Our Last Summer

Alliances-1

Alliances

Whether Alex ignores him or not, they soon form an uneasy sort of truce. Ever the history student, Ryan can’t help but compare it to the alliance of nations that aren’t enemies, but have a common goal.

He just isn’t sure what that goal is.

For the first month or so, they meet after church and simply hang around. Ryan isn’t sure when the Bexleys arrived in Appington, but they’ve been here long enough that Alex has his haunts and his favourite activities—one, it seems, is to irritate the ever-absent Longman household by, when they are on one of their many holidays, taking a tennis ball and a racket and playing against their garden wall perilously close to their large greenhouses. (This is activity thoroughly, if silently, approved by the entire village, as the Longmans are not well-liked.)

One lazy Sunday in late July, they smash almost every window of the greenhouses, and disappear back into the village in the evening, laughing at the idea of the universally despised Longmans returning to the mess and their dead, prized watermelons. It feels a little like friendship (it feels a little like Manchester, if Ryan is honest) but they are not friends.

They migrate to proper tennis in Nan’s enormous garden, using the terrace wall for a net, and usually knocking over the glasses of lemonade she brings out for them. She doesn’t mind.

August breaks to the first time they meet outside of post-church boredom—when Ryan goes to the shop for crisps and bumps into Alex on a Wednesday afternoon. Alex says practically nothing, and yet they somehow end up kicking a football around the churchyard regardless, trampling the grave of Robert Longley, 1835-1866, and sheltering from the noon heat in the shadow of the crumbling, beheaded angel that guards the Ashburn family, struck down with scarlet fever in 1902.

On the coolest days, after summer rain or later in the evenings, they unearth another football from either the mysterious depths of Alex’s house, or the equally mysterious depths of Nan’s garage, and play on the green. The old ladies puttering to and fro on whatever business old ladies have coo over them sometimes; when Milly pushes extra cake on them after church on Sundays, Ryan realises that Alex is quite the schemer. Occasionally in these impromptu matches, they will see Alex’s father coming back from work; he waves out of the car window and Ryan returns it. More often, they will part and go their separate ways in an effort to avoid Mr. Harrison going to the pub, who will inevitably pause and lecture about when he was twenty and played for Arsenal (which Ryan has been reliably informed is a complete lie).

As early August delays the storms, and the cooler air begins to eventually brush through the vale, they begin to explore beyond the village. Independently, they have both explored before, but different sides and have left most of the east as uncharted territory. They spend the mornings travelling out, the peak of the day hiding in the shade and dozing—or that’s what Alex seems to do—and the evenings returning and smashing their unruly way through hedges and fences as if the world belongs to them.

“Have you seen the house?” Alex asks one Sunday morning before church.

“House?”

“Out in the fields.”

“What house?”

“It’s where the dead people used to live.”

He sounds like a child, and Ryan laughs.

“Have you seen it?”

“No. No, I haven’t seen any house.”

Alex shrugs. “We’ll go tomorrow.”