“That bit is upside down,” Jen chews her lip, holding two halves of a tent pole. “Or is it? I don’t know. Maybe you were right.”
“I have no clue, to be honest.” I hold my hands up in surrender and back away from the crumpled heap that is our shared tent for the weekend, the sight of which fills me with increasing dread. “You know what I’m like. I can’t do stuff like this.”
“Like read?” She scrutinises the crumpled instruction sheet for the tenth time. “This shouldn’t be so hard for us. Do you think we should have been assessed in school?”
“For a learning difficulty? What? No. There weren’t classes for this kind of complicated stuff. It’s not our fault.”
“It’s piss easy,” Shane comments. He assembled both his tent and Claire’s and Evie’s in the time it took Jen and me to wrestle our tent parts from the bag. “You put the poles together, thread them through the tarp, and stick the pins in the ground. What’s the matter with ye?”
“Dunno. We’re just fucking stupid, I suppose.”
“Push over, I’ll do it.”
Jen lets the poles roll off her palm onto the ground and we let him, watching uselessly as he slots the poles together with some sort of insane, military efficiency and has the whole thing standing neatly, our perfect, nylon dome, in about two minutes flat.
“Thanks,” I say.
Jen echoes. “Yeah, jeez, cheers for that.”
“Do you ever think the real world is, like, going to come and bite ye in the arses?” Shane wonders, wiping the sweat from his face with the hem of his t-shirt. “When you go off and start living on your own, I mean. Do you ever worry you won’t be able to hack it?”
I look at Jen, and she at me. I shrug. “I’m moving to a city, like, do you think there’ll be wilderness excursions there, or something?”
“You might eventually need to read instructions, is all.”
I grin. “Someone else can do it for me.”
“Right, yeah.” his brow furrows. “I’m just saying, like, you might get a bit of a shock when you’re out there on your own.”
“I’ve been alone though,” I argue. “It’s not like my parents do everything for me. I’m not one of those kids who was-”
“Yeah, not with all things, just some things. Like, what if you ever needed to earn your own money, to get a job in a restaurant or something? Do you not think you’d need a bit of know-how, a bit of practical experience?”
I scoff. “Why would I need to do that?”
“Because sometimes people have to work.” I hate the way he’s saying it, and feel my body stiffen like hackles are rising along my spine. Of course, Shane is going on about this. Proper job this, practical experience that.
This is the tone that accompanies every tactful reminder that he comes from a hardworking family and I, apparently, do not. Like my parents’ academic backgrounds lessen their credibility. Like it makes them snobbier, lazier, more willing to sneer at ordinary folk. What's true for them does not automatically extend to me. To think so is an insult.
Shane’s dad is the head chef in some hotel in Tullamore, his mother a florist who works seven days a week, and they have drilled into him and Kelly their extraordinary, frankly ridiculous work ethic. They think it’s normal, aspirational even, to get up at five in the morning for some mundane job. But I know something with more truth to it: that there’s merit in taking it easy, with relaxing, sleeping in, and spending time with the things you enjoy. And, by the way, what does all of this have to do with a tent?
I plaster on my best laid back smile and drop a hand onto his shoulder.
“This is a boring conversation.” I insist, in the hopes that I will embarrass him out of putting me through this conversation. “Let’s grab a few drinks, yeah? Talking about future stuff should be off-limits for the weekend.”
He shrugs. “I suppose, yeah. I’ll drop it.”
“Thanks, mate.”
I amble over to where the girls hang out on the grass and join them, getting Claire to pass me of the drinks we smuggled through among an inaccessible pile of socks and underwear at the bottom of her bag. I crack it open and swish the beer around my mouth. It’s warm, horrible, but it’s wonderful in another way. It’s the most authentic experience possible. Here I am, in a field, drinking warm beer with the sun on my face. Carefree, with the rhythmic beat from the main stage pulsing through the earth beneath me. I could get used to things being simple.
