Felice lives ten minutes outside the town but, because of rush hour, it takes twenty-five. Dad and I don't speak as he drives me out. We never do. Instead, I watch the windscreen wipers swish hypnotically back and forth.
The rain driving against the windscreen of the car blurs the view of the twisting road. Hemmed in with ditches, the high hedges are lush and wet, weighed down with greenery.
The house is buried at the bottom of a narrow lane. People say the site is beautiful with its commanding view of the river below and prehistoric burial site brooding in the distance.
The ancient passage grave is a listed monument, but it's so far off the beaten track the only visitors it attracts are lost hikers.
And us.
It's our special place.
Axel Carr's house is a statement piece of glass and thrusting angles that defies the forces of nature surrounding it.
Felice hates it.
She preferred the house that was there before, a modest bungalow, hidden in the landscape, barely big enough for Felice and her brothers to grow up in. That was before her parents got divorced, back when More Video 4 U was just a couple of stores in local towns.
Now they've a massive home with only Felice and Axel left to rattle around in it. Perhaps that's why he doesn't mind when she fills it with her friends.
"Axel is there, isn't he?" Dad is always so suspicious. It's the lawyer in him.
The trick is to give him just enough of what he wants, so I keep my voice indifferent. "Yeah, he'll probably ask you in for a drink."
"No!" If it hadn't been for the seatbelt, Dad would almost have leaped out of his seat. The last thing he wants is to give Axel free legal advice over several whiskeys. "I'll just drop you off. I need to keep going."
"Fine!" I smile to myself. It's exactly the reaction I was hoping for.
As soon as we pull up, the front door swings open and Felice comes flying down the steps, oblivious of the rain.
"Her hair's not blue, is it?" Dad squints at her through the rain on the windscreen. In the grey evening light, Felice's hair has a silvery sheen but underneath, it's definitely blue.
"Jesus wept!" He shakes his head in despair. "That's a perfect example of why we didn't want you going to London."
It's no secret my parents disapprove of Felice, but Drimshanra is a small town and, though they don't move in the same circles as her father, they know who he is.
Everyone does.
Drimshanra doesn't have many success stories, and Axel Carr is entirely self-made, the richest man in town. Plus Felice and I both go to St. Catherine's, an expensive boarding school in Dublin.
But the main reason my parents tolerate our friendship is because, like Axel Carr, they find driving up and down to Dublin every weekend to collect me and bring me back to school is a total chore. But now that Felice is in St. Catherine's, a perfect solution has presented itself. We take the Drimshanra bus together on Fridays, and that's how we've become close.
"Don't stay up all night," Dad says as I fish my bag off the back seat. "You girls have the whole summer to talk and catch up."
"Sure." I slam the car door shut behind me.
"Kit!" My best friend throws her arms around me and I feel alive again, for the first time since she left. We've barely known each other a year. Even though she lives just ten minutes outside Drimshanra, I'd never met her until she turned up as a new girl in St. Catherine's last September, but life before Felice came into my orbit has already become a distant memory.
I hug her back. "This place has been dead without you."
"So, where's Spike?" she asks as she pulls me up the stairs to her room. "I thought he'd come with you."
"Not tonight. It's the end of the exams." Spike is eighteen, older than us, and like every other final year student in the country, he's been doing exams all month. "Didn't you know? They're all going out."
"What? He's going out with those losers instead of us? I can't believe it."
"Come on," I try to calm her down. "It's a one off, a farewell to the past, you know how it is. He felt the need to show up –– like a Grand Finale."
"My arse, he should be out of there so fast, he's kicking the dust from his feet." Felice replies.
"Look, I got us a film to watch." Once she gets started on Spike, she could go on all night. I need to get her attention. "There's a new guy in the shop, moved down from Dublin. He thought it was a good choice."
"Did he now? What is it?"
"Your favourite." I hand her the video and she bursts out laughing.
"Strictly Ballroom. Ok you've cheered me up. New guy's got taste anyway. Is he good-looking?"
Her question throws me. His looks were ok, but he wouldn't be Felice's type.
"He's not cool enough for us," I say.
"Who is?"
For some reason her bored dismissal of this guy she's never met and who, admittedly, isn't very cool, niggles at me. I almost feel bad for him, except I don't even know him. And I really don't want to.
Felice has only been back a couple of hours but her room is already a mess. "Got all this in Camden market." She sifts through the stuff strewn on the floor, the clothes trailing out of bags, and picks up a black lace top. "Cool, eh?"
"Yeah," I say. "It's amazing."
"Got it for you, babe!"
"Wow, thanks." I forget all about the new guy. Felice is back and we're together again. That's all that matters.
"Try it on, I want to see how it looks on you."
"What's that? Spice Girls?" I ask in horror as she pulls out shiny track suit bottoms.
"No." She swipes at me with it, but she's laughing at the same time. "More like Gwen Stefani. Wait till you see it with the hair."
Minutes later, we've both changed and are staring in the mirror, arms around each other, amazed at how different we look.
"I knew you could wear that top. You're so slim." Felice grins at our joint reflection. "Look at you, such a cool rock chick!"
The black top is tighter than I'd normally wear and more low cut, but it has an edgy effect with my oversized boyfriend jeans and grungy hair.
Before she left, Felice was the queen of baggy clothes, but she's a chameleon and in London, her look has transformed again.
"I got bored of black," she says. "Looks better on you than it does on me."
Even though she does look totally amazing with her silvery blue hair in a rough cut bob, and a cut-off top that exposes her midriff, I can't help being sorry she's ditched the black.
I liked the way the three of us were the same, all of us always in black. It marked us out, defined us as a group. Made me feel I belonged.
As she turns away, I catch a glimpse of something, a dark stain on her back, peeking out over the elasticated waist of her orange tracksuit bottoms.
"What's that?"
"This?" She grins and pulls back the elastic to show me. "I got a tattoo."
"No way, you didn't! Did it hurt?" I examine the small black abstract design, the skin around it still pink and a little raw. "What is it?"
"A tribal symbol."
"Wow, that's so cool." But the tattoo disturbs me. It's something else that sets us apart. There's no way I could get one. Ever. Her blue hair is nothing to how this would freak my parents out. I hope they never see it.
"What did your dad say?"
"Dad? Don't worry about Dad, he won't notice."
Unless, he's gone blind, there's no way Axel Carr will miss that tattoo the next time she goes out in a crop-top. I say nothing but she knows what I'm thinking.
"Look!" she hikes up the waist of her tracksuit bottoms. "See? All covered. Told you, he's not going to notice."
This is what I love about when we're together. We are so in tune, sometimes we don't need words, we're almost telepathic.
"Come on," she says after we've pulled all her purchases out of the bags and rummaged through them. "Let's watch Strictly!"
We raid the kitchen for popcorn and crisps. Outside it's so dark all you can see are the slanting rivulets of rain running across the huge plate glass windows.
"Spike has a shite night for his big party, hasn't he?" Felice comments with satisfaction. Once the video is on in the den, it's just like old times as we get caught into the conspiracies of the Australian Dance Federation and their resistance to change.
Scott Hastings is making his iconic entrance onto the dance floor when the phone rings outside in the hall.
Its shrill jangle cuts through the music, freezing us both like statues.
It's an instinct.
The call in the middle of the night.
Always bad news.
Author's Note
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