Before the Ruins Read online

  In the manor kitchen, Em took the necklace out of her bag. We were in the big room, where it was always cool and dim. There were giant flagstones on the floor. We made tea there on the camping stove, and in its deeper recesses, the milk would last for days.

  The diamonds were dull until she took them to one of the low, long windows and held them up to the light.

  “They’ve got the right shape, with the big tear drop. Same as in the picture. There were loads of them.” She coiled them up and then rubbed them on her shirt. “Mum says I should put them in bicarb.”

  Peter stretched out his hand for them. “They’re heavy.”

  We passed them round. By the time it reached me, the necklace was warm. It did have weight to it. The stones were square cut, apart from the teardrop, which had come from India, a gift to a Colonel Ashton from a maharaja for saving him from a tiger. Had this been real, how many carats would it have been? The settings and the clasp were tarnished, it was impossible to see the color of the original metal, but it was probably nickel, at most silver-plated.

  “How do we know these aren’t the real ones?”

  “Because they cost three quid?”

  But if you’d laid the real necklace, also dirty, also tarnished, next to this one, I doubted I could tell them apart, the real from the fake. When David was gone, I’d trust myself even less.

  Em had found them, so the first time Em hid them. We waited in the kitchen, listening to her footsteps disappear, trying to hear the creak of the stairs, of the opening of a door; and when she returned searching her face for clues, for traces of the hiding place. She did a good inscrutable. She was a good keeper of secrets.

  If you found them, you hid them next time. We played it for weeks, never tiring of it, which isn’t so odd when I think about it. There are other games, far more boring games, I’ve played, games that have gone on for years on end, games played routinely, with no hope of reward.

  * * *

  In the beginning, when we were small, I gave Em a hard time. Some days I would speak to her, some days I wouldn’t, acting like she’d done something wrong. I told her the teapot was stupid till she stopped wearing it. I stole her lunch a week running. When we were taken for swimming lessons, I lingered in the changing rooms and put her knickers in the bin. On her pencil tin, she had Tipp-Exed the initials MF and a heart, so I told Martin Frost and he punched her on the arm.

  It was malice I was after. I was waiting for the smug look on her face when she told on me. Or weakness, sobbing, Please don’t be horrid to me, Andy! I mined for them with a passion, but came up empty-handed. In the end, I gave up.

  When we were thirteen, she reminded me. I was sitting on a chair in her bedroom with a towel round my neck. Em was tickling at my face with her mum’s makeup brushes, her breath warm on my skin.

  “Remember when you used to bully me?” Her smile was impish.

  I squirmed in my seat. She was doing my lips so I couldn’t answer back. I had to suffer in silence while she went through it all, till her mum shouted up that dinner was ready.

  When we came down the stairs, she said, “Don’t you both look glam! You deserve to be on Top of the Pops.” Em had turned veggie, so it was Linda McCartney sausages and mash. June let us take it back up on trays. But I couldn’t eat. There was a pain in my stomach. I wasn’t a very nice person. I’d always known it, but a lot of the time I managed to keep it buried away, out of sight.

  “It’s all right, Andy,” Em said. But I couldn’t look up.

  “This tastes like shit. I don’t want it. I want to go home.”

  Tears sprung in Em’s eyes. I sometimes wished I could cry, but the feeling got stoppered in my throat.

  “Really, really, really, Andy. I wasn’t getting at you. I always knew we’d be friends.” She put her plate down and seized my hand. Em was quick to accept fault in a way I never could.

  I stayed over, chrysalissed in a sleeping bag on a foam mattress dragged out of the wardrobe. In the dark, we whispered. The cottage walls were six feet thick so there was no need for it, but it was thrilling to whisper, to share things you wouldn’t tell anyone in daylight when they could see your face.

  “So what’s this new bloke of your mum’s like then?”

  “Joe?” I said. “He’s all right.”

  And it wasn’t a lie because in the beginning he was.

  * * *

  Em was waiting for me at the telephone box. Monday to Friday Marcus worked for Darren, although to be fair plenty of times he got off early or went in to be told he wasn’t needed. When he couldn’t give us a lift, we took the Ridgeway path together, trotting the three miles as the haze lifted from the horizon and the wheat goldened and the air began to tremble slightly in the heat. Then we went down, cutting across the fields to the stile and then traversing the nettle patch and briars to the old gate that took us onto the manor grounds.

  “Keen as a fox, you.”

  “Today’s the day, isn’t it?”

  “And if you find them, Andy, the real ones, what’ll you do then?”

  “The real ones?” I hadn’t thought that much about it. It was the hunt I liked above all.

  “Peter kissed him,” Em said. I stopped and turned to face her. “Last time, when we were leaving, I went back for my sketchbook and I saw Peter kiss David.”

  “What kind of kiss?”

  “Not the kind he gives his mum.”

  “And what did David do?”

  “Nothing. I mean, Peter kissed him, and then after a moment or two, it ended and David sort of patted him on the shoulder, and then he said goodbye.”

  “Patted him? Like a dog?”

  We came out a couple of hundred meters from the manor among a small group of apple trees. Their branches bent to meet the long grass. They’d had it really, but they still fruited, round hard little apples that as summer went on glowed red like lanterns.

  “He shouldn’t lead him on.” The words felt funny on my lips. It was what some boys said if you were friendly to them or looked too good.

  “Maybe he’s not,” Em said.

  From the manor, I caught the sound of the piano. So Peter was already there.

  They could not have numbered that many, but in memory it feels like there were a thousand of them, those beautiful mornings, the manor waiting. Peter playing a melody, something of his own devising he was working on. David lying out on the lawn, or frying eggs on the camping stove. As often as not, as we approached, he wouldn’t even say hello, just lift his eyes and smile, as though among such good friends welcomes were unnecessary.

  * * *

  The swifts were crying, the evening light creeping away like it couldn’t bear to leave. Marcus had built a hearth out of loose bricks and was trying to cook sausages over a bit of wire mesh. A little smoke snaked away across the grass. Em poured vodka into plastic cups. They were both happy, I think, and Peter was happier than I had ever seen him.

  He and David were walking toward us over the lawn. Peter was not bad looking, I realized. At school, he’d been called all the ugly names there were, daily, for years. A tide of hostility toward him, because he was awkward, because of the way he spoke, because he was clever. Sometimes it ebbed, sometimes it flowed. It’d come to feel real. I thought of the last couple of years, how there’d been something hunched about Peter, something drawn, almost—now that I thought about it—like he was cradling a wound, only apparent now that it was gone.

  David was laughing at something Peter had said. Peter’s lips were curved in a smile. His hair was a bit longer than I’d seen it. In the light there was a reddish hint to it. He was filling out, growing into his height. On the grass their long shadows overlapped.

  Great things were expected of Peter, and I had the sudden appreciation that he would get them. Prizes. Glitter. Entrance to new worlds. A sudden and horrid vision—us bumping into one another in a supermarket many years in the future. Peter, all expensive, braying, “Well if it isn’t dear old Andy,” while lifting an
enormous bottle of champagne into his trolley, and me in tracky bottoms and rags clutching a pack of value fish sticks. Or two liters of cider. Or the sticky paws of snotty triplets. The pain in my guts was so visceral that I had to turn away.

  I didn’t mean to hurt him though.

  * * *

  Em found the diamonds around the neck of one of the stone cherubs that adorned the fountain, Peter among the weeds of a flower bed, Marcus inside the back of the old piano, David in an empty bird’s nest in the stables. Em found them most often, I think. They were always the ones we had hidden, always Em’s charity shop diamonds, never Mary Ashton’s.

  The white burning sun was just above the treetops, the wood beneath was blue. July days. August around the corner. When I closed my eyes, I could still see the sun, burning dimly behind curtains of orange, a red mark.

  Victory for Andy! The diamonds were sitting in the fork of the pear tree. I put them on, fastening the clasp around my neck, and then I took off my shoes and climbed up. Through the first-floor window, I could see Em and Marcus. They were on their hands and knees peering under dust-sheeted furniture.

  “Oi!”

  When they turned, I indicated my neck with a finger and watched their faces sink. Then I went on up, taking the drainpipe again. Only when I got to the roof, I couldn’t get up. I just couldn’t make my legs do it. Strange. I gave the order again, but my body said no.

  I went back down. David was waiting at the foot of the tree.

  “Lost your bottle?”

  I sailed past him. What did it mean, the nerve being gone? In stories, there were magic mirrors that showed what was inside people. In reality, you couldn’t see. It was dark in there and you were left to guess.

  I took him by surprise, putting a foot behind his and pushing. He went down into the grass easily. I knelt over him.

  “No.”

  “I see.”

  I watched his chest rise and fall. His lips were coral pink. His eyes shifted color depending where he was. Now they were blue-green, like spring grass.

  David put a finger up to touch the necklace. “They suit you.”

  * * *

  The keeper booted the ball long and it came down over the halfway line. Marcus got a toe to it, but one of the Pewsey players barged him and sent it back up the pitch.

  Em and I were sitting with Darren on a wooden bench they’d brought out of the club hut. Every time something exciting happened, Darren stood up and the bench heaved like a seesaw. It was Saturday afternoon, a grudge match, and we were two-nil down near the end of the first half.

  Darren rubbed his face with his hands. “That ref got dropped as a baby.”

  The whistle blew and someone’s gran brought out the orange slices and squash. I wondered what Peter and David were up to. What I saw in my mind’s eye made my cheeks burn.

  An ice-cream van pulled up and Darren dug out a tenner. “I’ll have a Mr. Whippy.”

  “With a Flake?”

  “Don’t be daft. Of course, with a Flake.”

  I got three. On the way back, one of the Pewsey players jogged past. “I’ll give you something to lick if you want.”

  Marcus came over. “What did he say to you?”

  “Forget it, Marc.” But he made me tell him and when he went back on the pitch, he was a bottle of rage.

  “Shouldn’t let hisself be wound up like that. He’ll get sent off.” Darren ate the last of his cone with a crunch. Em screeched in my ear as Marcus took a shot at the goal, but he was miles off target. Then he got a yellow card for elbowing. “Wait for it,” Darren said.

  But Marcus was carried off, not sent off. An opponent went in with a two-footed tackle. “Foul,” Em howled, “that’s a fucking foul! Sorry, Uncle Darren.”

  It was his ankle. He lay there clutching it and writhing. Darren was all over the ref. By the time they brought him into the clubhouse, the joint was swollen up like a grapefruit. Marcus held a bag of ice to it, jaw set.

  “I can’t play with you here.”

  Darren whipped round, voice molten: “Don’t you blame her because you can’t control yourself!”

  We went back in Darren’s car. Em in the front, me with Marcus’s head in my lap in the back. The house Marcus shared with his mum was a new build, one of Darren’s, with thick carpets, a fancy kitchen, and dimmers on the lights. The double glazing was so thick, you couldn’t hear anything from outside.

  Marcus’s mum was home. She always seemed to be home. All those white goods to look after. I think I made her nervous, but then what didn’t?

  Em had a shift at The Polly at four. I was relieved when Darren put his head round the living room door and said he’d drop us both back in town.

  “Come see us yeah? Tomorrow?”

  I dropped a kiss on Marcus’s forehead. “Course.”

  Traffic was heavy. Darren pulled into the market square and Em hopped out. They docked her pay if she was late.

  “How’s Peter? What’s he up to today?” Darren was always asking about Peter. Back when he took us trampolining, he used to call him the Professor.

  “He’s all right.”

  “Reading a book somewhere I ’spect. And you, Andy? Things all right with you?” As I got out, he beckoned me back. He wasn’t smiling now. “You ever need anything, you come to me.”

  * * *

  Two days of getting the bus out to see Marcus was enough. His mum didn’t want us up in his room, so we sat on the cream sofa, Marcus with his leg up on a pouf. His ankle was all the colors. There was nothing on telly. We couldn’t even talk about the manor because his mum was always in and out, giving a little cough in the doorway in case she was interrupting anything.

  We ate lunch at the table. “Markie likes his yolks runny. What about you, Andy?”

  There were photos everywhere, mostly of Marcus, a couple with Darren and some old people. My eyes lingered on a picture of his mum in her wedding dress on her dad’s arm. It was up on a top shelf and turned a bit to the left, like whoever put it there wasn’t sure they wanted it to be seen. I moved closer.

  “Andy! Put it back.” In the photo, she looked about twelve with long, straight seventies hair. Her smile went from ear to ear. Marcus was struggling to his feet.

  “All right, all right.” I set it down and came and sat down next to him. “You never hear from your dad?”

  Marcus shook his head. “Don’t want a bar of him. She says the only good thing came out of it was me.” He took my hand. “When you marry someone, you look after them. Treat them right. And you should wait, shouldn’t get married young. You should be at least twenty-one.”

  The bus didn’t come for another hour.

  I chose a seat on the top deck on the way back, feeling the breeze pour over me, listening to the twigs scratching on the roof. There weren’t many people on. Two ravers a few rows back were talking about e; Double Doves and Mitsubishis; how you wanted a line of whizz on the way up and a bong for the way down; Lakota vs. the Brunel vs. Gold Diggers; the trippy carpet at Membury Services.

  “You want to listen, you come sit with us.”

  So I did, sliding across the seat as the bus shook round the corners, and listening to Scuttler and Lee—both on the simian side, both wearing clothes sizes too big—tell me about their weekend adventures like soldiers recounting legendary battles. They worked at B&Q in Swindon and spent most of the time smoking weed in the stores, or sleeping off their comedowns in the cardboard recycling container.

  “It’s quite comfy in there,” Scuttler said.

  There were summer jobs going if I was interested.

  By the time I got off in Marlborough, I was twenty quid lighter and with three pills, brown-speckled like hen’s eggs, in my back pocket.

  * * *

  “Best not tell Marcus, because of Uncle Darren.” Darren didn’t hold with chemicals. A bit of hash was okay, but that was it.

  Peter surprised me because he said, “Fuck Darren.” He’d not been keen to try e before, but now h
e was. Em had a shift at The Polly, so it was just me, Peter, and David. We dropped a half each in the manor’s kitchen.

  Butterflies gave way to tingles, to an urge to move. I raced them round the lake, but stopped halfway overcome by a drenched, sicky feeling.

  I bent double, panting. Peter put his hand on my shoulder softly. “You want us to hold back your hair, Andy?”

  “I’m all right. I’m all right.” Better than all right, floating. Then suddenly, good so good, and David and Peter feeling it too.

  “Let’s go up the castle,” I said.

  “But it’s miles.”

  “Not cross-country it isn’t.”

  The path went up through a sea of emerald nettles, dusty and going to seed. Just past Ogbourne, a track led up to Smeathe’s Ridge. On either side of us, the land fell away. Further on, there was an ordinance survey marker that showed north and south, east and west. To the north, far away, there was the motorway, the M4. Cars were flowing in either direction, a steady flow for as far as I could see, and it conjured the image of a ribbon drawn in either direction, a ribbon being tied around the earth. A breeze was blowing. It plucked at our T-shirts and blew my hair about my face.

  “I don’t want it to end,” Peter said. But it seemed like it was already seeping away, so we took the other halves, only to find ten minutes later we were peaking again. When the second halves kicked in, Peter dropped to his knees in the grass.

  David turned to me, pale, his pupils black and dilated. He looked like a rare and exotic flower, impossibly beautiful.

  Dry mouth. Thudding heart. Skin burning. I sat down and closed my eyes, lost in it. When I opened them again, both Peter and David were lying on their backs staring at the sky.

  “I’m going to go. I want to see my mum. I want to talk to her.”

  Peter raised himself up on one elbow.

  “Bad idea. Bad idea. Stay with us.”

  But I shook my head.

  “Really, Andy? You’re going to go?” David said. “Can’t you talk to her later? You were going to show me this castle.”