Our Last Summer by Jennifer Joyce
Chapter 19
It rains quite a lot during the festival but we don’t let it dampen our spirits. We listen to fantastic bands, we sing and we dance and we eat good food, and I’m having such a great time with my friends that I almost forget that I’m here to save Ed. In a year, he’ll be gone and I can’t let the opportunity to prevent the accident slip through my fingers. I can’t sit back and let it happen. There has to be something I can do, even now, to make sure it never happens.
‘You look lost in thought.’ Heather flops down next to me on the patch of dryish grass that I’ve managed to bag and hands me a bacon butty.
I feel lost in general, to be honest, but I don’t say this to my sister. ‘Just soaking up the atmosphere before we have to leave.’
Heather pulls a face. ‘Wish we didn’t have to go.’
‘Be a bit boring once all the beer tents and food stands have gone and it’s just us and a massive field.’
Heather shrugs and unwraps her own bacon butty. ‘Better than going to work though.’
‘Good point. It’s been a laugh though, hasn’t it? Thanks for inviting us.’
Heather shrugs. ‘Had to. Keeley and the others backed out and I couldn’t come on my own.’ Heather smirks at me before she sinks her teeth into her sandwich. I know she’s only messing and I play along, digging her gently with my elbow. This is the first festival I’ve ever been to, because Heather didn’t invite me originally. I think she’d rather have boiled her own head than spend a long weekend with me and the feeling was very much mutual, but there’s been a shift in our relationship. A thawing that has allowed us to connect in a way we never had before and I’m learning so much about my sister that I never knew.
Last night, as we sat outside Yvonne and Heather’s tent with a bottle of vodka and a pack of playing cards, Heather had entertained us with impressions of people from work, and although the others hadn’t known who any of our co-workers were, they’d howled with laughter. Heather’s talent for capturing and exaggerating the essence of those around her had been a revelation to me and the impression of the head housekeeper had been my favourite.
‘Do your impression of Linda again.’
Heather swipes at her mouth with the back of her hand and clears her throat. With a straight back and her chin tilted in the air, she adopts an over-the-top posh voice.
‘I am Linda Peterson, queen of this castle and you, peasant, are a scruffy urchin. Tie your hair back! Remove those disgusting false nails at once. How dare you smile in my presence?’ Heather rolls her eyes, back to being herself again. ‘She’s like Mrs Gacey with a fucking feather duster.’
I almost choke on my sandwich as I bark with laughter at Heather’s assessment of the head housekeeper, because it’s spot on.
‘You’re funny.’ I’d never realised it before because I was too caught up in the pain-in-the-arse parts of my sister.
Heather nods. ‘I know.’
I roll my eyes, but good-naturedly. ‘And modest.’
‘You forgot stunningly beautiful.’
I shove her with my shoulder. ‘Get lost.’ But I’m smiling because I feel like I’ve not only found my sister, I’ve also discovered a new friend.
‘I could sleep for a week when we get back.’ Otis yawns, covering his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Pity we’ve got work in the morning. I’ll be falling asleep at my desk.’ He groans and thumps his fist down lightly on the steering wheel. ‘I forgot about that meeting first thing, with Geoff and Marjorie. I’ll definitely be falling asleep having to sit through that. What time are you in work tomorrow?’
I’m only half-listening to Otis so I don’t respond. Instead, I turn to look out of the window, back towards the car park we’ve just left. After an amazing weekend, we’re heading home.
‘Poor bugger.’ Otis has glanced back too, and he thinks I’m watching the car that’s stuck in the mud, with three festival stewards helping to push it forward. But I’m really on the lookout for Tomasz’s car. He’s driving back with Ed, Yvonne and Heather, and I haven’t seen them since we said goodbye in the swampy car park. I’d been in Otis’s arms at the time as he’d carried me across the mud, bride-over-the-threshold style, even though I was wearing my wellies.
‘Did you text your mum? To let her know we’re on our way back?’
It’s sweet of Otis to remind me to do this, because Mum will have spent the past few days worrying, even though Heather and I are old enough to look after ourselves. I’m twenty-six and Heather has just finished her second year at uni, where she’s proved she’s more than capable of taking care of herself, but I remember the previous summer, when Heather had gone to the festival with her mates and Mum had almost worn a hole in the living room carpet with her anxiety-induced pacing.
‘I’ll do it now.’ I wriggle my phone free from my jeans pocket. The lock-screen image is a selfie of me and Otis, grinning drunkenly at the camera, heads squeezed close together so we both fit in the frame. Being with him was fun and carefree, but he isn’t The One. The One is in another car, driving my best friends and sister back home to Little Heaton. As lovely as Otis is, I’m a bit put out that I’m not travelling with any of them. The others all gravitated towards Tomasz’s car while Otis carried me to his, and I didn’t want to come across as dumb by asking why the cars weren’t more evenly split.
‘What time are you in work in the morning?’ I’m vaguely aware that Otis has already asked me this question, but I don’t know the answer. ‘Hopefully I’ll have time to drop you off so you don’t have to mess about with the bus.’
So we’re staying at Otis’s place tonight, which makes the travel arrangements make sense. The others are all going to Little Heaton and we’re not, and this, strangely, makes me feel a bit sad. It seems odd to not be going home to Mum and Dad’s after living there again for the past few weeks.
‘Elodie?’
‘Sorry.’ I tap at my phone so I can check the calendar, where I add my shifts. ‘I’m on a ten-six.’
It’s been over a year since I started working at the hotel and I’m no longer a chambermaid. I’m a receptionist now, with some extra administration duties on top. Gillian has really taken me under her wing and is encouraging me up the career ladder.
‘Great. I’ll drop you off at home in the morning before I head into work.’ Otis yawns, covering his mouth with the back of his hand again. ‘Getting up is going to be a killer though.’
‘Make sure you don’t fall asleep at the wheel.’ My tone is jovial, but I am a little concerned, to be honest. We didn’t sleep much during the festival; once the acts were finished for the night, we stayed up, playing cards and drinking until we couldn’t keep our eyes open a moment longer.
‘We should have brought the L-plates with us.’ Otis stops at a junction and checks for traffic before turning off. ‘You could have had some practice.’
Yes!I can’t help my lips spreading into a wide smile as I realise what this means. With the extra hours and money from work, I’d been paying for driving lessons – another step towards freedom from Little Heaton.
‘I don’t think having the supervisor napping counts when you’re a learner.’ Not that I need supervising – I’ve had my licence for nearly six years. Passed first time – though I’m not sure I could use time travel as an excuse if we were pulled over.
‘Good point.’
I slide my phone back into my pocket and turn the radio on. It’s ‘Despacito’, which I haven’t heard for so long. It was everywhere this summer and then it was gone. I turn it up and Otis and I sing along to the ‘despacitos’ and the occasional ‘oh, yeahs’, neither of us able to manage the rest of the lyrics. Otis taps out the beat on the steering wheel and I nod along. The windows are open and there’s a breeze whipping up my hair, and this moment sums up my relationship with Otis. Fun. Carefree. Liberating. Showing me that there was a life beyond Little Heaton. And I didn’t even need to fly all the way to America to find it.
I’d forgotten how pretty Otis’s house is with its arched windows and roses climbing up the white rendered walls. Inside, the walls are pale grey and the floors are a glossy oak, the furniture and décor kept to a minimum, giving the place a clean, clutter-free look (though Otis claimed this was because he and his housemates couldn’t be arsed shopping for bits and pieces for the house rather than by design). The rooms are large, apart from the kitchen, which is tiny, like an afterthought squeezed in at the last minute, and there’s a separate walk-in shower in the bathroom, which I make use of as soon as we’re inside, rinsing the grime of the festival from me. As fun as camping was, it was pretty grubby, especially with the bogginess caused by the heavy rain.
I’d loved this house. It didn’t have the ancient, swirly-patterned carpet that should have come with a health warning due to its headache-inducing capabilities that we had at home, and we could usually watch what we wanted on the telly because Otis’s housemates were barely at home in the evenings. I didn’t have to sit through Fake Britain, or Gardener’s World or that Gary Barlow search-for-a-band thing that Mum loved and wouldn’t let us speak – or cough, or sneeze, or even breathe, practically – through.
Otis’s house is calm. It’s fresh and light and neat, and as far away as you could get from my family home. But I sort of miss the chaos of home right now. I miss Gran complaining about the cold, aggressively buttoning her cardigan up to her chin while death-glaring at whichever poor sod happened to be in the room. And I miss Mum lusting after Gary Barlow or Sam Nixon or any other vaguely attractive male on the telly, and I miss Dad talking over everything (apart from the Gary Barlow search-for-a-band thing, because he valued his life). I even miss despising Heather’s reality TV.
‘Are you okay, babe?’ Otis is lounging on the sofa, his legs draped over my lap, Arnold the pug curled up against his chest, but I’m sitting upright. Stiff. Uncomfortable in a place I used to feel at ease.
‘Yeah.’ I smile, overbright, overcompensating for my discomfort. ‘Just tired. The weekend, you know?’
Otis grins. ‘It was good though, wasn’t it?’
‘Yeah.’ I relax against the sofa a bit more. ‘Really good.’
‘Are you watching this?’ Otis juts his chin out, indicating the telly. EastEnders is on but I haven’t been paying attention. I stopped watching it when I moved to California and I only half-watched it before that. I shake my head and Otis turns it over, flicking through the channels before he finds an old sitcom. I watch for a little while but my eyes are heavy and I’m struggling to keep them open. I must drift off because the next thing I know, Otis is gently shaking me awake. We go to bed – there’s a pair of clean pyjamas in the bottom drawer, along with a few other bits and pieces – and I fall back to sleep again pretty much straight away.
I dream about Ed, about Yvonne and Sacha and Tomasz, and I wake early, before Otis, before either of our alarms, with a tight knot in my stomach. I have to do something to stop the accident, but what? The accident involved Sacha but he wasn’t the catalyst. It was Ed and his grandfather, and I don’t know how to prevent the conflict between them. I feel helpless, but there must be a reason that I’m here, in the past. It should be impossible, but I’m jumping back in time and I’m able to change things. Prevent things.
The question, though, is how do I prevent the drama of that day – Ed and Reverend Carter, Yvonne and Sacha and Ronnie – and stop the tragedy. That day changed absolutely everything, changed everyone, and I must find a way to alter the events that led up to it.