They’ve been here three weeks and they still can’t windsurf. It’s become a joke. Neither of them has been able to stand on the board for more than a few minutes, but each time they fall in, they haul themselves back up again. Melody aches in places she didn’t know she had muscles, sees the ripple of her veins through her arms now. ‘It’s not beating me,’ Honor declares, twisting the top off her second bottle of beer. ‘I refuse to go home until I can do it.’ If it was down to Melody, they would have given up after day one. But Honor won’t let her quit. She never gives up. Never has. And Honor’s influence makes Melody stronger than she would be alone.
The holiday in Tarifa was nine years ago yet the images appear so sharp and bright in her mind they dazzle. Melody casts a look around the cool, sterile kitchen where she sits with her laptop. The nothingness of it sits in sharp relief to her memories. Closing her eyes, she allows her recollections to work her senses; the smell of frying food rolling off the beach shacks, the first glug of icy beer in the sun, the soundtrack of Honor’s chatter following her everywhere. Honor was right, they were happy. Had either of them realised, as they ate slices of watermelon under the endless blue sky, how content they were? Probably not. Youthful ignorance had tricked them, made them believe that this was what they were entitled to, how it would always be. They were reckless with their happiness.
Melody has no right to own these memories now. It is a legacy she has destroyed. What she did afterwards undercut everything, their friendship, their trust, their shared history. Yes, it hadn’t been the same between them for a good while. Honor had seemed diminished somehow, quiet where before Melody struggled to get a word in edgeways. Was this Melody’s way of punishing her friend for changing? Whatever, there were no excuses. She knew what she was doing even in the heat of it. She knew she was throwing it all away and still she didn’t stop.
The photo in Honor’s hallway, Melody has it too. Their last day in Tarifa. They cracked it, stayed on their boards, glided back and forth in the water for hours. Why had it been so difficult, they wondered, when it came so instinctively now? Honor has kept the photograph, must see it every day. In this Melody finds the smallest crumb of hope.
This is how it happened.
Another holiday. Ibiza this time. Honor and Sam, Patrick and Melody together in a villa near Portinatx at the northernmost tip of the island.
She couldn’t sleep. Above her the fan rotated to no discernible effect. She rose from the bed, naked, pulling on a vest, knickers, as little clothing as possible, took her book from the bedside table and went outside.
The whistle of crickets, the hum of the refrigerator, the distant lapping of waves that reminded her of the sound she heard when she put a shell to her ear as a child. She read a page of her book, shuffled on the chair. She was restless. Tonight the plan had been to skip booze, give their livers a rest. She sighed. Sod it, I’m on holiday. The indulgence appealed to her: reading and drinking, semi-naked, alone.
With her wine, she settled back down to read. One glass, followed by another.
‘How many books is that? Your fourth?’ The voice came at her through the darkness.
She jumped. Red wine spilt down her vest. Across the terrace she could make out his shape.
‘How long have you been there?’
‘Long enough,’ he said, ‘to know that you’re on to your second glass of wine.’
‘I’m on holiday. To hell with abstinence.’
‘Well since you put it like that …’ he got up and disappeared into the kitchen, returning with a glass that he filled with wine before sitting down next to her.
‘It’s a stupid idea.’
‘That’s not what I asked,’ Sam said.
‘The answer is no.’
‘You disappoint me, Melody, where’s your sense of fun, adventure?’
‘I’m drunk.’
‘You’ve been drinking. There’s a difference between that and being drunk. I’ll go on my own, then.’ He hauled himself out of the chair, stretched his arms out wide, flexed his wrists so she could hear the little snapping sound his bones made.
‘You could drown and no one would know.’
‘Not if you were watching I couldn’t.’
The beach, all to themselves, sunbeds stacked, chained together. Straw shades rustled as they caught the wind. Black shadows of waves shifted in the distance. Stars jewelled the sky.
Sam stripped off.
‘I’m going in, what are you … waiting for?’ His last two words faded out as he crashed into the foam.
When she looked, she could only see his head now. ‘It’s lovely, come on. I dare you, what are you scared of?’ he shouted. His voice distant and echoing.
What was she scared of?
She removed her vest, kept her knickers on, a semblance of propriety. She ran down towards the water’s edge, arms crossed to cover her chest, hold her boobs in place. A semicircle of moon illuminated the sand, its light dancing off the water. She crept in, prepared for the cold to slap her skin. Instead she found it tepid, like a cooling bath. One … two … three, she counted. Then under.
Her arms pushed through the water, lightness filled her limbs. As she swam she was aware of the thermal changes; swimming through warm water only to be encircled by pockets of cold. Moving through the black sea under the dark sky pierced with stars, she felt herself become fluid, in tune with her environment. Down and down she swam, conscious of the tightening in her chest. When she could bear it no longer, she put her hands by her sides and let the water propel her upwards, bursting through the surface and gasping for breath. Then she turned over on to her back and gazed at the sky, allowing her body to be carried by the current. She’d never known a feeling like it before – the magical liberation of being reduced to her simplest instincts.
Afterwards, on the beach, they huddled close, towels pulled around their shoulders. There was an effervescence about her, the energy of the sea still fizzing through her body.
With her finger she carved out an M in the sand.
‘We should be getting back,’ she said, but her voice carried no conviction. She wasn’t ready to abandon the night just yet, to go back to the villa and lie wide awake in bed catching the intermittent draughts of the fan.
She wanted to remain stripped back, with only her instincts, a while longer.
A fly landed on her cheek. Sam leant in to swat it away. He stayed there, close to her face, a current sparking between them.
‘Dare you,’ she swore he said, but his lips were already on hers.
Mel had been fucking her best friend’s boyfriend behind her back. And Honor knew. It’s all there, written down in words on the screen in front of her.
There’s a line and when it’s crossed there’s no going back, no matter how much you want to.
Once they’d started, they couldn’t stop. Or wouldn’t stop? Not that it mattered now. The consequences were the same. And Honor had found out. How?
It made sense now, the awkwardness that characterised their meetings towards the end. Honor had put her own feelings to one side when Mel had been in hospital and even in the months after when she was recuperating. Doing what was expected of her. But friendships are predicated on trust. If you lose it, there is nowhere left to go. Maybe if Mel had had the decency to own up, say sorry, she could have changed the course of things. But Sam counselled against it.
‘She doesn’t know, why tell her now? What good would that do?’
‘She’s not stupid, I’m sure she knows,’ Mel told him, thinking of their aborted trip to London, the excruciating silences on the train journey.
‘No she doesn’t. You’re just projecting your paranoia on to her.’
It’s all in your head.
Sam wanted to keep their story neat and tidy, no messy overlaps.
In his head it went something like this: Honor told him she was leaving shortly after the attack. Sam and Mel got together six months afterwards, which was an entirely respectable amount of
time to have elapsed between two relationships.
He could say it as many times as he wanted, but Melody knew Honor didn’t see it that way.
She snaps the laptop shut. She feels both vindicated and ashamed. The more she reads Eve’s file, the more she realises how delusional she has been, swaddled in layers of lies.
Her mobile is on the table next to her. There is still a number for Honor in there, obsolete now, she imagines. How many times has her finger hovered over that number, willing herself to call?
No, she thinks, calling her is not good enough. She imagines the distance between them on the line would be too great. It would allow for words to be misconstrued and distorted. What she wants is to see her, to stand next to her and hear the tone of her voice, to face up to her friend and what she did to her. To say sorry.
It is long overdue.
Sam’s car is too precious to be squeezed in to a space in the hospital car park, at least Mel assumes this is why he always bikes to the station and takes the train to work. His keys will be hanging on a hook in the cupboard underneath the stairs. Everything in their house has a place. Even me, she thinks. Opening the cupboard door she switches on the light and sees them glinting at her, next to a row of other keys. Above every hook is a label. SHED, FRONT DOOR, WINDOWS, KITCHEN DOORS. Beneath them the shoe storage, each pair with its own cubbyhole. She thumbs the metal logo on the key ring. The circular blue and white roundel. It’s his new car. Would he mind? She laughs. Who’s she kidding? The last time she drove alone was three years ago, when she mounted the kerb and hit a bollard as she was turning the corner. The impact left a little dimple in the side of the car. He didn’t shout. It would have been better if he had. Instead she got the silent treatment, swore she could almost hear the anger whistling out of him, like a pressure cooker blowing off steam.
‘If you want a little runaround, we can get one,’ he said eventually, but she wasn’t to drive his car any more. Still, he’d kept her on the insurance. There were always exceptions to the rule. Like when they were out and he wanted to drink, he was prepared to overlook her lack of spatial awareness then.
She pictures his face when he realises it’s missing. The thought makes her smile.
She unhooks the key, slips it in her pocket and runs upstairs to gather a few bits of clothing: a jumper, trousers, a toothbrush, clean underwear as a contingency. She will take her laptop too. The prospect of driving the distance alone daunts her, but it’s not like she’ll be surrounded by people. She’ll be confined within £30,000 worth of German engineering. She locks the front door behind her, and holding the key fob out in front of her presses the button to open the garage. The door rises slowly to reveal Sam’s car. Beetle black, shining.
After the first twenty miles or so, once she allowed her grip to relax on the steering wheel and brought her breathing under control, she began to relax into the drive. Now, two hours in, she’d go so far as to say that watching the world flicker by in her peripheral vision is giving her an absurd amount of pleasure. She’s opted for the longer, scenic route that follows the curves of the coast. Cruising at sixty with her window down, she hears that strange juddering sound caused by the wind, feels its vibrations in her chest. It makes her giddy, along with the briny air that rolls in from the sea. She’s forgotten how glorious the light is here, the way it constantly changes and shifts; the same scene painted in a different palette every time you look. Today it is warm and golden and the cliff faces are the colour of honeycomb, like a Cadbury’s Crunchie.
It gives her an idea.
She recognises the turning and indicates right, driving on down a narrow road. There’s a small car park at the end. It’s only half full, so she has her choice of spaces. Once she has parked, she gets out and without pause starts walking downhill. She focuses on her trainers kicking out in front of her. She’s counting in her head, conscious of the undulating path, the uneven clumps of grass, the way the earth is soft and waterlogged in parts, the stretches where it is hard and solid underfoot. Occasionally she jumps to dodge a pile of dog shit but for the most part she keeps her stride steady, enjoying the way it shuttles her back to an earlier time. This is what they used to do. Her and Honor. The closest to a natural high you could get. On the count of four hundred Melody knows she has reached the point closest to the cliff edge that juts out proud over the sea. Finally she allows herself to look.
The sensation slams into her. Simultaneously her feet scramble backwards as her body sways forward. A surge of fear and exhilaration charges through her. She feels it in her limbs, her muscles. It fizzes in her bloodstream.
She holds her arms open wide and lifts her head up. Clouds score the sky above, gold-edged where the sun shoots through them. A gust of wind could take her and propel her forward. That is the allure, skirting so close to the edge. She peers down the sheer drop of the cliff face before gazing out at the stretch of water, a blurred line where it hits the horizon. Down below the sand has been scooped out from the cliffs. She hears the distant bark of a dog, the pull and suck of the sea.
This.
Her body hasn’t let her down; the visceral reaction to step back from danger is as raw and powerful as ever. She may have spent years ignoring her instincts but they have not deserted her. Nothing is lost. Casting a final glance down to the beach, she turns and walks back up the path to the car.
They sit on the sofa. It is soft grey wool. Next to Melody is a cushion in purple velvet; she watches the shade of it change from lighter to darker as she brushes her finger up and down the fabric. Honor always had good taste, seemed to amass pictures and odd bits of furniture and fabrics that Melody would think looked hideous only to see them in situ a month later and marvel at Honor’s vision. Her house is everything that Melody’s isn’t. There are layers of personality to it, the trinkets from her travels, the photographs framed in a mixture of antique and modern frames, the rugs with splashes of acid pink and teal. It has colour and life. It’s grown and evolved over the years Honor has lived here. Mel thinks of her own home, chosen from magazines and brochures, delivered and installed. There’s no love in that.
Being here is like settling into an old chair again. The comfort and smell of it. For a moment Mel sinks back and lets it cushion her. Then she turns and locks eyes with Honor and immediately corrects her position. It’s not for her to feel comfortable here any more.
Words. She’d love to find the right ones. Sentences with the power to rewind her life to that night in Ibiza when she said to Sam, ‘We should be getting back.’ Words that would allow her to get up from the beach at that precise moment and walk to the villa to lie in bed under the fan. She wouldn’t have kissed Sam. They wouldn’t have fucked each other. She didn’t appreciate the fact that one reckless, selfish decision could destroy so much.
Her sliding-doors moment.
She’d change it if she could.
She stares at the teapot. It the same old china one Honor bought in Alfie’s Antique Market years ago. Butterfly Bloom; she even remembers the name of the collection. Melody had listened in amusement to the sales patter from the assistant, knowing full well Honor was already sold. She was like a magpie, and Melody was familiar with the sparkle in her eyes when she happened upon something special.
Honor has served Melody tea from this pot countless times before – hungover Sunday mornings, late nights, afternoons sharing a slab of cake – but not once have her hands trembled like they do now.
‘You look well …’ Mel says. These are not the words she had in mind but they are spoken with conviction nevertheless. Honor does look good, different to how Mel remembers her in London. She was always at the gym, her face gaunt, losing too much weight, losing herself. ‘Come back,’ Melody wanted to shout. But she didn’t. Why not? Isn’t that what friends are supposed to do? Stage an intervention? Tell the truth when no one else is brave enough to confront it? Now her face is fuller and flushed with colour, her hair cut in a crop that accentuates her perfectly chiselled cheekbones.
She seems to have returned to the old Honor. It is Melody who has changed and shrunk since they last saw each other.
‘I should have called … to warn you …’ she says eventually. ‘It’s just …’
‘I wasn’t doing anything special.’ Honor hands her a teacup and saucer. They match the pot. Mel imagines her scouring eBay and markets to source them. Everything about this house reminds her of how well she once knew her friend, and yet here they are unable to find more than a sentence of conversation.
She can’t do it. She puts her cup down on the table. ‘This is really weird … You’re making me tea and I expected you to shout at me. I wouldn’t blame you if you hated me. It’d probably make me feel better if you screamed at me.’
‘I don’t hate you,’ Honor says slowly. ‘So don’t expect me to scream.’
‘I’m sorry … that came out wrong. What I meant was … well I just didn’t expect to be sitting here drinking tea with you.’
‘That makes two of us. It’s been a long time … why now?’
‘I wanted to say sorry. I know it won’t change anything, but I wanted you to know. I’ve wanted to say it for years I was just too scared.’
‘Of me?’ Honor raises an eyebrow incredulously.
Mel shakes her head. ‘Of facing up to what I had done. Admitting that it was my fault I had lost you.’ She glances around at Honor’s photographs. There are no obvious signs she has a partner no evidence of a child in the house. ‘He said you didn’t know, that I shouldn’t tell you. Not that it excuses anything …’
‘That sounds about right. I don’t see why he would bother to tell you after all this time, though.’
The Life I Left Behind Page 24