Twice a year, book-ending the summer, the travelling funfair would come to town, setting up on the wide expanse of green that bordered the beach. Whispers would go around the school as the trucks arrived and the rides were assembled, each silhouette more familiar by the year; the helter-skelter with its coarse, hemp sliding mats, the terrifying Octopus, all spinning limbs and flashing lights and, of course, the elegant ferris wheel, standing tall like a lady among whores.
I'd spent happy afternoons there as a kid, queueing with candy floss melting onto my fist, looking ahead to pick which bumper car I wanted. Though my family was not well off, my mum always found a good handful of coins each for my brothers and me, and we would scatter into the fair like rabbits going to ground, giddy with the deluge of lights and noise and sugar.
I breathed in the air now and was filled with a bittersweet nostalgia as I stepped into the fair's maze of crowded lanes for what would be the last time. In a fortnight I would be hundreds of miles away, beginning a new life at university, and I didn't intend to come back.
I strolled past stalls selling overpriced plushies of the latest childhood fads, little grinning pikachus and what-not. I was tempted by a Gryffindor pillow but the poor kid in me made me put it back. Instead I found a food hut and bought a limp hotdog dressed with ketchup and undercooked onions, and I ate it as I went to find the grown up rides.
The Octopus was smaller than I remembered. Aged eight it had seemed like some frenzied, mechanical monster, or perhaps a mass torture device, complete with screaming people. Now, a decade on, it looked much less intimidating, and I added myself to the end of the queue, determined to finally conquer an old adversary.
"Oi, Jackson." A deep, familiar voice behind me. I turned and saw the blue-eyed and dimple cheeked face of Dan Hughes, golden boy of the rugby team and bane of my school life. His face wore its usual satisfied grin as he eyed me with amused interest. I sighed inside.
"Hello, Dan." I said, and resigned myself to a ruined afternoon.
He wasn't really a bully, at least not in the conventional sense; he had never beaten me up or taken my lunch money or that sort of thing. He was more of an annoyance, a constant mosquito buzz of lame jibes and dumb pranks that followed me around the school. Whenever I'd found a new quiet spot to eat my sandwiches and read my paperback at lunch he would find me within a week and pick up where he'd left off. Not that he couldn't be pleasant at times, and I was convinced that it was at least occasionally genuine.
"On your own, as usual?" He smiled, pink lips and white teeth.
That was the worst part of it all. That despite his seeming life's mission to piss me off, I fancied the ever loving arse off the shithead, and no matter how he poked and prodded at my ego, one smile like that numbed my animosity. He knew it too, I was sure.
I made a show of looking around.
"Yes, Dan I'm on my own. What's it to you?" He looked me up and down, but the expected comment about my appearance never came.
"That ride's shit." He said, meaning the Octopus, and I couldn't disagree. "Come with me. I know a way to make this place a lot more fun." I was a heartbeat away from telling him to fuck off when he flashed that smile again, a look in his eyes that told me he knew exactly what he was doing. I caved.
"Fine." I said and followed as he strode long legged towards the beach. The shorts he wore hugged his backside and I got lost watching the firm muscle rise and fall as he walked. His thighs and calves were dusted with dark blond hair and I remembered the library window that overlooked the playing fields where I would sit and watch his rugby practices while pretending to study.
We stepped into the shadow under the pier and Dan leant against one of the rusted iron pillars, pulling a joint from his pocket and lighting it. A scattering of seagulls cackled nearby but otherwise we were alone beneath the wooden deck. He handed me the joint and I looked at it dubiously.
"Come on." He said. "Don't be a pussy."
With a shrug I lifted the joint to my lips and inhaled.
"That's it." He said. "Take it deep and hold it there." There was a glint of mischief in his eyes that I could see despite the shade. I took a long drag, but before I could hold my breath my lungs threw a tantrum, coughing blue clouds into the breeze. Dan burst out laughing and I felt a big hand patting my back as I recovered, and when I did I found that I was laughing too.
"Fuck." I said, already feeling my head go fuzzy. "That's potent stuff." His hand lay on my back for a moment before he walked off further into the shadow of the pier, perching himself on a low, grey stone wall that formed part of the sea defenses. I followed to sit by him, the weed and his more amiable than normal mood making for a strange sense of comradeship between us. There we both were, at the end of our shared adolescence, about to step into the world of adulthood.
"What are your plans?" I asked, as I gazed absent mindedly at the spears of sunlight that fell between the gaps in the planks above. I began to understand why stoners stare at things. Dan took a toke before answering.
"I'll be starting an apprenticeship next month. Construction." He passed the joint to me. "It's a mate of my dad's company so..." He wondered into his own thoughts, looking into a shallow pool left by the tide. He sounded resigned. "You got into uni didn't you?"
"Yeah." I said, trying not to sound pleased with myself, even though I was. "Business management."
He looked at me with raised eyebrows.
"So what, you're gonna be the next Alan Sugar?" He poked his elbow playfully at my ribs and we both laughed.
"It's better than candy floss." I said. After the laughter subsided he looked at me more seriously.
"Good on you, mate." And I could tell that he meant it.
"What's this? Danny fucking Hughes saying something nice?" He gave me another jab in the ribs.
"All I mean is...." He gave me an odd look. "We're all becoming different people now, aren't we?"
I looked back at him, trying to read his expression, trying to fill the gaps that I sensed lay between his words.
"Or we're becoming who we always were." I said, not entirely sure what I meant in the moment, but it seemed to fit in my weed spun mind. Danny nodded thoughtfully, a rare look on him and not an unattractive one, and he carried his thoughts in slow steps away from the wall. He turned on his heel to face me.
"Right." He said, the old Dan back. "You, ya lonely little loser, are coming with me to get shit faced. One last fuck you, alright?" He didn't stop to receive an answer, and struck out towards the strip of shops that lined the seafront road, confident and correct that I would follow.
We pooled our resources at the off-license and emerged with eight cans of strong, white cider and a bottle of gut-rot rum, taking them to the top of the headland that overlooked the northern end of the beach and green. Dan shed his shirt and, not to be outdone, I did the same and we sat in a secluded spot with our backs to a tree, looking out at the vista of the fair, the beach and the sea.
I was reminded that we had been friends once, long ago in little school. Our parents knew each other and we would go to one another's birthday parties, and though my memories of that time were vague, something of it felt rekindled as we sat and talked and drank and laughed, our bare shoulders touching in the dappled light under the tree. His words came back to me. "We're all becoming different people". We're becoming who we always were.
"I'm sorry I was always such a cunt to you." Three cans in and Dan had become earnest. I wasn't sure how to respond. My feelings about him were complicated, and these hours of closeness and pax had tangled them up even more.
"It's....its alright." I patted his shoulder, sticky with sweat. "You were annoying as fuck at times, but....I didn't really mind that much." He turned to look at me and I became very aware of how close his lips were to mine, those pink lips that even now were creasing into the smile that killed me.
"That's good." He said. I saw his eyes searching my face, and the pause we shared then seemed to ask a question neither of us was quite ready to put into words. The moment passed like a cloud shadow and Dan cracked another can. He looked out towards the horizon and I let my eyes wander down across his body, at his chest and belly slowly rising and falling, his narrow waist and thighs like young trees. When my attention returned to his face he was looking at me again. There was no smile now, just lips barely parted and eyes that held mine like a magnet draws a compass needle.
"I always noticed when you looked at me." His voice was low, his breath so close it stirred the fine hairs on my cheeks.
"Is that because you were always looking at me?" I said, and he gave a single, silent laugh and shrugged.
"Yeah. I suppose you're right." He said.
I couldn't tell you who finally started it. Our lips brushed then overlapped, then parted as he angled his head, laying his nose alongside mine. I was surprised at his softness, the tender and tentative way he let his mouth slowly part as our tongues met, and he tasted of rum and apples and smoke and sun cream. The moment broke too soon and we parted, eyes on anything but each other. Dan grabbed the rum and took a hearty swig before passing it to me. I could see that he was wrestling with what had just happened, so I took the bottle and drank, letting the silence solve what it could.
"That was....." Dan said, ending the silence. He turned to me. "That was....amazing." He smiled that fucking smile and it crashed like a wave on me. Whatever expression it had put on my face was enough for him to plant another kiss there, a longer and deeper one, and his hands were on my arms pulling me closer, guiding me to lie back on the grass.
