2018
Zoe and Carl are naked in bed together. He sits cross-legged while she sits on his lap with her legs wrapped around him. She can feel him hard inside her. Their foreheads are pressed together, and each has a hand placed over the other’s heart. The yab-yum position, an essential part of their Tantric practice.
When their foreheads part, Carl’s eyes search hers. His pupils are enlarged with desire, but Zoe also sees fear and uncertainty in his gaze. She closes her eyes and shudders as if overcome by arousal. Anything to prevent him detecting her own muddled feelings.
It’s almost midnight, but neither of them is ready to sleep. After Sofia rejected Zoe’s proposal at breakfast this morning, the Pure Heart members retreated first to their rooms and then into the mundane daily chores that keep their community running. They didn’t observe formal mealtimes, resorting to taking leftovers from the fridge back to their rooms. As if each of them needed space to make sense of this latest turn of events.
‘Are you sure I articulated our plan properly?’ Zoe slowly undulates her hips. ‘Maybe Sofia didn’t really get what I meant.’
‘You were amazing,’ Carl says, his voice husky with lust. ‘Amazing.’
‘Really?’ Zoe isn’t sure. Looking back, she hopes her old loyalty to Quinn didn’t weaken her message. All day she’s been fighting the urge to beg Quinn for forgiveness.
‘Just be with me here and now,’ Carl says. ‘In this moment.’
She lets out a deep moan, but she isn’t here with him, she’s back at the kitchen table, listening to Sofia’s revelations about owning Pure Heart. Now, as then, she is wrestling with conflicting reactions. Shock and acceptance of the inevitable. Of course, Sofia would have blocked every financial escape route.
‘We need to cleanse ourselves of today.’ The minuscule movements of Carl’s hips send shivers of pleasure from Zoe’s belly to her chest.
‘So much drama.’ The shivery pleasure spreads from her chest to her throat.
Carl takes slow, deliberate breaths. ‘We need to connect with our higher selves.’
‘Yes.’ She wants to connect to her higher self. She really does. When Sofia repeated her offer, Zoe felt something light and pure and good slip out of her. She could almost see it drifting across the kitchen and slipping under the door. Was it her higher self, abandoning her?
Carl caresses her face. ‘When I’m with you, I reach such an elevated spiritual state.’
A prickle of irritation. Carl often says their sex takes him to a spiritual high, and she used to think that was a compliment. A testament to their unique connection. Now she wonders if sex is just a way for him to escape his anxieties. Maybe she’s nothing more than a battery he plugs into to renew himself. Maybe he’d feel this way about anyone.
‘Breathe with me, beloved,’ Carl says.
She tries to turn herself on by picturing Dmitri’s strong hands on the Land Rover’s steering wheel. She imagines those hands on her face, as Carl’s are now. She imagines them gripping her hips, forcing her to fuck him hard and fast.
‘What’s wrong?’ Carl says. ‘This feels a bit off.’
‘Sorry. I need a wee.’
Her husband looks wounded as she clambers off him. In the bathroom, she sits on the toilet even though she has no desire to go. She just needs some breathing space.
Out of nowhere comes an urge to ring her mother. For comfort? For guidance? The last time she called home it was a lunchtime and Faye Aldridge was drunk. I’ve got some friends round for Prosecco on the lawn. Zoe cringed to think of Faye and her bloated, alcoholic friends guzzling cheap Prosecco from Aldi in the pitifully small garden at the back of her mother’s bungalow.
Remorse floods through her. Many times over the years, Quinn has been the mother figure Zoe wanted and needed. Could life at Pure Heart really continue without her?
She stays in the bathroom for almost five minutes. When she returns to the bedroom, the moment of intimacy has, as she hoped, passed. Carl is standing by the open window, smoking a roll-up.
‘Sorry,’ she says, getting back into bed. ‘I’m a bit drained, that’s all.’
‘I get it.’ Carl blows smoke into the night air. ‘There’s a lot to unpack right now.’
They lapse into silence. Through the open window comes the low gurgle of the swimming pool, the relentless cyclical song of cicadas and the two-note hoot of an owl, soft and melancholy.
‘That’s a Cyprus scops owl,’ says Carl.
Zoe remembers the dead bird Andreas pulled out of the pool. A symbol of the birth of a new generation.
Carl rearranges the papers on his desk and dusts the cover of the large, leather-bound notebook Sofia gave him a few days ago. A shaft of silvery light highlights the first signs of wrinkling, sagging skin on his buttocks.
Zoe looks away.
‘See anyone out there?’ she asks.
Carl shakes his head. ‘The shutters are closed in Quinn’s room,’ he says. ‘Mel’s too.’
Zoe has avoided Mel all day. She did go to Holly and Joe’s room this afternoon but as she was about to knock on the door, she heard Holly sobbing and Joe’s voice murmuring to her, soft and soothing.
‘What are we going to do?’ Carl pulls out the chair at his desk and sits down.
Sofia’s offer hangs in the air between them. Zoe picks up the Chanel scarf Sofia gave her from her bedside table. She hasn’t worn it, but she finds the silk enticing and likes to touch it. ‘I really thought my idea would work.’
‘It still might,’ Carl says. ‘Maybe Sofia thought she’d lose face if she agreed immediately, but she might go away and think about it.’
‘Really? You think so?’
Carl shrugs. An image of Quinn’s empty grave swoops into Zoe’s mind. The gaping hole in the ground. Waiting.
‘Should we leave?’ she says.
‘Leave?’ Blue smoke trails from Carl’s nostrils.
‘What choice do we have?’ Zoe knows her higher self would pack a rucksack right now and leave Pure Heart.
‘Maybe you’re right,’ Carl says.
Zoe imagines the two of them trying to live an ordinary life. What if they got jobs in Limassol or Nicosia? Zoe could work in a shop in one of the big hotels. She could even sing in the bar. Cover versions of popular songs for tourists. Carl could… she wasn’t sure what he could do but he’d find something. An honest living. An honest life. If there was nothing in Cyprus, they’d have to go back to the UK. She thinks of them sleeping in her mother’s spare bedroom until they get themselves sorted. Despair washes over her.
‘I won’t let Sofia drive me out.’ Carl’s fingers drum on the cover of his new notebook.
Zoe thinks of the words written inside it. The novel Carl is desperate to complete. ‘I’m not saying I want to leave, but what if—’
‘We’re not the people she thinks we are.’
‘I know that.’
Out in the courtyard a burst of hissing and mewling. Cats scrapping.
‘Leaving makes it look like we’ve got something to fear,’ Carl says. ‘As though we don’t trust ourselves.’
‘True.’ Zoe wraps the scarf around her left wrist. It’s offensive really, that Sofia thinks so little of them. ‘So, we’re staying?’
Carl returns to their bed and lies down beside her. ‘I think we should,’ he says. ‘I think it’s the right thing to do.’