‘Gareth and Senara sitting in a tree!’ The voice was below us, and, when I leaned over to look down, it was Clem looking up, laughing. I jumped out of the tree at once, hoping again that the dress was surviving this adventure.
‘We were certainly not K-I-S-S-I-N-G,’ I told her with as much dignity as I could manage, brushing the back of my dress. I noticed that I wasn’t in thrall to Clem any more. Since Rik knocked me back, I didn’t really care.
Gareth’s voice was guarded. ‘We were T-A-L-K-I-N-G, actually.’
‘I know someone who’ll be pleased to hear that,’ she said, giving me a knowing look. ‘Not the talking. The not-kissing.’
I walked away from the tree and straight into Rik. I stepped back and turned away as I heard Clem say, ‘So, is there room in that tree for one more?’
I’d been getting through the evening by avoiding him. Now I’d walked into him, and I could smell him, and he made my stomach lurch, and I had to get away. I started walking off, but he touched my shoulder. I shook him off and walked faster. He walked quickly next to me.
‘How are you doing?’ he said.
‘Fine.’
I didn’t look at him. I set my course towards Martha. The bastard had told me that he didn’t fancy me, and I felt it, a slap in the face. A jellyfish sting. I was done with being a sidekick. I wasn’t going to be his Robin. Just for once, I’d thought I had a chance of being the main character.
I walked faster. He kept up easily. I slowed down. He slowed down.
I sighed. ‘What?’
He stopped. ‘I don’t know, Senara. It’s a party. I wanted to hang out with you. Look, have I done something else to offend you? I’m really sorry if I did. I don’t know what it was, but I can see you think I’m a dick, so maybe it’s the obvious thing again, or maybe it’s something else, but please: all I’m asking is for you to tell me.’
I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t bear to. How could I possibly have thought that there could have been anything between us? A girl like me would never get together with a boy like him. Tonight I was the most stylish I’d been in my entire life, and that was because I’d borrowed a dress from a ninety-two-year-old lady. Go figure.
And I didn’t even know if he liked girls. I’d built all my hopes on a thing that didn’t exist.
‘It’s nothing,’ I said.
We were near the house now, and I looked around. I thought there were maybe seventy people here, and I recognized almost all of them. They were people I’d known for years, people I vaguely recognized from school, people I’d just seen around. The music was light and poppy. I listened to some words – ‘the river keeps on flowing and the party keeps on going’ – and thought how meaningless everything was.
I saw Treve in the pool with Daniel, finally actually together after a year of flirting. Amina was lying on her back on the grass, her arms stretched out on either side. There was shouting, laughing, singing. I’d been worried that it would get out of hand, that with the gates open more and more people would come, that the house would be trashed, but so far it seemed all right. This place was pretty remote. We were hardly going to attract random passers-by, and there were no neighbours to complain.
Martha was still at the poolside, presiding over it all in her ballgown. She didn’t see us walking past because she was talking to two people who’d been in the year above us at school. I checked the time. It was twenty to ten. I would take her home at ten, as she’d asked, and then I’d spend the rest of this evening avoiding Rik, spending time with my actual friends.
Megan and Josie were up against a tree, kissing. I pushed down the stab of jealousy.
‘Tell me if you want me to go,’ said Rik.
‘I want you to go.’ I still couldn’t look at his face. I couldn’t deal with the fact that it was so perfect.
‘OK. Sure.’ He started to walk away, and I wanted to call him back. He stopped. ‘But please, Senara? Just tell me what I did.’
I looked at him because I had to. I melted a bit in spite of myself. My defences came down, and I put them back up.
‘It’s nothing,’ I said. I had nothing left to lose, and I’d had a couple of drinks, so I added: ‘I mean, you must know really. When we were on the beach? In Penzance. I was kind of gearing up to make a fool of myself, and you nipped it in the bud, and I just feel a bit stupid. That’s all. There you go.’
I thought it would be good to have another drink, and so I walked as fast as I could towards the kitchen door.
Rik ran after me. ‘What are you talking about?’ His voice was urgent.
I shook my head. My eyes were burning, and I wasn’t going to let him see me cry. I wasn’t, wasn’t, wasn’t.
‘No, Senara! Stop!’ He put a hand on my arm. I shook it off. ‘No – you’ve got it wrong! I know exactly what you mean, but I thought you shut me down. I’m shit at this, but I was trying to say, I never fancy anyone, which is why it’s so amazing, the way I feel about you. It was there straight away for me. Feelings that I don’t normally get, and I was wondering if you felt any trace of it. I was trying to be smooth.’ He laughed, but in a not-amused way. ‘I’m a twat. I mean, I know we established that already, but please file Penzance beach in that category.’
I stopped. I didn’t want to meet his eyes. ‘Seriously?’
His words were burned on my brain, and I jumped straight back into the moment. He’d said: ‘I never fancy anyone.’ He’d said: ‘I call it being super-selective … If you can imagine someone the exact opposite of Clem and Gareth? … Well, that’s me. I just hardly ever meet anyone who I find even remotely interesting.’
I tried to press play, to see what might have come next.
I supposed it could have been turned round with a ‘but’.
‘I really did feel as if you shut me down. Because I was about to go there, and you said you too never fancied anyone.’
‘I was …’ I searched for the word. ‘Hurt. I was jumping in to say that I hated romantic things too, so that you didn’t see that I was absolutely gutted.’
‘I definitely didn’t see that.’
Something in me, wound tight, was starting to relax. My breaths were deeper. I could look at him now. I could look into his eyes. He could look into mine. Was this real?
‘I’ve always felt like a sidekick,’ I said. ‘Always. I’ve always been the one in the background, while other people have their dramas. I never have my own storyline. I’ve always thought I was too boring for the exciting things. I mean, look at me. I’m short. Not glamorous. I don’t have any sense of style. I’m an extra.’
No one had ever looked at me in the way Rik was looking at me now.
‘You’re not an extra.’
He took my hand, and our footsteps crunched on the gravel as we walked away from the rest of the party and round the corner of the house. We sat on the steps in front of the big door.
It was quiet here, and the air was thick with rain that wasn’t quite falling. There were no stars; the sky was a duvet of dark cloud.
We looked at each other, and everything changed. I felt the bones and the missing woman and all the rest of it slip away, just for a moment.
‘You’re not a sidekick. You’re not in the background. You’re right in the centre of everything.’
We looked at each other for a few seconds and both burst out laughing.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Possibly the cheesiest thing anyone’s ever said. Please, stop me talking before I fuck it up again. Anyway, you look stunning. Breathtaking.’
I felt my cheeks going red and looked up at the black sky. We were lit only by the party lights, of which there were many.
‘Amazing what a vintage dress can do,’ I said. ‘And low lighting.’
‘It’s not the dress. It’s not the lighting.’
I wanted to be in this moment, right now, nowhere else.
I looked across at Rik and noticed that he was heart-stoppingly handsome. He was wearing a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt and denim shorts. The whole ensemble made him seem like a movie star. I took a deep breath and told him so.
He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Can I go back to what I was saying before?’ he said. ‘On the beach?’
‘I promise not to jump in and shut you down.’ My stomach was fluttering in anticipation.
‘I never fancy anyone. I call it being super-selective, but Meg despairs of me. If you can imagine someone the exact opposite of Clem and Gareth? Well, that’s me. I just hardly ever meet anyone who I find even remotely interesting – and I guess that’s why I paused for too long, because the last thing I was expecting when I came to Cornwall was to meet somebody I liked straight away. But I did. I met you. I can’t stop thinking about you. And believe me when I say that never happens.’
He was stroking the back of my neck. It made every hair on my arms stand up on end.
I looked into his eyes.
‘Super-selective just means you wait for the right person. It means you know them when you see them. Right?’
We didn’t need to say anything else. I felt like the most beautiful, luckiest girl in the world. I leaned up to him. He leaned towards me. Our lips met, and everything else melted away.
We had no future, and I had to accept that. He was going back to London in a couple of days. He lived in Chelsea and had staff. This was a holiday romance. It was going to end as fast as it had begun.
So I needed to enjoy it. Right now it was real. I wanted this, and nothing else, right now. Here I was, sitting on the steps of a huge house, kissing the boy I really, really liked on a hot, charged evening.
We sat there, not talking. I didn’t want it to end.
I sighed, leaned my head on his shoulder and said, ‘I think we need to get Martha home. Sorry.’
I felt him nod.
‘That’s why you’re amazing,’ said Rik. ‘Seriously. You make sure everyone’s OK. Let’s face it, Clem’s never going to think to do that. I can’t believe Martha’s been holding court here for hours, and she’s, like, ninety or something. Yes, let’s take her back. Then … maybe we could get away from here for a bit? Would you like to go down to the beach?’
I nodded. I very much did want to go down to the beach, away from the party, the camellias, the high fence.
We were walking towards the pool when someone screamed. It wasn’t the kind of drunk shouting that everyone had been doing all evening. This was the kind of scream that makes you drop everything and run. Rik and I sprinted across the grass to where a small crowd was already gathering by the pool. The pool lights, which had been on, were switched off.
It happened in slow motion. First I noticed that Martha’s chair was empty. There was a half-full champagne glass on the little table next to it, but Martha had gone.
I knew. But I kept my eyes away from the water and decided, quickly, that Clem must have taken her home after all. I looked at the others. Maya was the one who was screaming. She wouldn’t stop. It was a sound that went right through your body, that sliced you in half.
‘Maya!’ I shouted, and I ran through the group of people, and Maya was pointing and yelling.
Someone switched the underwater lights back on. They lit the pool up, bright blue.
Maya had flowers in her hair and was wearing shorts and a plunging top, and she was still holding a glass of punch with flowers floating on top of it.
I followed the direction of her finger.
There was someone floating in the water. Someone wearing a deep red dress, a dress she had called her lucky charm.
The lights were on, and Martha was face down in the swimming pool.