Free Shadows & Tall Trees by Michael Kelly

his boarding school.
    “Well, tell him it’s absolutely necessary that we meet as soon as possible. I’ve urgent business in France, but it’s unthinkable that I should leave without seeing him. Especially as he won’t even agree to speak on the phone.”
    “He’s every bit as keen to meet up as you are. He wants an explanation.”
    A summer afternoon years ago. And a creeping about on the landing outside the study. A deadline for a script and no ideas. What did the child want now? He was a good-looking boy in a slightly pale way. Delicate features and enormous blue eyes, but with a sort of shivery sensitivity that was irritating, like a pedigree dog that had been badly inbred. The auteur gave up and they went to the shops and bought comics (
Beano
,
The Dandy
) and ice creams.
    They were in the garage when it happened. The boy had both feet on the floor and one arm trailing slightly behind him when the auteur slammed the door shut. A scream, the fine lines of a face crumpling, jets of tears. The auteur opened the door, took the boy’s hand in his: a half moon of hanging flesh, the beginning of the blood grin on a middle finger that would have to be ice-packed and bandaged.
    Even now the auteur is not sure whether he did it deliberately.
    “An explanation for what? In the circumstances, I’d say that we are the ones who are owed explanations, don’t you think?”
    “Have you chosen?”
    He lifts up the menu, but it’s a blur. The glasses aren’t bifocals.

    The lunch and the wine have made her drowsy. She is not used to being the object of hospitality in the middle of the day. And now it is well past four o’clock and none of the small tasks (the payment of a bill, the visit to the dry cleaners) she set herself have been accomplished. She knows that if she were to change out of her blue dress and shower, or even make herself a cup of tea (fragrant, lemony), she would revive, but she is listless, heavy with the inertia of late afternoon. There are four more days left before she is due to return to the office. Although spending her holiday in the city where she works has had the virtue of economy, she regrets the loss of the two weeks on a Greek island that she had planned.
    There is a small patio with plants in terracotta pots and garden furniture bleached by the sun. She pours herself a glass of iced water from the fridge and goes outside.
    If she takes her shoes off, she knows the warmth of the flagstones will remind her of the summer she was an actress. The year she was in a film written and directed by her uncle. She remembers the scene, shot from behind, in which she and her cousin are standing on the fringe of the beach: dunes and marram grass beside them, and beyond the full length of the bay at low tide. The sugar-sparkle of white sand. The sheen darkest where the tide last reached. They wriggled out of their clothes. Her cousin was naked first and for a moment he stood beside her. The viewer knew from the angle of his head that he was looking down at her. Waiting for the moment when she too was naked and they would run off together, their footprints the first of the day, the dents almost invisible at first, then slowly darkening until the first wave came dazzling across the breadth of the beach.
    What the film will never remember was how fine the sand was, silkily running through her toes. The first shock of the wave, unexpectedly cold on such a hot day. And later the taste of salt on her cousin’s skin.
    They were often mistaken for brother and sister. To be close seemed natural.
    She sips the water. The sunlight falls on the bench opposite her and the dark shadows of the slats paint the flagstones. At the western edge of the city the evening is gathering melancholy light.
    She was just that much older than him, and so it was that she went to his room. The moonlight shone through the blinds, striping his blanket with silver. Then she was with him, skin to skin, both loving as if untarnished. Later they