by Lindsey Kelk
‘Over my dead body,’ Louisa gasped, madly shoving her iPhone X down the back of her knickers. ‘How does she think we’re going to cheat at hula hooping with our phones?’
‘Definitely a sociopath,’ I decided with narrowed eyes as Camilla placed everyone’s phones into a big, branded tote.
‘OK, who feels like throwing an axe?’ Jenny asked, holding the weapon up in the air.
‘Me,’ I replied, raising my hand. ‘I do.’
I had a very good feeling I was going to be a natural at this one too.
‘And it all comes down to the final competition,’ Camilla Rose declared as both teams lined up at the edge of the ocean.
My nose was tingling from being out in the sun for too long and the rumble in my stomach suggested we must be very close to lunchtime. Since the hula competition had ended in a draw, our team managed to snatch back two points in the axe-throwing competition but we lost the limbo and the pineapple peeling, although I was thankful points were the only thing we lost after Louisa almost managed to take her thumb off, removing the core from her last pineapple. So far, this was not turning out to be the relaxing trip Jenny had promised. We’d already had Eva in tears and Paige was soldiering through a nasty turned ankle. I was not someone who believed competition brought out the best in people and this morning had done nothing to persuade me otherwise.
‘Our last challenge harks back to the days of the Hawaiian people’s oceanic adventures,’ Camilla said. ‘One member of each team needs to swim out to the pink buoy, grab the silver streamer and swim back to shore.’
‘I’m not doing it,’ Lily declared. ‘I’ve got lash extensions in, the seawater will ruin them.’
‘And you know I’m not a good swimmer,’ Louisa said, shaking her head decisively. ‘Ever since I nearly drowned at Jason Simpson’s swimming party.’
‘You did not nearly drown,’ I said with a sigh, stripping off my T-shirt to reveal my black one-piece swimming costume. The sooner I got this over with, the sooner I could have my phone back and see what that lunatic wanted. ‘You swallowed a mouthful of water because you were diving for bricks with his brother and showing off.’
‘I almost died!’ she protested. ‘I was sick for hours.’
‘Yes, I know, all over the back seat of my dad’s Ford Sierra,’ I replied. That car had never been the same. ‘Whatever, I’ll do it.’
‘Me and you then, is it, Clark?’ James strode up towards me, flexing his muscles as he walked. ‘I don’t want to put you off but I should mention I spent two months training with professional swimmers for Aquaman.’
‘You weren’t in Aquaman.’ I said, tying my hair up in a bun.
‘Bastards cut me out,’ he muttered. ‘Eight hours a day flopping about in a bloody tank and they turned my character into a talking dolphin.’
‘How is it fair that I have to swim against him?’ I asked. ‘Surely that’s cheating?’
‘Sorry,’ Jenny said with a not-sorry-at-all shrug. ‘Take it up with your team captain.’
We’d been here less than twenty-four hours and there was already no love lost between Jenny and Lily. She hadn’t stopped complaining from the moment we got here. The food wasn’t right, the birds outside her room were too noisy, the moon was shining directly through her window, the slope of the bath was too steep for her exceptionally long neck. The last one had been my favourite. All the better for Jenny to strangle her if she didn’t pack it in, I thought to myself as she pulled a tiny brush out of her handbag and combed her eyelashes, without a hint of irony, in front of everyone.
James dropped down into the sand, putting on a one-armed push-up show for his new friends while I ignored the creaking noises coming from my knees as I shook off my shorts. I wasn’t having it. James did not get to win just because he was bigger, faster and had voiced an animated superhero dolphin. I’d always been a pretty good swimmer when I was younger, I definitely stood a chance. The water wasn’t that deep. I could see the bottom almost all the way out to the buoy as we stepped into the sea, tiny waves lapping at our ankles. I could definitely do this.
‘On your marks!’ Jenny shouted.
‘I’m going to have you, Clark,’ James said with a grin.
‘Get set!’
‘May the best man win,’ I replied, eyes on the prize.
‘Go!’
The second Jenny gave the command, I gave James a hard shove, knocking him off balance and sending him face first into the sand.
‘Cheat!’ he wailed. ‘She cheated!’
‘He slipped!’ I shouted as I ran into the waves. ‘Sorry, James.’
The water was cold against my sun-warmed skin as it hit my body. I folded my arms over my chest before ducking down to submerge myself and start swimming. I should be on the beach right now, I thought, sweeping my arms through the water towards the buoy, I should be on the beach in my swimming costume and drinking a cocktail out of a pineapple. Was that too much to ask? My arms burned from the unfamiliar effort as I reached the buoy, grabbed my silver streamer and turned around. Right behind me was professionally trainer swimmer and very angry man, James Jacobs.
‘I can’t believe you cheated,’ he gasped between strokes.
‘I can’t believe you didn’t,’ I replied, sailing right on by.
The swim back was harder as I pushed against the tide, clinging to my streamer for dear life. Paddling as though my life depended on it, I heard Louisa and Lily screaming my name from the beach. I was almost there, switching from swimming to wading as the bottom of the ocean became the beginning of the beach, when I felt someone grab hold of my ankle.
‘Not today, Satan!’ James screamed.
‘Stop making me do things I have to apologize for later!’ I shouted back, kicking hard until I felt something solid.
James fell backwards into the surf but I scrambled through the water on my hands and knees, hurling myself at dry land like a beached whale. I was starting to understand how that happened, I realized as I lay panting in the sun, listening to Lily and Louisa cheer my name. Swimming was exhausting, beaching yourself was definitely the easier option.
‘Blue team are the winners!’ Camilla Rose announced. ‘Even though I’m not entirely sure I approve of the tactics used to secure the victory.’
‘I am sorry,’ I said, still panting for air as James collapsed on the beach beside me, silver streamer still in his mouth. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’
‘Human nature,’ he said, flopping face down in the sand. ‘We adapt so quickly. Remember the last Harry Potter film? One minute they’re running around trying to free house elves, the next they’re carrying their twin’s dead body out on a stretcher. You looked into the heart of darkness, darling, and it looked back.’
Rolling onto my back, I squinted up into the blue sky before it was blotted out by the silhouette of Jenny Lopez.
‘Congrats,’ she said, swapping the silver streamer for my mobile phone. ‘This thing has been blowing up. I thought you said you weren’t joining The M.O.B.?’
‘She called again?’ I asked, sitting upright and drying my hands on the edge of Jenny’s shorts.
‘She called so many times,’ Jenny replied, pulling the fabric out of my hands. ‘What does she want? Does she want to come meet us? Can she bring Beyoncé with her?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, putting my phone on Do Not Disturb and refusing to think about it. ‘And I don’t care.’
‘I still think you’re going to regret this,’ she sang as everyone started back towards the staircase and back up to the house.
‘And I think you’re going to regret forcing me to play American Ninja Warrior when you promised me a relaxing holiday,’ I told her, whacking her on the arse as we walked. ‘What are we doing now?’
‘You,’ Jenny said, whacking me right back. ‘Are going to get lunch and then hit the spa. I have to work. Also, have you been working out? Your ass feels like steel.’
‘You’re a terrible liar,’ I reminded he
r. ‘Really? You have to work?’
She nodded, pulling her hair up into a ponytail as if to drive home the point.
‘If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were avoiding me,’ I said lightly. ‘What happened to you, me, a cocktail and the hot tub?’
‘We’ll do that later,’ she promised before picking up her pace and racing off to catch up with her assistant, Sumi, at the front of the group. ‘Enjoy your massage!’
‘What’s up with her?’ Louisa asked, falling into step beside me.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied, watching as she ran off. ‘But I’m definitely going to find out.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘Hello?’
‘Am I glad to hear your voice,’ I sighed as I sank into the sun lounger outside my room ten minutes later. ‘How are you? How’s Al? Is she there, can I talk to her?’
‘Angela?’ he yelled into my ear. Drums and guitars crashed in the background as I held the phone away from me and put Alex on speaker.
‘I’m at rehearsal, I can’t hear you. Can I call you back?’
‘Oh,’ I replied, deflating slightly. ‘Where’s Al?’
‘At home with my mom.’
Oh Christ. I just knew that woman was out buying Alice more rubbish I’d have to accidentally destroy next time I did a load of washing. If I came home and she’d pierced my daughter’s ears, I’d be piercing her face. With my foot.
‘It’s gorgeous out here but Jenny’s being weird,’ I shouted over the escalating noise in the background. Craig had drunk too much caffeine, I could totally tell. ‘I think she’s avoiding me.’
‘Ange, I’m sorry, we’re right in the middle of this, can I call you back? We’re doing a song with Johnny Jefferson at the show and he’s only around to rehearse tonight,’ he explained. ‘And I can’t hear a damn thing.’
I listened to the noise in the background. Didn’t sound like Johnny Jefferson to me. Sounded like a girl.
‘Who else is there?’ I asked. ‘Can you put me on speaker? Can I say hello to everyone?’
‘It’s just us,’ he replied. ‘And we’re working.’
‘Weird, sounds like a woman’s vocals down the line,’ I said, wincing as I said it. I sounded like a suspicious idiot and I knew it.
‘Yeah, Cara is here too,’ Alex said. ‘Anyway—’
‘Cara?’
‘You know Cara.’
I did not know Cara.
‘She’s opening for us, we’re doing a whole thing all of us together at the end of the show,’ he said before sighing loudly. ‘Ange, I can’t hear shit. I’m hanging up now. I’ll call you later.’
‘I love you,’ I called loudly.
But he was already gone.
Well. So far, so shit, I thought as I lay back on the sun lounger.
‘Go to Hawaii, everyone said,’ I muttered, scrolling through my text messages to find nothing from no one. ‘You’ll have an amazing time, everyone said.’
But instead of lapping up the gorgeous blue skies and sweet ocean air, I was worried about a grumpy husband, confused by an evasive best friend and, quite frankly, terrified of how James might go about getting his revenge. At least Louisa and I had the afternoon at the spa to look forward to, I reminded myself. Please, universe, distract me from my own nonsense. It was almost impossible to worry about anything when you were slathered in oil and getting a nice rub-down from hopefully a very attractive man named Sven.
‘You’re being irrational,’ I said out loud before taking myself back inside for a shower. ‘You’ve had too much sleep, too much time to think and you’re being irrational. Everything is going to be all right.’
And I very nearly believed it.
‘And then what did he say?’ Louisa asked when I relayed my conversation with Alex an hour later in the lounge at Hala Lanai spa.
‘That he couldn’t hear anything and he had to get on with work,’ I replied. I wrapped my fluffy spa robe tightly around myself and sulked. I had not done a good job of convincing myself to cheer up even though I had done an excellent job of eating a burger at lunch. But here we were, in Bertie Bennett’s private spa, and I was determined not to ruin the afternoon for myself. Every time you opened a door on the estate, it was another piece of heaven. When Camilla had said we were getting massages, I’d imagined someone coming to my room with one of those fold-out-pasting-table-type things, but no, that was not the case. Behind what seemed like the perfectly normal door of a perfectly normal villa, we’d found a dimly lit lounge, complete with huge, squishy sofas, big fluffy blankets and pillows, pillows and more pillows for us to wait on while they prepped the massage rooms. Serene spa music played over hidden speakers, accompanied by a distant rumbling. When I pulled back the blind that covered a window, I discovered the rumbling came from the waterfall outside. Just in case we wanted to act out our own Herbal Essences ad.
‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ Lou insisted gently, bringing me back to the here and now. ‘He was rehearsing, wasn’t he? You could hear the music in the background, couldn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘But why would he be weird about this Cara woman being there? And why would he say I know because I definitely don’t. The only Cara I can think of is Delevingne.’
Sitting on the opposite sofa, her profile etched out against the five candles she’d positioned all around her, Lily closed the magazine she was pretending to read and sat up, excited.
‘Maybe it is Cara Delevingne?’
I turned to look at our previously silent team captain. Couldn’t have got her massage at a different time, could she? Of course not.
‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’ I asked.
‘Just a suggestion,’ she replied, picking up the magazine and flipping through the pages theatrically.
I twisted my wedding ring around and around on my finger. It was so frustrating. I’d never doubted Alex before. Why did these ideas have to sneak into my head when I was a million miles away? Louisa pulled my hands apart and fixed me with a gentle stare.
‘Look, Angela, when I thought Tim was cheating on me, there were so many signs. He was working late, Gracie was taking up all my time and we weren’t having sex at all. Every conversation we had was about the baby. He felt like he wasn’t getting any attention and I just felt weird, like I didn’t know who I was any more. You haven’t had any of that, have you?’
‘No,’ I replied, grabbing a handful of freshly baked miniature macadamia nut brownies from the coffee table in front of us. ‘Absolutely none of that applies to us in the slightest.’
I stuffed three brownies in my mouth and chewed madly.
‘And Tim wasn’t even cheating, it was just some stupid attention-seeking flirtation. I was hypersensitive and his precious male ego was bruised. Maybe he’s a bit annoyed that you went away and maybe you’re feeling a bit insecure about yourself. That’s all normal for a new mum and dad.’
‘Unless he is having an affair with Cara Delevingne,’ Lily said. ‘You’re married to the lead singer from Stills, aren’t you? He’s fit.’
‘Ladies?’
The door to the treatment room opened before I could put Lily through it, face first. A pretty Hawaiian woman wearing loose pale pink trousers and a T-shirt waved us through the door into an even darker, circular room, lit only by a couple of candles. The whole building was made of wood and this had fire hazard written all over it but I was ten seconds away from a two-hour massage and if Bernie Bennett wanted to play fast and loose with health and safety regulations, who was I to tell him otherwise?
Inside the room, I saw two more women in identical outfits and three massage beds, positioned so that the heads of the beds pointed into the centre of the room.
‘We’re all getting our massages together?’ Louisa asked before I could.
‘Yes,’ confirmed the first woman. ‘Today, the three of you will be experiencing traditional Lomilomi massage, a spiritual massage practice from the islands of Hawaii. It is a massage conduc
ted with prayer and intention that has passed down through healers in our communities for centuries, connecting your body and your soul.’
‘Sick,’ Lily said, unfastening her robe and dropping it to the floor. ‘You need us naked, yeah?’
Need or not, Lily clearly had no concerns with stripping off in front of strangers and, for the first time since we’d met, I was a little bit jealous of her. Not because her body was perfect (even though it was) but because she really didn’t seem to care what anyone thought about her.
‘However you are most comfortable,’ the therapist replied, unmoved by her charge’s naked stretching. ‘We will step out for a moment. Please make yourselves comfortable under the blankets, face down on the beds.’
I slipped out of my robe and quickly hopped under the blankets on the closest bed while Lily threw herself into a thankfully bum-to-the-wall downward dog.
‘So good to stretch before a massage, don’t you think?’ she said, looking up at us from underneath a curtain of glossy brown hair.
‘Just get on the bloody bed,’ Louisa grunted. Motherhood had done nothing to improve my friend’s patience and I for one was grateful. ‘And Angela. Alex is not having an affair with Cara Delevingne, you know he isn’t. What’s really bothering you?’
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted, shuffling down the bed until my face was safely slotted into the cushioned cradle. ‘It’s not one thing, it’s a lot of little things. Going back to work, missing Al. I just feel off. And Jenny is definitely avoiding me, have you noticed?’
‘She’s been here the whole time,’ she replied, tucking her hair behind her ears to keep it out of the cradle attachment. ‘How is she avoiding you?’
‘She’s avoiding being on her own with me,’ I corrected. ‘And now that I think about it, she has been for ages.’
‘Go on then,’ Louisa said, giving in to my paranoia but making it very clear she was humouring me at best. ‘Convince me.’
‘Before she invited me on this trip, I hadn’t seen her in ages,’ I started as the treatment room door opened and three pairs of feet crept quietly across the floor. ‘And she hasn’t been over to see Al in months. She’s always got an excuse not to come over. Seriously, it’s been months. Al doesn’t even know who she is. Even Mason pops in sometimes, on his way home from CrossFit competitions. He’s obsessed with her and yet Jenny is never around these days. It’s all I can do to drag her out for coffee.’
