What Happened At Glastonbury C2: A Bit Of Personal Growth
Story: What Happened At Glastonbury
Chapter: Two
Warnings: Language
Summary: The journey to the Festival begins, but Sienna is plagued with regrets and ominous dreams.
“Wow, you four got ratted last night, didn’t you?”
“No, Duncan. These three did. I just had a couple.” Tanya’s Look made the point more effectively than her words. Which, if you looked closely at the dark marks under her eyes, were not strictly true, but she had a certain position as the invincible head of the dojo to maintain. Not to mention, she was bigger than either myself, Jack, or Drew, so probably the drink hadn’t affected her too badly.
The rest of us, on the other hand… Jack and Drew were wearing sunglasses and looking pasty. I was wearing a baseball cap pulled low on my forehead. And, probably, also looking pasty. We were hanging around in a large parking lot in London with our assorted luggage, awaiting the bus that would carry us to Glastonbury. Tanya had seen to it that we were ticked off on the register of volunteers and had our ID badges, and as I waited for the paracetamols I’d just swallowed to take effect, I looked around and was slightly stunned by the sheer scale of the operation. I’d known the Festival was big, but I hadn’t fully realised it was that big. There were hundreds of people waiting, and this was for one set of coaches on one day; there were others picking up from other locations across the UK both on the previous day and throughout the rest of the day, plus people who were making their own way down.
I nudged Tanya. “How many of us are there?”
“Working the bars?” She frowned briefly. “A couple of thousand.”
“Holy crap.”
“Yeah. Glastonbury has… ooh… about 188,000 people there in total.” She grinned and remarked professionally, “It’s quite an exercise in logistics!”
Amp grinned. “Anyone want a bacon sandwich? Nice, greasy, bacon sandwich, anyone?” He waved the remains of his first sandwich around in front of Jack, who shrank away from it, and glared sickly. Drew just shrugged. “Yeah, why not? Make yourself useful, Duncan, get two.” He looked at me. “Three? My treat.”
“No. Thank you.”
Beside me, Mark, who made up the remaining member of our team of six along with Duncan, chuckled from behind the newspaper he was reading. “Getting pissed before you go to Glastonbury? Not necessarily the brightest idea.”
Yeah, I’m really going to take advice from a guy whose wife kicked him out after he screwed the babysitter, I mentally snapped back, and then mentally kicked myself for being a bitch. Mark wasn’t a bad guy. A bit screwed-up, but who wasn’t?
It occurred to me with a certain unease that there might be ulterior motives behind Tanya’s choice of Mark to round out the team. There were actually twelve of us going altogether from the dojo. Tanya was heading up one team of six, with one of her instructors, Leo, heading up the other.
Technically, if leadership was being assigned in terms of seniority, it should have been Drew heading up the other team. He was Tanya’s longest-serving student; she had been teaching him since she was fifteen and he seventeen. But friendship had prevailed, and Drew was on our team with her, Jack, and me, or the “Awesome Foursome”, as Amp kept referring to us. Well, friendship, and the fact that Drew and Leo did not get on well, due to a combination of the fact that Leo held his more senior position in the dojo largely due to the fact that Drew didn’t particularly want the responsibility, meaning that at any point, technically, Drew could replace him.
That, and the fact that, according to Jack, Leo was secretly something of a homophobe, whereas Drew was an un-secret homophobe-phobe. Interestingly, though, I thought, Drew reined in his usual flamboyance about his sexuality whenever he was in the dojo. He was open if asked, but never made a point of it. Partly, I thought, because there were, sadly, various considerations that came into being about having an openly gay instructor in a school with children’s classes (even in this day and age), but I also wondered if it was partly due to his feeling secure enough in there to drop the act…
… In any case, Tanya had selected her teams, and Mark was on ours, which I found… concerning, I supposed. She and Jack had too much class to actually stick Mark under my nose and say “There you go, nice single male for you, get on with it”, but I wondered if this was her version of it.
I could see the logic. Mark was near my age, attractive, intelligent, gainfully employed in a similar line of work to me, at which he was successful (Detective Inspector in the Metropolitan Police’s Art Crimes Squad). Separated with two young kids, but who didn’t have a bit of a history at our age?
At our age, now, there was a depressing thought. Time to face reality, Sienna, I thought gloomily. Thirty is coming into view, so let’s face it, from now on it’s not single young guys with no baggage, it’s nearly middle-aged men with a divorce behind them, or something like it. And it’s not like you don’t have a past.
Which was the problem. I could see the appeal of Mark. I could see the logic; he would fit in just fine with myself, Jack and Tanya, and he even got on reasonably well with Drew. Although where exactly Drew himself would fit in with all this I still wasn’t sure. Unless he finds a partner… hah, a flying pig on Mars would be a more realistic picture.
But Mark wasn’t my type. You mean he’s not Bobby, my subconscious thought, and I pushed it away. Bobby was gone, and he and I would never be together again, so I should just face up to reality, and get on with it.
“All aboard!” Duncan yelled cheerfully, returning from the local sandwich shop with a couple of steaming sandwiches in his hand. He handed one to Drew, stuffed the other into his jacket pocket and trotted off to load the rucksacks into the belly of the buses. I followed him and offered to help, but he just shrugged and picked up two of the huge bags with one large hand. “It’s alright, SiSi, I’ve got it, but cheers… Hi, Robyn.” He waved to his girlfriend, who’d come to see him off, and who ran over to kiss him goodbye. I left them to it, and rejoined the others.
“Thank you, Amp,” Drew yelled, and cheerfully shoved his way onto the bus and up the stairs, commandeering six seats at the front on the top deck. Jack and I followed him up, shortly followed by Tanya, Mark and Amp. I chose a seat next to the window, wanting to see where we were going. I hadn’t seen as much of England as I wanted to, having been stuck in London for work for most of my time here, and I was quite looking forward to seeing more of it. At least, once my hangover lifted.
“Got everything you need?” Drew asked me, settling in beside me and stretching his long legs into the aisle.
“A new head would be nice,” I replied.
“Aww, poor little SiSi!” Drew teased me. “Sure you don’t want a bacon sandwich?” He waved his at me. I glared.
“Go. Away. And let me die in peace.”
He chuckled, hugged me briefly across the shoulders, kissed the side of my head, then started munching the sandwich as though his life depended on it. I returned to staring out of the window. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Tanya and Jack settling in in front of me, and Mark and Amp occupying the seats beside us, with Leo’s team following on behind them.
The bus gave an almighty shudder and jerk, then rolled forward to the accompaniment of much cheering throughout the bus.
“We’re off!” Duncan yelled behind me. “Woo-hoo!” More loud cheers came from behind him.
In front of me, Jack turned round and smiled. “Looking forward to this, SiSi? You okay?”
I smiled back at him, reached forward, and gently squeezed his arm. “Oh yeah, it’s going to be great!”
“Oh, you bet it will be.” He smiled hugely. “I haven’t been to the Festival since… Drew, when was it?”
Drew mmphed through a mouthful of sandwich. “Dunno… what year was it you were hanging around London wearing a leather jacket and trying out the starving-in-garret-unsigned-rock-star approach to life?”
“That was uncalled-for. Around the same time you were dying your hair bleached blond and prancing around in tight trousers in some of the dodgier bits of Soho. Could have been ’95, I guess.”
“Why are you two always so horrible to each other?” I asked.
“Because, if we were nice to each other, people would think we were gay,” Drew and Jack chorused in perfect unison, then looked at each other and frowned with identical expressions of concern.
“No, it’s only funny if I say it, Jack. If you say it, it just sounds prejudiced.”
“Alright, you two have got to stop this.” Amp leaned forward between myself and Drew. “It’s dead worrying. I mean, it starts with the two of you reading each other’s minds, and that’s all right, but what if it spreads? What if you start reading my mind? That would be bad.”
“You’re right, Duncan, that is a frightening thought,” Drew replied, and grinned. Amp flashed him the finger, grinned back, then settled back in his seat to discuss the Festival line-up with Mark. Drew and Jack exchanged wry smiles, then Jack turned round to snuggle in beside Tanya.
Hmm. Score one for the “Jack and Drew used to fuck” theory? I wondered. I’d begun to suspect a while back that, just possibly, Jack and Drew had at one point been more to each other than just platonic friends. Jack was happily married to Tanya, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t played around a bit in his younger days, I thought. However, I was unlikely to find out for definite. I didn’t want to ask Jack or Drew directly in case it looked like I was prying into their personal lives, and, despite the fact that Tanya’s mind was as broad as a plank, I didn’t quite think I could ask even her the question “So, did your husband and your gay male best friend used to fuck each other?”
I shrugged and dismissed the thought, taking a swig from the bottle of water in my bag and noted that my headache seemed to be lifting.
“Flapjack?” Jack turned round again and offered me a small cake from a bag. I took one, deciding it would do me good to eat. It was delicious, as was everything Jack cooked. I took another, causing Jack to smile hugely and pat my arm, then leaned back into my seat and stared out the window, watching London’s streets sliding by. We were out of the city centre down and onto one of the big arterial roads leading to the west. I sighed, tried not to wish that Bobby was with me, and thought of nothing.
***
Three hours into the journey, and my hangover had been replaced by a sensation of dull boredom. We’d stopped once for a bathroom break, and we were supposedly near the festival site, but the journey seemed to be taking forever, and I wasn’t succeeding in my plans not to think of Bobby.
He would have loved this, I thought. It would have been a slightly odd picture, I supposed, to someone who didn’t know Bobby well, the New York City detective in his sharp suits hanging out with a load of kids and aging hippies in a muddy field… but only if you didn’t know Bobby well. Didn’t know that he found humanity infinitely interesting, and that he would have loved the festival even if he didn’t care too much about the music, because he would have loved the chance to watch people being people. That, and he would have liked it because you liked it, and you and he loved to see each other happy…
I banished the thought fiercely, reminding myself that if Bobby had really liked to see me happy, he’d have introduced me as his partner - his romantic partner - to his mother, and made our relationship permanent.
Or would he? Had I pushed too hard, too soon? Would I have got what I wanted if I’d been willing to wait for longer?
Who knew? I thought sadly. Bobby and I were history now. I loved him so much, but I would need to put him behind me if I was ever going to have another relationship.
Like you did with John? I thought miserably. I’d gone from one fucked-up relationship to another, even more fucked-up relationship, with a senior police officer who’d turned out to be corrupt. Not exactly ideal, since I worked for Interpol myself and couldn’t afford even the hint of corruption to attach itself to me. Drew, who had told me in the first place about John’s corruption, had helped me take John down, but not before I was nearly killed in the process. I still had a livid red scar on my left leg as a permanent reminder of what could have happened if the shot that had been intended for my heart hadn’t missed.
It really hadn’t been my year for romantic relationships.
“Look, there’s Stonehenge!”
I was roused out of my mood by a loud yell from behind me, and turned to see Amp pointing excitedly at the window. Around me, others were doing the same, peering excitedly through the windows to the large ring of ancient stones beside the road. I hadn’t realised it ran so close to the ancient monument; I could almost have reached out my hand and touched them.
Beside me, Drew looked up from the book he was reading and smiled. “Nearly there, hey?”
“How nearly is nearly?”
“Um. About an hour.”
“Oh, great.”
“Hey, there’s a lot of people trying to get into one small space,” he pointed out.
“Yeah.” I smiled half-heartedly, and returned to staring out of the window.
The next thing I knew, I was standing somewhere familiar. It was dark, and cold, and there was what felt like mud, no, wet sand beneath my four feet. I realised then that I was standing on all fours, but with dream-logic, that was quite normal.
I looked around under the stormy, orange and black sky over the beach, staring out over the jagged rocks to the wild sea beyond. Beside me, a giant lion with a black mane looked at me mournfully. I turned to mouth I’m sorry, but my new mouth wouldn’t form the words, and it loped off into the distance, vanishing beyond a hill out of sight.
I turned around slowly to see where I was. Over my head, a large bat fluttered, but I ignored it, focussing instead on another lion, lolling regally on a nearby sand dune. It had no mane, and I realised that it was a lioness. It grinned at me, then lowered its great head to affectionately lick the top of the head of a small tabby cat that lay curled comfortably between its great paws. The small tabby closed its eyes in happiness, then rubbed its head affectionately against the side of the great beast’s face, licking it gently.
I turned my gaze from the two cats, then spotted a nearby pool of water. I loped over to get a drink and stared at my reflection.
I was a fox. A small fox with red fur and sad green eyes looked up at me from the pool. I stared for a few moments, mesmerised, then became aware of another presence. Another fox appeared in the water beside me, and I turned to see a lanky, sandy-furred fox with grey eyes grinning at me. It lolled its tongue, and drank greedily from the pool.
“Didn’t you used to be a crow?” I asked.
The sandy-furred fox lolled its tongue at me again and spoke. “Everyone’s allowed a bit of personal growth. Come play.” It flicked its tail at me.
I shook my head, and it loped off wagging its tail. I looked down into the pool sadly, and saw another, horrible reflection.
I flicked my head up, and saw a hideous lizard there on the other side of the pool, with a giant frill around its neck and yellow staring eyes. It hissed at me. “Should have shot you, bitch, when I had the chance.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” I replied. “You’re in prison for life. You can’t do anything to any of us. I’m not afraid of you.”
“No, it’s me you should be afraid of.” A horrible rough voice boomed from behind me, and I felt fear for the first time. I whipped around to see a giant black dog with dripping jaws looming behind me. It smiled horribly, revealing rows of yellow teeth, and lunged for me. I tried to dodge, but it was too quick and grabbed my shoulder, shaking me…
“…Wake up, SiSi, we’re nearly here!”
I jerked awake to find Drew shaking my shoulder. “Wake up, sleepy!”
I bolted upright and realised that I’d been asleep on Drew’s shoulder for at least the past hour. “Shit, where are we?”
“Nearly here, look!” Drew pointed excitedly out of the window and I gasped.
In front of us, as the bus trundled slowly down the hill, the Festival lay sprawled out across the hills. It seemed to cover the entire valley in a sea of blue tents, with here and there a candy-striped yellow and red giant tent, or white marquee, poking out above the throng. On one of them, a giant inflatable figure of a blue man lay reclining; elsewhere the silver point which I realised must be the Festival’s main stage, the Pyramid Stage, pointed skywards, and I could see a huge grey oblong which I suddenly realised was a cinema screen in one of the other fields. At the back I could see rows and rows of white points, which I realised must be tipis, then the white oblongs of caravans and Winnebagos, and then rows and rows and rows of cars. There was so much of it, filling the eye as far as I could see.
“Oh, holy crap, it’s a city,” I remarked.
“Yep, nearly two hundred thousand people. Pretty impressive, huh?”
I glanced at Drew’s face, and saw that he was smiling like a kid on Christmas morning. I’d never seen him look so purely happy in the two years I’d known him, and for his sake, I put on a big smile of my own. “Yeah!”
“You’re going to love this, SiSi,” he promised. “Just as well you got some sleep now.” He paused and rubbed his shoulder. “Even if you did just drool all over my jacket.”
I smiled. “It will wash. Are we nearly there yet?”
“Hell yes!” Tanya grinned at me. “Nearly there. We’ll put the tents up and go and explore!”
“Fantastic!” I smiled back at her, and decided that I was not going to let my crappy mood spoil my friends’ much-deserved vacation. Besides, I was starting to feel excited myself.
I had no idea what the next four days held, but at least it would be a break from reality.
Chapter: Two
Warnings: Language
Summary: The journey to the Festival begins, but Sienna is plagued with regrets and ominous dreams.
“Wow, you four got ratted last night, didn’t you?”
“No, Duncan. These three did. I just had a couple.” Tanya’s Look made the point more effectively than her words. Which, if you looked closely at the dark marks under her eyes, were not strictly true, but she had a certain position as the invincible head of the dojo to maintain. Not to mention, she was bigger than either myself, Jack, or Drew, so probably the drink hadn’t affected her too badly.
The rest of us, on the other hand… Jack and Drew were wearing sunglasses and looking pasty. I was wearing a baseball cap pulled low on my forehead. And, probably, also looking pasty. We were hanging around in a large parking lot in London with our assorted luggage, awaiting the bus that would carry us to Glastonbury. Tanya had seen to it that we were ticked off on the register of volunteers and had our ID badges, and as I waited for the paracetamols I’d just swallowed to take effect, I looked around and was slightly stunned by the sheer scale of the operation. I’d known the Festival was big, but I hadn’t fully realised it was that big. There were hundreds of people waiting, and this was for one set of coaches on one day; there were others picking up from other locations across the UK both on the previous day and throughout the rest of the day, plus people who were making their own way down.
I nudged Tanya. “How many of us are there?”
“Working the bars?” She frowned briefly. “A couple of thousand.”
“Holy crap.”
“Yeah. Glastonbury has… ooh… about 188,000 people there in total.” She grinned and remarked professionally, “It’s quite an exercise in logistics!”
Amp grinned. “Anyone want a bacon sandwich? Nice, greasy, bacon sandwich, anyone?” He waved the remains of his first sandwich around in front of Jack, who shrank away from it, and glared sickly. Drew just shrugged. “Yeah, why not? Make yourself useful, Duncan, get two.” He looked at me. “Three? My treat.”
“No. Thank you.”
Beside me, Mark, who made up the remaining member of our team of six along with Duncan, chuckled from behind the newspaper he was reading. “Getting pissed before you go to Glastonbury? Not necessarily the brightest idea.”
Yeah, I’m really going to take advice from a guy whose wife kicked him out after he screwed the babysitter, I mentally snapped back, and then mentally kicked myself for being a bitch. Mark wasn’t a bad guy. A bit screwed-up, but who wasn’t?
It occurred to me with a certain unease that there might be ulterior motives behind Tanya’s choice of Mark to round out the team. There were actually twelve of us going altogether from the dojo. Tanya was heading up one team of six, with one of her instructors, Leo, heading up the other.
Technically, if leadership was being assigned in terms of seniority, it should have been Drew heading up the other team. He was Tanya’s longest-serving student; she had been teaching him since she was fifteen and he seventeen. But friendship had prevailed, and Drew was on our team with her, Jack, and me, or the “Awesome Foursome”, as Amp kept referring to us. Well, friendship, and the fact that Drew and Leo did not get on well, due to a combination of the fact that Leo held his more senior position in the dojo largely due to the fact that Drew didn’t particularly want the responsibility, meaning that at any point, technically, Drew could replace him.
That, and the fact that, according to Jack, Leo was secretly something of a homophobe, whereas Drew was an un-secret homophobe-phobe. Interestingly, though, I thought, Drew reined in his usual flamboyance about his sexuality whenever he was in the dojo. He was open if asked, but never made a point of it. Partly, I thought, because there were, sadly, various considerations that came into being about having an openly gay instructor in a school with children’s classes (even in this day and age), but I also wondered if it was partly due to his feeling secure enough in there to drop the act…
… In any case, Tanya had selected her teams, and Mark was on ours, which I found… concerning, I supposed. She and Jack had too much class to actually stick Mark under my nose and say “There you go, nice single male for you, get on with it”, but I wondered if this was her version of it.
I could see the logic. Mark was near my age, attractive, intelligent, gainfully employed in a similar line of work to me, at which he was successful (Detective Inspector in the Metropolitan Police’s Art Crimes Squad). Separated with two young kids, but who didn’t have a bit of a history at our age?
At our age, now, there was a depressing thought. Time to face reality, Sienna, I thought gloomily. Thirty is coming into view, so let’s face it, from now on it’s not single young guys with no baggage, it’s nearly middle-aged men with a divorce behind them, or something like it. And it’s not like you don’t have a past.
Which was the problem. I could see the appeal of Mark. I could see the logic; he would fit in just fine with myself, Jack and Tanya, and he even got on reasonably well with Drew. Although where exactly Drew himself would fit in with all this I still wasn’t sure. Unless he finds a partner… hah, a flying pig on Mars would be a more realistic picture.
But Mark wasn’t my type. You mean he’s not Bobby, my subconscious thought, and I pushed it away. Bobby was gone, and he and I would never be together again, so I should just face up to reality, and get on with it.
“All aboard!” Duncan yelled cheerfully, returning from the local sandwich shop with a couple of steaming sandwiches in his hand. He handed one to Drew, stuffed the other into his jacket pocket and trotted off to load the rucksacks into the belly of the buses. I followed him and offered to help, but he just shrugged and picked up two of the huge bags with one large hand. “It’s alright, SiSi, I’ve got it, but cheers… Hi, Robyn.” He waved to his girlfriend, who’d come to see him off, and who ran over to kiss him goodbye. I left them to it, and rejoined the others.
“Thank you, Amp,” Drew yelled, and cheerfully shoved his way onto the bus and up the stairs, commandeering six seats at the front on the top deck. Jack and I followed him up, shortly followed by Tanya, Mark and Amp. I chose a seat next to the window, wanting to see where we were going. I hadn’t seen as much of England as I wanted to, having been stuck in London for work for most of my time here, and I was quite looking forward to seeing more of it. At least, once my hangover lifted.
“Got everything you need?” Drew asked me, settling in beside me and stretching his long legs into the aisle.
“A new head would be nice,” I replied.
“Aww, poor little SiSi!” Drew teased me. “Sure you don’t want a bacon sandwich?” He waved his at me. I glared.
“Go. Away. And let me die in peace.”
He chuckled, hugged me briefly across the shoulders, kissed the side of my head, then started munching the sandwich as though his life depended on it. I returned to staring out of the window. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Tanya and Jack settling in in front of me, and Mark and Amp occupying the seats beside us, with Leo’s team following on behind them.
The bus gave an almighty shudder and jerk, then rolled forward to the accompaniment of much cheering throughout the bus.
“We’re off!” Duncan yelled behind me. “Woo-hoo!” More loud cheers came from behind him.
In front of me, Jack turned round and smiled. “Looking forward to this, SiSi? You okay?”
I smiled back at him, reached forward, and gently squeezed his arm. “Oh yeah, it’s going to be great!”
“Oh, you bet it will be.” He smiled hugely. “I haven’t been to the Festival since… Drew, when was it?”
Drew mmphed through a mouthful of sandwich. “Dunno… what year was it you were hanging around London wearing a leather jacket and trying out the starving-in-garret-unsigned-rock-star approach to life?”
“That was uncalled-for. Around the same time you were dying your hair bleached blond and prancing around in tight trousers in some of the dodgier bits of Soho. Could have been ’95, I guess.”
“Why are you two always so horrible to each other?” I asked.
“Because, if we were nice to each other, people would think we were gay,” Drew and Jack chorused in perfect unison, then looked at each other and frowned with identical expressions of concern.
“No, it’s only funny if I say it, Jack. If you say it, it just sounds prejudiced.”
“Alright, you two have got to stop this.” Amp leaned forward between myself and Drew. “It’s dead worrying. I mean, it starts with the two of you reading each other’s minds, and that’s all right, but what if it spreads? What if you start reading my mind? That would be bad.”
“You’re right, Duncan, that is a frightening thought,” Drew replied, and grinned. Amp flashed him the finger, grinned back, then settled back in his seat to discuss the Festival line-up with Mark. Drew and Jack exchanged wry smiles, then Jack turned round to snuggle in beside Tanya.
Hmm. Score one for the “Jack and Drew used to fuck” theory? I wondered. I’d begun to suspect a while back that, just possibly, Jack and Drew had at one point been more to each other than just platonic friends. Jack was happily married to Tanya, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t played around a bit in his younger days, I thought. However, I was unlikely to find out for definite. I didn’t want to ask Jack or Drew directly in case it looked like I was prying into their personal lives, and, despite the fact that Tanya’s mind was as broad as a plank, I didn’t quite think I could ask even her the question “So, did your husband and your gay male best friend used to fuck each other?”
I shrugged and dismissed the thought, taking a swig from the bottle of water in my bag and noted that my headache seemed to be lifting.
“Flapjack?” Jack turned round again and offered me a small cake from a bag. I took one, deciding it would do me good to eat. It was delicious, as was everything Jack cooked. I took another, causing Jack to smile hugely and pat my arm, then leaned back into my seat and stared out the window, watching London’s streets sliding by. We were out of the city centre down and onto one of the big arterial roads leading to the west. I sighed, tried not to wish that Bobby was with me, and thought of nothing.
***
Three hours into the journey, and my hangover had been replaced by a sensation of dull boredom. We’d stopped once for a bathroom break, and we were supposedly near the festival site, but the journey seemed to be taking forever, and I wasn’t succeeding in my plans not to think of Bobby.
He would have loved this, I thought. It would have been a slightly odd picture, I supposed, to someone who didn’t know Bobby well, the New York City detective in his sharp suits hanging out with a load of kids and aging hippies in a muddy field… but only if you didn’t know Bobby well. Didn’t know that he found humanity infinitely interesting, and that he would have loved the festival even if he didn’t care too much about the music, because he would have loved the chance to watch people being people. That, and he would have liked it because you liked it, and you and he loved to see each other happy…
I banished the thought fiercely, reminding myself that if Bobby had really liked to see me happy, he’d have introduced me as his partner - his romantic partner - to his mother, and made our relationship permanent.
Or would he? Had I pushed too hard, too soon? Would I have got what I wanted if I’d been willing to wait for longer?
Who knew? I thought sadly. Bobby and I were history now. I loved him so much, but I would need to put him behind me if I was ever going to have another relationship.
Like you did with John? I thought miserably. I’d gone from one fucked-up relationship to another, even more fucked-up relationship, with a senior police officer who’d turned out to be corrupt. Not exactly ideal, since I worked for Interpol myself and couldn’t afford even the hint of corruption to attach itself to me. Drew, who had told me in the first place about John’s corruption, had helped me take John down, but not before I was nearly killed in the process. I still had a livid red scar on my left leg as a permanent reminder of what could have happened if the shot that had been intended for my heart hadn’t missed.
It really hadn’t been my year for romantic relationships.
“Look, there’s Stonehenge!”
I was roused out of my mood by a loud yell from behind me, and turned to see Amp pointing excitedly at the window. Around me, others were doing the same, peering excitedly through the windows to the large ring of ancient stones beside the road. I hadn’t realised it ran so close to the ancient monument; I could almost have reached out my hand and touched them.
Beside me, Drew looked up from the book he was reading and smiled. “Nearly there, hey?”
“How nearly is nearly?”
“Um. About an hour.”
“Oh, great.”
“Hey, there’s a lot of people trying to get into one small space,” he pointed out.
“Yeah.” I smiled half-heartedly, and returned to staring out of the window.
The next thing I knew, I was standing somewhere familiar. It was dark, and cold, and there was what felt like mud, no, wet sand beneath my four feet. I realised then that I was standing on all fours, but with dream-logic, that was quite normal.
I looked around under the stormy, orange and black sky over the beach, staring out over the jagged rocks to the wild sea beyond. Beside me, a giant lion with a black mane looked at me mournfully. I turned to mouth I’m sorry, but my new mouth wouldn’t form the words, and it loped off into the distance, vanishing beyond a hill out of sight.
I turned around slowly to see where I was. Over my head, a large bat fluttered, but I ignored it, focussing instead on another lion, lolling regally on a nearby sand dune. It had no mane, and I realised that it was a lioness. It grinned at me, then lowered its great head to affectionately lick the top of the head of a small tabby cat that lay curled comfortably between its great paws. The small tabby closed its eyes in happiness, then rubbed its head affectionately against the side of the great beast’s face, licking it gently.
I turned my gaze from the two cats, then spotted a nearby pool of water. I loped over to get a drink and stared at my reflection.
I was a fox. A small fox with red fur and sad green eyes looked up at me from the pool. I stared for a few moments, mesmerised, then became aware of another presence. Another fox appeared in the water beside me, and I turned to see a lanky, sandy-furred fox with grey eyes grinning at me. It lolled its tongue, and drank greedily from the pool.
“Didn’t you used to be a crow?” I asked.
The sandy-furred fox lolled its tongue at me again and spoke. “Everyone’s allowed a bit of personal growth. Come play.” It flicked its tail at me.
I shook my head, and it loped off wagging its tail. I looked down into the pool sadly, and saw another, horrible reflection.
I flicked my head up, and saw a hideous lizard there on the other side of the pool, with a giant frill around its neck and yellow staring eyes. It hissed at me. “Should have shot you, bitch, when I had the chance.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” I replied. “You’re in prison for life. You can’t do anything to any of us. I’m not afraid of you.”
“No, it’s me you should be afraid of.” A horrible rough voice boomed from behind me, and I felt fear for the first time. I whipped around to see a giant black dog with dripping jaws looming behind me. It smiled horribly, revealing rows of yellow teeth, and lunged for me. I tried to dodge, but it was too quick and grabbed my shoulder, shaking me…
“…Wake up, SiSi, we’re nearly here!”
I jerked awake to find Drew shaking my shoulder. “Wake up, sleepy!”
I bolted upright and realised that I’d been asleep on Drew’s shoulder for at least the past hour. “Shit, where are we?”
“Nearly here, look!” Drew pointed excitedly out of the window and I gasped.
In front of us, as the bus trundled slowly down the hill, the Festival lay sprawled out across the hills. It seemed to cover the entire valley in a sea of blue tents, with here and there a candy-striped yellow and red giant tent, or white marquee, poking out above the throng. On one of them, a giant inflatable figure of a blue man lay reclining; elsewhere the silver point which I realised must be the Festival’s main stage, the Pyramid Stage, pointed skywards, and I could see a huge grey oblong which I suddenly realised was a cinema screen in one of the other fields. At the back I could see rows and rows of white points, which I realised must be tipis, then the white oblongs of caravans and Winnebagos, and then rows and rows and rows of cars. There was so much of it, filling the eye as far as I could see.
“Oh, holy crap, it’s a city,” I remarked.
“Yep, nearly two hundred thousand people. Pretty impressive, huh?”
I glanced at Drew’s face, and saw that he was smiling like a kid on Christmas morning. I’d never seen him look so purely happy in the two years I’d known him, and for his sake, I put on a big smile of my own. “Yeah!”
“You’re going to love this, SiSi,” he promised. “Just as well you got some sleep now.” He paused and rubbed his shoulder. “Even if you did just drool all over my jacket.”
I smiled. “It will wash. Are we nearly there yet?”
“Hell yes!” Tanya grinned at me. “Nearly there. We’ll put the tents up and go and explore!”
“Fantastic!” I smiled back at her, and decided that I was not going to let my crappy mood spoil my friends’ much-deserved vacation. Besides, I was starting to feel excited myself.
I had no idea what the next four days held, but at least it would be a break from reality.