Things like that made Robert special, but they also made him weird.
For their own reasons, Sarah and Jasmine liked having him around. I used to think that he served as a chaperone - knowingly or unknowingly, I don't know, but definitely someone there to stop Alex and Sarah and me and Jasmine from getting the chance to find out as much as we could about each other on beautiful sunny days.
Whenever we met up with Jasmine and Sarah, they'd always inevitably "made an earlier arrangement" to meet Robert somewhere. And he'd always show up. It was as though he was psychic or something. Either that, or they really had made an earlier arrangement to meet him at a specified place and time. And he was never late. Never. An earthquake wouldn't have slowed him down. A nuclear fucking explosion couldn't have stopped him. He was irrepressible. He was ubiquitous. A life force. And that was why I had amended my first thought. That's why Jasmine and Sarah wanted him around. He made those little dead things feel as though they were alive. Somehow.
Robert had a secret. No, Robert had many secrets.
Robert was a friend of Jasmine and Sarah. He was their friend, not ours. Still, he was cool to have around sometimes, like when he'd built the dam. And flooded the Downs.
“Watcha doing?” I asked, finding Robert up to his knees in water, while Jasmine and Sarah sat on the hill and watched as he directed the flow of the built-up stream.
“Robert's building us a dam,” Jasmine said haughtily.
“A cofferdam,” Sarah added.
“What's a cofferdam?” I asked, thinking I'd been tricked into being the first line feeder of a very bad joke.
“It's this,” said Robert, wading out of the water and letting me see what he'd done.
It was nothing much to look at - just a board, some stones, another board and a prop, but you could already sense it had a huge and vital and somehow urgent power about it. It was meant to do something. Something big. You could feel it, see it, hear it, smell it, taste it - and know it.
“What'll it do?” I asked, not really that innocently.
Robert stood there looking at me for a moment, really hard, like I'd not seen him look at me before. Then he shook his head and looked away. He muttered something and pointed at the swelling stream.
“Whatever,” he said off-handedly.
“We want you to flood the Downs,” Jasmine said. The way she said it you just knew she'd been saying it a lot. It sounded like drama lines she'd rehearsed very badly.
All I was thinking was of siding with Jasmine, so I asked the BIG question. And set the whole thing in motion.
“Will it flood the Downs?”
We all looked at each other. Four of us. Four right-angle corners of a square. Four conspirators. Robert. Sarah. Jasmine. Me.
“Yes,” said Robert quietly. “It will flood the Downs.”
And it did.
As I scrambled down onto the warm and soft sand of Rock Point, I thought about the weeks I'd spent grounded for being one of the fabled Four-Who-Flooded-the-Downs. One of the legendary. One of the mythical. One of the magical ones. Only it didn't feel all that magical to me. Somehow I felt excluded, not included. Robert and Jasmine and Sarah made a threesome. A trinity. A trio. A triangle. Three was a magic number. Not four. Four was the horsemen of the apocalypse. Four was definitely not a lucky number. Four was foul and I was four. So, somehow, without even being aware of how, I was excluded. Never in a definite or tangible way, but enough to let me know. Just like those odd pieces of jigsaw you find, all the time knowing they're not really random. And it was in this state that I came to make friends with Alex.
Alex was reliable. That's all I asked. Without knowing it, he was also calm after an emotional storm. To his credit, he never questioned our friendship. Maybe that showed he was more sensitive to my needs than I ever could be to anyone else's - other than my own.
“It's lovely here,” Sarah said, and I suddenly knew I'd been pursuing (if that's what my few feeble attempts at seduction could be called) the wrong girl. How could I now metaphorically and literally start chasing after Sarah, when I'd clearly spent the last three years expressing an interest in Jasmine. What of offended parties? As I thought about this, I wondered if anyone would be offended? Jasmine? Alex? Robert? Sarah? Alex would go with whatever I said, Jasmine wouldn't be too upset, and not for long, Robert… Well, right here was the blind spot. I simply didn't know how the trio would be after a shake-up. Probably okay, but… one never knew. A new angle always causes a rethink, especially in a triangle.
