One Night on the Island(51)

‘Thinking,’ Cleo says, a million miles away.

‘Penny for your thoughts?’ I say, hunkering down beside her. Jeez, it’s cold out here without a sweater.

‘I was wondering whether we need a new rules sheet.’ She smiles, bumping her shoulder against mine.

‘Or we could just have no rules at all,’ I say.

‘I was quite fond of that chalk line,’ she says.

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘How about no stalking each other on social media?’

‘Afterwards?’

I nod. I meant at all but especially not afterwards.

She twists her head to stare at me in silence for a few seconds. ‘Still no regrets today?’

I don’t blame her for rechecking. I left her sleeping this morning, needed to walk and clear my head. ‘It’s pretty hard to regret something that felt so damn good,’ I say.

She half smiles. ‘It did feel pretty amazing.’

I pull her blanket around my shoulders too so we’re huddled together. ‘I don’t mean this in the way it’s probably going to sound,’ I say, but I don’t censor myself because if I do it’ll probably come out worse. ‘I needed last night. I needed to be with someone who wasn’t Susie.’

‘And I just happened to be there?’ she says, neutral.

‘No, no. It’s not that you just happened to be there at all,’ I say. ‘It’s that you happened to be you. My head has been stuck in a place where I couldn’t imagine ever wanting anyone else like that.’ An image of myself on the morning of my wedding surfaces in my head; the churn of nerves threatening to bring my breakfast back up, my mother carefully straightening my tie. ‘My marriage. I made vows, I promised to love one person for ever. It meant something to me. Everything, at the time, and it’s hard work letting go of all of that, you know?’

Of course she doesn’t know. How could she? But I do hope that she’ll at least see that my life is complicated. Although actually, right here and now, this doesn’t feel complicated at all. She laid her expectations out clearly: let’s share everything we are for eight days and then never see each other again. It’s cut and dried.

‘Are you sure you want to let go?’

‘Am I sure?’ I shake my head, unwilling to lie to Cleo even a little. ‘I’ve defined myself by my position as a husband and a father for a long time now; I guess I’m trying to work out how to be one without the other. I’ve drifted through the last year like a man clinging to a life raft hoping to be brought aboard again, even though I could see the lights of the ship moving slowly away from me, and … and this is a crappy analogy, I know, but coming to Salvation was the only way I could see to not drown. Does that make any sense?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘More than you know. I’ve been drowning in London too, in meaningless connections and unrealized dreams. Coming here is like a system reset for me.’

‘A system reset, huh?’ I say. I kind of like that way of looking at it.

There’s something else I need to say. ‘I want you to know I didn’t sleep with you as a way to get even with Susie – for Robert, I mean.’

‘No?’

I shake my head. ‘Part of not drowning is swimming. I guess you could say you’re proof I should keep kicking.’

She’s quiet as she absorbs my clunky attempt to explain what’s happening in my head and my heart. That for the next week, she is what’s happening in my head and my heart. My system reset.

‘I’m a strong swimmer,’ she says, leaning her head on my shoulder. ‘I’ve got you.’

I’m accustomed to needing to be the strong one in life – for the boys, for my mother, for Susie. There is extraordinary comfort in someone saying ‘I’ve got you’. It brings a lump to my throat, so we sit for a while and watch the dolphins out in the bay.





Cleo





21 October


Salvation Island


THEY DON’T DO IT LIKE THAT IN STARBUCKS


I’ve been to more than my fair share of wedding ceremonies in recent years – a good handful every summer since I turned twenty-five – so you’d think I’d have an idea where to start with the vows for my own. And I probably would if it was a regular ceremony, but it’s tricky to know what to say when there’s no one else to say it to. The usual ‘in sickness and in health’ and ‘for richer, for poorer’ don’t apply. Do I even need vows, really? Maybe not, but I do rather like the idea of making myself some promises. I’ve written a list to whittle down. Some sit firmly towards the frivolous end of the scale: I promise not to watch more than three back-to-back episodes of Say Yes to the Dress while eating ice cream from the tub and yelling ‘It looks like net curtains!’ at the screen. Others hover around the middle serious: I promise not to make myself finish books if I’m not invested by page fifty-nine. Don’t ask me why page fifty-nine, it just feels far enough in to know. And then there’s the big, top-line promises, the ones that will be the most meaningful, and probably the hardest not to break. This one, for instance: I promise to rethink my working life, to take the idea of leaving London seriously. I’m giving myself until Christmas to make the break. It’s the right thing to do. I know it is, because even just writing the intention down felt like someone had given me a really great massage, that feeling of sweet relief when knots unravel and you can finally unclench your teeth.