If you found them, you hid them next time. We played it for weeks, never tiring of it, which isn’t so odd when I think about it. There are other games, far more boring games, I’ve played, games that have gone on for years on end, games played routinely, with no hope of reward.
* * *
In the beginning, when we were small, I gave Em a hard time. Some days I would speak to her, some days I wouldn’t, acting like she’d done something wrong. I told her the teapot was stupid till she stopped wearing it. I stole her lunch a week running. When we were taken for swimming lessons, I lingered in the changing rooms and put her knickers in the bin. On her pencil tin, she had Tipp-Exed the initials MF and a heart, so I told Martin Frost and he punched her on the arm.
It was malice I was after. I was waiting for the smug look on her face when she told on me. Or weakness, sobbing, Please don’t be horrid to me, Andy! I mined for them with a passion, but came up empty-handed. In the end, I gave up.
When we were thirteen, she reminded me. I was sitting on a chair in her bedroom with a towel round my neck. Em was tickling at my face with her mum’s makeup brushes, her breath warm on my skin.
“Remember when you used to bully me?” Her smile was impish.
I squirmed in my seat. She was doing my lips so I couldn’t answer back. I had to suffer in silence while she went through it all, till her mum shouted up that dinner was ready.
When we came down the stairs, she said, “Don’t you both look glam! You deserve to be on Top of the Pops.” Em had turned veggie, so it was Linda McCartney sausages and mash. June let us take it back up on trays. But I couldn’t eat. There was a pain in my stomach. I wasn’t a very nice person. I’d always known it, but a lot of the time I managed to keep it buried away, out of sight.
“It’s all right, Andy,” Em said. But I couldn’t look up.
“This tastes like shit. I don’t want it. I want to go home.”
Tears sprung in Em’s eyes. I sometimes wished I could cry, but the feeling got stoppered in my throat.
“Really, really, really, Andy. I wasn’t getting at you. I always knew we’d be friends.” She put her plate down and seized my hand. Em was quick to accept fault in a way I never could.
I stayed over, chrysalissed in a sleeping bag on a foam mattress dragged out of the wardrobe. In the dark, we whispered. The cottage walls were six feet thick so there was no need for it, but it was thrilling to whisper, to share things you wouldn’t tell anyone in daylight when they could see your face.
“So what’s this new bloke of your mum’s like then?”
“Joe?” I said. “He’s all right.”
And it wasn’t a lie because in the beginning he was.
* * *
Em was waiting for me at the telephone box. Monday to Friday Marcus worked for Darren, although to be fair plenty of times he got off early or went in to be told he wasn’t needed. When he couldn’t give us a lift, we took the Ridgeway path together, trotting the three miles as the haze lifted from the horizon and the wheat goldened and the air began to tremble slightly in the heat. Then we went down, cutting across the fields to the stile and then traversing the nettle patch and briars to the old gate that took us onto the manor grounds.
“Keen as a fox, you.”
“Today’s the day, isn’t it?”
“And if you find them, Andy, the real ones, what’ll you do then?”
“The real ones?” I hadn’t thought that much about it. It was the hunt I liked above all.
“Peter kissed him,” Em said. I stopped and turned to face her. “Last time, when we were leaving, I went back for my sketchbook and I saw Peter kiss David.”
“What kind of kiss?”
“Not the kind he gives his mum.”
“And what did David do?”
“Nothing. I mean, Peter kissed him, and then after a moment or two, it ended and David sort of patted him on the shoulder, and then he said goodbye.”
“Patted him? Like a dog?”
We came out a couple of hundred meters from the manor among a small group of apple trees. Their branches bent to meet the long grass. They’d had it really, but they still fruited, round hard little apples that as summer went on glowed red like lanterns.
“He shouldn’t lead him on.” The words felt funny on my lips. It was what some boys said if you were friendly to them or looked too good.
“Maybe he’s not,” Em said.
From the manor, I caught the sound of the piano. So Peter was already there.
They could not have numbered that many, but in memory it feels like there were a thousand of them, those beautiful mornings, the manor waiting. Peter playing a melody, something of his own devising he was working on. David lying out on the lawn, or frying eggs on the camping stove. As often as not, as we approached, he wouldn’t even say hello, just lift his eyes and smile, as though among such good friends welcomes were unnecessary.
* * *
The swifts were crying, the evening light creeping away like it couldn’t bear to leave. Marcus had built a hearth out of loose bricks and was trying to cook sausages over a bit of wire mesh. A little smoke snaked away across the grass. Em poured vodka into plastic cups. They were both happy, I think, and Peter was happier than I had ever seen him.
He and David were walking toward us over the lawn. Peter was not bad looking, I realized. At school, he’d been called all the ugly names there were, daily, for years. A tide of hostility toward him, because he was awkward, because of the way he spoke, because he was clever. Sometimes it ebbed, sometimes it flowed. It’d come to feel real. I thought of the last couple of years, how there’d been something hunched about Peter, something drawn, almost—now that I thought about it—like he was cradling a wound, only apparent now that it was gone.
David was laughing at something Peter had said. Peter’s lips were curved in a smile. His hair was a bit longer than I’d seen it. In the light there was a reddish hint to it. He was filling out, growing into his height. On the grass their long shadows overlapped.
Great things were expected of Peter, and I had the sudden appreciation that he would get them. Prizes. Glitter. Entrance to new worlds. A sudden and horrid vision—us bumping into one another in a supermarket many years in the future. Peter, all expensive, braying, “Well if it isn’t dear old Andy,” while lifting an enormous bottle of champagne into his trolley, and me in tracky bottoms and rags clutching a pack of value fish sticks. Or two liters of cider. Or the sticky paws of snotty triplets. The pain in my guts was so visceral that I had to turn away.
I didn’t mean to hurt him though.
* * *
Em found the diamonds around the neck of one of the stone cherubs that adorned the fountain, Peter among the weeds of a flower bed, Marcus inside the back of the old piano, David in an empty bird’s nest in the stables. Em found them most often, I think. They were always the ones we had hidden, always Em’s charity shop diamonds, never Mary Ashton’s.
The white burning sun was just above the treetops, the wood beneath was blue. July days. August around the corner. When I closed my eyes, I could still see the sun, burning dimly behind curtains of orange, a red mark.