Swimming at Night: A Novel (20 page)

Ed returned with a box of tissues. “The night you slept with Mia,” she said, her voice deadly calm, “she passed out on our bathroom floor. I found her the next morning.”

Ed didn’t move.

“How drunk must she have been?”

“We were both drunk.”

She glanced out of the window. She didn’t marvel at the view of the lake bathed in the late-afternoon sun or the pristine vineyards stretching beyond; she was remembering something else from that day. Katie had been making risotto in the kitchen when Mia had come in wearing her jogging gear. She remembered asking how Mia’s head was and whether she needed a Band-Aid for the cut on her ankle. That’s when Mia had announced she was going traveling.

She turned back to Ed. “After screwing you, Mia booked a round-the-world ticket to get the fuck away!”

He didn’t balk at her language; perhaps he’d grown used to this new Katie, the one who flicked from tears to anger as quick as a switch.

“When I found out she was going traveling, I came around to see you.” She’d left a pan of burnt onions cooling on the side and the smell had lingered in the apartment for days. “I was upset that she was leaving me, and do you remember what you said? ‘A change
of scenery will be good for her.’ I thought you were being understanding—but the truth was, you were pleased she was going.”

“Katie—”

She had found her stride and wouldn’t be deterred. “If it hadn’t been for you,” she said, her voice growing louder, “she’d have never left like that. I knew there must be a reason. I even tried talking to you about it after her funeral, but you told me Mia was just
impulsive, young, bored.
” Her anger burnt in her throat and made her jaw tight. “If you hadn’t screwed her, she’d never have gone traveling. Never have ended up in Bali. Never have been on that cliff top. It was your fault, Ed. Yours!”

“Come on! I didn’t make her have sex with me. Just like I didn’t make her go traveling, and I didn’t make her throw herself from a cliff.”

Her eyes widened. “What did you say?”

“I said what the police, coroner, and witnesses all believe. That’s good enough for me.”

“I’m her sister! What about what
I
believe? I knew her better than anyone!”

“You didn’t even know she was in Bali.”

The remark smacked her like a punch.

“Christ, don’t you see how unhealthy this obsession of yours has become? You’ve run off to the other side of the world, clinging to that journal like it’s some kind of lifeline. Mia is dead. She committed suicide. I am genuinely sorry about that, I really am, but you need to accept the facts.”

She reached for the nearest thing she could find: his laptop.

“What on earth are you doing?”

She lifted it above her head.

“Good God, Katie! You need to calm down.”

She felt the weight of it in her fingers and wrists.

“That’s got all my contacts in it. It’s very important to me.”

She glanced at the ripped cream pages discarded on the bed. “Just like my sister’s journal is important to me.” She remembered Ed’s look of surprise when he found out Mia kept a journal. The next morning she’d discovered him leafing through it,
Checking there is nothing to upset you,
he’d told her. “This whole time you’ve been lying to me, trying to cover your tracks—”

“I was protecting you.”

“Protecting me?” Katie realized how desperate Ed must have been to get his hands on the journal to check Mia hadn’t implicated him. But Katie had been careful not to let it out of her sight. Until today. “You manipulated me into going for a walk so you could take my bags up to the room—”

“I mean it, Katie! Put it down before you do something you regret.”

Perhaps it was his tone or the implication that she wasn’t in control that spurred her on, but she found her arms drawing back. Then with all her strength she launched the laptop across the room.

She heard Ed’s sharp intake of breath and then a loud, satisfying crunch as it hit the wall. Glass and silver plastic shards rained down on the carpet, the screen splitting from the keyboard. An angular dent was left behind in the paintwork.

“Jesus Christ!”

Calmly, she picked up the journal and hooked on her backpack.

Ed was staring at her. “You are not the woman I fell in love with.”

She caught sight of herself in the mirror. Her hair was loose around her face and her makeup had worn off with the day. Her eyes danced with anger. The faded backpack with its fraying straps
and promise of adventure no longer looked so incongruous on her back.

“You’re right, Ed. I’m not.”

*   *   *

She followed signs to the tourist information office. There she found herself standing before a volunteer who circled a hostel on a map with an orange highlighter and said, “It’ll take you fifteen minutes on foot.”

Katie strode there in ten. She was shown to a dorm where three young women were getting changed. Hiking boots and sweat-hardened socks were discarded on the floor, and the room was thick with the smell of deodorant. Desperate not to pause, not to think, she struck up a conversation and discovered that the girls, two from New Zealand, the third from Quebec, were on a ten-day outdoor experience and had just hiked a section of the cape-to-cape trail. They told her about the wide ocean bluffs and the crickets that sprang like firecrackers from the undergrowth, bouncing off their shins.

Half an hour later she found herself joining them in a bar that served pizzas the size of hubcaps. The hikers ate ravenously, but Katie’s stomach was too knotted for food, so she drank wine and felt the liquid working through her like sunshine. In the next bar they ordered more drinks and played poker and Katie was declared a natural when she beat them following their own tricks.

Now they were in a packed bar where they had to shout to be heard over the rock band playing on a makeshift stage. They’d managed to shoehorn themselves around a table stained by ring marks. She set down her empty glass; her head felt light as if only distantly attached to her body.

“I checked,” Jenny, one of the hikers, who had muscular thighs and a wicked smile, was saying.

“No way he’s single,” the girl from Quebec countered, leaning forward so they could hear. “He does at least, what—ten, twenty expeditions each year? He must have bagged a hot girlfriend on one of them.”

“He’s gonna bag another on this trip,” Jenny said with a wink, and they all laughed.

Katie’s engagement ring cast a shoal of light across the table and she moved her fingers so the light swam. She had been thrilled when Ed presented her with it, glinting within a black leather ring box. It was a princess-cut diamond, set in a platinum band. She had fallen in love with the simple elegance of the ring and the idea of what wearing it symbolized.

“You gonna keep it?” Jenny asked.

“Ditch it,” the Canadian girl said. “Do something ceremonial—chuck it under a land train—a final
fuck you
gesture.”

“No! Sell it!” Jenny cried. “Spend the money on something he’d hate. Drugs, drink, male strippers.”

Katie laughed. Her lips felt numb. She yanked off the ring and pushed it to the bottom of her bag. “My round.”

The band continued to thrash at their guitars as she jostled at the bar, which was four deep with customers. A bartender leaned forward, a hand cupped to her ear to catch a drinker’s order who, after the second attempt at shouting, simply pointed to the draught and held up four fingers.

Was it this loud, Mia, in your dingy cellar bar? Did you have to lean close to Ed to be heard? Did he smell jasmine on your skin and alcohol on your breath? Or did you flick him one of your hard looks that always infuriated him, only this time, did you turn up your lips in a hint of a smile, too: “Well, then?”

You were wearing my dress. You never asked. It was too short on you. I never said, but I thought it looked tarty. Perhaps that’s what
Ed liked. His friends must have been impressed, a group of suits watching the barmaid who could toss back shots like a landlord, and who danced like a tease.

You might have been drunk—more than I am now?—but you knew what you were doing when you felt my fiancé against you. I can see his fingers peeling the thin straps of my dress from your shoulders. Did he kiss you first, or was that too intimate for you? Did you think of me, even once? Your sister! His fiancée! Did you take a second to imagine how I’d feel?

The crowd pushed from behind and she was squeezed tight between thick, sweating bodies. She imagined Ed and Mia this close, his mouth on her neck, her pierced navel, the insides of her thighs. Did he prefer her long legs and her taut stomach? Had he thought Mia more beautiful? Or was it that he wanted to taste her wildness—just to sample a different dish?

How must it have felt to be like you growing up, Mia? With no boundaries, or limits, or expectations heaped on you. You once said I was the sunny-haired and sunny-natured sister who made daisy chains with her friends. You cast yourself as the dark-haired, dark-spirited one, who prowled the beaches alone. But I never once saw us like that. I saw you as freedom, as the open sea. And I longed for it.

Clumsily, she undid the top buttons of her dress and rearranged her bra so her breasts looked fuller. She smoothed her hair behind her ears and licked her lips.

The man beside Katie, whose tanned arms bulged out of a cut-off shirt, winked at her. She smiled, glancing up at him through her eyelashes. When the person in front of him moved away from the bar, he gestured for her to take their place. She slipped into the gap and as the crowd closed around them she felt the heat of his body against her back.

“What’s ya name?” he asked, his breath hot in her ear.

“Mia,” Katie told him, feeling something inside her pulling loose.

“You are fuckin’ hot, Mia.”

“Then maybe you should come and find me later.”

She ordered double shots for the table and carried them back on a silver tray sticky with spilled drinks. They drank them in one, slamming the glasses down on the table. Then they found a space on the cramped dance floor that smelled of sweat and beer. Alcohol and music pulsed through her as she swayed her hips to the band’s rhythm. The other girls laughed and joked as they danced, but Katie felt far away now. Voices cut across one another, glistening bodies spun and wove around her. She coiled herself into sensual shapes and even when the others had gone to sit down, she danced on.

People were turning to watch as she writhed, her eyes closed, her hands running through the air.
Is this how you danced that night? Is this what Ed wanted?
She danced harder, not caring what people thought, not caring that she was drunk.

The man in the cut-off shirt moved in front of her and put his thick hands around her waist. “Hello, Mia.”

She laughed at the sound of that name, throwing her head back. Above, a mirror ball spun, reflecting her image in a thousand broken fragments.

The man slipped his knee between hers. Their hips pressed together and she wrapped her hands around his waist to steady herself. Then his mouth was covering hers, wet and hungry. She could taste salt and whisky.

They danced on, him spinning her until the lights on the dance floor blurred. She was sweating beneath her dress and her head was beginning to ache.

She broke away, saying, “Bathroom.”

“I’ll come,” he said, and she let him take her hand and lead her there. He waited outside.

The stall smelled of urine and vomit. She had trouble locking the door, and stumbled as she took down her underwear, clinging to the toilet roll dispenser to right herself.

“Okay in there, hon?” a woman shouted from the next stall.

“Fine,” she managed, her head spinning.

As she washed her hands in a sink blocked with paper towels, she knew the man would be waiting. She would have sex with this stranger with his thick arms and greedy kisses. She would do it because she was too drunk not to. She would do it because she wasn’t the woman Ed fell in love with. She would do it because she didn’t care enough to say no.

She wove from the bathroom, her hands still damp. A firm grip encircled her wrist and she was pulled away.

*   *   *

There were voices somewhere beyond where Katie lay. She opened her eyes a fraction, shifting as the world came into focus. She raised a hand in front of her face to shade the sun streaming into the room. Where was she?

She swallowed and her mouth felt swollen and dry. She’d been drinking. She paused on an image of Ed grasping a fistful of pages. They had fought, broken off their engagement. She felt for her ring: gone.

She pushed herself upright, saw the empty bunks beside hers, and realized she was in a hostel. The hikers. She’d gone out drinking with the hikers. Then she remembered a man’s mouth covering hers. Nausea overwhelmed her and she lurched from the bed. She took several deep breaths, her head pounding.

What the hell had happened? Had she had sex with him? They
had been at the bar together, she was certain of that. She’d told him her name was Mia. Then later they were dancing. She remembered going to the toilets . . . with him?

She glanced down and realized that she was still wearing last night’s dress. It was twisted around her stomach, a beer stain spread over the skirt. Her heart was racing. She wanted to crawl into the ground.
So this is how it feels to be you?

She began tugging at the dress, ripping the buttons open, and yanking it over her head. She flung it to the ground and stood panting in her underwear.
What have I done?
She slumped against a table, knocking a plastic water bottle over. It rolled to a stop beside a note. It had her name on it and she picked it up.

Katie,

Thought you might be needing these.
[Two hand-drawn arrows pointed from the page, indicating the water and a pack of aspirin.]
Hope you didn’t mind being chaperoned back. He didn’t seem like your type!

Love, Jenny

P.S. Remember, sell the ring! Buy yourself a flight to New Zealand and come stay!