Summer's Edge Page 5

  "I will be glad to see the back of her," Alice agreed.

  "In the film, that scene with his girlfriend, was that rape?" Becky asked. She was still thinking about Basic Instinct.

  Jules didn't know. "I think it was maybe just more heated. Like in the heat of the moment."

  "Do guys like that? I don't think I would," Becky said.

  Alice didn't think she had much to worry about with Brett in that regard. He looked more like a puppy dog than a stallion. Her thoughts went to Mr Walker, momentarily casting herself in the scene with him. Given the savage way he had kissed her in the pavilion she could well imagine him doing something like that. Grabbing her from behind and having his way with her. She shivered.

  Lying in bed she imagined a different outcome at the barbecue. What if his resolve and faltered and he had ripped her t-shirt off and covered her body with his?

  She imagined his hands on her breasts, his rock hard body crushing hers. Would he stand up and take her against the wall, or bend her over like Basic Instinct? Or would he throw her down on the tiles, push her legs apart and make her his?

  She wanted him so badly it was nearly painful. Her body felt neglected. She couldn't remember ever having desired anyone else this badly. She'd dated boys before and they'd messed around, but she'd never felt an overwhelming urge to just lose all her inhibitions and better judgement and go all the way.

  At least she had a kind of non-school link to him through Becky now, if there were any more group social occasions like that. At some point surely his resistance would break down? Particularly as the end of term approached, removing those concerns.

  8. School tensions

  Alice felt differently at school the next week. Knowing that Mr Walker liked her and was fighting his attraction to her gave her an illicit thrill. Their paths didn't have much occasion to cross, as out of respect to his order she avoided the cricket pitches, but she noticed that he was in Assembly every morning and in lunch every day.

  Nearly always she would find him looking at her, then deliberately looking away.

  Jules had also finally decided to embrace the situation which made Alice feel better about things. Not that there was a situation, yet anyway, but Alice could feel something drawing them together like a magnet.

  Beyond that, revision occupied most of their time. They mainly studied different subjects, only sharing a few subjects and none between all three of them. Alice had Economics with Jules so they revised together. She had Biology with Becky, who in turn had History with Jules.

  On Wednesday the lizard and its owner were back at the vet, to Alice's relief it looked much better. She got to hold it this time, feeling the soft, dry warmth of its belly compared to the hard tough scales on its back. Reptiles would be an interesting area of practice.

  On Thursday afternoon they had tennis and were once again in their micro skirts, aimlessly hitting balls over the net.

  "What's the point of this?" said Jules. "None of us are on the tennis team, we leave forever in a matter of weeks, and we could use this time so much better for revision."

  The games mistress gave some pat response about healthy bodies and healthy minds.

  Jules was also annoyed because she’d had to partner with Maddy Pullen.

  "I can vote, marry, drive a car and even join the army yet I'm still forced to play tennis twice a week." What Jules actually wanted to do was slip off that afternoon because there was a fair in town and Leafy would be there.

  "Why would he be at a fair?" Becky asked.

  "It's the fairground workers moving from place to place, it's like a travelling market."

  Becky was confused. "You can't buy anything there except candyfloss and stuffed toys."

  "Yes you can, if you know what you're buying," Jules told her.

  Alice was staying as sober as possible that term, trying to drink less and avoid recreational substances. As tempting as it was to take her mind off all the exam stress, it probably wouldn’t help her results.

  She was worried about the influence of Kate and her friends on Jules. Kate had plans to do something like art or fashion and had half-heartedly applied to St Martins and a few other places but didn't have many offers. She was considering travelling for a year. Not backpacking like Alice and Jules intended, but joining the travelling community in the UK for a while.

  Jules’ parents would freak out, Alice thought, if she abandoned her plans to do law. She was also concerned that Jules might change her mind about backpacking in Asia with her and go travelling with Kate and some convoy of crusties instead. But there wasn’t a lot she could do if Jules did decide that.

  After tennis they lazed about under the trees for a while as the weather was so good. No one felt like dusty classrooms and books.

  "It's such a waste having exams in the summer term. They should be in winter when there's nothing to do except stay indoors and study," Alice said.

  She stood up and grasped onto the branch of a tree, hanging off it for a moment and enjoying the stretch through her body.

  "That's making your skirt ride up showing your knickers," Becky said.

  Alice dropped down, not really caring until she looked across and saw Mr Walker about ten yards away. He would have clearly seen everything. She went scarlet.

  "Nice one, putting on a show for your man," Jules said.

  "Do you think he saw?"

  "I shouldn’t think so. Assuming he’s registered blind, and shut his eyes, and was facing the other way."

  Alice buried her face in her hands.

  "He just looked over again," Becky told her. "I think he was smiling."

  * * *

  Alice was looking after her younger brothers on Friday night because Richard and her mother were going out to a dinner party. They never expected her to babysit but she was usually happy to. They were good little boys. She sometimes wished she had a sibling nearer her own age but that was just one of the many dreams ended by her father’s death.

  She sat in her mother’s bedroom, looking at the photos of him in the dressing table drawer while her mother chose earrings and finished her make up.

  "Do you still think about him often?"

  "Every day, when I see you. You have his eyes."

  Alice felt bad but her mother reassured her.

  "It’s not a sad feeling any more, the way it used to be," she continued. "Of course it is sad, if I think about it in a certain way, but mainly I think about how proud of you he would have been. It’s not the loss of him that hurts now but what he lost by never knowing you. And what you’ve lost."

  "I feel guilty that I don’t feel it," Alice said. "I try to, but it’s like it happened to someone else."

  "You weren’t even born darling. You couldn’t be expected to feel it in the same way as if you had known him."

  Her mother was deciding between some diamanté drops and some pearls. "The pearls," Alice said. She liked that her mother’s jewellery was discreet and elegant. She was never embarrassed by her mother like some girls were by theirs. She remembered an unfortunate classmate whose newly divorced mother had turned up blind drunk to the school concert and had flung herself at the chemistry teacher.

  "With Richard, did it worry you that he was older?" she asked.

  Alice’s mother laughed. "Hardly. He was only in his forties and I was a grown woman with a child. If anything I felt very lucky that he felt that such a nice man had feelings for me. Enough men his age were casting their wives aside for a secretary half their age."

  Alice, who considered her mother to be very beautiful, personally thought that Richard had got the better end of the deal but didn’t say so. Although she liked Richard very much he wasn’t an obvious Casanova. Or Lothario. Or whatever the men that went off with their secretaries were supposed to be.

  "If I ended up with an older boy - a man - would you be very worried?" she asked.

  "I’d be very upset if I thought someone was taking advantage of you. But if you met a nice man, and he was kind
to you, then a few years difference wouldn’t matter. I hope you’ll finish your studies first though."

  "I hope I won’t be single for the next six years," Alice said.

  "I mean in terms of settling down. You have so much time ahead of you." Her mother had finished blotting her lipstick and was getting up to leave.

  "But you wouldn’t mind if there was someone?"

  "As long as you respect yourself and others, and be safe and careful, then you’ll be alright." Her mother probably thought she was talking about her trip with Jules.

  The boys were wildly excited as usual to have a night alone with Alice. She always spoiled them. They had already had their supper and bath early but she always let them have ice cream and stay up later than usual watching cartoons. The day would come soon enough when they would be awkward adolescents and not sweet little boys any more, she thought.

  Alice envied them their companionship. Perhaps they’d fight later on, but for now they were like a little team, the best of friends. After they had gone to bed following extra stories and tucking in she felt lonely. She knew Jules was out with Leafy again but Becky was probably in. She rang her.

  "I’m babysitting the boys. Do you want to come over?"

  Becky was only a few minutes drive away. She was keen to see Alice so she could analyse and scrutinise how things were going with Brett. Jules had been a bit dismissive recently.

  It was an interesting thing, being in a threesome of best friends. In such a group normally one person always got left out but somehow they made it work. There was a different type of glue for each of them. Alice and Jules were more academically similar: higher achieving and more ambitious, and had both lost parents. While their families were quite different, both were stepfamilies.

  Jules and Becky had known each other since they were at playschool and their mothers had been friends. There was something that the two of them shared that felt alien to Alice but she could never put her finger on what it was. It didn’t matter, it was just that on the surface of it Jules and Becky were the most different of all of them, with Jules being outspoken and confrontational and Becky being much quieter and more timid and conventional. One might expect Alice to get caught in between them but she rarely did.

  Maybe the differences were the very thing that connected them. Becky grounded Jules while Jules pushed Becky out of her fear zone.

  Alice and Becky both planned to work in medical fields and were less confrontational than Jules. They were the laid back ones, the ones who shared an eye roll when Jules once again got fired up about something.

  Though recently Alice found herself feeling more rebellious and impatient, more like she thought Jules must feel. Everything felt like they were in limbo, they were hovering, waiting for something. She wanted it to come to fruition, whatever it was. Yet she feared even more that it might not do so, that she might have to chart her own course out of this and there would be no clear guides to point the way.

  Becky arrived and as there was nothing on TV they made brownies. Becky was the most domestic of them and was a competent cook. Alice and Jules, fearing starvation if they went to university with no culinary skills, had started working their way through a "Cheap Meals for Students" recipe book that Jules’ stepmother had given her. Every other recipe seemed to involve canned tuna, rice, beans or a combination of them.

  "How did you pick all this up?" Alice asked Becky, licking the spoon while they waited for the brownies to cook.

  "Mum taught me. We just always did it, since we were small. Even my brother."

  "It makes me feel useless, I can barely boil potatoes," Alice said. She’d also burnt potatoes several times, letting them boil dry while she got distracted doing something else. "So how are things with Brett?" she asked, being generous as she knew Becky would want to talk her ear off.

  "He’s so wonderful! Honestly we have so much in common. I know it hasn’t been long but I really haven’t felt like this about anyone before." Becky continued to reel off Brett’s wonders and Alice listened kindly, her mind wandering to other things.

  "Where do they all stay?" Alice asked. She had been wondering if the overseas players were put up in a house or just stayed in hotels. They travelled around so much.

  "He and Grant have got a flat in Bristol but they often crash at Graeme’s place in Gloucester."

  "Do you think he’ll ask you to stay over with him? And will you, if he does?" Staying over would mean sleeping with him. Becky, like Alice, was still a virgin.

  "He hasn’t yet but he might. And yes, I think so." Becky blushed.

  Alice realised she was going to end up the last of the three to lose her virginity at this rate. Jules had lost it ages ago and was probably sleeping with Leafy already.

  She had fantasised a few times about Mr Walker taking her all the way in the pavilion. If he hadn’t broken it off but had instead thrown her to the floor, ripped her clothes off, and had his way with her just as brutally as he had kissed her.

  She had imagined him losing his resolve at the barbecue after stripping off his shirt, taking her in his arms, stripping off her own wet t-shirt and crushing her against his amazing body.

  Alice wasn’t sure which scenario she preferred. She liked the idea of a man taking control and getting so carried away that he just took her, overriding any doubts she might have. But she also liked the thought of something more mutually passionate, with the man showing concern for how she was and what she wanted.

  Maybe the reality was totally different. Or maybe she could try both. It wasn’t the kind of thing they were very clear about in the magazines or books she had read. They mainly talked about birth control and had a few diagrams of different positions. The only person she could really ask was Jules but she had hesitated so far. What if her fantasies were weird? She was pretty sure Becky’s idea of sex was all honeymoon and rose petals and gentle embraces. Romantic rather than raunchy.

  9. Euphoria

  At sunset they were heading through the countryside on their way to a rave that Kate had told them about. "It’s up on some sort of hill near Stroud," she had said.

  Kate was driving them which worried Alice as she had no idea how they would get back if Kate got wasted. She supposed she could drive Kate’s car for her.

  It was easy enough to find as loads of other vehicles were heading there. This was a relief to Becky has she had worried that Brett and his mates, who were travelling separately, might get lost and not make it.

  "The police will be here soon if they’re not already," Kate said.

  "Will they break it up?"

  "I doubt it. They left Lechlade alone, it was too big to stop."

  Sure enough they saw flashing blue lights as they approached and found that roadblocks were already being set up. "It’s all off, it’s over," a policeman told them, trying to wave them away.

  "Bullshit," Kate said, though not to the officer. "They always say that to try and break it up. We’ll just have to leave the car and walk the rest of the way." Kate managed to find a nearby field with an open gate and they parked in there, as other vehicles had done. Alice was glad they were all wearing Doc Martens, the mud from earlier rain would have wrecked most other shoes.

  It was a steep climb up the hillside to Selsley Common. The sun had just gone down by the time they arrived and the sky was still light. You could see for miles across the Cotswold hills, rolling green fields divided by trees and hedgerows, villages strewn about, church steeples. It was like being on top of the world.

  At the summit there were already thousands of people with the action taking place around a bowl-shaped dip. Sound systems, cards, vans and drink sellers surrounded the huge crowd dancing below them.

  "That’s going to be a mud bath by morning," Jules said.

  Becky was fretting about meeting up with Brett. "I had no idea it would be so big, how are they going to find us?"

  "How many of them are coming?" Jules asked.

  "I don’t know, Grant is but I’m not sur
e about the English players."

  Kate had vanished to find her friends. She eventually reappeared with a dreadlocked bloke whom Alice assumed was Leafy. He wasn’t too bad looking. His dreads were tied back off his face and he wore an eyebrow piercing and a baggy army surplus jacket.

  Jules was trying to play it cool but was obviously thrilled to see him.

  "Come over, we’re having a smoke by Mush’s van," he said. They went with him. Mush turned out to be another bloke with dreads who was completely out of things already. There were a couple of girls there as well. One had dreadlocks with her hair shaved underneath on the sides. The other had nose and lip rings and stripey tights covered with holes.

  Alice’s and Becky’s DMs and jeans felt like school uniform by comparison. Jules was wearing her awful multicoloured baggy trousers again, similar to Kate and Leafy so at least she blended in.

  Leafy sat down and started crumbling hash into a roll-up. He took a couple of drags and then passed it to Jules.

  "Alice works at a vet," Kate said to Leafy.

  For some reason this sparked interest. Mush came out of his daze. "You got anything on you?"

  "What I am supposed to have?" Alice asked.

  "Special K. Ketamine. All vets have it. You should have told her Jules, she could have brought some," Kate told her.

  "Didn’t think of it," Jules said.

  Alice knew that Jules knew that not in a million years would she have taken substances from work. She was annoyed at Kate though.

  "I don’t want to stay here, I want to find Brett," Becky said to Alice in a whisper.

  Alice didn’t particularly want to sit around smoking either. The dance pit had more appeal. She needed something though. A drink would do.

  A guy caught her eye. "Rhubarb and custard? Doves?" Alice had no idea what she should be asking for.