Bringing the Summer

by Julia Green

  ‘You’re bound to get in.’ I make a sad face. ‘I’ve just got to know you, and now you’ll be off.’

  ‘Not till next September. And you can visit,’ he says. ‘Like you visit Theo.’

  For a second I’m so taken aback I’m speechless. He knows! How? Did Miranda tell him? Theo?

  Gabes gets up. ‘Want another coffee? I’m getting me one.’

  I shake my head. ‘No thanks.’ My voice comes out weird. I know my face must be scarlet: I’ve gone hot all over.

  I’m so totally embarrassed I can’t think. I watch him standing at the counter ordering his coffee. He turns for a moment, and catches my eye. He’s so very good-looking, with his golden, curly hair and startlingly blue eyes, and so very different from Theo you’d never guess they were brothers.

  I didn’t expect this.

  Gabes brings his coffee back to the table and sits down next to me. He stretches his long legs out under the table and sits back in his chair, stirring in a spoonful of sugar, acting too casual, as if he’s not bothered.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say at last. ‘I should have told you straight away about meeting up with Theo.’

  Gabes frowns. He carries on stirring. ‘It’s none of my business, really,’ he says. ‘You’re a free agent.’

  I wait.

  There’s a horrible silence before he starts talking again. ‘But my brother, Freya? A bit insensitive, don’t you think? Not even to mention it.’

  ‘It’s not like you think.’

  ‘What do I think?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. This is really embarrassing, Gabes. But you and me, well, we’ve just been friends all this time, haven’t we? I mean, you didn’t seem interested in me, not in that way . . . least, that’s what I thought; not like girl and boyfriend I mean, and of course that’s fine, if it’s what you want, and it’s kind of the same with Theo but . . . except . . .’ I run out of words.

  ‘Except?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ My voice fades.

  ‘He fancied you right from the start, didn’t he? I should have realised.’ Gabes turns to look me right in the eyes. ‘That’s so typical of him, you know? He doesn’t have a clue what friendship means. He’s jealous of it, so he has to mess it up for me. It’s like a kind of base instinct with him when he can’t have something: to destroy it for someone else.’

  I look down at the table. I fold the paper napkin over and over, into tight white squares. This is horrible.

  ‘You should be very careful of Theo,’ Gabes says slowly, after a long silence.

  I don’t ask him what he means. He’s warning me, and I kind of know he’s right, but I don’t want to hear any more.

  Across the room, Miranda is watching. She half smiles, and turns away.

  I feel sick, suddenly. Claustrophobic.

  ‘I need to go,’ I say. I grab my coat and my bag and push open the door, out into the street.

  I stand for a second on the busy square. The fruit-stall people are packing up. Pigeons are pecking at the scraps in the gutter. The big tree in the middle of the square is twinkling with fairy lights hung along the branches. Above the tall buildings that surround the square, the sky is a deep navy blue.

  I blink tears away. This is ridiculous. I haven’t done anything wrong. Not really. Have I? I’ve kept some secrets. Got close to two brothers. It’s hardly a crime, is it? Why can’t I be friends with both of them?

  I glance back at the café. It looks cosy and comforting, all lit up. And then, when I look more carefully, I see Miranda, sitting exactly where I was a few minutes ago, leaning forward, talking to Gabes.

  I turn away. I start the walk home alone through the crowded streets. Town’s been busy like this since half-term: coachloads of people doing Christmas shopping. I have to push through crowds of tourists staring up at the decorations in the Abbey courtyard. The noise and the people grate on my nerves. I shove and push through the people waiting at the park and ride bus stops, past the queues waiting for the cash machine outside the supermarket, past the church and the library. I start walking home up the hill: the pavements are emptier here, now that I’m passing houses and flats and pubs instead of shops. I begin to calm down.

  It’s nearly six by the time I get back, but neither Mum or Dad are home. They seem to be working later and later. I remember, as soon I see her note, that Mum said she was going straight from work to a talk at the university to do with her landscape gardening course. There’s macaroni cheese ready to be heated up for my supper, and salad in the fridge.

  I can’t be bothered to heat the food; I eat it straight from the bowl, cold, standing at the kitchen window. I don’t eat any salad. I go upstairs and lie on my bed. I don’t bother to turn my light on. I stay there for ages. Eventually, I crawl over to the desk, switch on the lamp, haul my bag up on to my lap and look for my homework notebook.

  Art coursework due on Monday. Biology test: Friday. That’s tomorrow. I pull out my Biology file and start reading the notes. I make myself focus.

  Twenty

  ‘You’ve got some post,’ Mum says as I come in the door after college on Friday. ‘Looks like an enormous Christmas card. Wonder who it’s from?’

  ‘Mum! You’re so nosy!’

  I pick up the envelope from the kitchen table and take it upstairs with me. I don’t recognise the handwriting.

  I open it.

  It’s from Danny.

  Not a card, but an Advent calendar. Not a glitzy one or one with chocolates, but home-made specially for me: he’s drawn a picture with pen and ink, painted it, stuck on glitter sprinkles, made the little doors with numbers and everything. The picture is a map of St Ailla, with the beaches and the lighthouse and the post office shop and the farm and campsite and everything. He’s drawn tiny Christmas lights along the rigging of the little ferry moored up in the bay.

  There’s a note on a scrap of paper.

  You can open all the doors up to today (whatever day this gets to you, that is) but then you must promise only to open one a day till Christmas Eve. No cheating! Dan x

  The doors are tiny. I prise open the first one with my fingernail, very carefully. Inside, there’s a little fish, swimming in turquoise sea. I open eleven doors, one after the other. Everything’s in miniature. A tiny border collie dog, like Bess at the farm; a crab pot; a rowing gig; a fire on a beach; three mackerel on a fishing line; my blue notebook; a pebble; my special glass bead; a paper lantern with a candle inside; two wetsuits hanging on a line; a tent. He’s drawn each little picture in black ink and then touched in the colours delicately with a watercolour wash. I had no idea he could even draw.

  For a split second I’m almost jealous that I didn’t have the idea first. But I’d never have thought of making an Advent calendar for Danny. Who now calls himself Dan, I notice.

  I imagine him poring over the paper, his dark hair falling forwards over his face, concentrating. I stare at the tiny pictures. They bring my island summers so sharply into focus that for a moment I am full of longing to be there – to be sitting in Evie and Gramps’ solid stone house, or running up to the downs, the sound of the sea drumming in my head. I want to be climbing up, up one of the rocky stacks on the wild side of the island, right to the top, the wind blowing my hair back as I stand, arms outstretched, taking in the whole panorama of our island and all the other islands stretching beyond, dark shapes floating on a bright sea.

  Dear Danny. Dan.

  I am utterly touched – it’s the nicest present anyone could have given me, and so totally unexpected. I work out that each of the little pictures is a reference to something we’ve done together or something I’ve told him about. I prop the calendar up on my table against the lamp. Just looking at it makes me smile.

  But I don’t stay happy for long. It’s Friday night, and I’m not going anywhere. No one’s phoned or texted me. I daren’t call Miranda. I have the horrible feeling that she’s never going to talk to me again. Right now she’s probably out with Charlie and Tabitha
and Ellie and everyone – Gabes, even – having fun. I wonder what she’s been saying about me. I feel really alone.

  Theo will be back at Home Farm this weekend.

  But I don’t phone him, and he doesn’t phone me.

  After a while I stop moping and pull myself together. I might as well make the most of my spare evening. I’ve got loads of work to finish for college. I need to plan what to get for Christmas presents for everyone.

  I go looking for Mum. I find her sitting at the desk in her newly painted study with the blue curtains and white walls, a big pad of paper spread out in front of her.

  ‘What can I send Evie and Gramps for Christmas?’

  ‘Something you’ve made?’ Mum says. ‘They don’t really need anything.’ She puts her arm round my waist and pulls me closer to her. ‘Most of all they’d like to see you, Freya. Perhaps you could arrange a date to go over? The Easter holidays, or spring half-term, when the weather will be better.’

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ I ask her.

  ‘Planning out a garden, for a new client. Dad’s client, in fact, but they’re going to be guinea pigs for my first proper design.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Yes. I’m pleased.’ She takes her arm away, and flips back a page to show me what she’s done so far. ‘I need to get on, Freya. I’ve got so much to do at the moment.’ She looks up at me briefly. ‘You’re OK, aren’t you? I don’t seem to have spent much time with you lately. But I guess you’ve got plenty on too. You’re busy with your own friends.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say, though I’m not. I drift towards the door. I almost tell her about Theo. About Bridie and Gabes and Miranda and everything. I’d like to, really. But she’s busy working again, head bent low, concentrating on her design. This isn’t the right time. I pad downstairs into the kitchen and make myself tea.

  I flick through the stack of drawings and paintings in my portfolio. It will need to be something small enough to frame and post. I pull out the one I did back in September, of a girl swimming out to sea, viewed from high up, as if we are looking with a seagull’s eye, with the space of air and light between. It’s still my favourite.

  I rummage through my bits of paper and card to find some mounting board, and get my special knife from my pencil case, for cutting the edges. It’s one of the cool things we’ve learned this term, how to mount a picture properly, with a bevelled edge. It takes two goes to get it right. I turn the board over and in pencil with my best handwriting, I write the title of the painting: Into the Wild Blue. I sign my name. It’s going to be too heavy to post if I get a wooden frame for it, so I decide not to. I wrap it up in layers of white tissue paper and bubble wrap and then some shiny blue paper from the box of recycled wrapping paper we keep under the stairs. I write on a small square of card: Happy Christmas to dearest Evie and Gramps with all my love from Freya xxxxx, wrap the whole thing in brown paper and address the package.

  I’ll post it tomorrow.

  I sort out Mum and Dad’s present, next, and then I try to think of something I could send to Danny. I scan in the drawing I did of him in the summer, fishing for mackerel off the rocks. I make it into a card. I don’t write much, just Happy Christmas, and love Freya.

  And then I think about Miranda: even if she isn’t speaking to me, I still have to send her something. I can’t bear not to. So I make another card for her from the same little sketch of Beady Pool that I used as the inspiration for Mum and Dad’s watercolour painting. Next I go through a load of photos to find one of us together, that I can print out and frame for her as a present. If we ever see each other again, that is.

  Dad comes back from his latest work trip at about ten thirty; I hear voices, him laughing with Mum downstairs, the chink of wine glasses, and then music drifts upstairs and I can’t hear anything else. I check my phone for the millionth time but there are still no messages.

  Is Miranda waiting for me to say sorry? I text the words, and wait, but nothing comes back from her. Just before I go to sleep, I send a message to Danny.

  Thank you for the beautiful calendar xxx

  In the morning when I go downstairs, I find Mum and Dad already up, drinking coffee at the kitchen table.

  Dad smiles at me over the Saturday review pages. ‘Hello, stranger! OK?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Got plans for the day, Freya?’ Mum asks.

  ‘Thought I’d go swimming,’ I say. ‘I haven’t been for ages.’

  ‘Great idea. Want a lift down? I’ll be going shopping later.’

  I shake my head. ‘I’ll go early, before the pool’s too busy. I can go on my bike.’

  ‘Town will be mad this morning,’ Dad says. ‘Take care on the roads.’

  I’ve forgotten about gloves, so by the time I’ve got halfway to the canal path my hands are frozen. This way along the towpath is a short cut and avoids the worst traffic on the London Road. It’s pretty, all covered in frost, the sun breaking through the mist. I ring my bell to warn the dog walkers as I bowl past. I duck under the first two bridges. At the third one I stop: this is the turning for the track down to the riverside path to the leisure centre. If I went straight on, I’d pass by our old house, with its steep garden going down in terraces to the canal . . . the house where we were so happy together, with Joe . . .

  I turn off down the track. The river is high. The water swirls and eddies, dangerous and mud-brown, bearing whole trees along in the swift current. You’d never imagine you could swim in it in the summer, or that anyone might even want to.

  It’s been a while since I’ve swum in an indoor pool. The sounds echo round your head, the water seems dead and sludgy. It stinks of chlorine. But after a while I get into a rhythm up and down the pool in one of the roped-off lanes, and it’s good to be making my body really work. After about thirty lengths of front crawl, my mind begins to calm down. My thoughts stop racing. It’s as if the jagged edges have been ironed out. I breathe more deeply. Let it all go, I tell myself. Miranda, Gabes, all that. None of it matters. Things will be all right. I do another ten lengths, breaststroke this time. I float for a while on my back.

  The clock ticks round. The pool begins to fill up with screaming kids, families. I climb out. My legs feel wobbly and achey from the exercise: I suppose I’ve got out of the habit the last few weeks. It doesn’t take long to lose fitness. Under the shower I start to remember all the things I don’t like about the changing rooms: the dirty floor; the hairs clogging the drains. Queuing to use the hairdryers. I put my wet towel and swimsuit and goggles into my bag and go outside. It’s only eleven fifteen.

  I wheel my bike along the road into the town centre. It’s heaving with Christmas shoppers. I stop off at the post office to send my parcel to St Ailla: there’s a huge queue, and they’ve got some stupid new system. I take the ticket for my turn and sit down on one of the new seats, the parcel on my lap. Staring at the address makes me think about Evie and Gramps having a quiet island Christmas, without Joe or me, and my eyes suddenly fill with tears.

  My phone bleeps with a new message.

  Theo!

  Film at 7.30ish? Meet inside cinema?

  Yes! I text back.

  He must have come back from Oxford last night with Beth. And he’s thinking about me.

  The day begins to get brighter.

  It takes me ages to decide what to wear. I’m not normally so self-conscious. I try a short skirt with black leggings and boots, and then change back to jeans. Nothing looks right. I brush my hair a million times, to make it shiny, and try pinning it up loosely with my silver butterfly clip, and then I give up on that too.

  Mum looks up as I slip past her door. ‘You going out, Freya? I haven’t even thought about supper yet!’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘I had a sandwich earlier.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Just a film.’

  ‘Don’t walk back by yourself if it’s late. Call us for a lift if you need one.’

  Dad’s
outside in the garage, making something. He waves as I go past. ‘Have fun!’

  A kind of bleakness washes over me again, like last night. It’s as if I don’t properly belong here, in this house. It isn’t a family house. Ours isn’t a real family any more. I feel as if I might just blow away: there’s nothing holding me down, keeping me safe.

  I arrive at the cinema five minutes early. For the next twenty-five minutes I imagine he’s not going to turn up after all, and that everyone going past will know I’m a total loser with no friends. For a second I think I glimpse Miranda in a crowd of people going into Screen One. I look away quickly and pretend to study the posters on the wall.

  At last I see him: pale face, dark clothes, messy hair. He weaves through the crowds of people in the foyer towards me.

  ‘You’re really late!’ I say.

  ‘Am I? Sorry. Got caught up with stuff. Shall we get tickets, then?’

  The two decent films are sold out, and there’s no way I want to sit through either of the others: a meant-to-be-funny one about a teacher and a nativity play, or a dreary action movie.

  Theo looks cross.

  ‘It’s your fault for being so late,’ I tell him.

  ‘Well, since you were waiting here, why didn’t you just get two tickets?’

  ‘Because we hadn’t agreed which film! Honestly, Theo!’

  ‘You should have chosen one you wanted to see, seeing as you are so picky.’

  Already we’re pitching into an argument. We seem to do that every time we first meet. I bite back my reply. No point making things worse.

  ‘What now? I’ve got the van. We can go somewhere else,’ Theo says.

  ‘The van?’

  ‘Mum’s van. Beth wouldn’t let me take her car.’

  ‘I didn’t know you could drive!’

  ‘I don’t need to in Oxford. But I can.’

  For some reason I feel slightly scared. It’s not that I don’t trust him, exactly . . . If Maddie lends him her van she must reckon he’s safe. But he’s still got that angry look in his eyes, a bit reckless and wild, which makes me wary.