Daylight Saving Read Free Page A

that’s it. Cut loose.”
    I stood up from the table, and so did Dad. We walked in opposite directions — him toward the bar, me toward the door.
    “Oh, Dad,” I said.
    “Yes, Daniel.” He turned, sipped from his drink.
    “Don’t drown,” I said.
    He laughed. “I shan’t be going in the lake,” he said.
    I nodded to his beer. “I’m not talking about the lake,” I said.
    Outside, the air was cool and crisp, autumnal. I unlocked my bike from the stand. None of the drinkers outside seemed to notice that it was a woman’s bike. Maybe Dad was right. Maybe nobody was looking.
    I could see the bike path as I walked my Shopper along the beach. The bicycles had dynamos, which meant that when you pedaled, your light came on. The dynamos made a clicking sound, like grasshoppers. Each of the cabins had two little posts on the lawn, with a lamp inside. These were the only sources of light. With the clicking of the dynamos, the weird white lamps, and the cyclists sweeping their beams across the forest, it looked like an underwater planet.
    I glanced back out to the lake. My eye was drawn up to the higher branches of a tree, where I saw a figure lying along a bough, wearing a bright-red top with the hood up, and with one leg hanging down. It was the girl from the road. I shook my head and turned to the people sitting outside the Pancake House. They were talking and smoking, looking at each other. They hadn’t seen the figure. Maybe I hadn’t seen it, really.
    I took a deep breath and looked back out to the tree. The distant figure was still there. I closed my eyes and turned away.

Back at the cabin, I opened the TV cupboard and turned on the set. There were lots of satellite channels, but most of them were showing sports, so I turned it off again. For a moment, I thought I saw shapes on the blank screen. I thought I could see that tree out by the lake, with the figure sitting in it like a leopard. I rubbed my face.
I’m just tired,
I thought. I shut the doors of the cupboard.
    I listened carefully to the silence in the cabin. I listened until the silence fell away and revealed the noise of Chrissy, Tash, and their friends laughing in the yard next door. Their barbecue must have been winding down. I could smell the charred food. Beyond those sounds, I could hear the forest, its rhythms and night murmurs. I could almost feel it pressing in on the cabin.
    I went to bed and lay awake for a while, thinking about what had happened back home, with my mum. Thinking about time. When they tell a story, a lot of people say, “I don’t know where to start.” I know what they mean.
    I could start at two p.m. on the fourth of September. The day after the first day back at school. I was at home watching TV. Our house shares a sheltered entrance with the liquor store next door. It’s like a little corridor. The liquor store put a security camera by the entrance, and, weirdly, if you go to the second AV channel on our TV, it links up to the camera. I used to switch it on sometimes when I heard people downstairs. The problem is, you can’t leave it on too long because it burns the image onto the screen. I don’t know why. It’s a technical thing. Our TV was pretty good. A nice Samsung, quite new.
    At two p.m. on the fourth of September, I heard a noise downstairs. I wasn’t expecting anyone, and I wasn’t in the mood for lots of questions about why I was home from school. So I hit AV2 on the remote to see who it was. It was Mum. She was just inside the alleyway by the entrance. And she was kissing a man. I recognized him. It was Dr. Greggs, our local GP. The kiss was a passionate one; he had his hand inside her coat, around her waist. All this was happening in black-and-white, on our telly. I was paralyzed and only managed to snap out of it when I heard a sizzling noise coming from the TV. I switched it off and went up to my room. Thankfully Mum came in alone, and by the time she realized I was in the house, she was more