One Night on the Island(20)

I look at him, and he looks at me, and a steady spiral of fury rises in my gut. ‘Goddamn it,’ I say, vicious at the fucking weather. I scrub my hands over my face.

He fills the kettle and sets it to boil as I sink down on to a dining chair, my face in my hands.

‘It’s like a conspiracy,’ I say. ‘They’re all colluding to stop the boat from coming.’

‘Unless someone dies,’ Mack reminds me again.

‘I might,’ I say.

‘You probably won’t.’

‘Can you?’

He shoots me a look. ‘Unlikely.’

‘I can’t work with you here,’ I say. ‘I want to be alone.’ If I was watching myself from the outside, I’d scoff at such Greta Garbo melodrama, but I genuinely feel as if my very reason for coming to Salvation is negated by Mack’s presence.

‘You know what, Cleo? I don’t find you easy either,’ he says. ‘Frankly, you complain too much.’

I raise my face slowly from my hands and stare at him as he opens the cupboard.

‘Coffee?’ he asks, as if he hadn’t insulted me two seconds earlier.

‘I complain too much?’ I say, opening my eyes wide. ‘I complain too much?’

He shrugs, filling two cups even though I didn’t say I wanted one. ‘I don’t want you here, you don’t want me here. I get it. Trust me, no one wishes that boat was coming tomorrow more than I do.’

‘Because you think I’d have been on it?’

‘Cleo, I’d have put your bags on it myself.’ He reaches into a low cupboard and pulls out a bottle of whiskey then splashes a good measure into his cup. He glances at me as he hovers the bottle over my cup, and I nod, grouchy.

I know for sure now – Ali is wrong. Mack Sullivan is never getting on that boat, storm or millpond, which means I’ll be the one forced to make the choice to stay or leave.

I don’t say thank you when he bangs the mug down in front of me but I don’t refuse it either because I’m stuck in a cabin off the Irish coast in a storm, and that warrants whiskey.

‘Have you ever been to Boston?’

I dig around inside the contents of my whiskey-confused brain for the answer. ‘No,’ I say. ‘New York but not Boston.’

Mack rolls his shoulders, his hands around his glass on the dining table. We’ve dispensed with the need for coffee in favour of drinking the whiskey neat.

‘You know one of the best things about Boston?’ he says. ‘We have this huge frickin’ tower with a light on top that tells everyone the weather forecast.’

I frown. ‘A tower?’

He nods. ‘Blue for clear, red for storms.’

‘No need for massive men to climb mountains to deliver the forecast in person then,’ I say.

He tips his glass towards me. ‘Exactly.’ He shakes his head. ‘You know it’s not a mountain, right?’

I flick my eyes at the ceiling. ‘You should have realized by now that sometimes, occasionally, I exaggerate when I’m stressed.’

He puts the back of his hand against his forehead. ‘I want to be alone,’ he says, dramatic, taking the piss.

I shoot him a glare, and he laughs into his whiskey.

Over the last hour or so, we’ve sat at the dining table sinking whiskey and trying to come to terms with the fact that we’re interned here together for another week, and then only if the boat comes. Or someone dies. We’ve moodily concluded that it would be better if neither of us does that.

‘Want to know something else Boston has that nowhere else does?’ he asks. ‘My two fuckin’ amazing kids.’

It’s a sharp conversational turn from light to heavy, the kind of confidence we haven’t shared up to now.

‘You must miss them a lot,’ I say, sort of a question and sort of a statement, because his boys are his phone screensaver and his laptop background. He picks his phone up and flicks through it, sliding it over the table towards me.

‘Nate’s eight, Leo’s twelve going on seventeen.’ His half-laugh doesn’t get anywhere near his eyes.

I look at his family, so healthy and alive they’re practically climbing out of the phone screen; Mack and his youngest are bent almost double with laughter, and a woman, his wife I presume, has her arm around their eldest son’s shoulders.

‘You have a beautiful family,’ I say, handing his phone back.

He swills his whiskey around in his glass. ‘Had,’ he says. ‘I had a beautiful family.’

An awful feeling of dread creeps over my skin. Has something tragic happened to his wife? Have those boys had to endure losing the mother they clearly adore? God, I hope not. He sighs, a bone-deep rattler that heaves through his body as he finishes his drink and slides the empty glass on to the table. If so, I’ll willingly get on that boat, he can have the lodge.

‘And now I get to see my boys only when Susie allows it, and every now and then she lets me help them with their homework over FaceTime. The rest of the time I live in a condo alone, and the silence is so damn loud I can’t hear myself think.’

So on the upside, I don’t think anything terrible has happened to his wife. On the downside, he’s clearly unhappy both at home and not at home, apart from the people he loves.