The Dead of Summer

I stormed off to the bus thinking, wankers, wankers, wankers. Why did I mind so much? I wasn’t after friends – had always preferred, actually, knocking about on my own. I bunked off a lot, wore the wrong kinds of clothes, had a boy’s haircut and didn’t give a fuck about Duran Duran. I didn’t know what to say to the other kids nor they to me. They left me alone and that was only what I wanted.

I had got being ignored down to a fine art – and there is an art to it. It takes concentration and years of practice to ensure that you are constantly overlooked. I was a slipping-into-the-shadows sort of person, a disappearing-into-the-crowd sort of kid. Always on the periphery, a walking ‘Do not disturb’ sign. Nobody bothered me and I intended to keep it that way. I was the invisible girl. And yet. And yet. Something about Kyle tugged at me, pulled at me. I guess I must have seen something in him. I guess I saw me in him.

And at least Kyle and Denis looked like they had a purpose. They didn’t seem to give a shit about school or the other kids either. I wanted to know where they were going, what they got up to after the last bell rang, where Kyle went to at night. I just did. And I really wanted somewhere else to go other than back home.

Do I wish, now, that I’d kept away from them? Do I look back and curse the moment I first set eyes on Kyle? I just wish that he was still here. I miss him still, you see.

A few days later I got back to find Dad drinking tea with one of our neighbours. Janice was fortyish, ginger and fat, and each of her breasts was bigger than my head. Her make-up looked like she’d thrown it on with a bucket, and she wore the sort of clothes that looked good on my sisters, but kind of made you wince to see them on someone like her. My dad looked terrified, our neighbour’s Lycra-clad rolls and ear-splitting laugh seemed to flatten him against the splashback like a dribble of spilt gravy. Next to her he appeared even more vague and hopeless than usual. In fact, I had never seen him so relieved to see me.

She spotted me before I had a chance to back out. ‘You must be Anita!’ she shrieked, thrilled. I started edging my way out the door, but Dad lassoed me with his panic.

‘Anita, this is our neighbour, Janice.’ He stood there nodding desperately, like someone with Alzheimer’s and clutching his can of Tennent’s.

‘Don’t mind me, babes, come and sit down.’ She beamed and patted the chair next to her. I sat in the one nearest the door. ‘Thought I’d come and be neighbourly,’ she said in the south-London whine I’d soon grow to hate. Her teeth were very small and yellow in her big, pink mouth. ‘Been having a lovely chat with your dad,’ she said. ‘He’s been telling me all about you.’ I stared at my dad who started examining one of the buttons on his cardi.

Janice hugged her cup of tea to her cleavage, her piggy, mascara-clogged eyes suddenly brimming with compassion. ‘Terrible what he’s been through, bringing you all up on his own.’ She looked at me like it was my fault Mum had dropped dead.

At last Janice cottoned on that I was the sort of silent, staring child who makes adults like her nervous and shut up. We both looked at my dad, who looked at his can. Luckily for Janice, at this point, Push came in.

My brother had never been one to shy away from a good cleavage and once the introductions had been made sat down with the air of a fifteen-year-old who has just found out he lives next door to Samantha Fox. ‘I’ll have to pop round for sugar sometime,’ he said with a wink, and Janice giggled and patted her hair. Cocky, handsome, big-mouthed Push. Not for the first time Dad and I stared at him in amazement. Where did he come from? we silently asked each other.

After three minutes of Push banging on about himself, I was ready to make my escape. But I froze at the door when Janice said, ‘Lewisham High, is it? So you must know that Kyle Kite.’

It was the first time I’d heard his full name but I knew instantly who she meant. Funny to think now, I suppose, how notorious that name has become, how synonymous it is with something I could barely comprehend back then. At the time though I merely turned back from the door, my curiosity pricked, to see her suck her cheeks in, raise her eyebrows and look at Dad as if to say ‘WELL!’

‘Kyle?’ I asked, ‘Kyle who lives opposite?’

‘That’s the one! No. 33.’ She shook her head as if she was going to start welling up again. ‘Such a sad business.’

‘What was?’ I wanted to strangle the words out of her.

‘His little sister was Katie Kite!’ She said the name triumphantly. Expectantly. Me, my dad and Push looked at each other, the penny almost but not quite dropping. The name vaguely but not really ringing a bell. We looked back at Janice, shaking our heads. Sorry, who?

‘Little Katie Kite!’ said Janice in exasperation. ‘God almighty, don’t you lot read the papers?’

Janice sighed and filled us in. One morning a year ago Kyle’s mum (‘nice lady, but a bit, you know …’) went to wake up little Katie, only she wasn’t there. Five years old she was, gorgeous little thing. Vanished. No trace of her anywhere. ‘Surely you remember? Front-page news!’ We did, then. We remembered the headlines, the pictures of the little girl, the appeals for information. We remembered, but not clearly – our own nightmare was filling our thoughts back then.

‘They never found her.’ Janice cupped her tea closer. ‘Just disappeared and nobody had a clue who did it.’ She shuddered. ‘Enough to drive anyone mad, wondering about it. Her mum never went out again. Poor Kyle does all their shopping. And his lovely granddad goes round too.’

Even Push was impressed. ‘What, did someone have her away then?’

‘That’s just it, love. No one knows. The police were crawling around here for ages. No signs of a break-in. Couldn’t find a thing. Total cock-up by the sounds of it. Hauling in half the neighbourhood, accusing all sorts. Even dragged the ex-husband back from God-knows-where but not a dicky bird. Poor little thing just disappeared and Christ only knows what became of her.’

Janice looked at each of our gaping faces with immense satisfaction and finished her tea.

The weeks before the end of term dragged on. Denis and I stuck together during the day and sometimes we’d catch glimpses of Kyle around school but he always ignored us. Often he’d turn up to meet Denis after he’d clearly been bunking off all day. I’d managed to break Denis’s habit of answering my every question with his own retarded ones, but on the subject of Kyle he was unforthcoming. It was mind-bendingly frustrating. If I’d been interested in Kyle before, now I was fascinated. Imagine knowing someone whose sister had vanished?

I once asked Denis if he ever went round to Kyle’s. He looked a bit shifty and tried to turn the conversation back to dinosaurs or Curly Wurlys or whatever the fuck he’d been talking about. But after I went on at him he said, ‘Yeh, well no, not really. Mostly we go out and do stuff.’

I asked him what sort of stuff.

‘Just mucking about sort of stuff. Down by the river.’

I looked at him with my ‘Don’t be a dickhead’ face.

‘Looking for caves,’ he said.

Caves? Looking for what caves? But Denis escaped into his sodding Home Economics class to learn how to make shepherd’s pie, and that was that.

The days slouched on, dragging their heels towards the end of term, each one much like the last until suddenly one morning something a bit weird happened. By then I’d got into the swing of things at Lewisham High. My teachers were so relieved that I was the sort of kid who kept her head down and her mouth shut that they pretty much left me to my own devices. That particular day I was in Maths with Denis. We were both in the bottom class – him for obvious reasons, me because it was easier to play dumb and coast along with the retards rather than have to get involved and take part with the few kids in that place who actually gave a shit. The teachers were far too busy trying to keep World War III from breaking out to bother with the likes of me.

So after Maths, Denis and I came out of our classroom to find Kyle right outside. He was just standing there in the corridor really still, his fists clenched, his eyes on the floor, but he was doing this thing, the thing I do too, of pretending that he wasn’t really there. I recognised it straightaway, that haziness; the inaccuracy of him, like, even though you were looking directly at him, it was really like you were only seeing him from the corner of your eye. Shadowy. There’s a certain knack to that.

He was with three other kids and they were taking the piss out of him, laughing at him, and he had his back to the wall like he was trying to blend into it. They were saying stuff like, ‘Fucking tramp’, that sort of thing. ‘Weirdo.’ Just the sort of thing kids like us got all the time. You just ignored it. But then one of them, a tall lanky girl said, ‘Where’s your kid sister then?’ and she started laughing, you know that Ahahahahahaha high-pitched sort of fake laughing kids do when they know they’re not really being funny.

That’s when it happened. Kyle looked up then, straight at the girl who had said it, and it was like suddenly all of him that he’d been hiding, pretending wasn’t there, zoomed back into him with such brute force that all of him and his anger and hatred for those kids suddenly concentrated, focused into his eyes with the speed of a bullet. And the girl stopped laughing like she’d been slapped. Her face just dropped, just went completely blank with shock. Then Kyle went for her, just sort of lunged at her. And she ran, then. She ran as fast as she could but Kyle just threw himself off down the corridor after her.

By this time a bit of a crowd had gathered so we all chased after them, the other kids yelling, ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ We chased them down the corridors and up the stairs and when we reached the top there they were: Kyle and the girl. He had her by the throat. She was half-bent backwards over the banister, half-hanging over the stairwell – quite high up they were, Kyle’s thumbs pressed into her windpipe, her eyes all bulging and red. All the other kids just went really quiet.

A teacher came and broke it up, yanked Kyle by the elbow away from the girl and marched him off to the headmaster’s office and that was that. And I remember thinking then that I would do practically anything to be friends with Kyle.

Suddenly it was the end of term. Seven whole weeks with no school stretching ahead of me and I didn’t have a thing to do. Some mornings I’d just sit on our steps in the sunshine, watching the people go by. Push got a summer job and my sisters hung out in the nearby park with their new college mates, taking it in turns to buy cider and fags. Sometimes I’d see Denis come and knock for Kyle. He’d turn and wave at me if he saw me hanging about, but Kyle never looked back when they went off down the street together. Occasionally I’d see an old man letting himself into No. 33, but I never saw any sign of Kyle’s mum. I tried to imagine what their house was like inside, but the curtains were always drawn and I could only picture dark empty rooms behind them.

The day that everything changed was a Saturday. I was bored shitless of hanging around the house while Dad watched cartoons so I decided to go into Lewisham.

The streets of our bit of Brockley were wide and long with tall skinny houses that felt like they were leaning forward, like they were about to fall down on you with their pointy roofs and their big bay windows like gaping mouths. The pavements were lined with trees so big their roots had started to push up through the tarmac like trapped arms. I tripped over them a hundred times in those first few weeks.

I walked until I got to the hill that goes down to Lewisham, the slopes of Crystal Palace and Forest Hill behind me, Deptford and Greenwich spread out below. You could see the masts of the Cutty Sark from there, the river twisting behind it. Buses thundered past me as I walked down the hill. Soul music blasted from open doors and the primary-coloured Caribbean shop fronts jingle-jangled in the dust between the crumbly bricked houses, black and white stickers peeling off their dirty windows that said ‘CND’ and ‘Ban The Bomb’. I kept my eyes on my flip-flops as they picked their way along the dips and hollows of the dried-up pavements.

Packed, Lewisham was. When I reached the high street I was overwhelmed suddenly by the mobs of Saturday morning shoppers; teenagers with pushchairs, tramps with their cans, religious nuts shouting into loud speakers, cars blaring music. A 180 bus stopped and not caring where it was going, I got on.

It wasn’t until I’d sat down on the top deck that I realised Kyle and Denis were sitting on the seat across from me. They didn’t notice me at first. Kyle was sitting neat and compact, his scrawny white neck rigid as he stared at a fat girl eating a burger in front of him. Denis, taking up most of the seat, was jiggling his knees up and down, whistling the same long thin note between his teeth. I watched Kyle watch the fat girl, noticed his disgust at the way she gnawed at her food, fat globs of mayonnaise and relish dripping onto her hands. The bus chugged, unbearably hot, towards Greenwich.

Then, suddenly, from the smoke-fogged seats at the back came, ‘There’s those fucking gypos from school.’

Kyle kept looking straight ahead, but Denis and I both turned, our eyes meeting briefly, knowing instantly what this meant. At the back of the bus sat Mike Hunt and his mates Lee and Marco. I had been at Lewisham High long enough to know that this was seriously bad news. I was surprised they’d had time to notice Kyle and Denis long enough to recognise them, busy as they usually were setting fire to each other or getting shitfaced on glue in the toilets. They were in my brother’s year, and they were grade-A psychos. Mike was so hard nobody even ever took the piss out of him for having a name that basically sounded like ‘my cunt’. His older brother was in prison for stabbing some bloke and you got the feeling Mike wasn’t far behind him. It was said he’d been expelled from his last school for sexually assaulting one of his teachers. Most of the time Mike and his friends were in Lewisham High’s off-site and optimistically titled ‘Improvement Centre’, but otherwise they terrorised the corridors and playing fields, looking for someone’s day to ruin. And they were making their way towards us.

The fat girl got up and Mike and Marco fell into her empty seat, Lee next to me. Mike was so blond and pale you could see the veins of his face behind his thin white skin. ‘What’s this then?’ he said. ‘Spastics’ day out?’

Denis looked anxiously at Kyle.

‘Oi!’ Mike’s voice was suddenly so loud every passenger on the packed bus swivelled their heads towards him. ‘I asked you a fucking question.’ His laugh was ear-splitting, shrill as a girl’s. ‘You seen what they’re wearing?’ he asked Lee. Marco, his face grey and greasy as uncooked hamburger, spat dismissively at Denis’s head. Conversation from the other passengers petered out.

I saw Denis glance down guiltily at his and Kyle’s outfits.

He was wearing a too-small T-shirt with a picture of Inspector Clouseau on the front, the words, ‘Where’s that rinky-dink panther?’ written in curly pink writing underneath. Kyle was dressed with his customary disregard for either fashion or temperature in tweed trousers two sizes too big and a nasty brown nylon jumper. His bony elbows poked through little holes in the sleeves. To be fair they did look like a couple of gypos. But Kyle was still looking straight ahead, as if he hadn’t noticed them yet.

Marco turned to Mike and pointed proudly at his top. ‘Kappa, this is. Thirty-eight quid right? My dad got it from this shop up West, yeh?’

Mike snorted. ‘Fucking shit that is.’ He pointed at his lime-green sweatshirt. ‘Lacoste. Forty-three quid down Romford, so fuck off.’ They turned their attention back to Kyle and Denis. ‘Where you going then, girls?’

Kyle sighed, stood up, and with a flick of his head to Denis, signalled for him to get up too. A sudden recklessness made me slip past Lee to join them. The three lads got up to bar our way. ‘Off somewhere, wanker?’ Marco asked Kyle softly. Mike noticed me for the first time. ‘All right, Paki. Want some too do you?’ He turned to his mates and laughed. ‘Seen the state of these cunts?’

Lee shoved his face in Denis’s. ‘Give us a fiver and you can go.’ Denis looked like he was going to shit himself.

When Kyle finally spoke, it was with the gravely sympathetic air of a doctor imparting very bad news. ‘Mike,’ he began sadly, as the other passengers craned forward to listen. ‘Your mum’s a lesbian, your sister’s on the game and your dad sucks cock. Now let me off the fucking bus. Please.’

There was a moment of silence, then an eruption of shocked laughter from a crowd of black kids at the front and suddenly the rest of the bus were shaking their heads and smiling in disbelief too. Mike looked like someone had thrown a brick in his face. ‘Hah?’ he said.

One of the black kids shouted, ‘Let them off the fucking bus, batty-boy.’

A fat girl with braids got up and made shooing motions with her hand. ‘Get out of the man’s way, you pasty little shit.’ Her boyfriend, big and menacing, kissed his teeth at Mike. ‘Let them through, man, or shall I kick ya bony ass?’ His friends started laughing, waving their right hands till their fingers clicked, shouting ‘Shaaaaaaaaame!’ and ‘Buuuuuuuuuurn!’ while the girl, creasing up, said, ‘Bwoy! Mama’s a lesbian!’ She wiped pretend tears from her eyes and shook her head slowly. ‘Oh my gosh, that’s harsh, man.’

Mike’s only option was to feign indifference. Shrugging, he moved aside to let us pass. Me and Denis followed Kyle downstairs. The bus kept level with us for a while as we walked in silence. As it finally veered off to the right, a window slid open and Mike’s face appeared in the little square gap. He gobbed at each of us, three wet balls of spit landing expertly on our heads.

three

We make telephones at the factory where I work. I’ve been there for four years. Every day for four years I have been responsible for sticking the manufacturer’s logo onto the bottom of the handset. Millions and millions of sticky labels I have attached, each one identical to the last. I am a good worker, Doctor Barton. I am quiet, steady and fast and I always beat my targets. At first the other workers resented me for it, but once they realised I was oblivious to their remarks and dirty looks they gave up and now I am to them like part of the bench I sit on every day.

And the days and weeks dissolve into each other, they dissolve. I measure out each one carefully, inch by inch, fraction by fraction, until it is night and I can go home and wait for Malcolm.

Malcolm is nineteen, six months younger than me, and he lives with his mum in my block. He washes up in the kitchen of a Mexican restaurant called Speedy Gonzales. I knew there was something different about him right away. I mean, I knew there was something different about how I felt about him. I wasn’t afraid of him. I didn’t want to duck my head and run into my bedsit whenever I passed him. I usually avoid people’s eyes and so does he, but after I had been here for a year we just gently, bit by bit, started letting ourselves not look away, whenever we passed on the stairs or in the corridor. We didn’t smile or anything, didn’t speak, but we started to let our eyes rest awhile on each other’s. Which is a lot, an awful lot, for people like me and Malcolm.

Denis, Kyle and I had got off the bus in the middle of Greenwich, the market place and cafes spewing tourists come to buy cheap antiques or second-hand jeans. We started walking towards the river and the high masts of the Cutty Sark. When we reached the boat I stopped. Denis looked at me questioningly. ‘You coming then?’

I glanced at Kyle, who was squinting up at the sun and fiddling with a cigarette butt he’d pulled from his pocket. He shrugged and nodded. The three of us walked on.

The day had the kind of hyper-real, orange-hued brightness that engraves itself in memories, the sky so blue I felt I could reach up and tear chunks from it. At the river we stopped to watch some tourists get on the pleasure boat. A woman handed out ice creams to her kids as her husband took pictures from the jetty. Kyle stared across the river at the scrappy brown wastelands of the Isle of Dogs then looked pointedly at the brick and glass-domed entrance to the Thames’ foot tunnel. Denis shook his head. ‘I’m not going down there,’ he said. It was clearly a familiar request. He shuddered and turned to me. ‘Don’t like being underground.’ Kyle shrugged and we turned towards the cool shaded walkway that follows the Thames’ bank in the direction of Woolwich.

We fell into single file, Kyle leading the way. We didn’t speak, each of us dragging a hand along the black iron railings, our faces turned towards the river, scenting out like dogs the water’s warm, yeasty whiff as it lapped gently below. To our right was the cold white stone of the Royal Naval College, looming and magnificent in the midday heat.

On we walked, past laughing, beery pubs, down cobbled lanes then out again to the deserted narrow streets of east Greenwich. We were alone suddenly, no tourists or weekend shoppers there. Just little rows of black-bricked houses in the shadow of an enormous power station in a perpetual sullen stand-off. Tiny pubs on corners, an air of recent violent brawls, in the dark cracks we glimpsed lone old men with fag-butts for fingers staring at their pints.

We joined the river again and made our way to the grassy wastelands that scorched and browned between some warehouses. On a steel girder in an empty boat-yard we smoked the cigarettes I’d stolen from my sisters’ stash. The air was thick with river smells and hazy with heat. Distant clankings from the scrapyards mixed with shouts of laughter from a nearby beer garden while the Thames lapped below us like the sea-shore. A whiff of molasses from the animal feed factory drifted and mingled with the sounds and light like liquid, the sun scorching the tops of our heads and the backs of our hands. I watched the river turn and tug and thought that somewhere it must join up with the sea, somewhere very far away I’d never been.

‘Did you know,’ said Kyle eventually, ‘that if two people were to hold hands for like, years and years and years, never letting go I mean – like eating and going to school and that, just holding hands all the time – that their skin would eventually grow over each other’s and they’d be joined up?’

Denis gazed at him with silent respect for a while before eventually asking, ‘What if they weren’t in the same class, though?’

Seven years have passed since that summer. Here in my little room in Bristol I look out over the quiet Clifton streets and the distant fields and hills, but what I see are the banks of the river Thames. That day was the start of it all, see – the start of me, Denis and Kyle. And despite everything, despite what was to come, I smile when I think of the three of us then. The truth is, those first few weeks we spent together were the best of my life. You look a little shocked, Doctor Barton. But just listen. Listen to me.

That first day Kyle and I didn’t talk much. The few times I did speak to him it was like dropping a stone down a very deep well. He’d look at me with vacant eyes until whatever I’d said finally hit the bottom of him and you could almost hear the ‘plop’, then he’d blink and either answer, or not. Mostly I kept quiet as we smoked and listened to one of Denis’s rambling stories and threw sticks into the river, but my eyes kept returning to Kyle’s face; that guarded, always-thinking face like one of those rodenty, bug-eyed cats. But his eyes were as grey as stones, as grey as the river. A face that could utterly shock you with its rare half-smiles like a sudden crack of light in a dark room.

I got the feeling that he wasn’t mad keen on me being there, and while he was used to Denis’s constant chatter and questions, I was merely being put up with for that one brief day.