20

I woke up at ten, taking a moment to orientate myself. The yellow room with two windows. The big house. Rik was a twin. Clem knew about the drone.

The skull.

It was Saturday.

Party day.

Clem was up, wearing a white shirt undone over a bra top, and the smallest pair of towelling shorts I’d ever seen.

‘Senni,’ she said, ‘I was about to wake you. So you and Rik are going to Penzance to fetch party supplies. He’s passed his driving test, so he’s taking the green car. I know Martha’s ordered all the food and drink, so you guys just need to get everything else. Fill the car with stuff.’

I put the kettle on. ‘What’s everything else?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Party stuff! Like I said. Get, like, helium balloons. Those lanterns people release.’

I interrupted. ‘I’m not getting them. They’re terrible for birds and animals, and a fire hazard, and they end up in the sea.’

I stopped and marvelled at myself standing up to her like that. It was because of Rik. I was more confident. I felt different.

‘Fine, eco ones or whatever. Get decorations. I want to put lights all the way up the drive. Some fairy lights in trees maybe? Tealights. Candles and shit.’

‘Candles and shit.’ Rik was standing behind me, in the doorway, pretending to write it down. ‘Fine. We’ll get you some candles and some shit.’

I took half a step backwards so I was standing almost up against him.

‘Oh, shut up,’ said Clem. ‘Where’s Meggy? I need her to do that thing she does at home where she puts all the expensive things away. She can use the small sitting room because we can lock that. Can someone wake her and get her to do it?’

‘What are we doing? You and me?’ Gareth was in the courtyard doorway, his hair wet. Fair enough: I wanted to use the pool as much as possible too.

‘You and me, baby? First of all, we’re going to your house.’

I saw him tense up. ‘Why?’

‘I want to look at your clothes so we can coordinate outfits.’

That was so bizarre that I turned to leave them to it, forgetting for a fraction of a second that Rik was millimetres away from me. I walked straight into him. My body pressed completely against his. He steadied me with his hands on my shoulders. We stood there for a few beats.

He smelled amazing.

‘Sorry!’ I looked into his eyes. He looked back.

‘Don’t be,’ he said, his voice soft. ‘So – what’s it like in Penzance? Is there parking?’

‘Loads. Which room is Meg in? Shall we wake her before Clem does?’

Meg was supposed to be in a room called the green room, which made it sound as if she was preparing to be on telly. We located it, and I knocked on the door, but she didn’t answer. Rik grinned.

‘Step aside,’ he said. ‘Right, just so you know, I do this at home. She’s used to it. I’m not like this with anyone else, OK? It’s a sibling thing.’

I nodded. He pounded on the door five times, then flung it open and jumped into the room, shouting: ‘FBI! This is a raid!’

He yelled it at the top of his voice, then stopped.

‘Oh,’ he said, and his voice was normal now. ‘Shit. She’s not here. Hasn’t been here at all, by the look of it.’

‘You must be such an annoying brother.’ I was smiling at this new aspect of him, but then my brain caught up. ‘She must have just got up and made the bed?’

I stepped into the room. The walls were minty green, the floorboards varnished like the ones in the room I was in. The window overlooked the drive, and the light was pale and soft. The bed was made up with a pale green duvet cover and pillow case.

Meg’s bag was on the end of it, open with a few clothes spilling out. The duvet was perfectly straight.

‘Got up, made the bed, put her bag back on it with everything exactly as she left it yesterday?’ His phone was already in his hand. ‘Nah. She hasn’t been here. She went off with Josie last night. I thought she’d come back after I crashed out because that was early. Did you see her?’

I thought back to the end of the evening, and I realized that I hadn’t seen Meg. I’d been disappointed when Rik fell asleep, knackered after a night on the sleeper train and a sunny afternoon with alcohol, and I’d gone to bed myself to think about him and replay all our conversations. I hadn’t even thought about Megan. Only Rik.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I went to bed early too. I’m really sorry! I should totally have checked that Meg was back first.’

‘Shit! No, I should.’ He put his phone down. ‘She’s not answering.’ He was alert now, giving off a new energy. ‘Is there anywhere she could have been in danger between here and Josie’s house?’

I knew there wasn’t, but I walked through it in my mind. ‘No. There are two ways down to the village. You can take the coast road, or the footpath. The footpath is quicker. There’s nothing dangerous.’

‘What about the cliffs, on the coast road?’

‘Not really. It’s all fenced.’

I tried to think about this logically. The longer I spent mulling it over, the weirder it was that Meg wasn’t here.

‘She’d have to have gone past the house and further along the cliffs to get to an unfenced bit, and she just wouldn’t, would she? Oh shit! She didn’t have a key to the gates! We might not have heard the buzzer. The garden’s a fortress. We should ask Martha.’ I started to calm down. ‘Actually I bet she’s at Martha’s cottage.’

‘But I’d have a load of missed calls from her. And we’d have heard the buzzer because we woke you up with it yesterday, didn’t we? Maybe she came back late and didn’t want to disturb us. Can you go down and check with Martha, while I look in every other room in this house?’

The Sainsbury’s van was outside Martha’s place, so I had to ask her about Meg at the same time as helping with the delivery of a huge amount of alcohol and party food.

‘No, dear.’ She raised her voice. ‘Can you stack it all just inside the front door? Thank you. Yes, I’m having a little gathering. All my friends. No, I haven’t seen Megan. I’m not sure I’d know her if I did, but I didn’t see anyone trying to get through the gates. Not at all. What’s happened?’

I tried Josie again. She didn’t answer.

‘She was walking back on her own through the village, but we’ve only just realized that she never arrived.’

Rik pulled up in the green car. I decided not to ask about insurance.

‘Go and find her.’ Martha patted my arm. ‘And for goodness’ sake message me the moment you do. Promise?’

I was trying not to imagine Megan at the foot of the cliffs. Megan attacked and left beside the path. Megan lost, wandering in the dark all night long.

‘Promise. And you’ll call me if she turns up here?’

‘You know it.’

I gave directions from the passenger seat, and Rik drove straight to Josie’s house. Five minutes later he was pulling up on the street, and while he parked I ran up to the front door and pounded on it, like Rik doing his FBI raid except serious. I waited, and then he was at my side. I could feel the waves of tension coming from him, and reached out to squeeze his hand. He clung on to me.

Nothing happened. I knocked again, and still nothing happened. We looked at each other. He was so close to me that I could feel the edges of his arm hairs touching mine. Our fingers were interlinked. When he leaned down, I could feel his breath in my hair.

‘She must have taken that country path. Fucking hell. Can you run along it and call me if –’

The door opened slowly, and there was Josie’s mum. She looked nervous and then relieved.

‘Oh, Senara,’ she said, and then she looked at Rik and took a step back. This was massive: I knew she never opened the door to strangers.

‘Hi, Angie,’ I said. ‘I’m so, so sorry to disturb you. Is Josie here? We’re actually looking for Rik’s sister Meg. Did you see her last night?’

Angie smiled quickly, then took three more steps backwards. She was wearing a shapeless knee-length dress. It was unusual for her not to be in pyjamas.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I did. Do you want to come in?’

I wanted to shout at her to explain, but I knew I couldn’t. We stepped into the narrow hallway.

‘Do you know where she might be?’ said Rik, clenching his teeth. ‘I’m her brother, and we’ve just realized she didn’t come home last night.’

Angie nodded, put a finger to her lips, and pointed to Josie’s bedroom door. I opened it as quietly as possible, pushed it and peered in.

And then everything inside me relaxed. All the breath came out of me, and I motioned to Rik to come over. I felt him beside me, looking over my shoulder.

Josie and Meg were squeezed up in Josie’s single bed. Meg’s hair was all over the pillow, and they were curled into each other, covered by a sheet. They were both fast asleep.

I stepped back and closed the door.

Rik exhaled, long and loud, and leaned back against the wall.

‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘I have so much to say to that girl when she wakes up. I really thought the worst had happened. Really, really believed it.’

He held up a hand to show me that it was shaking. I patted his arm and wondered whether this would be a good moment to hug him.

Angie walked us back to the front door. ‘I found them talking outside on the doorstep,’ she said. ‘Told them to come in. They carried on talking. Chattering away, they were. They had some tea, and leftover pizza from the other night, and they went to Josie’s room. I only found out your sister had stayed over when I looked in this morning, same as you just did. Do you want to wake them?’

‘No need,’ I said quickly. ‘Rik and I are going into Penzance for some shopping. Can you tell them that when they’re up?’

‘Course I can,’ said Angie, and she looked happier than I’d seen her for ages.

‘And please could you tell Megan to look at her phone?’ said Rik. ‘Jesus Christ.’

I texted Martha and told her everything was fine. She replied immediately with the emoji. I messaged Clem and Gareth, who didn’t reply. We stopped at the big Sainsbury’s on the way into Penzance and bought fairy lights and tealights and an approximation of Clem’s shopping list. Rik paid for it on a credit card, and I tried to imagine what it must feel like to be able to do that. To spend a hundred pounds without stressing at all.

I remembered the envelope of cash that Felicity had given me, and wondered whether I should be using that to pay for things. I’d been planning to save it, but maybe I should be contributing to the party costs.

‘Can I give you half the money?’ I said.

‘Absolutely no way,’ said Rik.

We parked in the harbour car park and looked out to sea. The wind blew into our faces. I savoured the smell of the ocean mixed with exhaust fumes and harbour things. I loved that about Penzance: it was real.

It was real, and I was here with Rik. It was almost a date.

‘Penzance!’ said Rik. ‘So. What do I need to see?’

I led him around, pointing things out as we went, and everything looked different because I was here with him. The Isles of Scilly ferry was bigger. The ice-cream shop was better (he had Jaffa Cake flavour; I had Twix). We took the outdoor escalator and went up to the main street, and I showed him the bookshop where Josie worked and hoped she wasn’t meant to be working today because, if she was, I should definitely have woken her up.

‘Cute shop,’ he said.

The pavements were busy with people, all wearing as few clothes as they could get away with, so there was plenty of sunburnt flesh on display. There were pushchairs with babies shaded from the sun. We stepped into the road to let a mobility scooter pass, and I thought of Martha and her absolute refusal to use hers. I looked into the windows of the charity shops, alert for my elusive style, but there was nothing that appealed. We passed Tesco, Co-op, the old post office, and more, more, more charity shops. I felt the sweat on my scalp, under my arms, down my back. The sky was clouding over, the air crackling with electricity. I longed to throw myself into the ocean.

Penzance had been a focal point my whole life. I had come here every schoolday for the past five years. It was a cool town. A complicated one. It was arty and bookish, with a huge homeless population, massive poverty and immense drug and mental-health problems. Right now it was at peak tourism, so it was also a base for people going to Land’s End and Sennen and the Scillies.

Although I knew that you couldn’t say it was because of Clem’s second home that there were so many people here with no shelter, no food, no hope, I also knew that you could, and I knew that Rik knew it too. Second homes and homelessness were what Mum, after a glass of wine, would call ‘two cheeks of the same arse’. Life was unfair: some people had too much, and others had nothing, and I wanted there to be a way for everyone to have the right amount.

I decided not to say any of this. We walked in silence past a woman with a double pushchair, and I checked that it was babies rather than dogs. I couldn’t believe how often it was dogs.

The storm was hanging in the air. Heatwaves lasted a week at most; everyone knew that the mizzle and the mist would soon be back. That was why the beaches were full of locals as well as tourists, why people were swimming in the sea at every opportunity, and why so many people walking around the town were bright red and peeling.

‘It honestly usually rains,’ I said. ‘And I think you’re about to experience that. I hope it holds off for the party, though.’

‘It rained last time we were here,’ said Rik. ‘When we went to St Mawes. Absolutely pissed it down the whole time.’

‘The trip that Meg was talking about?’

‘She’s rewritten it in her head so it was perfect.’

‘She was telling me about some afternoon-tea place. That did sound nice, to be fair.’

‘Yeah.’ We waited to cross the road. ‘A hotel. Everyone says you have to go for afternoon tea there if you’re in St Mawes. I mean – have to?’

‘I wouldn’t have a clue.’

‘We went because our parents saw it on a list of must-do things for Cornwall. Or something.’

There was a gap in the traffic. I set off after him, running to catch up.

‘What are your parents like?’

He shrugged. ‘Fine. I kind of hesitate to go there, but you won’t be surprised to hear that we grew up with nannies. Our dad works away. Mum’s a banker. They’re nice but super busy. Like this week we just messaged them to say we’d be in Cornwall with Clem, and they were both, like: Fine, have fun. The real person we had to tell was –’ He stopped.

I didn’t finish the sentence, even though I could have done. They had to tell Holly. They had to tell their housekeeper.

‘I’m not going to say we’re poor little rich kids because …’ We both looked at a group of homeless people across the road. ‘So, yeah. I’ll shut up.’

I took a deep breath and tried to think of something else to say. I didn’t want the fact that Rik was so rich to make things feel awkward between us. It hadn’t been feeling like that, and now it did.

I changed the subject. ‘Are you hungry?’

‘Shit! Yes, I am. We didn’t have breakfast, did we?’

And just like that everything was fine again.

‘Fancy getting some chips and taking them down to the beach? This time I’m paying.’

‘Fish and chips?’ said Rik. ‘Oh my God! That’s the best idea I’ve ever heard.’

I tried not to smile too broadly. This was definitely feeling like a date.

We sat on the stones with our food, and I warned him about the seagulls, who loved to snatch food right out of unsuspecting people’s hands. The white wall of the Jubilee Pool jutted out into the ocean on our left. Newlyn and beyond were off to the right, and the ocean stretched out ahead of us. The sky was clouding over. The stones on the beach were heavy and smooth, the esplanade above us. We ate with our fingers.

‘Penzance,’ he said, leaning back on the wall, picking up his biggest chip. ‘Yes. I like it.’

The chips were covered in salt and vinegar. They were thick and perfect. I watched the clouds reflected in the surface of the sea.

‘Me too.’

‘I was so scared this morning. I thought something really bad had happened to Meg. That skull last night, and then my sister missing this morning. I was freaking out.’

It was so easy to talk to him now. I was glad he was confiding in me.

‘I could see you were. It was awful. But she’s fine.’

‘Yeah. She is. More than fine, I’d say.’

We exchanged a glance, and the lightning bolt shot through me again.

‘You think that Josie and Meg …?’

‘Er – it certainly looked like it.’

I felt so naive. I had read that scene as two girls sharing a bed because they’d been talking and then fallen asleep. Josie had had two boyfriends, and she’d never mentioned girls. I recalibrated it all and felt stupid. I told him. He laughed.

‘Meg’s bi,’ he said, ‘and, judging by the way the two of them were looking at each other yesterday, I’d say Josie was receptive. You didn’t see that? Not at all?’

We didn’t speak for a while. Was this exciting tension? Or was it me not being able to think of anything to say? How were you supposed to know the difference?

I had to say something. We were on the beach, on a date. I opened my mouth to be brave.

I planned it in my head. I was going to say: What about you, Rik? Relationships-wise? I was going to hope that it would lead on seamlessly from Megan and Josie. I was going to see where that took us. My heart was pounding.

I tried it out in my head again. What about you, Rik? Relationships-wise? Would that do? Should I say: What do you feel about holiday romances? That would be more direct. Was that OK? The waves lapped at the shore. The gulls shrieked. The air was almost sparkling with future-storm. I could hear the cars going past above us. My lips were stinging with salt and vinegar. Should I say something even clearer? Maybe I should say: What about you and me? Was that too risky?

If anything was going to happen between us, it had to happen now.

I opened my mouth to do it. What about you and me?

I was about to speak when Rik said, ‘I never fancy anyone.’

I waited. I waited for him to add ‘except you’, but he didn’t. That, it seemed, was his full statement.

‘Really?’ My voice sounded wavery and stupid. I felt tears springing to my eyes and looked away, down the beach, so he wouldn’t see them. I had been ready for this, ready to kiss him right here right now.

‘Yeah. I call it being super-selective, but Meg despairs of me. If you can imagine someone the exact opposite of Clem and Gareth? The opposite, apparently, of Meg and Josie? Well, that’s me. I just hardly ever meet anyone who I find even remotely interesting.’

I felt myself deflating, humiliated. This must be what it was like to have a regular, unrequited crush. I’d thought we were in this together, but we weren’t. It was just me.

I replayed the moments. Standing in the sea. Sitting on the grass. He’d gone to bed early; that should have given me a hint. I’d taken his hand, and he’d held mine tightly – when he’d been scared his sister was dead. We had barely brushed against each other since he’d found out that she was fine.

I saw it all in the cold light of reality.

The whole thing had only existed in my head. He was probably laughing at me.

I talked, saying anything to fill the void. I kept my head turned away from him.

‘Me too,’ I said. I didn’t want him to know how I’d been feeling, so I decided to join his team. ‘My friends say I’m like one of those women in the olden days, saving myself for marriage, but I’m not. I just haven’t met anyone I want to bother with yet. I bet there’s a name for it. Not asexual, I don’t think. Just picky.’

‘You get it,’ he said. I slumped back against the wall.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I get it.’

I didn’t want to be here, on the beach with our chips, for a moment longer. I threw my last few to the birds, who went mad for them, and stood up.

‘We should get back.’

We walked to the car in silence. He tried to start a few conversations on the way back, but I shut them all off. I directed him back to Cliff House and, when we got there, I went to my room and had a shower so I could cry without anyone knowing.