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At this I think of something. I dash to pick the camera up from the blanket.
“What are you doing?” he asks urgently, his voice suspicious.
As quick as I can, I select all of the pictures saved in his camera. I don’t have enough time to only select the ones of me, so I have to delete all of them. For some reason, a slight twinge of guilt twists in me, because even though I’m only getting rid of pictures he took without my permission, violating my privacy, it feels like I’m destroying his art. I push that thought away quickly. It’s not art. It’s voyeurism at most.
He grabs the camera from me now, suddenly realising what I’ve done.
“You deleted them all,” he whispers in disbelief, scrolling up and down as though that might make them reappear.
Tears spring to my eyes. “Yes, and I had every right to.”
His face contorts with suppressed anger. “You had no right,” he grits, his jaw working. “For fuck’s sake, I hadn’t even saved them properly to my computer yet, Lana!”
“I had to get rid of them. You took pictures of me sleeping, Robert. That’s not healthy.” My momentary outrage dissolves, and now I just feel guilty. “I’m sorry, but you can’t keep those kinds of pictures of me. You…you just can’t.”
He stomps right up to me and takes me by the shoulders harshly. His stare is so intense that I don’t know if he’s going to kiss me or smack me. In the end he doesn’t do either. He lets go and brushes harshly past me, stalking into the house.
I’m left standing in the bright, sunny garden, while my heart falls into a dark, perturbed place.
Interlude II – Robert
September 2004.
The first day back at school is always exciting. I’m just home from spending the summer at my dad’s. Turns out, living in Ireland wasn’t as atrocious as I expected it to be. It’s definitely different, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. For instance, back in London we’d steal booze from our parents’ drinks cabinet and go get pissed on some street corner. In Ireland we get someone’s older brother or sister to buy it for us, and then we’ll go drink it on the beach or in the middle of a farmer’s field before stealing a car and going joyriding around the countryside.
I’m basically the king of the guys in my class. They all look up to me like I’m some sort of god of cool. I think having an accent works to my advantage. It makes me exotic to the kids here, someone to emulate.
Today is not only exciting because it’s the first day back, it’s also exciting because it’s Lana’s first day. Sasha and I are two years ahead of her, so we’ve never attended the same school before.
It’s sort of a big deal when a new girl starts here, since it was “boys only” up until a few years ago, having originally been an all-boys boarding school, so there’s a distinct lack of females. I haven’t seen my little redhead all summer, and I’m eagerly anticipating encountering her in the halls or at lunch.
My initial hatred has died down. I no longer blame her for being a friend to Sasha when I needed my sister to be friendless. Now I’ve developed a new feeling for her. It’s something perverse that I can’t quite explain. I enjoy making her miserable…seeing the ghost of pain flicker in her pretty blue eyes.
It’s kind of sadistic, but what the hell, maybe I’m a sadist. All I know is that I live for being around her, for being able to hurt her emotionally. It’s like verbal foreplay. Something in my psyche must be malformed, because if there’s a button in front of me, I’m going to push it. And if anyone’s the human equivalent of a button for me, it’s Lana.
Sometimes she seems so unaffected, yet I can tell I’m getting to her on a deeper level. She never lets it show on the surface. Like a little stoic warrior, she doesn’t give me the outburst that I crave. Perhaps that’s what drives me. I have to keep doing it until she finally cracks.
The signs are minuscule, but after two years I’ve learned to recognise them. When I’ve hit a sore spot, her eyes get huge and her nostrils twitch. It’s adorable.
The sick thing is, I think I might be in love with her.
I know, I know. What right does a sixteen-year-old have talking about love? Perhaps it’s just obsession. Mum says I’m far too intense for my age. I mean, if this is how I treat the people I love, then how on earth do I treat the people I hate? I think about this sort of stuff a lot. When you live in the back arse of nowhere, you have a lot of time to think.
Funnily enough, Mum also says I think too much.
When it comes down to it, though, it’s really just all about Lana. Somehow our relationship has evolved into this unhealthy cycle of me being a dick and her taking it.
I crave our interaction like a drug.
Since we’ve been apart for three whole months, I’m in desperate need of a fix.
Class doesn’t start for another fifteen minutes, and I’m sitting on the grass with my mates Dean and Liam, loosening the tie that my mum made me put on before I left the house this morning. Oh, yeah, there’s another difference between my school here and the one I went to in London — we have to wear uniforms. Ugh.
I see Sasha and Lana approach the school gates, and my heart speeds up. Sasha’s over the moon to have her best buddy back after our summer away. She’s got her elbow resting on Lana’s shoulder as they walk along, reciting some big story, probably about how our dad’s a bastard and she hates him.
They fought more than ever this summer. I can’t count the number of occasions where he’d say something to piss her off and she’d pull a strop. There were lots of feet stomping up stairs and bedroom doors being slammed shut. Now Sasha’s going through a Goth phase; black hair dye and matching nail polish are her new favourite things.
