Free Flick by Abigail Tarttelin Page B

here. Go to the cinema?”
    â€œIf you’d like to, Bow, that would be lovely. May I call you Bow?”
    She laughs. “You may. But I don’t want to go just because I’d like to! I want to do something you want to do too!”
    Oh, isn’t she so polite, I think happily as the voice pipes up sardonically, This could go on forever .
    â€œHa ha, well I don’t know what we do around here. There isn’t much to do. We sit in the center of Osford and drink alcoholic Panda Pops mainly. What d’you like doing though?”
    â€œBoys.” I feel her grinning provocatively down the phone. “But for today I’d like to do something that you usually do.”
    â€œErr, okay!” I stop to wonder what she looks like naked, then realize she’s expecting me to speak. “Er, sorry, like what?”
    â€œHow would I know!?” She squeals laughing. “What d’you do in your free time?”
    â€œIn my free time? Erm . . .” A pause ensues.
    â€œ. . . Flick?”
    â€œÂ . . . I mostly just look up ‘smallest’ on eBay.”
    â€œRight.”

    We go to the beach. I’ve lived here all my life and can see the sea from my bedroom window. In summer we have barbecues and jump off the pier at high tide. Our hair is stiff and brittle from years of fucking about in the water and most of us have an obscene amount of bright flowery Hawaiian shorts in our wardrobes, and a wetsuit in the garage that we never use. These are the symptoms of a seaside dweller. It’s normal for me but it fascinates Rainbow. We meet on the beachfront and I grin inanely as we walk towards the water on the wet sands, me holding her hot little hand. We roll up our trousers and paddle in the wash, shyly kicking the water up at each other. We count the boats.
    Rainbow tells me about Hull, where she’s from. It’s a city south of here by an hour and a half, and almost as grubby as Sandford, but she used to live in a really nice Victorian terrace in a posh, leafy suburb practically in the country, which doesn’t surprise me. Her mums moved out here because they wanted to live near the sea, so now they live in a sizeable sandstone house in what, I note to myself, is the nice part of Ness, right near the beach. That’s not to say she’s rich. Houses are cheap as chips round here and people from the south sometimes move here to get more land or extra bedrooms, but it’s true that some areas of Clyde County have less litter and bigger gardens than others. Ness is considered a wee bit classier that Osford and Langrick because it has tearooms and a reasonable view from the cliff.
    She tells me about her little brother, Tim, who is shy and gay and had a rough time with bullies in Hull, and about her mums, one who works in a graphic design firm and the other who writes books on historical figures. The designer grew up in Hull and is of Irish ancestry, and the author is Scottish, with parents from Glasgow and Trinidad. I tell her, feeling a bit lame, that my family come from Clyde County and have for a while, although beyond my grandparents we’ve never discussed it so I don’t really know. She calls me inbred and I call her a cock and push her over onto the sand, and we tickle each other, which is just an excuse to touch. She finds shells she likes and I put them in my pockets for her, planning to bore a hole in one so she can use it as a necklace. I kiss her neck. We look at the birds together and try to identify them.
    We do the things you do honestly when you’re between fifteen and seventeen, and dishonestly when you’re older, in the illusory hope that you are still between fifteen and seventeen. This includes talking about life and the future (I don’t yet mention the kids and Berlin), our hopes and dreams (I want to get away from Clyde and retire my poor mam from her job on the till at the co-op; Rainbow wants to live