Intermission: Summer Boy

When you were growing up, there was a small group of you that played together when young, then hung out together when older, then stayed in touch when you all went your separate ways. You built dens in the woods and you told each other ghost stories, and you got sick on the drink that you stole from bottles you refilled with water, and you coughed over first cigarettes and commiserated over first loves.

There were others who would come and go, some of whom you liked, some of whom you didn’t, but all of them on the edges of the group, never on the inside. Davey was just there for one summer, staying with an aunt while parents were off abroad, though he never said where. Sometimes you wondered whether abroad meant prison. You were too young to get served in pubs, but too old just to hang out in the forest and the fields, so you all spent a lot of time in Maria’s, the Italian cafe, taking ages over a drink, dropping a little money in the fruit machine if you felt flush and lucky, watching the world go by the windows.

Davey used to sit on his own in there, sitting at a nearby formica table with a can of coke, and although he never appeared to be looking, you could feel the loneliness and the wanting. One day you asked if he had change for a fifty pence so you could go on the fruit machine and he didn’t but you got talking, and the next time you were all in you all said, “All right?” and the time after that you asked him something about music and he came and sat at the table.

He stayed on the fringes, sometimes there, sometimes not. You thought he was shy, a little weird and awkward, but not in a bad way and of course at that age you all felt a little weird and awkward yourselves. You remember a photo that you got Maria to take of the group of you with the little plastic camera you’d got for your birthday, everyone pulling faces or trying to look cool, Davey a little to one side, a shy smile. You loved that photo, because it captured the time so well, but in the end it got stuck in a box with all the others, and the summer ended and one day Davey wasn’t there and the next and then you never saw him again.

Years passed and you all went off to university in different places and the bonds of friendship weakened, great intensity slowly replaced by fond memories slipping away behind you like the countryside on a train journey. One Christmas, all back in town, someone suggested on Facebook that you all met up again, so you turned up in Maria’s rather than the pub and talked and reminisced in that way which was full of laughter underpinned by profound melancholy that those times were gone, and there was space between you all that would never be bridged, and nothing else would shine as brightly. You talked of fights and drunken running over car, and who had stayed behind in town and who they were married to now, and at one point you said, “I wonder what happened to Davey,” and everyone looked blank.

You remind them of the summer, the cafe, the fruit machine, the dark coat he always wore, and your friends just frown and shake their heads, to the point where you almost get annoyed as if they have deliberately agreed to wind you up. The more you go on, the more they laugh, and in the end it spoils the time for you.

When you get back to your parents, you go into your wardrobe and pull out the box stuffed with photos, its sides sagging. You sift through family holidays and seasides and safari parks and photo booth gurning and drunken arms around each other and blurry gigs and the one you thought you loved that you had got over a month later, and then you find the photo Maria took, all the gang, at the best of times, pulling faces or trying to look cool. Off to the side, where Davey had stood, there was nothing.

You stare at the photo for a while, wondering if you had gone mad. Then you count the drinks on the table, and there is one more drink than there are people, and one of the drinks is a can of coke.

What you don’t know, unless you happen on him by chance, is that in another cafe in another town, Davey’s sitting on his own with a can of coke, waiting, the boy he always was and always will be, every summer, year after year after year after year.