‘All right, all right.’ He threw down his half-eaten teacake and sat back.
‘There’s just no point, is there? There’s nothing to see. Just trees and a few old rocks.’
‘It doesn’t matter, does it? We can just go there for some alone time. We used to spend whole days there when we were kids.’
‘Yeah, well. We’re not kids any more, are we?’ Max’s face was still doing that scrunched-up thing. ‘I’ll come over for lunch soon, I promise.’
‘How about when the new car’s there? That weekend, yeah? Please? I’ll tell Mum to do your potatoes in Fry Light. She won’t mind.’
‘OK. I’ll change my training schedule that weekend.’
His face lightened at once, but I could feel my forearms heating up – my rash was coming on. It was always worse in summer. He reached across the table for my hand and just held on to it for the longest time. As my stress levels dropped, my body cooled, with a comforting sweep of goosebumps.
‘Anyway,’ he said, fiddling with something under the table and pulling out a small turquoise box and a large white envelope. ‘This is for you. Just to say I love you to Pluto and back.’ He handed them to me.
I couldn’t hold back my smile. ‘Not the Moon?’
‘Pluto’s further away, innit?’ He stuffed the second half of his teacake in his mouth and grinned crumbily at me.
I set down the envelope and opened the box. Inside, on a crushed velvet bed, was a silver chain with a solid silver teddy pendant in the middle. ‘Oh, it’s gorgeous.’
‘Cos I gave you a teddy bear on our first date.’ He took the necklace from the box, coming round to my side of the table. The original bear was still on the shelf above my bed – a little koala he’d brought back from Australia after one of his many holidays.
I felt the cold chain graze my neck, and the even colder metal of the teddy bear slide and come to rest at the base of my throat. Max did up the clasp. I looked down to see it and moved the teddy’s little arms and legs. The box said ‘Tiffany’.
‘This looks expensive, Max.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘Your dad gave you a loan, didn’t he?’ I said, unable to mask my disappointment.
‘Well, yeah – but when I start here next month, I can pay him back. It’s cool.’
Max was such a sponger where Neil was concerned. He never had to work for anything. He’d coasted through his GCSEs because Neil said he could just work for him at the garden centre. He was only doing A levels because I nagged him to. My dad said he could be so much more if he ‘applied himself’. The thing was, even when Max didn’t apply himself he got grades most kids would kill for. It was so annoying.
‘So it’s not actually from you, it’s from your dad, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Same as your driving lessons, your car, our Glastonbury tickets…’
‘Do you like it?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said, touching the teddy bear – a mistake, as he spotted my scabby knuckles.
‘Christ, what happened to your hands?’
I toyed with telling him the truth, but then thought better of it. ‘I fell over on the track a few days ago.’
‘How did you manage to fall on the backs of your hands?’ He lifted up my other one and looked at it, gently tracing his fingertips over the scabs. ‘This one’s even worse.’
‘I tripped. I think my new spikes are too big.’ I flexed my fingers – the deep ache was still there, but if I didn’t concentrate on it too much, it didn’t matter. Quickly, I diverted his attention back to the necklace. ‘This is beautiful. Thank you.’
I opened the envelope. Inside was an oversized card, covered in pictures of us. He must have spent ages sticking them down, shaking on glitter. There were pictures of us on swings. Our school Nativity, with me as Mary, with a cushion up my dress and Max as the innkeeper, with a scribbly black beard. Selfies in Starbucks. Selfies outside the arena in Cardiff waiting to see The Regulators. Selfies on bonfire night in woolly hats and scarves. Snuggly Duddlies in our Christmas onesies. There was one photo he hadn’t cropped – it was a day we’d spent on the island with some other kids we used to hang around with – Zane, Corey and Fallon. We all had wet hair and chocolate or jam around our mouths, and we were all laughing.
‘God, look at us,’ I said. My throat grew sore.
‘Yeah. I didn’t want to cut that one up,’ said Max. ‘I love that picture.’
‘Me too,’ I said, clearing my throat. I never saw them any more. Even though we’d all gone to the same school, walked the same streets, breathed the same salty air, we were virtual strangers now. Zane had turned out to be the world’s biggest bully, we hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Fallon since the funeral, and though Corey still lived just down the road from me, we rarely spoke any more. Weird, wasn’t it? One day spending every second of the holidays together, the next barely acknowledging each other’s existence.
I opened the card. The message inside read: To my Ella Bella Boodles, who owns my heart and every beat in it. Love you always and 4 ever Maxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
I looked at the front again. At the picture of us all as kids. Me, Max, Zane, Fallon and Corey. ‘Do you remember going to the town carnival? Us all sitting in Zane’s mum’s hairdresser’s window, eating tomato soup?’
‘Yeah, I do.’
‘And watching the fireworks on the hill on Bonfire Night. And that time we went to the island and Corey got stuck up the tree and Zane had to talk him down. God, we’d spend whole days out there in the summer, wouldn’t we? Do you remember camping out?’
‘Ella…’
I’d have given anything for just five minutes back inside that photograph. Before the island had become this evil cancerous lump sticking out of the sea that I could barely look at. It used to be called Grebe Island. Supposedly formed thousands of years ago from a huge blast of debris the volcano spewed out. Another local legend says there’s precious stones buried there. When the council put it up for auction, Max told Neil about the stones and the next thing I knew, he’d bought it and renamed it Ella’s Island. The council and a few birdwatchers were up in arms about that. I hadn’t been back there for years.
Max was looking at me, all glassy-eyed and cheesy smiley.
‘What?’ I said, a mouthful of freezing-cold fruit.
‘I really love you, Estella Grace Newhall.’
I looked up at him. ‘I love you too, Maximus Decimus Meridius.’
‘Oi,’ he said, with a bat of eyelids. ‘I’m trying to be meaningful here.’
‘I love you too, Max Alexander Rittman.’ I couldn’t say anything else. Why did looking at that photograph make me pine so much? Me and Max weren’t even going out then, just friends; friends who knew there was buried treasure on that island, and spent years looking for it. Friends who gurned for photos, who ate chips not caring about what we weighed, not caring whether our tans were even. That’s why I loved Max, I guessed. Because of what he represented. I’d hung around with various Beckys or Laurens at school and I knew girls at the track who did the same distances, but none of them were Max. He was my constant.
‘Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but to remain part of my character, part of the good in me, part of the evil…’
I couldn’t help it – I laughed. I was glad for the break in the tension in my throat. ‘You did not just come up with that.’
‘No, it’s from Great Expectations. I memorised