So much for shutting up shop. ‘Coming right up,’ I said.
‘That’s the problem with hippies,’ she said, as the teabag steeped. ‘Always the exact opposite of what they purport to be. Peace and love my arse. Ok, not all of them. I’m sure you’re a beacon of sincerity. But some of the most violent, lazy people I’ve ever met have had a CND sign hanging around their necks or that Hindu tattoo they all get.’ She could have been describing Mac. I experienced the lightbulb pop of a long-known truth finally expressed.
‘Have you done the whole circuit this year?’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen you before.’
‘The circuit?’
‘Working the festivals. That’s what I’m doing. Cash-in-hand work in the holidays. I’ve gone to so many over the last few summers that I’m starting to recognise people. That bloke on the burrito stall over there, I’m sure he was at Phoenix the other year.’
‘Possibly,’ I said, only then seeing that Burrito Jon had locked up for the night. ‘This is our first go at anything like this.’ It’s my brother’s idea really. We just wanted a way to see the eclipse that would pay for itself.’
‘And has it?’
‘We’ve lost money by coming.’
‘No wonder I can’t pick up any work. There’s a glut of labour. A skewed job market. I’m a hopeless victim of capitalism.’ She laughed again. ‘This is good chai.’
I smiled. ‘Is it strange, going to a festival on your own?’
‘I wouldn’t have chosen it that way. I can usually persuade a friend to come, but August is funny this year because most of my friends from home have gone to work in Ibiza for the summer. There’s a couple of people I know watching the eclipse in Devon, I probably should’ve gone with them.’ A breeze shook the trees, shivering the wind chimes. ‘It’s weird here, isn’t it? There’s something almost sinister about it. Not just the lack of people. The way it’s laid out. Usually it’s just one massive field, or fields with a bit of hedgerow in, but here it’s proper woodsy. There’s great clumps of trees. You wouldn’t be surprised to see an ogre or Little Red Riding Hood.’ She looked like something from a fable herself, her skin an unearthly white. ‘I’m Beth, by the way.’
‘Kit.’ The hand I shook was soft, like she’d been soaking it in honey, so different from Laura’s long, slim fingers I almost gasped; there was no ignoring the striplight flicker of desire and I pulled away, cutting the dangerous current.
‘Is it just you and your brother?’ She asked the question straight, but my hand still tingled where she’d touched me. I was suddenly, acutely aware of how isolated we were. I saw myself as though in an old-fashioned film, an angel at my right shoulder to represent my conscience and a devil at my left, a little red embodiment of my animal self. Tell her about Laura, whispered the angel. Tell her about Laura, now.
I swerved the question. ‘He’s tripping with his girlfriend. Better to be alone than stuck with someone who’s hallucinating.’
Beth grimaced. ‘Yeah, acid’s not my poison either. Not since Glastonbury ’94 and the burning crosses coming at me across the field.’ She shuddered. ‘Festivals aren’t the right places to lose your bearings.’ She drummed her fingers on her mug. ‘So what do you do when you’re not doing this?’
‘Just left Oxford. I’m about to start my doctorate in astrophysics.’
‘I read the other day that religion’s on the up in physicists,’ she said. ‘Apparently all the other scientists are atheists. But physicists, the ones who spend real time contemplating the hugeness of the universe, are more likely to say they believe in God than almost any other discipline. I thought that was really interesting.’ I don’t know what my face was doing but she smiled again. ‘I’m sorry, I’m talking too much. It’s just that this is the first intelligent conversation I’ve had in about two days.’
‘Me too,’ I said, and meant it. Talking to Beth was effortless. She got all my jokes, I got all hers. We swapped travel stories. I told her everything about myself except for the important thing. Tell her, urged the angel. Tell her about Laura. Let her know you’ve got a girlfriend. The devil simply leaned against his pitchfork and grinned. I looked up; still no stars.
‘It doesn’t look good for tomorrow, does it?’ Beth said.
‘Cloud cover right across the West Country,’ I said. ‘Still, we could get a break. Strong winds, you never know.’
‘Speaking of which, it’s really bloody cold now,’ she said. ‘Does this thing have an indoors? I want to keep talking but I’m turning blue.’
‘Sure.’ My voice, I noticed, had regressed by years; I was a squeaking adolescent trying to chat up girls on a beach. ‘I might shut the tent up now anyway.’ Beth watched me turn the sign to closed and zip the tent behind me.
That was when I learned my lesson about the relationship between contemplation and action. I was thinking about the logistics: the warm pocket of air in the tent; where the clean bedding was; her underwear, the buckle on my belt. The moment you think about an act in terms of how, you are already halfway to doing it.
The chill-out area, with its twinkling lights and Persian carpets, was a grubby harem. With Laura it had always been about love, but desire when laced with transgression has twice its usual pull. I thought to myself, with the unimpeachable logic of the insanely horny, that I would do this once, and then I would go back to Laura. I even reasoned – in as much as reason came into it – that I had simply deferred the women, the new bodies, the one-night stands, that were every young man’s due.
A red sleeping bag in one corner was held together by a belt.
‘This is clean,’ I said, and unclipped it. It rolled out like a red carpet. Beth sat at one end of it; I at the other.