‘Forty pounds, right?’ Grace handed him an envelope.
‘Leave it,’ Tom said, embarrassed.
‘You said forty pounds—on the phone.’
‘Yeah, but—’
‘What?’
Grace looked angry.
‘It doesn’t matter—about the money. I mean, just take the bike. I changed my mind about the money.’
‘What made you change your mind?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You said forty pounds. On the phone.’
‘Yeah, but—’
This had gone on and the sun had moved round the side of the house until it was filling the front garden.
Now Tom saw her, standing over by the ice cream van with her back to him. While he was watching, she stood up straight, laughing. She looked like she was having a good day. He should go before she saw him.
‘Hey, Tom.’ She’d seen him—was smiling straight at him.
‘Hey.’
She came across the grass in her flip-flops and a bottle-green T-shirt that said ‘Martha’s Crew’. Grace didn’t look like she belonged to anyone’s crew—let alone Martha’s. Tom watched the boy in the ice cream van watching Grace.
‘What brings you out here?’
He hadn’t seen her for a year, and this wasn’t the kind of thing—a year ago—she would have said.
‘I’m my sister’s chauffeur.’
‘She’s here?’
‘Somewhere.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘Saskia—Ruth.’
‘I didn’t know they were back from France.’
Tom didn’t say anything.
She squinted across at the fields laid out below the weighing-in hut, trying to pick out her friends.
He saw that her fingertips were stained purple.
‘You’re not picking anything?’ she said.
‘No—’
For some reason this made her smile.
‘How’s the bike doing?’ he asked
‘The bike’s doing fine. Only one puncture so far.’
‘You should change the tyres to Kevlar—they won’t ever puncture.’
‘Okay—’
Was she laughing at him?
‘They sound expensive though—and I still owe you for the bike.’
‘Fuck that,’ he said, genuinely angry.
She was about to say something when a voice started yelling, ‘Grace—Grace,’ from inside the hut.
‘Shit—I better get back.’ She disappeared into the crowd round the weighing-in hut and didn’t look back.
Tom and the boy in the ice cream van were left staring at each other. The afternoon felt suddenly pointless—as though it had been going on for too long.
Vicky followed Ruth to the far end of the raspberry field, whose boundary was marked by a narrow strip of woodland unable to cast any shade because the sun was too high in the sky and falling on it at the wrong angle. The earth was hard and tufted and, with a serious headache beginning due to the day’s dope diet, Vicky kept losing her footing. She picked the biggest raspberry she could find, put it in her mouth then spat it out again.
Ruth stopped picking. ‘You okay?’
‘Tastes funny.’ Vicky wiped her mouth. ‘Do they taste funny to you?’
Ruth took one of the raspberries out of her punnet. ‘Tastes fine. Maybe you just got a bad one.’
They carried on picking, the heat close around them.
‘Where did Sas go?’
‘Redcurrants.’
Vicky, bored, had stopped picking and was now just trailing after Ruth. ‘Redcurrants?’
‘Said she’d never picked redcurrants before.’
‘What d’you do with redcurrants?’
Ruth continued to make her way up the row, too intent on picking to respond to this.
Behind her, Vicky said, ‘Matt was meant to phone at twelve today. He’s been on holiday and he said he’d phone when his plane landed, but he never did. No message—nothing. I’m meant to be going to a party with him this weekend.’
She looked up instinctively as a plane went overhead, nosing down towards Gatwick. ‘I can’t believe you and Sas didn’t meet anybody in France—like, anybody at all.’
Ruth had stopped picking and was staring at something in the distance, her shoulders so taut with concentration that Vicky had one of her brief, habitual anxiety attacks that their GP at Park Surgery refused to prescribe her Diazepam for.
It was the plane—the plane that flew over just then; it had crashed. She just knew it. Any minute now there’d be smoke and debris and the field would be full of soft, torn, bloodied body parts. Any minute now the silence would end and she’d see freshly twisted wreckage and freshly dead people. What if Matt’s flight had been delayed? What if Matt was on that plane?
The two blues she took out of her pocket now and put into her mouth had, until recently, belonged to her mother, Sylvia, whose anxiety attacks their GP at Park Surgery had been happy to prescribe Diazepam for.
She’d been taking Sylvia’s prescription Diazepam since she was fifteen—when the burglary nightmares first started. It was the same every night—she’d wake up around two, convinced she heard someone crossing the gravel drive, walking up the side of the house and letting themselves in through the patio doors. She’d lie in bed flushed with fear and barely breathing, listening to the intruder’s footsteps on the stairs, and waiting for her bedroom door handle to start turning. That’s when she’d take the Valium, put on her i-pod, and curl up under the duvet—whatever the weather.
‘What is it?’ she tried not to scream.
Ruth, distracted, said, ‘Does that look like Mr Sutton to you?’
‘Mr Sutton?’ Vicky’s eyes grazed the fields spread out around them, still looking for smoke, still sniffing the air for blood.
‘Over there.’ Ruth pointed.
Vicky felt herself start to calm down. The sky was clear—no smoke. The plane that had gone overhead had landed safely.
‘I’m sure that’s him.’
Vicky looked. Ruth was right. In the next field was their Art teacher, Mr Sutton—whose home address they’d taken from confidential staff files so they could send an anonymous Valentine’s card.
Mr Sutton was the youngest male member of staff at Burwood Girls’, and taught art under an overwhelming barrage of oestrogen that manifested itself in the various totemic gifts he was recipient of—from an envelope full of pubic hair to a photograph of a pair of bare breasts.
‘What’s he doing here?’
‘Picking fruit—like everybody else.’