by Julia Green
Simon Piper.
He’s funny and cute; give him another four years or so and he’ll be cool and hunky. He is an outdoors freak. I haven’t a clue what he’s talking about some of the time. He knows lots of facts about things. We have quite a laugh. He is much nicer than I expected.
Matt Davies.
Has the bluest eyes. Dark hair that curls over his collar. His blue linen collar!! Mature. Sensitive. With the most soooo kissable lips. When he left their house this morning he looked right at me. That’s twice now. The time in the bookshop. And today.
Nina Piper. Nina Davies.
Leah Davies.
I can feel that something is changing. Something is going to happen to me soon.
Leah lets the pen doodle along the diary page. It loops and spirals. She draws a butterfly. She draws another. Then a flower with a big round middle and five petals, like Ellie might draw. She gives it two eyes, then a mouth. A happy face, with turned-up lips in a smile. She draws a whole row of flowers, and then a smaller butterfly above them, and dotted lines to show the path of its flight, dipping from flower to flower: a series of brief encounters.
She daydreams a while longer about Matt Davies.
Simon’s mum is too old for him. She must be nearly forty, and she doesn’t exactly make an effort. Her hair, for instance. She should get highlights or some colour, to cover up the grey bits. Leah reaches over to her dressing table and picks up her brush. She pulls it through her hair, feeling it tug on her scalp, making it tingle. She turns so the sun shines on to her hair and reflects off it like gold. Imagines his hand rearranging it, turning her into a painting. Perhaps she can get Simon to wangle an invitation to his studio. They could go up there together.
She shifts closer to the window. Simon’s house looks dead, everyone out. What time is it?
She’s determined not to think about what’s happening downstairs in her own house.
It’s the last lesson, Monday afternoon. Only two days now till they break up. Simon and Pike are on their way to English. Johnny and Dan are in the other group (top set). He’s glad he’s got Pike. He’s even worse than Simon at spelling and reading aloud.
‘Oi! Simon! I’ve been wanting to see you. Come here, please.’ Mr Davies’s voice.
Damn! He’d hoped to sidle past the art rooms without Mr Davies noticing.
Pike looks at him and laughs. ‘Expect he’s got a message for your mum.’ He’s heard all about what happened at the weekend from Johnny and Dan.
‘Shut up!’ Simon says, shoving him. Pike nearly squashes some innocent girl walking down the corridor.
Mr Davies frowns at them both. ‘Your art homework?’ he asks Simon. ‘You’ve missed two, now, as well as a double lesson.’
Simon hangs his head. ‘Haven’t got it,’ he mutters.
‘You mean, not got it with you now, or not done it, full stop?’
‘Not done it.’
‘Excuse us,’ Mr Davies says to Pike. ‘We need a little chat, Mr Piper and I. Where are you two off to now?’
Mr Piper. That was his dad. A shiver goes down Simon’s spine. How dare he! He’d like to punch Mr Davies right there and then. He can’t stand that teachery way of talking.
‘English,’ Pike says. ‘With Miss Wooding.’
‘OK, Simon. I’ll be brief. Step in here a moment.’
‘I’ll tell Wooding for you.’ Pike grins at Simon. ‘Good luck.’
Simon watches him disappear along the corridor. Now he feels totally alone.
Mr Davies isn’t expecting a class; he’s got drawings laid out all over the tables: big charcoal ones, and pen and ink sketches, and one bright, beautiful abstract oil painting, like a peacock among the black and white drawings.
‘Good, isn’t it? One of my A-level students.’
Simon nods. His palms are sweating.
‘So, Simon, what’s happening? With the homework? It’s not like you.’
‘Haven’t done it.’
‘Why not?’
Simon shrugs. ‘Don’t know.’
‘Did you try?’
‘I drew something. Tore it up.’
‘Why?’
‘It was crap.’
‘Real reason?’
‘Don’t know.’
Silence.
‘I’ll be late for English,’ Simon mumbles.
Mr Davies’s voice sounds peculiar, as if he’s swallowed something and it’s stuck in his throat. ‘Don’t throw it all away, Simon. Not now. Just as some sort of petty protest…’
Simon can’t speak. Something’s welling up inside him: a huge fury, waiting to spill out in a torrent of filthy words. But he doesn’t say anything.
Mr Davies coughs, then he speaks more slowly and quietly, as if he’s deliberately calming himself down. ‘Your artwork has been fantastic. What I’ve seen since May. You have a rare talent. So just do one homework. For tomorrow. OK? Fresh start next term, for the new GCSE course.’
‘Can’t.’
‘What do you mean, can’t?’
‘I can’t draw. Not at the moment.’
‘Can’t, or won’t? This isn’t something to do with… with your mother and me, by any remote chance?’
Simon’s gone hot all over and then suddenly freezing.
Mr Davies moves away towards the window. Simon looks up. Mr Davies has his back to Simon and is staring at the sky. There’s a gull high up. Mr Davies has both his hands in his pockets.
‘OK,’ he says slowly, turning round to face Simon. ‘I guess we all have blocks from time to time. Creative people. Artists. Let’s leave it, this time. We can make a fresh start next term. I’m sorry it’s hard for you right now. It’ll get better.’
He’s backed down completely! Simon can hardly believe it.
Mr Davies starts picking up drawings off the table and examining them. ‘You could do stuff as good as this. Better, even.’
‘Can I go now?’ Simon asks. He feels slightly sick.
Mr Davies sighs heavily. ‘Yes. Don’t forget, Simon. You’re welcome at the studio, any time. Come with Nina in the holidays.’
Simon’s head is throbbing. He walks out of the art room without speaking. He doesn’t know what to think.
He’s fifteen minutes late for English, but Miss Wooding doesn’t mind. She’s showing them an old black and white film of To Kill a Mockingbird. It’ll be one of their set texts next term. He doesn’t really take any of it in.
Pike comes down to town with him after school. They take the bus all the way to the bus station, and then they walk along the seafront and down along the harbour wall. Pike’s dad is a fisherman, though not at this harbour. He works on a trawler at Newlyn. Pike doesn’t think there’ll be any fishing fleet left by the time he’s ready to work.
‘That’s only two years,’ Simon says. ‘Unless you stay on.’
‘What for?’ Pike says. He gets a crabbing line out of his pocket, sticks a bit of old sandwich on the hook and dangles it down over the harbour wall into the deep green water. ‘We need some proper bait really,’ he says. ‘Bacon, or sand eels.’
Simon leans back against the warm stones of the harbour wall. His head still aches, but it’s kind of comforting being with Pike.
There’s a figure of a man shambling along the pier end of the harbour. He seems familiar. Simon watches him for a while. He looks odd. He’s wearing a long heavy coat, even though it’s so sunny. Of course. It’s him again. ‘There’s that mad bloke,’ he says to Pike. ‘Who nearly shot me and Dan and Jon at the weekend.’ He doesn’t tell him about what happened later with Rick Singleton. He hasn’t told anyone about that, or about what he found when he finally went back in the evening to see if he could retrieve his stuff; how he found it all neatly packed up, back in the bag, and how three large shells had been placed on the folded tarp. Oyster shells. He shivers, remembering.
Pike laughs. ‘He’s all right,’ he says. ‘He just likes to keep an eye on things, that’s what my dad reckons.’
&nb
sp; Simon pulls a face. ‘But he’s still weird. Look at him. In that old coat. What’s he carrying, anyway?’
They both watch the man as he comes closer. Now they can see what it is in his arms.
‘It’s a bloody great seagull,’ Pike says. ‘A young one.’
‘What’s he doing? Told you he was weird!’
The bird is struggling to get free, flapping its speckledy wings and twisting its neck. Close up now, Simon can see something’s wrong with its beak. The man stops every so often and seems to put his hand right inside. The bird flails and flaps and squirms, but it can’t squawk.
‘It’s got something stuck,’ Pike says. ‘Fishing hook, probably. They swallow them sometimes. Trying to get the fish. Stupid things.’
They watch. The man’s managed to get the hook out. The bird lets out a huge croak and wriggles its neck, and then Mad Ed lets it go, throws it up into the air and the bird flaps and finds its own strength and soars away.
‘What’s the point?’ Pike asks. ‘There are too many gulls already.’
Rick Singleton comes into Simon’s mind again: him and his mates, circling that young gull. He wonders whether they broke the wing in the first place, and what they did to the bird after he’d gone.
‘Pity you can’t eat them,’ Simon says. ‘What do you reckon they’d taste like?’
‘Rotten fish. Garbage. Vomit.’
Mad Ed has shambled off again. They watch him go further along the wall and sit down on a bench.
‘I wonder what he’s doing in town,’ Pike says. ‘He stays up on the cliffs, usually. Or at the farm.’
‘He gives me the creeps,’ Simon says. ‘He’s watching us, you know.’
‘That’s what people always say. But what’s wrong with it? We’re watching him, aren’t we?’
Pike’s got no imagination, Simon thinks. He always thinks the best of everyone. Simon wonders whether to tell him what happened up at the burial mound, and about the catapult. But when he thinks how to say it, it doesn’t sound like anything worth telling Pike. He’d just find some perfectly logical explanation.
‘We’re not going to get any crabs,’ Pike says. ‘They’re not that stupid. They know we’ve only got bread on the hook.’
‘We should come back,’ Simon says. ‘Bring proper bait. Or we could fish off the rocks. And make a fire, cook fish and crab and stuff. Let’s do it on Wednesday. For the last day of term. They’ll let us out early, won’t they?’
Pike nods. He pulls up the crabbing line.
Mad Ed’s still watching them as they make their way back along the harbour, but Simon doesn’t mention it again.
On the way up the hill to his house he starts thinking about Leah. He’s supposed to be meeting her tomorrow. He can’t tell Pike about that, either.
Tuesday evening. Leah watches from her bedroom window. She’s arranged to meet Simon at eight. She’s been ready for ages. He appears at his gate at exactly five past. She goes down to meet him.
‘Ready?’ She smiles at him.
He nods.
‘What did you tell Nina?’
‘Said I was going for a walk. To see the burial mound. She liked that. It’s history. I said I might do some drawings. So it’s art too.’
She can see a small sketchpad stuffed into his pocket.
‘You didn’t mention me, then?’
He doesn’t answer.
‘She’s going to borrow some more books about stone burial chambers for me. I’ve been reading about the history of this place — ancient history, you know?’
Not really. But Leah makes a mental note to try to take an interest.
‘Why do you want to show me, anyway?’ she asks Simon.
‘I want to see if anything… happens. Like before.’
What’s he going on about? She remembers him saying something about hitting his head; she wasn’t really paying attention. He looks a bit weird this evening. Or maybe it’s just the light, all red and gold over him as they walk down the lane to the path. He walks slightly ahead of her as usual. He walks too fast. Every so often she has to jog to catch him up. She notices the hairs on his legs where he’s rolled up his blue trousers, his leather walking boots. Matt Davies might have looked a bit like this about sixteen years ago. Sixteen years! She’d have been just a baby!
She clambers over the stile after Simon, into the tunnel of trees that marks the beginning of the footpath.
He turns and waits for her to catch up. ‘This is called the Coffin Path,’ he says.
She gives an obliging shiver. ‘Creepy,’ she says.
‘They used to take the coffins this way from the farms when people died. To the church. I’ve been reading about it.’
Right. Whatever. Why’s he telling her this?
‘But the burial chamber is much older than that,’ he goes on. ‘Five thousand years. Neolithic.’
‘Is it far?’ She’s wearing flip-flops. Her feet ache.
‘No. Not really.’
They come out of the trees, over another stile, into a field. She shivers for real. Bare arms, midriff — should have brought a jacket.
‘It’s always windy here,’ Simon says. ‘Come on. You’ll warm up if we walk faster.’
Her flip-flops click against her heels as she shuffles over the rough grass track. After a while she takes them off and walks barefoot. The grass feels surprisingly warm.
The sun’s dropped low now, behind the hill. The sky’s a fantastic turquoise colour, like silk. Leah stumbles, grabs Simon’s arm. ‘Whoops!’ She hangs on.
He has to match his pace to hers, though all the time it feels as if he’s chafing to get away and go faster.
‘Why don’t you wear proper shoes?’ Simon asks, as she stops again to pick a small stone from her heel.
She shrugs. ‘How far now?’
‘Another two fields, I think.’
At the stile she sits for a moment on the top stone. It’s broad enough, almost like a seat. She closes her eyes. ‘Tired,’ she says to Simon, like a small child on a too-long walk.
‘That’s where they would have rested the coffin,’ Simon says. ‘Where you are.’
She shivers again. What did he have to say that for? He’s winding her up and it’s beginning to get to her, all this stuff about coffins and dead people. Even if it was a long time ago.
She climbs down the other side. ‘So, what happened the other night?’ Leah looks into his face and watches the flush spread over his cheeks.
‘I’m — I’m not sure, exactly; I came over all funny when I went in the stone chamber and next thing, I was lying on the ground outside with a sore head.’
Leah laughs. ‘How much did you say you’d had to drink?’
But her laugh hangs uneasily in the air. She wishes it wasn’t getting dark. This doesn’t seem such a good idea now.
‘You can see it now, there.’ Simon points to a dark shape across the field. It’s not what she expected; it’s bigger, for one thing. They get closer. Two huge stones guard the entrance. The roof is grassed over. Her flesh begins to tingle. She grabs Simon’s arm again.
‘What was it for?’
‘A place to put the dead, I suppose. Or maybe just their bones. Inside, there are lots of separate chambers, like little rooms. It goes in a long way and it sort of slopes back into the ground. It feels as if you’re going down deep.’
She wishes she hadn’t said she’d come.
‘So, are you coming?’ Simon asks. ‘Or would you rather stay and guard the entrance?’
‘I’m not staying out here by myself,’ Leah says. She peers into the mouth of the chamber. It’s so dark! ‘Get your torch.’
Simon pulls out the sketchpad, and then the torch. He leaves the pad on the grass. He takes his catapult from his other pocket and keeps it in his hand as they go in. He gives her the torch.
The beam of light thins into the darkness. It hardly makes any difference, just a small pinprick immediately in front of the torch. She’s shaking.
> ‘You could wait here,’ Simon says, ‘and I’ll go further in and see what happens this time.’
‘No way.’
‘Come on, then.’
She takes his arm again and slides her hand down until it’s lightly touching his. She feels his hand go taut, and then relax. His fingers curl round hers.
She’s never been anywhere so dark. The torch beam makes one tiny pool on the stone ceiling when you shine it up, but directed ahead of them, the light just bounces back. Their voices too, are swallowed up by the darkness.
She feels the dry earth under her feet. To begin with it feels cold, and then something seems to happen. Her fear drains away. Her body starts tingling all over and a warm feeling flows up through her feet, up her legs, her thighs, her belly. She can feel the pulse of Simon’s heart through her fingertips. She has a sudden yearning to bury her head into his chest, though she doesn’t.
Her head begins to spin.
‘Can you feel it?’ she whispers, and tugs him closer. He’s so close now she can smell his faint, musky male smell. He turns, and she senses rather than sees that his face is right next to hers, almost touching, but not quite.
‘What?’
‘How warm it is, and sort of… alive. The stone.’
His breath is warm on her cheek.
‘It feels amazing,’ she says. ‘It’s magic or something. What is it?’
‘I don’t know. There’s no sound, though. Our voices don’t echo, like you’d expect. The sound is sucked away. I can hardly hear you, even though you’re so close.’
She can hear a tremble in his voice. ‘You’re shaking,’ she says. ‘Are you all right?’ Her voice is unexpectedly tender. What’s happening to her?
‘Yes — no — you —’
She lets her lips brush against his face. ‘It’s OK,’ she whispers. ‘Us. Here.’
His lips touch hers. She puts her arms right round him, presses his spine, feels his body go tight. Then the tingling in her own body takes over and she starts to feel dizzy.
He pulls away from her. ‘Got to get out!’ He stumbles out of the stone chamber and she follows, grabbing on to his T-shirt for dear life, as if she will drown alone in the darkness. Then they both lean against the entrance stones, shocked at the sudden explosion of all their senses as they come out into the cool air, feel the wind and the rough grass. The whole sky seems to open up above them, studded with a million trillion stars.
