Swimming at Night: A Novel (6 page)

“Good London tan,” she said, referencing the lily-white shade of his chest as he stripped from his T-shirt.

“Good slacker’s tan.”

She laughed, and Finn took the opportunity to race past her, splashing through the white water and hurdling small waves before the sea finally took his legs from under him. He tumbled forwards, flattening his body and spreading his arms so he hit the water with a slap, sending silver droplets skyward.

Mia was still laughing as she waded in to join him. The cold water was like a vise at her ankles, which reached its grip to her knees and caused a shaving nick to sting. A gull cawed overhead and she glanced up, watching it glide on the breeze. The seabed dropped away suddenly and water rose over her cotton pants and towards her stomach, which she sucked in away from the sea’s bite. She took a quick breath and then dived under.

When she surfaced her dark hair was slicked to her head like oil. She kicked her legs and swam with clear, smooth strokes.

“Don’t go too far,” Finn called. “I only do
Baywatch
rescues on red-pants days.”

The waves rose and fell beneath her. One took her by surprise and white water slipped over her head like a blanket. She rubbed the water from her eyes and then took off in a front crawl, feeling the tightening of her muscles as they worked to propel her forward. On every second stroke she turned her head for air, and felt the weak sun brush her face.

Eventually, when her legs began to stiffen from the exertion and the cold, she slowed and swam parallel to the shore, looking at the cliffs from a new angle. It was an impressive coastline—dramatic,
weather-beaten, and empty. The space was intoxicating, a physical relief after London where she had felt as if she could never quite catch her breath. Away from the city, away from the memory of who she’d become, it was the first time in months that Mia felt at ease.

*   *   *

That evening, they sat on a picnic bench clutching tin mugs filled with hot chocolate. She could hear waves breaking in the distance, a soft rumble, almost like a far-off truck passing by. She slipped a silver hip flask from her back pocket and unscrewed the cap. “Whisky?”

Finn pushed his mug towards her. “Good job on dinner.”

Having camped often in their youth, they had mastered one-pot dishes to a level of wizardry. Tonight, Mia had offered to cook, serving noodles with thick slices of salami, simmering with peas, chunks of mushroom, a few cherry tomatoes, and a shake of seasoning. “Always tastes better outdoors,” she said, splashing whisky into both mugs. “It’s been so long since we’ve camped together.”

“London parks don’t have quite the same appeal.”

“True.” She smiled. “But—really—are you enjoying London?” Finn had moved there after graduation, renting an apartment above a butcher’s shop. It backed on to a railway line, and water shook from the kitchen tap whenever a train passed.

“I do. I did. It was a change after Cornwall.”

“What, Friday nights at SJ’s didn’t do it for you?”

“No, I love leopard print and Lycra on fifty-year-olds.” He grinned. “London wasn’t for you, though?”

“I guess not.” She had missed the sea with a deep ache and found her dreams were filled with beaches and empty horizons.

“Is that why you wanted to go traveling?”

She stretched the sleeves of her sweater over her hands and
then wrapped them round the mug to keep warm. “I was ready for a change.”

“It’s been a tough year. You deserve a break.”

Do I?
she thought. It had been Katie, not her, who stayed stoically at their mother’s side throughout her illness. Mia had closed her eyes to the beakers of pills, the clumps of hair in the shower tray, the new gauntness in her mother’s cheeks—because it was easier. Anything was easier than watching her strong, capable mother wilt. She felt the hard little pebble of guilt that lived in her stomach and she reached for the hip flask, putting her lips around the cool metal mouth.

Finn slung his arm around her shoulder. “You okay?”

She nodded.

“Listen, Mia.” His voice was serious and she glanced up. “When your mum was ill, I know we weren’t hanging out so much—but you did know I was there for you, didn’t you?”

“Course,” she said, embarrassed by his earnestness. They had never broached the subject of the four strained months when a wall had reared up between them, stacked with hard bricks of resentment and cemented by Mia’s silence. She wasn’t sure she was ready to now.

Sensing that, Finn pulled his arm back and said, “So tell me about Mick. When did you decide you wanted to see him?”

“I found a photo of him when I was clearing out Mum’s wardrobe.” In the picture he was standing onstage with a band in front of a banner that read
BLACK EWE
. The band looked as if they’d just finished a set, their faces red and glistening with sweat. A man with long black hair that had turned damp at the temples stood in the center, holding a guitar loosely at its neck and staring intently at the camera. Beside him, Mick looked exuberant and fresh in a fitted suit and pointed brown shoes that turned up at the toes. He
had no instrument to hold like the others, so he had shot a double-handed finger-gun at the camera and cocked his head to one side with a wink. It was a gesture that Mia would never have made, far too assured for it to look natural on her, yet she liked the picture as she saw a similarity between her and her father in the strong shape of their noses and possibly the curve of their lips, too. “I suppose seeing the picture made me curious.”

“You haven’t been curious before?”

“Not really. Well, maybe a little,” she conceded, thinking of a comment her grandmother made years ago that had always stuck with her. Mia had been in the bath, the water turning brackish from the mud caked to her knees. She wriggled and protested at having her hair washed, her grandmother eventually snapping, “Such an awkward, independent thing, aren’t you?” And then adding under her breath, “Just like your father.” The illicitness of that name had lingered in the steamy room for a long moment. Long enough for the comparison to settle deep into Mia’s thoughts.

Finn tilted his mug to his lips, finishing his drink. “How come you haven’t talked to Katie about your visiting him?”

Mia thought for a minute. “Sometimes when people give you their opinions, they can end up becoming your own. I didn’t want that.”

A car pulled into the campsite, the headlights briefly illuminating them before the engine was cut. A couple got out and began staking out their tent by flashlight.

The few sentences they’d just shared were the most Mia had admitted to anyone, even herself. For now, that was enough. She reached across for Finn’s mug. “I’ll wash up.” Then she hopped from the picnic bench and disappeared to the water tap.

Later, after she’d brushed her teeth, spitting the paste into a bush, she climbed into the tent with Finn. It was pitched with the shadow
of a scrub-covered hillside in the background and the salty breath of the sea to the fore. They lay with their heads on a folded beach towel, poking out of the tent so they could gaze up at the stars. They’d spent countless nights sharing a tent or lying like sardines in the single beds in each other’s rooms. Their friendship was close and easy even now, a gift that Mia would always be grateful for.

“Shooting star,” she said, pointing.

“Didn’t see it.”

“It’s hard to when you have your eyes closed. Sorry, you should sleep.”

They pulled their heads inside, zipped up the tent, and lay next to one another, just as they had done a thousand nights before.

*   *   *

The ground was unforgiving beneath Finn and he moved his weight onto his side, avoiding a ridge that was digging into his shoulder blade.

Mia was already asleep. He lay listening to the faint murmur of her breath and the crickets singing in the undergrowth beyond the tent. What Finn loved about camping was that life moved at a slower pace. A simple meal took longer to prepare; a bed for the night had to be erected and then dismantled; a shower and change of clothes became a luxury rather than a daily routine. He took more time to absorb the sounds, smells, and rhythm of a place, and to pay attention to what he was thinking.

Mia shifted, her hand slipping from her stomach and coming to rest on his forearm. He felt the heat from her skin against his. He could have moved his arm from beneath hers, yet he remained still. Unchecked in the darkness, he found his thoughts straying to a summer’s evening when he and Mia were sixteen years old.

They were at a gig watching an American punk band called
Thaw, who they’d been lobbying to see for months. Mia had worn a pair of pale jeans ripped across her thighs that she’d bought from a secondhand shop called Hobos. She’d painted silver eyeliner in sharp flicks at the edges of her eyes and brushed something on her cheekbones that made them shimmer. She looked older than the bare-faced girl he’d helped to reel in a mackerel earlier in the day, and the transformation both unsettled and appealed to him.

The band met all their expectations: the arena was pulsing with energy, the mosh pit was frenetic, and with each song the crowd grew wilder. Mia was effervescent, dancing wildly with her hands thrown skyward. She turned and shouted something to a burly man with a thick neck who had been standing behind them. The man cupped his hands together and, before Finn realized what was happening, he watched Mia place her foot in the sweaty palms and be tossed into the air. Her body arched backwards, her arms outstretched at her sides like open wings, and she was caught by a sea of hands, crowd surfing over the tops of people’s heads.

The black Beastie Boys T-shirt she wore—one she and Finn shared as they could only afford one between them—rode up her waist, exposing her smooth, slender stomach. The lighting crew picked out this ethereal girl with her wave of dark hair and spotlighted her journey to the front. A group of men, sweating heavily and thumping their fists in the air, whistled and catcalled at her. Every inch of Finn’s body tensed at their remarks, and he imagined beating a path through the audience and shutting them up.

The crowd continued to buck and writhe, illuminated by brilliant blue and white laser lights, and he strained to keep Mia in sight. Ducking to the side of a lanky man, he was able to spot the bouncers pulling her over the safety barrier. He didn’t know how she’d find her way back to him and four more songs were belted out before he saw her.

Squeezing through an impossibly tight gap, she stood before him, her cheeks flushed, her forehead glistening with sweat.

“Mia!”

As the band launched into their final track, the audience surged forward, pinning her against him. Instinctively, he gripped her waist, fearing she could slip beneath their feet. Thrust together, he felt the heat of her midriff through her damp T-shirt. Unfazed by the crowd, which roared beneath a thick haze of smoke, Mia placed her hands around Finn’s face and kissed him briefly on the lips.

The crowd heaved backwards; Mia slipped free from his hands. She turned towards the band and carried on swaying and rocking. Finn remained rooted to the spot, while a thousand other people danced on.

There are key incidents in everyone’s history—pivotal points on which the axis of life can swivel, and a seemingly innocuous action can flip the entire direction of one’s fate. For Finn, that kiss changed everything. Mia, the girl he’d always hung out with, became an enigma to him overnight. At school the next day, every ordinary interaction—holding a test tube while Mia added magnesium ribbon, eating ham sandwiches together on the bench beneath a sycamore tree, sharing a pair of earphones on the bus ride home—became fused with his new desire. It was as if he’d stepped out of his body and into someone else’s. He was so unnerved by this shift that he ditched the last two days of the school year to give himself space to think.

When school broke up for the summer, Mia cycled to his house with her tent, sleeping bag, and a bottle of vodka she’d bribed Katie into buying, and told him they were going camping in the forest that backed on to the cliffs. He could think of no excuse good enough to refuse, so he grabbed his sleeping bag and followed.

That evening, an unforecast downpour drove them into the tent before dusk. They played cards and drank vodka, and Finn stole furtive glances at Mia and wondered how he’d never before noticed that her eyes were the lush green of emeralds. Once the rain stopped, they unzipped the tent on to the dark forest steeped in a rich, earthy smell. They stood in the damp heather, the hems of their jeans turning sodden, and felt drunk and exuberant. The moon that night, a perfect silver disc, looked so spectacular that for no reason at all, Finn howled like a wolf. Mia giggled and then howled, too.

In the 72 hours since Mia had kissed Finn, he’d thought constantly of how it would feel to kiss her back. Properly. “Mia,” he said, moving in front of her unsteadily. She looked at him, still grinning. She wore no makeup, and in the moonlight her skin looked luminous. “God, you’re so beautiful!” he said suddenly. Then he reached a hand to her cheek and leaned forward to kiss her.

Moments before his lips reached hers, Mia pulled back.

“Finn!” She laughed, thumping his chest. “I thought you were being serious for a second! Don’t weird me out!”

Finn had bent forward, pretending to laugh, too, when actually it felt as though he’d taken a punch in the gut.

He didn’t see her for three weeks after that as he joined his family on a vacation in northern France. On that trip, Finn lost his virginity to a seventeen-year-old girl named Ambré, who was working as a cleaner in the park where they stayed. She wore a pink bra and no pants beneath her uniform, and invited Finn to her caravan each afternoon on her three o’clock break. While he was genuinely thrilled by the arrangement, it gradually exposed the depth of his feelings for Mia. He not only yearned to touch or kiss her in the way he was doing with Ambré, he also missed other things, like the sound of her laughter, or the way she’d bite the tip
of her thumbnail when she was concentrating, or the determination in her voice when she’d tell him, “I can do this.” He missed Mia’s friendship—and wasn’t prepared to risk that again.