Lost Summer

by Stuart Harrison

Back the way they’d come two tiny figures were visible more than a mile away, moving slowly up the steepest part of the hill.

  Adam had pulled a book from his pack and started reading while David sat with his feet dangling over the edge of the rocks, chewing on a stem of grass.

  ‘What’s that you’re reading?’ David asked after a while.

  Adam silently held it up so that he could see the cover but he didn’t say anything.

  ‘The Crystal Cave? What’s it about?’

  ‘I’ll let you read it when I’ve finished.’ He was being sarcastic because David didn’t read anything unless it was about sport.

  For a while David tossed small pieces of rock out into the open, seeing how far he could throw them. Eventually he stopped and said, ‘What’s up with you?’

  Adam put his book down. ‘So, now you’re talking to me again, is that it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Come on. You haven’t said a bloody word since we left the others.’

  David found another stone, and threw it hard out into the air where it dropped from sight.

  ‘I just said it without thinking,’ Adam said. ‘For Christ’s sake I didn’t mean to embarrass him or anything.’

  But if David had heard him, he didn’t give any sign of it. He picked up another stone and threw it out into the air.

  ‘How do you think he got that bruise anyway?’ Adam said, though David kept his back turned and didn’t reply. He sensed that David’s refusal to talk about it stemmed from loyalty to Nick, but the reasons behind it were something Adam was excluded from. At first he’d tried to make friends with Nick, but every gesture he’d made was openly rejected. Once Kyle had offered to give all four of them a lift to Carlisle so they could go to a film they all wanted to see but Nick had refused to go at the last minute even though Kyle had said he’d pay for all of them. It had developed into an argument and in the end Adam had had enough.

  ‘You’d go if David’s dad was paying though wouldn’t you?’

  Nick had glared at him and clenched his fists. ‘Fuck you, grammar boy!’

  For a second Adam had thought Nick was going to throw a punch. David and Graham were looking on silently and in that moment Adam had realized that if he and Nick had a fight they would be forced to take sides. That afterwards no matter who won or lost nothing would be the same again. He knew they wanted to see the film and it was obvious that Nick was being unreasonable, but he sensed that they would side with Nick. Even as the realization hit him David had stepped in.

  ‘I changed my mind about the film anyway. Let’s go fishing instead.’

  It was meant to defuse the situation and Adam knew it. But he also knew Nick had won a subtle battle. They had gone fishing, but Adam had never forgotten how he’d felt.

  Watching David’s back as he threw stones from the edge of the Giant’s Chair Adam knew it was pointless to push it. He went back to his book and after a few minutes David started whistling and murmuring snatches of a song. After a while he gestured to the view.

  ‘This is great isn’t it? I’m never leaving here.’

  Adam looked up. ‘What about if you go to university?’

  ‘Why would I do that? I’m going to work for my dad when I leave school. What about you, Adam, what are you going to do?’

  He thought about it. He wanted to be a journalist and work for a newspaper. ‘Go back to London one day, I suppose.’

  David shook his head. ‘You’re a city boy. Do you miss it?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘I’d feel out of place there,’ David said.

  The others had eventually caught up and they had spent the day rabbiting.

  ‘Have you ever done that?’ Adam asked, to which Morris replied that he hadn’t. ‘What happens is you find a warren and net all the holes then shove a ferret down one of them to flush out the rabbits. In theory anyway.’

  He’d never really enjoyed that kind of thing. He only tagged along fishing, shooting and rabbiting with the others because that was what they did.

  Nick had become frustrated that day because his ferret kept killing rabbits down the holes instead of chasing them out. Then the ferret would go to sleep and Nick would have to dig it out. The others had taken it in their stride but if it hadn’t been for the satisfaction of seeing Nick thwarted Adam would have been bored out of his skull.

  Late in the day they had found another warren and when they were finished Nick came and checked the last hole Adam had netted. He kicked at one of the pegs and when it came out of the ground easily he sneered.

  ‘That wouldn’t hold a bloody mouse.’

  The others looked on without comment while Nick made a show of doing the job himself.

  ‘He did it to humiliate me,’ Adam told Morris. ‘And to make a point. He was always doing that kind of thing.’

  Finally Nick had sent his ferret down a hole. An hour or so passed before it was clear that once again he would have to dig it out again. He set to with a short spade, his face set in anger while Adam lay in the sun watching with quiet satisfaction.

  It took Nick half an hour to find his ferret. He bent down to pluck it from the ground and Adam got up, hoping that perhaps now they could go home. But instead of returning it to the sack Nick pinned the ferret to the ground with his foot. The animal squirmed briefly under the pressure and then almost carelessly Nick raised his spade and then suddenly jerked the blade downwards and the ferret was still. Without a word Nick wiped the blood off on the grass.

  Adam was silent, recalling his mingled shock and revulsion.

  ‘A few days later David tried to explain that Nick had to do what he did because the ferret was no good. Looking back I suppose Nick’s family probably ate what he caught but I didn’t see it that way then.’

  ‘But it made you feel different from them.’

  Adam nodded. ‘I was different.’

  That night Adam stayed late at his office. He was thinking about the Mounts, both of whom he’d gotten to know while he’d been looking for their daughter. They were lucky, they had found strength in each other, but the strain was indelibly etched in their faces. A kind of haunted look. It was the not knowing, they had told him, which was the hardest thing to bear. It always was. He looked at the photographs of their daughter on the wall. He had a feeling about her, that she was slipping away as he got closer. It was always like that. The ones he found left him in peace. Those in his dreams were the ones he never found.

  Louise was asleep when he got home. He went into their room and for a little while he stood inside the door watching her in the dim light that leaked in from the landing. She bore a physical resemblance to many of the women he’d been out with over the years and she wasn’t the first to tell him that he worked too hard, or that there was a part of him she felt he kept locked away from her.

  Quietly he closed the door and went to the couch in the living room.

  His leg was aching as it sometimes did when the weather was damp. He sat down and kneaded the ridged and scarred flesh. It still looked red and inflamed after all these years.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘Last time we talked you told me that despite your friendship with David you felt different from the other boys. Why do you think that was?’

  ‘Different reasons,’ Adam replied from the window. It was raining outside, a fine misty drizzle that hung like vapour in the air. ‘We had different experiences. Castleton was a small rural town and I’d grown up in Hampstead. The two places were worlds apart.’

  ‘But you tried to fit in?’

  ‘I suppose that’s human nature isn’t it? To belong to the tribe.’

  ‘For most people it is,’ Morris agreed. ‘Generally speaking we look for others like ourselves to associate with. The friends of Arsenal supporters are usually other Arsenal supporters.’

  Adam smiled. ‘If you’re going to use football as an analogy I suppose I felt like a reserve. When Nick wasn’t around I was brought on to play, I felt like
one of the team, but then Nick would turn up and I’d be back on the sidelines.’

  ‘During our last session you said that you thought Nick was jealous of your friendship with David. Was that because you shared experiences with David, like school, that Nick was excluded from?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘But you felt excluded from some of the experiences that Nick and David had in common. So, were you jealous of Nick?’

  Adam had never thought of it that way. ‘If I’m honest I suppose the answer is yes.’

  ‘It sounds almost as if you were in competition with each other, in a sense, for David’s friendship.’

  ‘I don’t think I felt that way,’ Adam said.

  ‘How did you feel?’

  ‘It was more like feeling a constant need to prove myself.’

  ‘To whom?’

  ‘I suppose to David. I wanted our friendship to be as important to him as Nick’s evidently was.’

  ‘You didn’t think it was?’

  ‘Going back to the football analogy I felt as if I was always fighting for my place on the team. I was looking to score the goal that would finally cement my place. I mean it wasn’t simply about David, it was about acceptance in the wider sense.’

  ‘And did you? Score that goal?’

  ‘I thought I had,’ Adam said.

  Morris rested his chin thoughtfully on his steepled fingers. He sensed that this was what Adam had been leading up to.

  The year was 1985 and spring had been unusually warm and dry. By summer the country was baking in a heat wave. Adam had turned sixteen and had a holiday job at the Courier in Carlisle. The pay was terrible, and his job was mostly running errands and making coffee, but at least he got to see how a real newspaper worked, even if it was only a local daily where news meant local horse shows and reports of council meetings.

  The editor was a dour Yorkshireman who spent most of his time secluded in his glass-walled office. Now and then he would emerge and gruffly summon one of the reporters. The door would close and the unlucky victim would have to sit in full view of the rest of the office while his or her work was savagely criticized. The only person who escaped these sessions was the paper’s senior reporter who, alone it seemed, had the editor’s respect.

  Adam had been at the paper for three weeks the first time he spoke to Jim Findlay. He was standing at the photocopier feeding endless sheets of paper into the machine when Findlay paused on his way past.

  ‘Adam isn’t it?’

  Findlay was rarely in the office. He did most of his work from the pub on the corner, where he habitually sat at a table in a sunny corner by the window with a pint glass and a whisky in front of him and an ashtray brimming with cigarette butts. He was Scottish and spoke with a broad accent. He looked to be in his forties, and had thinning hair that was turning grey and mournful eyes that gazed on the world with a kind of weary resignation.

  ‘Yes it is,’ Adam answered, recovering from his surprise.

  Findlay nodded. ‘How’re you liking our wee paper then?’

  ‘It’s fine. I mean, I’m enjoying working here.’

  ‘Is that so? I expect you’ll be wanting to become a journalist yerself one day, is that it?’

  ‘Hopefully, after university anyway.’

  Findlay seemed amused. ‘University eh? You’ll no’ want to be working at a place like this then. I’ll expect you’ve bigger plans.’

  There was something faintly mocking in his tone, though Adam didn’t feel that he was the target, but rather that Findlay was mocking himself. The humour in his eyes faded and was replaced with something closer to regret. He placed a hand briefly on Adam’s shoulder.

  ‘Don’t mind me laddie,’ he said, and with that he wandered off.

  At the end of the day Adam caught a bus back to Castleton. It was a sunny late afternoon, the heat of the day trapped in the narrow lanes between the hedgerows. In the fields the grass was drying to pale yellow. The hedgerows of hawthorn and crab apple and cow parsley were in full bloom. Towards the woods the air shimmered in a haze.

  As the bus rounded a bend and crossed a stone bridge, a cluster of vehicles and caravans parked in a cut off the bridleway came into view. A grey horse was tethered to a tree stump near an ancient truck and smoke drifted lazily across the river. Back in April Adam had first seen the camp on the way home from school. David had stayed late for cricket practice and the only other person on the bus had been an old man who sat across the aisle. He had pale skin and thin wispy hair and his eyes were rheumy and red-tinged.

  ‘Gypsies,’ he’d muttered. ‘Come around every few years they do.’ His mouth turned down in a grimace and he said something quietly to himself.

  A little further along the road the bus had stopped and the old man got off and walked towards some cottages set back from the lane. The bus had barely moved off when it slowed again and pulled hard over so that the hedge scraped against the side. Out of the window Adam saw a brown horse carrying three figures on its back. Two were small children, and behind them was an older girl of perhaps seventeen or so. Her head was almost level with Adam so that as she passed by only the glass and a few feet of space separated them. He registered wide, dark eyes, a full mouth, and thick, unruly, almost jet-black hair. She stared back at him without expression. She wore a simple shapeless plain cotton dress. After she had passed he looked back and glimpsed her bare legs and the full rounded shape of her breasts against the material of her dress. The horse had no saddle and only a rope for a bridle. As he watched the girl kicked her bare heels into the horse’s flanks, and then the bus turned a bend and they were lost from sight.

  The gypsies had stayed throughout the spring and into the summer. The old women called at houses selling lucky charms and muttering curses if they found a door slammed in their faces. The rate of break-ins and petty crime in the area rose, which people generally attributed to the gypsies. Johnson’s sawmill was broken into one night and a load of lumber stolen, but though the police went to the gypsy camp none of it was ever recovered. Kyle warned Adam to steer clear of them.

  When the bus reached the square in Castleton, Adam crossed the street towards the newsagent’s with his jacket slung over his shoulder. The bell above the door rang as he went inside. He paused, allowing his eyes to adjust to the comparative gloom. The shop smelt of sherbet and liquorice, underlain with the whiff of tobacco. Angela smiled when she saw him.

  ‘Hello, Adam.’

  ‘Hi.’ He went to the fridge and took out a cold bottle of coke. ‘Hot out there.’

  ‘It’s lovely.’ Angela pulled a face. ‘Not that I would know. I’ve been stuck in here all day.’

  He handed her some money, and as she operated the register her smock tightened over the swell of her breasts. His gaze lingered for a fraction of a second and then he fixed his eye on the magazine rack.

  ‘Here’s your change.’

  ‘Oh, thanks.’ He feigned distraction, hoping she wouldn’t notice the flush of colour creeping into his cheeks. Her eyes were blue, but unlike any blue he had ever seen. Pale, but shimmering with light. Her long pale yellow hair was bleached in highlights by the summer sun, her arms brushed with a light tan.

  ‘How’s your job going?’ she asked him.

  ‘Fine. I like it.’

  ‘Are you going to the disco?’ She gestured to the notice board on the back of the door where a bright orange flyer advertised a disco at the church hall at the weekend.

  ‘Are you?’ he asked impulsively. He realized his question could almost be construed as asking her out and he felt his cheeks burn. He wished the ground would open up and swallow him whole. If she noticed, however, she didn’t let on.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered.

  The door opened. ‘Well, I better go,’ Adam said, relieved and disappointed at the same time.

  ‘See you at the weekend then.’

  ‘Right. See you there.’ As he left he caught the eye of a woman coming in. She smiled at him.


  He walked down through the town to the bridge and then along the path across the water meadow. On the far side Johnson’s sawmill was hidden in a copse. The familiar tangy scent of cut pine and sawdust hung in the air. The gates were open and two trucks were parked in the yard outside the cutting shed. The saws were silent. On one side of the yard stood a two-storey wooden building with an outside staircase that led to the office door. Underneath was a room where the men had their tea. Every morning Adam left his bike around the back before he caught the bus to Carlisle.

  As he passed the open tearoom door he almost tripped over Nick who was sitting outside smoking a cigarette in the shade. He had left school by then and was working full time at the sawmill.

  ‘Sorry, didn’t see you there.’

  Nick squinted up at him, his expression managing to look like a sneer, though it might have been the sun. ‘Been working hard then? All that sharpening pencils and making the tea, you must be knackered.’

  Adam ignored the sarcasm and stepped over Nick’s legs.

  ‘Better watch you don’t get a blister on your little finger.’

  ‘I’ll try to remember that. Is David around?’

  Nick shrugged unhelpfully and picked a shred of tobacco off his lip. ‘Somewhere.’

  Just then David appeared at the top of the stairs. He was tanned and muscular from working outdoors in the sun, in contrast to Nick, whose face remained pale beneath his black hair and who still looked like a skinny kid.

  ‘Have you finished?’ Adam asked. He was thinking that they could go down to the river for a swim but David shook his head.

  ‘We’re working late today. There’s an order that needs doing.’ He aimed a kick at Nick’s foot. ‘Come on. We’ll see you tomorrow, Adam.’

  Adam watched as they headed towards the shed and Nick laughed at something David said. He knew that when Nick had applied for a full-time job a few months earlier David’s dad hadn’t been too keen on the idea. Adam had overheard David pleading Nick’s case, insisting that Nick couldn’t be blamed for the way his dad was, and though in the end Mr Johnson had conceded, Adam had the feeling he’d never really been happy about it. He wondered if Nick knew about that.