Apparently he had ‘other plans’.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
CHARLIE
He hadn’t expected her to agree to come, but people keep surprising him. Okay, it wasn’t a huge surprise that his mum had agreed to have Bob – but he had been slightly shocked that she’d been okay about him deferring his university place to study astrophysics.
Why had that surprised him? He’d thought she might think it was weird, that he’d be ‘wasting’ a year, or was delaying things because he wasn’t ready to leave home.
It wasn’t that at all. It was just, he wanted to do something else first.
When Charlie had been offered the place on the archaeological dig, it turned out that they were still short of participants. Maybe being stuck on a Hebridean island for six months wasn’t many young people’s idea of fun. Were they mad? It was amazing.
Esther isn’t staying for the full six months as she has loads of other stuff going on. She and her new flatmates are planning an Interrail trip around Europe, and then she’ll be getting her head around applying to university to study history. Her A-level grades were actually goodenough. She’d just been swept along by the whirl of excitement after the reality show, and almost forgotten that other things were possible too.
Betterthings, actually. Charlie knew she could do it, and that getting involved in the dig would look great on her applications for courses.
Not that that’s why she’s come. She’s come because they’re friends. Best friends, really.
Their accommodation is in basic prefab huts, and there’s a big communal kitchen and lounge where everyone hangs out. As well as working on the site – a swathe of hillside close to the shore – there’s also lots of cataloguing and research to be done. But most of the work is dirty, and Charlie was amazed at first how Esther just got stuck in, working as hard as anyone.
She seemed different, he thought when she arrived on the ferry. She looked different too. For one thing, her hair didn’t look quite as thick as it used to be. He decided not to mention it, but one evening, as they all sat around the open fire with a few beers, she caught him looking at her and said, ‘Yes, Charlie. I had hair extensions and they’re gone now. Far too high-maintenance.’
Day after day they work on the site, with shovels and trowels and, for the finer work, small brushes to sweep the earth away from their finds. Another thing that amazed Charlie about Esther is that she arrivednotwith a collection of suitcases but just one small rucksack, neatly packed, with proper walking shoes. His mum was amazed when he told her. Actually, she was amazed that Esther had gone there at all. ‘Charlie,’ she ventured last time they spoke, ‘are you and Esther, um …’
‘Together? No, Mum,’ he retorted. ‘She’s three years older than me.’
He knew she was thinking about the Esther–Miles agegap, and they laughed. ‘We’re just friends,’ he said simply, although there’s no ‘just’ about it.
It really is as simple as that, Charlie thinks now. He liked it when she said, ‘I’m just Esther to you, aren’t I? I’m not “Esther Burton”.’
He’s thinking about that as she knocks on the door of his room, scrub-faced, shiny-cheeked and ready to start the day. It’s Sunday; a day off from the dig. ‘Ready?’ she says.
‘I’m ready,’ Charlie says and smiles, smiles, smiles at the thought of the day ahead.
*
But actually it turns out completely different to how he’d expected. When Charlie arrived here he’d been told that the weather can change in a blink, and you can be sunbathing one minute and hammered by hailstones the next. Which is why he’d told Esther to bring waterproof gear and warm woollies even though it’s the height of summer.
On the beach now, they’ve been huddled in thick sweaters, but gradually the clouds part and the day starts to brighten. Esther pulls her phone from her pocket. ‘Checking the weather?’ Charlie teases her. ‘You can just look at the sky, y’know …’
‘No,’ she retorts. ‘It’s just, I can actually get a signal here.’
‘Can you?’ he asks in surprise. Normally he doesn’t bother bringing his phone out here on the island because it’s pretty much off-grid. For some reason his granddad pops into his mind. He says he ‘doesn’t believe’ in mobile phones.
‘They’re not a religion,’ Charlie teased him last time he was in Corsica. That was the time he’d hid under atowel on the beach like a stupid twelve-year-old and yelled at his mum. Okay, shewasbeing annoying – but she was only trying to stop him getting burned. But he’d been all out of sorts that whole summer.
It wasn’t that he’d been jealous of Remy being in Paris. It was that he’d known their friendship had changed forever. Remy had Freya now, and it was as if that thing between him and Charlie had never happened.
Just one kiss, it had been, well over a year ago now. They’d sat up late watching a movie at Charlie’s and both been a bit drunk. They’d laughed and been a bit embarrassed afterwards, and it had never been mentioned again.
Charlie wasn’t sure about what was going on in his head. However, hehadknown that he needed to push his mum away during that time, just to get some space to think. It made him feel terrible, this cycle of being horrible to her, then feeling guilty, then feeling mad at her for ‘making’ him feel guilty … God! Wasn’t it exhausting sometimes, being alive? It was easier to just keep out of her way. But what a jerk he was last summer. Not now, he hopes. He’s grown up a lot since then.
Charlie does have his phone today because he thought he’d take some pictures on their day off, to send to his mum in Corsica. To show he’s surviving, and isn’t sunburned. He smiles at the idea. He’s doing more than surviving. Here on this island, with a billion stars above his head, he’s really living.
He looks down at his phone now. There’s a message from Remy, out of the blue.I miss you mate, is all it says.
Charlie tries not to react but he knows Esther can see it in his face. She’s perceptive like that. And she knows not to say anything right away. They just sit there, the two of them with no one else around. It’s just them andthe steady whoosh of the waves until finally she says, ‘Was that Remy?’
