She stood at one end, where the blond boy had stood, the bamboo faintly rustling between her and the distant pavilion. Underwater lights had transformed the pool into a block of green-blue luminescence, and wavelets on the surface caught flecks of white from a standing lamp. Shivering light.
Thirteen years old! She smiled as she lowered herself down on the edge of the pool and dangled her legs in the water. And all over some hyperactive kid with a rat-tail in his hair.
Her head jerked up at the deep liquid crash at the far end; a swell lapped over the edge and wet her skirt. At first she didn’t see anything, just a froth of bubbles. Then a pale figure slid out from under the turbulence, gliding submerged towards her. Something touched her foot and the figure did a perfect turn, streaking to the far end without coming up for air, then back again. When it arrived at her feet, rippling fingers reached out and touched the wall, and a boy burst through the surface of the water and stood, gasping. The pool was shallower than she’d thought, only waist deep. He vaulted up onto the edge, twisting to sit next to her.
A white smile, almost too big for his lean face; short hair so pale it seemed transparent, flattened against his head; pale eyes; and all tinted strangely by the underwater light. Young – seventeen or eighteen – but a head taller than Erin. He rubbed a hand across his scalp, making the hair stand up in little spikes and spraying her with droplets. A cool breath of cut grass and chlorine.
“Hi,” he said. Cocky. Grinning.
She returned his smile warily: “Hello.”
He pursed his lips, as if to restrain that knowing smile. She could see he was shivering, goosebumps on his thighs below the black swimsuit. “You’re cold,” she said.
“Flippin’ freezing.” He rubbed his arms with an exaggerated shudder and shuffled his thighs a little closer to hers. Gave her a jokey nudge.
She laughed. Impulsively, she put her arm around him and rubbed his back, amazed at the feel of such young, elastic flesh. He was beautiful, broad-shouldered with flat, hard muscles in his arms and chest and thighs. He leant in closer, putting his wet chin on her shoulder.
Erin stiffened.
It was a kind of kiss. She could feel his lips and nose and eyelashes, pressed against the side of her face. His clean breath. He felt very cool, and for a moment she wondered whether this really was a boy in her arms or something made from water, from grass. She almost turned to find his mouth, almost laid a hand on his thigh.
But she pulled back, lifted her feet from the pool and stood up, graceless. He watched her, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. A rapacious gesture. No longer boyish. His skin was evenly bathed in blue, but his eyes were even lighter, as if they weren’t eyes at all but small windows through which sunlit water shone.
“You should have a towel,” she said. “Warm yourself up.”
She stood a moment longer, then turned and walked away, half-blinded by the lanterns that led up the slope into the dark. The flush in her cheeks felt like sunburn.
In the morning she woke from dreams of damp, blue light. For a while she stared up at the ceiling … had it even happened? It wouldn’t be the first time she’d risen from sleep with dream and reality dissolving in her mind. But when she covered her face with her hands she smelt grass and chlorine, and found she was smiling. The clock next to the bed said ten thirty, way too late for breakfast. Erin hadn’t slept so long in years.
In the Dining Pavilion she found coffee, and the round man. The others were all off on a “vineyard ramble”.
“Matthew, hi!”
“Um, Michael.”
“Oh, right. Sorry.”
Her gaze slid away from him and out of the window, into the air beyond. The lawns sloped down in invitation, down to where the golden bamboo nodded over the pool. The vineyards stretched to touch the feet of the mountain, and was that a pair of hawks in the sky? She smiled apologetically at Michael and slipped out onto the deck.
Clouds were rolling in low, hiding the mountain. Like the weather, Erin felt reckless, changeable. She walked down the sloping grass – steeper, it seemed, than before; she could barely keep up with her feet, and broke into a little trot.
The pool was pale and ordinary in the daytime – no longer the night’s dramatic arena of aqua glass. She had that feeling of returning to a childhood scene, of being too large, things much smaller than remembered. The day smelt different: crisper, colder, slightly briney. But when she dipped her fingers into the water, she was surprised to find it warm. It began to rain, large cold drops. Erin opened her mouth to catch them. The difference in temperature was voluptuous.
She’d always loved to swim in the rain. She glanced over her shoulder: no one around, and she was out of sight of the pavilion now. Anyway, she’d be leaving soon, this morning if possible, before the others returned. What would it matter if she got caught taking a dip?
Quickly she stripped off her blouse, her jeans, down to her underwear. As the rain grew heavier, she slid into the pool and swam a length, two. Then turned on her back and floated, droplets on her face. With her eyes closed, her body was weightless; she could no longer tell up from down, or the rain from the water that held her. The wetness and rushing sound enclosed her, buoyed her; she could almost have slept.
Then she sensed a new pull below her in the water. Something forming from the massed droplets, a body rising. She rolled over, and opened her eyes under the rain-dimpled surface to see him suspended beneath her, rippling and indistinct. Silver bubbles bursting through his smile, short hair waving like translucent sea moss. He was naked and palest blue: blue skin, blue teeth, blue hair. The water pressed silence into her ears. She put out her hands and they were blue too, and when she flattened her palms against his chest, their skins seemed to merge. Hands took her hips and pulled her down. The crown of his head was against her throat, lips at her breast. Fingers cold through the fabric of her bra, and then that was gone, floating away like seaweed; fingertips pushing down her spine to its base. She kicked her panties away, each movement slowed against the water. Turning, rolling, no breath needed, breathing water. She gripped her ankles around the small of his back, pulled him into her and kissed him, his hip bones sharp against the insides of her thighs. Hands squeezing her waist, tongue cool in her mouth. His smooth length was at first slippery in her arms, then found purchase, gripping, locking hard.
She tried to hold the moment, still and breathless; but they floated together to the surface, rolling. She felt the rain pummelling her back like shot. She tried to grasp him, keep him at her centre, but she felt his body falling, separating from her, dissolving into water in her arms. At last her lungs gave out, and she turned her head to gasp a breath.
When she opened her eyes again, she was alone in the pool. She floated in zero gravity, staring straight up into the falling rain.
Eventually she stood, waist-high in the water, letting the rain stream over her. Her feet tangled in her bra and panties, and she picked them up with her toes. Holding the damp fabric against her chest, she made for the edge of the pool, striding slow-motion through the cooling water.
Her clothes were soaked through from the rain by the time she got back to the pavilion. Light spilled out onto the deck from inside. Hugging herself, she leant against the window. Her breath misted the glass.
Alice and a couple of the other men and women were inside, sitting in armchairs with coffee mugs, walking shoes kicked off. Erin saw the warm connections that were building between them, saw them clearly: soft orange lines chalked across space, tentatively linking each to each. Alice was laughing and leaning towards Michael. None of them was very young, none perfectly beautiful. Erin saw the lines on their faces, the first strands of grey, the excess weight. Their caution, their worldliness. But still they seemed hopeful, game, ready to try. Could she enter there? She crossed her arms tightly, about to turn away.
“You must be freezing,” said a voice behind her.
It was the man from the night before, the dark one who’d
looked straight through her. Now he seemed to see her. Or was it perhaps just the wet T-shirt effect of her sodden clothes? He offered a cardigan. “Did you fall in?”
She laughed and shook her head, and he held the jersey while she poked her arms into the sleeves. It was much too big for her, porridge-coloured and smelling of tobacco, but she was glad to cover herself.
“Doug,” he said, holding out a hand. “We didn’t really meet last night.”
Blunt fingertips, coarse hair on his wrists. But his grip was warm and dry. “Let’s go inside,” he said, and she let him put a palm against her back to steer her in. “You’re shivering.”
But she wasn’t, really. She wasn’t trembling at all.
The Boulder
When the boulder came down from the mountainside, it must’ve made a sound like the end of the world, rocking the ground with each thunderous landing and recoil. It must’ve sung through the air, thrashing the bush on the slope into a sappy pulp with every bounce, on its way to embed itself in the lawn of the luxury holiday home below.
Dan did not hear or see this passage. He slept deeply, as teenagers do, waking only when the last impact shuddered the foundations of the house. He knew immediately what it was, though. Not an earthquake, not a bomb. His first thought on waking was this: the mountain is falling on top of us.
In the ensuing silence, he didn’t even sit up. It was not his house, after all, not his place to investigate. The two collie dogs that had slept in the room with him both went to sit at the closed door, as if expecting a visitor, but they didn’t bark. No other footsteps in the house. Dan lay very very still, playing dead, until the trick seemed to work and he slipped back under, into sleep.
It was late morning when he woke again. He dressed and walked through the house and opened the glass sliding-door into the back garden.
Half the lawn had been replaced by a grey-brown boulder as high as the house.
The rock was two-tone, raw side up, stained brown where the earth had held it. It looked like something from another planet, bearing traces of a different world. A few crushed fronds were trapped in its crevices, and the sharp, sweet smell of high mountain places.
The more nervous dog trembled at his heels, while the other snuffled around the base of the boulder. Dan was trembling too. The rock seemed precarious: the lawn, at a slight rake, was on the verge of tipping it towards him. The slightest touch might send the monster sliding again, right over him and through the glass doors and on into the house.
But after he’d stared at the monumental guest for a while longer, it seemed clear that the boulder had chosen its place of rest. It didn’t creak or shift. He went a little closer.
The rock had not had an easy descent – it was bruised, with paler stone showing through on the scuffed edges. One small impact mark, at eye level, was almost perfectly circular, a neat scoop of strawberry pink. He thought of Colette: a touch of delicacy on the scarred brow of the stone.
He reached out, then pulled his hand away. The scene should not be disturbed. Because had there not been a crime here somehow? Damage? Looking up, he could see the destructive strides of the boulder, a clear trail all the way up to a patch of exposed soil on the ridge. Surely someone would want to know who was responsible? And here, the evidence looming over him, undeniable.
Dan went back inside. He took the dirty wine glasses into the kitchen and put them in the sink. He picked up Colette’s shoes and carried them to the main bedroom. The bed was empty.
He was sixteen and Colette, a year and a half older, was his very first girlfriend. She was a slender girl with light, curling hair. At times her long, fine-boned face, with its delicately flaring nostrils, made him think of an ivory horse in a chess set. They’d known each other for only a few months when she invited him to spend the week-long holiday in her family beach house.
“I’ll meet your folks?” he asked, nervous.
“No, are you crazy?”
So it would just be the two of them. He hid his amazement.
“I go there all the time,” she said. “My parents are cool with it.”
Dan was husky, large for his age. He was reminded that Colette had not yet guessed how young he really was.
The holiday was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him. Colette, who had her driver’s licence, came to pick him up in a shiny little car.
But once they got to the house – which was huge, white, and filled with light and views of blue water – he was awkward, unsure of what they were there to do. His family had never had holiday houses, or holidays really, and he didn’t know how to behave. In the first few days they had sex several times – which was still astonishing to him, barely believable. Otherwise, all she wanted to do was lie on the beach, which was five minutes away on the other side of the road. He went with her, but secretly he felt a yearning in the other direction: up, to the topmost point of the high rocky ground that lay behind the houses.
The big windows and patio doors woke tingles in his scalp. Once, when he was ten, on a school trip to the public swimming pool, he’d run in his bathing trunks towards the glitter of water and instead slammed head first into the shock of a glass wall. He remembered the dumb halt of it, and then a blank. Waking up a few moments later, he’d felt at first a nameless despair, and later shame. It still gave him a quake of strangeness, to think of that missing moment, black as space. Thick head, he remembered the teacher saying. That’s what saved you.
“Great view,” he said to Colette. It was not the first time he’d made this observation.
“Mm,” she said. “I told them to get burglar bars, but Mom and Dad love having it open like this. All the light. Anyway, we’ve got serious security. Those guys are here in like two minutes, with guns. Plus they cruise past every half hour.”
“Great,” he said. “I’ll try not to look too suspicious.”
She gave him a laugh, a full, genuine one, and he laughed back in relief. He said to himself: maybe she is waiting for you to be decisive, to show her something new. That is what a boyfriend does. You could just say: I want to go up the mountain today. Or, better: Let’s go up the mountain.
So that’s what he did say. Just like that.
“Ah …” she said. “Let’s not, and say we did.” She was reading the label on a bottle of suntan oil. Already she had on her tangerinecoloured bikini.
He flushed. “Sure, no, I just thought …”
“You can go, if you want,” she said, smoothing the oil onto her legs. “Go.”
There was no path. Dan climbed up as high as he could, the dogs running ahead, until he could see over the crest of the hill and almost into the valley beyond. Near the top, the boulders were heaped up against the side of the mountain, waiting their turn like huge, slow children on a diving board. You could see where others had already rolled and come to rest on the slope below. Right down at the bottom, some had been built into the fabric of the houses, the road, the sea wall.
There was dampness on his upper lip and under his arms. Around him the mountain sweated and shifted too. When he came down he would be smelling, scratched up; he did not like her to see him like that.
One last boulder blocked his way to the summit. He kicked at its base. There was no danger of shifting it: the rock was deeply rooted. It was like kicking at the earth’s core. Nonetheless, he thought, with the next rains things would tumble, rearrange. Mountains were always falling down.
He laid his cheek against it, smelling the cool greenish-grey of the stone. Then he gripped and started to climb, finding the holds and ridges by touch, clumsy but strong. Granite was harder to climb than sandstone – not so many cracks. It hurt his fingers. Halfway up, he imagined Colette watching him from behind and it almost made him slip.
Since they’d arrived here, he’d been holding himself so stiff next to her, terrified of breaking something. Trying to tell when it was okay to touch her and when not. Now it was good to move. To sweat, and not worry about sweating.
At the top, he stood and looked down. The waves were coming in neatly in thin white rolls. Turquoise lozenges of swimming pools gleamed. Land and sea took on their proper proportions, seen from this height: the world was ocean. Such a sombre blue. It made the colour of the pools seem frivolous.
From above, the shapes of the big houses were eccentric, with whorls and curlicues, like multi-chambered seashells. Each one three times the size of his own home, but oddly flimsy: the fallen boulders looked so much more solid.
Colette’s parents owned one of the larger houses, well placed for sea views. He found the broad driveway, the double garage, the patch of grass at the back and the small pink rectangles of the deckchairs.
There was a pale fleck moving diagonally across the green of the lawn. He deciphered it: Colette, settling herself in a deckchair. It was strange to see her so reduced. Although she was not a large person, usually she loomed over him, close up, filling his vision. Strange also to realise that, for the moment, he was glad not to have his face pressed up against that flesh – glad just to breathe. He hated the smell of suntan oil.
Breath had sometimes been hard for him, these last few days, with Colette growing ever more beautiful in the sun. In the evenings, they sat down to eat at the long table in the dining room. She liked to dress for dinner: lipstick, hair up, shoes with a heel. It made her look older, even, than she’d seemed to him before. Usually, she ordered in – but not pizza: exotic restaurant food, always several different dishes. She did not seem to expect him to pay, for which he was silently thankful. They ate from porcelain plates with silver cutlery, and drank fine wine from the extensive rack.
He knew they should be making conversation, like a man and a woman on a date, but he sat searching for words. The formal dining arrangement made it worse. Each night he said less and drank more. There were periods of silence, with Colette staring out of the window at the darkening sea, or checking her cellphone for messages. The dogs kept watch from the corner of the room.
Homing Page 6
