Above the Vaulted Sky - Page 10

But he’s given me the answer that I needed. I know my girlfriend better than anyone else. We’ve known each other for five years, we've grown up together.

I smell the smoke that has become ingrained in the trees behind the art rooms.

I hold a hand out to steady myself, gripping onto the bark beside me. My still wet face remains defiant to the dry air of a summer’s day. I'm standing in the woods behind the art rooms. I’m standing in the school I’d almost forgotten. The countless lunchtimes I’d trodden the path down to the student-designated smoking area.

Is this how easy it is? I think about a place and I’m there.

‘Hey, Easton!’

I turn, startled by the recognition. I see a young boy trudging through the wilderness of a suburban London green space; green, but eternally greyed by the endless pollution around it. I can hear the A-road our school backs onto, car after car after car speeding past, invisible to the delinquent teenagers hidden in the trees.

‘Hurry up!’ the boy calls again. I look closer. Graham. It’s Graham Upton, the boy I’d been attached to until we’d gone to separate colleges, and here he was, standing in his school uniform waving at me, an unlit Marlboro between his lips.

Slowly, feeling embarrassed, I raise my hand.

And then I feel the breath knocked from me. Like my lungs have been grasped and squeezed.

A boy, in the same black blazer as Graham, appears before me, so immediately close I start and step back into the tree.

That brown hair, sodden with gel at the front because he thought it was cool. That black bag with the hole in it; the devourer of many a pen and pieces of homework. Those turn ups at the bottom of his trousers.

It’s me. I’ve walked through myself.

‘Now we hurry,’ grumbles the other me.

‘We have an invite,’ Graham stresses. ‘An invite to the smoking hut. This is the holy grail of invites! Don’t mess this up for me.’

‘And who got that invite?’ the other me asks, stopping in his tracks. ‘Who helped Isobel with her Science write-up last week for this? And who thought this was a stupid idea until he suddenly decided last week that he was a smoker?'

I look at the scene before me. The scene I remember so vividly. This is the day I met Penny for the first time.