Our Last Summer

Summer-2

They gather by the bike shed, around Tom wrestling with his bike lock, and a brave few light their cigarettes, defying the ridiculous heat and the threat that Mr. D’Souza, the football coach, might appear around the corner at any minute.

The heat is unbearable. Even Ryan strips off his shirt, modesty for once giving way to comfort. Tom’s cigarette is obscene, its glow repugnant in the shimmering sunlight, and Tom laughs at him when he retreats to the shade.

“Bloody hell, Ryan, don’t stop the strip tease now!” he jeers. “Was just gettin’ into that!”

When Andy—new kid, expelled from his last place, some Scouse-accented git that’s been in five fights since he showed up—sneers and curls his lip, Tom almost casually clips him around the ear, and Ryan snorts.

“Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he snaps back, and Danny laughs from the burning metal bars he perches on.

“Get a room, y’fags,” he mocks, and turns to peer through the slats in the wall, eyeing the girls leaving. Their skirts are hiked to their knickers, their long legs on display for the world, burnt lobster-red in the new dawn of summer. They will return in the autumn, sunburned and overweight, complaining of autumnal diets and hiking their skirts high again to show off those supposedly fat thighs. Nobody minds.

It’s been a hot year, and Ryan doesn’t look forward to visiting his Nan. She lives down south, near London, in rolling countryside where the air doesn’t move and the people sit in sleepy silence until the storms break—and then only stir to complain about the rain. It is always hotter there, and time slows in the heat, until it feels as though he’ll never come home. It is endless. Sometimes, he wonders if the people aren’t trapped there, caught in the web of the heat and the stillness, and secretly want to escape as much as he does.

But then, Nan lives in a village full of old people, so probably not.

He should look forward to visiting her. He should. He does love his Nan—he will even admit to it—and he only sees her twice a year as it is, but he can’t help but feel bored in the sweltering heat of the south, and the stillness and inactivity of village life for people whose existences revolve around their plants, their churches, and their perpetually absent grandchildren.

And then there is the vague resentment at having to go: he does not choose to visit every summer, but is handed a backpack and a suitcase by his mother and parked on the train every year, without fail, because, in essence, his parents do not trust him in the house alone for eight weeks.

In his more generous moments, Ryan can acknowledge the truth: they do not trust his friends for eight weeks. They do not trust Tom and Danny and Harry, and all the lads from school suddenly let out to the streets, not to lead Ryan astray.

He wishes he could disagree—wishes he could honestly claim to be stronger than that, but then, Tom (mostly Tom; after all, Danny and Harry have no such hold over, or interest in, Ryan’s daily life) has talked him into bunking off, into throwing stones at the McPherson house, into that official caution for shoplifting, and out of numerous opportunities that perhaps he should have taken.

Whether they trust Tom or Ryan, or not, the ultimatum is the same. He can go to Nan’s, or he can sit in his mother’s office every day and stare, paralysed with boredom, at legal documents that he won’t ever understand.

Ryan’s parents both work full-time: his mother is a lawyer, and his father trains weaker, slower, thicker people in the territorial army and the army cadets, and comes home with a voice hoarse from shouting. They are both professional, upright, strict people with a work ethic the size of Ryan himself, and a constant wariness of his slipping into the “deliquent, completely irresponsible!” ways of the true Mancunians that he associates with at school—people like Tom and Danny and Harry.

Sometimes he understands, but he doesn’t have to like it.

His parents, after all, don’t know Tom like he does. Tom is his best friend, to use a juvenile and girly term, and while he understands what his parents see, he also sees what they don’t—Tom’s ambition to be a police officer, his habit of getting into fights to protect his little sister, his loyalty to his friends even as he mercilessly teases them himself, and the sheer danger in insulting Tom’s mother.

Tom isn’t perfect, he knows, and sometimes his parents’ inability to see that grates.

But then, today, in the wet cloth of summer heat and watching Tom and Danny exchange lustful comments on the perfect arse that graces the inside of the very short skirt of Maria Marquez, he can also see why they don’t.

“You off south again?” Harry asks, already preening in the reflective face of his watch, and Tom snorts.

“If you got any gayer, you’d be shagging Andy Sutherland,” he mutters, and c***s his head at Ryan. “They’re not packing you off to London again?”

Ryan shrugs. “Yeah.”

“f**k’s sake, I’d go f*****g apeshit if my parents trolleyed me off again,” Harry drawls, ignoring Tom’s comment and fiddling with his hair—bleach-blond this week—again. “Dunno why you don’t, you know. You’re weird.”

“Come off it,” Tom scuffs him around the head, undoing his work. “His old man’s a soldier, in’t he? You wanna pick a fight with him?”

It’s a good point—and the one Ryan allows. It’s not the right one, but the right one would earn him a solid year of mockery, so he smirks when Harry huffs and drops down from the bike rack, and says nothing.

“Still,” Tom mutters, “f*****g gay.”

“Protesting too much!” Harry mocks, unlocking his bike. “I gotta get back before the old man—cheers, losers.”

“f**k off,” Tom calls after him, and then he’s gone. After a moment, Danny—because it is not done to intrude on Tom and Ryan—heaves himself off the red-hot bars and disappears to pester the girls again, ever hopeful, and Tom stubs out his cigarette on the nearest saddle. “You not back ‘til September, then?”

“Probably not.”

“Gay,” he repeats, jumps off the rack and pulls Ryan into an awkward hug. “Go on then—git. Your girlfriend’ll be waiting.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

“Not until you man up,” Tom agrees, and waggles his eyebrows. “Gothic chick—she’ll be a hellraiser in bed.”

“Go screw yourself,” Ryan returns easily, and walks away. Somewhere over his shoulder, Tom laughs and his lighter snaps again, and then he is out of the school grounds and into the cool shade of the alley that runs along the back of the terraces towards his own estate.

Jennifer waits in the shadows, looking cold despite the black tights and the ragged skirt and the long-sleeved shirt predicting the death of the establishment, and she falls into step with him without a greeting.

“Bournemouth or Penzance?” he asks, and she scoffs.

“Bournemouth,” her voice is a raspy drawl, from screaming to her music and screaming at her teachers and screaming at her parents. Jennifer rebels; against what, Ryan doesn’t know. “To enjoy ourselves. My cousins are coming too. God.”

Ryan hums in false sympathy. He rarely sees his cousins; the last time was Emily’s wedding, where she had grown up before him, and she looked very much as he imagined his mother to have been, once.

“Four weeks with him,” she adds sourly.

‘Him’ could be her father, or her brothers—any one of them—or her uncle, or even the aforementioned cousins. Ryan has no idea, and it is too hot to endure Jennifer’s rants, too hot to even try to comprehend her.

“I’m going to Nan’s again,” he says instead, and she sighs around the cigarette that she jams into her mouth.

“Well, it’s all right for some,” she sneers, and Ryan cannot quite agree.

* * * *

She waits on the platform—his mother’s mother, shorter than her grandson, but with the same brown eyes and slow smile that spreads from the centre like a sunrise.

He steps off the train and right into her embrace—she smells of lavender and laundry detergent, and her grip is strong for such an elderly woman. She feels cool, her arms a shelter from the heat that was oppressive in Manchester, evil in London, and downright fatal here, and Ryan feels a burst of affection for the woman who is, arguably, the most important relative that he has.

“Hello, dear,” is all that she says, kissing him on both cheeks and having to stretch up, just a little now, to do it. She is smaller than he remembers; her car, shimmering in the heat, is rickety and a tighter fit than it used to be, and with every pothole-induced bump over the country lanes towards Appington, his head grazes the roof uncomfortably.

When they pass the welcome sign, and turn off to Nan’s lane at the east side of the churchyard, he notices how the village seems to be frozen in time, standing stubbornly the same in the face of the world. It is always summer here, and each summer is exactly the same.

He is wrong.