Swimming at Night: A Novel (21 page)

It had been Jenny who had grabbed her arm and led her from the pub toilets. Now she remembered the man, an angry vein pulsing in the neck like a threat, protesting that he would take Katie home, but losing.

Relief swam through her. She swallowed two tablets and then wrapped herself in a towel and left for the showers. Finding an empty stall, she turned the shower dial to hot and stepped in. Scalding water pummeled her scalp and turned the skin on her
chest mottled red. Steam rose around her and she filled her lungs with it. She washed her hair and smoothed soap over her body, letting the water rinse her skin clean.

Without warning, tears began flooding her face. Deep sobs rattled through her body, drenched by the noise of the shower. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, her head throbbing with the enormity of what had happened. Their wedding would have to be canceled; there would be guests to tell, arrangements to unravel. But it was bigger than that. She wasn’t just losing her fiancé, but the life they’d planned together—the home they’d imagined building, the children who’d have one day played there.

Look at what you’ve done to me, Mia! I’m alone in Australia, sobbing in a hostel shower. My engagement is over. And now I’ve got nobody. You’ve ruined everything! And for what? A quick fuck in a corridor?

In a burst of movement, she yanked the dial to cold. Icy water poured over her head and down her spine. She gasped, her eyes wide. Instantly she was alert, her skin tingling. She cut the shower and caught her breath, her anger fizzling out.

As cold water dripped from her body, Katie thought back to Mia’s entry.
You filled six pages with details of that night. At the end of it you asked yourself, “Why did I screw him?”

Your answer was a single line at the bottom of a page: “Because I’m a bitch.”

But I’m starting to understand more about you, Mia. I don’t believe you were the dark-haired, dark-spirited girl you’d have had us think. I know why you slept with Ed. You wanted to take the most important person in my life from me.

Just like I took Finn from you.

(Western Australia, February)

S
he dived down again, her body a slick underwater arrow, toes pointed, fingers together, hair in a smooth dark trail. She cut through the sea like a fish, her eyes open to the blurry blue sting of salt water, her ears filled with its fizz and echoes. Then she pulled her arms to her sides, arched her back, and kicked upwards, breaking the surface and feeling the sun on her face.

There was no breeze and the sea settled around her. The shore was empty and the karri forest beyond, still. She floated on her back with her eyes closed. The air was thick and she could feel the weight of heat in it. She wished Katie were floating beside her, the sea making them weightless. The thought caught her off guard. It had been years since they’d swum together and she wondered why she still missed it with such a sharp ache.

She flipped onto her front and swam back in. Water streamed off her skin as she waded in to shore. She wrung out her hair and then shook the sand from her sun-crisped towel and wrapped herself in it.

She padded back to the hostel and dustings of sand trailed her along the corridor as she headed towards Noah’s room. There was no swell forecast, so she was hoping to spend the day with him. Zani had told her about a deserted cove 20 kilometers up the coast, where a pod of dolphins regularly visited. She had e-mailed a link of how to reach it and Mia was planning to take Noah there.

She knocked on his door. She imagined stepping from her towel, and slipping into bed beside him, Noah’s body still warm. When there was no answer, she turned the handle and went in.

The room was empty: the bed had been stripped and his belongings were gone. Blood began to pulse in her neck.

She hurried along the corridor to Jez’s dorm. She knocked twice, then let herself in. A row of stripped bunks framed the room. She swallowed, telling herself there must be some explanation.

Clutching her towel to her chest, she moved outside and followed the perimeter of the hostel, which led her to the garage. She stepped into the musty dimness and waited a moment for her eyes to adjust. Save for the hostel’s shared surfboard, huge and dented with a missing fin, the rack was empty.

Then she checked the patch of gravel beneath the eucalyptus trees for his van.

Gone.

She jogged back inside towards the reception desk. Karin, one half of a Dutch husband-and-wife team who ran the place, asked, “Hey, what’s up?”

“Where’s Noah? He was staying in room four.”

Karin closed one eye and squinted towards the ceiling through the other. “Checked out,” she said, opening both eyes again. “And the guys from dorm seven, too.”

“What? When?”

“First thing.”

“Where did they go?”

“No idea,” Karin said, picking up a mug of coffee and blowing it cool. “They were talking about a good forecast. Aren’t they always?”

“Are they coming back?”

“If they are, they haven’t booked.” With one hand she drew a blue folder towards her and flicked casually through its plastic sheets. “Nah, we’ve got nothing for a month.”

He couldn’t have left. Two days ago they’d lain on the grass and he’d talked about places he’d traveled to, of islands with no roads, waves that broke over kelp forests, fishes with wings, and whales that sang. And she had pictured it all, imagining new adventures on shores fringed with two sets of footprints. “Was there a message for me?”

Karin opened her palms. “Sorry, darl. Not that I’ve been given.”

“Mia!”

She swung around, expectant. But it was Finn. He was strolling towards her holding a piece of toast, jam dripping onto his thumb. “Good swim?” he asked, then licked the side of his thumb clean.

“He’s checked out,” she said. “Noah’s gone.”

*   *   *

Finn looked at her closely. Her wet hair was slicked back from her face, and her eyelashes were stuck together in dark triangles. She grasped the top of the towel against her chest and he could see the tracks of dried salt water flecking her collarbone and wrist.

She looked so young: like the Mia of his teenage years who had waited outside his math class to tell him her BMX had been stolen. He remembered that day. She’d been so distraught that after school he’d gone to the junkyard, found an old shopper bike with a bent
wheel arch, and spent the weekend fixing it up. He’d shaved off rust, replaced the brake clamps, and repainted it sky blue—her favorite color. When he wheeled it around to her on Sunday evening, she had grinned so hard that her eyes watered. He had loved being able to fix the problem, but he had no idea how to fix this.

“Did you see him? Did he say anything to you?”

It was the small note of hope in her voice that scratched at his heart. But what should he tell her? That Noah had happened to come into the kitchen when he was making coffee, and mentioned they were flying out to Bali? Should he tell her that it was he who’d asked, “Does Mia know?” and Noah who’d replied, “I couldn’t find her. Let her know for me?”

The guy’s offhandedness was an insult. Finn couldn’t relay that. So instead he answered, “Sorry, I haven’t seen him, either.”

Her gaze fell to the floor.

He saw the faint freckles across the bridge of her nose brought out by the sun. He ached to wrap her in his arms, but he knew it wasn’t him she wanted.

“He left for the surf.”

He saw her biting down on her bottom lip. He couldn’t bear it if she cried.

“He should’ve told me. I can’t believe he’d do this.”

Neither can I,
Finn thought.

They’d been traveling the same route as Noah for weeks and Finn had watched from the sidelines as their romance played out. At night he’d lie awake in their dorm listening to the other travelers moving about as he waited for Mia. He’d hear the door click open, see a triangle of light spill into the room, then hear the soft pad of her feet across the linoleum. He’d watch the silhouette of her shape climb up the ladder into her bunk and hear her shifting
above him, moving the pillows and sheet until she was settled. Each night she returned to their dorm he wondered,
How could Noah let her go?

He’d distracted himself by picking up with a group of Europeans who were spending a season in Margaret River. He joined them for a week of grape picking at a local vineyard and doubled his cash playing poker with them in the evenings. It wasn’t hard to avoid Noah—the man spent all day on the water and didn’t leave the beach much before dusk.

One afternoon, Finn had been hiking and paused on a headland to watch the huge breakers peeling off the point break. A van had pulled up and Noah got out. He acknowledged Finn with a nod, then took his board and scrambled down the headland and into the surf. Finn watched for a few minutes. Noah’s talent on the waves was clear, but what marked him out as exceptional was his fearlessness. Finn admired him for that, but, as he watched Noah catch wave after wave, he knew he could never like him. It wasn’t simply that Noah was Mia’s lover, it was because he didn’t cherish her. When he paddled in and found Mia waiting on the shore, her arms hooked over her tanned knees, grinning at him, he didn’t see he was the luckiest man on earth. When he entered a room and she looked up, he didn’t kiss her or slip his hand around hers. When he packed up his board and flew out to Bali, Noah didn’t even realize what he was leaving behind.

*   *   *

Lying on her stomach on the top bunk, Mia wrote:

Six days. Still no word. We’re flying to New Zealand tomorrow. Part of me is desperate to leave—but the
other part wants to stay because the pathetic truth is, I want to be here in case he comes back.

Another couple have moved into room 4. The man hangs his tasteless shorts over the balcony rail where Noah’s rash vest used to dry, and I want to rip them down and grind them into the dust. I resent his girlfriend more: she gets to lie in the double bed now and feel the creak and stretch of the springs beneath her as she’s made love to. I want to throw her out, seal up the room, stop them from trampling my memories.

Perhaps it
is
time for New Zealand.

She closed the journal and pushed it under her pillow, then lay back, staring at the cracked paint on the ceiling. When she was seven, Mia had lain on Katie’s bottom bunk with its shimmering canopy, trying to imagine that she was a princess. But it never felt real to her. She couldn’t picture the graceful steps, or the prim curtseys, or the pretty gowns, so she had clambered back up the ladder to her lair, content to be an explorer with a ceiling of stars to navigate.

The door clicked open. She heard the cheerful slap of flip-flops, then the creak of the bed frame as Finn climbed two rungs of the ladder. His head poked over the side of the bunk. His eyes were bright and he was grinning. “I’ve got a plan.”

She blinked, taking only a moment to remember the expected response: “What do I need?”

“Just your sleeping bag.”

She took a deep breath and then sat up.

“You want to do this?”

“Yes,” she said, shaking herself into action. She climbed down and pulled her sleeping bag with her.

They left the hostel and struck out in the direction of Reds, Finn leading. She felt the breeze on her skin and the relief of being outdoors. Crickets sang in the bushes and the air smelled of eucalyptus. By the time they reached the rocks, night had fallen and they picked their path by flashlight, her bare feet clinging to the chalky curves of the rocks.

The wind blew onshore and her sundress curled around her thighs. She untied a sweater from her waist and pulled it on. They continued until Finn chose a rock wide enough to lay both sleeping bags on. “We haven’t stargazed yet in Australia. As it’s our last night, I thought we should rectify that.”

“Good plan,” she said, settling herself on top of the sleeping bag.

From his backpack, Finn pulled out a bottle of rum and set it down with a clink.

“Very good plan.”

They listened to the boom of waves breaking at sea as they drank, occasionally gazing up at a wide sky filled with stars. She was grateful for the way the sweet, dark liquid ran down her throat, washing away the edges of her sadness.

Later, she lay back on the rocks, her rib cage expanding as she made a pillow of her arms. Above, the stars winked and glittered. “How many do you think there are?”

Finn took another swig of rum and then lay beside her. “I read somewhere that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on earth.”

“I never noticed them in London.” They were faded by street-lights, car headlamps, over-illuminated office buildings, and the glow of millions of homes. She thought of her sister somewhere in the city. It would be morning and Mia imagined her at her desk,
leaning close to a computer screen, her face serious. “I wish Katie could see this.”

Finn raised himself onto his elbows. “You miss her?”

“Sometimes,” she said, surprised by the tug to her heart.

“Are you going to talk to her about Harley?”

She shook her head, realizing how dizzy the rum had made her. “I don’t want her to know we’re half sisters.”

“Why?”

“It dilutes us.”

“What do you mean?”

Alcohol had always found a way of working into the closed channel of her emotions, allowing her feelings to flow more easily into words. “Mum had an affair. Do you think Katie would want to hear that? It means we’ve got different fathers. It stretches apart what’s left of our family.” She sighed. “And she’d want to know all about Harley.”

“So?”

“So I’d have to tell her everything—that he drank and took drugs, that he could be insular sometimes and wildly out of control at others, that his friends and family eventually lost faith in him. And the whole time, she’d be matching parts of him to me.”

“You need to let this go, Mia. You’re nothing like Harley.”

“Aren’t I?” she said, thinking of the other dark similarity they shared. “Harley had an affair with his brother’s wife.”