The Half Burnt House

‘If you could see the future,’ Sam asked her, ‘would you want to?’

It was the end of the school day and they were sitting outside the sixth-form building. There was a roundabout there with a stone edge and a circle of flower beds in the centre, and Sam and Katie met there every afternoon at the end of lessons. They were seventeen years old. As teenagers do, they sat and gossiped. They complained about her parents.

They asked each other questions.

If you could see the future, would you want to?

Katie thought about that. It was exactly the kind of question that had made her fall in love with Sam in the first place, but in that moment it made her uneasy. Sam was handsome and charismatic – full of talent and ambition – and for some unfathomable reason he seemed to be in love with her as well. That made her happy, of course, but she was also frightened of losing him. Next year they would both be going away to different universities, and that upcoming separation felt like a threat looming on the horizon.

What was going to happen to them then?

‘Katie?’ Sam prompted.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because what if you saw something you didn’t like?’

‘Then you’d be able to change it.’

‘Maybe.’

It was a warm afternoon with only the slightest of breezes. She watched as a group of kids drifted past them, hitching their bags up on their shoulders, talking and laughing. They were heading down the sunlit drive that led to the nearby village, while others were wandering away towards the bus stop. It was a reminder that she and Sam would have to part ways shortly. Katie lived close to the school, whereas his house was a bus journey away.

For a long time Katie had felt like a spare wheel in her family; it was her younger brother, Chris, who her parents doted on. But over the last year Sam had made her parents a lot more interested in her life than they had been previously. Her mother especially was suspicious of him, and overly keen to monitor their relationship and keep it from going too far. If Katie was not home on time after school, there would be questions. At weekends she and Sam were not allowed to be alone together. If Katie went round to his house, her mother was always careful to ensure his parents were home too.

The resentment that caused had been growing steadily, simmering away inside her, a little hotter every day. What she wanted to do was to spend as much time as possible with Sam before they were separated, and it seemed desperately unfair that her mother believed she was entitled to intervene.

‘Could you change it, though?’ Katie wondered.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, if you just saw the future, you wouldn’t know how you got there. So anything you did to avoid it might actually be what led you to it all along.’

Sam considered that.

‘You’re so clever,’ he said.

‘That’s why you love me, right?’

‘No. It’s just one of the reasons.’