Free The Last Summer of the Water Strider by Tim Lott Page A

beanbag. I nodded faintly towards it. Delicately she sat, cross-legged. Despite myself, my eyes
darted towards the inner apex of her thighs. She noticed – I saw the slight raise of an eyebrow – and I immediately looked away. But I had time to take in that she was wearing slight,
filmy pants, stained slightly with something dark.
    She didn’t speak again for some time. Perhaps a whole minute passed. She gazed out towards the window, as if I weren’t even there. I was worried that I had offended her by the
intemperance of my gaze. Disconcerted, I asked her if she wanted something. She shook her head, the wings of her long brown hair like thin curtains in a breeze, but remained silent, apparently
staring at the slight movement of the trees outside the window. A big white bird – an egret? – swooped down from one of the branches and snapped up something small with its beak. I
shifted my position on the bed uneasily, but could think of nothing else to say.
    Eventually, after about two or three minutes, she spoke – so quietly that I had to strain to hear her.
    ‘What do you think of Henry?’
    ‘I’m not sure yet.’
    ‘You must think something.’
    ‘He’s very different from my father.’
    ‘He really isn’t a faggot, you know. Far from it.’
    ‘I get it.’
    She looked at me directly for the first time.
    ‘He’s on a very strange journey. A long road. You know? Sometimes I think he’s like . . . ’ – she glanced down at my pile of comics – ‘. . . Superman.
No, that’s not it. Atticus Finch. You know Atticus Finch? I don’t know. That sort of guy. And he is. He’s really a trip. Like no one else. But inside. There’s . . . I
don’t know. He wants to be something. But he isn’t really it. Do you see what I mean?’
    The question didn’t seem to require an answer. She took a sip of her green tea.
    ‘Have you ever tried it?’ She held the tea out to me.
    I shook my head.
    ‘Go ahead. You should. It has remarkable properties. I have nine, ten cups a day. It cleans you out. Of course if you do it properly – Henry does this sometimes – you’re
meant to whisk it for ages. But I just sling the leaves in and pour on hot water. It’s very lazy of me. Yeah. I hate the way I’m such a slob.’
    She looked suddenly depressed. Then she propelled the tea an inch closer.
    ‘Go on. I dare you.’
    I took the cup. Our fingers momentarily touched, and I felt a thrill. Then her hand withdrew and I sipped the tea.
    ‘It’s horrible.’
    Strawberry laughed – a tinkly, silvery jingle.
    ‘It’s good for you.’
    ‘It tastes like medicine. Or wood bark. Bitter. Maybe you should put sugar in it.’
    ‘Sugar is poison. It’s like, I don’t know – honestly, you should read about it. There was this piece in the
Village Voice
. You know the
Voice
?’
    ‘I’ve heard of it.’
    ‘Oh, it’s like, the bible and all. Greenwich Village. You know, in New York? I lived there awhile. Not literally though. Not “the gospel”. It just tells the truth, you
know? Real stuff,
real
stuff. Not this bullshit government propaganda.’
    She frowned fiercely as she pronounced the word ‘bullshit’, as if she was suddenly very angry.
    ‘Anyway, the big sugar corporations, I mean from the eighteenth, or was it the nineteenth century? – shit, I can’t remember – have peddled this to the people to make
bucks. It’s like a whole thing. Conspiracy. Same old, same old. Fucking everyone over. I feel sorry for them, actually. To be that greedy. All the same, they got the whole Western world
hooked. Ask Pattern. He told me all about it. What was it built on? Slave labour. That’s right. You know? Anyway, I just take honey sometimes. You know, from bees? That’s OK. It’s
different.’
    ‘Who’s Patton?’
    ‘Pattern, not Patton. Patton was a fucking general. Pattern’s more like an annoying Boy Scout.’
    I was having trouble following her, but I remembered a few facts from my science