by Megan Tayte
‘How they must feel right now…’ I said to Luke beside me. ‘Kind of makes you want to grab a surfboard, doesn’t it?’
‘Then why don’t you?’ He caught my look and added, ‘There’s a women’s comp, you know. If you practise, I think you could enter next year. I’d come and cheer you on…’
Next year. I wouldn’t be here next year.
Ignoring the squeeze of my heart, I said, ‘Surfing with you in the cove is enough for me. I want to do that.’
‘Tomorrow evening?’
‘Tomorrow as soon as we get back.’
He laughed at my impatience and kissed me, but not for long – a shout went up and we broke apart to watch a surfer take the biggest wave yet. I watched him surf. I watched all of them surf. The whole scene – the dancing surfers, the gold-tipped waves, the sky streaked with pink – was like a painting in a gallery you just can’t turn away from. Mesmerising. Only this scene was ever-changing: every minute the sun sank a little further and the light changed, until eventually the reds and yellows of the spectrum were gone, leaving only blue.
When the sun set there was a second of disorientation all round as the event organisers turned up a series of very bright floodlights directed to illuminate the main section of the beach and sea. Then a cheer rang out and gathered strength: the party had begun. Within an hour the atmosphere had transformed from chilled to electric. A live band was bashing out what Si informed me was ‘funky bounce rock’, and everywhere people were dancing and shouting and laughing and drinking. The buzz was brilliant – but agonising. I had a headache, a bad one, and all the painkillers I had on me hadn’t shifted it. So when Luke headed off to the Beach Bar to get us another round of drinks, I took the chance to slip away from our little base of operations, which was situated ear-splittingly close to a stack of speakers, in search of a little calm.
I walked down to the water and watched the surfers. In the dark they were streaks of yellow and orange and green and pink neon. The wind had picked up, and with it the waves. They appeared black now, and I moved closer, searching for some remaining trace of blue. And then a hand on my arm yanked me back. I shrieked.
‘Scarlett! It’s me.’
‘Jude! What the hell!’
He pulled me along a little way, so that we were right at the edge of the floodlights’ reach, half in the light and half in the shadow. Then he turned me to face him.
‘What were you thinking?’ he demanded. ‘Right then.’
‘What?’
‘What were you thinking?’
I’d never seen him so agitated. I tried to shake off his hand on my arm but he held on grimly.
‘Jude, please – you’re scaring me.’
‘I’m scaring you! Scarlett, what were you doing at the water’s edge?’
‘Watching the surfers.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Well, what the hell else would I be doing?’
He let go of me abruptly and exhaled loudly.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I said, rubbing my arm.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry. When I saw you walking to the water I thought… I thought you were going in.’
‘Why would I do that?’
‘Why wouldn’t you? Sienna did...’
In a second I understood:
‘How many more sunrises do you think I have?’
‘How many do you need to say goodbye?’
‘All of them.’
‘Are you sure?’
I hadn’t realised then what he meant. Now I did. Sienna hadn’t lived out her natural life, hadn’t taken every moment she could have, hadn’t allowed anyone – herself or others – to suffer through her illness. She’d chosen an end point. She’d killed herself. I could do the same. I should do the same?
Suicide.
I saw a woman on a bleak and windswept clifftop. Crying. Tortured. Desperate. Placing her baby in the arms of a benevolent stranger. And then stepping back, and falling, and falling, until jagged rocks ended her pain. She had chosen that death. She had chosen Death.
It hurt, it hurt. Pain, deep in my head. Hot. Horrific. I grabbed my head and I staggered and I felt Jude catch me and I heard his voice in my ear but I couldn’t respond; it was hard enough just to breathe.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please. I can’t do what she did. I just can’t.’
‘Then don’t. Don’t do that.’
Something shifted in my head – I felt it, I felt the pressure lift.
‘Is the pain better?’ he said.
‘Yes.’ Abruptly, I realised I was sitting on the sand and Jude was crouched in front of me. ‘Did you heal me?’ I asked.
He shook his head and said gently, ‘I can’t heal what’s in your head, Scarlett.’ He let go of my hands and used the sleeve of his jacket to wipe my cheeks. They were wet, I realised; I’d been crying.
‘It never even occurred to me before,’ I told him. I needed him to understand. ‘And now I see why Sienna did it, and I should do it too, for her, to go to her quickly…’
I’d pictured Sienna’s death many times. I’d pictured her underwater, serene in her surrender as she sank, gracefully, into the darkness. But when I reimagined the scene with me as the subject, it was entirely different. I was thrashing about, screaming silently.
‘I can’t, Jude. I just can’t do that! All those months, grieving Sienna, that was the root of it all – I could never understand because I could never do that.’
For the first time that night he smiled. ‘Scarlett,’ he said, ‘you’re a Cerulean through and through. You shall not kill, remember? We believe that life is sacred, a gift. We believe that none of us have the right to take a life, any life. It’s good to think that. It’s –’
‘There you are!’
I always thought ‘jumped guiltily’ was a figure of speech, but there was nothing innocent about the way both Jude and I jerked at the sound of Cara’s shout. I turned to see her walking the last few feet towards us. She was smiling, but there was a sharpness in her eyes that made me wonder how long she’d been watching us talk.
‘Hi, Cara,’ I said in what I hoped was a relaxed tone.
‘What are you two doing sitting over here?’ she said. ‘In the shadows. All alone.’
Jude took over: ‘Scarlett felt rough. I brought her over here for some air.’
Pretty much the same line he’d given Luke outside the club the night before. Apparently, this was his go-to excuse for being huddled up with me. But whereas Luke had melted quickly into concern, Cara was still regarding us with suspicion.
‘Right then,’ I said, getting up off the sand. I lurched a little on the uneven surface and Jude, already on his feet, reached for me. I caught the look on Cara’s face at that little intimate gesture and stepped back smartly.
‘C’mon, Cara,’ I said, sliding my arm through hers, ‘lead the way to the bouncy funk.’
‘Funky bounce rock,’ she corrected automatically as I tugged her away. Once we were out of Jude’s earshot, she stopped in front of me, so that we were face to face. ‘Scarlett,’ she said seriously, ‘what was all that about?’
‘I had a headache. I sat down for a bit. Now I feel better.’
I figured the truth was my best weapon against my perceptive friend. Eyes narrowed, she weighed me up. Then, finally, she relaxed.
‘Idiot,’ she said, poking me hard in the ribs. ‘I told you to lay off those energy drinks. Take my advice: stick to rum.’
*
The night surf formally ended at eleven o’clock with an epic firework display. My head complained at the booms and bangs, but my heart did not – leaning against Luke’s chest, his arms wrapped around me, I knew this was a precious memory in the making, one I would come back to in my mind again and again… after.
The fireworks were exploding in a frantic rhythm, but I was calm as I watched them. The feelings Jude had awakened earlier were gone now, burnt out as quickly as the shower of sparks from a rocket. If anything, that li
ttle incident on the fringe of the light had made me more resolute than ever to focus on life now. Jude was right that life was sacred. I should treasure it.
A quick succession of explosions illuminated the entire bay.
‘It’s beautiful here,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it?’
Luke’s arms tightened around me. ‘It’s beautiful here because you’re here.’
‘Soppy,’ I teased.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But you have that effect on me. You make me soppy. You make me happy. You make me… you make me want do crazy things and amazing things and…’ He leaned in close and growled in my ear another kind of thing.
‘Cavendish,’ I said through my grin. ‘Are you drunk?’
‘Yes. On you.’
‘And a little bit of beer.’
‘I only had three bottles! It’s you, Scarlett Blake. You make me feel this way. Do you know, this is the furthest I’ve come from home since Mum and Dad died? You make me want to live bigger. See more. Do more. With you.’
I stepped out of the circle of his arms, so that I could turn around and look up at him. He was so happy; I didn’t think I’d ever seen him so happy. Reaching up, I cupped his cheeks. They were hot under my hands, and full with his smile.
‘What if this moment was all we had?’ I said. ‘What if there was no more, just this – just you and me on a beach watching fireworks? What would you do next, Luke?’
For a moment he just gazed at me, and I counted one, two, three flashes of red from the sky reflected in his eyes. Then he reached for me
and there was no beach
and there were no fireworks
and there was no sadness
and there was no longing
there was only that kiss, and it was everything, and it was endless.
30: TYGER, TYGER
When the weekend ended, so too did the summer, it seemed. We returned to an autumnal Twycombe with a biting sea breeze and a sky so thick with cloud that glimpses of blue were rare. In a matter of a fortnight, t-shirts were swapped for jumpers, ice-cold sodas for mugs of tea and sunglasses for umbrellas. Surfing was harder: wilder, colder. The cottage was draughty and gloomy, and a thick woollen cardigan became essential wear. Even walking Chester on the beach was more of an effort – I had to steel myself to shrug on a coat and step out beneath the glowering skies.
When I look back now on those last weeks in September and October, before everything changed, it strikes me how hard I tried to live the fantasy not the reality. If my life were a movie, I wanted this to be the montage sequence – a fast-paced, inspiring collection of scenes epitomising a life well lived. Shining, happy faces. Beautiful backdrops. Endearing kookiness. An upbeat backing track by a really cool band.
In truth, the song was wrong – too slow, too poignant. And occasionally, as if the movie director were set on subversion, a scene cropped up in the mix that undermined the theme. A recycle bin full of empty painkiller boxes. A dog barking at a frying pan in flames. A tiger stalking around the cottage garden.
But I blazed on regardless. I brushed aside the headaches and the odd moment in the cottage when I seemed to have lost a slice of time. I didn’t worry about the spate of little accidents that befell me – so I was clumsy, absentminded; so what? I refused to think about when the end would come, and how my final moments would play out. I was polite but distant with Jude, urging him to back off for now, let me live my life. (He did, but he watched me often, I knew; I felt his eyes on me.)
Bucket-listing, I suppose you’d call it: in those last weeks, I did anything and everything I thought was important and meaningful, or not remotely meaningful but sheer fun.
I packed a picnic and took Luke back to Heybrook Bay, where we climbed on the rocks and collected shells and paddled until our feet were numb.
I worked my way through the South West Coast Path’s recommended dog walks with Chester, taking in the very best of Devonshire scenery and country pubs along the way.
I bought a pogo stick and mastered the art of kangarooing around the drive of the cottage.
I sat through a Bella–Edward–Jacob marathon with Cara, all five films back to back, ten hours, Twihard.
I visited Grannie Cavendish and read to her the entire Hans Christian Andersen compendium.
I talked Luke into driving to Babbacombe Model Village, an hour away, where we spent an afternoon as Gullivers in the land of Lilliput.
I rang in for a competition on a local radio station and won a year’s supply of yoghurt for naming five Greek gods in ten seconds.
I had a stab at teaching Chester to doggie surf: disastrous but hilarious.
I hung out with a partially blind loggerhead turtle called Snorkel at Plymouth’s National Marine Aquarium.
I travelled to Stonehenge and lay naked amid the ancient stones and hundreds of other blue-arsed participants for photographer Spencer Tunick’s latest live nude installation.
I took Luke to the theatre for a touring production of Chicago, then gave him a reprisal of ‘And All That Jazz’ back home dressed in one of Cara’s basques.
I blew more than two hundred pounds on an eighteen-inch Double Chocolate Dream Gateaux from Patisserie Valerie and took it over to Luke and Cara’s along with three forks.
I joined Si and Duvali letterboxing on Dartmoor, orienteering and solving clues and generally clambering about in the mud.
I booked a one-day culinary course at River Cottage HQ, where Luke and I learned to make artisan breads.
I called my mother once, twice.
I went zip-wiring with Cara: fifteen metre-high platform, one hundred and fifty metre-long descent wire dangling over a lake.
I threw an early Halloween party at the cottage for all the surfing lot, with carved pumpkins and cobwebs and spider cookies and brew-ha-ha punch and blood orange martinis and a ‘Monster Mash’-led soundtrack.
I wangled tickets for an Ed Sheeran concert at the Pavilion and took Luke, and when Ed sang our song from the folly, we kissed, and kissed, and kissed.
I loved it, every minute. I was frenzied, unstoppable, relentless, like an artist in the throes of creation or an addict on the very pinnacle of a high. I told myself I could go on like this forever – forever was here, now, after all. But by the time leaves were carpeting the ground and cold October rains were misting the cove, the spirit was willing but the body was weakening.
Jude warned me, of course, that it was coming: the turning point. His pessimism may have been valid, but it was depressing, and so I ignored him at all turns. But later, afterwards, I would wish I had listened. For Luke’s sake.
*
‘That is one funny looking animal.’
‘It’s awesome.’
‘It’s got a Gonzo from The Muppets thing going on with its nose.’
‘Look – it’s coming over. Gorgeous!’
‘What is it? Some kind of anteater-pig-hippo descendent?’
‘It’s a tapir, Luke. Closest relatives are rhinos and horses.’
‘What are you, some kind of zoologist?’
‘Nope. It says on the sign… look. ’
‘I’d rather look at – oof!’
I turned around to find Luke stepping back smartly from a small toddler bearing an enormous plastic lightsaber.
‘Sorry! Sorry!’ called a harried-looking woman hurrying down the path towards us. ‘Ivor! Naughty. You don’t run off.’
‘Piggie-’ippo!’ explained the toddler to his mother, pointing a pudgy finger at the enclosure beyond.
‘Tapir, actually,’ Luke told little Ivor knowledgeably, then winked at me.
I looked at the two of them together, my gentle giant with a tiny person at his knees. Something inside me ached at the sight. I tugged on Luke’s hand to pull him away. ‘It’s freezing out here. Coffee?’
‘Make it a hot chocolate and you’re on.’
We headed up the hill to the warmth of the restaurant, hand in hand, the sound of Ivor’s ‘Mummy, a peer! Mummy, look: a peer-piggi
e-’ippo!’ echoing in our ears.
It was by no means a day for a zoo trip: the weather was cold with grey skies leaching out intermittent drizzle. We’d been planning to come to Dartmoor Zoo before now, but had been waiting for blue skies. Then this morning, when I’d woken up with an empty Sunday stretching ahead and the ticking of the clock thrumming through the cottage, I’d called Luke and told him to grab his wellies – today was the day, weather be damned. In fact, he’d turned up in his usual trainers (now leaden with mud), but at least he’d been willing, if a little perplexed by my sudden urge to see capybaras and coatis. He’d long since stopped commenting on my energetic, seize-the-day mentality, opting instead to sit back and go along for the ride.
And it was worth it. Even on a gloomy day like this, it was impossible not to appreciate the magic of this small, family-run zoo, tucked away down winding lanes and set on a hillside with spectacular views over the surrounding countryside. There was a simplicity to the place that set it apart from other zoos I’d visited: commercial ones, jam-packed with animals and burger stands and play areas in vibrant primary colours. Here, it was all about the animals. Big enclosures with intelligent designs allowed visitors to get intimately close to animals that roamed around their spaces with confidence, masters of their domains. Here, no depressed raccoon stared miserably out at you from its cell, no deranged wolf ran in endless loops around its cage; here, when they set the birds of prey free for the flying display, they came back.
But it wasn’t just the animals who were relaxed here, it was me too – despite my block-of-ice feet, despite the mud splattered up my jeans, despite the headache building at my temples. In the restaurant, I watched Luke as he told a story of the first time he ever saw an elephant, as a young boy. His eyes were bright with the memory, his cheeks flushed fit to scald, his smile brilliant. And I thought, this, right here, I could just stay here: eternity.
‘Scarlett?’
‘Huh?’
‘You were doing it again.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Zoning out.’
