The Last Party (DC Morgan #1)(70)

It’s the boy from number four. Clemmie’s son. He’s in baggy tracksuit bottoms, as he always is, in spite of the heat, and he’s more interested in his phone than in the twins showing off. They’re being massive try-hards and he’s totally ignoring them. Hilarious.

He stands, chucks his phone on the deck and stretches. His T-shirt rides up a bit, and his stomach’s all tanned. He’s skinny, rather than toned, and he doesn’t seem as if he’d be the twins’ type, but then it’s not like there’s much choice around here. Seren’s had a few snogs with boys in her year, but there’s no one she’d actually go out with. Shudder.

The boy jumps from his deck to the next, then saunters across number two, where the old lady with the stick lives. When he gets to the other side of the deck he swings himself down the ladder on to the jetty. For a second Seren can’t see him, but then she hears running feet and he leaps in the air and tucks himself into a bomb.

He lands smack bang between the twins, sending a massive wave over each flamingo. Seren ducks behind a tree to hide her laughter – not that anyone could hear her over the squawks the twins are making. She walks further down the shore, finding a spot to swim where she won’t be seen by the residents of The Shore.

Afterwards, Seren’s making her way back through the forest towards town, when she hears a crack behind her, like someone standing on a twig. She carries on walking, then stops short and spins around, and, sure enough, he’s there.

‘Why are you following me?’

The boy holds up his hands as if Seren’s got a gun. ‘Why were you watching us?’ His clothes are soaked through, dark grey where they had been light.

‘I was bored,’ Seren says, dismissively.

‘Same. I’m Caleb.’

‘Seren.’

‘Seren?’

‘It means star.’

‘Nice.’ He stares right at Seren, holding her gaze, as though he’s sizing her up. So she does the same. They stay like that for ages, and Seren doesn’t want to look away first because it feels like losing. Eventually, Caleb speaks. ‘You could have come over and said hi, instead of hiding in the trees.’

‘I wasn’t hiding.’

‘Whatever.’

‘I’m not—’ Seren stops. She can’t believe she almost said that: I’m not allowed, as though she’s still ten and needs Mam’s permission to play out. And anyway, Caleb would never understand why everyone in Cwm Coed hates The Shore so much.

‘I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could spit,’ Elen had said, when they’d seen the first signs of life across the lake. ‘Arrogant, land-grabbing bunch of . . . You’re not to go anywhere near that place, you hear, Seren?’

Caleb gets a baccy tin from his tracksuit bottoms and shakes it. ‘Do you wanna go somewhere for a smoke?’

Seren takes Caleb above the forest, and he complains about the hill, about his legs aching. Seren laughs, dizzy with the exhilaration of hanging out with someone new, with the steep climb, with the prospect of getting stoned. ‘Just wait!’ On and on they climb, until they get to where the forest meets the field, and the waterfall crashes into the stream that winds through the trees back down to the lake.

‘Here.’ Seren turns him around and they stand next to each other, looking back down the way they came.

‘Fucking hell.’

‘It’s alright, isn’t it?’

Cwm Coed isn’t the sort of place Seren’s ever been proud of living in – not like if you lived in New York, or one of those villages where people have thatched roofs and put their shopping in wicker baskets – but sometimes, like now, she sees it through someone else’s eyes, and it looks pretty fucking fantastic.

They collapse on the grass, and Caleb skins up. The first drag is like it always is, so hot and harsh Seren wants to cough, but she swallows it down and closes her eyes, and then it’s blissfully sweet, like when the lake is so cold it feels hot. They pass it back and forth, the cigarette paper sticking on Seren’s bottom lip and dragging it out as if it doesn’t want to leave her mouth.

‘Have you always lived around here?’

‘Yup.’

‘It’s amazing.’

Seren sits up. ‘Are you taking the piss? It’s a shit hole.’

Caleb laughs and sits up too. He has a gap between his front teeth, and when he smiles you can see the tip of his tongue through it. ‘All this.’ He waves an arm: the lake, the mountains, the forest. ‘You can go anywhere.’

‘Where? There’s nowhere to go. The cinema’s an hour on the bus.’

‘All this, though,’ he says again. He gets the tin out of his pocket. ‘Can you roll?’

Seren doesn’t dignify that with an answer, pulling out two Rizlas and sticking them together to make a joint twice the size of the one they just had. Caleb lies back down and closes his eyes, letting out a loud sigh. The shadows under his eyes look like bruises.

‘Stop looking at me.’

‘I’m not looking at you.’

Caleb grins, his eyes still shut. ‘Your loss, then.’

Seren lights the joint and takes a drag. She exhales slowly, watching the smoke plume in the still, hot air, then she touches the filter to Caleb’s lips and holds it there while he does the same, as intimate as a kiss. ‘What’s it like at The Shore?’