I flinched at this, but I knew he didn’t mean it the way it sounded, so I didn’t say anything. A waiter brought us another round, with a little dish of peanuts.
‘So is that one of your resolutions, then?’ Dom asked. ‘Winding up the company?’
‘I haven’t made any resolutions this year,’ I said. ‘It’s just a decision.’
The next day, we lay on the beach in scorching sun, our pale English bodies turning gently pink in the sun. Local boys, incongruously dressed in early nineties English football strips, wandered along the shore and approached with baskets of wares to sell: samosas, cans of Coke, ready-rolled spliffs. Dom bought us two of each.
‘Are you really a Manchester United fan?’ Dom asked our vendor.
‘Ronaldo,’ the boy replied with a grin. ‘Rooney, Giggs. Best team in the whole world.’
Dom looked pained and muttered something about the ubiquity of the Premiership being ‘yet another thing to resent Rupert Murdoch for’. The boy just smiled at us and trotted off down the beach, humming ‘Volare’.
Dom and I found ourselves a square metre of shade under a low palm, smoked our joints looking out over the shimmering sea. In our beach bag, my phone buzzed again and again. It was Alex.
‘You should answer,’ Dom said. ‘Just say hello.’
‘It’ll cost a fortune from here, Dom. It’ll cost both of us a fortune. Anyway. We’re on our
honeymoon
. Why does she keep calling? There can’t possibly have been another hideous tragedy at exactly the same time of year can there?’
‘Perhaps she’s just calling because it’s … well … the anniversary. She probably just wants to find out if you’re okay.’
‘She’s driving me mad.’
‘She’s hurt. She just got divorced, and she also lost a friend, Nic.’
‘Oh, don’t you start.’ I got up off my towel. ‘I’m going for a swim.’
In the shallows, the water was clear and warm as a bath, but it turned colder and darker blue the deeper I got. I floated on my back, eyes closed, I drifted. I was thinking about the first time I swam in the Indian Ocean. It wasn’t the New Year’s Eve in Cape Town, that was the Atlantic. This was eleven years ago, April or March, I think. Aidan had started his desk job in London, he was earning a decent salary at last, Karl had just sold a piece to a gallery in New York, so he was in the money, too. So the four of us – Julian and Karl, Aidan and I – decided to take a holiday in Mozambique.
We flew to Maputo and drove north to Vilanculos. I was awestruck, I’d never seen beaches like that – endless, unspoiled, completely deserted, with not a building, high rise or otherwise, anywhere in sight. We couldn’t even wait to take off our clothes, let alone pitch our tents, the moment we arrived at our camping spot we just piled out of the rental car and tore down onto the sand and into the water. We bought fish from a local market and grilled it over a fire on the beach, accompanied by cheap (gut-rotting) rosé. It was heaven.
Salt tears were running down my cheeks, joining the ocean. And I could hear someone yelling my name.
‘Nicole! Hey! Nicole!’
I opened my eyes and started to tread water. I’d drifted right into the middle of the channel between Lamu and Manda, the current was carrying me towards the open ocean. Drift out there and you don’t come back. For just the slightest fraction of a moment the idea was tempting, the thought of disappearing out into the endless blue, but the desperation in Dom’s voice brought me back to myself, and I started to swim, I started to fight.
It took me twenty minutes to get back to shore. Dom, following my progress from the land (he never was a very strong swimmer), came running to meet me as I half walked, half crawled up the beach.
‘What were you doing?’ he yelled, grabbing hold of me, enveloping me in his arms. ‘What on earth were you doing?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I panted, collapsing down onto the wet sand. ‘I drifted too far.’
He sat down next to me. ‘That’s the last time you get stoned before going swimming.’
‘Definitely. Either that or we need to fashion some sort of anchor to keep me near to shore.’
Dom put his arm around my waist and kissed my shoulder. ‘If only,’ he said, ‘if only I could make an anchor to keep you near me.’
We went back to our room, made love under the mosquito net, drank hot sweet tea brought to us by the hotel staff. We compared sunburn. Mine was definitely worse, no doubt exacerbated by all that time in the water.
‘Putting on clothes again is going to be agony,’ I complained.
‘We could just spend the rest of the holiday naked,’ Dom suggested.
‘Tempting, but do you not think we might look a little out of place at the New Year’s Eve party tonight?’
‘I don’t know,’ Dom shrugged. ‘They looked to me like a pretty swinging crowd.’
In the end I wore a maxi dress with no underwear, which excited Dom no end and kept me comfortable. The party, held in the hotel bar, started out a quiet affair.
‘That’s the problem with these honeymoon-y places,’ I grumbled to Dom. ‘It’s all couples, so there’s no atmosphere. No one’s hitting on anyone else.’
‘Don’t be so sure about that,’ Dom replied. ‘The blonde over there with the large … uh …’
‘Tits?’
‘I was going to say bottom, but she’s fairly proportionate, I suppose. Anyway, I reckon she’s been eyeing up the overly tanned chap with the tight T-shirt on.’
While other couples made stilted conversation about their weddings (size, location, quality of best man’s speeches), Dom and I sat in the corner, people-watching and munching on the most delicious crab cakes I have ever tasted.
‘We really ought to mingle,’ Dom said after his fourth crab cake. ‘We’re being a bit antisocial.’
‘This is our honeymoon, Dominic. We’re supposed to be antisocial. In any case, I don’t think they’d be terribly impressed by our registry office nuptials, do you?’
Fortunately, the handsome Danish hotelier, Michael, had invited some locals who arrived three sheets to the wind and livened the place up no end. Dom and I got talking to Bruce and Lara, originally from Devon, who ran a donkey sanctuary just outside Lamu village, and who invited us to go on a snorkelling-slash-fishing expedition on their boat the following day.
‘You see?’ I said to Dom. ‘The key thing is to be antisocial until the interesting people show up and invite you to go out on their boat.’
‘You’re so much cooler than I am,’ he said.
‘Aren’t I?’
Dom and I skipped the New Year countdown, choosing instead to go for a walk on the beach. Even at one minute to midnight, it was almost as bright as day, a full moon reflecting off the vast expanse of pale, wet sand. Apart from waves breaking far out to sea, the silence was perfect. We walked, hand in hand, for two or three miles, then turned and walked back again, awestruck by a seemingly endless expanse of inky, star-studded sky.
We rounded the beach head and were heading back towards the lights of the hotel when Dom wandered down to the water. He looked up at me with a grin.
‘Fancy a swim?’
‘I’m not wearing my bikini, Dominic.’
‘I know,’ he said, the grin turning from merely cheeky to lascivious.
Giggling like school children, we stripped off and jumped into the water. It was cooler than it had been that afternoon, it felt delicious on my hot, sunburned skin. We floated on our backs, looking up at the sky, hands interlaced.
‘We should do this more often,’ Dom said to me.
‘Skinny dip?’
‘Get away, just the two of us. And yes, we should skinny dip more often, too.’
‘You reckon they wouldn’t mind too much at the pool at Wimbledon Leisure Centre?’
We drifted a little further and then started back for shore. It was only when we reached the point at which our toes could touch the sand with our chins still above water when I noticed that there was somebody on the beach. Two people, actually. The curvy blonde and her husband. They were sitting about a metre or two from where I’d dropped my dress.
‘Hiya!’ the blonde called out. ‘What’s the water like then?’
‘Lovely,’ Dom said, shooting me a look. ‘It’s very nice.’
‘Yeah, lovely,’ I agreed. We’d reached the point at which, if I went any further towards the beach, I was going to be flashing my tits at them.
‘You’re braver than I am,’ the blonde said. ‘I wouldn’t go in the water in broad daylight, let alone at night. All those creepy crawlies … Ugh. Have you seen the size of the crabs round here?’
Dom and I splashed around half-heartedly, waiting for the couple to get bored and leave. They did not.
‘Have you been to the donkey sanctuary yet?’ the woman went on. ‘Poor mites. In a terrible way some of them.’
‘We were thinking of going tomorrow,’ Dom replied.
He and I swam around a bit more. I was starting to get cold and the couple on the beach showed no sign of leaving.
‘Really enjoying it out there, aren’t you?’ the bloke asked.
Dom was laughing to himself.
‘They’re never going to leave,’ he whispered.
I was getting the giggles, too.
‘We’re going to have to face death by freezing or death by embarrassment. Which would you prefer?’
‘I say we just brazen it out.’
And so we did. Hand in hand, stark naked, the two of us waded out of the water and up the beach as casual as you like. The blonde and her other half watched us, open-mouthed.
‘The water really is lovely,’ Dom said as he pulled on his boxer shorts. ‘You ought to try it.’
‘Maybe tomorrow,’ the blonde said, her gaze averted.
‘Well, we’re off to bed now,’ I said, and the two of us walked off towards our room, heads held high, as though flashing complete strangers was something we did every day.
Back in our room, we collapsed on the bed, laughing helplessly.
‘Oh my god, did you see the way they looked at us?’
‘We have to face those people at breakfast,’ Dom said. ‘I’m not sure I can bear to leave the room.’
‘It’s just like you said. We just brazen it out. Act completely natural. Never complain, never explain.’
Someone – presumably the handsome Danish hotelier – had left a bottle of champagne and a box of Belgian chocolates in our room, with a note wishing us a happy New Year. We took these goodies and climbed into the enormous stone tub in the bathroom. I lay back in Dominic’s arms, my eyes closed. In moments like these, I could forget about everything. I could be happy.
* * *
I woke, as I often did, in the early hours of the morning. I wriggled out of Dominic’s embrace and checked the time on my phone: it was just before four and I had three missed calls. Alex, inevitably, my mum, unsurprisingly, and Aidan.
That wasn’t expected. Aidan and I hadn’t spoken in months, not since he’d called me in April. He was in London for a couple of weeks, he wondered whether we could meet up. Just to talk. He was finding it a bit of a struggle, he said. I was the only person he felt he could talk to about Julian. I was the only person who would understand. I didn’t tell him that I felt the same way. I didn’t tell him that I couldn’t talk to Alex, I couldn’t talk to Dom. I didn’t tell him that he was the only one I wanted to talk to, because he was the one who knew Julian like I did. I didn’t say that. Instead, I said: ‘I got married. A few weeks ago.’
There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Eventually, he spoke. ‘Congratulations.’
‘It was just a small thing,’ I said, not really sure why I was explaining that. It could have been the most lavish ceremony since Charles and Diana’s nuptials and he wouldn’t have expected to be on the guest list.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Well. That’s … well. Brilliant. Great. Congratulations. All the best, Nic.’
We stayed on the phone for a ridiculously long time, neither of us saying anything, until eventually I hung up.
I checked the time of his call, it was about two hours ago. I slipped out of bed, pulled my dress over my head and gently pushed open the door. Our room had its own little terrace, then a few steps down to a lawn, and from the lawn a few more steps to the beach. I walked down onto the sand. I sat down with my back to a palm and, my heart hammering in my chest, dialled Aidan’s number.
‘Hey, Nic.’ I was expecting him to sound drunk, or at least to be shouting above the noise of a party, but his voice was clear, quiet and sober. ‘Thanks for calling back. Wasn’t sure what you were up to for New Year. Just thought I’d check in.’
‘I’m on honeymoon,’ I said.
‘Shit. Sorry. Hang on a minute – you’re on your honeymoon? First marriage didn’t last long then?’
‘This is my first marriage, you git. We just haven’t had time to get away.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Lamu. Kenya.’
‘Bloody hell, what time is it there? It must be …’
‘About four.’
‘Sorry, Nic. Thought you were in London.’
‘That’s okay. You in New York?’
‘Yeah. It’s just after nine.’