But then out of nowhere came along Sam “Spike” Morris, and everything changed. Spike had only joined the school when he was sixteen, but he had a quiet confidence about him that meant he soon made friends. He was tall, with shoulder-length black hair, and, much to the jealousy of his bumfluff-sporting male peers, possessed a full-on folk singer’s beard. Almost immediately, the word went around that Spike had somehow incurred Sally’s wrath, and that he was in for a windmilling if he crossed her again.
Andrew saw the telltale signs that a fight was happening somewhere as the other kids—as if by some innate instinct, like animals heading for higher ground before a tsunami—all began hurrying toward the portable buildings. He got there in time to see Spike and his sister squaring up, circling each other warily. Spike, Andrew noticed, was wearing a badge with the peace symbol on it.
“Sally,” Spike said in an unexpectedly soft voice, “I don’t know why you’ve got this beef with me, but I’m not going to fight you, yeah? Like I said, I’m a pacifist.” Sally had tackled him to the ground before the “ist” was out of his mouth. It was at this point that Andrew got caught up in the melee of kids around him and was knocked to the ground, so for a few moments all he could hear was the approving roars as the fight continued out of sight. But then the roars suddenly gave way to jeers and wolf whistles. When Andrew finally managed to get to his feet and see what was happening he was met by the sight of Sally and Spike locked in a passionate embrace, sharing an almost violent kiss. They broke apart briefly and Spike grinned. Sally returned the smile, then swiftly gave him a vicious knee to the balls. She marched away, hands raised in victory, but when she looked back at Spike writhing on the ground, Andrew was sure he saw concern tempering her triumph. As it turned out, Sally clearly felt something deeper than just concern for Spike Morris’s welfare, and against all odds, the two of them became an item. If Andrew was surprised at this, nothing could have prepared him for the effect it seemed to have on Sally. The change was instant. It was as if Spike had tinkered with a pressure valve somewhere and all her fury had been released. At school they were inseparable, loping around with hands clamped together, their long hair swaying softly in the breeze, handing out spliffs to the other kids they towered over, like benevolent giants who’d wandered down from the mountains. Sally’s voice began to change, eventually morphing into a slow, monotonous drawl. At home, she started not only talking to Andrew but inviting him to hang out with her and Spike in the evenings. She never acknowledged her previous reign of terror, but letting him spend time with them, watching films and listening to records, seemed to be her way of trying to make up for it.
At first, Andrew—like most of the other kids at school—thought this was some sort of psychotic playing-the-long-game tactic; Sally was only sneaking him into pubs and inviting him to watch Hammer horrors on ropey VHS to make the inevitable beatings afterward unexpected and even more brutal. But no. Spike, it seemed, had softened her with love. That and the weed. There was the odd flash of anger, usually directed at their mother, whose torpor Sally took for laziness. But she would always apologize afterward, and of her own volition.
Most surprisingly of all, shortly after Andrew turned thirteen, Sally went out of her way to source him a girlfriend. He’d been minding his own business, reading The Lord of the Rings in his usual spot by the fight-zone portable building, when Sally appeared at the other side of the playground along with two other girls Andrew had never seen before, one Sally’s age, one closer to his. Sally strode over to him, leaving the other girls behind.
“Hey, Gandalf,” she said, pulling Andrew to his feet.
“Hello . . . Sally.”
“See that girl over there? Cathie Adams?”
Ah yes, he did recognize her now. She was in the year below.
“Yes.”
“She fancies you.”
“What?”
“As in, she wants to go out with you. Do you want to go out with her?”
“I don’t really know. Maybe?”
Sally sighed. “Of course you do. So now you need to go and talk to her sister, Mary. She wants to see if she approves. Don’t worry, I’m doing the same with Cathie.” And with that she signaled to Mary with a thumbs-up and pushed Andrew roughly in the back. He stumbled forward, just as Mary shoved Cathie in his direction. They crossed in the middle of the playground and exchanged nervous smiles, like captured spies being exchanged across an exclusion zone.
Mary swiftly interrogated him, at one point leaning close and taking a tentative sniff. Seemingly satisfied, she turned him by his shoulders and shoved him back the way he’d come. A similar process had occurred with Sally and Cathie, it would seem, and the end result was that the next few weeks seemed exclusively to involve his holding Cathie’s hand in mute acceptance as she paraded them around school at break times, her head held high in the face of jeers and wolf whistles. Andrew was beginning to wonder what the point of all this was when one evening, following a school play and two and a half bottles of Woodpecker cider, Cathie pinned him against a wall and kissed him, before he promptly vomited on the floor. It was the best evening of his entire life.
But such are the cruel twists of fate that only two days later Sally sat him down to deliver him the terrible news, as passed on to her by Mary, that Cathie had decided to end things. Before Andrew had time to process this, Sally was hugging him ferociously, explaining that everything happened for a reason and that time was a great healer. Andrew had no idea how he felt about Cathie Adams’s decision, but as he rested his head on Sally’s shoulder, enjoying the pain that came from her fierce embrace, he thought whatever had happened was probably worth it.
The following Saturday, when Andrew came back upstairs after having been dispatched to make popcorn, he looked through a gap in the door and saw Sally and Spike kneeling, foreheads resting together, whispering softly. Sally opened her eyes and kissed Spike delicately on his forehead. Andrew had no idea his sister was capable of anything so tender. He could have kissed Spike Morris himself for performing this miracle. After everything, he’d finally gotten a big sister. Unbeknownst to him, that evening would be the last time he’d see her for years.
He had no idea how Sally and Spike had managed to sneak out of their separate homes and get to the airport, never mind how they’d afforded the flights to San Francisco (it later transpired that when Spike turned eighteen he was entitled to a large sum of money that had been left to him by his grandparents). Andrew found a note in his sock drawer from Sally explaining that they’d “gone to the States for a while. Don’t want to cause drama, little bro,” she added, “so please can you explain everything to dear old Mother, but not until tomorrow?”
Andrew did as he was told. His mum reacted to the news from her bed with a sort of affected panic, saying, “Oh dear. Dearie, dearie me. Really, that’s unbelievable. I can’t believe it.”
There followed a surreal meeting with Spike’s parents, who arrived outside the house in a VW camper van and a haze of marijuana. Andrew’s mum spent the morning fretting exclusively about which sort of snacks she should put out and Andrew, terrified that she’d now gone entirely mad, scratched so hard at the spots on his cheeks that he bled.
He spied on the conversation by lying on the landing and peering down through the banister. Spike’s father, Rick, and mother, Shona, were a jumble of long brown hair and potbellies. Hippies, it turned out, didn’t age well.
“The thing is, Cassandra,” Rick said, “we kind of feel that as they’re two consenting adults we can’t stop them from following their hearts. Besides, we went on our own trip at that age and it didn’t do us any harm.”