Stuart Harrison - Lost Summer

Watching David’s back as he threw stones from the edge of the Giant’s Chair Adam knew it was pointless to push it. He went back to his book and after a few minutes David started whistling and murmuring snatches of a song. After a while he gestured to the view.

‘This is great isn’t it? I’m never leaving here.’

Adam looked up. ‘What about if you go to university?’

‘Why would I do that? I’m going to work for my dad when I leave school. What about you, Adam, what are you going to do?’

He thought about it. He wanted to be a journalist and work for a newspaper. ‘Go back to London one day, I suppose.’

David shook his head. ‘You’re a city boy. Do you miss it?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘I’d feel out of place there,’ David said.

The others had eventually caught up and they had spent the day rabbiting.

‘Have you ever done that?’ Adam asked, to which Morris replied that he hadn’t. ‘What happens is you find a warren and net all the holes then shove a ferret down one of them to flush out the rabbits. In theory anyway.’

He’d never really enjoyed that kind of thing. He only tagged along fishing, shooting and rabbiting with the others because that was what they did.

Nick had become frustrated that day because his ferret kept killing rabbits down the holes instead of chasing them out. Then the ferret would go to sleep and Nick would have to dig it out. The others had taken it in their stride but if it hadn’t been for the satisfaction of seeing Nick thwarted Adam would have been bored out of his skull.

Late in the day they had found another warren and when they were finished Nick came and checked the last hole Adam had netted. He kicked at one of the pegs and when it came out of the ground easily he sneered.

‘That wouldn’t hold a bloody mouse.’

The others looked on without comment while Nick made a show of doing the job himself.

‘He did it to humiliate me,’ Adam told Morris. ‘And to make a point. He was always doing that kind of thing.’

Finally Nick had sent his ferret down a hole. An hour or so passed before it was clear that once again he would have to dig it out again. He set to with a short spade, his face set in anger while Adam lay in the sun watching with quiet satisfaction.

It took Nick half an hour to find his ferret. He bent down to pluck it from the ground and Adam got up, hoping that perhaps now they could go home. But instead of returning it to the sack Nick pinned the ferret to the ground with his foot. The animal squirmed briefly under the pressure and then almost carelessly Nick raised his spade and then suddenly 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?’