Lying About Last Summer Read online

  Our group is missing a member. The third girl in our room is arriving late by train and Pippa has gone to pick her up. I sit next to Fay, who flicks her salad round the plate and talks in her little kid’s voice about how she’s in a gifted student programme.

  She says she wants to be a doctor, and when she starts up about work experience in hospitals, I can’t help thinking about Oscar, my brother. Nine years old with four big operations behind him. I push my chair backwards with a loud scrape, and go to select another brownie.

  Pippa comes back towards the end of lunch with our room-mate. She has short black hair, expensive green headphones round her neck, tight jeans and a vest top that clings in the right places. Multiple earrings follow the curve of one ear. The other is bare. Her name is Danielle.

  A short while later, a member of the catering staff comes in to take plates away and Pippa stands up and clinks a piece of cutlery against her glass for attention. “Now that everyone’s arrived, I’d like to officially welcome you all to Morley Hill. This holiday has been made possible by BAK-up, and each of you is coming to terms with losing someone special in your lives. Moving on is a difficult but necessary stage of bereavement and we hope this week will help. That’s why our holiday camp is called Getting on with Your Life.”

  It is? I must have skim-read that part of the letter. I picture Pippa in different-coloured glasses as she tells us that attendance at various workshops throughout the week is optional but thoroughly recommended. Regular brown glasses would be my choice for her.

  “Let’s introduce ourselves. Say where you’re from and what you’re looking forward to most about this week. It could be … a specific activity, making friends, being with people who understand what you’re going through. I’m not going to ask you to talk about what brought you here. You yourselves can decide when you’re ready to do that.” She swivels round, giving us all a chance to see her calm counsellory smile.

  I imagine a hideous getting-to-know-you game where we’re each given a list of everyone’s names and another list with the relationship to their dead person and how they died, and we have to mingle and match everyone up.

  “Who wants to go first?” asks Pippa.

  A boy on the other table raises his arm. He has longish blond hair, tanned skin and the sleeves of his graffiti art T-shirt are tight round bulgy muscles. Boy-band material. He’d be the laid-back one with a tragic past. “I’m Joe,” he says. “I come from Cornwall. I’m into surfing and being outdoors, so this holiday was a no-brainer for me. I’m looking forward to hanging out with all of you. It’s going to be fun.”

  A couple of people clap, but I don’t know why.

  Fay’s next. She kicks off with how her dad died in a car crash three years ago. How she was sitting in the front passenger seat and nearly died too. I don’t want to listen. She goes on and on about how much she misses him and I look out of the window at the grass, trees, flower beds and winding paths. There’s a swimming pool somewhere in the grounds. I picture myself easing on a swimming hat and lowering my goggles on to my face; then I take a deep breath. Without closing my eyes, I imagine myself diving into a deep pool of turquoise water and swimming underwater as far as I can, until my lungs are nearly exploding.

  I’m aware that the boy in the pale blue polo shirt is looking at me. I exhale abruptly. A bit too loudly. Other people look at me. Fay trails off, sparing us any more details about her stay in hospital, and the boy grins. Properly, so that I see he has great teeth.

  “How about you, Brandon?” says Pippa, and he looks from me to her.

  “Er, yes, so I’m Brandon,” he says. “I’m from London, and I’m here because my mum made me come.”

  There are a few laughs. Not from me.

  Pippa nods. “I hope you’ll have a good time.”

  He gives a small shrug. The polite sort.

  Danielle plays with one of her earrings as she speaks. She says she’s from a village we’ll never have heard off. “What I’m looking forward to this week is a break from my dad.” Next to me, Fay flinches.

  Then it’s my turn. “My name’s Skye and I live near London.”

  But that’s not where I’m from.

  The button on the waistband of my jeans is too tight. I need to wriggle into a better position so it doesn’t dig into me so much. “I’m here because I wanted a holiday,” I say. “I’m looking forward to the high ropes and jumping from the tower.”

  “You can have your first adrenaline rush later today,” says Pippa. “The high-rope session is at four o’clock.”

  Some people start talking about the high ropes, and Pippa waits for a while before calling for quiet. Once you get past those glasses, she seems relatively normal, and not too teacherish.

  She keeps on round the group with the introductions. There are twelve of us. At the end, she checks her watch and says, “You now have exclusive use of the swimming pool until three. I’ll see you later at the high-ropes course.”

  Fay, Danielle and I change into our swimming stuff in our room, in mostly awkward silence, and wind towels round ourselves for the walk to the pool.

  “This was my dad’s swimming towel,” says Fay. She secures it against her waist with one hand and holds the other arm out so we can see it better.

  It’s navy blue with a faded patch that’s almost pink and a ton of loose threads. There’s not a lot to say about it.

  I try. “Cool.”

  Danielle gives me a look that means Cool? Really?

  The pool is large, with white plastic sunbeds around it. The rest of the group is already in there, swimming, shrieking and abusing the inflatables.

  I badly want this to be OK. Stage one: slip into the water speedily so that nobody sees too much of my chub. Stage two: do a couple of strokes of front crawl and feel the water blanket my face.

  It will feel good, like it used to.

  “Come on!” yells the boy from Cornwall. Joe. He splashes us and Fay shrieks. Danielle takes off her towel and bombs into the water. The lifeguard leans back in his high seat to avoid being splashed and says nothing.

  Fay dips a toe in the water and squeaks, “It’s freezing!” But she throws her towel on to a sunbed and eases herself, yelping, into the shallow end, elongating herself so she’s even thinner. The water reaches midway up her thighs. She looks back at me. “You coming in, Skye?”

  “Maybe,” I say, but already I can feel my breathing isn’t right.

  “You can sunbathe later,” she says, and squats down into the water with a gasp.

  I sit on the end of a sunbed, still wrapped in my towel, and inspect the nail varnish on my toes. They alternate red and pink, a homage to Luisa. It was her signature toe look last summer. Her toes were a lot less ugly than mine.

  Somebody’s blocking my light. I lift my head and see polo-shirt boy. Brandon. Except he has a bare top half now. He picks up a small beach ball that’s under the sunbed nearest to me and catches me looking at him.

  “You not swimming?”

  Oh, how perceptive. “Nope.”

  He probably thinks I don’t want to get in the water because I’m embarrassed about being seen in a bikini, or because I have my period. I don’t care. Either of those things is better than the truth.

  four

  I shed my towel while no one is looking, lie back and sunbathe behind closed eyes and sunglasses. Fay calls my name from the pool but I ignore her. I hear Joe trying to organize some volleyball-type game. Someone says that without me the teams are uneven. I keep still until it’s obvious that the game is under way. Then, because my shoulder feels too hot and I have no suntan lotion, and because the smell of chlorine is making me remember things I don’t want to remember, I get to my feet. I’ll go back to the room and be the first one ready for the high ropes.

  I reach down for my towel, and suddenly I can smell a plant that grew in a pot by the pool at Yew Tree House. It had masses of small white flowers. I spin around, dizzy, desperate to see a bush with small white flowers,
to know that I’m not hallucinating a smell. Everything tilts.

  I lose my balance and fall. My knee hits and slides across warm, rough stone. It burns with a breath-stopping intensity. When I’m able to, I cry out.

  The noise in the pool cuts out immediately.

  “Are you OK?” It’s one of the boys.

  Smooth. I’m in nothing but a bikini and everyone’s staring at me. I nod without looking round.

  “Oh my God, you’re bleeding.” That’s Fay’s voice.

  My knee is a mess. I grab my towel and hold it against the blood, so I can’t see it any more. Joe is climbing out of the water. He walks over, water bouncing off him on to me before he’s even close. “You want me to take a look?” He speaks as if he’s a first-aider, like he knows what to do. His board shorts are a swirly pattern of reddish-orange and bright white with a rip on one side. The rip might be part of the design for all I know about surfer chic.

  “I’m fine,” I say to his anklet. It’s a faded green with a little shell woven in. I bet it means something. I bet he has a surfer girlfriend who gave it to him. “It’s nothing.” With a bit of effort, I stand, slinging the towel across my arm, ignoring my knee.

  Now Fay is out of the water. Peering at me, at my knee, medical-student style. “Skye, you should sit on the sunbed for a moment.”

  The lifeguard is wandering over.

  “I’m fine,” I say. I slide my feet into my flip-flops and start hobbling. “It’s nothing. I’m heading back to the room. I’ll see you later.”

  Outside the swimming pool enclosure I check my knee. It’s scraped rather than deeply cut but it hurts like hell. I rearrange my towel over my shoulders so it doesn’t brush against my knee, and limp on past the kitchen area. The double doors are open and I can hear the sound of clanging pans and a high-pressure tap running.

  “Skye! Wait up.”

  I twist round to see Joe run across the grass, barefoot, still wearing only his swim shorts. When he reaches me, he says, “Tell me to get lost if you want, but are you really OK?”

  My knee’s throbbing, but I don’t look down at it. “I’m fine,” I say. “Thanks.” I have to blink away the threat of tears. I don’t know what they’re about.

  Joe carries on walking beside me. “Don’t let it spoil your first day.”

  I shake my head.

  “Look forward, not backwards.” He slows his pace. “Easier said than done, I know. I lost Kyra, my girlfriend, last summer.”

  “Last summer,” I begin. Everything ended and started with last summer. I suck in enough air to be able to say it: “My sister died.”

  He smiles. The sympathetic kind. The dead-person-conversation kind. “Summer’s a difficult time for both of us, then. What happened to her?”

  When I’m ancient, in my nursing home with white hair and a floral nightie that reaches to my toes, I wonder if that question will still make my lungs collapse.

  “She … drowned.” In a pool of red water.

  “How?”

  I avoid his eye, and focus on a sign that has one arrow showing the direction of the lake, and another to the campfire area. If I can’t say it here, on a BAK-up holiday, maybe I’ll never manage to put what happened behind me. Joe isn’t an adult who needs to know, or someone who wants the gory details; he’s been through the death thing himself. All I need to say is one sentence and ignore the pounding in my chest. “She hit her head as she fell into the pool and was knocked unconscious.” I don’t know why I add, “There was an argument.”

  Joe nods. “Sounds traumatic. I hope you weren’t there.” He sees me hesitate. “Oh, no. You were, weren’t you?”

  My mouth is dry and my shame a thousand red-hot needles pricking me.

  “You couldn’t save her?” asks Joe.

  He’s close to me, peering into my guilty eyes. The towel is making me too hot but I can’t take it off. I shake my head.

  “No? You poor thing, Skye,” says Joe. He touches me lightly on the arm. “I’ll let you get back to your room. See you at the high ropes in a bit, yeah? Take it easy.”

  I watch him jog with long strides back towards the pool. I should have asked him about Kyra, his lost girlfriend.

  My knee is throbbing as I demonstrate to the instructor how I can unclip and clip myself to a wire. Since I’m the last person to do this, I think about doing it wrong, to shake things up a bit. But I’d risk being bumped on to the baby course, where the ropes are half a metre off the ground.

  “You have two carabiners on your harness,” says the instructor for the gazillionth time. “You must never be on the course without at least one of them being attached to the wire.” Her voice is a shouty monotone.

  We’re all doing this activity, Pippa included. I can tell she’s done this before, even though she’s making a point of listening ultra-carefully to the instructor.

  “No pressuring the people in front of you. Give them space,” drones the instructor.

  Beside me, Fay has stopped worrying about her helmet, and is now fretting about her harness. It’s not tight enough. It’s digging into her leg. What if it can’t hold her weight?

  If it can’t hold her weight, we’re all doomed.

  Pippa looks over. “Don’t worry. I’ll check it in a minute.”

  Danielle, standing further away, rolls her eyes and scuffs her Vans in the dusty earth.

  The instructor says, “Any questions?”

  Somebody asks how many accidents have happened.

  “I always get asked that,” says the instructor in a weary voice. “The answer is none, and it will stay like that on my watch. You’ll be sent home for any stupid or risky behaviour. All righty. Let’s queue up.” She makes her mouth into a straight line, which is probably as close to a smile as she allows herself to go.

  While Pippa checks Fay’s harness, I sidle away and merge into the queue to start the course. I end up behind Danielle and in front of Brandon.

  We climb a steep ladder to a wooden platform which has a mesh fence round it, apart from the bit where each of us has to step off and swing on a rope a short distance on to some netting. Our instructor stands at the gap, to check each person has clipped on their carabiners.

  Joe goes first, leaping in one smooth movement on to the rope netting. “This is awesome!” he shouts as he climbs up to the first proper high ledge.

  “Clip on, then go,” barks the instructor when it’s Danielle’s turn. She whoops loudly as she swings.

  “Next,” says the instructor. I take a deep breath, and as I push off from the platform, my knee seizes up. I try to turn myself so that my other leg will reach the netting first and gain a foothold, but I somehow misjudge it and smash into the netting, my face against it, scrabbling to hold on.

  “Smile!” says someone. Above me, on the ledge, Danielle holds her phone in my direction. I glare at her and haul myself up the netting, wincing each time I have to put weight on my bad knee. By the time I reach the ledge, Danielle has long disappeared along a walkway made from swinging wooden steps.

  I clip on to the new wire and stop to check out the view for a moment. I see the roof of an accommodation block, a glimpse of a lake with an island in the middle of it, cows in a field. Below are paths, trees and bushes. The drop is brutal, but if I fell the carabiners would save me. Unclipped, I’d be dead for sure.

  As I walk along the first plank of wobbly wood, adrenaline pumps through me, deadening the pain in my knee. I’m hyper-aware of everything, from the texture of the rope in my hands to the hardness of the wood beneath my trainers.

  For ages, Danielle is well ahead of me, and I’m worried about Brandon catching me up, but then I can’t tell if I’m going quicker or she’s going slower because I’m closing in on her. I step on to an easy rope-ladder section that she’s still on, and she turns to hiss at me, “Give me some space!”

  I see straight away that both of her carabiners are lying against her harness, unclipped. If I wobble the walkway too much, she’ll lose her footing
or fall through a gap. I freeze, breath stuck in my throat, and watch how her hands grip the rope either side of her and her legs tremble as they negotiate each rung. I want to turn away in case I witness something that can never be forgotten, but I can’t. I’m here. I know that means I have to see it through, whatever happens. She walks in jerky steps towards the ledge at the end of the section, and I will her to keep going. As soon as both her feet are on it, she clips herself back to the wire with both carabiners and steps on to the next section. She moves lightly now, like a mountain animal. My body is rubbery, weak with delayed fear.

  It takes me a long time to catch her up. When I’m close enough, I whisper, “Why did you do that?”

  “Do what?” she asks without looking round. “What are you on about?”

  five

  Yew Tree House, before Nico

  I wake in the night because I’ve had a bad dream about Oscar. He’s in hospital again, with Mum, because of an infection, and I dreamed the medicine wasn’t working. I know it’ll be impossible to go straight back to sleep, so I switch on my bedside light. The chill in the air and extra-quietness make me twitch back the curtain by my bed, and everywhere is white.

  Snow. It lies so thickly that you can only tell where the swimming pool starts because of the cover-roller sticking up, but you can’t tell where it ends.

  It’s lonely being the only one in the house who knows about the snow. I hold out for as long as I can, and then I wrap my duvet round me and walk past Oscar’s empty bedroom along the landing to Luisa’s room.

  “Lu,” I say quietly. Sometimes when I stand by her bed at night, she goes mad because for a second she thinks I’m a random crazy who’s broken into her room.

  Tonight she groans.

  “It’s snowed!” I sit on her bed. The bed I’m so envious of because it’s a double.

  “Wow.” She sits up, then flops back against her pillows. “I’m too tired to look right now. Go back to bed.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about Oscar.”

  She sighs. “Get in, but don’t put your cold feet anywhere near me. I’m serious.”

  I leave my duvet on the floor and scoot in beside her. Her bed linen is washed with the same products as mine but it smells different. She goes back to sleep immediately and I snuggle down, gazing at the posters on her wall and planning the snow day ahead.