Should I have brought food? Will other people be there who I don’t know? What happens if I need the loo?”
“You know, Blue, just because I happen to be here doesn’t mean you have to spew the entirety of your thought processes at me. Thrilling as they are.”
“I’m only wondering.”
“You’re supposed to wonder! That’s what life’s for. Embracing the new.”
“Hello?” I say, lifting the frondy tassels. “I’m embracing the new! And it turns out the new is itchy.”
She snorts, skipping lightly ahead of me on the pebbles, hair lifting off her face, arms splayed one higher than the other for balance.
I wish I could take her picture. I’ve got Diana in my denim bag, but I know she’d vanish out of the shot like smoke.
I’ve only got a year to wait before someone can pin her down in a print, though. My heart feels big at the idea, and it hits me all over again: she’s me, that’s me, that’s who I’m going to be. Not guessing or hoping, but guaranteed.
“What are you staring at now, you weirdo?” she says, screwing up her face.
It would be good if I was a bit nicer. Maybe I can have a quiet little talk to myself, in a year’s time, about consideration and thoughtfulness.
“Come on,” I sigh, hopping across the rocks more quickly. “I think Fozzie’s waving at us.”
She’s there up ahead, a tiny figure at the foot of a cliff. Up above is Penkerry Point; our caravan too, somewhere too far up and back to spot. There’s no way down the sheer cliff except along the short cut to the Promenade, then doubling back along the beach, away from the Pier, along the stretch that’s only uncovered at low tide. I can see the lighthouse on Mulvey Island off in the distance, and the Bee rock in between, sticking high up out of the water, with its three yellowish stripes.
By the time I’m near enough to see Fozzie’s grin, I can smell woodsmoke, and hear an acoustic guitar being strummed.
“You made it!” Fozzie calls, and the guitar strumming stops abruptly.
Dan shouts something, inside the rock. Fozzie makes urgent shooing motions off to the side, and for a sick moment I think: I’m not meant to be here, I wasn’t invited, they’re all going to leave now I’ve come.
I sneak a look at Red and her face is greyish, eyes darting unhappily across the pebbles as if she’s thinking the same thing – but before I can turn back, Fozzie’s got hold of my wrist.
Three steps up the beach and up again over a pocked, seaweedy slope of solid rock, the cliff splits open into a cavern, high and huge. There’s a campfire at the mouth of the cave, sheltered by a dip in the rocks. I eye the flames, wary, thinking of dragons. And fire extinguishers. I bet no one here even cares about the fire triangle. But I let Fozzie push me forward, inside, blinking smoke out of my eyes. There’s an instant chill once I’m inside the cliff, the woodsmoky smell mixing with mould and damp.
There’s whispering, shapes of people moving in the dark.
A flickering. A set of small flames appears, with Mags’s glowing face above them.
“One, two three,” someone hisses.
The guitar strums again, and suddenly the cave echoes with Happy Birthday to You, as the small flames move towards me.
Someone flashes a phone torch across the cave wall right at the back, high up, to show HAPPY BIRTHDAY BLUE! painted unevenly across the rocky wall, in glossy white house paint.
Fozzie grabs me from behind, Dan hugs me from the front, and Mags holds out a lopsided sponge cake, for me to blow out the candles.
I can barely summon up breath. I don’t make any wishes this time. I don’t need them.
Then there’s a cheer, and more hugging, and I whisper, reluctantly, “It’s not actually my birthday today.”
Mags shrugs. “Yeah, but your mum said your real one was crap. And Dan never turns down an excuse for cake.”
“Hey!” he huffs. “Credit where it’s due, it was Fozzie’s idea.”
Fozzie blushes in the firelight. “Mags did the painting,” she says, nodding up at the white letters. “Standing on Dan’s shoulders. Team effort.”
“You did all this for me?” I whisper, tilting my head to the clumps of people I’m beginning to make out as my eyes adjust, sitting on tumbled rocks, gathered round the guitar.
Fozzie looks embarrassed. “Well, not just for you. I mean, there’s always a bunch of people down here when the tide’s low enough to get in the cave. It’s, like, the party place. But I thought we’d sort of turn it into a party for you as well. Is that OK?”
I hug her again, and tell her it’s even better.
She drags me around by the arm, introducing me to blurry faces with names I can’t keep track of: Cal and Anya and Marco and Pete, Other Pete and Sarah, with a baby on her knee, cheeks round, dimples firelit. I recognize a few from the Pavilion crowd, the ones Tiger dances with. The guitar girl’s name is Verushka or Danushka or something between the two; she’s very smiley, either way, and asks me to pick a song for her to play next. I ask if she knows “Summertime Blues”, and she laughs, all teeth, and starts playing it right away.
Fozzie squeals, like I knew she would, and starts to dance while Dan sings the words, loudly and mostly wrong.
Mags is chopping up cake and handing it round.
I squint into the darkest depths of the cave, where the ceiling slopes down and the floor slopes up, but it’s smelly and colder back there, s
o I drift nearer to the light and the fire, and find what I hadn’t even realized I was looking for: a familiar black shape sitting cross-legged near the cave entrance, framed by the flames.
Merlin, and his top hat.
I slot into place beside him, catching sight of Red hovering just outside, beyond the campfire. I give her a tiny wave, and she smiles tightly, leaning against the rock with her arms wrapped round herself.
She’s being kind again, I know, just like Mulvey Island. Letting me feel as if I’m doing this for the first time. Not giving away my birthday surprise.
Maybe I won’t need to have that talk to myself, about being nicer.
“Evening,” says Merlin, cards in his hands, shuffling them together with a whirr. “What’s all this about, then?”
He taps the tasselled scarf with the deck.
“Just thought I might be cold,” I say, feeling my face grow pink as I tug the scarf off and tuck it out of sight behind me.
Merlin gives me a narrow knowing smile from under his hat.
“Oh, all right, my sister made me wear it,” I mutter, not even sure why I’m confessing it. I settle back against the wall – then tip forward again with a yelp, as the wet slimy rock seeps through my shirt.
“Yeah, you probably don’t want to do that,” says Merlin, pointing a long pale finger up at the cave walls. They’re black, slippery with green algae. Even my painted birthday message has green flecks in it. I look round, and realize everyone else is sitting a careful distance from the walls of the cave.
“Right,” I sigh, peering over my shoulder at the mulchy green blobs on white. Hopefully Tiger will be too dreamy-eyed over Catrin to notice I’ve ruined her shirt. “So – this whole cave is underwater sometimes?”
Merlin nods. “You see the Bee, out there? That’s how you can tell what the tide’s doing. So long as you can see all three stripes, you can get in and out of the cave easy. Two stripes, you’d better be a good swimmer. One stripe, kaput. Note how I am sitting conveniently near the exit, with a clear view of said helpful rock.”
He smiles, awkwardly this time, as if he’s letting me into a private secret. I’m glad I told him about the scarf, now.
He shuffles the deck again. The campfire spits and pops as someone throws on more wood, and I feel the extra heat, warming me on one side only. Varushka/Danushka plays that song “Wonderwall”, and everyone sings along.
I should probably say something, but Merlin’s strange. I don’t know what it is; it’s like I want to be next to him, but when I am, I’m not sure which me to be.
I pull Diana out of my denim bag.
“Don’t,” he says, hands stilling.
“I wasn’t going to take one of you,” I say pertly, focusing on the singers at the back of the cave.
“No, that’s not—” he says, and I feel his fingertips brush my wrist, as if he wants to grab my arm to stop me.
I lower the camera, my wrist tingling.
“Sorry,” he says quickly, pulling his hand back, flicking at the edge of the cards with his thumbnail. “I just hate that. It’s all anyone does round here, walk through the day going click click click, as if life means nothing unless you can show someone else later. It’s not real memory. What do they remember, all those tourists? Here’s where I took a photograph; here’s where I took a photograph; here’s where I took a photograph.”
His voice is hard and bitter, and I clutch Diana tightly in my hands.
“I do know what you mean,” I say, hesitating. I want to agree with him, to make him feel better. “But photographs can be more than memories. They can be art; something beautiful. They can show you the things you didn’t see.”
I hesitate again, picturing the prints pinned above my bunk bed: the silhouette girl, the empty space where Red should be. Fozzie’s blank look at my unfocused snap of a cloudy square of sky and a patch of grass. The mobile phone in silhouette-girl’s pocket, waiting to ring.
“And what’s in a picture, it’s not only one thing. It depends who’s looking.”
Merlin’s hazel eyes, hiding behind their smudgy rings of liner, slide away from the shuffling cards up to mine. He sucks on his bottom lip, visibly thinking. One eyebrow quirks, as if he can see a different me now too.
“Get us, deep philosophers,” he says eventually, smiling, embarrassed.
“Oh yeah,” I say, nodding. “Intellectual birthday parties: it’s the next big thing.”
“Right, right. Happy birthday.” He laughs. “So, did your spirit guide get an invite?”
“Yeah, she’s just over there,” I say, giving Red at the mouth of the cave another little wave.
“Eating a slice of cake, right?”
“Spirit guides can’t eat cake. Their hands go right through it, like smoke. It’s a bit gutting for them, actually.”
Merlin looks at me and sighs: fond, like a teacher with a silly pupil. He sits up straighter, presses the cards into my hands, and makes me fan them out, the backs facing me. He sucks on his lip again, skims finger and thumb across the tops, and plucks out one card, pressing it to his chest.
“Come on then, let’s have it. Now you say, I shall guess the card you have chosen,” he prompts.
His eyes glitter in the firelight, full of challenge.
I nod seriously, then let my eyes drift as if I’m tuning in to some other frequency, directly to where Red is leaning against the rock, the flicker of the campfire between us. All she needs to do is come a little closer, lean over his shoulder, and whisper the answer to me.
But Red’s not catching my eye. She’s looking at Merlin through the smoke, eyes wide and warm; lips, just parted, curving into a giveaway smile. A Tigerlily smile.
Red likes Merlin.
Red likes Merlin. The way Tiger likes Catrin.
I look at him again. His eyes glow orange from the campfire. His face is all angles, cheekbones and nose: dark shadows, pale curves. I want to touch his cheek. Stroke it. Run my thumb along his jaw, touch his full lips. . .
An “Oh,” spills out of my mouth.
“Can’t you read my mind?” says Merlin, feigning lightness, his eyes still intense.
“Um. Apparently not today,” I say breathlessly, and hope to god he can’t read mine.
I like Merlin too.
I’ve never felt it before, so it might just be smoke inhalation or all those Weetabix, but there’s definitely something funny going on in my chest.
Is this why they put love hearts on Valentine’s Day things? That’s where I can feel it: inside my ribs, a fluttering, like a bird in a cage that’s trying to get out.
I want to kiss him. My lips feel tight and tingly. Is that what that is?
I look across the fire to find Red’s eyes: for confirmation, that I’m reading this right.
Her eyes are already on me, her face schooled, blank. The moment our eyes meet, she ducks out of sight, away from the cave.
I shiver, and Merlin’s face falls.
“You all right?” he says, dropping his card as I shiver again.
He strips off his tailcoat to drape it round my shoulders, his hand brushing my bare neck and sending a quiver down my spine.
He likes me back, the quiver says.
The coat is warm from his body, warm and too big. It smells like spearmint gum and woodsmoke.
“Seven of clubs,” I murmur as I stumble to my feet. “Sorry, I have to – I’ll be right back, I promise.”
“What – oh,” he laughs, picking the card off the ground where it’s fallen, face up. “That’s cheating!” he calls after me.
I throw up my hands in apology as I whirl through the smoke, past the crackly fire and up out of the dip on to the beach. It’s dusky outside, and I peer into the gloom, gazing down the beach for Red.
She’s sitting on a rock at the base of the cliff, not so far away. It
’s as if she’s waiting for me, though she still looks surprised to see me bundled up in Merlin’s coat, tails flapping in the wind.
I stride across the pebbles, not even glancing back to see who might be listening.
“You like Merlin,” I say: statement, question, whichever.
“I like Merlin,” she says.
“So. Right. So – does that mean he’s going to be. Um. My boyfriend?”
Red looks at her hands, tucks her flapping hair behind her ear, and swallows.
“I don’t know,” she says. “When this was my Penkerry summer, we never even met.”
10. A Two-Flavours Problem
I don’t understand. Perhaps some rocks have fallen on my head. Perhaps the campfire has made me sleepy and this is some kind of barmy dream – because Red is still talking in a low, colourless voice, and none of it makes sense.
“Fozzie was never my best friend,” Red says, looking at her bare knees. “I never hung around with the fairground gang, not when I was here. Believe me, I wanted to. I was lonely, bored. But I saw that girl nearly fall from the Red Dragon, just like you did: didn’t dare even set foot in the fairground for that first week. Even once I had, all I did was watch them. I used to go to The Shed nearly every day; listen to them mucking about, wishing I knew how to start up a conversation. Watching Merlin. Fozzie was always friendly enough, but I was never anything more than a customer. That funny girl who sits in the corner, not talking.”
I can’t imagine Red being that girl.
But I can imagine Blue doing it. I’d be doing it too, if it wasn’t for her.
“Not exactly the best summer ever,” Red says. She tries to crack a smile, but her eyes are stuck on sad.
“But you said. . .” I start, but I barely know where to begin. “You said that’s why you wished yourself back: because being in Penkerry was so brilliant.”
