At Hawthorn Time by Melissa Harrison

Author:Melissa Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

Inside, 14B turned out to be almost completely identical to his previous shed, which somehow made it more disorientating. The shelving was laid out in the same way, with the same wire-guided forklifts making the same noises; the toilets were the same, the office was in the same place, but it wasn’t Dave in there, it was someone else. It was unnerving, like those dreams where you’re somewhere familiar, but everything is slightly different.

As the foreman, Andy, took him through the stock-control system, Jamie’s mind drifted back to Megan. Did he actually fancy her or was it just because everyone did? Either way, it was ludicrous to think she’d ever be interested in him. He’d only ever got off with four people, after all.

The girls at school – getting anywhere with them had involved a sort of subterfuge; the sense, almost, that you had to trick them into it. Though that was probably just with him; he probably wasn’t doing it right. Maybe girls wanted it with everyone else; that was certainly how his friends made it sound. ‘She was gagging for it,’ they’d say after a party at someone’s house, and everyone would laugh – Jamie too. Which were real, he’d often wonder: the girls he knew, reluctant and intimidating, or the ones his friends described?

At secondary school it had become clear that girls fancied Alex. It was odd, seeing as he mostly ignored them– but then, that was probably why. Even girls like Melanie Abbott and Ciara Williams – Jamie could see what they were like around Alex, how they softened and tried to impress. To them he was invisible, and he knew that if he let himself he could start hating them for it.

His friendship with Alex, by then, had begun to change. They were in different classes for a lot of stuff, and Alex had a new group of friends who Jamie didn’t really know. He’d got a haircut, too, and didn’t look like a farm boy any more; he’d begun to talk about becoming an architect or a surveyor, instead of a farmer, when he grew up. And yet, outside of school they were still close: they described things for each other in a way they’d never had to before, and for Jamie at least, the new distance between them made Alex both less familiar and somehow more interesting.

They still did their homework together after school, more often by then at Jamie’s than at the farmhouse. His parents were used to Alex being over, and although they had never properly talked about what was wrong with his mum he’d always had the feeling that Alex knew and didn’t mind. The dolls, for example: there they were in the lounge, lined up on the windowsill in their baby clothes. But Alex had never said anything, and he’d been grateful for that.

It had taken him far too long to realise that other families might not be perfect either, that it wasn’t just his that was fucked up.

A

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