We Are Together Because (eBook)

A novel of siblings, sex and the end of the world

Kerry Andrew (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
320 Seiten
Atlantic Books (Verlag)
978-1-80546-019-0 (ISBN)

Infos

Luke, Connor, Thea and Violet spend their first holiday together alone in their father's house in the south of France. The boys don't really know him, and they don't really know their half-sisters, either. Luke, the most easy going of the four, is keen to bring a new shape to their overlapping, unconventional family; Connor and Thea, born just six months apart but a world of difference between them, are struggling to hide their attraction to each other; Violet, the youngest, is trying to figure some things out about herself, and trying desperately to forget others. Sex in all its multiple forms is on the minds of the siblings during the hot, lethargic summer days spent next to the pool, but the land around them is starting to respond to something inexplicable and eerie. Animals begin to act strangely. There is a buzzing sound that only Connor can hear, and when Violet one night sees a plane light abruptly disappear in the sky, it signals the beginning of something that threatens so much more than their turbulent holiday. With considerable power and unfolding revelation, We Are Together Because starts as a sensual summer drama and very quickly becomes about our own survival, asking us what is truly important in life, and how far we've strayed from our place in a more fluid, vibrant, natural world.

Kerry Andrew is a London-based musician and author. They are the acclaimed author of Swansong (2018) and Skin (2021), and their short fiction has been shortlisted twice for BBC National Short Story Award and has been performed on BBC Radio Four. They are also the winner of four British Composer Awards.

Textauszug

One

The sun never reached this part of the river.

It was cold, unswimmable. The sheer limestone cliffs narrowed to just a few feet apart, and merged into one on the water’s marbled, flat surface. Elsewhere, the ancient walls were deep with moss and ferns that never lost moisture.

Caves were dug here, places of dark and quiet when there was nowhere else. Red ochre striped by fingers onto white rock. Strange shapes – lines moving outwards from one central point, webbed together. A child, buried with a polished axe and a flint blade.

Hundreds of metres above the gorge, the land was once hard in summer and hard under snow in the winter months. In the hills, past a village that prided itself on almonds and lavender, sat a farmhouse, 153 years old, and built with mountain stone. Home to three generations who spent long days amongst their sixty sheep, and short nights packed too tight into its rooms. Over a century and a half, clusters of houses appeared around it, vineyards and olive groves spreading further. The Great War came, and the family dispersed. The farmhouse began to crumble at the edges, tiles cracking, stairs slanting, before the tourists started to arrive.

Now, along with a third of the houses in this south-eastern corner of France, it was a summer residence. William Low had purchased it nine years ago, regularly leasing it out to friends and work colleagues when not staying there himself, which he did with less frequency than he’d ever intended.

This time, he did something new. He sent his offspring – his lopsided family, slipshod in the middle – ahead, whilst he worked on completing three simultaneous cases and tried not to worry about how they would get on.

William would not see his children again. No one would.

It was late July, and the youngest of his four progeny was currently standing one-legged on the high wall above a slanted slope of young green oak and olive trees and was, not for the first time, thinking about killing herself.

* * *

If she fell now, she would hit her head on a rock and split it open. If she tried to jump, get height on it, she might impale herself on a branch. She could at least break a leg, with enough effort.

Violet swivelled around on the heel and ball of one bare foot, to face the garden and the pool and the house. She could stand on one leg for ages. A very warm breeze lifted up the hairs at the bottom of her neck. Do it, Violet, it whispered. Disgusting fucking bitch. She could just tip back, let herself go, arms outwards.

Violet. In her etymology app, violet was a small wild plant with purplish-blue flowers, c. 1300, from the Old French ‘violete’, from the Latin ‘viol’. The last colour in a rainbow. The name great-grannies had. You couldn’t shorten it, except to ‘Vile’, which some girls whispered not very quietly, or ‘V’, which some boys demonstrated by waggling their tongues through two fingers. Up yours. The victory sign. Vee Vye Vo Vum.

Her sister’s name was two of the most basic words in the English language stuck together, and yet it meant goddess of light, mother of the sun, moon and stars.

Big brother one: light, again. Giver of light. Big brother two: strong and wise and apparently a lover of hounds. She should have that one – dogs were her number-one favourite.

Dad had obviously worked his way down, from normal names that normal people had, to embarrassing ones. LukeConnorTheaViolet. Trust her to be last.

It was fucking annoying.

Violet had been watching trash TV with Dad back home in London – for all his lawyering and history books as heavy as bricks, he was a sucker for people marrying strangers and entrepreneurs making fools of themselves – when he proposed the holiday.

‘What do you think about France with Luke and Connor this year?’ he’d said, putting his hand in the bowl of popcorn.

‘Cool beans!’ Violet had said, before he mentioned that he’d be working in Beijing for at least the first week. She felt like she’d been trapped into it, but was still excited – they’d only ever seen each other the odd time. ‘Parent-free zone. So like Love Island meets Lord of the Flies.’

‘Hmm,’ said Dad. ‘Hopefully neither of those things. If you don’t think you’re old enough, kiddo, just say. You can come with me in the second week.’

‘I’m old enough,’ said Violet. ‘I’m very mature. It’s Thea you’ve got to worry about.’

‘Be nice to your sister,’ Dad said, as he often did, quite interchangeably, to both of them.

Violet tipped her face up, still wobbling precariously on one leg, and squinted through one eye.

No violet here. Blue and then some. You could absolutely one hundred per cent guarantee that the sky was going to be blue, no matter what. Even before climate was followed by crisis, not change. Big, bright, slap-you-round-the-face blue, all of the blues possible if you looked from Dad’s room, which was at the front of the house and which Luke had commandeered until Dad got here. Lake. Sky. Pool.

Cyanotype blue. Her mum had put her on a photography course last summer and now she had a Canon EOS 4000D DSLR camera and a lens for it, and she liked looking at proper old-school cameras in second-hand shops and on eBay. Together, they had gone to this really cool exhibition about early photography, and it had made her look at her phone like it was a piece of Lego. Imagine seeing this stuff for the first time – things appearing on metal plates or paper, as if rising from the depths. They would have freaked out.

William Henry Fox Talbot, Cecilia Glaisher. The first photographers used salts of silver and acid, experimenting until the vase of flowers didn’t turn black, until the silhouettes of ferns became crisp and alive.

Anna Atkins mixed two diluted chemicals together so that they were sensitive to ultraviolet light, brushed them onto card, and left them to dry in the dark. Then she squashed seaweed or algae between two plates of glass onto the paper and exposed it to the sun. The plants came out chalk white on a dreamy blue, like skeletons.

Ultraviolet. Ultra meaning beyond everything, on the far side of. She was ultraviolet, in that she was so unlike her stupid name it was untrue.

She would erase herself, one way or the other. She could forget, be someone different who it hadn’t all happened to. But not different as in dead. Not yet. Fuck you, death-whispering breeze.

She lowered her hovering foot, bent her knees so that she could rest one hand on the blistered white paint of the wall, and jumped down into the back yard.

* * *

Thea was lying on her bed, thinking about sex.

This was not a new activity, to be fair – not in one sense, in that for a long time she had been thinking about what it would feel like, and whether it would hurt, and whether a boy would be disappointed in the size of her breasts or bum or hips, or be distracted by the spot on her chin – but it was a relatively new activity in that now she had finally had sex.

A few times, actually.

She shifted, and the sheet came with her, stuck to the backs of her thighs. The heat was a constant reminder of skin pressing down on her, of being enclosed by arms and legs, the sheer blissful terror and suffocation.

She put her hand between her legs and pushed upwards, just to relieve the pressure, to make it spread throughout her body and not feel concentrated in that one place. Bruised, in a good way.

Metaphysical pessimists in the philosophy of sexuality – St Augustine, Kant, Freud sometimes – believed that acting on the sexual impulse was unbefitting to human dignity, and a threat to one’s very personhood – that either side might get lost in the sex act and become just a thing. Metaphysical sexual optimists – Plato, Freud again, Russell – saw sexuality as just part of human existence, and something to be relished. In your face, Kant.

It was easy. After the first time, anyway. After wondering how she would be able to accommodate anything larger than a super-sized tampon – and even those felt a bit full-on sometimes – it had really been a surprise how smoothly it fitted. She was a natural.

Thea had been behind, really, compared to others. Compared to Jade, who’d whispered in her ear one morning in tutor group, aged fifteen, that she had been – in her words – deliciously fucked. Compared to Mischa, who had decided to give up smoking once she’d started having sex aged fifteen and a half, because one vice was enough, and sex was cheaper. Compared to Harper, who’d started going out with the captain of the football team in their girls’ school earlier this year. She was finally part of the club.

There was a loud splash that was almost definitely Violet bombing into the pool for the fifth time this morning. When her little sister was seven, she would hit the tennis ball on a string in the back garden over and over again until Thea, aged ten and fed up with the incessant thock every afternoon, cut the string.

She didn’t know what Luke had done when he was seven. Or Connor.

She supposed that Dad wanted them to get to know each other more, as if they hadn’t had enough awkward birthdays and Christmas parties. But living together, the two boys and two girls –...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.3.2024
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Science Fiction
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror ► Krimi / Thriller
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: Aliens • Apocalypse • Family • Invasion • Leave the World Behind • Queer • station eleven • Supernatural • THE END WE START FROM • The Last of Us • The Road
• ISBN-10: 1-80546-019-6 / 1805460196
• ISBN-13: 978-1-80546-019-0 / 9781805460190