Buried -sample.

It is late spring 2006. I sit at the table stirring my coffee. A letter rests against a framed photograph on the mantelpiece. Curled, shaky handwriting in blue ink. Sender: Mrs Roberts, Mynydd Isa, North Wales. The heavy air warns of a summer of sultry afternoons and sleepless nights. She has made contact again.
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The summer of 76 was the longest and hottest on record. The school holiday dragged on and on, sticky days and weeks melted, like chocolate, into an unrecognisable shape.
There were water fights galore on the estate. We weren’t reliant on standpipes for our supply and bans were a thing of the future. Prides of glistening children gathered and wreaked their revenge on bad tempered out of work dads using bike pumps and washing-up liquid bottles. It was a favour to the men really, bored and boiling, sitting on pigeon-grey ground blowing smoke rings into the scorched air. They played along, hollering, howling and promising to belt us if they caught us, which they never did.
It was the sort of heat that slows even children down. We lolled about in the shade, fighting over whose turn it was to fetch orange pop. Evening offered slight respite. We lay on lino floors absorbing dull coolness like sponges in tepid puddles.
It was the year I waved goodbye to uncertainty. I was sixteen years old and girlish. Friends on the cusp of womanhood looked down on me through eyelashes heavy with mascara, plucked eyebrows arched. I didn’t care. By the end of that summer I knew who I was and where I was going. A long way from there.
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