You know those summers that never seem to end? They’re long and hot (not too hot) and drowsy yet active; easygoing. And no matter how late you stay up it’s light for most of your day? We’re right in the middle of one, my friends and I. They usually happen after the end of big exams, like GCSEs and ‘A’ levels, and when you’ve finished you university course, like I have. They’re full of promise, these summers. There’s so much time to fill before we all start all over again, or start something new, or whatever, and your mind’s unencumbered by duty or formal thinking, or guilt that you aren’t doing either of these and it goes spinning off on its own round of invention. Whether you never do any of the things you think of is not important – you’ve thunk them. Thought them. I really shouldn’t write as I think, should I?

The summers embedded in between the years of courses (A levels, GCSEs, honours degree, masters, doctorate, BTEC, apprenticeship, whatever) aren’t like this. Especially university, when all your friends disappear and you’re left with the boring ones from back home you never liked when you were in school with them anyway. Such summers are for long letters and feeling bad that you’re not doing all those things your suddenly freed brain comes up with. Such summers can only be Summers, like this one, where each day is a distillation of the essence, the concept of Summer, when you have a lover to share them with, especially a new one; again, like I have.

There she is. Laura. Over there, laughing her tits off with P. P insists we call P P because it doesn’t tie P down to the constraints of a falsely-imposed gender role. P is incensed that there is no neutral pronoun in the English language (and I must admit that at this point I’m a bit pissed-off too) apart from ‘it’, which has rather impersonal, inanimate, almost insulting connotations.

They’re both laughing delightedly (and delightfully), heads back and eyes sparkling. They both look across at me, laughing to me, eyes beaming out across the space. I smile back, shining lazily, feeling full of sun; hot and juicy and too lazy to reach across to the table for my sunglasses. I’m still at the stage where I’m conscious of a need to impress Laura, so I try to ignore the trickle of sweat sliding inexorably down my side and the fact that my bra strap has slipped off my shoulder under my teeshirt, and that sooner or later I’m going to have to do something about it.

P turns P’s head and Laura lingers for a little on me, grin concentrated down now to a delicious little smile. Our eyes hold each other before she turns back to P. I’m not jealous because a) I’m too lazy ever to be jealous, b) I could never compete with P for anyone’s attention, anyway, and c) P has denounced sex. I assume P has renounced it too, but that’s probably a big assumption. Any assumption’s bad where P’s concerned, and that’s the way P likes it. P works very hard at it. I’m beginning to hate this neutral pronoun thing heartily.

The Cough’s back. No – not a symptom. Well, maybe he’s a symptom of our group or a symptom of our time (that was profound, huh?). He’s named (not to his knowledge, as far as we know) in honour of a recurring hacking cough which shakes his frame, rattles his throat and draws blood from the ears of his companions until one last spasm produces a meagre amount of phlegm which he neatly deposits in a paper hanky. With anyone else I would call it a tissue, but Paul’s definitely got paper hankies. The cough, along with his pale skin, undernourished frame and black-circled eyes, used to bring looks askance and whispers of TB and you know what that means. You don’t? Well tough shit – I’m not going to spell it out. (Well, okay, here’s a clue: in affluent Western inoculated society, only a few get TB – only those who can’t fight off diseases, who’ve got a knackered immune sys... well done!) He’s been known to cough up blood a couple of times, but that always turned out to be a nosebleed that had gone down the back of his throat.

In fact, that’s Paul’s problem – he has almost constant catarrh, and that slips down into his lungs and bungs them, so he has to cough hard to clear them. It’s a miserable, thin cough too, because he’s fighting really tough negative pressure (and really tough mucus too, by the sound of it). At the moment it’s all exacerbated (good word, that) by his hayfever, and he can’t blow his nose to get rid of all this because he gets the aforementioned nosebleeds.

There’s always going to be someone who doesn’t enjoy the summer. It used to be me, because I tend to overheat easily and the car fumes get to me, but I can’t say I’ve noticed this year. She’s looking at me again, momentarily released by P, who has turned the full beam of P’s wit on someone else.

I don’t remember when I first saw her, or, rather, I do; I don’t remember when I first fancied her. I can remember when I fell in love, because from then on my life was dictated by obsession, every event’s concept centred on how close or far away it took me from the step of asking her out. It was a moment when we both looked at each other at exactly the same time and smiled, then looked away. And it was about some trivial other thing that was happening, and not as if we’d never smiled at each other before, and not as if there’d never been all that time before when, since from practically the first moment we had a real conversation with each other, we knew that we fancied each other, and that we both knew it. There was a kind of frisson of inevitability about it, but I never thought I’d fall in love with her.

Or with anyone again. I thought I was over all that. But then, each time I do, I think that I thought I was over falling in love. The last boyfriend went badly – I went out with a friend, which I’d sworn never to do, fallen in love with him a week or so later, then gone back to ‘just’ being friends. And then I had to tell him and he took it badly. We’re talking thought he’d found his One And Only stuff here, and I think everyone else saw it, and well before even me. Right at the beginning, in fact, when everyone asked why I was going out with him. And then all the complicated other things after that little picnic, and projects and family and exams and then her. I tell myself I’m lucky and I know I am. I know it can’t last long, because, well, for all sorts of reasons – me, her, the impermanence of ‘that’ sort of relationship – in fact, there’s a little cowardly part of me that hopes, in a sticky, sweaty, twisted way that it’ll all break up before I’m really forced to tell my mother.

P laughs loudly, throwing the head back and displaying the throat to the sun. P seems to be drinking in the hot air. Laura’s sitting down, sipping at a cool glass, Melanie’s screaming with laughter, her eyes full of sunlight too. You can feel the disapproval of Melanie’s neighbours like a palpable thing, like they’re washing a stew of lumpy thoughts across the stone wall, trying to damp down our noise.

The tiny ferns stir a little on top of the back wall. My chair creaks slightly, expanding with the heat and complaining at my weight. Laura’s drink looks very cool; I can feel it slipping down her throat. A tiny fly has landed on her shoulder and she hasn’t noticed it. I shift my legs slightly, forcing myself not to stare. I’ve just felt the breeze that stirred the ferns, but it doesn’t make much of a difference.

Melanie stands up. "Here’s to the longest day." We smile back, raise our glasses or cans and mutter back at her. Melanie guzzles her lager, hair streaming down as her head hangs further and further back. When she finishes, there is a scatter of sticky-palmed, lazy applause. She reaches for another can.

"Bibulous bunny," says P; a thing only P would say. It started off as a joke one of us brought back from an arduous trip made across Europe only the width of a coach aisle from a determinedly soppy couple. Naughty Bunny, Sleepy Bunny, Silly Bunny etc. P took it on as P’s own, using meticulously correct and multi-syllabic words that are so old and so correct, so precise in their meaning, that even those of us who know what they mean would never use them. I always promise myself that I’m going to come out with a whole string of them one day, absolutely correctly pronounced and completely apt, of course, just to show P that P’s not the only one who knows how to use them. But I never will. It’s not my role.

Any minute now, Helena’s going to lean across and ask what I’m doing. Don’t get me wrong – I love Helena, we all do; we all love all of the rest, in fact, but I know she’s going to have to ask. Now freed from a glassy Tom, propped against the wall over there, she is at liberty to indulge her curiosity, to question, to probe. Sometimes I think P would be so good for her – P needs to answer, and she needs answers. And the thing is that P would teach her to ask, too. But Tom, encased in the shiny-hard capsule of Tom’s personality, provides a host of problems for her to solve, which is what she thinks she wants, and what she assumes he needs.

Paul gazes at Melanie; a tiny frown of concern appears, then disappears when she smiles slowly to herself, cross-legged on the cracked concrete of her back garden. She is still quite steady, not wobbly-drunk yet, and has relaxed enough to actually enjoy herself rather than make sure we all think she is. Paul is the only one who knows that that scar which stands out against the top of her smooth, tanned shoulder is from where her last boyfriend let fly at her with a broken bottle. She is the only one who knows that the dark patches of skin under his eyes are because he can’t sleep for more than an hour or so at a time, rising every so often to cough away what’s pooled in his lungs for half an hour. The doctor can’t give him anything because he needs to cough this stuff up, and they haven’t worked out how to deal with the mucus.

I am the only one who knows that Paul is the only one who knows what Tom did to Melanie, and I am the only one who knows that Melanie is the only one who knows about Paul’s sleeping patterns. I know because they both told me as the only person they were going to tell about what they’d learned. I am the only one who knows that they are both in love with P and that this will draw them closer together than anything else could. Even they don’t know that, although I couldn’t swear that P doesn’t know.

The sun’s shining down from behind my left shoulder. It reflects off the page in front of me and the table to my right, shedding a weird white glow on my skin. The pages of this book are full of sunlight, making them subtly powerful, strong and happy. Helena shifts beside me, curiosity pricked, drawn by the strong beam of the white pages bursting to share their message. The moment she leaps whatever barrier Tom places in her and asks the question is surely near.

Time ticks on the hot paving and the still-cool stones at the bottom of the walls, afternoon turning slowly to evening. The colour of the sky is perfect, and when it turns grey with dusk we wouldn’t want it any other way either. P laughs again, suddenly, but Melanie is looking at the ground between her feet, a slow-spreading smile almost complete. Paul sighs and leans back; Helena sighs, and leans forward.

When she asks me, I’ll cock my pencil against my shoulder and tip the book sideways for her to see, but at such an angle so she’ll have to lean over. I’ll say "I’m drawing a picture of us all," and she’ll say "But it’s all words," and I, looking at Laura looking down at that ladybird on her knee , short straight hair swinging over her face, will say "Exactly."