“You’ve got the fear.”
“A bit. It’ll pass. Hey, what are you doing?”
What I was doing was unbuttoning his Levi’s. One of his legs began to tremble slightly, dancing in the air. I wondered what it would take for Marcus not to respond to my hands—more than the prospect of a thirty-foot drop, it seemed.
Something was rustling about in the undergrowth over to the left. The moon was peeping. I liked having him where I wanted him. I liked the fact that like this, he could not touch me back, so I did it slow. Before he came, he said my name, quickly, with a furrowed brow, like I troubled him, like I pained him. I wiped my hand off on my jeans.
“I think you hit the headless horsewoman.” But part of my brain was thinking, Well, that’s that done for a while.
Later, in bed, floating on a little hash cloud, I thought of the world after the apocalypse. I saw Marlborough empty of people, its supermarkets abandoned, its shops looted. I imagined packs of dogs marauding up the high street, and the great stone fountains of its famous college dry and full of leaves. At our own school, Saint John’s, our work peeled from its sugar-paper mounting on the display boards, and in the canteen, the linoleum shrank and cracked, and the enormous saucepans rusted where they hung on the kitchen walls.
It made me feel something, something shimmery, like the times in the church, years before, when I would hang over one of the creaking pews till my hair touched the flagstones and Peter would ring one of the hand bells right next to my ear. Even after the sound had faded and my ears had stopped ringing, something in my brain would go on resounding, as though deep inside me a tiny cliff was shearing off into the sea, a tower block collapsing soundlessly.
So I kept bringing us back to it, asking Marcus and Peter and Em again and again what they would want to do if they had one more day, just one more day.
* * *
On June 20, dawn broke the color of Mrs. East’s roses. After much consideration, I’d decided not to kill my mother. Instead, I made myself pancakes for breakfast. I put all the golden syrup I wanted on them, which turned out to be all the golden syrup there was. Then I licked the plate.
The lane into town was narrow and windy. When cars came along, I waited on the verge and then wandered out again to the middle of the road where it was sunny. The woods exhaled cool air. At some point I started jogging, and then the jog became a sprint, just for the hell of it, in and out of the sunlight and the dappled shadows on the road, until I was winded, and slowed, panting, to a lope.
A tractor was haymaking in a field. I passed the rugby club, and then the corner of the common where the circus tents of the Mop would set up every autumn, and where certain girls would sit near on the grass banks in summer, waiting for cars to pull up and take them out to some quiet spot in the Savernake and—almost always—bring them back.
When I got to Marlborough I went to the bank, and since it was the last day on earth, I took out every penny I had, which added up to nineteen pounds and seventy-eight pence.
* * *
The manor lay empty, with a chain and padlock on the gate and signs that said the property was patrolled by guard dogs. It wasn’t. Men working for Marcus’s uncle Darren had put the signs up a few years back, when the family who owned it got into trouble with inheritance taxes and had put it on the market. It had sold, a year or so ago, but there was still no sign of the new owners. A couple of times squatters had gotten in, but Marcus’s uncle had ways of dealing with unwanted visitors, involving his Alsatians, Arnie and Sly; balaclavas; and a couple of his bricklayer friends. Last time, he let them leave with what they could carry, burnt the rest of their stuff, and gave Marcus the thumb-sized piece of hash he’d taken from them.
As we came down the hill along the A436, from the van’s passenger seat I could see the manor’s shingle roof and then, for a split second, I was allowed a glimpse of its lovely face before it was swallowed by the line of firs that stood along the front boundary, shielding it from the road. On the double-decker to Swindon, from the top deck, you could keep it in view for a few more seconds, and on school trips, or the annual Christmas excursion to see a show at the theater, I had always looked out for it, greeted it as a secret friend, like the mysterious, bowing blue-robed figure in the east window of the church.
Marcus parked the van in front of the gate and we climbed over quickly and moved up the driveway, out of sight of the road. There were weeds growing up through the gravel and the lawn was knee-high in wild barley and thistles. As we drew nearer and the sound of the cars—already muted by the firs—diminished, I became aware of the murmur of bees in the grass. I suppose there were crickets and hornets and wasps as well, but what I remember was that heavy, satisfied sound that bees make. The brick had weathered to a darkish pink, and each one was surrounded by a rime of white mortar. With the morning sun upon it, it made my heart quicken.
We stopped a few feet away from the front door and dropped our bags on the stone steps. Peter peered in the windows and as I bent over to untie my laces, I heard him bang the knocker against the door, and the sound echoed through the empty building. Marcus was standing with his hands in his pockets, gazing upward.
The manor was three stories high. On either side, set back a little, and a story shorter, were wings. The roof was shingle, the facade brick, and around the mullioned windows, the builders had incorporated seams of local flint. Further on, if you followed the drive round, were stables and a clutch of outbuildings.
“Are you going to take that side?”
With his chin, Marcus indicated left. That way, the climb was fairly easy owing to a chimneypiece edged in sticking-out brickwork, and nearer the top, a string course, a line of bricks that stuck out edge-ward from the wall.
No other route was immediately obvious, but I knew that Marcus had found one, and that it was hard, which was why he was nudging me toward the easier climb. Every way I looked, the eaves were the problem. Then I caught Marcus cast a quick look right and, following his gaze, I saw in the shaded corner where the wing met the main house, there was a tree. Tiny green-and-brown dappled pears hung from its branches and, while it barely reached to the first-floor windows, coming halfway down the wall was a piece of drainpipe, and above that a series of jutting cornerstones.
I went to stand beneath it with Marcus at my heels.
“I’ll take the tree and the pipe. You take the chimney,” I said.
“You sure?”
“The world ends today.”
“Right.” I wasn’t going to be told what I could and could not climb and Marcus was smart enough to know it. Besides, it was one of the things he liked about me. His mum, Darren’s sister, was a bag of nerves, forever calling up Marcus or Darren and asking them to drop whatever they were doing because she thought she smelled gas or the fridge was making a funny noise.
“I’ll watch you.”
“Peter can do it. I’ll meet you at the top.”
He looked at the route up and poked the toe of his trainers into the ground. The lawn at the base of the tree was soft and springy, but even so.
“You fall, Andy, you’re fucked.”
“Think so?” Our smiles met. Peter, hearing his name, ambled over, a finger thrust between the pages of a book to guard his place.
“There’s a piano inside.”