Mia had been wearing a dark blue dress with a pattern of flowers on it and her hair, loosened by the wind or his fingers, had escaped from the pins holding it back. She had looked, with her bright eyes and flushed cheeks, as if she had been in the grip of some great moment of revelation. Even then, Tina had wondered what the advantage of vulnerability was when it was allied to toughness. There surely couldn’t be anything creepier than looking into an adult face and seeing the innocent blankness of childhood, and yet it appeared to draw some women in. It had worked on Mia, anyway. It had been the potential of the boy she had clung to when she was confronted by the reality of the man. Tina felt the old, helpless anger burning through her again.
*
‘What are you thinking about?’ Spike asked now, and she was startled back to the present. In the pool a semi-deflated swan was drifting round and round by the filter, while the ice machine in the reception area spat cubes into a tray.
‘Nothing much,’ she said.
‘You looked real pissed about something,’ Spike said.
‘I’m just thinking that you need to ramp up your seduction of Lottie,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad you have taken the task on, but you’re being too subtle. Start giving her soulful looks. Tell her she looks beautiful, that kind of thing. You’re a master at it.’
‘Am I?’ he asked, looking at her with a serious gaze.
‘Second nature,’ Tina said breezily.
‘Be careful what you wish for, Valentina,’ he said.
‘What do you mean? And don’t call me that.’
‘I don’t mean anything,’ Spike said. ‘I’m just saying.’
‘I hate it when you just say things.’
‘What would happen if I really fell for her? She’s lovely.’ He didn’t think it would happen but he wanted to dent Tina’s complacency. She was just too annoyingly sure of herself.
‘Be my guest,’ Tina said, although for the first time since she had devised the plan, she felt a moment of doubt. Spike was certainly more interesting than dolorous Dean, but she didn’t plan on him becoming a permanent feature.
‘That’s big of you. You do realise there’s something a bit weird about pimping out your sister like this.’
‘I’m just ensuring she keeps her options open.’
‘OK. I’ll fall in love with your sister, if that’s what you really want.’ Spike felt an unexpected sense of desolation – it was clear that Tina was completely oblivious to anyone’s feelings but her own.
‘Great . . . although I doubt you will. She’s not really your type,’ Tina said.
‘She’s beautiful, kind, clever, what’s not to like?’
‘She’s too earnest for you. You prefer your women to be a little more challenging.’
‘I just want someone nice who sticks around and shares things with me. Someone unafraid of life, who’s ready to make the most of everything.’
‘Did you know that Lottie is scared of getting her hair caught in zips?’ Tina said. ‘And bee stings and rabies and sepsis and inhaling sequins and a million other things?’
‘That’s kind of cute,’ he said, goading her. ‘She doesn’t seem scared of the things that really matter.’
‘Are you saying I am?’
‘I’m saying nothing,’ Spike said. He stretched out on his sun lounger, revealing his flat stomach and the V-shaped tendons disappearing into his shorts that Tina had always had a weakness for. He looked so maddeningly comfortable that she got up and scooped the wasted ice cubes up in a towel and tipped them into his lap. He jumped up and grabbed hold of her and made to throw her into the pool. At the very same time as trying savagely to extricate herself, she wanted to stop moving and allow herself to be held. Then the water took her, and the mobile phone she had tucked into the pocket of her shorts, and she cursed him once again.
Chapter 15
THEY WERE MAKING FOR A car park near the beginning of a trail that took them through the Golden Canyon and Zabriskie Point to a possible place to camp a couple of miles beyond. They had registered their intention to stay overnight in Death Valley at Furnace Creek, and hired rucksacks, a tent that was large enough for three – although Tina had told Spike he had to sleep outside – a stove and sleeping bags. Lottie had scrupulously read the information about what was allowed and what was prohibited and made a list of the necessary equipment. Tina had been patient enough until Lottie had started to go on about camping pans and spare socks and poring with unnecessary attention over the map of trails. Then she had lost interest and wandered out of the shop to take pictures of some children who were doing handstands in a line against the supermarket wall. She loved how joyful their faces looked, with their hair hanging to the ground and their eyes half closed, their toes pointed in their sandals.
She put her camera on the ground, took a deep breath and swung onto her arms. For a moment she thought she wasn’t going to be able to get her legs up, but then something in her loosened, her hips hinged and, just like that, her legs were resting against the wall. She remembered the rush of blood to her head and the bulging, crazy inversion of her gaze. The small girl next to her looked sideways and gave a cheer.
*
Emerging laden down from the shop, Spike saw Tina’s handstand and something in him turned, as if he too was looking at the world upside down.
She had never told him she loved him, but he had hoped that one day she would. He was a patient man. Part of him had admired the fact that she didn’t give in easily to sentiment. He had had other relationships in which the word had been used loosely, without any real or lasting feeling. I love ham sandwiches. I love Barcelona. I love pearl earrings. I love you. There had been days when they were together when he was sure she had been on the brink of saying what she felt, days when he would sense an uncharacteristic, worried tenderness, but she always pulled away at the last minute, diverting them both with a joke, or picking up her camera to take a picture of something that had caught her eye. She had taken a lot of pictures of him. He had always been surprised by the moments she chose to record. He never looked as he imagined himself to be in her photographs. There was an imprecise, off-kilter quality to the images, as if she was trying to work something out.
He had thrown all the photographs away along with the other bits and pieces she had left behind her – a half-bottle of lemony perfume, a brush still wrapped with her hair, a T-shirt she used to wear in bed – anything that had the potential to trip him up and set the pain jangling like a stubbed toe.
He had replayed the scene over and over again. Each time he tried to remember if Tina had showed even a trace of guilt, but in his memory her face was always lacking any kind of real remorse. The man she had slept with hadn’t been anyone special. Spike couldn’t even remember now exactly what he had looked like. He had been a friend of a friend who had taken to hanging around. Dark-haired, a sweater always round his shoulders, a little too talkative. A chancer. The kind of man who made a point of laughing loudly at jokes and who always drew attention to the fact that he was buying the drinks. Someone who insinuated himself into groups where no one really knew him but accepted him because they assumed he must be there at someone else’s invitation. Spike would never have known about it if a working weekend away had not been cancelled, and he hadn’t arrived back at the flat when she wasn’t expecting him. Like a sap he’d bought wine and flowers, and turned the key in the lock with a sense of pleasant anticipation. A weekend he would be able to spend with her after all stretched ahead. He hadn’t called. He had wanted to surprise her. She had been a little under the weather and he had wanted to do something to cheer her up. Take her to the beach, perhaps, or to that Moroccan restaurant she liked which was rigged out like a tent, which gave him cramp in his legs because they had to sit on the floor.
She turned when she heard the door open, and for a moment she stared at him. He had seen her shock and something that might have been regret, a ripple of feeling in her face, the words starting and then dying on her lips.
Then she had gathered herself and adopted a kind of blank defiance. She got off the bed, her hair tangled, her beautiful skin flushed the same way it did when he touched her. She had moved slowly, with no attempt to hide her body. There had been no apparent shame in the almost languorous way she had picked up her shirt from the floor and put it on. The man had covered himself with a sheet and made a strange sort of snorting noise, half way between laughter and fear. After several moments in which Spike had stood frozen looking at the scene – the window open, the curtain moving gently in the breeze – he’d shut the door and walked out of the apartment to the nearest bar and drunk himself stupid.
When he got back five hours later, she had gone.
*
‘Acting your age again,’ he said now as she swung herself upright, grinning and flushed. He would not show her how she still affected him. All that was done.
They parked the car and packed rucksacks and distributed provisions and set off on the trail. It started as a narrow, intermittently paved track between layered rocks, their strata pushed upright in slender slivers and blooming with occasional clusters of white, spiked quartz. The surfaces of the rocks were rippled with petrified sand, as if they still retained a memory of water over them. After a quarter of a mile or so the view opened up slightly to reveal glints of green and gold and slender, twisting side paths down which waterfalls had once spilled out into lakes. Ahead of them, beyond the ochre sandstone mounds, the Red Cathedral loomed, its surface scored with cracks and folds like the scrolled stonework in the walls of a gothic church. When they stopped to look back, taking the opportunity to have a quick drink, the weathered slices and mounds of the Badlands appeared soft, like floral foam; as if it might be possible to stick your fingers through them.
‘It makes me feel sort of holy,’ Lottie said, and for once she thought she had silenced the querulous voice in her head. What she could see around took up all the space inside her.
‘Thank you for bringing me here,’ she said to her sister.
Tina smiled and put her arm around her shoulder and they stood together, silent and perfectly aligned. Lottie wished it could always be like this.
*
For all her tricky ways, Tina had a great capacity for creating joy. When they were younger, it never felt as if anything could properly start until she was there. She had the knack of setting life in motion somehow. She would arrive at any gathering, inevitably late, always full of some story of disaster or triumph, always funny and opinionated and unmistakably present. She could just as easily cast a cloud over everything if she was in a bad mood.
‘What do you think of him?’ she had asked Lottie in one of her loud whispers when Mia and Rick had gone into the kitchen. They were at their mother’s house, the dark, misshapen little cottage in Ilfracombe into which she’d moved after finally splitting up with their father. Lynne and Joe had lived on together in a perpetual state of deadly skirmish, long after the sisters had grown up and left home. For years they had behaved like creatures in captivity, who, unable to escape their cage, had developed the teeth-grinding, sore-licking habits of animals driven mad by their imprisonment. Even after they split up they couldn’t embrace their new freedom, but instead worried away at the scabs left by their confinement.
‘He’s good-looking,’ Lottie had answered.
‘I’m never a big fan of winsome charm,’ Tina had replied. ‘I always think it’s hiding something under its floppy fringe.’
‘He seems dead keen on her, and I’ve never seen her looking so happy. She’s positively glowing!’
Mia did look great. She’d shed a stone that she didn’t really need to lose, but it had made her face look high-cheekboned. She’d swapped her boho blouses and ragged jeans in favour of neat, belted dresses and heels.
‘Yes. She is clearly getting laid regularly. I don’t know. It’s just that we hardly ever get to see her these days.’
‘You’re so contrary,’ Lottie had said. ‘You’ve been telling her she should concentrate less on work and more on her love life for years, and now that she seems to have found someone, you’re being all critical!’
‘I’m just reserving judgement, that’s all,’ Tina had replied, knocking back a huge lemon drizzle gin.
*
The path continued upwards and curved round the base of Manly Beacon. There were parts that had sheared away and the fall to their right was fairly precipitous, so that they had to be careful where they put their feet. At one point Lottie, dazzled by looking up at the monumental surface of the cliff, almost tripped and Spike caught hold of her.
‘Mind yourself,’ he said. ‘We don’t want you getting hurt.’ He smiled at her and adjusted her hat, which had been knocked sideways by her stumble.
‘You’ve got some golden dust on your face,’ he said, rubbing the side of her cheek gently with his fingers. She was surprised to find herself leaning into him, and had to make herself turn abruptly and walk on. She felt uncoordinated, as if her almost-fall had triggered a weakness. At Zabriskie Point, they sat down on their unnecessary anoraks and ate bread and cheese and drank beer and looked at the view – the bright mounds of the Golden Valley, the duller, softer folds of the Badlands and in the distance, beyond the alabaster gleam of the salt flats, a purplish mountain range. The sky was a celestial blue and full of hawks.
‘It makes me want to sing,’ Spike said, spreading out his arms to encompass the hills and the sky and the feeling of being there.
‘Don’t spoil it,’ Tina answered.
They weren’t allowed to camp near Zabriskie Point, but they had identified a track leading down from the hill and walked for a further mile and a half to a flat, sandy spot. Here they had an expansive view and the benefit of two huge rocks on either side to shelter them. They set about making a camp. Lottie took methodical charge of the tent, Spike stored the water and unrolled the sleeping bags and got the stove lit for coffee, while Tina sat on a blanket issuing vague instructions.
‘I’ve never been much of a Girl Guide,’ she said. ‘I‘ve always left all that to Lottie. She enjoys doing things like washing pans with a bunch of twigs.’
After a while she deigned to blow up the air mattress she had insisted they bring and then lay flat on it, looking up at the sky.
‘I’m just going to see if I can find some stones to weigh the sides of the tent down,’ Spike said. ‘It can get pretty windy at night.’
Tina sat up and they watched him walking off into the distance.
‘What happens if we have to, you know . . . poo?’ Lottie asked. ‘It says in the list of rules that you have to dig a hole with a trowel, and we haven’t brought one.’
‘You could fashion one out of a flat stone and a piece of wood,’ Tina said. ‘Didn’t you once get a badge for that?’
‘You always mock my time in the Guides, but it taught me a lot of useful stuff.’
‘When did you last have to use a reef knot, or make a bridge out of straws?’
‘You never know when skills like that will be needed,’ Lottie said. ‘I think I’ll just wait until we get back to go to the toilet. I haven’t got a digging implement and besides, I think the landscape is too open to properly relax.’
‘Your challenge today is to poo in the wild,’ Tina said, grinning.
‘How will you even know whether I have or not?’
‘I’ll know,’ Tina said. ‘Meanwhile, how about putting your catering badge to good use and rustling me up something to eat?’
‘Cheese or pastrami?’ Lottie answered, dragging the provisions rucksack out of the tent and delving inside.
‘Cheese, and one of those little bottles of wine we bought please,’ Tina answered, giving a great stretching yawn. ‘I’m done in. It was quite a walk.’ She made room for Lottie on the mattress.
Lottie was aware of her sister’s scrutiny as she fished around in the bag.
‘I can feel your eyes burning into the side of my head,’ she said.
‘That’s usual
ly your trick,’ Tina answered.
‘It doesn’t get me anywhere. You’re so secretive.’
‘What do you want to know? Try me,’ Tina said, biting into her sandwich.
‘I want to know what happened between you and Spike.’
‘Why are you so interested?’
‘Because you’re so strange around him,’ Lottie said, stretching out her legs. She was gratified to see that they had lost their white gleam and looked almost tanned.
‘I’m not the only one.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I saw that little exchange between you earlier. You stumbling into his arms, accidentally on purpose.’
‘You’re talking rubbish.’ Lottie moved further away down the mattress. But as she spoke she remembered that small, almost instinctive tremor, the way she had felt dazed after he had touched her face, as if for a moment she had forgotten who she was.
‘Am I?’ Tina said unrepentantly, taking a swig from her bottle. She had plaited her hair and it lay in a golden coil around her neck.
‘OK. I find him attractive,’ Lottie admitted, feeling a little flutter of panic as she said the words. Just saying it out loud made her feel as if she was betraying Dean. ‘But it doesn’t mean anything. I think that Ryan Gosling is attractive, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love Dean.’
‘We are not on a road trip with Ryan Gosling,’ Tina said. ‘More’s the pity.’
Lottie laughed. ‘I’m having fun, you know,’ she said, and leant over and tugged on Tina’s braid playfully.
‘You always used to pull on my hair as if you were ringing a bell,’ Tina said, but without rancour. ‘I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself. This is what I wanted, us being close again. Sharing stuff.’
‘I know,’ Lottie said. She moved along the mattress so that she was sitting next to her sister again. They drank wine and stared at the view. The sky was softening, and it was so quiet they could hear the creak of the rocks contracting and the stealthy rustlings of creatures emerging from their daytime shelters.
‘Do coyotes bite?’ Lottie asked.
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