It came to me gradually—without surprise, really, as if it were something I had known for a long time—that, if I managed to remember anything useful, I was going to take it to O’Kelly. Not right away, maybe not for a few weeks, I would need a little time to tie up loose ends and set my affairs in order, so to speak; because when I did it, it would be the end of my career.
Only that afternoon the thought would have been like a baseball bat to the stomach. But somehow that night it seemed almost seductive, it shimmered tantalizingly in the air before me, and I turned it over with a luxurious giddiness. Being a Murder detective, the only thing on which I had ever set my heart, the thing around which I had built my wardrobe, my walk, my vocabulary, my life waking and sleeping: the thought of tossing it all away with one flick of the wrist and watching it soar into space like a bright balloon was intoxicating. I could set up as a private investigator, I thought, have a battered little office in some dingy Georgian building, my name in gold on a frosted-glass door, come to work when I chose and skate expertly around the edges of the law and harass an apoplectic O’Kelly for inside information. I wondered, dreamily, if Cassie might come with me. I could get a fedora and a trench coat and a wisecracking sense of humor; she could sit poised at hotel bars with a slinky red dress and a camera in her lipstick, to snare cheating businessmen…. I almost laughed out loud.
I realized that I was falling asleep. This had not been part of my plan, such as it was, and I struggled to stay awake, but all those sleepless nights were hitting me at once, hard as a shot in the arm. I thought of the thermos of coffee, but it seemed like way too much work to reach out for it. The sleeping bag had warmed against my body and I had adjusted myself around all the little lumps and crevices in the ground and the tree; I was deliciously, narcotically comfortable. I felt the thermos cup fall from my fingers, but I couldn’t open my eyes.
I don’t know how long I slept. I was sitting up and biting back a shout before I was even fully awake. Someone had said, clear and sharp and right next to my ear, “What’s that?”
I sat there for a long time, feeling slow waves of blood surging in my neck. The lights in the estate had gone out. The wood was silent, barely a whisper of wind through the branches overhead; somewhere a twig cracked.
Peter, whirling around on the castle wall and shooting out a hand to freeze me and Jamie on either side: “What’s that?”
We had been outside all day, since the dew was still drying off the grass. It was boiling; every breath was warm as bathwater and the sky was the color of the inside of a candle flame. We had bottles of red lemonade in the grass under a tree, for when we got thirsty, but they had gone warm and flat and the ants had found them. Someone was mowing a lawn, down the street; someone else had a kitchen window open and the radio turned up loud and was singing along to “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” Two little girls were taking turns on a pink tricycle on the sidewalk, and Peter’s prissy sister Tara was playing teachers in her friend Audrey’s garden, the two of them yakking at a bunch of dolls lined up in rows. The Carmichaels had bought a sprinkler; we’d never seen one before and we eyed it every time they put it out, but Mrs. Carmichael was a bitch, Peter said if you went in her garden she would smash your head in with a poker.
We had mostly been riding our bikes. Peter had got an Evil Knievel for his birthday—if you wound it up, you could make it jump piles of old Warlord annuals—and he was going to be a daredevil when he grew up, so we were practicing. We built a ramp in the road, out of bricks and a piece of plywood that Peter’s dad had in the garden shed—“We’ll keep making it higher,” Peter said, “one brick more every day”—but it wobbled like crazy, and I could never keep myself from slamming on the brakes in the second before I took off.
Jamie tried the ramp a few times and then hung around at the edge of the street, scraping a sticker off her handlebar and kicking her pedal to make it spin. She had been late coming out that morning, and she’d been quiet all day. She always was, but this was different: her silence was like a thick private cloud all round her, and it was making me and Peter fidgety.
Peter flew off the ramp yelling and zigzagged wildly, just missing the two little girls on the tricycle. “You big ding-dongs, you’ll have us all killed,” Tara snapped over her dollies. She was wearing a long flowery skirt that puddled on the grass, and a weird big hat with a ribbon around it.
“You’re not my boss,” Peter shouted back. He swerved onto Audrey’s lawn and swooped past Tara, grabbing the hat off her head as he went. Tara and Audrey shrieked in practiced unison.
“Adam! Catch!” I followed him into the garden—we would be in trouble if Audrey’s mam came out—and managed to catch the hat without falling off my bike; I stuck it on my head and cycled no-hands around the dolly classroom. Audrey tried to knock me over, but I dodged. She was sort of pretty and she didn’t look really mad, so I tried not to run over her dolls. Tara stuck her hands on her hips and started yelling at Peter. “Jamie!” I shouted. “Come on!”
Jamie had stayed in the road, bumping her front tire rhythmically off the edge of the ramp. She dropped her bike, took a running jump at the estate wall and swung herself over.
Peter and I forgot about Tara (“You haven’t a titter of sense, so you haven’t, Peter Savage, just you wait till Mammy hears about your carry-on…”), braked and looked at each other. Audrey grabbed the hat off my head and ran, checking to see if I was chasing her. We left our bikes in the road and climbed the wall after Jamie.
She was in the tire swing, kicking herself off the wall every few swings. Her head was down and all I could see was the sheet of straight pale hair and the end of her nose. We sat on the wall and waited.
“My mam measured me this morning,” Jamie said in the end. She was picking at a scab on her knuckle.
I thought, puzzled, of the door-frame in our kitchen: glossy white wood, with pencil-marks and dates to show me growing. “So?” Peter said. “Big swinging mickeys.”
“For uniforms!” Jamie yelled at him. “Duh!” She slid out of the tire, landed hard and ran, into the wood.
“Sheesh,” Peter said. “What’s her problem?”
“Boarding school,” I said. The words made my legs feel watery.
Peter gave me a disgusted, incredulous grimace. “She’s not going. Her mam said.”
“No she didn’t. She said, ‘We’ll see.’”
“Yeah, and then she didn’t say anything else about it ever since.”
“Yeah, well, now she has, hasn’t she?”
Peter squinted into the sun. “Come on,” he said, and jumped back down off the wall.
“Where are we going?”
He didn’t answer. He picked up his bike and Jamie’s and managed to wobble them both into his garden. I got mine and went after him.
Peter’s mam was hanging out the washing, with a line of clothes-pegs clipped to the side of her apron. “Don’t be annoying Tara,” she said.
“We won’t,” Peter said, dumping the bikes on the grass. “Mam, we’re going in the wood, OK?” The baby, Sean Paul, was lying on a blanket, wearing nothing but a nappy and trying to crawl. I poked him tentatively in the side with my toe; he rolled over, grabbed my runner and grinned up at me. “Good baby,” I told him. I didn’t want to go find Jamie. I wondered if maybe I could stay there, mind Sean Paul for Mrs. Savage and wait until Peter came back to tell me Jamie was going away.
“Tea at half past six,” Mrs. Savage said, reaching out absently to smooth down Peter’s hair as he passed. “Have you your watch?”
“Yeah.” Peter waved his wrist at her. “Come on, Adam, let’s go.”
When something was wrong we mostly went to the same place: the top room of the castle. The staircase leading up to it had long since crumbled away, and from the ground you couldn’t even really tell it was there; you had to climb the outer wall, all the way over the top, and then jump down onto the stone floor. Ivy trailing down the walls, branches tumbling overhead: it was like a bird’s nest, swinging high up in the air.
Jamie was there, huddled up in a corner with one elbow crooked across her mouth. She was crying, hard and clumsily. Once, ages before, she had caught her foot in a rabbit hole when she was running, and broken her ankle; we had given her a fireman’s lift all the way back home and she had never cried, not even when I tripped and jolted her leg, just yelled, “Ow, Adam, you thick!” and pinched my arm.
I climbed down into the room. “Go away!” Jamie shouted at me, muffled by her arm and tears. Her face was red and her hair was tangled, clips hanging off sideways. “Leave me alone.”
Peter was still on top of the wall. “Are you going to boarding school?” he demanded.
Jamie squeezed her eyes and mouth tight, but choked-up sobs broke through all the same. I could barely hear what she was saying. “She never said, she acted like it was all OK, and all the time…she was just lying!”
It was the unfairness of it that knocked the breath out of me. We’ll see, Jamie’s mother had said, don’t worry about it; and we had believed her and stopped worrying. No grown-up had ever betrayed us before, not about something that mattered like this, and I couldn’t take it in. We had lived that whole summer trusting that we had forever.
Peter balanced anxiously along the wall and back again, stood on one foot. “So we’ll do the same thing again. We’ll have a mutiny. We’ll—”
“No!” Jamie cried. “She’s paid the fees and everything, it’s too late—I’m going in two weeks! Two weeks…” Her hands balled into fists and she slammed them against the wall.
I couldn’t stand it. I knelt down beside Jamie and put my arm around her shoulders; she shook it off, but when I put it back she left it there. “Don’t, Jamie,” I begged. “Please don’t cry.” The green and gold whirl of branches all around, Peter baffled and Jamie crying, the silky skin of her arm making my hand tingle; the whole world seemed to be rocking, the stone of the castle rolling beneath me like the decks of ships in films—“You’ll be back every weekend….”
“It won’t be the same!” Jamie cried. Her head went back and she sobbed without even trying to hide it, frail brown throat turned up to the fragments of sky. The utter wretchedness in her voice cut straight through me and I knew she was right: it was never going to be the same, not ever again.
“No, Jamie, don’t—Stop…” I couldn’t stay still. I knew it was stupid but for a moment I wanted to tell her I would go instead; I would take her place, she could stay here forever…. Before I knew I was going to do it, I ducked my head and kissed her on the cheek. Her tears were wet on my mouth. She smelled like grass in the sun, hot and green, intoxicating.
She was so startled that she stopped crying. Her head whipped round and she stared at me, wide red-rimmed blue eyes, very close. I knew she was going to do something, punch me, kiss me back—
Peter leaped off the wall and dropped to his knees in front of us. He grabbed my wrist in one hand, hard, and Jamie’s in the other. “Listen,” he said. “We’ll run away.”
We stared at him.
“That’s stupid,” I said at last. “They’ll catch us.”
“No, no they won’t, not right away. We can hide here for a few weeks, no problem. It doesn’t have to be forever or anything—just till it’s safe. Once that school’s started, we can go home; it’ll be too late. And even if they send her anyway, so what? We’ll run away again. We’ll go up to Dublin and get Jamie out. Then they’ll expel her and she’ll have to come back home. See?”
His eyes were shining. The idea caught, flared, spun in the air between us.
“We could live here,” Jamie said. She caught her breath in a long, hiccuppy shudder. “In the castle, I mean.”
“We’ll move every day. Here, the clearing, that big tree where the branches do that nest thing. We won’t give them a chance to catch up with us. You really think anyone could find us in here? Come on!”
Nobody knew the wood like we did. Sliding through the undergrowth, light and silent as Indian braves; watching motionless from thickets and high branches as the searchers clumped past….
“We’ll take turns sleeping.” Jamie was sitting up straighter. “One of us can keep watch.”
“But our parents,” I said. I thought of my mother’s warm hands and imagined her crying, distraught. “They’re going to be really worried. They’ll think—”
Jamie’s mouth set. “Yeah, my mam won’t. She doesn’t want me around anyway.”
“My mam mostly only thinks about the little ones,” Peter said, “and my dad definitely won’t care.” Jamie and I glanced at each other. We never talked about it, but we both knew Peter’s dad sometimes hit them when he got drunk. “And anyway, who cares if your parents worry? They didn’t tell you Jamie was going to boarding school, did they? They just let you think everything was fine!”
He was right, I thought, light-headed. “I guess I could leave them a note,” I said. “Just so they know we’re OK.”
Jamie started to say something, but Peter cut her off. “Yeah, perfect! Leave them a note saying we’ve gone to Dublin, or Cork or somewhere. Then they’ll be looking for us there, and we’ll be right here all the time.”
He jumped up, pulling us with him. “Are you in?”
“I’m not going to boarding school,” Jamie said, wiping her face with the back of her arm. “I’m not, Adam. I’m not. I’ll do anything.”
“Adam?” Living wild, brown and barefoot among the trees. The castle wall felt cool and misty under my hand. “Adam, what else are we supposed to do? Do you want to just let them send Jamie away? Don’t you want to do something?”
He shook my wrist. His hand was hard, urgent; I could feel my pulse beating in its grasp. “I’m in,” I said.
“Yes!” Peter yelled, punching the air. The shout echoed up into the trees, high and wild and triumphant.
“When?” Jamie demanded. Her eyes were bright with relief and her mouth was open in a smile; she was poised on her toes, ready to take off as soon as Peter gave the word. “Now?”
“Relax,” Peter told her, grinning. “We have to get ready. We’ll go home and get all our money. We need supplies, but we have to buy them a little every day, so nobody gets suspicious.”
“Sausages and potatoes,” I said. “We can build a fire and get sticks—”
“No, no fire, they’d see it. Don’t get anything that needs cooking. Get stuff in tins, spaghetti hoops and baked beans and stuff. Say it’s for your mam.”
“Someone better bring a tin-opener—”
“Me; my mam has an extra one, she won’t know.”
“Sleeping bags, and our torches—”
“Duh, but that’s not till the last minute, we don’t want them noticing they’re gone—”
“We can wash our clothes in the river—”