“But a Curly Wurly is all holes!” Em’s voice was hot with outrage.
David lay back on the grass. He was lean and a little shorter than both Peter and Marcus. Whereas Peter burned, Em freckled, and Marcus and I tanned, the sun turned his skin a tawny color. His hair was a dirty blond, the kind that would lighten in streaks. He made me think of summer, not June, but of the shorter days of July, the heavier quality of the air.
“It’s the holes I want it for. They have a very special flavor,” David said.
After a bit, I offered him the hash and he took a turn skinning up. He did it neatly with deft fingers. David had nice hands. It was the first time I remember noticing whether someone’s hands were nice or not. The joint went round. There was a little rabbit-shaped cloud up above all on its own. At some point, Peter started up. When I tuned in, he was talking about Oxford.
“… an offer from Balliol. Of course I have to get the results. Law’s very competitive.” He was starting to speed up. “Do you know today’s the apocalypse? Andy’s … well, someone said it was going to be today, so we decided to pretend that it was, which is why we came here. Andy’s idea. She has a bit of a thing about this place. What would you do if it were the last day on earth? It’s funny, because I’d still want to know what happened at the end of my book. So I’d probably end up reading right through it.” On and on it went, without a pause for breath, Peter, like a trackside bookie, giving David the inside information on all of us. “… and Marcus’s uncle keeps an eye on it for your friend’s family, and Marcus is learning the business,” and “Em’s an artist, very talented. She’s really into Blake,” and finally, “Andy just wants to climb, she wants to be the English Catherine Destivelle.”
I preoccupied myself with looking at my hands and willing him to stop. It would have been bad anyway, but being stoned made an agony of it. It was the braying edge his voice took on, his tone both superior and queasily desperate. It was almost as if he was trying to make you hate him, when of course, his intention was the exact opposite.
When he did suddenly stop, I glanced up to see David had laid a hand on Peter’s forearm. The touch can’t have lasted a moment. I wasn’t sure if anyone else had even seen it. In the silence that followed, someone suggested leaving.
* * *
David walked us to the van where Marcus rummaged until he found a pen so we could write down our numbers. When it was my turn, I hesitated.
“You can try this if you can’t get anyone else.”
“It’s for the box. Andy doesn’t have a phone. You have to call the phone box at the end of her road and sometimes she answers and sometimes no one answers, and sometimes you get a passerby,” Em said.
David folded the note and put it in his pocket. “Although if this is the last day ever, I guess there isn’t much time for me to use it.” While he was not looking at me in particular, in fact was turning from me to pat Peter on the shoulder and tell him that he must come back and try out the piano, I thought I felt the slightest stillness among his words, like the spot in a stream where the blank surface hides unexpected depths. And then, as we piled into the van, he glanced my way, as though to see if I had noticed it.
On the way back, we were quiet. I turned round in the passenger seat. Em was flicking through her sketchbook, but Peter’s eyes were closed, his arms wrapped around his knees. I figured that he was hating himself for his performance back at the manor. I had a way of bringing him out of it when he got like that; the trick was to make him focus his disgust on something outside himself. Shit music. Shit telly. Shittest album, actor, newsreader, DJ, politician. Biggest prick at school among the sixth form, biggest prick among the staff. Get the venom going, get the fangs bared and pointing outward.
But this time, I turned back to look at the road and left him to stew in it. It was not just that Peter was leaving, it was that he was so desperate to be gone; to embark on a new life at Oxford among his future friends, a cast he’d assembled from the pages of books by Evelyn Waugh, and men he referred to initially by surname—Wilde, Huxley, Auden—and then, as though they had, over crumpets and tea in their rooms, moved on to first-name terms, as Oscar, Aldous, and Wystan.
“You’ll come back to see us, won’t you?” I’d asked.
“I expect we’ll motor back for the odd weekend.”
Because that is what Oxford promised, weekends of motoring in the countryside, picnics under trees with companions who would, after the wine had gone to their head, rest their cheek upon his arm, sigh and close their lovely eyes. It was his grail and I had no role to play in it.
When I was fourteen, after Joe had gone, after I dared believe it was for good, I had stopped going to school for a while. I found other companions, other ways to have fun. When I came back, I’d expected the crevasse between me and Peter to disappear, but it didn’t. Half the time it was like he wasn’t even there, like he was off somewhere in his own head, and he never wanted it to be just us, just me and him. If I suggested we go off on our own, he made excuses. At first, I’d thought he was punishing me for disappearing, but it wasn’t that. It was like I wasn’t safe anymore. That was how he’d treated me, and even now the unfairness of it made my eyes sting so I had to stare hard out the van window at the blurring hedgerows.
On the high street, Marcus pulled up and Em and Peter got out. Em had choir and despite my threats of rivers of lava and Death on a white horse, she’d pledged to go out with a handful of old ladies singing Queen medleys. We were the same height, but that’s where the similarity ended. She was a fawn, Em. Not a pick over seven stone, and all fringe, eyelash, and skinny leg to my tits, arse, and lip. The same guys who at school shouted at me to get my tits out got tongue-tied around her, but I could never push her around.
“Em?”
“Not possible.” It was what she always said when she didn’t want to do something. A sad shake of the head, a sigh. “Not possible.”
“Pete, we pick you up at eight?”
“I’m going to stay home and revise. I’ve got that last exam, remember.”
“Pete, please!” It was Peter I wanted really. It always was. Games weren’t the same without him. “It’s the end of the world.” But he shook his head. He wasn’t playing anymore.
We went for a drive, stopping for a pint in the beer garden of the Red Lion at Avebury where we could look out at the stone circle. Marcus had a shandy because he was driving.
“You could get drunk if you wanted to. Won’t matter if there’s no tomorrow.”
“If I got caught driving Darren’s van pissed, I’d be praying for the apocalypse.” He looked away. I had the sense he was tired of it, that he wanted me to let it drop. But that wasn’t quite it.
“Andy—” Marcus looked about the garden, as if for help. Two women, a decade older, were sitting at a picnic table a way over with crisps and Cokes. One of them caught Marcus’s eye and I saw her whisper something to her friend and they both laughed quietly. On Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings, I worked in Darren’s office, sorting out the timesheets and helping with payroll. There was a new computer program that would, once it was set up, calculate everything automatically, and I was learning it since the two women who worked there refused to go anywhere near it. Most weeks Marcus picked me up after football, often still dressed in his kit, and Jules and Karen were the same as these two, purring and cooing over him, asking if he’d scored any goals, telling him he was the spitting image of Michael Owen, and offering him Jaffa cakes.