One Night on the Island(16)

And there we are, back in our respective corners of the ring. Our eyes clash and I down the rest of my wine, and he heads for the bathroom, taking his beer with him. I hear the bath taps turn and breathe a sigh of relief.

The atmosphere’s too frosty between us to share a meal or any further conversation. Later, he boots up his laptop, sitting on the bed, and I do the same on the sofa. The only sound over the course of the evening is the tapping of keys; he’s disconcertingly fast. Probably just typing random letters to psyche me out, I think, deleting the words I’ve misspelt in my haste to sound efficient. I give up and try to get into a book I grabbed at random from the bookshelf as he was coming out of the bathroom, a war thriller drier than Saharan sand.

Mack heads outside at about eleven and stomps around the porch with his phone held aloft, and I feel a hollow thrill of territorial victory that he clearly hasn’t had any success working out where the boulder telephone box is. A more generous person would probably show him exactly the right spot and how to hold his phone in exactly the right way, but I’m not feeling all that generous right now.

I can’t sleep. I’ve done my best to compensate for the sofa lumps with strategically placed pillows, but I’m not holding out much hope for a more comfortable night. It’s bugging me that he offered me more insights into who he is than I did. I feel the need to share similarly weighted snippets in order to even the scales, but I resent this game of emotional show-and-tell so I’m trying to dredge up three random snippets that won’t give too much away.

‘My first boyfriend, Lewis Llewellyn, was a goth who wrote terrible horror scripts. He was sixteen, I was fifteen. He asked me for my honest opinion on his masterpiece and then dumped me unceremoniously for not blowing smoke up his arse. My gran taught me to knit, and horses scare me because I fell off one when I was eight years old,’ I say into the late-night, pitch-black lodge as I shift into a different position on the sofa.

‘Did he make it as a screenwriter?’ Mack asks after a long pause.

‘Hot tub salesman, last I heard.’

I hear him snort.

‘You didn’t mention your wife,’ I say, before he can ask any more intrusive questions. ‘You said you have two boys and that you love lobster rolls and camping, but you didn’t mention your wife.’

He sighs. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘Is that your Facebook status?’

‘No, Cleo, it’s my fuckin’ life,’ he says.

Fine. Despite his carefully orchestrated getting-to-know-you session earlier, it’s clear I’m not the only one playing the cards that matter close to my chest. Keep your secrets, Mack Sullivan. You’re entitled to them, just as I’m entitled to mine. And I’m entitled to the keys to Otter Lodge too.





Mack





4 October


Salvation Island


EVERY LOOSENED THREAD


I haven’t unpacked my cameras yet. I’m itching to, but this ridiculous situation with Cleo is hanging over my head like a goddamn guillotine. Coming here is once-in-a-lifetime stuff for me. There’s no space in my head to accommodate an obstinate British woman looking over my shoulder or chewing my ear off. Being here is an intensely personal thing, and when it comes down to it, I’m a pretty private man.

You didn’t mention your wife. Cleo’s voice grates in my head from last night, and I slam the kettle down harder than necessary on the stove. No, I didn’t mention my wife because here’s the thing: it’s none of your damn business. I told you a bunch of other stuff in the hope you might try to understand that this is more than just a vacation for me, that this island is in my DNA, and that whether you like it or not, that does give me priority. I glance across the lodge to where she’s still sleeping, passed out with her dark hair spilled across the white linen pillow. The woman perpetually looks as if she’s on the set of a Snow White movie. Again, my fingers ache to close around the familiar form of my Leica; I can’t look at anyone or any place without assessing the shot, mentally adjusting the lens, choosing the precise moment to capture it exactly as I see it. The thrill never gets old. I took more shots on my own wedding day than the guy we paid to take photographs for us, images that have been pulled out far more often over the years than the official white leather album with our names embossed in gold letters on the front because they catch the people we love in their most unguarded moments. Susie’s mother, cupping her beloved daughter’s face in her hands. Daryl, my best friend and best man, casting a longing first look across the sunlit church towards Charlotte, Susie’s colleague, now the mother of his daughters. I swear you can almost see threads of love arc their way over the heads of the congregation from his eyes to her profile. A second later she turned and met his gaze; I captured that too. It hangs on their bedroom wall.

I’ve walked through every important moment of my life with my camera around my neck, and I’ve always known there would be a time in my life when I’d come to Salvation to capture the landscape and meet its people, to create a visual record of the place that runs in the blood of my grandmother, in my mother and in me. A few days before I left, Susie referred to my coming here as a vanity project – harsh-edged words chosen to cut me, diminish me, to underscore how far apart we’ve grown. She knows me better than anyone. She’s listened to me tell our kids stories of this faraway island as their eyes fluttered to sleep, the same stories my mother used to tell me. She knows full well this runs soul deep for me. Vanity project? Right now, it’s more like a fucking sanity project.