I have no recollection of getting out of the mud. It must have been a titanic struggle for Nikki, dragging me out on to the duckboards. There was a montage of crazy images, an out-of-body perception of this scarcely human grey shape staggering towards the gazebo using the girl as a crutch, past the gazebo in the direction of the north wall and through its aperture. Why is Nikki dragging me towards a 200-foot cliff?
Of course. One more ordeal. The bungee. And out there, somewhere below us, if only we could make it, the sanctuary of The Captain Cook.
I have no idea how she did it. I think she put the straps of the bungee apparatus round my ankles and dragged me to the cliff edge, and then embraced me and flung herself over, without letting go. I can only remember a rush of air in the darkness, an abrupt halt, and a few moments of oscillation. One moment we were lying on the shingle and then we were in a Zodiac with friends. I remember grasping in a seaman’s grip the forearm of a sailor manning the boarding gantry, and struggling up on board. Nikki found a cabin on Deck 4 with its own shower, pushed me inside, and closed the cabin door behind us. There was the sound of running water and she had helped me out of my filthy things and pushed me gently under the warm water. I leaned up against the wall of the shower and revelled in the wonderful, life-giving massage of the spray on my neck and shoulders. She took a bar of rough soap and languidly, but not coarsely, rubbed the ingrained mud out of the skin of my chest and back. Slowly, consciousness and awareness were returning. She kicked off her shoes and leant in through the open shower door, at first trying to keep her jeans and T-shirt dry. But as her clothes caught more of the spray she abandoned her caution and carried on cleaning the mud, now off my buttocks and thighs. Still dressed, she stepped fully into the cubicle. The mix of extreme danger, fatigue and physical exhaustion is a powerful aphrodisiac cocktail. I leaned over her stooped shoulders and pulled the shower door closed. I half turned and put a hand under the magnificent mane around the back of her neck, and gently coaxed her upwards. I fully turned towards her and she slid upwards across the front of my body, and for an instant on her toes, so that she could lean against me and replace the shower unit on its bracket above my head. Now she had both hands high above her head as she re-sited the shower nozzle so that the spray cascaded down from above on both of us. The saturated, transparent T-shirt stretched against her breasts and rode high above the exposed midriff, the beautiful cream belly and the curve of her lower back reaching down to the taut buttocks within the tight blue jeans. She let me pull the shirt from below up and over her head. Her forearms fell across my shoulders and her hands clasped round my neck. Her sodden hair fell in pleated rope strands across her face and she buried her face in my chest. I loosened her jeans at the waist and pulled them down over the toned curve of her buttocks. They were tight and soaked and unyielding. She gyrated her hips to help push her jeans down beyond her knees as the Perspex walls of the shower unit steamed over and became completely opaque.