july, age 4
The end of term was nearing, the school year coming to a painfully slow stop as July entered its penultimate week. The older classes at St Mary’s Primary School were finishing up class projects and clearing out their trays, some of them getting ready to move on up to high school for the next stage of their lives, but Reception was different. For the gaggle of four and five-year-olds who couldn’t read nearly as well as they could chatter, not much changed from their usual week. There was only so much learning that the young children could stand, and their teacher, Cora Jones, knew the value of educational play over the notion of traditional education. Most of the children loved it, their lives revolving around playtime in its various forms.
Lucas Langley-Flores was not most children. Even at his age, a month shy of his fifth birthday, he preferred order and organisation over loosely regulated play, whether that was how he arranged his books and his toys in his bedroom or the structure of his school day. There wasn’t much structure to be found in Reception, the day fluctuating between dressing up and playing with the water table, occasionally branching out into blocks and books. Every now and then there would be a story from the teacher or a break to play outside, when each child could have a plastic beaker of milk and a biscuit.
That was Lucas’s favourite time of the day. It wasn’t the food he cared about but the reliability. A break at ten thirty every day; lunch at twelve o’clock. Another short playtime when the clock struck two thirty before the day ended at four. Lucas couldn’t tell the time yet, but he knew those hours: he knew how the clock looked as it neared playtime, the placement of the hands engraved on his brain.
He looked up at the clock above his teacher’s desk. Cora stood beneath it, smiling at the class as she explained what they’d be doing later, but he didn’t hear her when his attention was so focused on the big hand. It was creeping closer to the six, the little hand halfway between ten and eleven, and he stared at it through the glasses that magnified his irises to everyone else. One minute to go. He didn’t know the exact timings, only that there was hardly any distance between the hand and the six.
Then he heard his teacher, focusing on her voice for the first time in a couple of minutes, and he stopped still.
“We’re going to go outside to play for fifteen minutes,” she said with an inviting beam, “and then we’re going to do some finger-painting.”
Lucas widened his stare, meeting her eye. She gave him an encouraging smile, holding up one finger as she continued to talk, and he knew what that meant. They’d developed a signal, a way for her to tell him that she would explain, and he waited until playtime officially began. It was only Nursery and Reception at that time, the two youngest classes heading out with two teachers and two assistants, plenty for the twenty children. Cora could afford to stay behind to crouch down by Lucas’s side for the first few seconds of the break.
“Hey, Lucas,” she said with a smile, perching on the edge of the low desk with her arms folded. “What’s up?”
“I don’t like finger-painting,” he said, his voice quiet, though it was less of a distaste for the artistic side and more about a hatred of getting the paint on his hands, the colour staining under his nails. “Do I have to?”
“Well,” she said, “remember what we talked about last time? About using gloves? I’ve got some gloves if you want to do that, so you can still do the project. How about we give that a go?” She gave him a bright smile and Lucas nodded, pushing his glasses up his nose. They were always slipping down.
“Ok,” he said, the word a murmur.
“Awesome. We’ll try it with the gloves, and you can keep your hands clean. Does that sound good?”
“Yes,” he mumbled. Cora squeezed his shoulder and stood, beckoning for him to follow her outside.
“Let’s go out for a play, shall we? It’s a really nice day – it’s warm and dry. Perfect.” She guided him outside, speaking in soft tones: she had got to know Lucas well over the past year with the slight advantage that she saw him almost every other weekend when he stayed with his father, and so did she. “How about you go and play with your friends, and I’m going to go and talk to Miss Green.”
Lucas spotted his best friend, Asher, and he trotted over to him. Asher broke into a grin, pulling Lucas into a game.
“We’re playing house,” he said. “We’re having a wedding.” He took Lucas’s hand, pulling him over to the archway that led to the school’s vegetable garden, maintained by the children in key stage two. Lucas’s eyes lit up, gripping Asher’s hand.
“Are we getting married?” he asked with a growing smile, his eyes widening. During an informal class discussion about different types of families at the start of the year, Cora had talked about marriage as a promise between two people who loved each other and wanted to spend the rest of their lives together. Ever since then, Lucas had been fixated on the idea of marrying Asher. He was his best friend, after all, and it seemed to him that that was a prerequisite of marriage.
“Yeah. We’re gonna be best friends forever,” he said, “so we have to get married.” He wore a triumphant beam, setting Lucas into position under the arch. He was almost a year older, his birthday in December rather than August, and it showed in his growing confidence that had come on in leaps and bounds since the start of the year. While he was just a few months away from his sixth birthday, Lucas wasn’t yet five.
A handful of children gathered around when fascination took over. One of the little girls in the class, Adler, wrinkled her nose. “Boys don’t get married,” she said with a frown, only for Asher to scowl at her.
“Yeah they do. My mummy says you marry your best friend.” He held up Lucas’s hand and then pulled him into a tight hug. “Lucas is my bestest friend in the whole world.”
“But he’s a boy,” Adler said. “You’re both boys.”
“Your best friend is a girl,” Asher said. “You have to marry your best friend. My mummy said so. And my mummy knows everything.”
Adler frowned. “I have to marry Carly?”
“Yes,” Asher said triumphantly, as though his logic was sound. For a five-year-old, it was: his mother’s words made sense, and Lucas liked the idea of being with Asher forever. He was his first and only friend, discounting his uncle Tom who was in fact a few months younger than him. Forever seemed like an awfully long time, he thought: he didn’t want to do it alone.
“Oh,” Adler said. “Ok.” She danced off to find Carly, and Asher returned his attention to Lucas.
“How do we get married?” Lucas asked, his lips pouting in confusion.
“You have to dress up all nice,” Asher said. He dug in the pocket of his trousers and took out two crumpled pieces of tissue paper. “Daddy had a bow tie. It looks like pasta.” He held up the bright green bow ties he had made out of a sheet of scrunched up tissue paper, messily taped in the middle. He tucked one into the space between Lucas’s collar and tie, doing the same to himself.
“What now?”
“Someone asks the questions.” Asher scanned the playground, his eyes landing on Tom. “Tom! Come here!”
Tom came over, only joining them because he liked Lucas, one of the only people in the whole school he was comfortable around. His mother taught Year Six and he saw her at every chance he could, and he had struggled so far to make any friends in Nursery when many of the children were part time. School was his least favourite time when it almost exclusively consisted of the kinds of activities he hated.
“We’re getting married,” Lucas said to Tom, who looked between him and Asher.
“Ok,” he said. He was a boy of few words, hardly using his voice at all.
“You have to say the words,” Asher said. “We say the … the promises, ’cause Mummy said you make promises. And you say we’re husbands” He looped his arm through Lucas’s, his grin so wide that it almost looked painful. “We have to make promises.”
“You do it first,” Lucas said, not entirely sure what he was supposed to do. He and Asher had always said they would get married, ever since they had become friends, but now he wasn’t sure what that entailed.
“Ok,” Asher said. The youngest of three boys, he was more advanced than Lucas in every way, whether that was with what he knew or how he spoke. He had started the year a timid mouse, but the months – and his friendship with Lucas – had brought out his more self-assured side. “I promise … I promise to play with you forever. And I promise to share my Haribos, even the squishy eggs and hearts. And we will play house even when we’re old, and I won’t shout at you. And I promise to hug you.” He grinned. “Now it’s your turn.”
Tom watched the two of them, his gaze flickering between the boys. Lucas took a deep breath, overthinking the words in his head. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say but Asher had promised to share his Haribo: that was a big deal. He tried to think of something he could give away, something that meant as much.
“I promise to hug you too,” he said. “And I promise I’ll share my books. And my crayons. And you can have my gingerbread sometimes.” He smiled a little more as he spoke, and he looked up when Cora walked over.
“Hi, boys,” she said, her arms folded as she smiled down at them. “What’re you up to?”
“We’re getting married!” Asher said loudly. Cora chuckled and tucked her hair behind her ear, shading her eyes from the sun that broke through the clouds.
“That’s fantastic,” she said, proud that they seemed to have taken notice when she had done a class on culture. They had talked about different types of weddings, an excuse to delve into the dressing-up box and read a few stories, and she loved nothing more than to see the children in her class take that on board. “Have you said your vows?”
“Is that the promises?” Lucas asked.
“Yes, exactly. You make promises to the person you’re marrying. What promises did you make?”
“We’re gonna play together forever,” Asher interjected, “and I’ll share my sweets. Are you married?”
Cora shook her head, her gaze momentarily dropping on Lucas. He wasn’t looking at her: his eyes were fixed on Asher, watching his every word. “No, I’m not. But those sound like really fab promises to make. Can I watch the rest of your wedding?”
Lucas nodded. He liked his teacher, to whom he had grown much closer over the past few months. There had been a period of confusion when he had learnt she was his father’s girlfriend, when she had first stayed the night in his flat, but he had grown accustomed to her presence now. He felt like he had a secret power that nobody else in his class had: he was a part of his teacher’s life outside of school.
“It’s your turn, Tom,” Asher said. “You have to say the words. You have to say we’re married.”
Tom shrank back against the tree, his voice tiny when he said, “Now you’re married.”
Asher pulled Lucas into a hug, holding onto him tightly, and Lucas gripped his best friend in an iron embrace. He hoped it was true, that he and Asher would be best friends forever, that getting married would mean they’d always be together. Cora clapped as they hugged, and Tom made himself as small as possible against the tree.
“Now we have to dance,” Lucas said, and he held Asher’s hands the way he had seen his mother dance with her boyfriend. He remembered how they held hands, and sometimes they just moved their feet as they hugged with music playing. Sometimes his mother danced with him too, or her boyfriend would swing him up and show him how to jive. He didn’t mind. Now he did the same with Asher, holding onto him as they span around in circles, and he laughed until his glasses flew off his face.
“No!” he cried out with a gasp, fear gripping him when he was virtually blinded without the glasses. His world thrust into a blur, his pulse quickened with rising fear until Asher swooped down to grab them, placing them back on his nose after he had dusted them off.
“Don’t worry, they’re ok,” he said, his grin coming into focus when he returned the lenses. Lucas touched the frames, checking they weren’t damaged, and he let out a dramatic sigh when he realised he could see once more. Asher’s face was just a few inches from his, a smile filling his line of vision. “I think they’re too big,” he said, peering at the frames. “They always fall off.”
Lucas held them against his face so close that his eyelashes touched the lenses. The last thing he wanted was to lose his glasses when he couldn’t bear to lose sight of what was right in front of him.
*
The two of them were often the last ones left in the classroom but today, Lucas was expecting it. It was a Friday and he was due to spend the weekend with his father, which meant he would be going home with Cora. He had slipped into the routine after a couple of months and now he knew not to worry when he was the only one left in the classroom: it was never long before his teacher helped him with his coat and took his hand, leading him to her car.
Asher’s mother was always late. His parents were busy, their jobs sucking up a lot of their time, and sometimes school pick-up wasn’t the biggest priority on their list. He sat opposite Lucas with a pack of playing cards split between them, each carefully adding one of their cards to the pile as they kept an eager eye out for a match.
“Snap!” he cried when he placed the ten of hearts on top of the ten of spades. Lucas took the pile, adding it to his hand, and he started the next round.
“Snap indeed,” came a familiar voice. Asher jumped to his feet when he spotted his mother, Ishaana. She held out her hand to him and laughed when he hugged her, taking his bag. “Sorry I’m late, Ash. I thought Daddy was getting you today and he thought I was.” She lifted her eyes to Cora. “Sorry about that!”
“Oh, no problem,” Cora said with a smile. “I’ll see you on Monday, Asher!”
Asher nodded and pulled Lucas into a tight hug. “Bye-bye, Lucas.” He returned to his mother but before he took her hand, he gasped and reached for her handbag.
“What’s the emergency?” she asked, letting it slip from her shoulder. She watched in amusement as Asher rifled through her things and came up with a miniature bag of Haribo. Gripping it in both hands, he crossed the classroom to pass it to Lucas.
“‘Cause I promised,” he said, and he looked around conspiratorially. “Don’t tell anyone!”
Lucas stared down at the bag. His best friend always seemed to be equipped with the sweets, possessively so: he was happy to share popcorn and pizza on a sleepover but not his gummy sweets. “Thank you,” he said, trying to count the sweets inside but the label on the wrapper made it impossible and he gave up. With a grin, Asher returned to his mother and took her hand.
Once they had exchanged the cool, air-conditioned classroom for the blazing heat of the end of July, Ishaana turned to her son. “What’s with the Haribos, Ash?” she asked. “You know that was the only packet I brought – you won’t have anything to nibble in the car now.” With her eldest son she had tried to only ever have healthy snacks in the house, handing out apples and packets of raisins, but her discipline had slipped a little more with each child and each year that she aged. Asher was number three and she was closing in on forty-six: her son’s minor addiction to those specific sweets didn’t bother her too much.
“I promised,” Asher said, gripping his mother’s hand as they headed towards Year Five and Year Six to collect his two brothers, Dylan and Aaron. Asher had never felt much like his brothers: where they were boisterous and loud, spending their free time playing football and hanging out with their friends, he still much preferred his own company – and Lucas’s.
“What did you promise?” Ishaana beckoned for her other two children when she spotted them, the two slouching out of their classrooms to join her. She hugged them in turn, earning two scowls when she ruffled their hair.
“I promised to share my Haribos with Lucas,” Asher explained. “We got married.”
Ishaana laughed, her eyebrows lifting. “You did? And you didn’t invite me?” She splayed her hand over her chest, acting as though she had been shot. Momentary concern flickered over Asher’s face.
“It’s school, Mummy. You can’t come to school.”
“I know, I know. I’m teasing you. Now, come on. Get your butts in the car.” She yanked open the car door for the boys to pile into the back seat and she waved at Cora when she spotted her heading towards the staff car park.
Lucas waved back. He squinted to see Asher but he could only just make out the backs of three heads that disappeared when Ishaana got into the driver’s seat and pulled away. He sighed and followed Cora to her car, getting in when she opened the door for him. She gave him a funny look that he returned, his eyebrows pulling together.
“What?”
“Did you hear anything I just said?” Cora asked, a laugh in her voice. Her eyes were always sparkly: Lucas liked that. She always looked happy and she made his father happy. He liked that too.
“What did you say?”
Cora just tittered and shook her head to herself. “You’re a funny old thing, Lucas. You must’ve been totally lost in your own world, huh? What’re you thinking about?”
“Asher.”
*
When Lucas got home at half past four, his father was already back from work and he raced over to see him, wrapping his arms around him. He couldn’t remember the time that his parents had been together as anything more than friends: they had broken up when he was little and he had no recollection of that year for which he had seen both parents almost every day, though that didn’t stop him from wishing that was the case.
Three days a week, Cora took Lucas back to his father’s house for the evening; every other weekend, Lucas got to spend three whole nights in a row in his father’s flat. It was a generous arrangement, something his parents had unofficially put together to allow him to spend as much time as possible with each of them without carting him to a different flat each night. Though Lucas knew no different, he had learnt to cherish the time he got to spend with his father.
“Hey, Lucas!” Floyd abandoned the supper he was putting together to give his son his full attention, after greeting Cora with a kiss and a hug. “How was today? What’ve you guys got up to?”
Lucas swung his feet, replaying the day in his head. He didn’t think about how he had almost got paint on his skin; he didn’t think about feeling of dried mud on his kneecaps when he had tripped at lunch time; he didn’t think about how his mother had put his sandwich at the bottom of his lunchbox and it had got squashed.
“Celebrations are in order,” Cora said. She hovered by Floyd’s shoulder when she sat down, giving Lucas an encouraging smile. “Why don’t you tell your daddy what happened today?”
“Asher and me got married,” Lucas said. “We’re gonna be best friends forever.” He pulled at the tissue paper bow tie he was still wearing, picking at the tape that held it together in the middle. His fingers itched to lay it flat, to spread out the wrinkled paper. Pulling the corners, he lined it up with the edge of the table but the creases didn’t disappear and it shrunk back a little when he let go.
“That’s awesome, Lucas,” Floyd said, “but I thought you said you were going to get married when you were ten?”
Lucas pursed his lips in thought, his attention divided between his father and the unruly sheet of paper, and he shook his head. “Asher’s already my bestest friend,” he said. “He will be forever. His mummy said you have to marry your best friend.”
“Well, I can’t argue with that logic. Maybe Asher can come over this weekend; you guys can have a honeymoon sleepover.”
Lucas wasn’t sure what that meant but he was too distracted to begin his usual barrage of why, why, why. “We’re gonna live together when we’re older,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Like Mummy and Truman.” He nodded to himself, repeating what his mother had told him when just a month ago, she had announced that in the summer, they would be leaving the flat he had grown up in to move in with her boyfriend and his daughter. They were due to move in a week but Lucas wasn’t sure he wanted to go: he liked Truman and he already adored Audrie as though she was the sister he wished he’d had, but he also liked riding the lift up and down every day. He liked the height, the thrill of feeling like he was living in the sky when the clouds seemed to drop lower than his window.
“How come?” Floyd asked. He took the tissue paper and smoothed it out, folding it into a crisp square.
“Mummy said we’re gonna live with Truman because she loves him,” he explained, repeating the words his mother had used when she had sat him down to explain what would be happening. “She said when you love someone and you wanna be with them, you live together.”
His words were simple, merely a repetition of his mother, but Cora stood a little straight when he spoke, her hand on Floyd’s shoulder.
“Your mummy’s right,” she said. “You should live with the people you love.”
Lucas nodded. “And I love Asher,” he said, a whorl in the wooden table snagging his attention now that the tissue paper was gone. He traced his finger over the dark knot, his fingertip bumping over the ridges in the wood.
“And I love you,” Cora said, her gaze moving to Floyd. He looked up at her when she said, “Both of you.” She dropped down onto a seat, her cheeks pink and her eyes wild as though she was trying to make a hundred calculations at once before a grin broke out across her lips. “Move in with me.”
“What?” Floyd frowned. Lucas looked up.
“I want you to move in with me,” Cora repeated. “I want you to live with me. I want to live with you.”
“Cora, are you serious? Do you mean that?”
She nodded quickly. “I do. I’ve got more than enough space and I hate living alone and it makes no sense when you could live with me. Lucas could have a bigger room and it makes sense, Floyd. Lucas is right – Sarah’s right, I suppose. We’re always together. We should live together.”
Floyd’s face cracked into a grin before he kissed her and his eyes met Lucas’s when he pulled away. “How do you feel about that, Lucas? Do you think that would be ok, if we move to Cora’s house.”
“If you move there,” Lucas said, “then Asher can move here.” He looked up with a grin at his own take on the situation. “We can play house!”
Floyd laughed and pulled Lucas over to him, hauling him onto his lap and kissing his cheek. “One day, bud. One day. Maybe when you’ve finished school, you can get a house and you and Asher can live there.”
Lucas grinned. He liked the sound of that. The circle of people he liked being around had started to widen as his parents had begun to date other people, accepting Truman and Audrie into his life before he had learnt that his teacher mattered to his father, but Asher had wormed his way there first. Less than a year ago, he had become Lucas’s first friend and as Reception came to an end, he was the only one. The only one who mattered, anyway.
*
Ishaana laid the table with six sets of cutlery and a jug of water, going all out for Friday night supper when it was virtually the only time she could get her family together. A pot of tomato sauce was bubbling away on the hob, ready to be served as soon as everyone made it downstairs. Asher sat at the table, watching his mother lay out the knives and forks.
“Is Daddy your best friend?” he asked, his elbows on the table and his chin on top of his hands.
“Absolutely,” his mother said.
“Since when?”
“Since before you were even a star in the sky,” she said with a grin.
“What about Auntie Mel? Is she your best friend too?”
Ishaana paused, her lips pursed. “Well, I think there are different kinds of best friends,” she said. “Auntie Mel is my oldest friend, and she’s my best girlfriend. Your dad is my best friend in a different kind of way.”
“He’s your best boyfriend?”
She chuckled and nodded. “You could say that.”
“Why?”
“Why what, hun?”
“Why did you marry Daddy?” His eyes followed her round the room as she moved, tracing her steps until she pulled out the seat opposite him and mimicked his position, slouched down with her chin on her hands and her eyes level.
“Because I love him,” she said. “He makes me laugh and he makes me feel safe, and we care about each other very deeply. I knew I wanted to be with your daddy forever, so we could make a life together and we could have you and your brothers. I think that your daddy makes me a better person. When you marry someone, they should be someone who makes you a better person because you have to share your life.”
“I can share,” Asher said. “I shared my Haribos with Lucas, ’cause we’re married now.”
Ishaana grinned and stood, kissing the top of his head. He followed her when she headed into the kitchen to check the sauce and give the pasta a good stir to stop it sticking together. “That was very impressive,” she said, dipping her finger in the sauce. Any moment now, the kitchen would be filled with life when Dylan and Aaron clattered downstairs to eat and her niece emerged from her bedroom.
As she stood in front of the fridge with the door wide open, searching for the block of cheddar with the grater in her hand, her husband, Bishop, appeared in the doorway and when he met Asher’s eye, he held his finger to his lips. Asher restrained his greeting for a moment, watching as his father snuck into the kitchen and stood completely still right behind his wife.
When she turned around, she shrieked and clasped her chest, thumping him with the hefty block of cheese. “Jesus Christ, you nearly gave me a fucking heart attack, you absolute idiot!” she cried out, struggling to censor herself with a thread of adrenaline running through her. Asher gasped: he knew she had said a bad word.
“Mummy,” he said, pointing at the swear jar on the counter. Ishaana dug a pound coin out of her pocket and dropped it into the jar.
“Sorry, Ash,” she said, shaking her head at her husband. “You snuck in quietly. I wasn’t sure you’d be home in time to eat with us.”
“I wanted to surprise you,” he said with a laugh, kissing her before she could attack him with the cheese again.
“I don’t think you know what a fucking surprise is,” she muttered. Asher heard but he didn’t say anything this time. His gaze was enough though: when Ishaana felt her son’s eyes on her, she added an assortment of change from her pocket. It didn’t seem to work as a deterrent: she always made sure to have cash on her, just in case one of her boys overheard an explicit rant.
“The surprise is that I’m home on time,” he said with a laugh. “How’s your day been, Ash? How was school?”
“Ooh, Ash, tell Daddy what you told me, about what you and Lucas did today,” she said with a grin, flashing her husband a knowing look as she waited for Asher to speak.
“We had a wedding at playtime. Me and Lucas got married.”
“You got married?”
He grinned and nodded. “We did promises and everything. And we danced, and Lucas nearly broke his glasses.”
Ishaana gave her husband a sideways glance, lowering her voice so even Asher’s alert ears couldn’t hear her. “Remember that bet we made?” She raised her eyebrows higher and glanced from Asher back to Bishop.
“Yes…” He eyed her suspiciously. The two of them were constantly making little bets, often at their children’s expense. It was nothing more than a bit of fun, placing wagers on their sons’ football games or their test results, though at the start of the year, Ishaana had made more of a long-term investment.
“I’m raising the stakes.” She grinned, glancing at Asher with a softer smile. He wasn’t paying attention, wandering off to find his brother’s when he grew bored of his parents’ company. “A hundred quid says those two get it off before they leave high school.”
He spluttered a laugh. “Jesus, Ish, he’s five!”
“Call it mother’s intuition,” she said. “You want in or not?” She held out her hand, challenging him with an arch of her brow. After a moment, her husband shook her hand. He was as competitive as she was, the two of them sharing that fiery streak.
“You’re on.”
+ – + – +
And so it begins! I know this is far from my best writing but there are always teething problems delving into a new book, especially with this kind of narrative. Bear with! This is something of an intro chapter: future parts will have a more defined narrative and I am still debating with myself about the style. What do you think of the more omniscient narration? Yay or nay?
I have a couple of announcements to make!
1: This book has undergone a lot of change in the past couple of days. While it was originally going to consist of thirteen shorter chapters, a snapshot of Lucas’s and Asher’s lives at intervals over 25 years, it is now planned out to be 25 longer (read: long) chapters set over around the same amount of time. I hope to finish the book for NaNoWriMo so keep your eyes peeled for frequent updates.
2: If you didn’t notice in the cast chapters for either this or for The Night Train, young Lucas has been recast. As adorable as Daehan is, he just didn’t fit the role and he was a poor example of my casting. I think Daamin is much better fit for the character and I hope you agree. An exciting part of this story being set over such a long period of time is even more scope for casting – I can’t wait for you to meet some new faces!
I hope you liked this chapter and that you look forward to the years to come!
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