Eric stood up and announced that he was turning in. ‘Don’t stay up late, honey,’ he called to his daughter. ‘Half an hour, deal?’ He ruffled her hair as he passed her.
‘Night, Daddy,’ Rose said, smoothing it back. He waddled to their tent, looking back once over his shoulder.
Adam was about to interrupt them, but the Yorkshireman insisted on telling him about his haulage business, and then Neil was wiping a bug from Rose’s shoulder, or pretending to, the deviously tactile bastard. Now the woman was on to the Prime Minister, how he seemed a decent enough bloke but the rest of them were chancers, and Neil was laughing along with her, and, Adam asked himself, how serious was it likely to be, anyway?
Eventually the woman said good night and went to their tent, but the man hung on. Beyond his chatter (the virtues of corporal punishment), Adam caught Rose asking whether Neil had a girlfriend and Neil saying he wasn’t sure, he would know later that evening, a corny line that made her grin. Neil had beaten him, his clever little tricks had beaten him, and after all, Adam thought, this was what he wanted. He had done this to himself.
Adam finished his beer. The fire had nearly burned out, but when he stood and brushed the dust from his shorts he thought he could see that, though she wasn’t drinking anything, Rose was swallowing nervously, as daunted girls did when they had made their decision. Neil’s hand was on her knee.
The Yorkshireman was dozing off, his chin making futile anti-gravitational jerks from his chest. Adam saw the smile on his friend’s face. High-school sophomore… This wasn’t his business. When he opened his mouth, all that emerged was ‘Good night’. Rose reciprocated in a voice that tried to sound composed but came out too high. Neil lifted his hand from her leg and waved. Adam walked slowly to their tent.
For Adam that night would always be associated with itching, a fierce sensation he could almost feel if he inadvertently thought back to Yosemite. He was in the tent, in the no man’s land between waking and sleep, when he felt Neil’s hand on his shoulder.
‘Adam,’ Neil whispered. Then, louder, shaking him harder: ‘Mate, I need the tent.’
‘What?’
‘I need the tent.’
Adam tried to focus on the ghostly features before panning towards the tent flaps. Through the opening he distinguished the girl’s legs, standing in the moonlight, one of them rotating on a pointed sneaker.
He hesitated. The tent smelled of beer.
‘Neil,’ he began, ‘have you…’
‘Don’t worry,’ Neil told him. ‘Boy scout.’ He tightened his grip on his friend’s shoulder. ‘Adam, come on.’
Adam kneeled, bunched up his sleeping bag and crawled outside in his boxer shorts and T-shirt. Rose’s face as he passed her was open and eager, as if she had won her own dare. He saw her bend and enter the tent, and Neil following her in.
He should have taken himself further off, beneath the trees at the edge of the campsite or beside the expiring fire. Instead he dropped his sleeping bag a few metres from the tent, blearily considering that to be his assigned place in the world.
He was nearly close enough to touch them and thought he heard almost everything. They were whispering, and now and again he lost them, but even then he caught the rhythm and the gist. They bumped into and tripped over each other as they settled themselves inside. There was some strangerish apologising, followed by silence, from which Adam inferred that Neil had used the entanglement to kiss her.
Outside the night was cooler than the tent had been, but it was warm enough for Adam to spread out his sleeping bag and recline on top rather than zipping himself in. When he lay down, uncovered, he hadn’t reckoned on the midges, or whatever the insects were, some unsquashably tiny and incessant creatures that tormented his forearms and legs. When he moved to scratch or wave them away, the lining of his sleeping bag crackled, interfering with his eavesdropping and potentially alerting Neil and Rose. He lay as still and stoically as he could for as long as it lasted.
The tent was small (standard issue from the tour operator), and two or three times an elbow or other extremity stretched the fabric in a slapstick bulge. She was giggling, and Neil was shushing her, then he was giggling too. There was quiet, punctuated by rustling as clothes were shed. Neil whispered something that Adam couldn’t decipher and Rose replied inaudibly. A minute later he heard her say, ‘Sure’.
The itching was overwhelming but he didn’t move. He could hear Neil going through his bag, taking things out, putting them back. Neil swore. That’s it, Adam thought. But there was more whispering, and some panting, and it was on again.
‘That much?’ he heard Neil asking her. ‘How much?’
‘Sorry,’ Rose said.
‘Okay?’
‘Okay.’
Adam knew when it was over. He swatted helplessly at the midges and zipped up his sleeping bag. He felt a fuzzy, insomniac dread, like a person who suspects he has left the oven on (High school sophomore’s what I mean). Even so, his alarm was subordinate to another feeling: a new, disconcerting jealousy. He hadn’t expected to be beaten, he wasn’t accustomed to losing, but it wasn’t mainly that.
Adam was jealous of Rose. She had come between them. She had taken away his friend. The two of them were still in the tent together, whispering, when — just as he was sure he would never manage to — Adam fell into a brief, uncomfortable sleep.
Eric’s first instinct, his instant threat, was to call the police. They had been careless and unlucky. Rose stayed longer than she should have; she, then Neil, fell asleep. Her father woke as it started to get light, saw that she wasn’t with him and shuffled out to look for her. They heard him rummaging around the camp and she panicked, scrambled into her clothes and outside, and he caught her leaving the tent. His shouting roused Adam, along with most of the others.
‘Fifteen,’ Adam heard Eric yelling. ‘Did you know that, you asshole? Fifteen! I told you guys!’
‘Nearly sixteen,’ Rose said quietly.
‘No, you’re not,’ he snapped. ‘You just had your birthday. Jesus… And your mother!’
Neil was saying ‘I’m sorry’ over and over. He was standing next to Rose in his boxer shorts, his legs pasty and thin, holding up his hands in a Don’t shoot! pose. At one point, apparently thinking of Eric’s friendliness and invitation, he added something about there having been a ‘misunderstanding’, but he quickly saw that straight apology was wiser. The hippies, two of the Germans and the gay couple were already there, hovering a few yards away, as if there were an invisible cordon holding them back.
‘Damn right you’re sorry,’ Eric said. ‘Don’t go anywhere, you asshole.’ He surveyed the other campers, as if to enlist them as sentries. ‘Where’s that fucking guide?’ He peered around for Trey. ‘Where’s the nearest phone? Jesus Christ, come here, honey.’
Eric seized Rose by a wrist and marched her away to the other side of the campsite. ‘What’s the matter with you, you asshole?’ he growled at Adam as they passed him. Adam heard Rose say ‘no’ repeatedly, her volume rising each time, the voice between a shriek and a plea, though he couldn’t make out what it was that she was rejecting — an imputation of duress, maybe, or a threat of disownment, or the call to the police.
The English couple arrived, the woman in an incongruous dressing gown, and they and the others spontaneously formed a loose, citizens’ semicircle around Neil, the tent hemming him in behind. Neil’s shoulders were slumped, his face bone white. He kept his eyes on the ground until, timidly, he looked up at Adam. After a few seconds Adam pushed between the Germans and joined him.