Lobsters (15 page)

‘We could get a mask and some flippers,' Casper added.

Stella snorted loudly. I knew she felt uneasy.

Casper picked up his wallet. ‘Come on, cuz,' he said to Pax. ‘You only have a five-minute attention span. You'll get bored lying on the beach.'

Pax looked down at Stella. She snatched her sunglasses off and rolled her eyes at him. ‘Oh my god, Pax, just sit down. You can't seriously want to go off playing with buckets and spades. Plus, I really need someone to do my back.' She tapped her bottle of sunscreen impatiently.

‘Yeah, OK,' Pax muttered. ‘See you later then, guys.' And he sat down obediently next to her.

As we walked away up the beach Casper said, ‘Wow, your friend Stella is pretty full-on. Pax is more under the thumb than my dad, and he's only known her forty-eight hours.'

I laughed. ‘Yeah, that's the Stella effect, all right.'

Pax was beginning to seem more and more like one of those Greek god statues you see in museums; nice to look at, but not much going on inside.

We walked beyond the end of the strip and on to beaches that were deserted except for the odd swimmer or group of Greek kids playing. We bought ice cream and dipped the Starmix in it and realized that we couldn't hear the thud of the music any more.

We saw a family of crabs. Casper said he was going to uni to do Marine Biology. We talked about potential A level failure backup plans. I suggested Casper could go and work at SeaWorld in Florida and he said I could be one of those people who dresses up in period costume and shows people round stately homes.

We got to a place where a line of tumbled rocks made the beach impassable. A group of young boys were climbing up and jumping into the sea. A tiny little kid clambered up really high – he must have been thirty feet above the water.

‘Oh god, I can't look,' I said. ‘It's actually making me feel queasy. What if there are rocks under the water? Should we stop him?'

But he leapt off, his tiny body clearing the rocks at the base and plopping into the sea. And then he swam back to the surface and heaved himself on to a rock and started scaling the cliff again.

‘I can't believe they're not scared.'

‘Well, it's a calculated risk,' said Casper. ‘He's seen the other boys doing it, so he knows he'll land safely, as long as he clears the jump.'

‘Yeah, but it's so high and he might not clear it.'

‘That's why it's exciting.'

We watched them for ages. And then they finally got bored and wandered away.

‘What's the scariest thing you've ever done?'

Casper shrugged. The sun was lower in the sky and turning it magenta. ‘To answer honestly I'll need time to think about it.'

I looked at the cliff. ‘Shall we do it?'

‘All right.'

Climbing to the top ledge was mission enough. When we were standing on it I started to shake. It was so much higher than it looked from the beach.

‘You need to make sure you take a really big, confident step out, OK?'

‘OK, OK.' I could hear myself getting hysterical.

‘Because you have to jump far enough out to clear the rocks at the bottom. As long as you do that you'll be fine.' He felt for my hand. ‘Right, I'll count to three.'

‘All right.'

‘One, two …'

‘Stop, stop! I need more time to psych myself up.'

‘That will just make it worse. I'm jumping this time and you either jump with me or you jump alone.'

‘OK.'

We both took a tiny step further towards the edge. He squeezed my hand.

‘One, two … three!'

And we both jumped at exactly the same time. I held his hand
for as long as I could before the descent tore us apart. I screamed loudly as I fell, hit the water and plunged deeper than I ever have before. The water swallowed me up and then the cold and the dark spat me back out and my head resurfaced. I hadn't been expecting the freezing water and I made weird gasping, squealing sounds.

As we clambered back on to the beach, I said, ‘I wish we had got someone to take a picture. To prove to everyone I actually did it.'

‘Why would anyone think you didn't? It would never occur to me that you wouldn't do that. Stella maybe. I don't think Stella's the cliff-jumping kind.'

‘Stella is fearless, actually.'

‘Yeah, I can see that too. We don't need a photo because we were both there and we can both keep it alive for ever.'

It felt like an admission that we were going to be friends after the holiday and beyond. He is the first boy
friend
I have ever had.

It felt like the dress night had drawn an invisible line between me and Stella. Or maybe just inside me. But maybe it was so invisible only I had actually noticed it.

We spent the last few days on the beach, swimming and reading magazines. We wandered round the gift shops and all bought matching bracelets. Slowly, Stella and I found a rhythm again. A new, more formal and tentative one, but one that we both knew would come right. Neither of us mentioned the dress. It had been packed away into my suitcase, along with everything else that had happened that night between us, never to be spoken
of again.

I did some things on my own. I finished my books, and went and petted the donkeys, and swam far out to sea with the flippers we bought. We hung out with the boys and, on the day of their flight back, Pax gave Stella his favourite hoodie as a goodbye present, and Grace told James she was with Ollie and that pulling him (James) had been a drunken mistake.

Grace had planned to call Ollie to confess all but it had gone wrong because he'd called her first and offered Stella and me his two tickets to Woodland Festival. He and his brother had been set to go with Grace and Tilly the week after we got back from Kavos, but apparently they hadn't bothered to check with their mum, who'd told them they couldn't miss their cousin's wedding just to get pissed in a big field.

It's pretty hard to confess all and then accept two hundred pounds worth of festival tickets, so Grace decided to keep it to herself and, all of a sudden, the four musketeers were going to Woodland. Me and Stella agreed to go because we couldn't
not
, really, and outwardly the four of us were still all the best of friends.

On our last day in Kavos, Stella got stung by a jellyfish and sat on the beach in Pax's hoodie looking murderous. The old me would have sat by her side, loyal to the end without even thinking about it.

I wanted to say ‘You OK?' in that fake passive-aggressive only-girls-can-hear-it voice. But I couldn't. Because I have known Stella for ever and there is a part of me that knows only I see her as she really is, and that maybe somehow she knows that. So I
ran back to the room and got the antihistamine my mum had given me, did impressions of Kourtney Kardashian giving birth and read
Ariel
to her in the voice of Donkey from
Shrek
.

I was wearing a bikini I had bought in a shop the day before. A proper, neon, look-at-me H&M bitch face bikini. To be honest, it was the bikini of a girl who had lost her virginity long ago, but I wore it anyway.

10

Sam

We'd only been in the car twenty minutes before Ben passed out. Completely out. Chris slapped him full in the face and he didn't even twitch. Although, since he started chain-smoking spliffs as soon as Robin put the key in the ignition, I suppose twenty minutes of consciousness was actually pretty good going. Chris put Robin's novelty Rasta hat next to him in case he woke up and vomited.

Robin's driving, which is erratic at the best of times, was bordering on suicidal as we hit the motorway and headed west towards Woodland Festival. I began to worry that his mum's Corsa wouldn't make it back in one piece.

He was
properly
excited about the festival. We hadn't been to a festival together – him, me and Chris – since Reading when we were fifteen, but that doesn't really count as we were only there for about five hours because our parents wouldn't let us camp.

When Robin is excited about something it's nearly impossible to get him to focus on anything else. That's one of the things I like best about him, I suppose. However, as we were bombing down the M4 at 90 mph and he was tapping his right foot
(the one on the accelerator) along to the music, it became a bit tiresome.

Three hours later, we pulled into the shoe-sucking mud of the Woodland campsite. Ben – newly refreshed after his long sleep and now enthusiastically back on spliff-smoking duties – asked me if I wanted to ‘toss a Frisbee about', but I told him I'd rather just get on with setting up our tents. The clouds were already starting to gather. A few little ones directly above our field were openly scowling at us.

I was starting to regret telling my mum – who'd urged me to bring a stout pair of rubber boots – that wellies were ‘for children and farmers'. I only had my old, battered skateboarding trainers with me. If it rained, I was screwed.

By 7 p.m., it was raining. Actually, ‘raining' sounds too tame. By 7 p.m., it was raining
really fucking hard
. Instead of just falling out of the sky like normal, these drops felt like they were being deliberately and angrily hurled at us. As if the clouds were irate neighbours trying to get us all to turn the music down.

But the music carried on despite the monsoon. So we decided to carry on too. I prepared to leave the tent by strapping two Sainsbury's carrier bags around my already-sodden trainers. Ben had his dad's knee-length mackintosh as well as a waterproof fisherman's hat to protect his spliffs, so he was fine. Robin had three cotton hoodies on, under the illogical assumption that, because there were three of them, he somehow wouldn't get wet. Chris was wearing a bin bag like a dress. He had punched a hole in the top for his head to go through.

‘I should dress like this all the time,' he said, as he examined
himself. ‘It's cheap and practical.'

I noted to Robin as we were all leaving the tent that Chris still looked annoyingly good, even when wearing a bin bag.

Robin laughed. ‘If Chris pulls looking like that, I'll give you a tenner.'

I nodded and we shook hands. I've known Chris longer than Robin. Chris could get laid wearing Robin's Female Body Inspector T-shirt. And that's ten times more off-putting than a bin bag.

We headed straight out to the dance tent. Robin – who, as previously mentioned, had just five hours of festival experience under his belt – loudly proclaimed that the main stage was just for ‘idiots who've never been to a festival before'.

Within thirty seconds of leaving our tents we were all soaked through. Getting to the dance tent was a nice break from the rain. We leapt about to the music like twats just to get dry. Even Robin broke off from just nodding his head near the DJ booth. It was proper, stupid fun – the kind we hadn't had together for ages. Since way before exams, anyway.

That was until Robin spied a group of fit girls doing the same thing about fifteen yards away from us. He danced closer and closer and they danced closer and closer until eventually we were all dancing together.

This probably sounds weird, but I always get a bit annoyed when it comes to that part of the evening when we start trying to get with girls. The introduction of attractive females into a fun night makes everything immediately less enjoyable, because you're suddenly not allowed to act like a complete dick. You've
got to adopt this cool, unflustered persona. You've got to pretend to be someone you're not.

I suppose girls like Hannah are the exception to that – girls that you can just relax and be stupid with. And not worry about acting like a dick and talking about hot Ribena, because they're up for doing the same thing. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that ten minutes with her in the bathroom was a pretty unique experience.

These girls were
definitely
not like Hannah. Ben and Robin instantly went from laughing and joking and attempting purposely terrible break-dancing moves to smiling smugly, raising their eyebrows and shuffling about like they were in a fucking Justin Timberlake video.

Chris was still messing about and taking the piss, doing rubbish windmills on the floor, but he's such a handsome bastard he can get away with things like that and not scare girls off. I went for somewhere between the two – smiling smugly and raising my eyebrows while attempting purposely terrible break-dancing moves – and probably ended up looking like even more of a weirdo as a result.

As usual, the fittest girls in the group started talking to Chris and Robin. Ben saw his opportunity and offered the third girl a drag on his spliff. Which left me with no choice but to spark up conversation with the fourth girl in their group.

She was wearing little yellow hot pants, large hoop earrings and had masses of strawberry blonde hair yanked up into a topknot. She was pretty fit, but quite clearly aware of this fact. She told me her name was Miranda, but she called herself Panda
because it rhymed with Miranda and she really liked pandas. She liked pandas so much that she had a cartoon one stitched on to her rucksack. She took off her sweater to reveal a T-shirt of the band Pixies.

‘I love Pixies,' I shouted over the thudding music. ‘What's your favourite song of theirs?'

She looked confused. ‘Oh, it's a band? I bought it because I thought it was something to do with the Geldof sisters. They're so awesome, right?'

I turned around to tell Robin, Chris and Ben that we needed to leave immediately but every single one of them was pulling their respective girl. The good news was that – since Chris was still wearing his bin bag gown – Robin owed me a tenner. The bad news was that we were clearly going nowhere. I turned back round to Panda.

‘So, we should probably pull, right?' she said vaguely. ‘If that's what they're all doing?'

‘Er … yeah,' I offered.

So that's what we did.

Hannah

My dad had been a bit hesitant about the whole idea of us going to a festival. Not because he thought I would take pills or get naked on TV, but more due to the camping aspect. He didn't seem to have a lot of faith in my Bear Grylls-style survival skills, which he obviously thought would be put to the test.

My mum had rushed out and bought a Cath Kidston tent and said, ‘Make sure you bring it all back so it can be used again.'

It took us three hours to put it up and by the end every inch was covered in mud, as were we.

‘There's no way I'm taking it down,' Stella said as she chucked her sleeping bag into it.

A bloke in the tent next to ours asked me which bands I was here to see. I didn't know what to say. I'm not one of those girls who is
into
music. It's one of the questions I dread boys asking. It's like a litmus test for how cool you are. I usually respond with ‘I like all different types of music' and try to change the subject as quickly as possible. I miss the times when it was acceptable to like the music in the charts.

I didn't even look at the line-up on the internet. Going to a festival was never about watching live music for any of us. It was just about wearing denim cut-offs with wellies and a hippie head band and being really tanned. I was still as white as anything. Kavos had made no impact whatsoever on my skin.

Despite the driving rain, Stella was on good form. She flirted with random blokes to get them to help us with the tent and stomped around the field in her limited edition Hunter wellies, jumping in puddles. Things were OK between us. We were friends just like always, but there was this detachment. We spoke every day but I didn't tell her about the massive argument I had with Mum about uni accommodation or how I was getting nervous about leaving home.

Toilet Boy hadn't been mentioned either. He was not even a
random I had pulled. Not even someone to add to our Year 9 snog book. He was just some bloke at a party. Just another name on the Lobster Door. He was no one. At least, that's what Grace, Tilly and Stella thought. To me, he was still a secret daydream.

Kavos and everything that had happened there would keep us in sleepover stories until something else massive happened. If we were still having sleepovers. Which we weren't really.

By the time we got to the main stage, it was dark, pissing down with rain and
freezing
. I was wearing my emergency hoodie and my dad's camping socks pulled right up to my shorts. So much for glamping. I'd already found an earwig in my hair and had to wee standing up behind a screen.

The main stage was heaving. I was squashed next to Grace, being shoved forward into a man whose face I never saw but who was wearing a cow costume.

Grace tapped Cow Costume on the shoulder and asked him to lift her up on to his shoulders. He did. Up there, above the crowd, she was screaming in that faux ‘I'm a cute girl' way and waving her arms in case the big screen caught her. I could hear Stella and Tilly behind me, but it was too tight to even turn around to speak to them.

Suddenly, I thought Grace was hurt because she started screaming. At first I couldn't hear what was actually coming out of her mouth, it was just a kind of guttural wail. And then she started making words.

‘Toilet Boy! Toooooilet Boooooooooy!'

He was
here
. Somewhere among all these mad, dancing
bodies, he was here. Grace was waving wildly. I saw her look down. Her eyes were searching for me. I was frozen with panic. Stella grabbed my arm and screamed up at Grace.

‘What? Are you sure?'

‘Yes, yes! It's definitely him! He's over by the speakers!'

Stella jabbed Cow Costume on the chest.

‘Cow Man! Put her down! We need to get to Toilet Boy!'

He looked confused. ‘You what?'

Grace dug her heels into his ribs.

‘Just put me down!' She was using her Head Girl voice.

Cow Man kneeled down, and Grace scrambled off his shoulders and plunged into the crowd. ‘Follow me!' she yelled at us. ‘He's this way!'

Stella grabbed my hand and Tilly's, and we surged after her. I felt seasick. Like I wasn't moving myself but being carried along with the current against my wishes.

‘Toilet Boy!' Grace was screaming, as if that was his actual real name, and he might respond to it. ‘TOILET BOY!'