Sheer Abandon

by Penny Vincenzi

  Her phone rang.

  “I just wondered if you could give me a lift to Suffolk this weekend, Miss Hartley. I ought to visit my mum and my car’s completely fucked up.”

  “I hope you don’t use that sort of language in front of your mother.”

  “Of course I don’t. Also, I have this girlfriend down there I really want to see. She’s the most fantastic lay and I’ve been missing her a lot.”

  “Well, I’ll have to look at my diary. Let’s see…Yes, I think I could just about fit you in. Now I do warn you, Ed, I’m horribly busy. I’ve got to see the Centre Forward people, I’ve got to do an interview with the local paper, and Norman Brampton has asked my parents and me to supper on Saturday evening. I’m sorry—”

  “That’s OK. I could come along, say I was your secretary. Hold your microphone while you address your adoring public.”

  “Yes, that’s a really good idea.”

  “Or I could gate-crash the wild evening at the Bramptons’. That sounds really cool. We might even be able to sneak upstairs after the dessert.”

  “Yes, that’s an excellent notion too.”

  “Or how about we leave early on Friday and spend the night at some luxury hotel off the M11? We could have dinner on the way.”

  “Now that is clever. You’re on.”

  “That’s my girl. You’re really living dangerously these days, aren’t you?”

  If only he knew how dangerously. Or rather, if only he never would.

  Tension, trauma, the delight of finally being with Ed again had made her overexcited; she came swiftly, heard herself shouting as she did so, as the bolts of pleasure shot into her, bright, dazzling, ferocious. Later, it was softer, sweeter, and very slow; and after that, she lay curled against him, her arm across him, and told him how happy he made her.

  She woke to find him shaking her, saying, “There, there, it’s OK, shush, shush. You had a bad dream,” he said, as she stared at him. “You were crying, talking in your sleep—”

  “Talking? What did I say?” she asked sharply, terrified.

  “Oh, just a lot of nonsense. Nothing that made any kind of sense.”

  “Yes, but what?”

  “Just a lot of words,” he said, folding her into his arms again, “rubbishy words. Go back to sleep.”

  But she was too afraid for that, and lay awake until dawn, watching him and wondering whatever he would do or say, if he knew.

  She felt much better in the morning. She bought a pile of papers and they sat reading them over breakfast, Martha drinking orange juice and coffee, Ed eating what the place called a full English. He kept offering her bits of it, feeding her mushrooms and tiny slivers of bacon on his fork.

  “I’ll have you overweight in no time,” he said, grinning. “Tell you what you did say last night. When you were asleep.”

  Terror hit her. “What?” she said. “What did I say?”

  “You said, ‘Treacle tart,’” he said, “and then you said, ‘Chips, please.’ Pretty incriminating stuff, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Oh shut up,” said Martha, and threw a bread roll at him.

  They parted at the Coach and Horses, where she was meeting Colin Black; he said he’d call her at her parents’ house in the morning.

  Clio sat on her new beanbag in her new sitting room and stared at her new television. She couldn’t, at this precise moment, quite think why she had got it; it was only Jeremy who had watched TV, but when she had bought the stereo, the young man had said they had special offers on televisions and she had suddenly thought that, actually, she would be on her own a lot and she wouldn’t be getting Jeremy’s supper or catching up on paperwork or returning phone calls, which were all the things she did while he watched it, because she’d have time to do that whenever she wanted, and maybe she’d even be rather bored sometimes, and a television might be a good idea.

  She looked up at the bare windows and at the blinds still in their Habitat bags, then she wandered into the kitchen, put on her new kettle, made herself a cup of coffee in one of her new mugs, and wondered however she was going to survive her new life.

  He had taken it quite well, really. He had listened to her quietly and politely and at the end they had agreed that the only thing was to part. He wanted a chance at least of having children, and clearly, with Clio, it was very unlikely. And she was (equally clearly) not quite the person he had thought; although the deception had initially been very minimal, almost nonexistent, it had grown disproportionately fast, in the end becoming so tragically huge that he could not contemplate trying to cope with it.

  Chlamydia. It was rather a pretty word. It could almost be a girl’s name. It certainly didn’t sound like the name of an ugly, loathsome disease. A disease that appeared to have rendered her totally infertile.

  Of course she didn’t know if it had. There was still hope. But the two last gynaecologists had both expressed grave doubts. Her fallopian tubes appeared completely blocked. And it was absolutely her own fault. She had slept with several men she had hardly known, and had contracted, in blithe ignorance, this awful, symptomless, unsuspected thing that had come back to haunt her when it was—probably—far too late to do anything about it. One of the things she most longed for, motherhood, was to be denied her: all as a result of some foolish, irresponsible behaviour when she was eighteen years old.

  It was on the trip to the island that it started. The dreadful need to know that men—any man—could want her, find her sexually attractive.

  She hadn’t expected sex to matter so much. She had just thought it would be a wonderful trip, meeting lots of people, seeing fantastic places; it hadn’t struck her that with hundreds, thousands of young people wandering untrammelled by any kind of discipline all over the world, pleasure of every kind must include sex in a big way. No one had thought to say, “Now look, Clio, everyone will be having sex all around you, all the time.” Or even tell her that she was very unlikely to return a virgin. Why should they? She had grown up in an extraordinarily uncommunicative family, repressed by her father, suppressed by her sisters, made to feel less pretty, less clever, less interesting than she actually was. She had gone to an all-girls’ school, and had never developed much of a social life, largely because she was shy and overweight and, when she did go to parties, would find herself bypassed for the other sorts of girls, the skinny, confident ones who knew exactly how to exploit their own attractions. After a few miserable experiences of standing in corners, talking to other dull girls, it became easier just to say she wouldn’t go. Of course her sisters had made even that worse, had commented on her weight and the fact that she didn’t seem to go out much, and told her she should learn to deal with her shyness, not give in to it.

  “It’s a form of arrogance,” Artemis had said once, “thinking everyone’s going to be looking at you,” and Ariadne had said yes, quite right and why should they, for heaven’s sake. “Just forget about yourself for once, Clio, think of other people instead.”

  That had been bad enough; it was worse when they tried to be kind and help her with her hair and makeup and suggest diets; none of their advice ever did any good. She’d had one boyfriend in her last term at school; she hadn’t even liked him, but he was someone to go to the cinema with and to take to the end-of-term dance. He had kissed her a couple of times, which she had found revolting, but nothing worse than that; the best thing he had done for her was tell her she was pretty, and she had liked his best friend a lot, which had goaded her into dieting, so that by the time she actually set off on her travels she had lost about a stone, and although comparing herself with the other two she felt she was the size of a house—she took a size fourteen and they clearly took tens—she knew she did look much better. Almost pretty in fact.

  And because the Thai food was the opposite of fattening, she had lost another half stone by the end of the second week on Koh Samui. She caught sight of herself in a cracked mirror in someone’s hut one morning and thought she was almost not fat anymore; her ha
ir had gone lighter with the sun, and she was brown and—well, she began to feel just a little bit self-confident, less apologetic about her appearance at least.

  Although that was a long way from being sexy.

  It was only when she went to Koh Phangan, for one of the full-moon parties that everyone had told her were so wonderful, that she had felt hopelessly, helplessly virginal. She had watched them in the darkness, against the background of the throbbing music, all the wonderful skinny brown bodies, enjoying one another, and although she had started talking to a very sweet boy, who was obviously also a virgin, and they had kissed a bit, nothing else had happened and he had fallen asleep on the sand after smoking a lot of dope. Clio was still at the stage of refusing dope—there were all sorts of scary warnings that the Thai police were at the parties undercover, offering spliffs and then arresting people who took them—but she had gone on drinking rather a lot. And in the end she had felt so wretched and sick that she had gone back to the hut and lain on her bed all alone, wondering if she might go on to Sydney much sooner than she had planned.

  And had gone back rather miserably to the relative homeliness of Koh Samui.

  Then something wonderful happened. The next morning, as she drank some very nasty coffee on the veranda of the hut, Josh suddenly appeared. Gorgeous, sexy, charming Josh.

  He had been up in the far north. It was amazing, he said, he’d done a three-day trip walking through the jungle—“It was uphill mostly, miles and miles, eight hours a day, and incredibly hot and humid, I was practically hallucinating about a shower and my bed.” He had done a four-hour boat trip to an elephant village, where they stayed for several days. “But it was getting a bit like hard work, so I decided to come down here.”

  Clio offered him some of the disgusting coffee and they sat on the beach and he went on talking about his trip.

  “They’re really poor up there; they live in these little huts, off the ground, with animals living underneath them. They wear proper tribal gear, with wonderful headdresses and then Snoopy T-shirts underneath that the tourists have given them. You’d have loved it, Clio.”

  She knew why he said that and it hurt: because he saw her as a swot, not the sort of sexy girl who pulled a different bloke every night. But she managed to smile, and say it sounded wonderful.

  “It is,” he said with a grin. “You feel you’re in another century as well as another place. There’s no contraception, of course, so there are absolutely loads of children. The poverty’s dreadful and quite little girls are sent south and sold into prostitution. Very sad.”

  He said he’d been a great novelty there, being blond, and that the whole village had been summoned to stare at him. “They sat and stroked my arms, because I’m so hairy.”

  “I’d love to go,” she said, and then, because it would give her an excuse to leave the beach, she said she was thinking of moving on and she might make her way up there.

  “Oh, but you mustn’t go on your own,” he said. “It’s much more dangerous up there, you must go with a guide, pay for your food and accommodation in advance. You do that in Bangkok, it’s quite easy. Now, you in touch with the others?”

  “No. Jocasta left weeks ago to go north—I’m surprised you didn’t bump into each other—and Martha left about a fortnight ago. To go to Phuket, I think.”

  “So you’re on your own?”

  “Well, no, not really. I’m staying here with two other girls and a bloke.”

  “Do you know anywhere I could sleep?”

  “In my bungalow,” she said and then thought he might think she was trying to pull him and flushed. “The thing is, there are four of us, and one is moving on today. We could go and ask the guy who runs the place.”

  “Cool. Well, if you don’t mind. I’m going to check a few things out.”

  He came back quite quickly; she was sitting chatting to a couple of the little Thai boys who swept the beach and put out the loungers, enjoying their sweet friendliness, their pride in earning some money for their families.

  “Well, apparently Ang Thong is a must. Why don’t you come too? It’s a day trip; boat goes from Na Thon, at eight thirty.” He had looked at her rather consideringly with his amazing blue eyes and suddenly grinned and said, “You look great, Clio. Being here obviously suits you.”

  Clio didn’t eat anything for the rest of the day, in case her flattening stomach redeveloped a bulge.

  She felt distinctly nervous but hugely excited next day, joining Josh and half a dozen friends he’d made the night before. It was a stunning morning, clear and blue, as they moved out of the harbour towards the archipelago of Ang Thong. The boat served the usual disgusting coffee and some rather nice cakes for breakfast and, after a bit, Josh and most of his new friends fell asleep, stretched out on the hard benches in the sun. Clio stayed carefully under the tarpaulin; she burnt easily, in spite of her dark hair.

  After about half an hour, Josh woke up, saw her sitting alone, and patted the bench next to him. “Here,” he said. “Come and sit with me.”

  And she had, her head swimming with excitement, sat down next to him and he’d grinned at her and put his arm round her and passed her his beer to share. He liked her! Josh Forbes, the gorgeous, gorgeous Josh liked her. Fancied her. She could feel it. And somehow it didn’t matter when another girl arrived and sat the other side of him and he put his other arm round her, because for the first time in her life she felt good about herself, and she knew that really he liked her best.

  The boat had reached the mass of islands now, was making its way between them, some of them quite large and lush, others little more than huge rocks carved into incredible shapes by the sea. They saw dolphins playing, and above them clouds of seabirds crying in the wind; and nearer to shore gazed down at rainbow-coloured fish through the incredibly clear water above the coral reef. It was an extraordinary journey.

  They anchored off the biggest of the islands, and transferred to a longtail boat to take them in to shore. They jumped out into water knee-deep and, even by Thai standards, warm—“Too hot to swim in,” Clio said to Josh—and the boat’s captain pointed them in the direction of the island’s greatest challenge, a steep 500-metre climb in a hollow behind the beach.

  “Very hard,” he said. “Not danger, but hard.”

  “Right,” Josh said. “I’m off. Who’s coming with me?”

  Clio was—and to her slight disappointment, all the others too.

  It was an incredibly tough climb through hard scrub and awkward boulders, up and up, sheltered to an extent from the sun, but not the heat, by the trees. They began light-heartedly, larking about, became tired and hot and increasingly silent. Two of the girls gave up, started slithering down, laughing again, telling them they were mad. Clio, directly behind Josh now, less fit than they were, knew she would rather die than give in.

  As she struggled on, feeling her salty sweat stinging her eyes, her muscles straining, everything hurting, dying seemed quite likely.

  But she made it, emerged from the darkness of the trees into brilliant blue light and up the last few metres to the summit; and then stood there, weariness set aside. It was as if she was flying above the islands, spread below and beyond her, jagged shapes, rimmed with white sand, carved out of the blue, mystically beautiful. Even Josh seemed moved by it, stood there, gazing at it in silence, and then smiled at her rather slowly without speaking. Clio wished she wasn’t quite so drenched in sweat.

  She had expected the descent to be easy but it wasn’t, and she was tired, dreadfully tired. As she neared the bottom, she began to feel dizzy and sick, the sun seemed horribly dazzling and she found it hard to find footholds; twice she slipped. Josh was ahead, and she was thankful; she didn’t want him thinking she was pathetic.

  There was a stretch of grass at the bottom of the steps; Clio just reached it, collapsed onto it, under a palm tree, her legs completely without strength. She sat, her head buried in her arms, feeling faint and dreadfully thirsty; she knew she had to get
back to the boat within a few minutes, everyone else had gone, but she literally couldn’t walk. Nor did she care.

  “You OK?” It was Josh’s voice, clearly anxious.

  “Yes, I’m fine. Thanks.”

  “You don’t look it. You look awful. Quite green.”

  “I’m OK.” She struggled to stand up and couldn’t.

  “Clio, you’re not. You’re dehydrated. Stay there, I’ll get some stuff for you.”

  He was back in minutes, carrying not only water but crisps (“You need salt”) and cola (“You need sugar”), and stood over her while she consumed them. Their captain waved to them to hurry; Josh shouted that he had to wait, gesturing to Clio lying on the ground; everyone stared. She could imagine them getting impatient, scornful of her, and worst of all, amused.

  Gradually she felt her strength return and managed to stagger to the boat, leaning on Josh’s arm, and felt self-conscious, sitting in the longboat, smiling feebly at people.

  “Right,” said Josh, handing her up the ladder into the other boat, “there you go. OK now?”

  “Yes, I’m fine,” she said. “Thank you. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be silly. You did well.” He grinned at her.

  She had expected him to leave her then, but he sat by her while they ate the lunch, and the others came over to them and chatted, asked her if she was all right. She felt wonderful; she could have laughed for joy, sitting there, with Josh at her side looking after her, sharing his bottle of beer.

  They stopped again later, on a much smaller island called Mae Koh, where another wonder awaited them—“And another climb, great!” said Josh—but this one was easy, leading through a narrow gorge and suddenly arriving at an extraordinary green-blue lake far, far below, entirely circled by cliffs, and filled with fresh seawater by way of an underground tunnel. It had a magical quality. Clio half expected some exotic sea creature to rise from it in greeting, and said so; two of the girls looked at her and then each other and raised their eyebrows; she felt incredibly foolish, until Josh said, “Or even a mermaid,” and again she felt fantastically happy.