The Steep Approach to Garbadale (30 page)

She lay draped over the gunwale of the fishing boat, her hands dipping into the water, her head lying on the wooden rail, her body slack against the inside of the hull, her lower legs splayed across the deck, and she listened to the drone of the outboard taking them back towards danger and to the sound of the men shouting and arguing, and she started to cry as she realised what she was going to have to do.

She waited as long as she dared while a little strength began to return to her muscles, then levered herself up and slipped over the side of the boat. She’d hoped they might circle back and try to pick her up again, which might at least stop them from going any further in, but the boat ploughed on. She never knew if they’d even noticed her throwing herself back into the water again.

‘You had to get back in the
water
?’ he says.

‘I’d convinced myself there was going to be another wave; maybe more than one. I felt as long as I could stay in the water far enough out I’d be safe. I’m at home in the water, I can tread water, I can swim for hours at the right rhythm. Even tired out I felt I had a better chance than being back on shore, facing another wave.’

‘Fucking hell.’ He stops and swings into her, taking her in both arms, enfolding her, hugging her to him, putting his nose into her short, black-blonde hair, and feeling her respond and clasp him to her. ‘And there was another wave?’

‘It was almost as big as the first,’ she says into the collar of his jacket. ‘Then a smaller one after that. I think I saw the fishing boat upside down in the trees a couple of days later, while we were still waiting to be lifted out. But it might not have been the same one. I forgot to look for a name or number or anything. Just another white fishing boat with an outboard.’

When she says ‘we’, she means all the surviving holidaymakers. She doesn’t mean her and Sam. They finally found his body half a kilometre inland a week after the tsunami hit.

A few things came to fill her mind as she trod water and swam weakly and discoordinatedly against the slow current. First, she wished she had a hat (she kept flapping water over her head to cool herself as the sun rose, beating down). Second, she remembered that Alban had once called her a tough cookie. At the time she had felt somewhat insulted, but just then, floating there wondering if Sam was dead and whether she was going to die, the phrase took on a kind of almost mystical significance. Yes, she was a tough cookie, and she would survive and she would not easily disintegrate and turn to mush just because she had been dunked in the water for a long time.

Also, third, she tried to quantify how hopelessly, uselessly, pathetically weak she felt. It took a long time - she was a mathematician, after all, not a poet, so images were not normally her strong suit - but eventually she decided on one. It involved a banana. Specifically, the long stringy bits you find between the skin and the flesh of a banana. She felt so weak you could have tied her up with those stringy bits of a banana and she wouldn’t have been able to struggle free. That was how weak she felt.

She was so exhausted and delirious with the weight of sunshine slamming down on her blonde, short-haired head all those long lonely hours that when she did finally come up with this image of utter and pathetic weakness she gave herself a croaky little cheer.

 
She didn’t swim back in until some time past noon. When she got to the shore, staggering through the debris washing around the tide-line, having to sit on the wave-smoothed sand for a while to get some strength back into her quivering legs, she thought that - despite trying to swim against the current and so keep opposite the same stretch of shore all this time - she must be a kilometre or two down the coast. This stretch was unrecognisable, just a wasteland of flattened trees and drifts of branches, leaves and fronds, studded with more smashed wood and the occasional piece of wreckage recognisable as human stuff: white plastic patio chairs, a piece of material that might have been a sundress, a cheery-looking beach towel with a sunset on it, and a parasol - colourful strips hanging tattered from white, twisted ribs. There were some sort of sand-covered ruins off to one side. She walked inland a little and discovered the remains of the tarmac road, and looked back and realised that the ruins were the hotel they’d been staying beside. She had come ashore almost exactly where their beach hut had been.

She escaped with bruising and cuts to her side and back, dehydration, and sunburn that made her face and shoulders peel.

He doesn’t know what to say. He just holds her. He’d been waiting for her to tell him, but had started to think that maybe she wouldn’t, ever. All he’d known was that she’d been there with this guy Sam - he’d never met him - and Sam had died and she’d survived because she’d been in the sea at the time. The rest, the details, she hadn’t wanted to talk about, until now.

‘Did you ever get any counselling for this, VG?’

She shakes her head, takes a deep breath and pulls away from him, still holding his waist with both hands. ‘No.’

He tips his head to one side. ‘You talked about this to anybody else?’

One quick shake of the head. ‘No.’ She frowns. ‘Well. I did try to tell Sam’s family, but they . . . They were understandably . . . They were very upset. The more I said the worse it got, so I shut up.’

‘Think maybe you should talk to somebody else?’

‘No, I don’t.’ Her eyes are the colour of old ice, and big and bright and very open, the look of perpetual surprise phased into something injured but defiant. ‘I’ve told you. And that’s more for you than for me. Feel free to feel privileged. I don’t need to tell anybody else. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell other people. Not without checking with me first.’

He shakes his head.
Dear God, you’re a hard one, VG. Or at least you think you are
. Who is he kidding? She is.

All the things he can think of saying sound trite and tired and clichéd when he thinks of them, so he doesn’t say anything.

He puts one hand up to her cheek. She leans her face very slightly towards his hand. Her eyes close. He lets his hand slip round behind her head to the nape of her neck. It feels soft and warm. He pulls lightly, bringing them slowly towards each other, and kisses her gently on the lips, nose and cheeks, then hugs her carefully to him again.

 
The year went on. Exams came and went. He grew a little taller, then stopped growing. He was shaving every couple of days now; more often if he was going out. He fancied other girls, danced and kissed and copped the occasional feel, but - even when, a couple of times, he was told he could - he didn’t take it any further, because he was trying to stay faithful to Sophie. He still wrote poems, and sent her a letter every week, usually writing a few lines each night before he went to sleep. He sent the letters to Aunt Lauren on her and Graeme’s farm in Norfolk. He’d sent a whole package the first time, a kind of edited highlights of all the poems and letters he’d written before Lauren had made her offer. He’d asked Sophie to reply in the covering letter that went with that first bundle as well as in most of the letters in the package, and he repeated the request in his first few letters after this secret postal service had been set up.

About a week after the first bundle had been sent, he allowed himself to start getting excited, waiting for the reply that now, surely, had to come. Their post was usually delivered after he’d gone to school, so he had to wait until he got home each day to see if there were any letters. The second Saturday after he’d had the conversation with Aunt Lauren, he’d hung around near the front door when the postman was due, making sure he was first to the mail, but there was nothing for him. The week became a fortnight, then three weeks, then a month. He wondered if something had come for him but had been intercepted by his parents. But that was paranoid. They weren’t like that. Were they?

He told himself it would take time. He imagined her being shut up in some forbidding Spanish boarding school - he’d seen photos of the Escorial, near Madrid, and that was the image he had whenever he thought of the place - and it being, perhaps, difficult for her to get out to a post office. He wondered if his mail was being intercepted before it got to her, if there was some strict housemistress who censored the mail of the girls and would never let anything as passionate and improper get through to one of her charges.

He wrote to Aunt Lauren, checking that she really was sending the letters on. She wrote back saying that she was. In his next letter to Sophie he asked her to write care of Jamie Boyd, his best friend for the last term. Jamie was the sort of pal who’d pass on mail dependably and unopened. Nothing came via Jamie either.

The Easter holidays arrived. He hoped that he’d hear something then, when she might be home and so able to write or phone. But still nothing. He decided she was probably staying with her biological mother, still in Spain. He’d have to be patient, wait until the summer holidays. She’d be bound to come back to the UK then. She’d be at Lydcombe and able to write or phone.

More studying, exams, homework, washing the car and doing housework to justify his pocket money, more snogs at parties.

At one party, at Plink’s house, a week before the start of the summer holidays, he got the knickers off a girl and used his fingers to make her come, hugging her to him afterwards.

His fingers smelled just the way they had with Sophie, which was achingly nostalgic and sweet, yet somehow sad at the same time. She was called Julie. He fell out with her the next day when he said he didn’t really want to go steady.

Andy, Leah, he and Cory spent the first two weeks of the summer holidays in Antigua. He felt he was practically thrown at the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Manchester couple who were in the bungalow next to theirs; the adults suddenly became fast friends and their offspring seemed to be expected to follow suit. Emma was blonde and leggy and attractive in an ice-maiden kind of way but the only similarity to Sophie was that she had braces. They kissed at a dance in the big hotel. The next day they rode around part of the island in a two-person bike thing with a canopy and he told her something about Sophie and his feelings for her. She understood, seemed almost relieved. They played a lot of tennis and kept in touch for years afterwards until she moved to South Africa.

During the summer he had a work-experience job at Kew; just general digging and lugging and so on, but it was at Kew, which was all that mattered, and he loved it. He started going out with one of the girl trainees, Claire. She was small, dark, chunky and curvaceous. They kissed sometimes but she wouldn’t let him go any further than putting his hand between her top and her bra. They went to each other’s houses; her parents lived in a semi in Hounslow under the Heathrow flight path. They spent time listening to records and playing games and kissing. He still felt he was being faithful to Sophie. This was, partly, an act; cover.

The summer wore on.

Still nothing from Sophie. Grandma Win had invited him to Garbadale for the last two weeks of the holidays, to do some gardening if he was so inclined - goodness knows, the place could do with all the help it could get - just to relax and amuse himself as best he could if he’d prefer. He hadn’t said a definite yes or no yet, but he needed to make up his mind.

 
There’s a small family do at the Richmond house; Kennard and Renée come with Haydn and Fielding and while he and Haydn are playing on the NES - he’s got a US version of a new game called
Super Mario Brothers
via his pal with the computer magazine-publishing dad - Haydn mentions being at Lydcombe a couple of weeks ago and seeing cousin Sophie. Alban drops the controls.

Sophie had been there for about a month at that point. Off to the States to stay with Aunt, umm, well aunt and uncle somebody - he couldn’t remember . . . Haydn looks at his new Casio watch, which has an entire tiny keyboard of buttons, and of which he is inordinately proud, even though his fat little fingers can barely manage the buttons . . . Leaving today, actually. This evening, in fact. Ha! That distant roar could be Sophie’s plane leaving now, for all they know. That’d be funny, wouldn’t it?

For an instant, as he sinks back against the side of the bed - Fielding is on it, cross-legged, reading a comic he’s brought with him - Alban thinks of dashing for the underground station and getting to Heathrow, finding her, maybe catching her right at the departure gate the way they did in films, and persuading her to stay behind, at least getting her to promise to write.

He’s getting another roaring in his head, and tunnel vision. Last time this happened he’d been smacked full in the face by a football. He hears Haydn talking about Lydcombe, about Sophie. Met some of her pals. Went on a speedboat ride. She tried to get him on a horse but it was very high up. Her boyfriend was very rude to him and Fielding. She’d said the reason for that was because she was leaving for the States soon for a couple of years and he - her boyfriend - knew she was leaving him probably for ever. If and when she came back he’d most likely be married with a couple of brats via some farm girl, and she’d have a Californian hunk in tow. But, hey - such was life.

 
Alban excused himself, staggered to the toilet, leaving Haydn blinking after him, asking him, Was he all right?

He sat on the loo seat for a long time with his head in his hands.

He needed to get out. He went down to where the oldies were, still at dinner, and said he needed some fresh air (some curious looks, but that was all), went out into the garden and over the back wall, along the lane, across a couple of roads and into the vast darkness of Richmond Park. He lay on the grass, looking up at the sky; a dirty orange cloudscape of reflection. Off to one side, between the clouds, he saw the navigation lights of the aircraft. Coming in, of course. Usual westerly airstream, so cousin Haydn was wrong; her plane would have taken off heading west, heading for the States, out over the M4 corridor, across Wales and Ireland . . .