Lost Summer - Stuart Harrison

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jerked the blade downwards and the ferret was still. Without a word Nick wiped the blood off on the grass.

      Adam was silent, recalling his mingled shock and revulsion.

      ‘A few days later David tried to explain that Nick had to do what he did because the ferret was no good. Looking back I suppose Nick’s family probably ate what he caught but I didn’t see it that way then.’

      ‘But it made you feel different from them.’

      Adam nodded. ‘I was different.’

      That night Adam stayed late at his office. He was thinking about the Mounts, both of whom he’d gotten to know while he’d been looking for their daughter. They were lucky, they had found strength in each other, but the strain was indelibly etched in their faces. A kind of haunted look. It was the not knowing, they had told him, which was the hardest thing to bear. It always was. He looked at the photographs of their daughter on the wall. He had a feeling about her, that she was slipping away as he got closer. It was always like that. The ones he found left him in peace. Those in his dreams were the ones he never found.

      Louise was asleep when he got home. He went into their room and for a little while he stood inside the door watching her in the dim light that leaked in from the landing. She bore a physical resemblance to many of the women he’d been out with over the years and she wasn’t the first to tell him that he worked too hard, or that there was a part of him she felt he kept locked away from her.

      Quietly he closed the door and went to the couch in the living room.

      His leg was aching as it sometimes did when the weather was damp. He sat down and kneaded the ridged and scarred flesh. It still looked red and inflamed after all these years.

      ‘Last time we talked you told me that despite your friendship with David you felt different from the other boys. Why do you think that was?’

      ‘Different reasons,’ Adam replied from the window. It was raining outside, a fine misty drizzle that hung like vapour in the air. ‘We had different experiences. Castleton was a small rural town and I’d grown up in Hampstead. The two places were worlds apart.’

      ‘But you tried to fit in?’

      ‘I suppose that’s human nature isn’t it? To belong to the tribe.’

      ‘For most people it is,’ Morris agreed. ‘Generally speaking we look for others like ourselves to associate with. The friends of Arsenal supporters are usually other Arsenal supporters.’

      Adam smiled. ‘If you’re going to use football as an analogy I suppose I felt like a reserve. When Nick wasn’t around I was brought on to play, I felt like one of the team, but then Nick would turn up and I’d be back on the sidelines.’

      ‘During our last session you said that you thought Nick was jealous of your friendship with David. Was that because you shared experiences with David, like school, that Nick was excluded from?’

      ‘I suppose so.’

      ‘But you felt excluded from some of the experiences that Nick and David had in common. So, were you jealous of Nick?’

      Adam had never thought of it that way. ‘If I’m honest I suppose the answer is yes.’

      ‘It sounds almost as if you were in competition with each other, in a sense, for David’s friendship.’

      ‘I don’t think I felt that way,’ Adam said.

      ‘How did you feel?’

      ‘It was more like feeling a constant need to prove myself.’

      ‘To whom?’

      ‘I suppose to David. I wanted our friendship to be as important to him as Nick’s evidently was.’

      ‘You didn’t think it was?’

      ‘Going back to the football analogy I felt as if I was always fighting for my place on the team. I was looking to score the goal that would finally cement my place. I mean it wasn’t simply about David, it was about acceptance in the wider sense.’

      ‘And did you? Score that goal?’

      ‘I thought I had,’ Adam said.

      Morris rested his chin thoughtfully on his steepled fingers. He sensed that this was what Adam had been leading up to.

      The year was 1985 and spring had been unusually warm and dry. By summer the country was baking in a heat wave. Adam had turned sixteen and had a holiday job at the Courier in Carlisle. The pay was terrible, and his job was mostly running errands and making coffee, but at least he got to see how a real newspaper worked, even if it was only a local daily where news meant local horse shows and reports of council meetings.

      The editor was a dour Yorkshireman who spent most of his time secluded in his glass-walled office. Now and then he would emerge and gruffly summon one of the reporters. The door would close and the unlucky victim would have to sit in full view of the rest of the office while his or her work was savagely criticized. The only person who escaped these sessions was the paper’s senior reporter who, alone it seemed, had the editor’s respect.

      Adam had been at the paper for three weeks the first time he spoke to Jim Findlay. He was standing at the photocopier feeding endless sheets of paper into the machine when Findlay paused on his way past.

      ‘Adam isn’t it?’

      Findlay was rarely in the office. He did most of his work from the pub on the corner, where he habitually sat at a table in a sunny corner by the window with a pint glass and a whisky in front of him and an ashtray brimming with cigarette butts. He was Scottish and spoke with a broad accent. He looked to be in his forties, and had thinning hair that was turning grey and mournful eyes that gazed on the world with a kind of weary resignation.

      ‘Yes it is,’ Adam answered, recovering from his surprise.

      Findlay nodded. ‘How’re you liking our wee paper then?’

      ‘It’s fine. I mean, I’m enjoying working here.’

      ‘Is that so? I expect you’ll be wanting to become a journalist yerself one day, is that it?’

      ‘Hopefully, after university anyway.’

      Findlay seemed amused. ‘University eh? You’ll no’ want to be working at a place like this then. I’ll expect you’ve bigger plans.’

      There was something faintly mocking in his tone, though Adam didn’t feel that he was the target, but rather that Findlay was mocking himself. The humour in his eyes faded and was replaced with something closer to regret. He placed a hand briefly on Adam’s shoulder.

      ‘Don’t mind me laddie,’ he said, and with that he wandered off.

      At the end of the day Adam caught a bus back to Castleton. It was a sunny late afternoon, the heat of the day trapped in the narrow lanes between the hedgerows. In the fields the grass was drying to pale yellow. The hedgerows of hawthorn and crab apple and cow parsley were in full bloom. Towards the woods the air shimmered in a haze.

      As the bus rounded a bend and crossed a stone bridge, a cluster of vehicles and caravans parked in a cut off the bridleway came into view. A grey horse was tethered to a tree stump near an ancient truck and smoke drifted lazily across the river. Back in April Adam had first seen the camp on the way home from school. David had stayed late for cricket practice and the only other person on the bus had been an old man who sat across the aisle. He had pale skin and thin wispy hair and his eyes were rheumy and red-tinged.

      ‘Gypsies,’ he’d muttered. ‘Come around every few years they do.’ His mouth turned down in a grimace and he said something quietly to himself.

      A little further along the road the bus had stopped and the old man got off and walked

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