Before I Die by Jenny Downham Page A

shops and the industrial estate and the wood yard, and we go beyond some kind of boundary where things belong to the town and are understood. Trees, fields, space appears. I shelter behind the curve of his back, and I close my eyes and wonder where he’s taking me. I imagine horses in the engine, their manes flying, their breath steaming, their nostrils flaring as they gallop. I heard a story once about some nymph, snatched by a god and taken somewhere dark and dangerous on the back of a chariot.
    Where we end up is somewhere I didn’t expect – a muddy car park off the dual carriageway. There are two large trucks parked here, a couple of cars and a hotdog stand.
    Adam turns off the ignition, kicks the stand down with his foot and takes off his helmet.
    ‘You should get off first,’ he says.
    I nod, can barely speak, left my breath behind on the road somewhere. My knees are shaking and it takes a lot of effort to swing my leg over the bike and stand up. The earth feels very still. One of the lorry drivers winks at me out of his cab window. He holds a steaming cup of tea in one hand. Over at the hotdog stand, a girl with her hair in a ponytail passes a bag of chips across the counter to a man with a dog. I’m different from them all. It’s as if we flew here and everyone else is completely ordinary.
    Adam says, ‘This isn’t the place. Let’s get something to eat, then I’ll show you.’
    He seems to understand that I can’t quite talk yet and doesn’t wait for an answer. I walk slowly after him, listen to him order two hotdogs with onion rings. How did he know that would be my idea of a perfect lunch?
    We stand and eat. We share a Coke. It seems astonishing to me that I’m here, that the world opened up from the back of a bike, that the sky looked like silk, that I saw the afternoon arrive, not white, not grey, not quite silver, but a combination of all three. Finally, when I’ve thrown my wrapper in the bin and finished the Coke, Adam says, ‘Ready?’
    And I follow him through a gate at the back of the hotdog stand, across a ditch and into a thin little wood. A mud path threads through and out to the other side, where space opens up. I hadn’t realized how high we were. It’s amazing, the whole town down there like someone laid it at our feet, and us high up, looking down at it all.
    ‘Wow!’ I say. ‘I didn’t know this view was here.’
    ‘Yeah.’
    We sit together on a bench, our knees not quite touching. The ground’s hard beneath my feet. The air’s cold, smelling of frost that didn’t quite make it, of winter to come.
    ‘This is where I come when I need to get away,’ he says. ‘I got the mushrooms from here.’
    He gets out his tobacco tin and opens it up, puts tobacco in a paper and rolls it. He has dirty fingernails and I shiver at the thought of those hands touching me.
    ‘Here,’ he says. ‘This’ll warm you up.’
    He passes me the cigarette and I look at it while he rolls himself another one. It looks like a pale slim finger. He offers me a light. We don’t say anything for ages, just blow smoke at the town below.
    He says, ‘Anything could be happening down there, but up here you just wouldn’t know it.’
    I know what he means. It could be pandemonium in all those little houses, everyone’s dreams in a mess. But up here feels peaceful. Clean.
    ‘I’m sorry, about earlier with my mum,’ he says. ‘She’s a bit hard to take sometimes.’
    ‘Is she ill?’
    ‘Not really.’
    ‘What’s up with her then?’
    He sighs, runs a hand through his hair. ‘My dad was killed in a road accident eighteen months ago.’
    He flicks his cigarette across the grass and we both watch the orange glow. It feels like minutes until it goes out.
    ‘Do you want to talk about it?’
    He shrugs. ‘There’s not that much to say. My mum and dad had a fight, he stomped off to the pub and forgot to look when he crossed the road. Two hours later the police were knocking on the