The Coldest Blood

They called him Dex but it didn’t suit him. He was shy, frail, with a lopsided poor-boy’s haircut. Timid too, frightened even, but he punctuated his fear with eruptions of random violence. Philip pitied him, but never turned his back on him. He ran to him now across the grass that separated the rows of chalets and they stood for a second, listening to the sounds of the distant jukebox, the metallic jangle of the camp’s fairground, their eyes piecing together the night in shades of black and white. A seagull, almost luminously pale, balanced on one of the lampposts which lit the path to the sea, its body turned into the breeze like the prow of a ship.

Smith appeared in the still-open doorway. Smith was bigger, a full year older, long limbs disjointed by a child’s rush to grow. He held the torch lightly, juggling it, smiling at the prospect of the game and scratching at his white, crewcut hair.

They stood together, saying nothing, and Philip was thrilled again by the intimacy this implied. Were they brothers? Philip could think of no way to ask. Why did they share the chalet – while Dex’s sister slept alone in a chalet by the pool? It worried him, this inconsistency in a world he thought he understood.

They ran down towards the saltmarsh. The tides had been high all week, the second of the game. Seawater, flowing up the river estuary, backed up through the network of channels to create a liquid maze. Here they had mapped out the rules – between the pumping station and the sluice, the old boathouse and the bird hide. Ahead they saw the iron sluice gate where they always met, and Dex’s sister there, waiting to begin, standing in a pool of light from her downturned torch.

Philip got there first and jumped up to sit beside her on the cool iron safety rail. He brushed her thigh with his leg, the guilt at this sudden intimacy almost buried beneath another emotion: a confused but intense attraction to the cool skin and the stretched mahogany tan.

The sister. Dex called her ‘Sis’ when he spoke, which was rare, but he stuck with her; a satellite, always connected by invisible bonds of gravity. Philip envied him that, and the soft brush of the skin.

So jealousy too: which only made him want to touch her again.

Smith, suddenly unsure, turned his square head towards the marsh. He took the torch from his pocket and shone it briefly into his own face.

‘Philip. It’s Philip’s turn.’