Sleight of Hand (31 page)

“Sure,” Sven says.

“On a dog lead?”

Sven shrugs. “I'm not with Tom,” he says. “All this is just to impress.”

“Right,” I say. “Well, anyway, tell anyone whatever you want. I'm outa here.”

As I reach the front door, Tom surfaces from the kitchen and grabs my sleeve. “Oh don't go. Stay for dinner,” he says.

“No,” I say. “No, not tonight. Really. You three just enjoy each other's company. Sven, by the way, is
fabulous
.”

Once outside, I find that I don't have the slightest desire to drive to Brighton, so I simply walk to the end of the road and settle in the farthest corner of the Bay Inn. Here I eat fish and chips, watch an excellent jazz-band comprised entirely of over-sixties, and wonder who exactly Tom is trying to impress by bringing a bitchy Swedish body-builder to dinner.

By Tuesday, it is clear that Jenny's new drug regime isn't working any better for her than the old one. She spends the entire day in bed, her only movements regular trips to the bathroom to evacuate the litres of mint cordial I am forcing her to drink.

Wednesday at lunchtime I hear her retching and decide that it's maybe time for her to inform the hospital. I phone Ricardo first to discuss it, but as usual these days, the best I can do is leave a message on his voicemail.

“You just finish that,” I tell Sarah, who is busy colouring-in a fluorescent pink dinosaur, “and I'll be back in a minute.”

Jenny looks up weakly as I enter her room and sit on the edge of her bed.

“Someone's not having a good day,” I say.

“No,” she says, simply.

“Are you going to phone Twat and tell him?”

Jenny pulls a face.

“Are you wearing fake tan?” I ask.

Jenny frowns at me incredulously, so I lean to one side to get a better look. “I think you're going yellow sweetie,” I say. “That's a kidney thing isn't it? You definitely need to call Twat.”

“You have to stop calling him that,” she says, smiling vaguely. “I nearly asked for Professor Twat at reception last time.”

I take her hand and stroke it. “It makes you smile though,” I say. “It makes you grin every time. So?”

“So?”

“Will you call Twat or shall I? Because you really are a bit yellow.”

“Let's just wait till Saturday. I want just to get through one week and see,” she says. “Maybe I'll be fine by Sunday.”

I sigh. “You think he'll take you off the trial?”

“That's what they said.”

“Frankly Jenny, you look like shit,” I say.

“Thanks.”

“Well, you do. And you looked great until you started taking the pills again.”

“What did you think of Sven?” she asks, clearly changing the subject.

“Sven?”

“Yeah.”

“He seems nice enough,” I lie.

“Yeah. I thought so too,” she says. “He was brilliant with Sarah.”

“Really?”
I ask, genuinely shocked.

“Yeah. He played with her all evening. It was like having a nanny.”

“That's sweet,” I say, thinking that it was probably Sven's strategy for avoiding discussing the true nature of his relationship with Tom.

“It made me think about asking Tom,” Jenny says. “You know, about Sarah.”

I push my lips out and shake my head vaguely to indicate that I don't understand.

“I thought I could ask him how he would feel about looking after her, just in case,” she says.

“Tom?”

“Well, now he's in a relationship.”

“They've only been together a couple of weeks,” I say, wondering whether to reveal that they maybe aren't together at all, or at least, not in the sense that Jenny means.

“Sure,” Jenny says. “But I think it might last. Call it woman's intuition.”

“Really,” I say. “Is that what you call it?”

“Careful, you sound jealous.”

“No,” I say categorically. “No, I'm not at all.”

“You're not having doubts then?”

“Doubts?”

“About Ricardo. About Tom for that matter.”

“No.”

“I saw Florent again last week by the way … did I tell you?”

“No.”

“Well, he asked after you.”

I shrug. “Good.”

“You don't seem to talk much anymore – you and Ricardo,” she points out. “Are you sure everything's OK?”

And it's undeniable that we don't. My phone calls to Ricardo have gone from an hour every day to ten minutes once a week. Ricardo insists that this is simply because it's the dry season and he's out at Max's all the time. But even though I can understand the logic of this, and even though I realise that Ricardo can't spend all his evenings alone staring at the cat, it would be dishonest to say that it hasn't crossed my mind: maybe he
has
met someone new.

Were Ricardo gay of course, this would be more unlikely. Colombia is a pretty homophobic society and as far as I know there are no options whatsoever for meeting other gay men in Santa Marta, let alone in Tayrona. But of course, Ricardo
isn't
gay, he's bisexual. So the whole
world
is his oyster.

I haven't asked him outright yet, but I think that the day might be coming when a direct question will slip unexpectedly from my lips. Because nothing Ricardo has said or done over the last month – other
than his continued view that we should take Sarah – provides any proof that there is a joint future for us. And in the light of what I can only admit is a failing,
fading
relationship and in view of the inability of either of us, under the circumstances, to do anything to fix this, even his views on Sarah are anachronistic at best. At worst, they may just be lies intended to placate me.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, everything's fine.”

“That was a long pause,” she says.

“Was it?”

And then Jenny pulls a face, pales even more than usual, and pushes me aside so that she can retch into the bucket beside the bed.

“Jesus Jen,” I say softly.

She makes a deep, weepy breathing noise and then retches again.

I stroke her back and chew the side of my mouth. “Don't you just end up vomming up the pills?” I ask.

“Not now,” she says.

“Sorry,” I say, standing.

“No,” she says, drying her mouth with some tissues. “No, stay! I meant not this late in the day. If I throw them up immediately I wash them and take them again.”

“Yuck.”

“And if it's during the first hour I have to take another dose. But this late in the day it's fine.”

“Poor you.”

She lies back on the pillow and blows through her lips. “Fun, fun, fun,” she says.

“And they said this is normal?”

She shrugs. “It can't be that
ab
normal,” she says. “No one batted an eyelid when I threw up in hospital. God, I feel so dizzy today though.”

She pats the bed and I sit back down. “Lovely day out there,” she says, looking out at the horizon.

“It is,” I agree, studying the yellow tinge to her skin and wondering if I should phone the hospital of my own accord, and then wishing Ricardo would phone me back, and then thinking about her asking Tom to look after Sarah, and realising that we're suddenly using Sarah as a cypher to discuss the possibility of Jenny's death again, and thinking that this definitely is
the
moment where I should step up to the mark and tell her that I will take Sarah if need be. All of these thoughts rush through my mind.

“Um, about Sarah,” I start. But then my mouth dries, and I can't go through with it.

“Yes?” Jenny asks.

“I … I thought I'd take her out for a walk this afternoon,” I say. “She made me promise. I think she's getting a bit stir crazy.”

As I watch Jenny's face, I see her look puzzled and then slip into a frown. Finally she raises one hand and points to the beach. “I think she's already … that
is
… what's she
doing?
” she asks.

I follow her gaze and see Sarah wobbling her way along the top of one of the breakwaters. Because of the way the tides have pushed the pebbles the beach is much higher on one side than the other, in fact, to the left, the way she is looking, the top of the wooden construction is almost level with the beach. Behind her though, the drop down to the lapping waves is at least two meters.

“Jesus!” I mutter.

I have the strangest experience, almost like an acid induced hallucination. I feel a wave of cold air and my scalp prickles and I think that I know that not only that she is about to fall, but also that she is about to
drown
.

In less than a tenth of a second, before Jenny has even pulled her gaze from the view, I am sprinting from the room. I take the stairs in two enormous bounds, almost breaking my neck in the process. I jump over the coffee table and almost run into the closed section of the bay window – only a last minute reflection from a standard lamp saves me, and I skid to a halt and crash up against it before squeezing through the opening and sprinting barefoot across the beach as fast as I have ever run anywhere.

As I reach the crest of the beach, Sarah comes back into view, still wobbling on the breakwater but now hearing me, she turns to look and starts to wobble and topple backwards her arms flailing. I rocket across the beach and reach the water's edge at the very second that her bottom breaks the surface of the sea, and I dive towards her and lift her back up and out at the exact moment that the water first touches her cheeks.

She's standing on dry land before she even realises what has happened.

I double up, dripping and panting beside her and that's when she starts to scream.

When I finally straighten up I see Jenny at the open upstairs window, nodding slowly.

Unable to control a sudden bubble of anger, I shout at Sarah. “What the fuck are you doing out here!” which of course, only makes her scream the louder.

Sarah calms down as soon as she is showered and dried. In fact, I think that the most upsetting element of the day was, for her, the fact that I shouted at her. She spends most of the day sitting upstairs on her mother's bed.

Jenny, bizarrely, makes no comment on the drama whatsoever. At first I think that she is simply too ill to pass comment, but there is something new about the way that she looks at me, something deep and important that I can't figure out.

Every time I catch her eye, I end up trying to work out if she is angry with me for shouting, or if perhaps, as I have wondered myself, she thinks that the only reason Sarah fell was because of my dramatic sprint across the beach.

Whatever the dark pools of her regard are hiding, she's not letting on, maintaining instead a crisp veneer of normality as if today is a day like any other. And perhaps that's it. Perhaps it is a day like any other. Perhaps parents get used to these brushes with mortality, and I am over-dramatising and over-analysing.

Late that night, when they are both in bed, I Skype Ricardo's landline despite the late hour. I intend to leave him a short message to ask him to call me when he wakes up, but as I start to speak, the emotion of the day and the bottle of wine I have downed combine to produce an unintended message from hell.

“Hi babe, it's me,” I start, quite reasonably.

“You must be asleep. I hope this doesn't wake you. But if it does, please come to the phone. I
so
need to talk to you. Are you there? No? Oh … It's been a horrible day. Sarah fell in the sea. She could have drowned. I ran really fast and saved her. But it really made me think about the responsibility babe. It seems stupid talking to an answer-phone, but we never seem to talk anymore. The thing is, I agree really, with what you say about Sarah, but I don't see how I can take her on when you're so distant. And
it's getting to the point where I'm going to have to say something to Jenny. We hardly talk these days. Jenny's going yellow – did I tell you that yet? I don't know whether to phone the hospital and tell them or not. I mean, what if she dies? What if her kidneys fail because I didn't call? And if I do call then they might take her off the trial, and what if
that
kills her instead. It's not fair that I have to worry about all this on my own. And if you were there you'd just say, call them, don't call them. God, I don't feel like we're a couple anymore. And I'm scared about that. You're turning into just some guy who's five thousand miles away. Someone who never calls. Someone who's never in. Someone who doesn't have an opinion.”

“I mean, what happened about Christmas? It's just over three weeks away. Do you remember saying you'd come over? But you haven't booked a flight. You haven't even mentioned it. I don't even know what I'm rambling on about … I'm sorry. I don't mean to … I mean, I know this isn't your fault … But it's just, I
really
need to talk to you today babe. Where the fuck
are
you?
Are
you even there? The phone always used to wake you up. Maybe you sleep better nowadays without me. Look, God … All I want to say is … call me. Please. I need to talk to you today. So if you still really do love me then call me. Anytime. Because otherwise, well, I guess I know what that means. I guess we both do.”

“Anyway, God, you'll hate this message. It's everything you detest. I wish I could wipe it but I don't know how. You're not going to pick up are you? No. Oh well. Sweet dreams.”

I hang up and then shake my head, incredulous at the message I have just left.

“That'll do it,” I mumble. “He'll probably never phone ever again.”

And then I sigh, and think that if that's what's meant to happen next, then maybe it's for the best that we just get on with it all. And that, I realise, is exactly why I left the message in the first place.