The Dead of Summer by Camilla Way

Author:Camilla Way [Way, Camilla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-00-744208-9
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2011-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

eight

It was a summer with no clouds and no breeze. A summer of melting tarmac and stinking dustbins, of five-pence ice poles and other kids on their front lawns, shrieking under sprinklers. A dried-up summer of glittering pavements and long black shadows. And the sun beat down without respite, every day the same. It was only Kyle who changed, only Kyle who shaped our days.

Days and days would pass where we’d just hang out and have a laugh. And when he was OK, talking about the caves, thinking up things for us to do, well like I’ve said, it was the best time of my life. I remember one time when we were up on Point Hill. The sun was just about to sink, the trees’ shadows lengthening in the last light like a crawling tide. We were lying on our backs, looking up at the sky.

‘When I grow up,’ Kyle said, suddenly, ‘I’m going to go all over the world. I’m going to travel to every country. I’ll go to places like Borneo and India and I’ll find caves and underground places that nobody else has dreamed of yet.’ I turned to lie on my side, my chin propped up in my hand, and watched him talk. The evening up there above London was very quiet and sweet smelling and Denis and Kyle seemed more solid, more real than usual against the softly glowing sky.

Have you ever noticed how that happens sometimes, Doctor Barton? How in summer at twilight when the light is sad and vague, how objects and people are thrown forward; how the fading, dying light makes them stronger and more certain in the world somehow? It did that to my friends that night. I lay back and imagined Kyle in Borneo or India, discovering a cave, digging down bravely into the centre of the earth, a miner’s torch on his head the only light to guide him.

‘When I grow up,’ said Denis, ‘I am going to go to Africa to find my dad. I’ll help him spread the word of God.’ We were all silent for a while. ‘Either that,’ Denis continued, after some time, ‘or work in a cake shop.’

‘What about you?’ Kyle asked me ‘What will you do when you grow up?’

I lay there, Kyle on my left, Denis on my right, and thought about how I didn’t want that summer to end, how I didn’t want that moment to end. An airplane trailed gold above us. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I really don’t know.’

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