Fresh Apples

When you get oil from a locomotive engine all over the arse of your best blue jeans, it looks like shit: black and sticky. I can see it’s black, even in the dark. I stand on the sty and try to brush it away with the back of my hand, bent awkward over the fence, but it sticks to my skin, and then there’s nowhere to wipe my hands. Laugh, they would – Rhys Davies and Kristian – if they could see me now. Don’t know why I wore my best stuff. ‘Wear clean knickers,’ my mother’d say, ‘in case you have an accident.’ She’d sayknickerseven when she meant pants. She’s a feminist, see. But it’s not like anyone would notice if I was wearing pants or not. Johnny Mental from up the street, he said when he was at school the police would pay him at the end of the day to look for bits of fingers and bits of intestines here, before he went home for tea. If it can do that, if it can slice your tubes like green beans, who’s going to notice if you had skid marks in your kecks? I can still hear the train chugging away, or perhaps it’s my imagination. Over in the town I can hear drunk people singing but closer, I can hear cicadas – that noise you think only exists in American films to show you that something horrific is about to happen – it’s real. It’s hot too. Even in the night it’s still hot and I’m panting like a dog. I’m sure it’s this weather that’s making me fucking nuts. I’m alive anyway; I can feel my blood pumping so it’s all been a waste of time. Forget it now, that’s the thing to do. Oh, you want to know about it, of course you do. Nosy bastard you are. Well I’ll tell you and then I’ll forget it, and you can forget it too. And just remember this: I’m not proud of it. Let’s get that straight from the outset. The whole thing is a bloody encumbrance. (New word that, encumbrance. I found it in my father’s things this morning.)

Thursday night it started, but the summer has been going on forever, for years it seems like, the sun visors down on the café and fruiterer’s in town, the smell of barbecued food wafting on the air, and never going away. And the smell of mountain fires, of timber crumbling and being swallowed by a rolling wave of orange flames. On the Bwlch we were, at the entrance of the forestry. There used to be a climbing frame and a set of swings made from the logs from the trees. It’s gone now but we still go there, us and the car and van shaggers. Sitting on a picnic table with my legs hanging over the edge so I could see down Holly’s top when she leaned forward on the bench, her coffee colour skin going into two perfect, hard spheres, like snooker balls, or drawer knobs, poking the cartoon on her T-shirt out at either side. She was drinking blackcurrant, the plastic bottle to her mouth, the purple liquid inside it swishing back and fore. I asked her for some. I wouldn’t normally – I’m shy, I’d lose my tongue, but my mouth was dry and scratchy from the sun. Yes, she said, but when I gave the bottle back she wiped the rim on the hem of her skirt like I had AIDs. Kristian and Rhys Davies John Davies, they had handfuls of stone chippings, throwing them at Escorts when they went past, their techno music jumping. Jealous they are, of the cars and the stereos but fuck that dance music, it’s Metallica for me. (Don’t tell them that.) It’s his real name by the way, Rhys Davies John Davies: the first part after some gay Welsh poet, the second after his armed-robber father, shacked up in Swansea prison.

Every time something passed us, a lorry or a motorbike, it grated on the cattle grid in the road. That’s how Kristian came up with the cow tipping idea. Only we couldn’t go cow tipping because you can only tip cows when they’re sleeping, in the middle of the night and it’d take ten of us to move one, so Holly had to go one better.

‘Let’s go and start a fire!’ she said.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said. ‘We should be proud of this mountain, Hol. They haven’t got mountains like this in England. And you’ll kill all the nature.’

‘Nature!?’ she said. She rolled her eyes at Jaime and Angharad. ‘It’s not the fuckin’ Amazonian rain forest, Matt,’ she said. She can be a cow when she wants, see. ‘C’mon girls,’ she sai