Summer Read online

  Then all his monks crowded round him too to ask him where he wanted them to go and do their God spiel in the world. He told them all to turn round and round and round on the spot and keep spinning till they fell over from dizziness. One by one they all fell over. Then he stood above them and said, okay, so whatever direction you ended up facing when you fell over, you go that way my brothers and spread the word.

  She passes Tesco. There’s a guy in the doorway but it isn’t Steve.

  She hopes he’s all right wherever he is. There are a lot of homeless people out today; it’s bright and dry. The last time she saw Steve he told her about the sixteen busloads brought down from Nottingham and the northeast.

  Free trip to the south coast, he said. One way trip. They dump them wherever the MP’s not a Tory. Town’s full of them. Sent them to the seaside. May as well all be on our holidays I tell you, cause nobody’s making any fucking money now they’re all here.

  She gave him what change she had in her pocket that day. Someone had stolen his boots.

  Thanks, love, he said.

  Keep warm, she said.

  Do my best, he said. You too.

  She imagines Steve on a screen and a clicker showing the donations behind him like the one behind Mercy Bucks, except Steve’s is going up really slowly in increments of 10p. She imagines Mercy Bucks spinning and spinning on the altar of the Mercy Bucks Church of the Spirit like a break dancer who can’t stop or a needle gone mad on a compass, Mercy demonstrating to her audience how to spin round and round till they all fall down. Then Mercy Bucks going round all the fallen-over dizzy people like on a battlefield, tending to them tenderly and pickpocketing them while she does.

  She imagines her mother now nipping out the front door in the winter sunny glare and through the gates and up the steps with all her invisible blades out – a bit like a Swiss army knife display unit in an army and navy stores, a giant red penknife that revolves on a stand with all its attachments splayed – and knocking at her father and Ashley’s front door to see if the remote’s in there.

  Her mother never uses the key her father gave her. She always knocks.

  She imagines Ashley opening the door to her many-bladed mother and standing there blank. Can’t hear. Doesn’t understand. Saying the nothing and shaking her head and closing the door again.

  Her mother won’t get any work done with the TV left on so loud.

  Not that there’s much administrating to do any more, for a business that’s been brex-fucked.

  She thinks of her mother this morning wandering round the front room shouting the words whether and heroine over the TV noise.

  Oh yeah. Station thing.

  Find the source, send it in unspoken obeisance to the Source Queen.

  She types the words whether and heroine into the search bar on the phone.

  Up comes drugs. Drugs, drugs, drugs, then quite far down, something about Jane Austen and Victorians.

  She clears the search bar.

  She types in the words station, held, and life.

  Stuff comes up about how long people can live in space stations.

  She adds the word heroine.

  Stuff comes up about drug addicts.

  She scrolls and scrolls – then there’s a single visual of Greta Thunberg, the photo with her hood up in the yellow coat that looks like a fisherman’s coat, the one where she looks like she won’t be fobbed off by anybody or anything.

  Heroine of my own life!

  Only the mighty Greta can upend the internet’s determination to make the word heroine refer not to a female hero but to a misspelling of a Class A drug.

  As if whoever was typing it in was bound to have meant heroin not heroine, heroine being such a little-used notion.

  Sacha thinks of Brighton station with the little slip-through entrance, the taxi rank and the place for bikes, the people in Pret and M&S. She imagines it all, all of the above, held in the palm of a giant hand. But whose hand?

  No one’s hand.

  Sacha’s own hand, now that she’s imagined it.

  No point in asking anyone else to hold your world.

  She stands at the school gate, wipes her phonescreen clean of prints on the underarm of her coat. As she does, the phone flashes up a text.

  It’s from Robert.

  think am about to do somer thing stupid;- down on beach opp shit st pls come rght now if you can i need a hand for 3 mins

  —

  It’s the pls rather than the rght now that does it. It signals real urgency, given that any politeness her brother used to have is well gone.

  It might be a trick.

  It might be real.

  By shit st he means Ship Street.

  Sacha steps back from the gate before anyone sees her who might ask her why she’s loitering and not coming into school like she should be.

  She texts Mel who will be in registration already.

  Melaneeee can u pass on apology & message ive a home emergency & will be in in 1 hrs time thanx mel (heart emoji heart emoji) sachxxx

  If it’s a trick? She’ll kill him.

  She loves him, but. He’s her little brother. But. He is clever, like really clever. But. It is as if since he turned thirteen a dark visor has come down over his eyes and he is looking out at everyone and everything through a metalled slit. From being the kind of boy who used to say brainy but random things like watermelons are 92% water and 8 per cent everything else, which means the water quantity = 92% and the rest is melon, so melon actually only = 8%, and the really exciting thing is that you can make a maths equation out of anything, even a fruit or a vegetable, he has become the kind of boy who gets sent home for saying things in class like why is there anything wrong anyway with saying a black person has a watermelon smile?

  Did you really say the things they’re saying you did? Out loud? To a whole class? And a teacher? his mother said looking up from the email that came from the school asking her and their father to attend a meeting about their son.

  Robert, you can’t say things like that, Ashley said.

  This was back when Ashley was still speaking.

  Yes I can, he said. Anyone can say anything. It’s called freedom of speech. It’s a human right. It’s my human right.

  It’s not a joke, Robert. It’s depraved, Ashley said. These are depraved things to say, and not in any way funny. How can you say such things?

  Easy, he said. I also explained to them why people hate women for being girly swots and only useful for sex and having children, especially children that you don’t admit to having, because being a man is all about spreading our seed.

  Robert! (chorus of voices.)

  And basically everybody, including quite a lot of women, think that women should shut up, he said. You’re always saying we should listen more to history and what it tells us about ourselves. I say history gave us the scold’s bridle for a reason.

  In the email the school had told them that Robert had reduced a class to laughing anarchy by standing up and saying these things.

  You’re quite the satirist, Robert, their father said.

  No, I’m quite the pragmatist, Robert said.

  I won’t have him in the house if he continues to say things like this, Ashley said.

  It’s one of the last things Sacha remembers her saying before she stopped speaking altogether.

  You don’t have to resort to bigotry to fit in, his father said.

  Are you calling our prime minister and other political leaders bigots? Robert said. Stop talking down our great country. We should be standing up for Britain. Anything less is treason and reveals you to be a doomster and a gloomster.

  Just tell your father, Robert, the thing you said about education, the one that particularly angered your teachers, his mother said.

  I simply noted, like our prime mi
nister’s chief adviser wrote in his blog, that children who come from poverty or grow up in it aren’t worth educating because they’re just not up to it, Robert said, they’re never going to be able to learn anything so there’s no point in the state paying for them to have an education they’re always going to be congenitally unable to use. And in this I’m only repeating what our own prime minister’s chief adviser thinks. And our prime minister, because his chief adviser’s so good at what he does, was recently elected with a huge majority. So what does that teach you?

  It made Sacha laugh.

  Till Robert began to be foul about her, like when Jamie and Jane, who her father had had to lay off, came round for (apologetic no hard feelings) drinks at Christmas and Robert stood at the door and announced to the whole room,

  my sister is an idiot. She actually thinks she can change the world, that with a bit of a nudge from her and her woke friends anything will change. It’s St Sacha’s most recent way of getting attention, and Jane, who’s from New Zealand, said to him, so you’re a bit of a sceptic then, Robert, is that your way of getting attention?

  and he told her she was foreign and made fun of the way she spoke.

  Sciptic.

  Then the police came to the door when they caught him cutting nicks into the seats of a bike-stand of parked bikes. They said he’ll be liable for a youth caution and he’s not too old to be arrested and charged with criminal damage or to find himself at a Secure Training Centre for a six-year-stretch. The police who brought him home were kindly even as they said the stern stuff. Their kindliness clearly annoyed Robert, who announced to the police that it would be worth being charged or whatever just to think of all those cyclists getting home with wet patches up their anuses.

  He is what her mother calls intransigent, what her father calls acting like a bloody moron and what Ashley, if Ashley were to speak out loud, would call something so expletive that their father would literally have to leave her and move back home again.

  It’s because he’s been so bullied, Sacha said when Robert wasn’t in the room. It’s because you moved him to a new school. He has to alter who he is to survive.

  They don’t know what to do about the stuff on social media, the stuff that followed him, like social media didn’t even have to draw breath, from the old school into all the phones of all the kids at the new school.

  Her mother is worried about him.

  Her father is angry about him.

  Sacha knows he is brilliant.

  She remembers the day he took the Alexa out and down to the beach hidden in his jacket then dropped it casually over the side of the pier into the sea shouting down after it, Alexa, tell us how to do the breast stroke. She remembers the day he actually started wearing the trainers that had been, until then, exhibits in the Robert Greenlaw Gallery Trainer Exhibition on the shelves in his room. She remembers the film he made on his phone, and this was in the old days before it was so easy to make films on your phone, of the disconnected way that people look when they’re listening to music on their headphones on the train or on a bike or walking along a street; the film he made showed their eyes, and the way they sat moving without even knowing they were to a beat that was nothing to do with what was happening round them in outer reality, and as the soundtrack to the film Robert, who was only nine when he made it, recorded himself following headphoned people around the town asking them questions about themselves which of course they couldn’t hear.

  That film he made had so shaken Sacha when she saw it that she’d stopped wearing her own phones, except in private, for quite a long time.

  But this last while it is as if Robert has attached a dimmer switch to his own brilliance and like he is randomly turning it down as low and dark as it can go then thunking it up to dazzling, and vice versa, meanwhile the person she knows has become trapped in there. He flickers and flashes like one of the arcade machines on the pier.

  He’s her brilliant brother.

  She also resents that she has to be the sister always aware of her brilliant brother. Like it’s her lot. For life.

  He’s the kid who – when he’d taken to doing all those personality quizzes online one afternoon, and Sacha’d sat and watched him for a while before saying, you know they use those quizzes for data collection and sampling? and he replied, but I am a data-anarchist and am consciously lying in my answers, I always make up a person who’s answering them so as to ruin all their culled data, and Sacha said, yeah but you know, Rob, even those made-up people, because it’s you who’s making them up, are all still you – looked up at her with such dismay in his face that it nearly made her cry to see him so defeated and she had to leave the room to stop herself feeling it.

  Now.

  Where is he?

  She scans the beach.

  Just nine in the morning but there’s always someone on it; she can see a few people, a young couple down by the water’s edge, some old people pointing out to sea, someone with a kid and a dog.

  She can’t see Robert yet.

  But her phone goes.

  It’s not from Robert. It’s a text from Mel.

  Hey not in tday sach (frowny face emoji) woman in Waitros told my mum ‘not to breathe near her children’ then a guy said she should be wearing facemask my dad went apeshit punched him (frowny face frowny face) meltdown big time (frowny face emoji with x x eyes) curtains closed on our windows blinds down today don know what else to do. Doc who was whistlblower Dr Li just died think am losing my mind sach ‘healthy society cannot have just one voice’ he is my hero told them in dec it was bad but they dint listn thority made hm shut it & now he is gon RIP i keep cryin i cant stop xxx

  Melanie’s grandmother is Chinese.

  Sacha thinks of the pictures of the virus online, the drawings people have created to approximate the virus. They all look a bit like little planets with trumpets coming out of their surface, or little worlds covered in spikes of growth, a little world that’s been shot all over its surface by those fairground darts with tuft tails from the old-fashioned rifle ranges, or like mines in the sea in films about WW2.

  The net is all photos of people in other countries with masks over their mouths and noses.

  According to the net people got it from eating snakes. Other places say bats and pangolins. Stuff has gone viral online about Chinese people eating little yellow snakes on skewers.

  Why would anyone want to eat a snake? Or a bat? Or a pangolin?

  Unless the eating snakes thing is a racist way to link the virus to racism and being used as a slur against Chinese people.

  Anyway it came from eating wild animals.

  But why would anyone anyway ever eat any creature that has to be killed just so that someone can eat it, when there’s so much you can eat in the world without killing anything?

  The longer Sacha lives the more insane she realizes the species she belongs to is.

  She texts Mel back.

  Heart emoji. Kiss emoji. Kiss emoji. Boxing glove emoji. POW emoji. Knight in shining armour emoji. Muscly arm emoji. Heart emoji. Heart emoji.

  There is no emoji she can think of that’s an anti-racist emoji.

  There are probably loads of racist emojis, and nothing obvious to send someone who’s been racistly done over.

  Why is that?

  She leans on the rail and looks out over the beach.

  The sea is grey even in the sun.

  She exchanges a look with a seagull.

  Winter for a while yet, then?

  Afraid so.

  Oh well.

  The seagull, bright yellow at the beak and feet, settles its wing feathers and looks away.

  Its beak sticks out like the masks people wore centuries ago in Venice in the plague.

  She thinks of those little cotton facemasks of now. They’re like nothing at all, dead leaves, blowaway litter, compared to the
real masks, the ones on the faces of the planet’s liars.

  All manner of virulent things are happening.

  She turns and looks at the facades of the buildings behind her.

  One Thursday when she was down here quite late she looked up at that building and saw cleaners cleaning it at eleven at night.

  It felt like she was meant to see it.

  But it also didn’t mean anything. It was just coincidence.

  Maybe coincidence never means the way you want it to. Because if it did it wouldn’t be coincidence, would it?

  She turns back, looks out to sea again.

  Some people say you can see France on a clear day with the naked eye, if you’re at the top of the i360.

  It’s not true, apparently. France is just too far for the naked eye.

  (The sigh360. The why360.)

  The naked eye! Can an eye ever have clothes on?

  She is a person on a pavement in a city in a country on a planet, seen from above by so many satellites that aren’t there so we can see how fine and beautiful our planet is from space but so the people who control the satellites can zoom in on people for all sorts of reasons that are nothing to do with what almost everybody and everything on the planet actually needs.

  What are they for, then?

  If seeing isn’t really about seeing?

  Everything is mask.

  She thinks about the girl she saw on TV shouting at the prime minister in Australia. You’re an idiot. You’re an idiot. You’re an idiot.

  Everything needs to be unmasked, right now, like that girl unmasked that man.

  No sign of Robert.

  She checks the time again.

  She makes sure she’s got Ship Street pretty much directly behind her.

  There. There’s a shape slightly further along. She immediately knows it’s him – even with his hood up she knows him. Those are his shoulders.