Swimming at Night: A Novel (33 page)

She was pressed flat to the wall. “You had a nightmare.”

“Did I . . . did I hurt you?”

There was a dull ache in her chest where his arm had swung out. “No. I’m fine.”

“What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here.” He turned away from her and moved towards the window. He placed his palms at the edges of the glass, like a prisoner desperate to leave. She saw that the dressing on his upper back had ripped off and his wound looked pink and tender.

She crossed the room slowly and placed her hands on the base of his back, just below the smooth cleft of his buttocks. His skin was burning.

“Noah?” she said, but he would not turn and face her. Whatever the nightmare was about, it still clung to him. She thought of his protests that she could never stay the night: “This happens often, doesn’t it?”

His jaw tightened and she saw from his reflection in the window that his eyes were screwed shut. There was something desperately vulnerable about the thin trail of blood that was beginning to seep from his wound. Placing her hand on his forearm, she stroked her fingers back and forth, skimming the dark edges of his tattoo. “It’s okay,” she told him softly.

The gesture seemed to undo him. His shoulders started to shake and he hung his head.

“Oh, Noah,” she said, threading her arms around his waist. She held him close, felt his sweat cooling against her skin. It scared her to see him like this. “What was the nightmare about?”

She felt his body tense.

“Noah?”

He didn’t answer.

“It was about Johnny, wasn’t it?”

He pulled away.

“You can talk to me.”

He said nothing and she saw how similar they were then, each weighed down by their private grief. They could help each other, she believed that. “I know you lost your brother. Tell me about him. I want to help.”

“Please go.”

“What?”

“I can’t deal with this.”

“Noah, I only want—”

But he had already crossed the room and started picking up her clothes.

“What are you doing?” she asked, anxiety spreading like a dark kiss along her chest. “Noah, please—”

“You’re pushing me, Mia. Trying to get inside my head. I can’t do it. I should never have started this. It was a mistake. I’m sorry, Mia, but it was a mistake.”

He passed her clothes back to her and she put them on, leaden. As she turned, she saw his backpack propped against the desk. It was packed. “You’re leaving?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Were you going to tell me?”

He looked at her, the darkness of his gaze concealing so much. Then he opened the door onto the corridor.

She moved through it.

“I’m sorry,” was all he said.

(Bali, August)

K
atie stepped out onto the balcony. A bird nesting in the hotel gardens flew off, startled, its dark wings lapping at the night sky. She wrapped her hands around the wooden railings and inhaled the smells of frangipani and cooling earth.

Finn joined her. Neither of them spoke. She listened to the far-off call of the surf and the breeze stirring the trees. She hadn’t yet read on in the journal as he’d asked her to do. Everything was rushing forwards, pulling out of her reach. She needed to center herself, to think.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice having lost the intensity of earlier. “I should have told you about my e-mail sooner. I was ashamed.”

She understood a lot about shame; it lived within her like a second heartbeat. She had told no one about Mia’s phone call. Instead, she had lived with the shame of that conversation, feeling its inky guilt sliding through her veins. “I haven’t been completely honest with you, either.”

He turned towards her.

She could feel his gaze on her, but she wouldn’t look up. She stared into the darkness as she told him, “Mia called me. It was the day before she died. We hadn’t spoken since Christmas when I told her I was engaged. Three months—that’s how long it’d been.” She sighed. “When she finally rang, it was to ask for money.”

“Because I hadn’t given it to her.”

“Yes.”

“Did you lend it to her?”

“I didn’t even consider it.” Katie closed her eyes and felt the night press against her skin. She thought of their conversation, the one she had been playing back in the bottomless depths of grief ever since.

“What did you say?”

She glanced over her shoulder towards the lit room where the journal lay. “Do you know why I didn’t read her journal when I first found it in her backpack?”

“You said you wanted to keep Mia’s memory alive.”

She laughed a single sharp note. “That’s what I told myself. It’s funny what you can make yourself believe. But the truth is, Finn, I’m a coward. I’ve never sat down and read it in one go because I didn’t want to know what Mia had written about our last conversation.”

Katie thought of the dark truth she’d so coolly released that last time on the phone, and the sound of Mia’s breath catching in her throat as it hit her.

“I could not bear to read that it was my words that led her to the edge of that cliff.”

(Bali, March)

M
ia slid her credit card into the payphone and punched in Katie’s number. She waited. Hard bass beats from a nightclub pumped down the street, drumming inside her chest. Opposite, a streetlight flickered, sending strobes of orange light across the curb where a scrawny dog nosed an empty food carton.

“Katie Greene speaking.” Her work voice was crisp and professional.

“It’s me.”

“Mia?”

“Yes.”

There was a pause. “I’m at work.”

“Can you talk? Just for five minutes?”

She sighed. “Wait a moment.”

Mia heard Katie telling a colleague that she’d be back shortly; then there was the sharp click of heels across a hard floor, the sucking sound as a door was pushed open, and then the rush of London traffic speeding across the phone waves.

“It’s freezing outside,” Katie said. “I can’t be long.”

Mia couldn’t imagine the flat cold of a winter’s day in London, when here it was night and the air was still so warm her cotton vest clung to her skin. “How are you?” she asked banally, unsure how to begin.

“Fine.”

“Sorry I haven’t called in a while.”

“It’s been three months,” Katie said.

“Has it?” Mia wrapped the phone cord around her wrist, twisting it tightly until she felt the blood flow to her fingers restricted. She couldn’t think of what she wanted to say. “How’s work?”

“Fine.”

“And Ed?”

“You didn’t ring to ask about Ed. Or work. What do you want, Mia?”

Mia pulled the phone cord taut and felt the cool prick of pins and needles in her fingertips. She didn’t want to ask Katie for money—she’d rather hear her chat about her life in London or reminisce together about some small detail of their childhood—but there was no one else who could help. She needed her passport back so she could get out of Bali. It was over with Noah. Her friendship with Finn, ruined. There was only Katie . . . she needed Katie to do this for her. “I need to borrow some money. About a thousand pounds. It’d be a loan.”

“Is this a joke?”

“I’d pay you back within a few weeks, once I’ve got work.”

There was a long, weighted pause. Up ahead, a group of young men in rugby shirts stumbled from the nightclub, cheering and jumping onto one another’s backs. They were drunk, jubilant. Mia suddenly longed to be surrounded by a group of friends, feeling the warm caress of alcohol flooding through her body.

“Do you know how many engagement cards Ed and I were sent?”

The non sequitur threw Mia and she hesitated.

“Thirty-seven. The apartment was filled with them. I had to prop some on top of the fridge as the windowsills were filled. My workmates took me out for dinner to celebrate. Ed’s sister came from Weybridge with flowers and a bottle of champagne.” There was a pause. “But you . . .
you
,” she repeated, a quiet fury contained in the word, “couldn’t even bring yourself to say congratulations.”

“Katie—”

“You haven’t been in touch for three months. I thought my
sister
would be the person I shared all this with. I wanted to ask your opinion on wedding dresses and venues and a hundred other details. But you never called—not even to find out if we’d set a date. And now you ring me,
at work
, to ask for money. What do you think I should say?”

Mia’s wrist ached. She released the phone cord and the skin beneath was yellowy white. She flexed her fingers slowly, feeling a creaking pain as the blood began to circulate. “I don’t know.”

“You’re traveling. You’re having fun. Meeting new people. I understand that—but honestly, how hard can it be to make time to pick up a phone? You didn’t even call on Mum’s birthday. It was three weeks ago. She’d have been fifty-four.”

The numbers on the dial seemed to swim in her vision. How could she have forgotten that? February 14th. Valentine’s Day. The postman always said their mother was the most popular woman on his route. The date hadn’t registered with Mia this year. Recently, time seemed to have been weaving circles around her and she’d lost track of days and weeks while on this trip.

“Have you nothing to say?”

Mia could feel perspiration sliding down the backs of her knees.
She wanted to explain that she thought about their mother every day; that birthdays had never meant anything to her. She could feel the words rising up and getting caught in her throat, like bubbles surging against the lid of a bottle.

“Jesus, Mia, don’t you care?”

“Yes, I care!” she cried, slamming her hand on the phone console. “Just because I forgot her fucking birthday, it doesn’t mean I don’t care!”

“And what about me?”

“What?”

“It’s not just about honoring Mum’s birthday—it should be about
us
, being there for each other.”

“I am.”

Katie’s voice was quiet. “You left.”

“I needed to get away.”

“From what?”

From you!
she wanted to scream.
Because I fucked your fiancé out of spite and I couldn’t look at you, knowing it!

“What’s pathetic is that I wished you’d asked me to go traveling. Did you know that? I actually wanted to come with you.”

“That’s crap. You’d never have quit your job. Or got on a plane.”

“I would have, Mia. If you’d asked me. But you didn’t.”

“Don’t try and push guilt on me.”

“Push guilt on you?”

She could hear Katie’s footsteps and the receding sounds of traffic. She imagined her sister walking onto a side street and moving past a row of tall Georgian houses, their front doors black and glossy.

“I’m the one who protects you,” Katie was saying. “That’s what I do. I was handed the role of older sister: sensible, protective,
reliable. You were handed younger sister: wild, independent, selfish.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Is it? Who took care of everything after Mum died? I organized the funeral, sold Mum’s house, found us an apartment, tried helping you find work.”

“You weren’t protecting me,” Mia said, anger burning in her throat. “You were controlling me, shrinking down my life so it could fit into a neat little package beside yours.”

“Is that what you think?”

“I don’t see how snatching my best friend was
protecting
me,” she said, and then the words were out there, like a firework launched into the sky. “Why him? Out of all the men you could pick from, why Finn?”

She heard Katie’s footsteps stop. Mia held her breath, waiting for the explosion.

But there were no bright lights or loud bangs. Just three words delivered as quietly as smoke: “I loved him.”

Love?
Mia’s head spun. She reached out a hand and held on to the phone console. Her palms were damp. “No.”

“I never planned to fall in love with him, but I did. I really loved him.”

Mia bit down on the inside of her cheek, pressing her teeth hard into the soft flesh. The metallic taste of blood filled her mouth.

“It was excruciating because I saw what losing Finn did to you,” Katie continued. “You were a shadow. I hardly recognized you. And then, Christ, Mum got ill. It was terrible for all of us, but I think it was particularly hard on you. And you wouldn’t let Finn or me support you. I hated seeing you hurting like that. I felt like there
was no choice: I had to let him go. I did it for you, Mia, because I was trying to protect you.” Katie paused. “And I had to protect you from Mum’s death, too.”

“What are you talking about?” Even as Mia said the words, a cool feeling crept over her skin.

“That morning—when she was dying—I left four messages asking you to come to the house to say good-bye.”

“I lost my—”

“Cell. Yes, you said. Come on, Mia. We’re beyond this.”

Mia’s ear was burning where the phone pressed against it. She wanted to rip it away, snap the cord with her hands, and fling it into the street.

“You weren’t at the house with me because you couldn’t cope with Mum dying. I understood that, but I kept calling because I didn’t want you to regret not saying good-bye.”

Mia had been walking at Porthcray all morning, her cell wailing in the pocket of her fleece. A week of southwesterlies had washed in mounds of seaweed that lay rotting on the shoreline, making the air taste sulphuric. She picked her way over them, listening to each of Katie’s messages and knowing that three miles away in her family home her mother was dying. Her mother who’d told Mia that her eyes were like polished emeralds, who had treasured a story Mia had written about a snow leopard when she was six, who’d assured Mia she didn’t mind what she did with her life as long as she was happy. She couldn’t die.

Farther up the beach, Mia had picked up a smooth white stone the size of a mussel shell and told herself that if she skipped it six times, then she’d go to her mother. She pulled back her arm and flicked her wrist; the stone bounced across the water like a jumping fish, sharp and bright, six times. She’d turned and begun to
walk back to her car, but halfway there she’d stopped, her legs refusing to take another step. Instead, she found herself bending to the ground, gathering the next pebble. She bargained with herself that it must skip seven times to be sure. Then eight . . . then nine . . .