“It’s one of the reasons I booked my stay. I was eighteen, I think, spending the summer with my granddad before I went off to uni. I was bored rigid. There were…yes, there were some kids, I remember now!”
He cast his mind back: eighteen. Jesus. A whole lifetime ago. His parents had just moved to Australia and he was packed off to his granddad for a few months, filling in time until he started his law degree.
It was a different world back then. A world of youthful arrogance and easy potential and the safe and certain knowledge that the whole universe was his for the taking. An endless summer of heat and rain and surfing; blonde-haired girls with skin that tasted of saltwater; of working on his grandfather’s farm and drinking cider and planning the rest of his life. His granddad, a wizened old man with a leanly corded body even in his seventies, had brought him to Harte Farm to discuss a joint venture with the vaguely hippy-ish couple who owned it. They were organic, he thought – ahead of their time.
And there were kids, yes, now he thought about it. A sulky brat of a boy, who had a habit of hiding and spying, and a hooligan girl with wild hair and a tendency to walk around naked. He looked at Pippa again. At the windswept tresses, roughly tied up into a boisterous ponytail. At the braless chest beneath the hot-pink jersey.
Really? Could that be her? All grown up, in ways you can never imagine when they’re seven and you’re eighteen? When that feels like a world of difference, the unthinkable rather than the inadvisable?
“You jumped on my head,” he said, smiling at the memory. He saw it now: he’d had a hangover, as was usual back then. Too much scrumpy the night before. He’d been trying to sleep it off in the fields, found a patch of shade beneath the spreading arms of one of the old oaks that dotted the place. Half asleep, dreaming of London and home and those sailing girls with the salty skin and dirty laughs.
She’d yelled, like Boadicea screaming out a war cry, and launched herself from the lower branches of the tree, landing straight on top of him. He’d never even noticed her – she’d been wearing camouflage paint, greened-up like Rambo, hiding in the dappled leaves. Twigs stuck in her hair, soles of her bare feet covered in mud from running wild all day.
It amused him to think of it now, but he’d been a bit embarrassed at the time. Shocked out of his stupor by Stig of the Dump, caught out by a kid. A strange and slightly scary kid, who seemed to have made him the target of some kind of farm-based war game. God knows how long she’d been up there, watching him as he snored and drooled and sweated cider.
He’d picked her up by the skinny ankles and run all the way across the field, dangling her inches from the ground. She screamed and yelled and twisted herself up to try and scratch him, but he held firm until he reached the duck pond – where he’d swung her back and forth as if he was winding up for the Olympic discus, then let her fly through the air and land with a huge splash in the middle of the water.
His grandfather had given him a right telling off – what if she couldn’t swim? What if she’d banged her head? What if she’d squashed a duck? But her parents, they’d been cool. Just laughed and said it served her right – she was a little savage and deserved a bit of her own medicine. Yeah, they’d been cool, and from what she said a few minutes ago, they were gone now. They might have taken off for a commune in Marrakesh, but he got the impression that wasn’t what she’d meant. Rather that they were dead, like his grandfather. That the little girl he remembered had had to grow up very quickly, and way too soon.
“You remember now, don’t you?” she asked, laughing. “You remember my war cry?”
She let it out again and he heard Scotty, Lily and Daisy join in in the background. My God! A whole family of them! Savages, one and all.
“Okay, okay…I surrender!” he said, holding up his hands in the universal gesture of giving up. “I do remember now – but you can’t blame me for not recognising you. You have changed a bit, you know? You’re more…”
He floundered, trying to find a word that didn’t sound lecherous, curling fingers against his palm in case they accidentally made the equally universal gesture for “curvy-woman shaped”.
“Yes?” she said, hitching an eyebrow up at him suggestively. “More what, precisely?”
He looked awkward, less self-assured and arrogant. The tiny lines at the corners of his eyes crinkled up, showing white beneath his healthy outdoorsy tan. She’d had a terrible crush on him back then, Pippa remembered. He’d been this tall, handsome, exotic stranger and she used to sneak around following him. Obviously, she barely registered on his all-grown-up radar. The scream-and-jump routine had just been her way of getting his attention. Her pick-up techniques had improved…well, not significantly since then, she acknowledged. It’s not like she’d had much practice.
“Just…more,” he said, finally, gazing over her shoulder as though he was trying to avoid making eye contact with her. “Who’s that?” he asked, chocolate-drop eyes narrowing.
“What? Who?” blathered Pippa, who’d been slightly lost in thought as she looked up at his face. How could she not have remembered him straight away? He’d been the first love of her life, and had broken her tiny heart by dunking her in the duck pond – which, she had to admit, she thoroughly deserved.
She turned, following his gaze. Saw a plume of black smoke, then heard the bang. The scrape. The crash and grind of metal clashing on the gravel.
“Oh,” she said, the fun fading from her cornflower eyes, “that. That’s Patrick. On his bike. Or off it, perhaps.”
“Has he…just crashed it? Is he all right?” said Ben, watching as the gunmetal smoke funnelled up into the equally grey sky. This was all a bit surreal, as though he’d wandered into an episode of the Twilight Zone. And he’d thought his life was odd.
“Yes, he’s just crashed it,” she replied, setting off at a fast clip towards the scene of the accident, “and yes he’ll be all right. He crashes it at least once a day, just to keep me on my toes. Don’t feel obliged to follow – he’ll just be a pig to you. You’ll want to thump him and I’ll feel embarrassed.”
“Well, with an offer like that! How could I refuse?” he answered, striding to keep up with her. She seemed relaxed – if a little downtrodden – but he thought he’d better tag along, just in case this was the one time the crash-test dummy had taken his antics a step too far.
The younger children trailed behind them and he felt a tiny hand creep into one of his. The little boy. Scotty. The kid looked up at him, the same glowing, healthy looks as the rest of them. They all looked like adverts for Scandinavian log cabins, with their shining blonde hair and big blue eyes. Thoroughly disconcerting.
“Don’t worry,” said Lily – or maybe Daisy – as they passed. “Patrick’s just a bit of a mollusc,” said the other one, completing the sentence.
The mollusc in question was sprawled on the path, one of his legs trapped beneath what looked like an old Kawasaki. He wasn’t wearing a helmet and his hair – predictably blonde, but a lot dirtier than the others’ – was splayed across a face that was scratched raw with gravel burn. It had to hurt and would be a swine to clean with all those tiny scrapes pockmarked with even tinier stones.
Pippa paused, her lips twisting into a grimace, then walked over without a word. She leaned down, picked up the bike and threw it to one side. It bounced, the spokes whirring in the wind. Wow, thought Ben, she was stronger than she looked. Or maybe, he realised, it was just that she’d had a lot of practice – nobody was reacting as
