Butterflies gave way to tingles, to an urge to move. I raced them round the lake, but stopped halfway overcome by a drenched, sicky feeling.
I bent double, panting. Peter put his hand on my shoulder softly. “You want us to hold back your hair, Andy?”
“I’m all right. I’m all right.” Better than all right, floating. Then suddenly, good so good, and David and Peter feeling it too.
“Let’s go up the castle,” I said.
“But it’s miles.”
“Not cross-country it isn’t.”
The path went up through a sea of emerald nettles, dusty and going to seed. Just past Ogbourne, a track led up to Smeathe’s Ridge. On either side of us, the land fell away. Further on, there was an ordinance survey marker that showed north and south, east and west. To the north, far away, there was the motorway, the M4. Cars were flowing in either direction, a steady flow for as far as I could see, and it conjured the image of a ribbon drawn in either direction, a ribbon being tied around the earth. A breeze was blowing. It plucked at our T-shirts and blew my hair about my face.
“I don’t want it to end,” Peter said. But it seemed like it was already seeping away, so we took the other halves, only to find ten minutes later we were peaking again. When the second halves kicked in, Peter dropped to his knees in the grass.
David turned to me, pale, his pupils black and dilated. He looked like a rare and exotic flower, impossibly beautiful.
Dry mouth. Thudding heart. Skin burning. I sat down and closed my eyes, lost in it. When I opened them again, both Peter and David were lying on their backs staring at the sky.
“I’m going to go. I want to see my mum. I want to talk to her.”
Peter raised himself up on one elbow.
“Bad idea. Bad idea. Stay with us.”
But I shook my head.
“Really, Andy? You’re going to go?” David said. “Can’t you talk to her later? You were going to show me this castle.”
“Come on. Listen, let’s have a cigarette. Let’s go threes.” Peter started fumbling in his pocket. “There’s something I want to tell you, Andy. It’s bad but it’s good. It’s really bad, but it’s also good. Stay. Don’t go.”
But I did, leaving the pair of them sprawled on the hillside.
By the time I got to the lanes, I was seeing fractals in the clouds, trails when I moved my hands. I got within a couple of hundred yards of the house, and then I climbed over the gate and lay down in the grass at the edge, hidden from the road by the hedgerow.
All the things I wanted to say to my mum were gone. Instead, I watched the barley rippling—the many thousand, thousand assembled ranks of stalks, the lifted ears—and I felt such tenderness for them. The clouds passed. At dusk, a field mouse crept between the rows, such a tiny thing, so busy, seemingly about such important work. I stayed there till it got dark and the ground grew cold.
* * *
Marcus was pissed off I hadn’t spent more time aahing over his ankle and listening to his mum chat on about three-piece suites. He was driving again, but at the manor he wouldn’t play the game, said he had to rest his ankle. I’d hidden the necklace, so I waited with him on the blanket while the others looked.
“What’s up with those two?”
David and Peter were coming round the side of the house, Peter almost on David’s heels, David with his eyes fixed on the ground. Something had happened after I’d left them on Smeathe’s Ridge. Whatever it was, it hadn’t done Peter’s cause any good.
“Dunno.”
“Lovers’ tiff?” There was an edge to Marcus’s voice. I could have placated him by saying something mean in agreement, or putting my hands on him, but I didn’t feel like it. It was a relief when he went back to work.
* * *
We only went out together once, to celebrate our exam results. Mine were solid. Em got an A in art, which was all she cared about. Peter’s were outstanding. Balliol would take him to read law starting October. I’d known it was coming but still had to swallow back the bitterness that flooded my mouth.
“A night on the tiles then?” Em’s mum stuck her head round the bedroom door. She was carrying a plate of cheese on toast, the bread cut into little squares. “To line your stomachs.”
When we were a bit younger, I’d made Em go nicking with me. Never in Marlborough, in Swindon where the shops were bigger. She was surprisingly good at it. Afterward we’d come home and divide the spoils. But we hadn’t been in ages, and I didn’t have anything nice. Em wanted us to wear dresses.
“I haven’t shaved my legs.”
“You can use my dad’s electric razor. I’ll tell him it was Faye.” Faye was her little sister. I tried on all of Em’s dresses, then we hit her mum’s wardrobe. June had been a teenager in the sixties and had the miniskirts to prove it. Em was swishing this way and that in a long paisley number as her mum came up the stairs.
“You put everything back afterward.” She stopped and leaned against the doorframe. “God, I used to be thin. Looks good on you, Em. Very romantic, very Joan Baez. You found anything, Andy?”
I shook my head and she went over and rifled through the rails.
“How about this?” It was violet, very short with a little collar and buttons down the front. “Go on. Try it on. It’ll go perfect with your coloring.”
It wasn’t like anything I usually wore. When I came out the bathroom, a bittersweet look passed over her face.
“I’ll tell you what. The pair of you can borrow them, but only if you let Faye join in for an hour. Slap some makeup on her. Let her show you her dances.”
Before we left, she made us stand together for a photograph. I don’t think I ever saw it. “Such young ladies,” she said and pressed the button.
Lady. Girl. Female. Woman. Each of the words made you feel a bit different, act a bit different even, when it was applied to you. They weren’t the only words for us, of course, only at Em’s house it was possible to forget the other words existed.
* * *
The club played guitar bands, the crowd a mix of grungers, indie kids, Britpoppers, plus a few lost-looking goths and metalers, the remnants of dying species that had failed to evolve.
David wasn’t sure about going.
“I don’t think there will be any wanted posters up,” Em said.
When he was out of earshot Marcus said, “He’s going to have to face the music at some point.”
Later, I wondered whether there hadn’t been someone in the crowd who recognized him. Later, sitting out on the step, waiting for the phone in the telephone box to ring, I would wonder about all kinds of things.
But it was a good night. We did shots. When songs I liked came on, I danced with Em. She was all lit up with booze and mischief. Elbowing our way through the crowd to the toilets, I asked her if she fancied anyone.
“Maybe the one with the Bob Dylan hair.”
So when we went back, I made sure we danced right up by him till he got the message and led her off upstairs to the balcony, but she came back after twenty minutes shaking her head. With boys, it was like she was always comparing them to someone in her head who was better.