Swimming at Night: A Novel (19 page)

“They’re all surfing Reds.” She proffered her joint.

“I’m good, thanks,” Mia said, and then moved on.

Crickets and cicadas hummed in the scrub-lined track that led to Reds. The beach took its name from the plateau of red rocks that lay like huge beached whales, now baking under a lowering sun. She slipped off her flip-flops and picked her way across them. The air was moist with a briny vapor lifting from the sea. Great lines of swell were breaking, the white water re-forming into smaller waves that crashed against the rocks.

Her conversation with Katie drifted from her thoughts the moment she saw Noah. He was standing a few steps away from the edge of the rocks, his surfboard underarm. The sun was sinking to the west and golden streams of light gilded his silhouette. Years of surfing had honed his physique to a lean structure of muscle. Unable to see his expression, she imagined him looking serious, his gaze fixed on the water. She’d come to understand that for Noah surfing was a need, as basic as hunger or thirst.

She wondered if it was his passion for the sea that drew her
to him with such unnerving force. There’d been other boyfriends—mostly brief and unremarkable relationships that passed with the seasons—but she’d experienced nothing like this.

“Hey,” she said, announcing herself.

He turned. Smiled.

“I was just looking for you to say Merry Christmas.”

He loosened his grip on his surfboard, but didn’t put it down. “Merry Christmas, Mia.”

She hadn’t seen him all day and wanted to place her lips against his bare chest and feel the heat of his skin. “I’ve something for you,” she said, feeling her bag at her side, which contained his present. Realizing that he’d have nowhere to put it, she said, “I’ll give it to you later.”

“Sorry. I haven’t got you anything. I didn’t think . . . ”

“This isn’t a Christmas present, just something I found.” It was a Hemingway book, her favorite:
The Old Man and the Sea.
It had been on the swap shelf at the last hostel they’d stayed in, so she’d traded it for her Lonely Planet, and had inscribed on the inside cover:
“To Noah, the freshest words about the sea . . . with love, Mia xx.”
She’d wrapped it in pages torn from a magazine and tied it with string.

“Let’s catch up later, then.” He leaned forward and kissed her. When he pulled away, his gaze darted back to the surf where the breakers rolled in, smooth and powerful.

“You should get out there.”

He moved back to the edge of the rocks, waiting for a lull between sets. When one came he launched the board into the water and then dived after it, cutting through the back of a wave. It took several powerful strokes to reach the board and then he slid onto it and paddled determinedly through the seething wash.

Mia gathered her hair from her face and tied it into a low
knot at the base of her head, then sat, hooking her arms over her knees. She enjoyed watching him surf; she’d spent enough hours on Cornish beaches to recognize his talent. He had an easy, fluid style and she noticed how he hung back from the other surfers who bobbed like seals in the lineup. He’d wait on an outside section, hitting a wave where it broke at its steepest or picking off the set wave that the other surfers chose to leave. She knew the risks he took, but he trained hard for the hold-downs. He’d told her that spearfishing helped his agility, and he did other exercises, like carrying rocks underwater to build up lung capacity and strength. She held an image of him gliding along the seabed, his hands wrapped around a boulder, a stream of silver air bubbles floating from his lips.

As he paddled, she recalled how his body had been raised above hers last night, his fists pressed into the white sheet of her bed, the veins in his forearms standing proud. She had turned her head and licked the delicate skin at his inner elbow. At her touch his arms had bent and he lowered himself onto her, covering every inch of her body with his.

A shadow fell over her and she looked up to see Jez staring at her with one eyebrow raised quizzically. “All right?”

She flushed a deep crimson as if her thoughts had been transparent.

He lowered himself onto the rock she sat on, positioning himself a couple of inches behind her. She felt it put her at a disadvantage somehow, having to turn more fully to face him.

Jez’s skin was weather-beaten; grooves deeper than his years cut into his forehead, and there were sun lesions on his nose. He was wirier than Noah, but they were a similar height. Since the evening she’d met Jez, they’d only passed one another a couple of times in the hostel; she’d smile but would feel relieved when he
didn’t stop. She found something disconcerting in the way his gaze followed her, as if he was always watching.

“Santa bring you everything you wanted?” he said.

“He doesn’t know my address. How about you?”

“What I want doesn’t come gift-wrapped.” He pulled a pack of tobacco from his pocket and began to roll a cigarette. There was dirt beneath his nails and his knuckles were flecked with pink scars. “Where are you headin’ next?”

“New Zealand. In a couple of weeks. Have you been?” Mia asked.

“I’m as well traveled as a paper airplane. Noah’s the jet-setter.” He lit his roll-up and the sweet smoke drifted towards her.

For a minute, maybe two, neither of them said anything more and they both watched the surf. Noah took off on a wave that reared well over head high, cutting back and forth in a whoosh of spray.

“Pretty incredible, eh?”

“Yes, he is,” she said, keeping her eyes on the water. “Does he ever compete?”

Jez stared at her. “He was on the pro tour for five years, paid to surf the best breaks in the world.”

“He never said . . . ”

“There’s a lot he never says.”

“So he was sponsored?”

“Yeah. Had a sweet little thing going with Quiksilver. Until he quit the tour.”

“Why?”

“You’d have to ask Noah that.”

She glanced at him sideways, unsure what he meant. Noah had told her that he and Jez surfed a lot together as boys, spending every second they weren’t in school chasing waves. “You weren’t interested in doing it professionally?”

He laughed, smoke bubbling from his mouth. “Let’s just say the opportunity never came my way.”

“It must be good taking time out now to travel together.”

“It’s good having no commitments. We can move on whenever we want. That’s what Noah’s always loved,” he said, looking directly at her. “No ties.”

He let those words hang in the air, and then he stood. “See you, Mia.” He dropped the butt of the roll-up in a gap between the rocks. A thin drift of smoke wafted after him.

Christmas on the beach hadn’t been all she’d imagined and she felt a surge of loneliness wash over her. She closed her eyes and wondered what Katie would be doing now. Was she sharing Christmas lunch with Ed’s family while carols played discreetly in the background? Or were they still having drinks, Katie holding a flute of champagne, her engagement ring sparkling in the light of a chandelier? She would have bought a new outfit for the occasion and her hair would be swept back, a delicate silver chain at her throat. Then, Mia pictured Ed, his hand on Katie’s, and she felt her skin grow cool. Could she really let her sister marry him?

From her bag she took out her journal and set it on her knees. She turned to a fresh page and began to write, the pen moving hesitantly at first, then gaining momentum, words filling the page like liquid flowing into a cup. The truth spilled out of her, raw and ugly, as she confided in the journal what she had been too weak to say to Katie:
“You can’t marry a man who’s cheated on you. Not when it was with your sister.”

(Western Australia, June)

K
atie held the torn pages of the journal between trembling fingers. When she finished reading, she looked up.

Ed had anchored himself to the cherrywood dressing table, spreading his palms flat against its polished surface. His head hung down and in the mirror above him she could see the patch at his crown where his hair was beginning to thin. He was conscious of it and used his fingers to ruffle the spot each morning when he woke, a gesture that Katie had found endearing, pleased by the vulnerable chink in his armor of confidence.

“You slept with my sister?”

Ed turned. His face had paled and his lips looked dark in contrast. “I am so sorry.” He ran a hand across his jaw. “It was a huge mistake.”

“How was it?” She was a poker player with nothing left to lose.

“What? I . . . ” he floundered.

In six torn pages, Mia’s entry had excavated a buried piece of Ed’s history, one that threw into question all Katie had thought
she knew. She had read that in a bar in Camden, her fiancé and her sister had had sex in a blackened corridor, knocking a painting off the wall that had cracked, sending a shard of glass splintering into Mia’s ankle.

“It was a mistake. And you must understand that we were both terribly drunk.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“No,” he replied. “I didn’t. I regretted what happened so vehemently that I never told anyone. I didn’t want to hurt you, Katie.”

“Yet you turned up at the bar where my sister worked, bought her drink after drink, and then had sex with her in a corridor.”

“What you read,” Ed said, “is her version.”

“Then I’d better hear yours.” She folded her arms to hide the trembling in her hands.

He took a deep breath. “Do you remember on Freddie’s birthday I told you I was meeting the boys right after work? We started drinking on the Embankment and then ended up—God knows how—in a cellar bar in Camden. I had no idea it was where Mia worked; she had so many jobs I could never keep up.” He waved his fingers through the air in his gesture for Mia: flighty, restless. “I only noticed her because she was wearing a dress of yours. I quite literally did a double take.”

She was careful not to let her face fall into an expression that she wasn’t ready to give away. She continued listening, saying nothing.

“When Mia finished her shift, I invited her to have a drink with us. It must sound ludicrous now, but I specifically recall thinking,
Katie will be pleased when I tell her.
I knew it bothered you that we hadn’t hit it off.”

He was right. Ed and Mia were from different worlds and
she’d felt as though her arms could never quite stretch wide enough to reach them both. Whenever Ed talked about business, Mia would catch Katie’s eye and begin an elaborate mime of nodding off, her head jerking her awake often enough to smile encouragingly at Ed. He’d caught her mid-performance once, and said, “Shall I make my conversation more inclusive next time by talking about barmaiding and student debt?” Mia had flipped him the finger and sauntered out.

Ed continued. “By the time she joined us, the boys and I were far along. She was determined to catch up and Freddie, as you can imagine, was encouraging her. We all drank far too much. When the bar closed, I offered to put Mia in a cab because I knew how much it worried you when she insisted on walking everywhere. I can’t say with much clarity what happened after that, but before we reached the cab we somehow ended up . . . ” He cleared his throat. “It was ridiculous, utterly without forethought or conviction. And I am deeply ashamed of myself.”

At a business seminar, Katie had once learned about the power of the pause. She let silence fall around Ed’s explanation and watched as he shifted, uncrossing his legs, straightening, and then shoving both hands in his pockets.

“It’s interesting,” she began, “because Mia’s journal entry was a little different. In your hurry to tear it out, I imagine you didn’t have a chance to read it all, so I’ll refresh you with a few details.”

Color rose on Ed’s neck and spread up into his lower cheeks.

“She noted that you were flirtatious from the moment she joined you, and insisted on buying her drink after drink. When you left to put her in a taxi,” she flicked through the loose pages to find the extract she was looking for, “Mia wrote,
Ed put his hand on
my lower back and whispered, ‘You look so sexy in that dress. But what I want to know is: What are you wearing beneath it?’ I shrugged and said, ‘Take a look.’ So he did.”

She stopped reading and looked at Ed. He had clasped both hands behind his neck so his elbows angled into the room.

“I have to say, that is a really wonderful image for me. Such a keepsake.”

“What matters are the facts: I betrayed your trust. Being drunk is no excuse. It happened and I am going to do everything in my power to make this right.”

She looked down at her hands, which still held the limp, torn pages. She could feel her poker face beginning to slip. He was her fiancé. She loved him. He was all she had left now that Mia and her mother were gone. Tears slid down her cheeks.

“Darling,” Ed said, moving towards her. “Please, don’t cry.”

Out in the corridor she could hear footsteps and the roll of a suitcase on wheels, then a key turning in a lock: she wished she were that guest, slipping into a different room, a different life.

He sat beside her, his weight lowering her fractionally on the bed so her body tilted towards him. He was careful not to touch her, but in a low voice said, “I love you more than anything. We’ve had so many wonderful times together, and I am not prepared to throw away our future over one dreadful mistake. My whole family adores you. If I screw this up I am fairly certain they will disown me. You know how much I love you—I’ve flown across the world to be with you—so I am asking you, Katie, to forgive me.”

Tears ran down her cheeks. Could she forgive him? It was such a lot to ask of anyone. He was right to say that they’d shared many wonderful times, but a relationship wasn’t a score chart of good experiences versus bad. It was about trust and honesty. But perhaps it was also about forgiveness and understanding.

“I’ll get you some tissues,” Ed said.

Watching him move into the bathroom, she was jolted by an image of Mia lying on the black-and-white-tiled floor of their bathroom in London, like an unseated pawn on a chessboard. She had been wearing a jade dress—Katie’s dress—that was twisted at her waist. When Mia had lifted her head and seen Katie standing in the doorway, she’d looked away, unable to meet her eye. That had been the night.