For the next few minutes, they worked in silence, Kate discarding far more rocks than she kept. From a distance, the beach had seemed littered with these perfect pale ovals, but upon closer inspection, many of them were nearer to grey in colour and lots had scuff marks or dents.
‘You don’t have to be too fussy,’ said Alex, who had wandered further down the beach and returned with both his hands full. There was white dust all over his chest hair and a fair amount in his beard, too.
‘Whatever you say, Santa.’
‘You are on fire today,’ he remarked, dropping his haul of stones on the ground.
‘It feels like I literally am,’ she said, looking fretfully towards the sun.
‘Here.’ Alex pulled off his cap and plonked it on top of her damp curls. ‘To stop your nose burning.’
‘Thanks.’ She tugged it down, adjusting the back until it fitted more snugly.
Alex sat down cross-legged and motioned Kate to join him, then pulled something out from behind his ear and handed it to her.
‘Where on earth did that come from?’ she said, staring at the black felt-tip pen in amazement.
‘You may mock the dreadlocks,’ he said, ‘but they’re great for storing things.’
‘I don’t mock them,’ she protested, blushing as he gave her a look.
‘You want me to rinse this pen in the sea for you?’
‘No.’ Kate clutched it tightly as he made a grab. Her swimsuit was finally dry, but the ends of her hair were still wet, and dribbles of cold water kept trickling down her back.
‘Are we ready?’ she asked, suppressing a shiver. ‘How does this game work?’
‘It’s not a game, so much as an exercise,’ he explained. ‘I’ll start by asking you a question, and all you have to do is answer it as quickly and as honestly as you can. Understood?’
‘Yes,’ said Kate, beginning to feel slightly apprehensive. ‘But wha—?’
‘Ready?’
She nodded; lips pursed in preparation. Alex gave her a moment to collect her thoughts, waiting until she had stopped fidgeting and was still, and then he spoke.
‘What scares you?’
‘Pain,’ said Kate, without missing a beat. ‘And germs.’
‘Write each word down on the stones – one stone for each thing that scares you.’
Puzzled, Kate did as instructed, swirling her ‘s’ and making the dot of her ‘i’ a smiley face.
‘What else?’ prompted Alex.
‘Being up on a high ledge,’ she said decisively. ‘So heights – and numbness.’
‘You mean physical numbness – when you doze off in an odd position and your arm falls asleep?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I mean the other kind – emotional numbness. I’m scared of being hurt, but what frightens me more than that is not caring at all, you know? Or being unaffected by love, or by hate, or even by grief. Becoming a shell.’
Alex did not say anything for a while; Kate saw his Adam’s apple moving in his throat, as if he was swallowing something down. When he spoke again, he sounded unsteady.
‘That was a good one. What else?’
‘Centipedes,’ she said, in an attempt to lighten the mood. ‘I found one in my bra once – while I was wearing it. The scream almost shattered the windows of James’s car.’
Alex nodded, a low chuckle escaping his lips as she selected a stone long enough to accommodate the word.
‘How about you?’ she said. ‘What are you scared of?’
‘Snakes,’ he said, taking the pen from her and writing it down.
‘Is that so?’ she said in bemusement. ‘So, when you said you’d protect me from them last night, what you actually meant was you’d run away and let me deal with them alone?’
‘But I would have stayed and fought a bear . . .’
‘Hmm, I suppose I can let you off then. What else?’
‘Sinking,’ he replied. ‘I worry about my boat sinking all the time.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ joked Kate, grinning at his expression of pretend outrage.
‘Your turn,’ he said, handing her the pen, but Kate had drawn a blank. There were many things she could write on the stones, but she wasn’t yet ready to share them – not until he gave away something more about his own fears.
‘What are we going to do with all these once we’ve finished?’ she asked.
Alex smiled rather wistfully. ‘Throw them into the water.’
‘Won’t that wash away the words?’
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘As Josh would say: “That’s what we cry for – to wash away our fears.” Only, in his version, you let the sea do it for you.’
Kate was aware of a strange sensation then, as if she was hearing his words for the second time. A memory tugged, but it was too quiet; and even as she felt it, it was gone, had slipped back into the misty corners of her subconscious.
‘This is Josh’s game?’ she said, and Alex sighed.
‘He was one of life’s survivors.’
‘Was?’ she echoed tentatively. ‘You don’t mean that he’s . . .’
‘Long gone,’ he said with finality. ‘Josh is long gone. Now, what are you going to write down next?’
‘Loss scares me,’ she said, scribbling it down. ‘The thought of losing my parents or Toby, of something happening to them or to James, or my best friend Robyn. I don’t think I would ever recover. I’m not strong enough.’
‘People do,’ he said gently. ‘Death is a part of life.’
‘One I want no part in,’ she said, underlining the word three times to illustrate her point.
‘What scares you more?’ Alex asked. ‘Losing someone, or dying yourself?’
‘The former, of course.’
‘So, your own death doesn’t scare you? You wouldn’t write it down on the stones?’
‘No,’ she said, mildly diverted by her own answer. ‘Like you said, there’s no getting away from it, so what would be the point in fearing it? That would make living unbearable.’
‘You’d be surprised how many people would disagree,’ he said.
‘Well, I suppose I do fear it in some regard,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Because if I were to die, the people who care about me would be hurt – although maybe not all of them,’ she added, thinking bitterly of James. ‘But the idea of anyone I love, anyone I remotely care about being upset,’ she went on, smoothing her thumb across a blank stone, ‘that does scare me.’
‘Shall we add it to the pile?’ he said, but Kate shook her head.
‘No. You can, if you like? Unless you have something better in mind?’
Alex accepted the pen and wrote ‘stubbing my toe’ in compact capital letters.
‘What?’ he said, as Kate scoffed. ‘That counts. Stubbing your toe really hurts – and always seems to happen at the worst possible time, too.’
‘Yeah, but you’re not scared of it, are you? The thought of stubbing your toes doesn’t keep you up at night?’
‘Fair point,’ he agreed. ‘But I’m still having it.’
They continued in the same vein for a while, each trying to outdo the other with sillier and sillier suggestions. Kate chose maggots, letters from the tax office and pterodactyls, arguing that it would only take a crocodile to be amorous with a pelican for the latter to stage an evolutionary comeback. Alex in response opted for scorpions, milky tea and asteroids. They had quite a stack now, and the ink was starting to wane.
‘Two more each?’ Alex said, and Kate nodded.
‘Yes – but they have to be good ones. Real ones,’ she added, seeing his features alight with mischief. ‘I’ll go first.’
‘Loneliness,’ Alex read aloud over her shoulder. ‘Even after what we discussed last night?’
‘I don’t mean solitude,’ she said. ‘I mean ending up alone; finding myself aged sixty, with no friends and no family around me because nobody remembers me. I am forgotten.’
Very gently, Alex took the pen from her and drew a firm line t
hrough the word.
‘It’s not loneliness you fear, it’s being lonely,’ he told her, turning over the stone and beginning to write.
Kate stared at the word, at the five neat letters, so innocuous in appearance yet so catastrophic in meaning.
Alone.
‘Did I tell you that I wanted to run away at the start of this summer?’ she said, staring out across the water because it was easier than meeting his gaze. ‘I proposed to James, you know. I stood up in a room full of our friends and family, on my thirtieth birthday, and asked him to marry me.’
Alex made a noise that sounded like ‘oh’.
‘Obviously, he said no. Well, he didn’t say anything in fact, he just stood there, staring at me with this horrified expression on his face, his mouth opening and closing like a goldfish stranded on land. If the situation hadn’t been so excruciating, it might have been funny.’
Kate waited, but there was no sign of laughter – not from Alex or herself. It was too fresh for that, the rejection still too painful.
‘Someone filmed the whole thing,’ she went on, closing her eyes as she recalled the blurry footage. ‘Posted it on the Internet and everything. I was even famous for a while – in the way that nobody would ever want to be, would not even want their worst enemy to be. I have a hashtag, Wannabe Wife, which is ridiculous because a wife isn’t what I wanted to be – not really.’
She sighed, reaching for a smaller stone and throwing it hard into the sea. There was a splash and it vanished, swallowed by the silvery blue water.
‘Why did you ask someone to marry you if you didn’t want to be married?’
It was a fair question but Kate still had to bite back the tears.
‘I thought it might make up for the fact that . . . That I couldn’t give him, give us, the thing we both wanted the most. I hoped that if we were husband and wife, that it would fix all the things that had gone wrong since—’
Alex did not say anything; he did not need to. They both knew what she was going to say next, but now that she had come this far, Kate wanted to get the words out, needed, perhaps, to let them out.
‘A baby,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t give him a baby. That’s why he’s left me; that’s the real reason. I’ve failed at things my whole life, but I just thought that if I could succeed at that, if I could be a mum, then it would make all the other stuff go away. But now, I can’t even do that.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Alex reached across and offered her his hand. Kate stared at it for a moment, then took it, her tears falling as she felt his fingers close around her own. He could have said more, offered words of sympathy, but he didn’t. Kate was thankful to him for that. He seemed to understand exactly how to comfort her and it wasn’t by mollycoddling, it was simply being there and listening, taking a portion of her pain and sharing it, lessening the load she had carried for what felt like so long.
‘Here,’ he said, selecting one of the few remaining stones and balancing it on the bend of his knee. ‘I think we should add the word “hashtags” to the pile.’
‘For both of us?’ she said hesitantly, and he smiled.
‘No – I barely know what they are. But this,’ he continued, reaching for another stone and writing the word ‘fear’ in large, bold letters, ‘is one of mine.’
‘You fear fear?’
A nod.
Kate added another stone and wrote ‘failure’ in a shaky hand. ‘There’s one stone left,’ she told him. ‘Your turn.’
The silence that followed felt to Kate as if it stretched on for ages, and she squeezed the hand she was still holding, urging him to be brave, to share a truth with her that meant something. He had helped her; now she wanted to be there for him.
Of all the words Kate was expecting to see on that final stone, none of them came close to the one that appeared, small yet profound, without so much as a murmur of explanation.
Me.
Dear Josh,
I never believed things would go this far, yet here we are.
Ten years.
You have been missing for ten years.
I have to admit, I do feel angry sometimes – frustrated with you for not getting in touch and outraged with a world that continues to keep you hidden.
On other days, I am simply sad, because you are my brother and I miss you.
But today? Today, I am determined. Because I have decided that this is the year I will find you. Whatever it takes.
I have never written down what happened between us on that dreadful day, although I rarely stop thinking about it. I go over and over it in my head, wondering how I could have said all those things to you, how I got to a point of such bitterness and resentment. Was it grief? Mum and Dad died that year, not four months apart. Do you remember how we clung to one another in the hospital? I was weeping but you were trying to be strong for me. Or maybe you had no choice. Maybe you thought that if you let that pain in, on top of everything else, it would have been too much. You would have broken.
You needed me more during those darkest of days than you ever had before, but every time I looked at you, I saw my own pain reflected back at me and I couldn’t bear it, Josh – I just couldn’t. Our shared loss should have brought us closer, but I allowed it to flow like water into the cracks that had long existed in our family. Fate and the universe and death were at fault, nothing more, but I wanted something tangible, someone I could shake and scream at and beat with my fists.
To my shame, that became you.
I know you chose to go because of me; that you never would have gone had I been kinder, stronger, better. Please come home so I can say sorry, so we can both forgive. I miss you.
Love, Angela
Part Three
Chapter 32
Robyn did not so much climb out of the jeep as cartwheel over the door, such was her haste to throw her arms around her best friend.
‘Look at your tan!’ were her first words, her mouth split open wide with approval as she gave Kate the once over. ‘Look at her tan!’ she said to Toby, who was staggering slightly under the weight of Robyn’s suitcase.
‘You do know we have a kitchen sink here, right? A few of them in fact.’
‘Ah,’ sighed Robyn, gazing around happily. ‘The Nimble siblings and their bizarre sense of humour – how I’ve missed it.’
Kate caught her brother’s eye and laughed.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I want to give you the tour.’
‘It’s so hot!’ Robyn exclaimed a minute later, as she fanned her face with a leaflet advertising boat trips that she had plucked off the hostel reception desk. ‘I thought it had been warm in London lately, but this place is sizzling. I bet we could cook bacon and eggs out on the pavement if we tried – speaking of which’ – she looked hopefully at Kate – ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance of breakfast. I mean, I had a tuna melt on the flight and some Pret porridge in the airport first thing, but that was basically the middle of the night. As you know, any food consumed between the hours of midnight and six a.m. does not count towards the daily intake.’
‘That rule still stands, does it?’ said Kate. The two of them had come up with it in their college days, when stumbling home from a pub or club always included a stop at the local kebab or fried chicken takeaway.
Her friend grinned. ‘The best ones always do.’
Once they’d deposited the luggage, toured Sul Tetto and Robyn had taken a quick shower before changing into beachwear, both women were ravenous. Rather than eat up on the terrace, which was crowded with backpackers, Kate bore her friend off to her favourite waterside café, where they ordered vast fluffy omelettes and rich, bitter espressos.
‘I know I keep saying it, but you look incredible,’ Robyn appraised, looking Kate up and down with such pride that she blushed.
‘No, I don’t. Look at the state of my hair.’
Robyn examined a stray curl, tugging it gently and watching it ping back into place.
‘You’ve always had a bonker
s barnet – it’s your thing.’
‘It’s become even more bonkers since I arrived here,’ said Kate. ‘It doesn’t matter how much conditioner I use; it always frizzes up as if I’ve stuck my big toe into a plug socket.’
‘At least your hair has volume,’ bemoaned her friend, rolling her eyes upwards.
‘Too much of it,’ countered Kate. ‘Your hair is smooth and shiny and makes you look even better than Uma Thurman did in Pulp Fiction. You do look a bit tired today,’ she allowed, as Robyn yawned for the third time since they’d taken their seats. ‘But still as beautiful as ever.’
‘Smooth talker.’ Robyn speared a slice of tomato. ‘I’ve been working non-stop lately. I took on three new patients and this past month or so has been real a learning curve for me.’
‘Me too,’ agreed Kate, who was running a slice of toast through the buttery residue on her plate.
‘The hostel looks wonderful,’ Robyn said. ‘I know, I know – I have said it about a hundred times already, but it really does. The photos don’t do your vision justice.’
‘Thanks,’ said Kate, sitting up a fraction taller. ‘It was a lot of fun, hard work, but fun. I blagged my way through a lot of it and I hadn’t a clue how to do the big stuff, such as the furniture and light fittings. I have Alex to thank for all that.’
‘Ah, yes.’ Robyn lifted her espresso cup and extended a theatrical little finger. ‘My next question was going to be about him.’
‘Oh?’ Kate arranged her features into what she hoped was a bland expression.
‘Do I get to meet him?’
‘I’m not sure. Probably. I did tell him you were coming.’
‘Is he still as good-looking as ever?’ Robyn smiled wickedly.
‘I’m not sure you’ll be so enamoured when you meet him,’ Kate told her. ‘He’s not your normal type.’
‘Thank god for that.’ Robyn rubbed her hands together. ‘My usual types mostly turn out to be idiots. It’s about time I tried something different. The last holiday romance I had was in Corfu when we were eighteen. Do you remember Stelios?’
‘I remember the back of his head,’ Kate said. ‘That was the only part of him I ever saw, on account of all the snogging.’
The Getaway: A holiday romance for 2021 - perfect summer escapism! Page 19