Girl A(104)

Wind whipped between the doors, and in the church, something fell.

‘I’m going to head off. I just wanted to say goodbye.’

He rested his hands on my shoulders. He seemed to be thinking of something to say – something which would be just right – which kept eluding him.

‘And congratulations,’ I said. ‘Again. I’m going back to New York. It’ll be a while before we see one another, I think.’

I covered his hands with my own, and lifted them away from me.

‘Don’t fuck it up,’ I said.

Olivia waited for me, as she had promised. She was reading on the veranda in a white plastic chair, with her feet on the table. Moths fuzzed around the light above her hair. There was a rusty glass on the table, and an empty bottle of red. ‘I meant to save you some,’ she said, ‘but you were later than I expected.’

I dragged up a chair and slumped down, and rested my feet on the table, next to hers.

‘How was it?’ she asked. She reached for my hand, and I allowed her to take it.

‘It was OK.’

‘Good food? Good wine?’

‘Yep.’

‘We can talk about it some other time, if you want.’

‘Yeah. I’d prefer that.’

She picked her book up from the table, and started to read. After a moment, she set the book back down and looked at me over her glass.

‘All of it?’ she said.

‘OK. All of it.’

In the morning, I woke up cold and muddled, contorted on the mattress which we had brought out to the veranda. Something about wanting to wake up facing the ocean. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

I could hear an engine. Olivia’s suitcase was at the door. She descended the stairs with her arms full of unpacked belongings, ring-eyed and moving gingerly. ‘This is un-ideal,’ she said, when she saw me. ‘We should have stayed another day.’

‘Another year, maybe.’

We were whispering, the way you do in the early morning. She crammed the last items into her case, forced the zip, and grinned. ‘Bloody hell,’ she said. She gathered me into her arms and kissed my hair, and then the suitcase was in her hand, and she was out into the morning.

My flight was in the mid-afternoon, and there was little left to do. I removed my pink suit and walked between the rooms, picking up the lovely objects. An old stone paperweight on a bedside table. A model rowing boat, painted by hand, in the same colours as the one in the cove. We had opened every window, and the noise of the tide lapped through the house. It was the first time that I had been alone in so many weeks.

In the shower, I thought about New York. I thought about the ChromoClick dinner, and how I would dress for it, with Jake across the table. I thought about the new psychologist, and all the work that we still had to do. I knew that Dr K intended to help me, and that she expected me to help myself; the plan was that we would talk again as soon as I landed. I was undischarged. That was how she had put it. We were standing outside our cafe, a few days before I left, and she was searching in her handbag for one of her cards. Even though I had all of her details. Had had them for years.

‘What if it takes for ever?’ I said.

‘Then it does,’ she said, and when she straightened up she looked at me with the one thing which had always been there. Fierce now as the very first time. Pride.

I dressed in white and set my suitcase in the car, and walked from the house down through the garden. The limbs of the trees shifted in the breeze, like a person stirring in sleep. The yacht was gone from the cove, and the sea lulled undisturbed beneath the sunshine, translucent by the pebbles and a deep, brilliant blue beyond them. Cicadas sung across the afternoon.

A few final moments. This was where I would come to, I thought, to retreat from the sadness of the city.

I lifted a hand to my eyes.

There was somebody coming up the beach.

She walked determined towards the water. The movements of her tendons and muscles and bones. Her skin warmed from the sun. She was as I had always imagined she would be.

I picked my way through the trees and down to the cove, pine needles sticking to the soles of my feet. I understood that there was no need to rush. She would wait for me. I knew exactly how she would smile. We made it here, she would say. After all of this time.

I stepped into the sunshine and called her name. She was at the edge of the water now, facing the sea, and she turned back to me and raised her arm, beckoning, or waving.





Acknowledgements


Thank you to my glorious agent and friend, Juliet Mushens. I can’t imagine this wild journey without you. Thanks, too, to the fabulous Liza DeBlock, for all of your practical magic.

I’m grateful to all of the co-agents and editors who have championed this book.

A special thank you to Phoebe Morgan and Laura Tisdel, for your insight, brilliance, and humour. This book wouldn’t be what it is without you. Thank you, too, to Julia Wisdom and the marvellous A-team at HarperFiction, and to the whole Viking team in the US, for your extraordinary creativity and support.

I’m hugely grateful to my colleagues, old and new, for so much encouragement and understanding.

Thank you to the many teachers who urged me to keep writing. In particular, I’m grateful to Mr Howson and his English department, who showed me boundless kindness when I needed it the most.