Adam says, ‘This isn’t the place. Let’s get something to eat, then I’ll show you.’
He seems to understand that I can’t quite talk yet and doesn’t wait for an answer. I walk slowly after him, listen to him order two hotdogs with onion rings. How did he know that would be my idea of a perfect lunch?
We stand and eat. We share a Coke. It seems astonishing to me that I’m here, that the world opened up from the back of a bike, that the sky looked like silk, that I saw the afternoon arrive, not white, not grey, not quite silver, but a combination of all three. Finally, when I’ve thrown my wrapper in the bin and finished the Coke, Adam says, ‘Ready?’
And I follow him through a gate at the back of the hotdog stand, across a ditch and into a thin little wood. A mud path threads through and out to the other side, where space opens up. I hadn’t realized how high we were. It’s amazing, the whole town down there like someone laid it at our feet, and us high up, looking down at it all.
‘Wow!’ I say. ‘I didn’t know this view was here.’
‘Yeah.’
We sit together on a bench, our knees not quite touching. The ground’s hard beneath my feet. The air’s cold, smelling of frost that didn’t quite make it, of winter to come.
‘This is where I come when I need to get away,’ he says. ‘I got the mushrooms from here.’
He gets out his tobacco tin and opens it up, puts tobacco in a paper and rolls it. He has dirty fingernails and I shiver at the thought of those hands touching me.
‘Here,’ he says. ‘This’ll warm you up.’
He passes me the cigarette and I look at it while he rolls himself another one. It looks like a pale slim finger. He offers me a light. We don’t say anything for ages, just blow smoke at the town below.
He says, ‘Anything could be happening down there, but up here you just wouldn’t know it.’
I know what he means. It could be pandemonium in all those little houses, everyone’s dreams in a mess. But up here feels peaceful. Clean.
‘I’m sorry, about earlier with my mum,’ he says. ‘She’s a bit hard to take sometimes.’
‘Is she ill?’
‘Not really.’
‘What’s up with her then?’
He sighs, runs a hand through his hair. ‘My dad was killed in a road accident eighteen months ago.’
He flicks his cigarette across the grass and we both watch the orange glow. It feels like minutes until it goes out.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
He shrugs. ‘There’s not that much to say. My mum and dad had a fight, he stomped off to the pub and forgot to look when he crossed the road. Two hours later the police were knocking on the door.’
‘Shit!’
‘Ever seen a scared policeman?’
‘No.’
‘It’s terrifying. My mum sat on the stairs and covered her ears with her hands, and they stood in the hallway with their hats off and their knees shaking.’ He laughs through his nose, a soft sound with no humour to it. ‘They were only a bit older than me. They hadn’t got a clue how to handle it.’
‘That’s horrible!’
‘It didn’t help. They took her to see my dad’s body. She wanted to, but they shouldn’t have let her. He was pretty mashed up.’
‘Did you go?’
‘I sat outside.’
I understand now why Adam’s different from Zoey, or any of the kids I knew at school. It’s a wound that connects us.
He says, ‘I thought moving from our old house would help, but it hasn’t really. She’s still on a million tablets a day.’
‘And you look after her?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘What about your life?’
‘I don’t really have a choice.’
He turns on the bench so that he’s facing me. He looks as if he’s really seeing me, as if he knows something about me that even I don’t know.
‘Are you afraid, Tessa?’
No one’s ever asked me that before. Not ever. I look at him to check he’s not taking the piss or asking out of politeness, but he returns a steady gaze. So I tell him how I’m afraid of the dark, afraid of sleeping, afraid of webbed fingers, of small spaces, of doors.
‘It comes and goes. People think if you’re sick you become fearless and brave, but you don’t. Most of the time it’s like being stalked by a psycho, like I might get shot any second. But sometimes I forget for hours.’
‘What makes you forget?’
‘People. Doing stuff. When I was with you in the wood, I forgot for a whole afternoon.’
He nods very slowly.
There’s a silence then. Just a little one, but it has shape to it, like a cushion round a sharp box.
Adam says, ‘I like you, Tessa.’
When I swallow, my throat hurts. ‘You do?’
‘That day you came round to chuck your stuff on the fire, you said you wanted to get rid of all your things. You told me you watch me from your window. Most people don’t talk that way.’
‘Did it freak you out?’
‘The opposite.’ He looks at his feet as if they’ll give him a clue. ‘I can’t give you what you want though.’
‘What I want?’
‘I’m only just coping. If anything happened between us, it’s kind of like, what would be the point?’ He shifts on the bench. ‘This is coming out all wrong.’
I feel strangely untouchable as I stand up. I can feel myself closing some kind of internal window. It’s the one that controls temperature and feelings. I feel crisp as a winter leaf.
‘I’ll see you around,’ I say.
‘You’re going?’
‘Yeah, I’ve got stuff to do in town. Sorry, I didn’t realize what the time was.’
‘You have to go right now?’
‘I’m meeting friends. They’ll be waiting for me.’
He fumbles around on the grass for the crash helmets. ‘Well, let me take you.’
‘No, no, it’s OK. I’ll get one of them to pick me up. They’ve all got cars.’
He looks stunned. Ha! Good! That’ll teach him to be the same as everyone else. I don’t even bother saying goodbye.
‘Wait!’ he says.
But I won’t. I won’t look back at him either.
‘The path might be slippery!’ he shouts. ‘It’s beginning to rain.’
I said it would rain. I knew it would.
‘Tessa, let me give you a lift!’
But if he thinks I’m climbing on that bike with him, he can think again.
I made a fatal error thinking he could save me.
Seventeen
I start with assault, shove my elbow hard into a woman’s back as I get on the bus. She spins round, crazy-eyed.
‘Ow!’ she yelps. ‘Watch where you’re going!’
‘It was him!’ I tell her, pointing to the man behind me. He doesn’t hear, is too busy carrying a screaming child and yelling into his phone to know I just slandered him. The woman sidesteps me. ‘Arsehole!’ she tells him.
He hears that.
In the commotion, I dodge the fare and find myself a seat at the back. Three crimes in under one minute. Not bad.
I rifled through the pockets of Adam’s motorbike jacket on the way down the hill, but all I found was a cigarette lighter and a bent old rollie, so I couldn’t have paid for the bus anyway. I decide to go for crime number four and light it up. An old bloke turns round and jabs a finger at me. ‘Put that out!’ he says.
‘Piss off,’ I tell him, which I believe might count as violent behaviour in a court of law.
I’m good at this. Time for a little murder now, with a round of the Dying Game.
The man three seats in front is feeding takeaway noodles to the small boy on his lap. I give myself three points for the food colouring creeping along the child’s veins.
In the opposite aisle, a woman ties a scarf about her throat. One point for the lump on her neck, raw and pink as a crab’s claw.
Another point for the bus exploding as it brakes at the lights. Two for the great globs of melting plastic from the seats splitting the air.