Jaddi
‘Hey,’ Jaddi whispered in Samantha’s ear. ‘You OK, Sammy?’
Samantha blew out a puff of air. ‘Watch it. We’re a long way up, and the next person who calls me Sammy is going in the water. I just hope it’s him.’ She nodded her head towards Harrison.
‘He’s not that bad, and he’s making Lizzie happy.’ Jaddi followed Samantha’s gaze and smiled at Harrison.
‘I know. I’m sorry.’ Samantha sighed. ‘I didn’t mean to grumble. I’m being pathetic. It’s just hard. This is our time together, not his. The days are flying by and we don’t have time to be sharing Lizzie with him.’ Samantha scrunched up her face.
‘We’re still all together. You’ve never minded about Ben being with us.’
‘It’s not the same, and you know it. Ben’s different.’
‘Talking of Ben …’ Jaddi smiled, desperate to cheer Samantha up. ‘Do you think he likes Lizzie?’
‘I don’t know. Why?’
‘Oh, come on. All those little sideways smiles he gives her when he’s not filming.’
‘And the bottles of water. He’s like her personal water assistant.’
‘I know.’ Jaddi nodded. ‘Sometimes I want to wave my hands in the air and say, hey, look at me, I’m thirsty too.’
Samantha laughed. ‘Do you think Lizzie knows?’
‘I don’t think so. She’s always been a bit oblivious to men liking her.’
‘Should we tell her?’
Jaddi scrunched up her nose. ‘Nah. She’s pretty wrapped up in Harrison right now. It’s hard to see how telling her that Ben fancies the pants off her will help. It could end up making things really awkward between them.’
‘That’s true,’ Samantha said. ‘I don’t want to rock the boat with the filming. At least Ben gives us space to be just us, unlike someone else.’ Samantha nodded towards Harrison. ‘I can’t explain it, but things have been different since Harrison showed up. Lizzie’s been different.’
‘I know Lizzie has been focused on Harrison this week, but it will calm down soon enough, I’m sure,’ Jaddi said. ‘How about I engineer some time for just the three of us once we get to the Gold Coast. No Harrison, no Ben, no microphones.’
‘How?’
‘Let me worry about that. You just try a little harder to be happy and not to hate Harrison so much—’
‘Is it that obvious?’
‘Only to me. I’m sure the others are oblivious.’
Samantha sighed. ‘I just wish I could be more like you, but I can’t sweep it all to one side and bounce around as if everything is fine. Everything is not fine. It’s an effort every day not to cry, or shout about the injustice of it all. She’s twenty-nine. How is that fair?’
‘It’s not.’ Jaddi swallowed back the lump forming in her throat. ‘But Lizzie doesn’t want us to be sad.’ She threw a glance to Lizzie, still enthralled in Harrison’s story. ‘We have to be happy for her. I’m not thinking about what will happen at the end of all this, I’m just trying to live in the moment, enjoy every bit of our time together before it all ends.’ Jaddi was lying; of course she was thinking about the end. It had always been the three of them. How were they supposed to go back to their old lives without Lizzie there completing the trio?
Just then, Chloe cleared her throat. ‘Time to get moving, climbers, whilst that sun is still setting.’
Jaddi idled for another moment. It wasn’t the burnt-orange sky, now turning a dusky purple, that Jaddi was thinking about, but Samantha’s words echoing in her head. I can’t sweep it all to one side and bounce around as if everything is fine. Is that what she was doing? Sweeping reality under the rug just like her parents. Jaddi’s upbringing, her entire family for that matter, had always been about skirting around truths and glossing over difficult subjects. Like her Uncle Prem’s unexplained disappearance. Not a single word had been spoken about it in fifteen years. She hadn’t gone to the funeral. She hadn’t known there’d been a funeral, or even been told he’d died, let alone how. If she hadn’t found the note he’d left when she’d been rummaging in her father’s study for a pen, she might still have believed he was off enjoying himself in some remote corner of the world.
Jaddi had adored Prem – his exaggerated gestures, his multitude of brightly coloured turbans, the way he seemed to know her thoughts before she’d voiced them, and the fact that he hadn’t succumbed to his parent’s pressures to make his marriage to some horrid woman, whose name Jaddi couldn’t remember, work.
It had been years later before she’d realised why.
It was another reason Jaddi loved Suk, she realised with a sudden ache in her chest, as she clipped her safety cable to the railing and began the descent. They had a shared acceptance of the maddening ways in which their families acted. They didn’t always agree on how to handle them, but they understood.