As Marcus swims off with the wine, Dylan looks at me. He’s worried. Good – he should be.
‘You OK?’ he whispers, passing me his glass.
‘Mm,’ I say. I take a long gulp of wine. ‘Thought it would be you knocking on the door, that’s all.’
Dylan bites his lip. ‘Oh, no, was that wrong? Should I have come around first? I didn’t know whether to – Marcus was sure you’d want him to apologise himself, and that did seem . . .’
‘Can you get up on the roof?’ Marcus asks. He’s lying on his back now, open bottle bobbing in his hand. He’s carefully keeping it upright, I notice.
Dylan and I turn to look at the villa.
‘There’s a loft,’ I say after a moment. ‘You can get to it from the bedroom next to Dylan’s. But I don’t think there’s a way on to the actual roof.’
Marcus swims to the edge and heaves himself up out of the pool. The water sluices from him, plastering his T-shirt to his skin. He doesn’t bother drying off, just heads straight for the house, leaving a small river behind him.
‘Let me guess,’ I say. ‘We’re going on to the roof?’
‘What Marcus wants . . .’ Dylan spreads his hands. ‘He tends to get.’
There’s a trapdoor from the loft to the roof. I don’t know how I never spotted it. I guess it never occurred to me to climb on to the slanted roof of a three-storey villa.
By the time we’ve explored the whole upstairs, located the trapdoor, found a ladder and got the trapdoor wedged open, we’re all drunk. I’m dizzy as I climb up the rungs, but aware enough to know this is massively dangerous. Marcus is already up there. I can hear him scrabbling around on the tiles. I look down at Dylan. He looks different from this angle, sort of younger.
‘Dylan? You coming up?’ Marcus calls from the roof.
I take another step, my head and shoulders emerging above the trapdoor. It’s hard to read Marcus’s expression in the darkness as he looks over and sees me instead of his best friend.
‘Are you going to help me out?’ I say eventually.
He stretches out a hand. The roof is only gently sloped here, and Marcus has his feet lodged in the guttering so he can’t slide off, but still, it’s mad, this. We could really die.
I take his hand and let him help me up. His skin’s cool. He smells of the pool, and an aftershave a bit like Dylan’s, but sharper. I shuffle on my bum, carefully twisting so I can lie back and look at the night sky.
‘Wow.’ There are so many stars, more than I’ve ever seen before. They’re everywhere, stretching out all around us, sliding into the edges of my vision. The sky is so big, I think. I’ve drunk too much wine too fast – I’d never normally have a thought like that.
‘Sublime, isn’t it?’ Marcus says. ‘In the Edmund Burke sense.’
I’ve no idea what that means. If it were Dylan, I’d ask, but there’s no way I’m asking Marcus.
Dylan coughs from beneath us. ‘Shit, Terry’s up!’ he hisses. ‘Let me go fob him off, hang on.’
Marcus laughs lightly. It’s so dark, just the light from the loft bulb shining up through the trapdoor. Marcus’s hand brushes the back of mine for a moment as he shifts on the tiles.
‘He’s scared to come up,’ Marcus says.
‘Who, Dylan?’
‘He doesn’t like heights. But he tends to forget until he gets there.’
I can hear the smile in Marcus’s voice. I can hardly look at all the stars above us, like my brain just won’t take it all in.
‘You weren’t scared,’ Marcus says.
‘I was.’
‘But you’re up here anyway.’
‘Sure.’
‘Are you the sort of woman who always does the dangerous thing?’
I smile at that. ‘Not at all. I’m not that exciting.’
‘I think you are,’ Marcus says. He shifts. I think he’s turned to look at me, though it’s hard to be sure in the darkness. ‘And I’m excellent at reading people.’
‘Right,’ I say, humouring him. ‘Sure you are.’
‘Your school reports always said you had lots of potential. You’ve worn those bracelets on your wrist since you were thirteen, maybe earlier – you feel naked without them. You love to dance, and you love to be seen, and you hate to be forgotten. And when you stand at the edge of a sheer drop with somebody else . . . you think for just a moment about pushing them off.’