Jonathan Lee - High Dive

‘He’s not unkind. Watch him around the bars of Belfast. He’s kissed all sorts of horrors.’

‘This is a wind-up.’

‘Is it?’

‘Why would you shoot me? I’m asking to join!’ It was a wind-up. It was. He lowered the gun. ‘I’m not shooting any dogs.’

‘It’s your choice,’ Dawson said. ‘I’ve made the three options clear.’

‘Three?’

‘Shoot a dog, one. Get yourself shot, two. Number three, you can shoot us. Although, for that option, you’d have to get cracking.’

‘This is stupid.’

‘We’ll give you three seconds to finalise your thoughts, Dan.’

‘This is, what’s the point of this?’

‘Three.’

‘Come on.’

‘Two.’

‘Please.’

‘One.’

Mick lifted the shotgun. He pointed it at Dan’s chest and fired.

The slam of impact. Shock of his body thrown back. A noise that put him deep inside himself.

As he hit the ground his senses ceased to function. There was darkness, silence. Only the slightest light swirling through the old dim world, sluggish as the cream his mother put in coffee.

He was groping for where the wound must be, the wound. Block the blood. Should have killed the dogs.

The leather of his jacket felt smooth. Nothing wet. Nothing ripped. Entry. Where was the entry? Slowly certain things came into focus: wind-swollen trees, a bird in blue sky.

He rolled onto an elbow. The Land Rover was pulling away, its tyres giving up dust. Mick was standing over him, holding out a massive hand. There was sand and white stuff on the ground. Grains? Rice? Some on his jeans too. Dry white rice.

Mick’s cool shadow. It looked from his face like he was shouting, a muscle jumping in the jaw. ‘Doctor the partridge,’ he seemed to say. The ringing in Dan’s ears changed in pitch. His chest hurt, his skull hurt.

‘We fiddle with the cartridge. Pack it with a bit of basmati.’

‘What?’

‘Ruining the local carb market, the rice, so we steal it from the Indian importers. Slows the flight of the thing right down. Sorry if you hit your head.’

Dan spat. ‘I might’ve. But I might’ve shot the dog.’

Mick laughed. ‘Yeah. But as initiations go, not so bad, eh? Next time a gun’s pointed, you’ll up your game.’

He had no clue where the handgun was. It wasn’t in his hand or anywhere near his hand. The dogs were moving wildly, happily, the lead snaking through the grass.

‘Useful to confirm his initial impressions,’ Mick said. ‘There’s that too. Thinks you’re more of a distance man, doesn’t he? Your DIY skills. Devicecraft. More and more he’s looking to the mainland. First lad to call his bluff.’ He pulled Dan up into a warm embrace.

Dan blinked and tried to hide his shaking hands.

‘It’s over.’

‘What is?’

‘Welcome to your new life.’

AFTER HER WEDNESDAY-MORNING swim Freya bumped into Mr Easemoth. He was her old History teacher at Blatchington Mill, the benevolent dictator of Classroom 2D, a man always striving for facts. You got the sense it was pretty important to him to feel he was misunderstood.

They exchanged a few words about the hotel. He grinned palely in the sunlight and said her future was bright. Mentioned also, awkwardly, that her father had given him a call. They’d discussed university options.

‘Very proud of you,’ Mr Easemoth said. ‘As well he should be.’

‘Thanks, Mr Easemoth.’

‘Some of those marks were among the best in Brighton, I’d guess.’

She smiled. ‘Thanks, I appreciate it.’

‘No,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Thank you . A pleasure to teach.’

Overhead a seagull screamed and wheeled. ‘Well, I guess I’d better …’

‘Oh, of course.’

‘It’s just.’

‘No no, don’t let me hold you up.’

The quality of his smile in this moment made her sad. ‘See you soon then, Mr Easemoth.’

‘And give my best to your father.’

Walking. The breeze on her legs. Brine in the air. She was wearing a brand-new electric-blue miniskirt. And would she ever actually see Mr Easemoth again? What had undermined him above all in the corridors at school was not his sinusitis, or the stains in the weave of his tie, or even his anti-charisma. It was the unfortunate rumour that he possessed a micropenis, and probably that part wasn’t true.

On rare September days like this, people in Brighton didn’t hang about. They threw off their drizzled raincoats and raided drawers for gaudy shorts. They cooked themselves on towels and bobbed about on waves. Gulls tottered across rocks, heads dipping low and feet lifting high, the motion mirrored by a kid checking his shoe soles for chewing gum. Old men watched the water through wavy iron railings and old women sipped tea outside cafeterias.

The purple-and-pink signage of the hair salon was up ahead. Also the ice-cream guy. She could murder a 99 with double flake, but there was a long queue on the left side of the van.

Wendy Hoyt was the second-cheapest stylist at Curl Up & Dye, a curvy hypochondriac whose own bleached locks — an advert, a warning — took up a massive amount of airspace. With Wendy, headaches were often imaginary tumours. Back pain amounted to osteoporosis. She’d had suspected failures in all the main organs, suffered a non-productive cough caused by contact with livestock, and her neck bore a hairspray rash that she preferred to blame on sea breeze. Freya didn’t pay much attention to Wendy’s catalogue of invented catastrophes, but at the same time had an instinctive sympathy for people whose catastrophes didn’t get much attention, so it was a sort of draw and she kept coming back.

‘Thought any more about it?’ Wendy said, tightening the gown around Freya’s neck. There had already been a discussion about why her hair was ‘pre-wash-wet’, a connected warning about the coarsening effects of chlorine, and a bonus tip about a girl who got pregnant when swimming because a boy had been masturbating in the shallow end. The hairdryers had been on. Wendy was breathing hard. The neon beads of her necklace shifted as her bosom rose and fell. From the top corners of the mirror hung two squiggles of silver ribbon that had survived the nine months since Christmas.

‘I’m thinking maybe not,’ Freya said.

‘We have more fun,’ Wendy said, winking. ‘Works like catnip in discos.’

‘Huh.’

‘I’m practically harassed. Blonde would flirt with your skin tone, too.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Different, I thought you were after. But if you want to stick with the flat brown look, we could always go side-ponytail, or fringe. Your friend Sarah — uni now, is she? — I gave her a lovely Cyndi Lauper.’

Wendy took a sip of cranberry juice, a drink she claimed was effective in warding off infections. The wall behind the mirror was the colour of a fine lime. Another wall was pink, a third was purple. A girl sweeping up hair clippings was humming a chorus-only version of ‘Borderline’ by Madonna, an undeniably awesome song, and her T-shirt said ‘All the Way to Wembley’ under a picture of a gliding gull. Freya closed her eyes and imagined, for a moment, sitting here at Mr Easemoth’s age, having the same conversation, counting the same neon beads around Wendy’s neck: three overlapping strings, twenty on the bottom, eighteen in the middle, sixteen on the top.

A lot of time passed. At least half a minute.

‘OK,’ she said. There was new heat in her skin. Live dangerously, right? ‘Cut it all off, Wendy, and turn me blonde.’

Wendy raised an intensively pencilled eyebrow. A customer from Hove walked in. Several things told you a person was from Hove. In this instance it was the explosion of silk scarves around the neck.