The Dead of Summer

by Camilla Way

  Mike stopped walking. He laughed his shrill girl’s laugh. ‘Are you fucking serious?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Why don’t the big man come down here and do it then?’

  I became very aware suddenly of all the different textures of Mike. His white-blond hair, his scabby mouth, his lurid T-shirt. I remember thinking that though he was only fifteen and skinny, he still looked strong, with an evil sort of strength that came from somewhere rotten in him. But it was the innocent quality to his face that made him really terrifying. That stupid, childlike expression that chilled you to the fucking bone when you spotted the cruelty hiding there below the surface, like a razor blade in chocolate.

  I tried to keep my nerve. ‘He reckons you’ll have all your mates with you if he comes down here,’ I said, as casually as I could.

  He considered this for a bit, shook his head, spat somewhere near my foot, then walked on. ‘Haven’t got time for this,’ he said. ‘Gotta get down the offy for me mum.’

  I waited until he’d walked a few steps. Then I said quietly, ‘Yeh, he told me you’d be too chicken-shit to meet him.’

  He moved so quickly I hardly knew what was happening. He spun back on himself and in one movement he had hold of my neck and was marching me back down the alley. His fingers were digging so hard into my throat I started coughing. He bent down and whispered in my ear, ‘Right you are then, Paki. Take me to your boyfriend and I’ll punch his fucking teeth in.’ He kicked me in the back of the knees. ‘Then I’ll punch yours in too.’ It was like every muscle in his body was concentrated in his fingertips and I thought that they were going to go right through my neck. I couldn’t breathe.

  He marched me through the alley, only releasing his grip when we came out onto the busy traffic of Blackheath Hill. ‘Where now?’ he asked.

  I couldn’t make my voice work properly for a few seconds, and he kicked me in the knee again, making my leg buckle. I rubbed my throat.

  ‘We’ve gotta get on a bus to Greenwich,’ I said. ‘Near the river.’ And I half hoped that he’d lose interest and go away. Then I looked at his face, and I knew that he wasn’t going anywhere. He was enjoying himself too much.

  He nodded, grabbed my shoulder and pushed me in the direction of the bus stop. He walked a few steps behind me the whole way, kicking me in the back of the legs occasionally to let me know he was still there. When we got on the bus he sat a couple of seats away and I kept my eyes fixed on him. Just before we had to get off, I saw him do something that almost made my heart stop. He glanced around to check that no one was looking, then pulled a flick-knife from his pocket. He held it between his knees, half crouching over it, and pressed the catch to make it spring open. Then he closed it, lovingly stroked the black plastic handle and put it back in his pocket.

  ‘We’re here,’ I said, thinking fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck, thinking what the fuck do I do now? He nodded and we got off and walked together down the backstreets where we’d seen him and his mates that time at the beginning of the summer, and all the way I wondered what I should do, now that I knew he had a knife. I hadn’t banked on that at all. I hadn’t taken that into account. But there was really nothing for it but to stick to my original plan. So, with Mike complaining the entire way, I led him to the mine.

  We stood in the middle of the empty scrapyard, and he said, ‘Come on then, Bud-bud-ding-ding, where’s the big man?’ I jerked my head in the direction of the mound of earth on the other side, and told him to follow me. He sighed and said, ‘Seriously, you’re going to fucking get it if he doesn’t turn up.’ I nodded, my throat dry, and started to pull the girders and boards from the hole. As he watched me, he pulled out his knife again and flicked it open. Suddenly my mind focused. I pulled the flashlight out of its hiding place where I’d left it the day before, and without turning it on I dived through the hole into the cave. Scrabbling down the steps in the dark, I heard Mike say from near the mouth, ‘What the fuck? Is this a cave?’ And then a moment later, ‘Cool!’ He sounded like an excited kid.

  I knew he’d follow me. He had the knife, he felt safe. I knew he’d come. I put the torch on the floor. Waited for him. My eyes had grown accustomed to the dark by then. His hadn’t. He felt his way into the little chamber, it glowed yellow in the torchlight. ‘Wow. This is fucking all right.’ He squinted at me. ‘OK, Bud-bud, nice of you to show me where you and your family live and all that, but now let’s go and find your mate,’ he grinned, the knife in his hand, ‘so I can cut his ears off.’

  He turned to go, then stopped when I said, ‘In here’. He gave me a suspicious look and I nodded to the little passageway that led to the next chamber of the mine. ‘What?’ he said. He walked towards me. The faces carved into the sandy walls gazed down on him, unnoticed.

  I nodded at the opening. ‘He’s in there,’ I said.

  He pushed me aside, then slipped into the narrow passage. ‘I can’t see a fucking thing,’ he complained.

  There’s nothing that momentous about killing someone, not really. You think there’d be more to it. I had Kyle’s penknife open in a second. Pushed the biggest blade into Mike’s side while he was caught in the narrow opening, before he even knew what was happening. Like cutting into a tomato. Surprising, though, the blood, how warm it is. How much of it there is. Funny that he didn’t even know he was dying at first. Susan, my friend, she’d known at once. She knew she was going to die. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed it more. Or maybe that was just because I’d loved her so much.

  Mike turned and his face, in the off-kilter beam from the torch on the floor made his eyes look like hollows, long shadows under each one. He turned and gave me the strangest look, batted vaguely with his hand where I’d put the knife in. I stabbed him again. He felt that, fell forward, dropping his own knife. ‘Wha—?’ he said. ‘Wha—?’

  I stabbed him again, I stabbed him right in his heart. The newspapers said later that he’d been knifed seventeen times, but I’m sure they were exaggerating. Punctured like a wet beach ball, blood came from his mouth, from everywhere, it took him a while to die. I sat cross-legged on the floor and watched. What did I feel? I felt nothing. Only that a tightness in me became suddenly a little less.

  I had done what I’d gone there to do. I had killed Mike, for Kyle, I had killed Mike but it didn’t feel as good as I thought it was going to: to be honest I felt a little empty. Not how I’d felt before.

  It began when I was six. Susan Price was my best friend and we went everywhere together. We sat next to each other in school and stayed over at each other’s houses at the weekend. I loved her long red hair and her freckles and I used to wish I had sky-blue eyes like she did. I’d even get my mum to buy me the same clothes as hers. And when I stayed at her house we’d sleep side by side in our matching pyjamas, side by side in the same bed. We’d have midnight feasts and I used to say, ‘What are you thinking? What are you thinking right now?’ Because it frightened me that I didn’t know exactly what she thought and felt every minute of every day. What it felt like to be her.

  The world had started to feel very big to me when I was six. Whenever I thought about its vastness, about how many people there were living in it, I’d start to get a tight, panicky feeling in my chest. I’d often dream that I was drowning in people, that I was in the middle of a huge crowd of strangers and they were clambering over me, squashing and trampling and smothering me until eventually there was nothing left of me, and when I’d wake up, breathless and afraid, the fear that I had never entirely went.

  And sometimes I couldn’t sleep for thinking about the amount of people in the world, about all the different thoughts and feelings in their heads and how I’d never know them, nor them me. I’d see a person on the street; just a random person – an old man, a kid, anyone – and I’d stare and stare at them, driving myself mad with thinking about them because the more I wondered about them, the less real I became, the less I could see myself, feel myself, and then the terror would start. Suddenly I seemed to be always o
utside myself, could only see Anita from the outside, as if I was another person watching myself, wondering who I was. And it scared me, it absolutely terrified me. Eventually, even my own voice frightened me because when I’d speak to someone, I would watch them react to me and answer me and that didn’t make any sense because I couldn’t work out who it was they were replying to, who they were looking at, whose voice they heard.

  When I used to stay round Susan’s house and she’d fall asleep, I’d watch her chest rise and fall, rise and fall. I’d want to know so badly what she was dreaming about, what it felt like to be her. Sometimes I’d wake her up and ask her, ‘What were you dreaming about? What were you dreaming about just then?’ And she’d push me away and say, ‘Nothing, go back to sleep.’ But I’d lie there and I’d stare at her and I’d try to stop the panic rising.

  I loved Susan. I loved her so much. I loved her gappy teeth and the sound of her laugh and the redness of her eyebrows. I wanted to spend every second with her, I wanted to know what it felt like to be her, what it was like inside her skin. I thought I’d be real again if I could just know what that felt like even for a second. And it got so that need in me got bigger than me, it became me, do you know what I mean?

  One morning at school our teacher gave us our little bottles of milk with the blue straws and Susan and I went to the Wendy house in the corner of the playground to drink them. Inside was this cot thing, like a camp bed, and Susan lay on it while I sat on the floor. She was giggling about something, I don’t remember what. The yelling squealing shouting of the other kids in the playground was like a crazy bubbling sea that kept threatening to crash into our little house, our hot, orange little world that smelt of sweaty grass and baked plastic; crash in and sweep away the last remaining specs of me. I tried to concentrate, to focus, to cling on to the real solid fact of Susan like a drowning person clings to a raft.

  After a while Susan’s eyes began to flutter closed and she began to fall asleep. I watched her little body fall and rise, fall and rise and suddenly I couldn’t bear it, that buzzing like a million wasps behind my eyes, that screeching like a million people trapped inside my head. Suddenly, Doctor Barton, I had the sensation of being in a very dark tunnel, and at the end of the tunnel was a brilliant light that I needed desperately to get to. Everything went black, suddenly, black and silent, only Susan, asleep on the bed was visible. She glowed, Doctor Barton, she glowed.

  I didn’t think about it clearly. An instinct made me do it, told me how to do it. I got up and I went over to the little cot. I put my fingers on her neck. She woke up with a start and for a moment we stared into each other’s eyes. I covered her mouth with my hand, and still her eyes held mine. I put my fingers into her throat and pressed, and then I lent on her neck with all my might, using my other hand to cover her mouth and nose. And all the time she didn’t make a sound – she thrashed and struggled under me but she didn’t make a sound and her eyes never left mine.

  And it felt beautiful. As I looked into her eyes I knew for the first time exactly what she was feeling. As she stopped struggling and I felt the Susan-ness leave her and fill me up, I felt complete. A whole person, not just a nothing, empty person, not the shadowy, confused, frightened person I’d always been. No, I felt connected and certain and real in the world for the first time ever. And just for a moment, the whole world became perfectly light, so light it hurt my eyes.

  My teacher found us. Susan had her eyes closed, and she’d gone a funny colour, but she was still breathing. I’ll never forget the expression on my teacher’s face.

  I was asked to leave that school. My mum came and collected me twenty minutes later and I never went back. And I never saw Susan again, though my mum said she’d told everyone we were only playing.

  So I stayed at home for a while, under my mother’s careful watch. And though she’d say, ‘You were just playing, weren’t you? You’d never hurt your little friend!’ I saw a haunted, sickened look creep into her eyes from that day onward that never really left her.

  And every night I would go to sleep thinking about how wonderful I had felt, that day in the Wendy house with Susan. All I could think about was how much I wanted to feel that again, how desperately I needed to feel that again.

  There in the sand mine I pulled the knife out of Mike and wiped it on my jeans. I felt empty. I had killed him for Kyle, to show him that I was the same as him, would do anything for him. And I had expected to feel how I had felt with Susan, I thought it would be the same, that the beauty would return. But killing Mike had felt like nothing. And a cold seeping blackness started to fill every single part of me until eventually I really couldn’t see the difference anymore between me and the cold, dead, black air of the mine.

  I shone my torch on Mike’s body, lying punctured and wrecked there on the sandy floor. It didn’t matter, I told myself. It really didn’t matter; I had done it all for Kyle, I had done it for Kyle and now I could tell him about it and he could tell me about how he’d killed Katie and we could run away together. To the sea, to America, to anywhere. Everything would make sense as soon as I told Kyle.

  When I came out of the mine, blinking at the sudden sunshine, I hadn’t even had time to change into the spare clothes I’d brought when I saw Denis appear through the gap in the fence at the far end of the scrapyard. I froze in shock while he bounded over to me, his fat lips flopping open like a big fish. Glub, glub, glub. ‘Hah?’ he said. ‘You just came out of the ground!’ He looked at me with amazement like I was some sort of magician. He ducked his head so he could peer around me. ‘What’s that hole?’ he asked.

  ‘Denis,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’ I wondered how I was going to explain my blood-stained clothes.

  ‘I saws you!’ he said. ‘From the bus! I saws you and Kyle!’

  I stared at him. ‘Denis, where are your glasses?’ His eyes without his specs looked like tiny white marbles sunken into his big chubby face.

  ‘I left them at home’ he said. ‘I broke them.’ He grinned. ‘I saws you and Kyle from the bus. So I got off but you were really far away but I followed you. I followed you the whole way. I was like James Bond.’ His face clouded over. ‘Then I lost you.’ He brightened again. ‘Then I thought to myself, you must be in here, cos there’s nowhere else you could have gone. So I looked through a gap and then I came in! But you weren’t here and–’

  ‘Denis,’ I interrupted him, knowing that this could go on all day. ‘I wasn’t with Kyle. That was Mike.’

  He shook his head stubbornly. ‘Course you were with Kyle,’ he said. ‘I saws you. I saws you!’

  Denis always said saws instead of saw. Fucking irritating it was.

  ‘No you didn’t,’ I said patiently. ‘That was Mike. I was with Mike. Come on, Denis,’ I said. ‘Let’s go home.’

  But he was having none of it. ‘Nah though. You ain’t friends with Mike.’ He ran up to the hole. ‘Is it a cave? Have you and Kyle found a cave?’

  ‘No, Denis. Come on, let’s go home,’ I said.

  He looked at me like I was playing tricks on him and then he laughed. ‘Kyle’s in there, isn’t he?’ he said.

  I couldn’t persuade him, I couldn’t make him listen. I did try, honestly I did. He just wouldn’t take any notice. Not surprising I suppose, seeing as that was what the three of us had been looking for all summer. ‘I wanna go in,’ he whined. ‘I wanna go in.’

  ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘It’s dark and it’s small and you hate being underground, remember?’ But he wouldn’t have it. He pushed past me and peeked in.

  ‘I’ll just go in for a bit. See Kyle.’ He pushed his head further into the cave’s mouth. ‘Kyle!’ he said excitedly. ‘Kyle, are you in there?’ He grabbed the torch from the ground where I’d left it, and turned it on.

  I picked up a rock and followed him.

  Inside the mine Denis was shining the torch on Mike. He had his fingers in his mouth. ‘Anita,’ he was saying. ‘Anita,’ he said and his voice was very small. He k
nelt down to look at Mike more closely. Started to shake him by the shoulder. ‘Anita,’ he said. ‘Anita, someone’s killed Mike.’

  I hit Denis with my rock. It left a big gaping cut on his forehead and knocked him out. And when I stabbed him in his big flabby gut, I felt nothing.

  seventeen

  A few moments after Kyle went into the mine the sky bagged and belched then sweated slow and heavy drops of rain that landed on me and the ground like balls of sodden tissue. Splat, splat, splat.

  I followed Kyle and found him standing next to Denis, the torch in his hand. I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. Like he didn’t know me.

  ‘Anita,’ he was saying. ‘What have you done?’ His face looked drawn and scared in the torchlight. He knelt down next to Denis. Traced the wound on his forehead. ‘Denis,’ he whispered. ‘Fucking hell, Anita, what have you done?’

  I looked at him. ‘I did it for you.’

  ‘Why?’ he said. ‘Why?’ He touched Denis’s springy hair and whimpered, ‘I don’t understand, Anita. I don’t understand why you’ve done this.’ And he kept shaking his head. Suddenly he was crying. Big fat oozing tears. I watched them catch on his cheek then fall onto Denis. ‘You’re crazy, Anita. You’re really, really crazy,’ he whispered. ‘I mean, what’s going to happen now, what are you going to do now? This is fucking mad. You killed Denis and Mike, Anita. You fucking killed them.’

  I searched his eyes for recognition, for understanding; some sort of connection and acceptance.

  ‘I did it for you,’ I said desperately. ‘I killed Mike for you, to show you that I understood about Katie, and that we can run away together if you want. We can do whatever we want now because we’re the same. I did it all for you.’ I didn’t know what else to say because Kyle was just staring at me, appalled. He didn’t love me. We weren’t the same. It was all fucking wrong.