Lying About Last Summer Read online

  Loads of people show up on the hill above the farm to slide down on sledges, trays or whatever else they’ve got available. Toby’s there of course, seizing the opportunity to sit on a sledge behind Luisa and cuddle her from behind as they hurtle down the hill. He comes back to the house with us, and volunteers to shovel snow off the doorstep and make a path across the driveway to the gate. No one other than us needs access so I don’t get why he does it. The track from the road up to our house and the farm is impassable at the moment. Mum and Oscar are holed up at the hospital and Dad is working from home at the top of the house in his office.

  Toby slurps hot chocolate with us in the kitchen afterwards, and when Luisa says she has to finish off an essay, he points at the back garden and says incredulously, “What? When there’s all that fresh snow?”

  “I need to get good grades if I want to go to uni,” she says. “Make a snowman with Skye.”

  We do. We make the sort that’s standing on its head, we jump on the trampoline, which hardly bounces because of the weight of the snow on it, and we make snow angels. We have a snowball fight that ends when Toby shakes a tree branch above my head and I’m snow-dumped so badly I can barely stay upright, and neither can he because he finds it so hilarious.

  “Don’t you have to help in the farm shop or something?” I ask as I trudge inside. He toes off his boots and follows me in to say goodbye to Luisa, dripping water up the stairs. As I remove my sodden outer layers in the kitchen, he shouts down to me that she’s not doing her essay at all, she’s watching a film on her laptop. I walk into her room, and he’s in bed with her, stripped down to his T-shirt, already sucked into the drama on screen.

  Luisa looks up, sees my damp hair and red ears and hands, and says, “Are you OK?”

  “I’m frozen.”

  “Get a hot-water bottle and another duvet, and watch this with us.”

  Before the film finishes, I fall asleep, huddled on my side away from the other two. I wake up slowly, warm and comfortable, listening to their conversation.

  “I don’t think Dad meant to tell me, but he’d had a few drinks,” Luisa is saying. “They’ve spent so much money seeing doctors abroad, his business isn’t doing well at the moment and Mum can’t work any more because of Oscar.”

  I open my eyes, eyelashes scratching on the pillow.

  Toby shifts. I can tell he’s not leaning against Luisa any more. “Your parents wouldn’t sell this house though… I mean, you’ve lived here all your life. And…”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll sell a kidney to help them out,” says Luisa in a jokey, upbeat voice.

  “I’d sell a kidney if it meant you staying here,” says Toby. “I’d sell my body.”

  Luisa laughs, and next there’s the off-putting sound of noisy kissing.

  six

  Now

  “How did everyone find the high ropes course?” asks Pippa as we line up for pasta bake and salad in the yellow dining room.

  Everyone mutters that they had a good time apart from Fay, who yaps on about the parts she hated, which is most of it, and Danielle, who plays on her phone.

  When I reach the food, I scoop up some pasta with the serving spoon and tap it against my plate until it falls off in one solid block. I decorate it round the edge with salad leaves.

  “There are sauces at the end,” says Pippa. “I can recommend the sweet chilli.”

  I shuffle along behind the others towards the jars and bottles. There’s mustard, ketchup, lots of different salad dressings, barbecue sauce and a jar of Lower Road Farm Sweet Chilli Sauce. I place my plate on the table and pick up the chilli sauce. The label with the curly font is hauntingly familiar. A waft of the sweet red sauce is all it takes to transport me back to the farm shop. I see an open tester jar on a table in the middle of the shop, fragments of savoury crackers on a white plate for dipping. I must have taken a step backwards, because I bump into one of the girls, who I think is called Kerry. Salad drops on to the floor from her plate.

  “Watch out!”

  Other people stream past me.

  “Give it a try,” says Pippa, next to me now. “It’s made by a local family and sold through their farm shop in a village called Pitford. I’ve started going there myself.”

  I know the family. We used to live next door.

  When I was offered this holiday, I knew Morley Hill was about half an hour away by car from Pitford, and that seemed an OK distance. Near enough to feel closer to my old life, but far enough away not to be confronted by it. Now I’m not so sure. I touch the neck of the jar with my finger and bring it to my tongue, and let the fresh fiery taste scorch my taste buds.

  “The centre likes to order food from local suppliers where possible,” carries on Pippa.

  I picture the bottles of chilli sauce on the shelving near the door of the farm shop, with the pickles and olives. “Is there a boy about nineteen who works there?”

  Pippa looks surprised. “Yes. D’you know the shop?”

  So Toby still works there. I haven’t seen him for a long time, barely thought about him. He’s part of my life that I’ve shut off.

  “I know the area a bit,” I say in a way that I hope makes her think we’ve had holidays round here. I pool a tiny amount of sauce on the side of my plate and look for a spare seat. One that’s not too near Fay.

  After we’ve eaten, Pippa stands up to announce there’s going to be an evening campfire. With singing. She genuinely thinks that singing is going to sell it to us. Then she remembers the other details: “And a proper fire.” Lucky us. With groups of younger kids, Pippa tells us, they have to use red and orange light bulbs. The only parts that sound remotely worthwhile are the hot chocolate on arrival, and marshmallows to roast on the fire.

  This is the reason I arrive early in the small clearing, on the edge of Morley Hill land. Fay is with me, even though she hadn’t had time to tie her hair up before we left our room, and is doing it now. Her hair elastic has little plastic cupcakes hanging from it.

  The hot chocolate tastes watery, and there’s not an aerosol of cream in sight, but the marshmallows, eaten off sticks, are good. Fay says she doesn’t eat them because they contain gelatin, but she takes one anyway and pulls it apart, dropping the tiny pieces in the fire and licking her fingers afterwards.

  We sit on logs with spiky slivers of wood sticking out of them. They’re far more of a health and safety risk than the small fire. We must be close to a farm because I can smell it, and even at this time in the evening there’s the faint rumble of what might be a tractor or forklift truck.

  At the end of primary school, I wrote in the yearbook that my ambition was to be a farmer. I hung out at Lower Road Farm whenever I could. I loved the Mulligan family, the farm dogs and having the freedom to roam. My perfect day was swimming followed by helping at the farm shop. Sometimes when both Mum and Dad took Oscar to see the heart doctor in Germany, Luisa and I slept in the twin beds in the tiny spare bedroom in the farmhouse, and I’d pretend that we were Mulligans, not Coltons.

  “I’m looking forward to the singing,” says Fay.

  “Seriously?” I say. Fay and I have nothing in common.

  “I’ve done singing exams,” says Fay. “Quite a few of them.”

  “You’ll have to get mingling with the Red group,” I say as I throw a dry twig into the fire. It explodes with a mini bang.

  I lean down to forage for more twigs and Pippa announces that as everyone’s arrived, she’s going to pass a clipboard round for us to select what activity we want to do in the morning. And song sheets. Laminated. If I chucked mine in the fire, there would probably be interesting coloured smoke, and dripping words.

  Pippa divides us into two groups and tries to get us to do a song with one group coming in after the other. We mumble along self-consciously, but the group that doesn’t have Pippa singing with them (mine) flounders. I worry it’s only a matter of time before she introduces some actions.

  Instead of actions, we get a bearded guy a
nd his guitar joining us. Pippa introduces him as if he’s some indie hotshot taking a break in his touring schedule, and settles him down on a log. He starts up with some twangy folksy number and without meaning to I catch Danielle’s eye across the fire. The smoke curls in front of her body but I can see she’s signalling something to me. She gets up from her log and melts away into the fading evening light, and I stand up to do the same.

  Next to me, as if she’s attached by string, Fay tugs on the bottom of my fleece. “Where are you going?”

  The toilet is the obvious answer, but Fay would probably decide she needed to go too. “To get my jacket. I’m a bit cold,” I hiss. “Back in a minute.” I disappear before Fay can offer me any of her garments. Not that they’d fit me.

  I follow the direction Danielle went in, back towards our accommodation block, before I hear her say in a low voice, “Over here.”

  After a couple of seconds I see her. She’s not that far from the path, under a tree, merging with the shadows. As I walk over, I see she has a lit cigarette in her hand. With a controlled breath she releases the smoke from her mouth. Wordlessly, she offers me a cigarette from a half-full packet of twenty.

  “What were you doing on the high ropes?” I say as I take one.

  “I wanted to see what it would feel like.”

  “I might have had to watch you die.”

  “True,” says Danielle. “But I didn’t die and you got an extra shot of adrenaline, so we’re both happy, right?”

  I place the cigarette on my lips. This will be my second ever cigarette. When I was in the swim squad, I was obsessed with protecting my lungs from pollution. I held my breath when I passed someone in the street who was smoking. I deliberately avoided trafficky roads if I was walking or cycling. Anyone would have thought it was me who was sickly, not my brother.

  Danielle eases a lighter from her jeans pocket and holds the flame so that I have to lean towards her. I suck in, and breathe out tar-tainted breath.

  “That was pathetic, wasn’t it?” says Danielle. I think she’s talking about my smoking technique until she jerks her head towards the campfire.

  My first cigarette was a couple of months ago, at a party, with a boy whose name I’ve forgotten. It was the first party I’d been to since moving near London. I wasn’t sure why I’d been invited. Or why I’d gone. We sat on the wall outside the house, and it felt similar to now. Being apart from the crowd, and from the music. There were probably a few police or ambulance sirens in the distance though. Here it’s country-quiet. No car sounds but plenty of creaking, rustling ones.

  “What’s your story, then?” asks Danielle.

  I let nicotine surge into my lungs before I reply. “Dead sister.”

  Danielle nods and drops her fag end, grinding it into the patchy earth with her flip-flop. “How old was she?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “How’d it happen – disease, accident, murder?”

  “I don’t like talking about it,” I say.

  “Oh,” says Danielle. “OK.” She’s lighting another cigarette for herself. “My golden ticket to this holiday camp is a dead mum. She was forty-four. So you get more tragedy points.”

  “I’m sorry about your mum,” I say.

  “It was cancer,” says Danielle. She turns away to breathe out her smoke. “By the way, you’ve got to see the video I took of you face-planting against that net this afternoon.”

  She produces her phone and scrolls through to find it. “Here.”

  “It’s not that funny,” I say, watching myself splat against the rope mesh. The harness makes me look as if I’m wearing one of those contraptions that babies bounce in.

  Danielle snatches her phone back. “I might upload it on to this webpage I know. People vote for the best ones.” She bats away any questions by waving her arm. “It’s just for a laugh. I won’t tag you.”

  I flick the ash off my cigarette. It flutters towards the ground, scatters and vanishes. “What if I don’t give you permission?”

  “Come on,” says Danielle. “With that helmet, your face is mostly hidden, and it’s hardly revenge porn.”

  “What if I’d filmed you while you weren’t clipped on?”

  She smiles. “I’d have been impressed. Hey, watch this.” She blows a series of smoke rings that rise up into the air, delicate and precise, like some kind of signal.

  Luisa took up smoking at university but I only knew because I saw a packet in her open bag last summer. We were in a café in Hoathley and I was minding her bag on my lap while she bought milkshakes, her treat. Mine was Oreo cookie and fudge flavour. I’d spent ages choosing it, but I couldn’t finish it. My stomach was smaller then.

  “I found your cigarettes,” I told her with a stern expression when she brought the milkshakes over.

  Anger flared in her face, and she put the drinks down so abruptly hers spilled over the edge. “Did you go through my bag?” She snatched it from me. “What’s in there is my business.”

  “You left your bag open and I saw them,” I said. “I didn’t touch anything. Honest.”

  Her face softened. “It’s all right. It doesn’t matter, but don’t do it again.”

  “OK. But I don’t think you should be smoking. Just saying.” It didn’t occur to me that she might be carrying round other stuff in her bag. Illegal stuff with a high street value.

  seven

  Thuds, shouts and screams, and I’m running. I’m on a treadmill and I can’t reach the swimming pool. Eventually I run faster than the treadmill and I dive into the water. Although I can see Luisa, she’s far away, at the bottom of the unfeasibly deep pool. She waves to me. My lungs struggle but I reach her and pull her up by her arms. With swelling panic, I see the brightness of the surface, but I don’t think I can make it. The water swirls and I can no longer breathe. I’m suffocating. And then the full unspeakable horror dawns on me. I’ve let go. I’ve let Luisa slip away.

  I wake, gasping for air, heart exploding, my entire body damp with sweat. It’s not the worst of the recurring nightmares. The worst is the one where I manage to rescue Luisa. From water or a fire or a crashed car. I shout at her to wake up, over and over, and she opens her eyes. For an exquisite moment I’m happy. Until she spits blood at me, screaming that I’m a coward and she’ll never forgive me. Her eyes roll back in her head and her body disintegrates in my arms.

  For several seconds I stay utterly still, unsure if I was screaming or crying in my sleep. There’s no movement from the other two, only steady breathing. If I close my eyes now, I’ll get the flashbacks. To the changing room, the red water, Luisa’s lifeless body. I wait it out, one hand on my stomach, feeling my breaths go in and out until I’m steady again, and fatigue creeps through my brain.

  When I wake up later, I’m not sure where I am. It’s disorienting but not unpleasant. It’s as if for those brief seconds I might have slipped into someone else’s life, with all their possibilities and opportunities. Bright light filters through the orange curtains, and makes a criss-cross pattern on the bottom half of Fay’s duvet cover.

  I reach for my phone, see that Mum’s already texted me twice, and skim through my social media sites. Once, I’d have woken to messages from my best friend, Annika, and the others. Maybe from Max Tomkins too. That was when swim squad was pretty much the whole of my life, and Annika and I were training for the same dream – to swim at nationals.

  Sometimes I’d have messages from Luisa, often sent to our own private chat group via the MessageHound app, a link to something she thought I’d like or a photo. Today the only message I have from someone other than Mum is from a girl in my English class asking what book we’re supposed to be reading over the summer.

  Breakfast is in the main dining room, which is its own separate chalet building, and the place is swarming with teenagers. I’ve left Fay and Danielle in bed – they say they’d rather miss breakfast and have a longer lie-in. At least Danielle does, and I’ve worked out that Fay isn’t much of an eate
r. I queue up by myself for a selection of buffet food, and assemble a bacon and egg croissant sandwich at an empty table.

  “Oh dear. Are you all on your own?” Joe’s standing on the other side of the table with a tray of fruit, yoghurt and juice. He’s wearing palm-tree-patterned board shorts and a tight black-and-white rash vest.

  “Yep,” I say. “But I don’t mind.”

  He sits opposite me and takes a swig of his orange juice. “So, how are you finding things?” he asks, as if he’s just got himself a counselling qualification.

  “OK,” I say, and bite into my deluxe croissant.

  “That’s good. You know, if you want to talk about anything, I’m right here.”

  I think he’s expecting me to thank him, but I nod and check that no one is listening in to this excruciating conversation. On the next table a group of Reds are arguing over who broke a music stand the day before.

  Joe stirs his yoghurt. “Guilt is very challenging.”

  I shouldn’t have told him what happened to Luisa. I can’t believe I was so stupid. “Please. Don’t.”

  “Oh. OK.” He looks surprised. “I thought you didn’t want me to tell anyone, not that you weren’t happy to talk about it with me.” He swallows down a large spoonful of yogurt. “By the way, I can be trusted completely not to tell anyone.”

  I take another bite of my croissant, and eat more quickly. I want breakfast to be over.

  “Did you choose kayaking or archery for this morning’s activity?” asks Joe.

  “Kayaking.” I ticked it because of what happened at the pool yesterday. I want to get over my water phobia. To be braver. The kayaking lake won’t be the same as the swimming pool. It won’t smell of chlorine, I’ll be wearing a life jacket and I’m going to be in a boat. Nothing like the swimming pool, in fact, but it’s a first step.

  “Are you much of a kayaker?” he asks. His eyebrows tell me he doubts it.