Anya and as soon as I heard about it, I knew we had to be there.
Tickets went on sale at nine am on a day in June, when my Year Five class was doing guided reading, followed by maths. I told them they were going to watch Planet Earth as a treat for being good (not true – they had been little bastards the day before) while I endlessly pressed redial on my phone with one hand, the other attempting to access ever-crashing ticket websites on the school computer. When it got to ten am I had to stop briefly to let the class out to play, before racing to the staffroom to continue.
When I got the automated message telling me, with totally unwarranted cheerfulness, that, ‘Due to exceptional demand, tickets to the End of the Summer festival are now sold out,’ I said, ‘Bollocks,’ loud enough and with sufficient heat that some of the older guard in the staffroom gave me pinched looks.
But then, the weekend before the event, a miracle occurred.
My friend at work, Zoe, knew someone roadying, and she was able to get her hands on two extra tickets; one for me, and one for Anya.
We were ecstatic. It was the very last weekend before the schools were back and it felt like a perfect way to end the summer.
And anyway, Anya needed cheering up.
We’d only been ‘trying’ as they say (such a weird expression because actually, we were quite good at it) for six months or so. But each time her period arrived, she became more dejected and withdrawn. The last time she’d claimed she ‘had a real feeling’ even though she was only overdue by a day or two. She made me laugh by saying things like, ‘Will you still fancy me when I am big with child?’
Maybe the humour was a disguise for how high her hopes had been raised.
On the day of the festival, we woke up to mizzling, nasty rain in the air and a low-slung sky. Anya was quiet that morning. I tried to chivvy her with some lame jokes, but she just smiled weakly and it was somehow worse than rolled eyes. When I asked what was wrong, she said she had a bit of a headache and I decided not to press.
Clad in wellies and waterproof coats, we arrived at the festival in a downpour. Our feet were sucked into claggy, viscous mud straight away and we were sweating inside our jackets.
I took the decision that the best way to fight off the vagaries of the weather was to drink as much as possible.
By late afternoon, I didn’t mind the mud.
And finally, at six, the sun came out.
We’d seen a weird kind of emo rock band and a folk-punk duo I like, plus some comedy in one of the tents. The main event was still to come.
I made my way back to Anya with two more wobbly pints of cider in my hands that I’d had to queue painfully long for. Her head was turned away from me and, as I reached her and said, ‘Hey,’ she seemed to startle.
‘You’re shaking,’ I said, noticing her hand as she took the plastic glass from me. ‘Are you cold?’
She gulped a long mouthful. Her eyes when they met mine were oddly bright. She seemed to be crackling with energy in a way that happened sometimes. It was very sexy.
‘It’s nothing,’ she said and turned to look at the stage. This was clearly a lie.
‘Hey,’ I said again, placing my hand on her slim arm, which was covered in goose bumps. ‘Did something happen?’
She shook her head vigorously. ‘People are dickheads, that’s all. Some bloke knocked into me and wasn’t very sorry.’
‘Where is he?’ I said, turning to look at the thickening crowd.
‘Gone,’ she said and gave me a wonderful smile that seemed to come from nowhere. ‘Let’s forget it, okay?’
‘Okay, if you’re sure.’ I took a swig of my pint.
I allowed myself to relax and soak up the buzz of the crowd. Soft evening light bathed us. The nearest group of people included a small girl whose face was painted like Spiderman, and a man in shorts with an Oasis T-shirt that seemed to have come from younger, slimmer times straining over his belly. He was bellowing about seeing Oasis at ‘Glasto’ to a small, middle-aged woman with a long-suffering expression.
Anya took a sip of her pint and did a little turn to survey the crowd. She was wearing what she called her ‘festival dress’, a long, hippyish affair with thin straps and a brown hem of mud, her waterproof coat tied around her waist. I didn’t resist the urge to kiss her freckled shoulder and she gave me a quick, warm smile.
There was a palpable thrum of excited energy in the crowd. The thing we’d all been waiting for was happening any moment now.
I heard someone call my name and turned to see Zoe squeezing her way towards us through the knots of people, grinning.
Zoe was almost six feet tall with her afro and, even though I had repeatedly told Anya that I hadn’t really noticed, you’d have to be insane not to recognize that she was kind of gorgeous. She wore thick-framed glasses that would have made anyone else look like Morrissey on a bad day, but highlighted her big, brown eyes, and she always had on brightly coloured lipstick. She could be stern when needed but the kids adored her; she had even won over some of the racist old parents round here.
The fact that she stood out at all was one of the downsides of living in this small, seaside town. I was born and raised in the crowded, multi-cultural heart of London and, well … it was an adjustment. I’d been asked more than once here – with a note of suspicion – if I was an Arab, because of my dark colouring and beard.
This place had its downsides, which sometimes made me want to run screaming back to the city, but it was also beautiful, cheap enough, and, therefore, home.
Zoe was my best friend at work – and, by default, probably in the town – but I sensed a tightening in Anya’s expression whenever her name came up. So, I tried not to talk about her too much. That Anya could ever be a bit territorial and jealous was, frankly, something I still found flattering.
Anyway, Zoe was looking great at the festival, in some sort of orange catsuit thing with a thick yellow scarf around the front of her hair. She pulled me into a hug and I could sense Anya tensing next to me.
‘Everything okay?’ Zoe said, turning to Anya.
She gave her an odd sort of look, but I didn’t think anything of it then.
Anya’s smile was tight. ‘Yeah, brilliant,’ she said. ‘And we’re so grateful for the tickets, aren’t we, Ell?’ But she reached for my fingers at the same time and it felt like she was making a point.
Zoe didn’t seem to notice anyway. She began to tell me a story about one of the mothers saying her son didn’t have any time to do an after-school club any more because ‘one of his tutors’ was changing days.
‘One of them?’ she said now. ‘He’s ten years old!’
Our school didn’t have too many pushy parents, but a slow gentrification process was happening in the town, which meant a new demographic of parent. We didn’t have any Octavias or Gullivers. Yet. Kept things interesting, anyway. I listened to the story and laughed at the right bits but was acutely conscious of Anya standing silently next to me the whole time.
After a few moments a tall woman with a shaved head and Cleopatra-like eyes came over, clutching two bottles of beer, one of which she thrust at Zoe.
‘Oh cheers,’ said Zoe. ‘This is Tabitha. Tab … Elliott, my partner in crime at school. And his wife Anya.’ We all nodded our hellos.
‘By the way,’ said Zoe, turning to me again. ‘You still okay to get started on the Charney Point visit? It has to be done quickly because they’re closing for a major refurb in October.’
This was a trip for Year Five to go to a Viking museum that was about ten miles down the coast. I’d logged it onto the school calendar and needed to remember to fill out all the risk assessment stuff. I made