The Twice-Lived Summer of Bluebell Jones (9 page)

“No reason,” says Fozzie, blinking a lot. “So, this friend, who I don't know?”

“I really like her, don't get me wrong. She's quite, uh, similar to me. A more
advanced
version of me. What I might be like if I was, say, for example, a year older. Right?”

“Right,” says Fozzie, frowning.

“And most of the time, that's all great – and she helps me out – and I'm totally grateful because she is kind of
amazing
and of course I want to be more like her—”

“M-hmm,” says Fozzie, still frowning.

“But I found out she lied to me. About something big.”

“I never!” squeaks Fozzie.

I blink at her, confused.

“Oh,” she breathes, rocking back on her heels. “You don't mean me. It's that girl who phones you up, isn't it? Your invisible friend, Dan calls her. Only joking. God, check out my big head. Sorry.”

She looks mortified.

“I wish it was you I was talking about,” I say into my knees. “You make a lot more sense.”

“Bloody hell, she must be trouble. So what did she lie about?”

I shake my head. “It's complicated.”

“You're worse than Merlin!” she smirks. “OK, so what are you going to do? She a friend worth keeping hold of?”

“I don't know,” I say, knotting my hands. “Don't know if I even know her all that well.”

“Does she have a good reason for doing what she did, for lying to you? I mean, from her point of view?”

“That's not the point. Her point of view doesn't matter.”

“Does to her,” Fozzie says, looking at me sideways. “Not being funny, but if you think that, doesn't sound like you're very good mates in the first place.”

I can hear what she's not saying.
I'm
not a very good mate.

I wish I could explain why I'm not being a horrible person; not when Red is the lucky one, perfect and seamless and already ready to speed off into my future.

“Invite her round here,” Fozzie suggests. “Go on! I'll get Dan to bring doughnuts. They fix everything. Or are you ashamed of us?”

She leans in and elbows me jokily, stale smoke on her breath, a forced edge to her
argh argh
laugh.

“Thanks. I might. I'll see. Forget I said anything, yeah? Come on, let's cover up some of this pink.”

Fozzie looks at me sideways a few times, suspicious, maybe disappointed – but once we start piecing the prints together, she's all smiles again.

Mags taps on the door, and coos when she sees the prints.

“You're an amazing photographer,” she tells me, shyly picking up a shot of her on the beach, on Dan's shoulders. The colours pop: blues and greenish-yellows, brighter than life.

“It's all down to the camera, really,” I mumble, but I glow all the same.

Mags joins in. We decide to frame James Dean, matching colours or clashing them, filling up gaps and spaces with overlaps before starting to tack them to the wall.

“I can't take all of these,” Fozzie says, sliding me some of the Mulvey Island beach shots. “You
have
to keep that one for yourself,” she adds, passing me the top-hat silhouette.

“And I don't know what that was meant to be, but you can have that one too,” Mags giggles, tossing me a bland-looking sea view.

It's Penkerry Point, on a murky day. Nothing special, grass and grey sea and some cloud.

Something special: the first photo, the one I tried to take of Red, the morning after my birthday. Red was right. It's as if she was never there.

I pick up the top-hat silhouette shot and hold them side by side. Red, invisible. Me, a black shape against the sun, empty space.

Two photographs of me, and I'm not in either of them.

It's like the photograph of Mum, drumstick to her belly: a picture of Peanut, though there is no Peanut yet. Part of the family. My family. Not there, and always there.

I hate Peanut.

I've never admitted that before. I don't think I even realized it till I thought it out loud in my head.

I hate Peanut for coming along and changing everything.

I love it, too, love it madly. But there's a corner of my heart – an alveolus; maybe two – that hates.

I hate Red too, just a little.

It aches, knowing I'll never be good enough by myself.

My brain ticks backwards. I look at Fozzie's purple boots, askew in a corner; stare at the top-hat photo and wonder if I'd ever have got on that boat to Mulvey Island without Red's help. Something tugs at the back of my mind; as if I'm looking directly at something, and it's so obvious I can't see it.

I remember what Red said outside the hospital, about watching the same movie over and over, knowing all the words. That's what this summer is for her. Action replay. No surprises.

No wonder she's lonely. I'm the only friend she's got in the world right now, and I've shut her out.

I bite my lip, and listen to the seagulls wheeling outside,
argh-argh-argh
.

I watch
Giant
on Fozzie's mum's sofa without seeing it, and text Red on the way home.

Sorry
.

She texts back:
Me too.

I reply:
No me.

She texts back:
No you
, and then, a minute later,
Yes, I am wasting 10p from the future. Suck it up.

That night, I pin the top-hat silhouette and the empty patch of grass to the ceiling above my bunk bed. My secret selves, watching over me while I sleep. When we go home, I'm going to rearrange my room. Paint, maybe, a few posters, to reflect my Redness back at me.

I sneak into Mum's handbag and pin up the fuzzed black-and-white printout of Peanut's scan too, to say sorry for that unkind corner of my heart.

In my dream, Peanut has a mobile phone, and texts me daily.

Grew 6 millimetres today
.

Body now covered in fur, like a monkey.

Tell Mum not to have curry again, it makes me uncomfy
.

I text back questions:
What's it like in there? Are you warm enough? Is it dark?

Peanut's ringtone is one of those long loud ones, and it makes Mum wriggle, though only we know why.

 

 

9.
The Cave

 

“So what do I wear?”

It's a Wednesday afternoon, Dad's on nursing duty, and tonight I've been invited to something called “The Cave”.

“How should I know? What do you want to wear?” Red's lying on my bunk bed, gazing up at my pictures.

“At least tell me if it's going to rain or not?”

She rolls over and peers out of the narrow window. “Looks a bit cloudy,” she says.

I give her a stare.

“What am I, a weathergirl? I don't know. A summer's a long time to keep track of. I don't remember eating four Weetabix for breakfast this morning either,” she says, with a meaningful nod at my overfull tummy.

“I had a light lunch,” I snap back, sucking in anyway.

And I'm going to be you next year, I think: you, with your boobs and your waist, so I can eat what I like.

I pull out two different tops and hold them up for comparison, like they do on TV makeover shows. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be looking for. Mainly I'm just checking for tomato ketchup blobs. “Look, if you won't tell me the weather at least help me out with the fashion. Which one looks older?”

She gives me a hard stare. “Which one do
you
like, Blue?”

I glare back. Opinions are fine for hipster people: the ones who fell in a vat and developed an acute case of Topshop. Me, I'm fashion-blind.

“I wished you here to help with exactly this kind of thing,” I growl.

“Yeah. Your wish came true and time-travel was invented so I could help you pick an outfit.”

I glare at her, decide on the spotty one at random, and turn my back, self-consciously pulling up my top to change.

“You're ridiculous, but no, I'm not looking,” sighs Red as I peek over my shoulder, her eyes locked on the ceiling. “This photo's amazing, by the way. Who is it in the picture? The sunshine silhouette?”

“It's me, you idiot,” I mumble, wrestling spotty cotton and armholes.

“That's you? Wearing Merlin's hat?”

Finally I get my head through the right hole, and tug it all straight.

Red's still got her eyes fixed to the ceiling.

“Yeah.” I frown. “But you already know—”

There's a clack from the front door behind me, and with a swish of the curtain Tiger's home, grabbing me from behind in a hug. She doesn't have much choice, since the room's so narrow, but she lingers, squeezing tight, head on my shoulder, getting her perfume up my nose.

“Hello, gorgeous, talking to yourself again?”

“Um. Yes. I'm funny that way,” I murmur, glaring meaningfully at Red.

Tiger spins me round on the spot so she can look at me properly, hands on my shoulders.

“That's OK,” she says, breathing in deeply, her cheeks very pink. “We like funny people. We
love
funny people.”

She opens her blue-egg eyes wide, and giggles.

“Is she all right?” asks Red.

“Are you all right?” I ask.

“I'm better than all right,” sighs Tiger, squeezing my shoulders. “I'm lovely. I'm lovable. I'm beloved.”

“Ohhhh,” says Red. “
Catrin
.”

“Catrin?” I say.

Tiger's smile bursts out wide.

“I said I love you,” she whispers, “and she said she loved me back.”

“Oh,” I say. “That's, um. Nice?”

It is. I am happy. Of course, she said
I love you
to Sasha the Cow, and Juliet, and a beardy bloke called Elliott during her trying-out-boys phase, and they probably said it back too, and every time not long later there was a lot of sobbing and having to have her hair stroked by Mum on the sofa all weekend – but it would be unkind to mention it.

“I know I've said it before, but it's different this time,” says Tiger, slipping an arm round my shoulder and sitting us down on the lower bunk, squashed forward over our knees. “Everything's different. Catrin's exactly like me, you know? Only she's herself too. And she lets me be myself. It's like there was a Catrin-shaped hole in me, like a jigsaw puzzle, and it ached and ached with emptiness and now I've found her I'm complete. She's put me back together again.”

I'm pretty sure those are song lyrics, not actual feelings, but the look on Tiger's face says she means them anyway. Every time she says Catrin's name her mouth shyly curves up at the edges. I want to take her picture, but she rests her head on my shoulder, and I can feel the glow coming off her pink face, warming me up.

“Just you wait,” she says dreamily, chin on my collarbone, her voice thrumming through my skin. “I know it sounds daft now, but it'll happen to you. When it does, it'll be like the whole world was grey before. You're going to love it.”

“Right. OK. Thanks. That sounds good,” I say, sliding out from under her arm and standing up, ready to exchange eye rolls with Red. But Red's lying flat, arms back and head resting in the pillow of her hands as if she's not even listening, gazing up with a shy curvy smile on her face, just like Tiger's.

Apparently when I'm fourteen, I'm going to get all dribbly and romantic too.

I like that.

“We're going for a picnic, later,” says Tiger. “You could come too, if you like. I want you to get to know Catrin better.”

I mumble something about having plans tonight.

“Sounds great! What are you going to wear?” She looks me up and down as I smooth my hands down the spotty top, and this time Red is definitely smirking.

Hours later, I'm stumbling down the short-cut path wearing a huge knotty tasselled scarf round my neck, a flappy white shirt, and a pair of Dad's old jeans, belted so they sort of fit. It's the sort of thing Tiger wears all the time, simultaneously effortless and intentional. On me, it looks like I got dressed in a crashed aeroplane in the Sahara desert, in the dark.

At the end of the path, the promenade is now covered in sandwich boards, and posters hooked on lamp posts.
Penkerry's Legendary Fifties Fest!
Band names fill the space underneath.
Kitty Pleasant
.
Billie Jo and the Jo-Belles. The Vicars of Twiddly.
Way down at the bottom are
Joanie and the Whales
.

They're in the tiniest writing on the poster, but it's still a buzz. The Fest is on Saturday. Dad's already covered the caravan with Post-it notes with song titles on, rearranging them to get the set list just perfect. He might be a rocker onstage, but I got my over-organized brain from somewhere.

I hurry down the steps on to the beach, skidding on pebbles.

Red scowls and trails along behind me, making me nervous.

“So is it a big cave? Will it be cold in there? Are there crabs and things? Should I have brought food? Will other people be there who I don't know? What happens if I need the loo?”

“You know, Blue, just because I happen to be here doesn't mean you have to spew the entirety of your thought processes at me. Thrilling as they are.”

“I'm only wondering.”

“You're supposed to wonder! That's what life's for. Embracing the new.”

“Hello?” I say, lifting the frondy tassels. “I'm embracing the new! And it turns out the new is itchy.”

She snorts, skipping lightly ahead of me on the pebbles, hair lifting off her face, arms splayed one higher than the other for balance.

I wish I could take her picture. I've got Diana in my denim bag, but I know she'd vanish out of the shot like smoke.

I've only got a year to wait before someone can pin her down in a print, though. My heart feels big at the idea, and it hits me all over again: she's me, that's me, that's who I'm going to be. Not guessing or hoping, but guaranteed.

“What are you staring at now, you weirdo?” she says, screwing up her face.

It would be good if I was a bit nicer. Maybe I can have a quiet little talk to myself, in a year's time, about consideration and thoughtfulness.

“Come on,” I sigh, hopping across the rocks more quickly. “I think Fozzie's waving at us.”

She's there up ahead, a tiny figure at the foot of a cliff. Up above is Penkerry Point; our caravan too, somewhere too far up and back to spot. There's no way down the sheer cliff except along the short cut to the Promenade, then doubling back along the beach, away from the Pier, along the stretch that's only uncovered at low tide. I can see the lighthouse on Mulvey Island off in the distance, and the Bee rock in between, sticking high up out of the water, with its three yellowish stripes.

By the time I'm near enough to see Fozzie's grin, I can smell woodsmoke, and hear an acoustic guitar being strummed.

“You made it!” Fozzie calls, and the guitar strumming stops abruptly.

Dan shouts something, inside the rock. Fozzie makes urgent shooing motions off to the side, and for a sick moment I think: I'm not meant to be here, I wasn't invited, they're all going to leave now I've come.

I sneak a look at Red and her face is greyish, eyes darting unhappily across the pebbles as if she's thinking the same thing – but before I can turn back, Fozzie's got hold of my wrist.

Three steps up the beach and up again over a pocked, seaweedy slope of solid rock, the cliff splits open into a cavern, high and huge. There's a campfire at the mouth of the cave, sheltered by a dip in the rocks. I eye the flames, wary, thinking of dragons. And fire extinguishers. I bet no one here even cares about the fire triangle. But I let Fozzie push me forward, inside, blinking smoke out of my eyes. There's an instant chill once I'm inside the cliff, the woodsmoky smell mixing with mould and damp.

There's whispering, shapes of people moving in the dark.

A flickering. A set of small flames appears, with Mags's glowing face above them.

“One, two three,” someone hisses.

The guitar strums again, and suddenly the cave echoes with
Happy Birthday to You
, as the small flames move towards me.

Someone flashes a phone torch across the cave wall right at the back, high up, to show HAPPY BIRTHDAY BLUE! painted unevenly across the rocky wall, in glossy white house paint.

Fozzie grabs me from behind, Dan hugs me from the front, and Mags holds out a lopsided sponge cake, for me to blow out the candles.

I can barely summon up breath. I don't make any wishes this time. I don't need them.

Then there's a cheer, and more hugging, and I whisper, reluctantly, “It's not actually my birthday today.”

Mags shrugs. “Yeah, but your mum said your real one was crap. And Dan never turns down an excuse for cake.”

“Hey!” he huffs. “Credit where it's due, it was Fozzie's idea.”

Fozzie blushes in the firelight. “Mags did the painting,” she says, nodding up at the white letters. “Standing on Dan's shoulders. Team effort.”

“You did all this for me?” I whisper, tilting my head to the clumps of people I'm beginning to make out as my eyes adjust, sitting on tumbled rocks, gathered round the guitar.

Fozzie looks embarrassed. “Well, not just for you. I mean, there's always a bunch of people down here when the tide's low enough to get in the cave. It's, like, the party place. But I thought we'd sort of turn it into a party for you as well. Is that OK?”

I hug her again, and tell her it's even better.

She drags me around by the arm, introducing me to blurry faces with names I can't keep track of: Cal and Anya and Marco and Pete, Other Pete and Sarah, with a baby on her knee, cheeks round, dimples firelit. I recognize a few from the Pavilion crowd, the ones Tiger dances with. The guitar girl's name is Verushka or Danushka or something between the two; she's very smiley, either way, and asks me to pick a song for her to play next. I ask if she knows “Summertime Blues”, and she laughs, all teeth, and starts playing it right away.

Fozzie squeals, like I knew she would, and starts to dance while Dan sings the words, loudly and mostly wrong.