‘I’ve kept you up.’
‘No,’ he shook his head. It felt like he’d been meaning to say more, but instead he reached out his hand for hers again. ‘Come with me.’
They stepped down onto the beach, the sand closing over their toes, the waves louder with every step.
Sacha stopped. ‘Close your eyes.’
Hannah did, and she felt his hands against the sides of her head, angling it carefully upwards.
‘And…open.’
She did.
The sky was a blanket of a million stars, winking white and pink and blue, too many for Hannah’s eyes to take in. The quiet, dark land stood back, allowing the light-show centre stage, and Hannah found she couldn’t speak.
‘Aether,’ Sacha whispered into her ear. ‘The stars are special, heavenly. Made of nothing found on land. The fifth element.’
‘They’re incredible. They’re –’ she turned to face him, their bodies almost touching – ‘they all are – earth, water, fire and air… Thank you for showing them to me.’ She took a step towards him and her hand brushed against his. He linked his fingers through hers, one hand then the other.
‘So,’ he said, ‘you found meaning in the stars after all?’
‘You.’ She nodded.
‘You found me in the stars?’ The corners of his mouth lifted, the smile subdued, his eyes searching hers.
‘I found you here,’ she said. ‘Although, I think it was actually the other way round. I think you found me.’
‘Better than the Drousolites.’ Sacha bent his head, and his lips touched hers.
They kissed for a long time. The sand was soft beneath their feet, the nighttime breeze caressed their skin, still warm from the day’s sun, and the waves churned further down the beach. The stars chinked the midnight blue above, peeping down at their embrace. But this time they were oblivious to the elements.
About the Author
Cressy was born in London but now lives in Norwich with her husband David and hedgehogs in the garden. She works in communications and spends her spare time reading, writing, returning to London or exploring the beautiful Norfolk coastline.
She’s been writing for seven years and has almost finished her fourth novel. The two best moments in her writing career to date are being offered representation by the lovely Katy Jones at United Agents, and finding out her story was going to be published in the Sunlounger 2 anthology.
She loves single malt, terrifying ghost stories, thunderstorms and romantic heroes, though not necessarily in that order.
Twitter: www.twitter.com/CressMcLaughlin
Visit www.sunloungerstories.com to discover more about the authors and story destinations.
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A Blood Lily from Moses
***
Roisin Meaney
DESTINATION: Africa
She wonders what would happen if she reached out and tucked in the label that pokes from the collar of the person ahead of her in the queue. A harmless enough gesture, surely – and wouldn’t any woman want to hide the evidence that her jacket had come from Penneys, not to mention the fact that she needed it in an XL size? Might be different if the label sticking out was Yves St Laurent – now that kind of wardrobe malfunction might well be deliberate – but Penneys? Hardly.
All the same, it might be safer to resist the impulse, given that they were in an airport check-in queue, and travelling can do funny things to people. The woman might be so wound-up at the thought of flying to London that a stranger’s touch, however well-meant, might be all she needs to turn around and shove her fist into the well-meaning stranger’s face.
Anyway, it’s not as if Emma really gives a damn about the label - the entire population of Dublin airport could parade around wearing their jackets inside-out for all she cares. It’s just something to focus on as she shuffles her way closer to the check-in desk, something to stop her from dwelling on the fact that she’s shortly going to board a flight, and begin a holiday, without Sam.
But who is she kidding? It’s all she can think about. It’s the only thing going around in her head since she opened Sam’s letter three days ago.
Emma, I’m so terribly sorry. If it’s any consolation, I hate myself every bit as much as I imagine you hate me right now.
For the life of her, Emma can’t see how someone else’s self-hatred is expected to make her feel the tiniest bit better. Anyway, she doubts that it’s true – hasn’t Sam gone straight from Emma to Barbara Clancy? Barbara Clancy, of all people.
‘I’m guessing the curtains don’t match the carpet,’ Sam had remarked the day Emma introduced them, not even six weeks ago. They’d bumped into Barbara at the market; she and Sam had shaken hands and exchanged some silly small talk, and Sam had murmured the comment to Emma as they’d walked off.
But clearly the fact that Barbara’s platinum blonde was straight out of a bottle hadn’t stood in their way. However it had come about, they’d met again, and Sam had decided it was time for a change.
I swear it just happened, Emma. Neither of us planned it, we just fell in love.
And no doubt Barbara Clancy’s carpet has been well examined by now. Try as she might, Emma can’t keep herself from imagining that scenario.
I’m so sorry, Emma. If you only knew how sorry I am. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world, you must believe me.
So many apologies in a single letter: ironic that she finds it hard to recall Sam ever saying sorry when they were together. And plenty of apologies still left unsaid: no ‘sorry for packing my bags while you were spending the weekend with your sick grandmother’, no ‘sorry for being too chicken to tell you to your face that I’m shacking up with your old school pal’. No ‘sorry for wasting two years of your life’.
The queue crawls onwards. The jacket label continues to dare Emma to touch it. She glances at the giant clock above the check-in desk. Two-fifteen, the plane leaving at three. Five hours in London before she boards the next flight. Most of the coming night spent in the air, hurtling south-east through the blackness to a country that straddles the equator while she tries to sleep sitting up, or watches films she’s probably already seen. Anyone’s guess how long it will be before she stretches out on a bed.
Sam took everything, clearly not too full of self-loathing to forget to pack the dental floss they both used, or the CDs they’d bought together, or the juicer that was supposedly a moving-in gift to Emma when Sam had taken up residence in her house, two years ago last Saturday.
The safari holiday was Sam’s idea. Come to think of it, a lot of things had been Sam’s idea. The Bikram yoga classes they’d both signed up for in October – and abandoned, to Emma’s silent relief, after two weeks. The canary yellow bathroom walls. The bread maker that’s been gathering dust on top of Emma’s fridge for months. A pushover, that’s what she is. And Sam was well able to push.
At twenty-eight minutes past two Emma reaches the top of the queue.
‘Travelling alone?’ the far-too-cheerful woman behind the desk enquires. Emma resists the urge to tell her that she is, in fact, accompanied by her imaginary friend. She wouldn’t mind one of those right now: anyone, however invisible, to keep her company would do.
But nobody walks beside her as she makes her way through security, and nobody sits next to her at the departure gate, where she keeps her eyes fixed on her shoes until the flight is called, so that nobody will ask her why she’s alone.
All the way to London she reads the newspaper she took from the hall floor on her way out this morning. Another arrangement put in place by Sam: Emma had always been happy to buy a paper at the corner shop, all of three minutes’ walk from the house, but Sam liked it already there when they got up. She realises as the plane begins its descent into London that she’s going to return to five unread issues, because she forgot to cancel the order. Five helpings of stale news waiting to welcome her back, as
if returning to an empty house wasn’t going to be painful enough.
Heathrow, as ever, is vast and noisy and too bright. It takes her over an hour to negotiate her way past the myriad shops and cafés and knots of harried travellers – none of whom, as far as she can tell, is speaking English – to the right terminal and check-in desk. Once rid of her suitcase, she finds a coffee outlet and buys a cup, ignoring the growling in her stomach from having eaten nothing at all since she got up at ten.
Her mother wouldn’t approve of going half a mile down the road, let alone halfway across the world, on an empty stomach, but it’s a long time since her mother had a say in what Emma did or didn’t eat. Not that her mother, or her father, has shown much of an interest in Emma’s life for quite some time; not since she told them, at the age of twenty, exactly what was what.
They didn’t approve of Sam, of course. The three of them never actually came face to face – Emma had been keeping her partners and her parents well apart for years – but still they didn’t approve. They’ll be delighted when they find out she’s on her own again. They’ll be lining up what they consider to be suitable boyfriends. Their hopes will rise once more – until she inevitably dashes them.
The afternoon plods on. When she eventually boards the plane to Nairobi, she finds it to be barely half full.
‘Your first visit to Kenya?’ the beautifully dressed treacle-skinned man across the aisle asks as they wait for take-off – and despite the despondency that’s been trailing her around since Sam’s departure, the question causes a twitch of anticipation in Emma. She’s on her way to Africa, a place she’s dreamed of visiting for as long as she can remember.
‘Yes, first time. I’m going on safari.’
No need to tell him she’s been abandoned: let him think she’s a fearless woman who always travels alone. He offers her a boiled sweet and tells her about the house spiders she’ll probably encounter.
‘Bodies the size of your palm, and they can zip across a wall in about two seconds flat – but don’t worry, they’re perfectly harmless.’
She sucks her sweet and turns her head towards the window and watches the lights of London being left behind as they climb high into the evening sky. She wonders, not for the first time, about the people she’ll meet on the safari holiday, the people she’ll be spending most of the next five days with. It wouldn’t have mattered so much if Sam was here – they could have escaped together if the going got tough – but she won’t be inclined to wander off alone in a strange place. Still, she’ll do her best to fit in, and hopefully they’ll get on.
Just as long as it’s not all couples.
It’s all couples.
Ted and Molly are somewhere in their twenties and on honeymoon.
Brendan and Frankie, fortyish, won the holiday in a competition Frankie saw on the back of a cereal box.
Kieran and Laura, hitting sixty, are celebrating their thirtieth wedding anniversary.
‘My partner and I broke up last week,’ Emma tells them. ‘We wanted different things.’
It’s only half a lie. Sam certainly wanted different things.
‘But had you both paid for this holiday?’ Laura enquires. Laura, it turns out, is the owner of the extra large Penneys jacket. Somewhere between Dublin and Kenya, the label got tucked in. ‘I mean, who can afford to lose nearly two thousand euro?’
‘It’s all in hand,’ Emma replies, but she doubts very much that Sam has a hope in hell of reclaiming a cent, which is slightly cheering.
‘You have a busy few days ahead of you,’ Carol tells them. ‘I hope you’re all set.’
Carol is their English tour guide, all smiles and jangly bracelets and hair tucked into a flowery scarf. She looks to be around Emma’s age. ‘We’re heading straight for our safari lodge, where you can relax for a while before lunch, and then we’ll go on our first game drive.’
‘It is all included, isn’t it?’ Laura asks. ‘There are no hidden charges, are there? I mean, at that price, for just five days.’
Carol’s smile doesn’t falter. ‘Don’t worry, everything you need is included – you just pay if you want anything extra. Now, if you’ll all follow me to the bus.’
‘I’ve never been outside Ireland before,’ Frankie tells Emma as they leave the airport in the air-conditioned minibus. ‘We nearly went to the Isle of Man once, but then Brendan’s mother died.’
Frankie looks tired. Her hair, bleached to the colour of custard, falls in a defeated bob to her shoulders. ‘I’m a barmaid,’ she says. ‘That’s where I met Brendan. He likes his beer.’
Brendan, sitting on her far side, removes his sunglasses and dabs at his shiny pink face with a handkerchief that still holds the creases of an iron. ‘Could do with a cold one now,’ he says, winking at Emma. His shirt strains across the belly that beer has built, ovals of paler skin visible in the gaps between the buttons.
‘You have children?’ Emma asks Frankie.
‘Twin boys, fifteen. My mam’s looking after them, God help her.’
It’s nine o’clock in the morning, and already the sun pours onto the biscuit-yellow landscape under a vast sky whose colour reminds Emma of forget-me-nots. They drive past gnarled trees and makeshift stalls and rusted ancient cars and shacks topped with sheets of corrugated iron. They see dusty naked pot-bellied children and wide-hipped swaying women dressed in carnival colours whose babies are clamped to their backs with lengths of patterned cloth.
The light is so different here, the sky so high above them, and so wonderfully blue. Despite her weariness Emma feels she can breathe easily for the first time in her life. Even from this initial glimpse of it she senses a primal connection with her surroundings; she feels the place reach out and embrace her.
They drive for two hours. Carol points out immense tea and coffee plantations and bands of Savannah grasslands dotted with herds of bony cattle and rough-haired goats. ‘If I wanted to see cows I could have stayed at home,’ Brendan says.
Carol laughs. ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to see a lot more. And for your next holiday, you can climb Mount Kenya, the second highest peak in Africa.’ She gestures to a distant towering dark blue mass ahead of them, its top half shrouded in haze. Emma tries to imagine Brendan clambering up, but the image refuses to take shape.
The honeymooners sit slightly apart from the others, Molly’s head tilted onto Ted’s shoulder. Laura flips the pages of a magazine and ignores the scenery. Brendan dozes, an occasional soft snore issuing from his slack mouth, sandaled feet splayed.
Frankie rubs cream into her hands and offers the tube to Emma. ‘I got it in the duty free,’ she says. ‘Thought I’d treat myself, since the holiday isn’t costing us anything.’
Laura, directly in front of them, lifts her head. ‘Lucky for some,’ she says, eyeing her husband. ‘It’s costing us a small fortune.’
Kieran gives a smile that doesn’t quite come off. ‘My wife doesn’t think she deserves an exotic holiday,’ he tells the others, and Laura makes a sound that could mean anything and goes back to her magazine.
The safari lodge lies within the perimeters of a vast national game reserve. ‘The border fence is electrified,’ Carol tells them as they drive through the gates, ‘to prevent the elephants from meandering onto the local farmlands. Keep your eyes peeled, you might spot one of them.’ But no elephants, or any other creatures, are sighted in the five minutes it takes them to reach the lodge.
It’s a low wooden building with bamboo mats on the polished floors, and off-white wispy curtains and ceiling fans. Emma’s suitcase is wheeled to her room by a young boy wearing a pale grey tunic and baggy trousers, and a pair of bright green flip flops.
‘What’s your name?’ she asks, and he drops his deep brown long-lashed eyes to the floor and whispers, ‘Wellington, Madam.’ She can’t remember how many shillings there are to a euro, so she takes a chance and offers him a hundred shilling note. His palm is unexpectedly pink. He flashes a beautiful shy smile and disappears.
She pushes off her shoes and stretches out on the double bed on top of the dazzling white sheets and wonders what Sam is doing now. Not thinking about her, that’s for sure. She can hear the shrill repeated cry of a bird coming from beyond a pair of tall windows on the opposite wall. A savoury smell drifts into the room, saucepans clang somewhere. She watches her ceiling fan spinning gently and is asleep within minutes.
As the days pass – too quickly, far too quickly – she finds herself more and more enthralled by Africa. Everything is more colourful here, everything pulses with energy. She presses her face to the window of the jeep as they are ferried from one game reserve to another by Moses, their cheerful driver. She gazes, rapt, as Carol points out the galloping wildebeest and grazing elephants and herds of leaping impala, the leopards and the cheetahs, the hyenas and giraffes.
Kenyan food is another adventure. At mealtimes she dips balls of maize porridge called ugali into meat stews redolent with spices and herbs. She eats wonderfully sweet mangoes and papayas and pineapples that bear no resemblance to their overpriced and far-from-ripe counterparts on the shelves of Irish supermarkets. She tastes groundnut soup, fish in coconut, cooked bananas. She drinks milk fermented with charcoal.
The sunsets each evening are hypnotic, the whole sky ablaze, the land splashed with every shade of orange and red and purple and bronze. The sight is impossibly, heartbreakingly beautiful to her. She wants it never to end.
When darkness falls she gazes upwards at the glittering black velvety bowl of the sky and listens to the chirping crickets and the various howlings and chatterings in the land that spreads out beyond the gardens of the lodge. So alive she feels, so shaken up and stimulated by the exoticism that surrounds her.
‘I love it here,’ she tells Carol as they sit on the verandah on the final evening. ‘I wish I didn’t have to go home.’
SUNLOUNGER 2: Beach Read Bliss (Sunlounger Stories) Page 50