Camilla Way - The Dead of Summer

I’d seen porn mags before of course, on the top shelves in shops, but this was the first time I’d ever looked inside one. There was no one there to see me but still I felt my cheeks burn as I leafed through its pages. I stared at the centre spread of three women, their breasts enormous, their legs spread, their expressions varying from comatosed to surprised.

‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

I jumped to my feet and the magazine fell onto the floor, flopping open to a picture of a girl sucking her own nipple, her fingers spreading herself down below. Push was standing in the doorframe, his green eyes cold and furious.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I—’ Push looked from me to the magazine and sprinted across the room. ‘You little bitch,’ he said. ‘You dirty little bitch! Having a good look, were you?’ His face was red with shame.

‘I was looking for the PacMan,’ I said feebly. I couldn’t look at him and felt almost as if it was I who was naked in the pictures of the magazine.

I can see now how it must have been for Push back then. Not easy to get laid when you looked like him. All those blonde, big-titted Lewisham High girls who wouldn’t be seen dead going out with ‘an Asian’, how they’d kick themselves now if they could see the man he was to grow into – if they could see the beauty that was to come. But there in that room I didn’t think any of that, of course. I was innocent for my age I expect, but those pictures were a smack in the face; a rude awakening.

‘Leave me alone,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t doing anything.’

‘Keep the fuck out of my room,’ he ranted. ‘Look at you. Dressed like a bloke and staring at girls’ knockers. You a fucking lezzer or what?’ And suddenly my left ear was ringing and burning where he’d slapped it. We stared at each other for a couple of seconds then I ran from the room, down the stairs and out the front door, where I fell smack bang into Denis who was about to ring the bell.

Denis trotted beside me while I gradually calmed down. Out of the corner of my eye I could see his flab jump about. Eventually we stopped at a railway bridge and hung over the wall, looking down at the train tracks below us. The bridge was covered in graffiti and I recognised one of the tags. I’d seen that same word sprayed in various colours and sizes on every wall, lamppost and bridge in south-east London. ‘Enrol’, it said, and whoever he was he’d been a busy lad. As I stood there with Denis I found myself wondering about this Enrol person; why he felt the need to announce himself like that in foot-high letters wherever he went. Maybe he just wanted to prove he was there, I thought. Show the world he existed. As I stood there that morning looking at his name repeated fifty times on the bricks, I thought that that was a strange thing to want to do. But I wonder what ever happened to him? I wonder where he is now? I guess his plan worked: I didn’t forget him, did I?

‘You seen Kyle?’ asked Denis eventually.

I turned to look at him and felt my mood lift a bit. It was good to see him even if he did stink of BO that day. ‘Nah,’ I said.

He pulled a Mars bar from his pocket and began to munch. ‘Me neither.’

We walked on, towards Deptford.

‘Where do you think he is?’ I asked.

‘Dunno,’ said Denis. ‘He said something about going to Point Hill.’

I didn’t know where Point Hill was, and didn’t much care if we found Kyle or not. It was just good to be out of the house and going somewhere. Denis started telling me a long and complicated story about his Uncle Richard who lived in Broadstairs and had once met Big Daddy and we got on the bus up to Blackheath. From there we walked over the common towards Greenwich Park but instead of heading towards the donkey rides and ice cream vans, Denis led me to a little side park – a field at the top of Blackheath Hill from which you could see all of London stretched out below. Denis pointed to someone sitting on a bench. Kyle.

When we reached him he didn’t seem particularly surprised to see us and barely glanced up. He looked tired, his eyes dull and sunken in his scrawny face. We sat in silence for a while, listening to Denis get his breath back and looking down on the city below us. The river flickered green and silver through the mangled, scrambled, silent mess of streets and parks and cranes and buildings, a billion windows blinking back up at us. Denis went off to buy ice lollies and we lay on our fronts on the scratchy yellow grass to eat them.

‘There’s a cave underneath this hill,’ said Kyle, finally.

‘I know,’ said Denis, sucking the big toe off his Funny Foot.

‘I wasn’t talking to you,’ said Kyle.

A sharp bite of pleasure. ‘A cave?’ I said.

‘It’s called Jack Cade’s Cavern.’ He began carefully squashing ants with his lolly stick.

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