That Summer He Died Read Online Free Page A

just gone ten. The train had got here early. Alan wasn’t due to meet him for another ten minutes. If he turned up at all, that was.
    And there was no guarantee of that.
    *
    Their phone conversation the previous afternoon had left James feeling awkward.
    Understatement. It had left him feeling paranoid, like he’d perpetrated the mental equivalent of breaking and entering, kicking the door down on Alan’s personal space and walking dog shit all over his new carpet.
    Prior to the call, making it had seemed like a good idea, and had continued to seem so, right up to the point when the stilted pleasantries had ended and he’d suggested to Alan that maybe it would be a good thing if he came down to visit him.
    ‘Why?’ Alan’s voice, monotone and incommunicative, had eventually come back. ‘Why would you want to stay here with me?’
    The fact that Alan had stopped calling James these last six months. . .the fact he’d not returned any of his calls. . .it all fitted now. He’d changed, the same way James had changed after his parents had died. Of course he’s changed, James thought then. Because how could he not have? How could he possibly have stayed the same after what had happened to Monique?
    ‘I’m sorry,’ James said. ‘Let’s just forget I ever––’
    ‘I didn’t say that. I asked you why.’
    Why? James knew why. There was an army of becauses queuing up to answer that question. Because he wanted out of London. Because he couldn’t stand staying in this flat on his own a minute longer, sensing its walls closing in around him like an iron maiden. Because it had been his parents’ London base and they’d died in a car crash two years ago, and no matter how many nights James spent here, he still woke up hoping they’d still be here when he woke up. And because Alan was a writer. Because James wanted to write, too. Because Alan was his only living relative. Because he’d never really got to know him. And because James didn’t have anyone else. And neither did Alan. Not any more.
    But what was the point of voicing any of this? Alan wanted to be left alone.
    ‘I’ll go now,’ James said.
    ‘No.’
    The word was like the opening of a door leading out of a dark cellar. The way it was said: with a beat of emotion, of engagement. James heard the flick of a lighter at the other end of the line and the inverted sigh of a cigarette being drawn on.
    ‘Tell me what time your train gets in,’ Alan said. ‘I’ll pick you up.’
    As James put the phone down and stared at the receiver, he felt his earlier paranoia blossom and bloom. Maybe his friends had been right. Maybe he should have listened to them when they’d told him that going down to spend the summer with his uncle was the worst idea he’d ever had.
    You what? Do what? What for? they’d said. And he could see their point. Here they all were, fresh out of school, most of them working in London to save up enough money to go to Asia, or America, or just about anywhere with broader horizons than the boarding school they’d been stuck in for the last five years.
    And here James was, already sorted in what had once been his parents’ London flat but was now his, with its mortgage fully paid off by their life insurance, just the same as the mortgage on their main country home, which another family was now renting until James decided whether to sell it or not.
    Oh, yes, he could understand his friends’ confusion. He had enough money not to need to work. He could have got his jabs and malaria pills and flown straight to Vietnam, or Nepal or India, and told his friends he’d meet them there.
    Or he could have done what he’d been telling them he’d do since he’d turned thirteen. He could have become a writer, or journalist, or blogger, for real. He could have gone and worked for free on an e-zine, or even started on the novel he’d told everyone he’d got planned out – though, in truth, it was little more than a mish-mash of ideas culled from