The Summer Without You (12 page)

Thankfully, everyone was sitting cross-legged on the ground now, doing lots of breathing. This, at least, she could do, she told herself, as she settled into the cross-legged pose she’d
last assumed, aged fourteen, in class assembly. As she’d told Hump yesterday, she excelled at any exercise done sitting down (or rather, lying down, wink, wink, as Matt always said), and she
had actually been breathing all her life. She’d be a natural at this bit.

Beside her, Bobbi – eyes closed – was exhaling incredibly quickly through her nose, like a dog panting on a hot day, only with its mouth closed. It looked easy enough. Ro copied her,
managing to keep up for at least ten seconds before she was left behind as her body – becoming gradually more keen on the idea of a really big inhale instead – became confused and she
actually forgot how to breathe properly.

‘Unbelievable,’ Ro muttered to herself, opening one eye and looking quickly around the room. Everyone was still exhaling away in unison, the collective huffing beginning to get
louder from the effort of sustaining the rapid breathing, so that it sounded more like a steam engine than a yoga class.

She closed her eye and tried again, but goddammit! – her nose just wouldn’t play ball. Within fifteen seconds, reflex won out over control and she found herself inhaling and gulping
down air rapidly, instead of expelling it. Seconds later, she hiccupped loudly.

She opened one again and saw the instructor frowning at her, as though she was being disruptive on purpose.

She tried again. Breathe out, out, out, she told herself, trying to keep up with Bobbi’s frankly spectacular breath sprints. She was doing it! She was doing it! At least half a minute had
passed and she was still breathing out, out, out— Oh!

‘Was that . . . ?’ Bobbi asked.

‘No,’ Ro replied quickly, her hands cupped over most of her face in absolute horror – too horrified to sniff – both women’s eyes locked on each other. Ro blinked,
wishing time travel was real, wishing she had never gone to that stupid party, wishing she’d never tried to match Matt on his thirst for adventure and knowing she couldn’t keep her
hands up for much longer. She couldn’t even get up to standing without putting one hand on the floor, so she couldn’t make an escape that way. Bobbi looked away, more scared than
revolted, and Ro quickly, inevitably gave the giant sniff that immediately confirmed her housemate’s fear that actually, yes, she had heard what she’d thought she’d heard.

Ro closed her eyes – even she was disgusted with herself – and, as best she could, got up and tiptoed out of the room. As she closed the door, she saw a look of relief cross the
teacher’s face and everyone began to chant in fluent Om.

She leaned against the wall of the corridor, tears of humiliation pricking her eyes. Tomorrow, she didn’t care what anybody said, she was damned well sleeping in.

‘And how was that?’ Hump asked, as she walked into the studio an hour later, only slightly less apple-cheeked, thanks to the cold shower she’d stood beneath
for half an hour. ‘Feeling zen?’

‘Hump, I could not even
breathe
.’

Hump laughed, thinking she was joking.

‘No. Seriously,’ she said. What would he do if he heard she’d blown her nose over her own face? No one would hear about it from her lips, that was for sure, but what about
Bobbi? Was it going to be turned into a house-share anecdote, wheeled out over every breakfast? Or worse, a Hamptons myth talked about at smart Manhattan cocktail parties, thirty storeys high in
the sky? Why had she even gone along with it? From the moment she’d fallen out of the hire car, dressed in Matt’s clothes, it had been abundantly clear she would never be like these
glossy spa people who all seemed so in control of their lives when she couldn’t even control her own hair. ‘What are you doing here anyway?’ she asked. ‘Aren’t you
supposed to be driving?’

Hump checked his watch quickly, before resuming rifling through the papers on his desk. ‘I’ve still got ten minutes.’

Ro dumped her bag down despondently on the counter and logged on to the computer.

‘Hey, you OK?’

She looked across at her languid landlord and gave a shrug. ‘Sure.’

There was a pause. ‘It’s Matt, right? You’re missing him.’

Her heart pounded at the very sound of his name. ‘A little, maybe,’ she replied, her voice tremulous suddenly.

‘Did you speak to him last night?’

She shook her head. ‘He’s out of contact almost all the time at the moment. He did warn me we wouldn’t be able to talk much, but . . . when you’ve spent eleven years
talking to someone twenty times a day, it’s a bit of a shock to go down to once a fortnight.’

Hump frowned. ‘You’re a very tolerant girlfriend, I’ll give you that. I don’t think I know any woman who’d give her man permission to just take off round the world
for a year.’

‘Half a year,’ she corrected him, slightly too sharply. ‘And I don’t see why everyone makes it out to be such a big deal. We trust each other. Why shouldn’t he have
a few months to himself before we settle down? We’ve been together a long time.’

‘I just don’t get why he didn’t ask you to go with him, that’s all.’

She looked down, stung by the brittle simplicity in his words. ‘He knows temples and sleeping bags aren’t my thing.’

They lapsed into silence, her tapping away primly on the keyboard, Hump sipping a takeaway coffee, his feet on his desk, intermittently reading incoming emails and watching her. Ro opened up her
email inbox – it was depressingly empty, with more spam than personal correspondence, and nothing at all from Matt. A client she’d done a wedding film for, back in Richmond, wanted her
to do a life-story film of her grandfather who’d flown as part of the Fighter Command of the RAF during the Battle of Britain. He’d been presented with a Distinguished Flying Cross, and
was due to celebrate his ninety-sixth birthday in November. Ro chewed her lip. November? Still six months away. Who was it who’d said he wouldn’t be buying green bananas at his age?

‘Oh! I got something that’ll cheer you up,’ Hump said suddenly, swinging his legs off the desk and crossing the room in a couple of strides. He produced a small plastic card
with a flourish from his back pocket. ‘Been missing this?’

Ro took it from him. ‘My Visa? But where—’

‘Long Story brought it in,’ Hump grinned.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Your beach assailant.’

Ro shot him a sharp look for giving the man such a flippant nickname, although she shouldn’t have been surprised. Hump had been delighted by her story as she’d recounted it to him
over breakfast in the Golden Pear yesterday morning, seemingly understanding none of the horror and shame that had accompanied it.

‘He’s surprisingly good-looking – if you go for preppy.’ He shrugged. ‘Funny you never mentioned that. It puts an entirely different slant on the story.’

Ro scowled at him. ‘How? How does it? The man
assaulted
me. Are you saying what he did doesn’t matter because he’s good-looking?’

Hump put up his hands. ‘Whoa! No! I’m just saying some women might have found it exciting to have a tall, dark, handsome stranger wade into the ocean with them.’

Ro’s mouth moved several times, but nothing would come out – at first. ‘Have you lost your bloody mind?’ she cried eventually. ‘He was going to throw me in and
destroy my camera, my livelihood, Hump! The man is a sociopath. It is completely irrelevant that he’s a good-looking sociopath.’

‘Ah, so you did
notice
, then?’

‘What? No!’ Ro stared down at the plastic card in his hand. ‘How did he even get hold of this, anyway? I didn’t know I’d even lost it.’

‘He said you left it behind in the hardware store yesterday morning.’

Ro looked up at him in alarm. ‘And how did he know where to find me?’

‘Apparently, you told Bob you had the studio here for the summer.’

Ro thought back to her conversation with the hardware-store owner and relaxed a little. She had told him that, and he had suggested she advertised in his window.

‘Oh. Right. Thanks,’ she said, taking it from him.

‘Hey, don’t thank me,’ Hump said, stuffing his hands into his shorts. ‘Long Story’s the one who went out of his way to return it to you.’ He wandered back to
his corner of the studio. ‘He was here for quite a while, actually. He really liked that photo of those two kids there,’ he said, jerking his chin towards the portrait of the two small
brothers. ‘I kinda got the feeling he was hoping you’d turn up. Who knows . . . maybe he wanted to apologize?’

‘I sincerely doubt that,’ Ro sniffed, remembering with a new burst of fury how he’d called her ‘a sport’.

‘Yeah? Well, it’s a good thing he brought it back. We’re all going out to Navy Beach tonight and my card’s already in overdraft.’

‘Hump, how can you be overdrawn? I, alone, am paying you a small fortune!’

‘You know as well as I do that being an entrepreneur basically means being broke until you hit the jackpot.’

‘I guess so,’ Ro agreed. She’d been overdrawn since university and didn’t see a time she would ever climb her way out. Maintaining her current level of debt was the best
she could seem to manage. She sat down on the stool and replaced the credit card in her purse. ‘So, did you all go out for dinner last night? I’m sorry I couldn’t wait up to meet
Greg. I was beyond shattered.’

‘It was as well you didn’t. Something came up at the last minute and he had to stay in the office. He’s coming out this afternoon instead.’

‘Really? Is it worth coming all that way just for a day?’

‘I guess it is to him,’ Hump replied. ‘Did you get the bikes sorted?’ Hump had started reading from his screen, his eyes moving side to side rapidly.

‘Yes, they’re brilliant. Real old boneshakers, but so pretty! Bobbi’s is green. Mine’s yellow – like the Humper!’

He looked up at her and winked. ‘Careful, I might brand you. You’ve got that beachy vibe going on already.’

I do? Ro thought to herself, smiling and looking out through the open doors. Sharp sunlight cast crisp shadows on the grass and she could see some shoppers sipping on frappés and browsing
in the expensive interiors boutique on the opposite side of the square. ‘Please come over. Oh, please come over,’ a voice in her head pleaded as she watched them examine some cushions
and switch on a lamp.

‘What’s Bobbi up to today?’

‘She said something about hooking up with some friends on Main Beach. Red umbrella, if you need her.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Hump looked over at her, his eyes taking in her (well, Matt’s) navy chinos, tightly belted and bunched at the waist, her ankles peeping beneath the roll-ups, her
white linen shirt pushed up her forearms and her hair pulled into a scruffy topknot. ‘You going to the beach later?’

‘No. I’ve got to work. I must start as I mean to go on. I can’t spend my summer on the beach, tempting though it is,’ she mumbled, her heart sinking as she saw the
customers in the homewares store wander back out onto the pavement. Damn.

Bobbi’s yoga class on the other side of town had been heaving this morning, and it had taken her and Bobbi almost twenty minutes to be served their coffees after getting the bikes, yet the
studio was empty.

She filled the small watering can in the bathroom off the back of the unit and watered the hydrangea on her new table, before going outside and doing the same to the flower boxes on the deck.
Next door, in the yoga studio, she heard soporific chanting and she wandered over, peering through the windows at the still but seemingly alert bodies lying in the dark room. Unlike the almost
ecstatic shouts in Bobbi’s class, this had a different quality to it altogether – it sounded almost monastic, Asiatic somehow – and she closed her eyes for a moment, letting the
sound wrap round her like a shroud and take her to a different place, somewhere far away from here, the land of big trucks and good teeth. In the darkness of her own head – these sounds
– she could let go of her sensory anchors and she felt herself transported to somewhere dark and ancient, the place where Matt was hidden from her view for the first time in over a decade,
and she sensed somehow – though it was elusive as an angel’s kiss – his presence, as if he was right behind her.

But he wasn’t. It was Hump, on another coffee run.

‘Filter?’ he called out, running across the grass before his next shift.

She nodded and wandered back into the studio, replacing the watering can on the table. And taking a seat at her high stool, she waited for the customers to come.

Ro scuffed the surf lightly, watching it fly and dissipate before her eyes as she walked through the shallows. The sun was so low the sand seemed to glow pink, and Ro had lost
track of time trying to capture it on film, before moving on to lying on her belly and training the camera on a hermit crab that was making its way down to the water, its pinprick footprints barely
making an impression on the soft beach.

She was supposed to have been back at the house forty minutes ago – Greg was due in on the 5 p.m. Jitney, and Hump was keen for them all to have drinks together on the porch before they
headed out to Navy Beach for the night – but she couldn’t quite bring herself to make the journey home. The light on the water was too enticing for one thing, but that was just her
alibi for being late. In truth, she just wasn’t looking forward to seeing Bobbi after the yoga horrors this morning, or to telling her frighteningly driven housemate that, yet again, not one
person had stepped foot in the studio and she’d spent the afternoon – once Hump had left – playing solitaire on the computer. Throw in the thought of being jolly to another
stranger she had to share a bathroom with and it was all slightly more than she could bear.

She knew she was lucky to be somewhere like this – watching dancing water skitter upon sunset sands and feeling the breeze that had blown all the way from home across the Atlantic to her
here – only, she hadn’t asked for it. Coming here hadn’t been her ambition in the way that Cambodia had been Matt’s. It had just been a proposition, a whim, a chance meeting
with a twist, an opportunity for her to save face while her boyfriend freeze-framed her life for six months. She knew it could have been worse, as these things went. She could have found herself
somewhere where the weather was bad or there was a language barrier, but just because it wasn’t terrible in any definition here didn’t mean it was a source of happiness for her either.
The naivety of what she’d done was hitting home. She had uprooted her business, left behind her friends and planted herself in the midst of strangers, all so that she could say, ‘Me
too,’ in the years to come, when she and Matt would tell their children about their half-year out and the adventures they’d each had.