Stonemouth

Later, when we were mostly all pretty much blissed out and the fire was smaller, quieter, more orange and red rather than yellow, and the music had gone all old-school trancey and a few couples had drifted off to the nearest dunes holding hands and blankets, Ferg was talking to Ellie and Josh.

I talked to various people — only about half were left, and half of them looked fast asleep — then sort of drifted off to sleep myself for a short while, then woke up and saw that Ferg was still talking to Josh and Ellie.

I wandered off to the rough area of long dune grass where we’d all agreed to pee, came back, washed my hands in the diminishing, retreating surf and found the three of them laughing.

‘Come on,’ Ferg said to Josh, and they both rose. ‘It’s a challenge.’

‘Where to?’ Josh asked, holding one hand over his eyes as he looked down the beach in the darkness.

‘To wherever one of us can’t run any more and has to stop for breath, or gets a stitch or something.’

‘We could end up back in town!’ Josh laughed.

‘Yeah, right,’ Ferg said. He took the packet of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, threw them and his phone to me as I approached.

‘Look after these. No peeking at my contacts.’ He looked like he was about to take something out of his back pocket too, but changed his mind.

‘Okay,’ I said, stopping and looking down at Ellie. She glanced up at me from her blanket with a sort of wary smile.

She was holding a white handkerchief. She let it go.

‘Go!’ she said, and the guys raced off. They disappeared beyond the fire’s dimmed glow in seconds. The first thin sliver of a new moon let you see where they were for about half a minute, but then they were gone, lost to the darkness somewhere between the ghostly creasings of the breaking waves and the sensed round bulk of the line of dunes.

It seemed like the obvious thing to do, so I sat down beside Ellie.

‘Okay?’ I asked, leaving it open whether this meant, Okay to sit down? or How are you?

‘Hey, Stewart,’ she said, making more room for me.

I put my hand over my eyes, the way Josh had, looked into the darkness. ‘Nope, disa—’ I started to say, as she said,

‘What are you shield—?’

We both stopped. ‘I was saying—’

‘Oh, I was just—’

I sighed. ‘Sorry. What … what were you saying?’

She looked amused. ‘I wondered what you were shielding your eyes from.’

‘Ah, yeah.’ I squinted up to the near-nothing moon. ‘Hardly moonlight. The fire. Your radiance?’

She looked at me. I shrugged. ‘You’re facing the fire.’ I told her. ‘I guess you must just have a high albedo.’

She looked startled, though there was just enough of a delay for me to think she was loved up, or on something. I was kind of coming down by this point.

‘I must have a high what?’ she said. ‘How would—?’

Shit. First we talk across each other, clumsy as children at their first dance, then I produce the most stilted, pathetic, over-the-top compliment known to teen-kind and then I come out with a technical term — a fucking technical term from astronomy, for the love of God. How to chat up a girl, Stewart. Oh — dear holy fuck — and now I’ve just realised she thought I said she must have a high libido. Oh for fucking fuck’s sake. Why wait for a girl to shoot you down in flames when you can do it so easily yourself? Don’t just shoot yourself in the foot, Stewart, wait until it’s lodged firmly in your mouth first.

‘Albedo,’ I told her. I had my eyes closed by now. I couldn’t bear to watch this. ‘It means—’ I paused for a moment. What did it mean again exactly? It referred to how much light an object reflects, I was fairly sure. The moon: it has quite a high albedo, so it looks white. The romantic moon. Oh, give up. What was the point?

‘Shininess, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Something like that?’ My eyes flicked open. She was gazing up, towards the moon. ‘Like … hmm.’ There was so little moon to see, you almost had to know where to look.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

I was as impressed with girls who knew this sort of shit as your average girl was unimpressed with guys who did. Brains as well as beauty. Oh, fuck; I’d already fallen in love with her peerless good looks, her flawless skin, her stunning figure and the bit between her legs and now I was falling for the bit between her ears as well. I was fucking doomed.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I was just wondering when we’ll see them again.’ I nodded. ‘Josh and Ferg.’

She looked to where the guys had disappeared.

‘Could be a while,’ she said, smiling.

It was an odd smile; maybe a little sad, wistful, something like that. She glanced back down the beach again. She made a single, gentle gesture; just that thing that’s not quite a laugh, when your diaphragm contracts. It raised her head and shoulders briefly, then let them fall again. There might have been a soft noise like a ‘huh’, but it was so faint that — even though the only other noise was that of the distant waves breaking — I suspect I imagined rather than heard it. I hadn’t even noticed the music had stopped.