The Dead of Summer Read online

  The next Saturday was Kyle’s birthday. I met Denis outside No. 33 and he banged the brass knocker on the huge black door clearly unimpressed by the grandness of the building that loomed above us. While we waited he worked his way through a kingsize bag of Maltesers, pouring them out into his pudgy hand and shovelling them into his mouth. Nobody came for ages then finally Kyle answered, a look of resignation on his face that said, ‘Let’s just get this over with.’

  The same dank darkness of the hall, the glowing orange warmth of the huge front room, the same thrill I’d felt as last time. But now the oval oak table was covered in bowls of crisps and little sausage rolls, bottles of Tizer and an iced cake with candles. A few balloons lay scattered here and there. Kyle sat down at the table, folded his arms and stared stonily at his plate. Denis carefully rolled up his bag of Maltesers, put them back in his pocket and made a beeline for a bowl of Skips.

  Across the room Patrick stood, bent over his pile of records. He smiled and straightened with a little grimace of pain and crossed the room in a few big strides when he saw us. ‘Anita! How nice of you to come.’

  I shrugged and muttered, ‘S’all right.’

  Patrick clapped his huge hand on Denis’s shoulder. ‘Always nice to see you, young man.’ Denis barely looked up from his crisps. Kyle continued to stare down at the table and I tried desperately to think of something polite and friendly to say.

  At that moment Kyle’s mum appeared. She stopped when she saw me and Denis. Just stood in the doorway staring at us, like she’d walked into the wrong house or something. I stared back at her. She was tiny but not how Denis’s mum was tiny where you still felt she could do you some serious damage if she wanted to. Elizabeth was the sort of person who made you feel dangerous; one false move and you’d send her flying. She was a puff of smoke compared to the tightly wound spring that Gloria was. Darting grey eyes and fluttering hands that kept twiddling and pulling at her dress. Wrinkles and silver strands in her hair but more of a little girl than me somehow, more than I’d ever been. The sight of us all there seemed too much for her and she clung to the doorframe in bewilderment.

  ‘Darling!’ Patrick went over to her, took her hand and led her to the table, where he sat her down next to Kyle. It was funny the change in Kyle then. Even Denis looked up from his plate in surprise. Kyle flapped around his mum like a trapped bat, took her plate and piled it with sandwiches, picked up her shawl as soon as it fell from her shoulders and wrapped it around her. Anxious, watchful. Shocked, I sat down next to Denis.

  Elizabeth said nothing while this was going on. Her big grey eyes stared at her teacup while her nervous little fingers pulled apart a sandwich. Denis helped himself to more of everything. Finally Patrick said gently, ‘Lizzy, this is our neighbour, Anita.’ I smiled, not knowing what to say. Elizabeth just stared at me, then finally managed a faint ‘Hello.’ Whispery and whispy. Her gaze drifted from my face and she relapsed into a staring silence.

  ‘And you remember Kyle’s friend, Denis?’ She turned her eyes to Denis, who waved his sausage roll at her across the table.

  Patrick put another record on then sat down with us and we ate the tea. He was jolly, chatting to me and Denis, asking us questions about this and that. Kyle said little, answering when Patrick tried to include him in the conversation, but mainly just staring at his mum.

  I tried to follow what Patrick was saying but I couldn’t take my eyes off Elizabeth either; her quick, nervous little movements, her little-girl’s voice that had creeped me out so much the week before. Not that she spoke much; she was practically mute. She just sat, passive and remote, while the world spun on beneath her.

  I wondered if she had always been like that or only since her daughter had disappeared. The way the three of them behaved with each other seemed so unconscious, so natural to them, that I sensed things had always been that way, that Kyle and Patrick had always treated her like a kid. It was like a kind of game, I realised, the point of which I couldn’t fathom. I wondered about Kyle’s dad and frankly couldn’t blame him for fucking off to America, the woman was clearly mental. I didn’t like her, wanted to shake her or throw something at her. Why? I wanted to ask the others. Why are you treating her like this? Like she’s made of glass? Like she’s six? But of course I said nothing.

  When we had finished eating and Patrick had lit the candles on the cake and got Kyle to blow them out and we’d all clapped, he produced a small gift-wrapped package wrapped round and round with too much tape, and placed it in front of Kyle. ‘For the birthday boy,’ he smiled. We watched as Kyle unpicked it. It was a Swiss Army knife, red and shiny and heavy when you held it. The biggest one you could get.

  Me and Denis went and stood by Kyle, took it in turns to hold the knife, weighing it in our hands. We watched Kyle take out all the blades; the little scissors, the corkscrew, the biggest knife and the smaller one, all of them – the little tweezers and toothpick too. He examined them one at a time while we watched admiringly, then he fanned them all out at once and there it sat, almost breathing, a gleaming red and silver insect in his palm.

  I took it from him, I couldn’t help myself. Gently I ran the biggest blade against my finger. So sharp and full of promise. One tiny bit of pressure from me and it would cut through the skin. Just one tiny push and there’d be blood. In that thin piece of steel the difference between feeling and not feeling, knowing and not knowing. It was beautiful.

  Kyle took it back from me. A glimmer of pleasure and interest for the first time. ‘Thanks,’ he muttered to Patrick, then closed it up carefully, putting it in his pocket.

  That was when Patrick announced Kyle’s birthday outing. ‘We’re all going swimming!’ he said.

  Denis looked up from what he was doing, which was rubbing balloons up and down on his T-shirt for the static, then sticking them to his head. He stared at Patrick, appalled, as a green sausage-shaped balloon became unstuck from his afro and drifted slowly, dejectedly to the floor. ‘Can’t swim,’ he said desperately, turning to me for back up.

  I looked at Patrick in amazement. ‘He can’t, you know.’

  But Patrick just laughed. ‘Then it’s about time you learned.’ He began piling up the plates.

  We looked at Kyle, expecting him to argue, but he had resumed his bored expression as if he’d just resigned himself to putting up with whatever was thrown at him that day. Elizabeth got up and wandered from the room. We all watched her leave.

  Then, ‘See to your mother, Kyle,’ Patrick told him. A look, brief and unreadable, passed between them. It was like when your car goes under a bridge and it’s suddenly dark and the radio cuts out. In a flash it had passed and Patrick’s face was light and smiling again. Kyle scraped his chair back and followed his mum upstairs.

  ten

  By the time they were thirteen my sisters were the stars of the Under-sixteens’ Leeds County Synchronised Swimming Club. Like two, sleek, spangly costumed seals with matching swimming caps, when they paired off to perform their routine it was always the highlight of any competition. They’d do it to that Torville and Dean music, ‘Bolero’ or whatever it was called, and their perfectly timed scissor-kicks, spins and lifts would have everyone in the audience cheering and clapping. Me and Mum would get the bus to whichever pool they were competing at and cheer and clap too, grinning at each other, knowing that those glamorous, clever water nymphs were ours.

  They were the best times. Afterwards we would always do the same thing: go to a Wimpy for hamburgers and strawberry milkshakes. We loved going there. With its china plates and cutlery to eat your burgers with, and a Banana Sundae in a glass dish for afters, it was just like a proper restaurant. ‘All girls together,’ my mum would smile. They were good those days. The four of us – three girls with their mum – having a Wimpy tea and a laugh. My sisters happy to have my mum’s full attention for once. Because they didn’t, usually.

  ‘Too wrapped up in each other, those two,’ my Auntie Jam sniffed more than once, eyeing me and M
um disapprovingly. ‘Unhealthy it is.’ It’s true my mum never let me out of her sight. The twins and Push mistook it for her loving me more than them, because they didn’t know about my secret, the thing which only Mum knew and meant she kept me close to her, under constant watch, a necessary closeness that I suppose must have locked the others out at times. They just thought I was her favourite. That she focused on me out of love.

  Me and Mum’s secret. When she was dead the swimming galas and trips to Wimpy stopped, and so did her careful watch on me.

  It was one of Bela or Esha’s old swimming-club costumes that I took to Greenwich Baths. Patrick had to buy Kyle some trunks from the little shop by the entrance and he offered to buy Denis some too, but Denis said his mum had told him he could swim in his pants. I think that was the only time I ever saw Denis in a bad mood. He really didn’t want to be there. He swung his plastic carrier bag with his towel in it and stared longingly, sullenly, at the rows of chocolate bars and crisps in the vending machine near the ticket counter.

  Me and Patrick were the only ones who seemed to be enjoying ourselves. To be honest I wanted to show Kyle’s granddad what a good swimmer I was. On the bus over there I’d sat apart from the others and daydreamed that Patrick adopted me and took me and Kyle off to live in Scotland. I had never been there but I imagined green fields and lakes and little cottages with people like Patrick living in them. I knew I was being stupid but I liked imagining it anyway.

  Greenwich Baths was old-fashioned. Victorian, Patrick said. It was all white tiles with little wooden changing cubicles along the edges like seaside beach huts. Above the pool was a gallery with rows of wooden fold-up seats. An onslaught of warmth and chlorine and echoey, excited laughter, kids running about and dive-bombing each other watched stony-faced by a blonde, pony-tailed lifeguard who sneered down from a chair on stilts, fingering her whistle like it was a loaded gun. A sign that said ‘No Eating, No Bombing, No Running, No Fighting, and No Heavy Petting’.

  We all followed Patrick up the nearest row of changing cubicles, but he stopped me and pointed over to the ones on the other side of the pool. ‘Ladies are over there’ he said. He said it nicely but I felt a bit stupid as I traipsed off on my own with my plastic bag. I squirmed into my sister’s costume, careful not to look at myself, hurriedly pulling the pink stretchy material dotted with silver stars over the two little bumps that had only just begun to appear on my chest. I didn’t want to think about them.

  When I came out Patrick was already in the shallow end looking up at Kyle and Denis who were stood miserably on the edge of the pool. Self-consciously I joined them. Suddenly I saw us through Patrick’s eyes: Kyle, shivering and scrawny, white and freckled in his brand-new, too-big trunks. Denis sulky and immense in his brown and mustard-piped Y-fronts and the orange arm-bands bought for him by Patrick. Me, a skinny brown boy in a baggy pink-and-silver one-piece. Not exactly contenders for the next Olympics, were we? But if Patrick thought we looked comical, he didn’t show it. Just said briskly from the water, ‘Come on now, kids. You’re going to have to get wet sooner or later.’

  I looked at Patrick, half-swallowed by the luminous blue water and felt a sudden stab of sadness. Without his clothes his shoulders looked a little puny, his chest a little frail. He reminded me a bit of one of those plastic inflatable chairs that have been sat on too often and have started to deflate and cave in. I preferred him buttoned up in his smart tweed jacket and stripy jumper. I noticed he had tufts of white hair sprouting from his ears, that his hands were covered in thick veins like tree roots. And although he still smiled brightly, I felt sorry to be seeing him like that, all wrinkly in the swimming pool.

  I glanced at Kyle who was staring at Denis and was surprised to see a little smile on his face. Suddenly he elbowed me in the ribs. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Denis has got tits.’ When Kyle laughed, which was rarely, he had this way of baring his teeth and snorting out of his nose; you could only be sure that he was laughing and not about to sneeze by looking at his shoulders. If they trembled and twitched it meant that somewhere inside he was pissing himself.

  I looked at Denis and started laughing too. He did have proper girls’ tits. At first I thought Denis was going to get the arse but he just grinned like he was proud of them and started doing a little dance to make them jiggle. The more we laughed, the more he jumped about until the lifeguard blew her whistle and fixed us with her depressed stare.

  We got in, then. Me and Kyle jumped into the water; Denis climbed gingerly down the metal steps. He stopped laughing straight away, just stood with the water up to his waist, a look of abject misery on his face. Gently, coaxingly, Patrick began to demonstrate the breaststroke. Me and Kyle swam off towards the deep end, racing each other. As I swam (beating Kyle) I wanted to shout, ‘Look, Patrick! Look at me!’ but Patrick was too busy with Denis to notice.

  Swimming is something I’ve always got very bored of very quickly. After ten minutes of going up and down, getting out and jumping in again, diving down to touch the bottom and so on, I’d had enough. Kyle was ploughing up and down still, his bony little head held stiffly out of the water and his two front teeth bared like a water rat’s. I swam back to see how Denis’s lesson was progressing. It wasn’t. He was still in the exact spot I’d left him in. Patrick was imploring, ‘Look, Denis, like this. Come on, son, give it a try, eh?’ and making swimming motions in the air. Denis just stared balefully back at him, keeping his arms stubbornly raised at right angles so they wouldn’t get wet.

  When he saw me Patrick said, ‘Anita! Come here and show Denis how it’s done.’ When I reached him he put his arms under me as I floated on my front. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Pay attention, Denis. This is how you do the front crawl.’ As Patrick supported me, I kicked my legs and chopped my arms. But Denis just got out and sat on the edge, his arms folded, his lower lip sticking out. He refused to look at us.

  And suddenly Patrick was spinning me around, skimming me over the water, his arms supporting me under my belly. The pool flashed faster and faster around me. He kept it up for ages until I was dizzy and laughing and spluttering. Suddenly he stopped and lowered me down and I turned around, still getting my balance and waiting for everything to stop spinning and there was Kyle. Standing so close to us, only an inch or two away. When I saw his face the laughter caught in my throat.

  ‘I want to go now,’ he said, his voice dry and cold in that noisy splashing warmth. And then he just got out and headed off to the changing huts, leaving me and Patrick staring after him.

  After I’d got changed I came out to find the three of them standing in the foyer. Denis had already bought a bag of crisps from the vending machine and was busy pushing coins in to buy more. We waited, while he frantically shovelled Monster Munch into his mouth with the desperation of someone afraid he might disappear if he stopped.

  We walked towards the park, the four of us stinking of chlorine. It was getting late, the sky just on the brink of its evening transformation like a woman slowly, carefully, applying make-up. Little clouds appearing like dabs of blusher, streaks of pink lipstick smearing the sky. The light smells of blossom deepening into a more jaded, muskier perfume. We walked through quiet streets a world apart from the ones round our way. No old men leaning out of windows in their vests. No TVs blaring or gangs of kids on corners. Only wide, flat-fronted houses with window boxes and freshly painted doors. Expensive, shiny cars parked outside each one.

  As we walked a lady and her daughter got out of a car, the woman’s heels clipping smartly on the pavement. The girl had long brown hair to her waist, a pair of ballet shoes in her hand, the pink ribbons trailing from her fingers. She waited for her mum outside one of the houses and I must have been staring because as we passed she made a face at me, a wide-eyed Joey Deacon face as if to say ‘What are you looking at?’ And I ducked my head and hurried on.

  As I caught the others up I wondered what it must feel like to be that girl; to live your life in a big house and go to ballet classes e
very Saturday. When I was a really little kid I used to ask my mum, ‘How do you feel?’ When she replied, ‘Fine, thanks, sweetie,’ I would say, ‘No, but I mean how do you feel? How do you feel, Mummy?’ And she’d look at me and say, ‘I feel fine, darling. Just fine.’

  It was impossible to explain just what I meant. That my mum was a separate person from me hit me one day like a kick in the guts. That I couldn’t and would never know exactly what she thought or felt, that there were secret, hidden parts of her I’d never be privy to, that I would never know how it really felt to be anybody else; not Mum, not my sisters, not the next-door neighbour who looked after me sometimes, nor anyone else in our street. I would never know them, feel what they felt. I was me and they were them and we were all separate and I was only five or something and didn’t think it out in quite that way, it was more of a muddy fear, a confused jumble of thoughts. But as I grew older the idea began to overwhelm me, kind of. It wouldn’t let me go – that sense of being so alone and unconnected in the world, of never being able to truly be another person, feel what they felt. I just couldn’t ever seem to get past it.

  I caught up with the others and we walked to the top of the hill. Opposite a little gate to the park was the castle Kyle had told me about, surrounded by high brick walls. The three of us stopped and looked in through the tall, black, iron gates at the wide, circular forecourt, the huge, arched wooden door and the blackened bricks of the turrets. Half a dozen cars were parked out front and from somewhere came the sound of laughter and music, the smoky wafts of a barbeque.