Swimming at Night: A Novel (12 page)

The sea was a balm. She dived under, dark water slipping over her head. She glided with her arms outstretched, her fingers
meeting in a neat point. She broke the surface to snatch a breath, and then dived down again, deeper this time, water gushing down the neck of her T-shirt.

She stopped kicking and let her body go still. Gradually she began floating up with her back to the sky, her limbs spread like a starfish. As children, she and Katie used to do this, letting their hair fan around their faces while they listened for the songs of mermaids. She heard the fizzes and clicks of the sea, and imagined angelfish swimming beneath her, silent and curious. Heat began building in her lungs as the desire for air grew. She forced herself to remain still, feeling the dark slopes of waves lift and drop her body as if she were a piece of driftwood.

The underwater rhythm shifted and she was aware of a new sound overlaying the gentle melody. It wasn’t the draw of a wave, more like fast sloshes of water hitting a wall. She tried to concentrate on where it was coming from, when suddenly she felt pain at the back of her head. There was a rush of noise and she was yanked upwards, her head snapping back. She gasped as she broke the surface, gulping in air.

She heard a shout, and then she felt herself plunging under again, salt water filling her mouth and shooting up her nostrils. Her clothes bulged, dragging her downwards, and she flailed underwater, disorientated.

Finally she surfaced again, gasping. There was more shouting and she kicked out, thrashing her way towards the shore. As soon as her feet found the seabed, she staggered through the shallows.

A man waded after her. “You okay?”

“Get the fuck away!” she shouted, her heart racing.

He stopped. “I thought . . . shit, I thought you were drowning.”

“I was swimming!”

“You were in your clothes. Not moving. It looked like, like you were . . . ” He didn’t finish.

“You were watching me swim?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. His eyes were wide, startled. “No. I was paddling back in. I saw a shape in the water. You were just floating there, facedown.”

Now she noticed the surfboard under his arm.

“I’m so sorry,” he said again, and she could tell by his voice that he meant it. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

She pushed her wet hair from her face and hugged her arms around her middle. “So what, you surf in the dark?”

“Sometimes.”

She was absorbed by the image of him alone in the black, hollow waves. “It must be dangerous.”

“The moon’s a good floodlight.”

She wondered what drew him into the ocean, risking his life for the thrill of a wave.

As he lifted a hand to wipe water from his eyes, she noticed the dark tattoo snaking across the underside of his forearm. “You were here earlier,” she said suddenly, remembering seeing him on the shoreline, staring out to sea with a meditative focus. “I saw you when you paddled in.”

He looked at her with his head tilted to one side. “Yes,” he said, eventually. “I remember.”

His voice was deep, gravelly. Did she hear an accent?

“You’re cold,” he said.

She hadn’t realized she was shivering.

“I’ve got a towel.” He moved past her and she found herself following. He had a bag stowed farther up the beach from which he passed her a towel. She used it to tousle her hair dry and then wrapped it around her shoulders.

The man took out a box of matches and knelt down in the sand beside a pyramid of branches and twigs.

“You built this earlier?”

He nodded. He struck a match and she caught its gunpowder scent. Cupping a hand around the flame, he lit the kindling in several places. He blew gently on the flames, which flickered and grew in response. The firelight illuminated his face; she saw the glistening water in his eyebrows and his dark, serious gaze beneath.

Once the fire took he moved back to his bag and pulled out a sweater. “Here, wear this if you like.”

She could have declined, walked away then, and returned to the hostel. She knew Finn would be waiting for her, wondering how the reunion with Mick had gone. But she wasn’t ready to leave. Not yet. “Thanks,” she said, taking the sweater. With her back to him, she peeled off her sodden T-shirt and bra and pulled it on. She tugged the sleeves down over her hands and her thumbs nestled into the holes that had been worn into them.

She sat beside the fire while he changed into dry clothes. When he returned, he handed her a bottle of beer.

“Cheers,” she said, twisting the cap free. “I’m Mia.”

He said her name aloud, once, as if that was the only way he would remember. “Noah,” he offered, hooking an elbow around his knees. He looked at her sideways. “So, you often go swimming in your clothes?”

She shrugged.

“There are strong currents around here. Someone should be watching out for you.”

“Who watches out for you?”

He smiled.

“I thought I was alone,” she told him eventually. “Me and my
sister used to do it when we were younger—just float and listen to the sea.” But that had been years ago, before Katie had become afraid of the sea, before they had drifted apart. Mia missed the summer afternoons they used to spend at the beach dive-bombing from the rocks or searching the shoreline for shells. The
Sea Sisters
, they had been nicknamed as children. “I just had the urge to do it again.”

He looked at her for a moment, fixing his dark eyes square on hers. She wondered if he thought her foolish, but he said nothing.

They drank in silence, watching the hypnotic flit and quiver of the flames. The thick smell of woodsmoke filled the air. Occasionally, Mia glanced at him, absorbing small details: the dark hair on his legs that thinned at his ankles; a tear in the seam of his T-shirt that ran an inch along his side; the casual grip of his fingers holding the beer loosely at its neck.

“So when did you start surfing?” she asked later.

“When I was a kid. We lived near Melbourne, a couple of kilometers from the beach. I used to cycle down after school and watch all the old guys styling it up on long boards.”

“Did you teach yourself?”

“No, there was this guy, Reuben. He was ancient, but whenever the swell pushed through, he’d be out. He wasn’t looking for the big waves or big moves, but he just had this poise on the water no one could match. I hung around on the beach whenever I could, just watching.” He took a swig of his beer. “Eventually I plucked up the nerve to ask him for a lesson—said I’d wash his ute in return. We had a deal. He’d take me surfing whenever the swell was right, and I made sure he drove the cleanest ute in Melbourne. He spread the word about my car-washing talents. Five months later, I owned my first board.”

“I like that,” she said, smiling. “You earned it.” She ran her fingers through her damp hair, loosening some of the tangles. “So what brings you to Maui? Are you traveling?”

He nodded.

“With friends?”

“My brother.”

“Really? You must get on well.”

He shrugged.

“Where’s he tonight?”

“At a bar in town.”

“Why aren’t you there?”

He thought for a moment. “I like my own space sometimes.”

She smiled, knowing exactly what he meant. She uncrossed her legs and stretched them towards the flames, warming her toes. The firelight caught the line of her shins and she could feel Noah’s gaze on them. “Where’s next on your route?” she asked.

“We’re heading back to Australia for a couple of months. After that, I don’t know. We’ll follow the swell.” He threw a stick on the fire and then asked, “How about you? Where are you from?”

“Cornwall. It’s in the southwest of England.”

“You get good Atlantic swells there. Cold, though.”

“You get used to it.”

He finished his beer and took out two more, passing one to Mia. “Where do you live now?”

“I moved to London almost a year ago. My sister and I bought a place there.” She traced the back of the beer bottle with her thumb, thinking about the apartment with its tall sash windows that only opened three inches, so she never felt as though she could get enough air.

“You didn’t enjoy it?” he asked, perhaps reading something in her expression.

“I guess I’m not a city person.”

He nodded, but kept looking at her, as if there was more to say.

She drew a breath. “It was a mistake moving there. Our mother died a few months earlier and I think we both needed to prove something to ourselves by living together.”

“To show you were still a family.”

“Yes, that was exactly it,” she said, surprised by the acuteness of his observation. He intrigued her, this man who surfed at night and preferred a beach fire to a bar. There was a sense of autonomy about him that she recognized in herself, too.

“Is your sister still in London?”

“Katie. Yes, she is. She’s happy there.”

“Where are you happy?”

She heard the lull of the waves, like soft murmurs from a lover. “By the sea.”

They continued to talk, swapping stories of their seas. She discovered that his was the clear blue water of the Tasman Sea with its peeling waves and roaming bull sharks, and she explained hers was the Atlantic, fringed by granite and slate cliffs and stalked by herring gulls.

When she spoke he listened intently, his eyes never leaving her face. His focus gave her confidence and she felt something within her releasing, as though a small door in her throat had been nudged ajar. She talked about her mother’s cancer and how Katie played nurse and she played truant. She told him how the weekend she moved to London, she’d lain in Hyde Park staring at the clouds, trying to pretend she was elsewhere. She confided that she’d come to Maui to meet her father, who’d humored her for an hour and then asked her to leave. As she talked, the fire burnt low and her hair dried in stiff waves from the salt.

Suddenly she looked up. “Sorry, I’ve talked too much.”

“No you haven’t,” he said studying her closely. His eyes were dark, serious. What was it about them? They seemed somehow older than the rest of his face. She could feel herself drawn to him.

Noah picked up a thin branch and prodded at the glowing embers. Her gaze traveled from the grip of his fingers, over his wrist, and to the black tattoo spreading towards his inner elbow. “Your tattoo,” she began, “when did you have it done?”

“Ten months ago.” He threw the branch on the fire. Orange sparks flickered into the sky. He angled his arm towards the firelight and she could see that the wave had been skillfully tattooed so its power was captured in a rush of water crumbling from the crest. At the bottom there were six discrete numbers.

The tattoo intrigued her. It wasn’t an adolescent attempt at rebellion like the Arabic words branded on the pale backs of the boys she went to college with. It had been done recently and was inked on the tender skin on the underside of his forearm. “It’s beautiful,” she said, reaching out and tracing the curve of the wave with a fingertip.

Instantly the atmosphere became charged and she was aware of heat emanating from where their skin touched.

Noah looked at her. She was surprised by how much she wanted to kiss him. They were strangers, yet somehow she felt as if they already knew each other. An overwhelming rush of desire filled her and she reached a hand to his cheek, feeling his stubble against her palm.

He blinked as if startled by the touch. For a moment she thought he was going to pull away, but then he leaned forward and pressed his mouth gently against hers. His lips were soft and warm, and she closed her eyes as he drew her closer, kissing her deeply. His tongue explored her mouth and she could taste the sea on his lips.

Her hands eased beneath the cotton of his T-shirt, feeling the muscular ridges below his shoulder blades.

He rose up onto one knee and, cupping a hand behind her head, he tilted her backwards, so that she was lying beneath him, her hair spilling over the sand. He ran his tongue from her collarbone to her throat. Her head swam.

A sky of stars hung above her and the heat of the fire spread along her side. Her thoughts melted free of her mind, so that the disappointment of earlier was lost to the press of his body, to the warmth of his skin, to the feel of his lips on her neck. She let herself dissolve fully, exquisitely, into this stranger.

(MAUI, APRIL)

K
atie closed the journal and pushed it aside. She pressed her hands to her forehead where a tension headache threatened. Once she might have been shocked by the risk Mia had taken with a stranger, but shock fell away beneath her anger at Mick.

Mia had been sheltered from many of the details of their father; this had left a blank canvas on which she could project any number of fantasies. Her disappointment at the reunion ran deep: eight neatly written pages attested to that. Katie snatched up the journal again and located the single sentence that had pulled her up short and made her heart crack:
“I wish Katie had been with me.”

She wished that, too! She wished she’d listened when Mia tried talking about Mick, rather than dismissing the conversation. The dull aching in her forehead spread, taking a firm grip of her temples. Moving to the backpack, she fished in the front pocket for aspirin. Her fingers brushed over a tube of sunscreen, a pack of tissues, and then they reached an inner zip. She slipped her fingers
in and they met with something slim and glossy that she couldn’t place. She tugged it free and found it was a photo.

Her eyes widened in surprise, and then she felt the oily rise of nausea at the back of her throat.

The picture was taken years ago when Mia was eight, Katie eleven. Their mother had driven them to the local town for a day out and, carrying beach towels and costumes, they’d strolled along the promenade snacking on gummy bears from a paper bag. Mia had been the first to spot the merry-go-round glinting in the sunlight, the singsong tinkle of its music carried on a light sea breeze.

It arrived every spring and stayed for three weeks before slipping away in the night, leaving only a faint ring of dead leaves and dust behind. Rather than painted ponies, what rose and fell on each twirl of the merry-go-round were seahorses. Each looked as if it had been dipped in a different ocean and dripped with the shade of the sea—cobalt blue, cerulean, navy, azure—and they always begged their mother to let them ride on it.