Hurt (17 page)

Mathéo nods, not trusting himself to utter another word.

‘Fine.’ Hugo sounds defeated. ‘But look – if you ever just wanna talk, I’m here for you, mate, OK?’

Holding his breath, Mathéo nods his head and closes his eyes.

He has nothing on at school for the rest of the afternoon so, in an effort to avoid Hugo, hangs around outside the gym until Lola is done with rehearsals. She finally emerges just after two and, as his parents are still at work, he persuades her to come back home with him for the afternoon. He is desperate to wipe the conversation with Hugo from his mind; he has missed Lola so much during the last couple of days, wants to put all that behind him, aching to feel that connection with her again. Still painfully aware of Hugo’s comments about his demeanour, he makes a concerted effort to act laid-back and cheerful in an attempt to recapture their carefree banter of the past.

Consuela won’t stop fussing around them, so in the end they manage to get rid of her by going outside to sunbathe, snuggled behind the rhododendron bushes at the end of the garden. They chat about stuff Mathéo missed the day before – Hugo getting blind drunk and Isabel going ballistic when he ‘accidentally’ kissed an ex at someone’s end-of-school party. After a while, the two of them lapse into companionable silence in the heat of the sun.

Eyes half closed, Mathéo suddenly remembers something that tickled him that morning on TV and starts to laugh. ‘Hey, listen to this . . .’ But Lola doesn’t move and, looking down, he sees she has fallen asleep against his chest. She lies face down, arms wrapped loosely around his neck, her only movement the steady rise and fall of her shoulders. Her pale eyelashes are still against her cheeks, her nostrils constricting slightly with each intake of breath, her face gently flushed with the warmth of the late-afternoon sun.

Carefully reaching for her discarded bottle of water, Mathéo tilts it gently over her face, letting fall a few drops onto her cheek. She twitches and wipes them away, but then he catches her nose, and finally her ear.

‘Hey!’ She raises her head and squints up at him, holding out a hand to deflect the stream of water now aimed at her eyes. ‘What the hell . . .? Aargh!’ She pulls herself into a sitting position and wipes her face with the back of her hand, shaking her head in an attempt to get the water out of her ear. ‘You bastard!’

She makes a vain grab for the bottle, but Mathéo rolls away, holding it just out of her reach and squeezing it like a water gun, spraying the back of her neck.

Half laughing, half cursing, she jumps to her feet and lunges for him. ‘Oh, you are
so
dead!’

Lola grabs the bottle and attempts to dodge past, but he is too quick and catches her round the waist, wrestling it out of her hand. She attempts to get it back, but is instantly blasted with water and dashes away shrieking, heading towards the large tree in the hopes of swinging herself up into its branches. Mathéo gets to her just as she reaches it, however, drenching her head and shirt as she shrieks and struggles. Finally she escapes his grip and races back into the house, slamming and locking the conservatory doors behind her with a triumphant whoop.

After a considerable amount of banging, Consuela finally lets him in, looking mildly horrified, Loïc trailing in her wake. Mathéo takes the stairs two at a time and eventually catches up with Lola in the top-floor bathroom, where she is attempting to dry herself off with his flannel.

‘Your shirt is transparent,’ he laughs, slinging her over his shoulder and carrying her into his bedroom. He throws her unceremoniously down on the bed. ‘Look at you! You’re a disgrace, Miss Baumann!’

‘Not funny! Gimme one of your T-shirts right now!’ she growls, kneeling up on the bed and lowering her head to unbutton her top; her wet, tangled hair falling forward, obscuring her face.

He jumps onto the bed beside her, almost knocking her over. ‘No.’

She looks up at him as he helps her out of her sodden top. ‘What d’you mean
no
, you filthy rat-bag? You want me to walk around in my underwear for the rest of—?’

His mouth meets hers with a jolt, cutting her off. ‘No,’ he gasps between kisses. ‘Personally, I think you should wear nothing at all.’

She starts to laugh, but he bites her bottom lip to silence her, and suddenly they are kissing hard, almost frantically, so fiercely they hardly have time to come up for air. His hands grip the sides of her face, then slide into her hair, her mouth hot and fierce against his. As their kisses become stronger, more urgent, almost painful, he wraps his arm around her waist, pulling her towards him so that their bodies are pressed tightly together, his hands pushing against the back of her neck, her head. He is kissing her so hard, they barely have time to surface for breath. She smells of grass and earth and peppermint, her lips salty and her hair soft and damp. And he never knew a kiss could be filled with so much emotion – passionate, yet somehow also desperate, as if it were both the first and the last kiss in the world.

He divests her of her top, leaves her to do the rest, and pulls his T-shirt over his head, kicking off his trainers and stepping out of his jeans. Then, suddenly, they are both naked on the bed, sending the duvet tumbling to the floor, their bodies meeting instantly. He can feel a current slide under his skin, crackling with electricity; it is the first time they have had sex since they got drunk by the river, and he is so turned on she has to remind him to use a condom. He sits up, cursing, and then presses down on her again and moves his mouth over her breasts, kissing her from her navel to her neck, then making contact with her mouth with a gasp, the sudden press of her lips against his almost making him come.

She circles his torso with her arms, wraps her legs around his, her grasp so fierce, so urgent, he can feel the edges of her nails against his back. She is holding on so tight that for a moment he feels trapped: trapped within her grasp, trapped within her body, trapped against his will. And suddenly he knows there is no escape, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. He can only freeze and lie still and try to disappear, evaporate into the air around him.

‘Hey!’ The voice, not one he recognizes, calls to him as if from outside a nightmare. ‘Hey!’ A breath, a silence. ‘It doesn’t matter. You’re probably just tired or – or . . .’

It takes him a moment to recognize the voice, the surroundings. Lola. But something has changed. He is cold; so cold he has to hold himself tight to stop himself from trembling. Something is very wrong: he hasn’t come, all earlier arousal completely sapped from his body. He has retreated, his penis limp and useless in the sudden cold, the sudden fear, the sudden emptiness of the room.

‘Fucking hell . . .’ He rolls away from her, quickly removing the empty condom and reaching for the duvet on the floor. Drags it back over them both, then rescues his T-shirt and boxers and pulls them on hurriedly. He looks up into a face that is almost as shocked as his. ‘Damn, I’m sorry, I – I really don’t know what happened!’

‘It’s OK.’ Pulling the duvet up to her chin, Lola is flushed, her lips stained red with the strength of his kisses. But she is looking at him with a look of nervous uncertainty and he presses his fist against his mouth and realizes he is trembling. ‘Sweetheart . . .’

He starts, the touch of her hand like a burn. He raises an elbow as if in self-defence. ‘Wait – just give me a second here!’

She recoils immediately, huddling against the pillows. ‘Sorry—’

‘No, it’s OK. It’s not your fault. It’s just – it’s just—’ His heart is racing. He can’t seem to catch his breath. He bites the knuckles of his fist in an attempt to stop himself shaking.
OK, get a grip
, he tells himself. These things happen. Except that he is overcome with a feeling of horror, of utter certainty. He will never be able to have sex again. He will have to leave Lola. It wouldn’t be fair not to. He will lose her for ever because he will never be able to make love to her again.

Through blurred vision he is aware of Lola pulling on her underwear, going over to his drawers to fetch a dry top, then sitting down beside him on the edge of the bed, reaching out to take his hand and wincing as he instantly pulls back.

‘Lola, I’ve – I’ve got training. I’m late—’

‘Mattie, don’t be like this. Please don’t be upset!’

‘I’m not!’

‘You’re angry, then—’

‘No, I’m just late, I have to go.’ He swings his legs off the bed and stands up, pulling away from her attempted embrace.

‘I don’t care about what just happened. But I care about
you
!’ Tears spring into her eyes. ‘Something’s wrong. Something’s been wrong for weeks now. That’s what I care about. And it kills me that you won’t tell me!’ She bites her lip, tears spilling over the edges of her lashes. But he forces himself to turn away, cross the landing to the bathroom and get ready for training.

There is a red exclamation mark next to today’s date on his iPhone calendar. It’s been there for several weeks now – Perez knows better than to spring things on him at the last minute. This particular red exclamation mark has only ever meant one thing to Mathéo: a new dive. This afternoon, for the first time, he will attempt the reverse handstand triple tuck off the ten-metre board. He has been practising it for several weeks now as a dry dive, into the foam pit down at the gym. He has spent several sessions practising it off the five-metre board in the safety harness. But today there will be no rig to control his fall, no pit full of soft foam to absorb the shock of entry. Today he will be launching himself backwards from the handstand position off the highest board – higher than two double-decker buses – and twisting and somersaulting through the air, legs flexed, toes pointed, then knees bent, hands gripping his ankles before straightening out and hitting the water like an arrow.

Mathéo knows only too well by now that thinking about what could go wrong when diving is always a recipe for disaster. But after what happened with Lola, his mind only seems capable of dwelling on the negative – dark, self-destructive thoughts he can no longer relegate to the side-lines of his consciousness. Arriving for training ten minutes late, he takes his time getting changed, spending longer than necessary strapping up the wrist he injured back in January, lingering for a while under the hot shower and going through his stretching routine and warm-up dives with a thoroughness usually reserved for competitions. The session is already well underway and the other divers are already going through their sets. His father, who always comes home early to watch him perform a new dive, is striding impatiently along the bottom row of the bleachers, looking typically out of place in his business clothes, despite having removed his jacket and loosened the knot of his tie. His face glistens with sweat. Now he is leaning over the rail of the bleachers, talking earnestly into Perez’s ear, forcing the coach to stand back against the wall with his head half turned to listen, while simultaneously keeping an eye on the squad’s three other divers, shouting out the odd instruction and blowing into his whistle to let each one know when the pool is clear. Mathéo already knows how the conversation is going: his father will be badgering Perez to tell Mathéo to hurry up; Perez will be trying to persuade Mathéo’s father that it is safer to let Mathéo take his time. But after a while, even Perez’s patience begins to wear thin; he emits three sharp blasts from the whistle around his neck and everyone stops.

‘Right, let’s get moving! Aaron, in the warm-up area loosening up your lower back! Zach and Eli, go through your sets on the lower boards! Matt, get started on the reverse triple tuck from the ten-metre right now, please!’

However, as is the custom when one of them is attempting a new dive, the other squad members hang back to watch.

‘Good luck, man,’ Aaron says with a lopsided grin as he goes over to the warm-up area and stretches out on his towel at a strategically positioned angle. Zach and Eli come over, as is customary, to give him high-fives before going to sit down on the ends of the lower boards and lean back on their hands, getting comfortable. A group of girls from the synchronized swimming club cut the music to their routine and gather to sit with their coach in and around the hot tub. Several lifeguards appear as if from nowhere to join the two already on duty – Mathéo senses rather than sees them in their matching tracksuits, gathered on the far side of the diving pool. Even the recreational swimmers pause for a break, hanging round the ladder in the shallow end for the best view. The regulars all know him by sight, recognize his name, and those who don’t know him stop anyway to see what all the fuss is about. All it takes is for Perez to raise the megaphone to his mouth, go through the standard safety procedure of announcing his name and the fact that he will be attempting a new dive for the first time, and everyone stops to watch. There must be at least thirty pairs of eyes on him as he steps out from beneath the poolside shower and briskly shakes the water from each ear. Thirty pairs of eyes follow him as he picks up his chamois cloth, walks over to the boards, and begins his ascent.

It might be a scant audience compared to competition days, but here almost everyone either knows him by name or knows him personally, having watched him train and dive over the years. They know his idiosyncrasies, are familiar with his body language, can tell in an instant whether he is feeling confident, cautious, or downright terrified. Some have even witnessed his meltdowns as a kid, when he would run from the pool, sobbing in fear. But over the years he has learned to control his emotions – is known on the team for never bottling out of new dives. So the focus here feels much more intense, much more direct, much more personal. In many ways, when attempting a new dive for the first time he is at his most vulnerable, his most exposed, his most defenceless. Even though he is well-liked by most of these onlookers, he knows only too well that their bated breath stems as much from speculation that he may crash and burn as from a desire to see him nail the dive. Much like watching a stuntman attempt a crazy feat, they hope either for a spectacular dive or a spectacular catastrophe.