Our Last Summer

Alliances-2

It is the first time that Ryan goes to Alex’s house, and Alex answers the door in his boxers and absolutely nothing else. Ryan can practically hear old Mrs. Tenorman pause on her way to the post office, but Alex doesn’t seem to notice his state of undress, nor the colour Ryan knows his own face is going.

Alex is lanky—obviously only halfway through puberty—and his body is a strange mix of childhood thinness and the building muscle of adulthood. His legs are covered in a thin layer of dark hair, and his chest has started to suffer the same fate—yet his face is so clean-shaven that Ryan suspects he doesn’t shave yet. But most strange of all is his skin colour—despite the long, endless days outside, he is lily-white everywhere (with the exception of a bruise on his arm and some scraped knuckles) from the middle of his chest—which Ryan knows he hasn’t bared in his presence—to his bony hands, which he obviously has.

He’s a strange sort of outdoor-vampire, Ryan decides.

“Um,” he says. “We were going to the house today?”

“Wait,” Alex says, and disappears upstairs—and he makes a surprising amount of noise for being so verbally silent—and Ryan is left downstairs, with the faint knowledge that this house is probably empty apart from them.

He pushes open the living room door.

He’s never been in Alex’s house, never mind the living room. There are pictures in the hall, but the living room is worse. It’s a crowded house of photographs, lining every available surface. There are two sofas, and a television, and a small coffee table, and a bookshelf hiding the entire opposite wall, and not much else. It would be lonely if not for the pictures. Pictures everywhere.

They really are everywhere—the wallpaper is hidden by them, the bookshelf only has half a dozen books, the television supports a family of them, the coffee table is coated—they’re even on the floor, propped up under the bay window with the lace curtains brushing their frames.

The one that springs to Ryan’s attention immediately is a picture on the television of John Bexley holding his son. It’s a pretty boring picture, just some guy and his kid. Ryan’s mum keeps similar pictures in an album by their bed, and she likes getting them out if any of Ryan’s friends come over. It’s just a picture.

But it’s a picture of Alex; Alex, at only six or seven years old, still small enough to be picked up, and he looks…

He looks like any other six-year-old, and that’s the bit that creeps Ryan out a bit. He’s beaming in that uninhibited childish way, showing off the gap where he’s missing a tooth, that cloudy hair already making a decided bid for freedom, his knees skinned and a definite ice cream stain on his striped t-shirt and…and he’s…he’s fine. It’s a completely normal picture—just like the photos that everyone’s parents must keep of their kids.

It’s almost scary, when compared to the withdrawn, near-silent boy that throws tennis balls through people’s windows, that Ryan has known for over a month now but rarely speaks.

Ryan turns away from it hastily.

There are very few pictures of Alex growing up. There are several shots of him and a redheaded girl when they are very small—mostly the girl playing with the new baby—but as they age, the pictures begin to home in on the girl.

She’s a stunner, that’s for sure. Ryan’s not blind to the fact that Alex is reasonably good-looking in his own way, but his—sister?—is gorgeous, with the same big pale eyes, a perfectly symmetrical face, and—as she ages—a figure to die for.

In the most recent (Ryan thinks) photo of her, in pride of place on the coffee table, she’s dressed in a sharp suit, wearing a fantastic smile, and looking about twenty years old, confident and sure of herself. She is glowing, brilliantly beautiful, the kind of girl with the world at her feet.

Ryan can’t match her up to Alex. If that is Alex’s sister, then why the hell is Alex so…so…whatever it is that Alex is?

By contrast, the most recent photograph of Alex is a school picture, a year or two old. It’s not the maroon uniform of the local comprehensive, but a green blazer and blue tie. He is completely expressionless, blank-faced and solemn, and his hair already needs cutting, though not yet so badly. It tells Ryan nothing. School pictures never do; he’s suffered enough of those overly-cheerful photographers and painful poses himself to know better.

But the picture before that, Alex is no older than eight.

He is drowned out by his sister, that red hair glowing off every surface, that beautiful face frozen in time, and overshadowing Alex’s pale, bony features with ease. She is everywhere, her presence practically living in the room with her pictures, and Alex is nowhere.

Ryan returns to the hall, shutting the living room door behind him, and shutting her out, suddenly chilled. He doesn’t want to look that girl in the eye.

Alex clatters back down the stairs, shoves his feet into his trainers, and slams the door behind them.

Ryan forgets, briefly, about the girl.

* * * *

They pass over the northern ridge, for the first time, and there it is, in the downward fall of the slope, leaning haphazardly amongst the pasture as if someone has simply forgotten that the house, the field, the land, even exists anymore.

It is a large house—an old farmhouse, though devoid of actual farm buildings. A collapsed fence and a collection of brambles and weeds mark where the garden used to be, and a washing line still stretches between two dying apple trees, the leaves withered and falling already, ahead of autumn.

As they draw closer, the damage becomes more obvious. Half of the windows are boarded, the other half broken, and half of the roof tiles are missing, some shattered in the long, neglected grass that reaches Ryan’s hips effortlessly. The front door is a gaping hole in the wall, showing a sunlit, paint-peeled, grass-littered entrance beyond, and there has been no attempt, as far as Ryan can see, to board it up again.

“You’ve been here before,” he says, when Alex picks his way expertly through the weeds, the nettles and the brambles, and pauses in the doorway.

“Yes,” he says, and disappears.

Ryan catches up to him inside. The house is airy, smelling like the outside, small holes in the windows and walls letting the world in, and the rooms have been stripped down until they are merely cubes of cracking wooden floorboards and peeling white paint.

“Do you come here often, then?” he asks, eyeing the empty rooms critically, and Alex shrugs.

“Not really.”

“How long do you think it’s been like that?”

Alex shrugs again. “Decades.”

Ryan leaves him, and goes to explore. The bathroom is intact, but dried out. The bath groans like a slaughtered elephant when he tries the taps, and no water is forthcoming.

The kitchen has been ripped out, gaping holes in the walls and paintwork from the now non-existent counters, and the faint spots of darker colour on the floors where a table used to stand. There were pictures, once—squares of more-intact paintwork have survived, darker and tinted blue—but the pictures themselves are gone.

Someone has sprayed ‘Chelsea4eva’ in blue on the boards that hold the back door closed. Someone else, presumably later, has erased ‘Chelsea’ with a single line of red and sprayed ‘Spurs’ above it.

“You wouldn’t happen to be a Spurs fan, would you?” Ryan asks when Alex appears in the kitchen doorway, and he glances over his shoulder in time to see Alex smirk and shrug.

“Maybe.”

Ryan eyes the back door and shakes his head. “I don’t even watch football, but I’m pretty sure Chelsea are better than Spurs.”

He glances back in time to get a raised eyebrow and a rude snort. “Right,” Alex says, folding his arms in an unmistakable challenge—and then coming out with quite possibly the longest sentence Ryan has ever heard from him: “Thankfully, your lack of understanding of the beautiful game is none of my concern.”

And then he smiles—and if John’s smile is charming, Alex’s is worthy of a salesman.