They’ve had their first big argument, over something really stupid – a row about poker nights with the boys. He wanted her to give them up.
Kit has rented Kittiwake for two weeks (his mother and Charlotte having claimed Falcon yet again), even though Hannah had told him she’d be too busy to spend much time with him until the gig championships were over.
They’d had a lovely romantic reunion, just the two of them snuggled up in the cottage, they’d played Cards Against Humanity with a group of gardening students in the pub yesterday afternoon, and he planned to take her fishing after the big gig weekend ended and it calmed down a little in the bar.
But yesterday teatime they’d squabbled and now she’s gone missing.
He’d woken around five to find she wasn’t next to him, she wasn’t outside in the cottage garden having a morning cigarette, 197and she isn’t answering her phone.
Last night’s poker game was being held at the worker’s cottage Vlad shares with Isak Mensah. Everyone is very careful not to say ‘black Isak’, one of only two black workers on the island. Although the other Isaac, Isaac Kaplan, is never referred to as white Isaac, and no one has to be at all careful about that.
Stretching and quickly pulling on his jogging bottoms and a T-shirt, Kit makes himself a large mug of Cornish coffee (which is a thing), and pops his head outside, deciding he’ll need his windbreaker if Hannah doesn’t return soon and he has to go looking for her. The sky looks unsettled despite the sun, and the wind has an edge to it.
He makes another coffee – he can’t function without a certain degree of caffeine, but who can – and tries her phone again. Nothing.
There is still dew on the hedgerows as he walks down towards New Grimsby, birds already trilling. Spring is his favourite time on Tresco. The season is in full blowsy bloom, trumpeting lush green Thomas Hardy vibes, bursting forth with pornographic vigour. Poppies and bluebells and lilacs and tulips compete for attention, pumping out scents that cry, Choose me, choose me! Pollinate me, baby! In Farmer Michael’s hives, the queens pimp out their worker bees to do the business.
Kit sneezes.
The row was all his fault. He’s been unreasonable.
Hannah works bloody hard, and he admires that about her, but, God, she likes to play hard too. Of course, he did the same at uni, but Hannah is still at it, even though she’s older than him. And it will be pretty full-on in the bar this weekend. How will she cope if she starts exhausted and hungover? He’s worried 198about her. It’s easier to tell himself that than acknowledge the deeper fear that she’s not as committed to the relationship as she was at the start.
‘You’ve got to grab life by the balls!’ she’d laughed when he first suggested she take it down a notch, perhaps cut down on the drinking and smoking. Early last night, when he repeated this apparently unreasonable suggestion that she reel it in a little, she accused him of nagging, and amiably told him to fuck off.
‘But I thought we could go to the outdoor theatre tonight,’ he said, hurt.
‘Why? I’ve already seen one play,’ she quipped.
‘It’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’
‘Isn’t it always.’
‘Don’t you want to do something together while I’m here?’ He sounded needy to his own ears.
‘Look, I arranged this poker game long before you told me you were coming over this time,’ she protested. ‘Not all of my life revolves around you, Kit. It can’t. What would I do then when you aren’t here? I’m not going to dump my mates whenever you click your fingers.’
Eventually she said he could join her at the poker game, but the way she said it suggested that she didn’t really want him there.
As she dressed for her night out without him, pulling on her favourite tiger-print leggings, he’d sat on the bed and tried to get back in her good books by talking about her coming to the mainland so they could be together properly.
‘You need a job first,’ she said, as she always did. 199
‘I think I know what I’d like to do,’ he replied. ‘I want to paint.’
‘What, like a painter and decorator?’ she asked, surprised.
‘No. An artist.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘It’s a nice hobby, Kit. But how are you planning to make a living out of that?’
‘I don’t need to make much,’ he said, annoyed because she wasn’t taking him seriously. And it rankled, her constant harping on about money, insisting on paying her way.
‘It’s like saying you want to be a pop star or an astronaut when you’re a kid,’ she continued, shimmying into her tight gold lurex top. ‘How many people can make a living being creative?’ She said the word as if it was ludicrous. ‘Your mother will probably cut you off if we move in together, you know that. You’ll need a proper income.’
It hurt because what Hannah said was true. His father hadn’t left him as much money as he’d anticipated. Stocks – as bad as roulette.
He sighed. The list of what he didn’t want to do grew longer by the day. Before Hannah, he’d considered volunteering abroad, building a school perhaps, somewhere in Africa, but she wasn’t at all keen. ‘We need some form of security,’ she argued. ‘You’ve had your gap year, it’s time to grow up.’
On this single aspect, Hannah and his mother agree.
He finds he is now marching down to New Grimsby, immune to Nature’s flirtations, his dark thoughts ruining the morning-has-broken atmosphere.
He yanks at a blade of grass, tries to make the wild bird call Hannah showed him, fails. He flings it into the hedgerow, 200and kicks a sapling, startling a pheasant who does its best Roadrunner impression.
Yesterday, Hannah suddenly announced, ‘My mother had such a small life. I want to travel, see a bit of the world. Visit New York, work there perhaps.’
She’s mentioned it before. Yet this time, her tone suggested she might be considering going alone.
‘What about me?’ he asked.
‘Come with me, if you like,’ she said, as if she could take it or leave it.
He felt a little pathetic when he asked, ‘You don’t want to be with me in London?’
‘I’ve just got to live a bit more before settling down. I want to live as much as I can, you know?’
You couldn’t miss that about Hannah. It was there in the way she danced. Sometimes it was sexy dancing, more often just free and silly and wonderful – like a child really goes for it until the years exact a self-consciousness.
She didn’t give a hoot if she looked cool. She didn’t care if she wore something fashionable. Charlotte was all about the latest trends – the right parties to be seen at, the right clothes to be seen in, but Hannah wouldn’t recognise a hot new label if her life depended on it. Charlotte once paid £400 for a pair of designer sunglasses and bragged about it on Instagram. Hannah wears a tatty old pair someone left behind on the bar, and she still looks great in them.
He stops a moment to gaze out over to Bryher, which is looking very comely in the early morning light, then he walks round the back of the Old Ship and up the steps of Vlad and Isak’s Hobbit-sized home. He knocks softly. There’s no reply so he 201quietly opens the door and finds Hannah on the battered sofa immediately in front of him, entangled with another body.
It takes a moment for his eyes to focus, the dimness of the interior a stark contrast after the brightness of the sun. Hannah doesn’t seem to be wearing all her clothes. He recognises Vlad, similarly topless, and sees his legs are hooked over the arm of the sofa and the rest of him is splayed across Hannah’s lap, his head lolling close to her naked breast. In other circumstances this might have made Kit think of La Pietà but right now art is the last thing on his mind. He is immediately and murderously furious.
‘What the actual fuck?’ he demands.
Vlad smiles, his eyes still closed.
On the coffee table in front of them, playing cards, a small pile of cash, an overflowing ashtray and an empty bottle of vodka are abandoned. Cushions are strewn across the carpet.
Kit grabs Vlad’s arm, and pulls violently, spilling the youth onto the floor.
‘What’s up?’ he groans.
‘Hannah!’ shouts Kit, shaking her.
She squints up at him and grins.
‘Hannah! What the fuck are you doing?’
Her lack of reaction winds him up further.
‘Strip poker, man,’ slurs Vlad from somewhere near Kit’s foot.
Isak appears from his bed in the next room. He is wearing ironic Spider-Man pants and nothing else. He yawns luxuriously and says, ‘Oh … hello, Kit.’ One of the young buff sailors from the big yacht mooring off Cromwell’s Castle emerges behind him in a dressing gown several sizes too small.
Kit shouts, ‘Hannah, get some fucking clothes on will you!’ 202
She remains unfocused but reaches forwards for her cigarette packet. She croaks, ‘Hi, honey, you’re home!’ sounding terrible as she laughs, precipitating a coughing fit.
Kit grabs a towel from the tiny bathroom, which is barely bigger than a wardrobe, and throws it at Hannah.
‘Cover yourself up.’
‘It’s cool, man,’ says Vlad. ‘It’s just a game.’
Hannah attempts to light a cigarette dangerously close to her hair. Kit snatches it from her.
‘Get dressed. Now!’
She doesn’t protest as he helps her into her hoody and shoes, which thankfully are slip-on sandals. He does not attempt the bra.
‘Lenses,’ she croaks, and he grabs her contacts from the bathroom, then drags her outside without saying goodbye, and slowly steers her back to Kittiwake. She tries to hold his hand and, petulant, he keeps snatching it away.
Caning it is Vlad’s forte and Hannah is easily led in these circumstances. Or perhaps Vlad is the one being led astray by her. And she’s back smoking again. Kit had managed to persuade her to stop, or at least cut down. She’s had a hacking cough for weeks, her voice rough and crackly when they called each other each night they were apart.
She turns her face up to the sun and lifts her arms to the sky.
Kit is appalled by the burning feeling twisting his guts. The early workers and walkers beaming in the morning sunshine seem to mock him and it takes a great effort to say, ‘Good morning.’
When they reach the holiday cottage he suggests Hannah take a shower. 203
‘Are you coming in with me?’ she asks. The walk seems to have brought her round.
‘No.’
‘Stop sulking. There was no harm in it. I drank too much, that’s all. If this is going to work, you have to trust me.’
‘I’m not sulking,’ he says sulkily.
She walks upstairs, tossing, ‘I don’t like possessive people, Kit,’ behind her.
For a second he feels a surge of anger so powerful he struggles to stop himself running after her, grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her hard.
Instead, he sets his jaw and leaves her to her shower. Then, afraid of precipitating another argument if he stays, he trails back down to the pub for breakfast, shocked by how wound up he feels.