‘Okay,’ I say, closing my eyes when she rests her weight against me. I relax too and we jostle until we find the natural point where we’re propping each other up.
‘You’re a comfortable wall,’ she says.
I don’t know how to respond. I’m struggling to respond at all because this is the closest I’ve been to any woman other than Susie for longer than I can remember, and even though we aren’t together, it feels like I’m crossing a line. I’m not. Literally, I’m on my side of the line and Cleo is on hers, and up to now we haven’t had a flirty kind of relationship. But now she’s leaning on me, I’m suddenly hyper-aware of the warmth of her body and the smell of her hair when she tips her head back. It makes me realize how crushingly lonely I am, how much I miss physical closeness.
‘Why the big sigh?’
I didn’t realize my thoughts were seeping from my body. ‘Just stuff,’ I say. ‘Leo sounded upset tonight.’
‘Must be tough to comfort him being so far away.’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘He’ll be okay though. He’s got Susie.’ And I haven’t, I think.
‘Want to talk about things?’ Cleo asks. ‘I’ll listen if you need to.’
‘This back-to-back thing is starting to feel more like confession,’ I say, stalling while I decide whether talking about Susie would be a good or a bad thing. ‘There isn’t much to say, to be honest.’ That’s a bottomless lie, but I just don’t know where to start and where to end. Does Susie miss me, miss us? She blows hot and cold towards me these days, arctic mostly, and then every now and then she texts, usually late at night when she’s had a couple of glasses of wine. These occasional mixed messages are just enough to keep me in the waiting room of her life, or maybe it’s the waiting room of mine. I know one thing. The seats are hard and too damn cold – I can’t stay there indefinitely.
‘We’re on a break?’ I trot out the tired Friends line rather than face all the things I’m not ready to articulate.
‘Okay,’ Cleo says, quiet.
We fall silent for a few beats. I slow my breathing to match hers – easy in, easy out. It’s comforting.
‘We’re the talk of the island, you know,’ she says, jokey, probably switching subjects for my benefit.
‘I doubt that takes much, to be fair.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘Although it took me by surprise today. I met a pretty cool group of women. I had fun.’
Fun. There’s something my life’s been short on in recent years. Any fun I’ve had has been geared around the boys. Jeez, I’m throwing myself a big old pity party back here and Cleo doesn’t even realize.
‘How’s your ankle?’
She leans forward, away from me, and I feel better, and worse.
‘Do you think they’ll call the boat if it’s broken?’
‘Only if it needs to be amputated.’
‘I think it might.’
I twist around and find she’s just kidding, leaning her weight on one hand, her wine glass in the other.
‘It’s not hurting much any more,’ she says. ‘The wine solved it.’
‘And there was me thinking it was my good company.’
She pulls a face. ‘You’re not bad, for a wall.’
‘Well, you make a terrible wall,’ I say. ‘Too fidgety, and your hair was in my face.’
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I’ll make sure it doesn’t stray over the boundary in future.’
‘You could always shave your head,’ I say. ‘You said you wanted to do something to mark turning thirty.’
She screws her nose up. ‘It’d be a statement.’
‘Worked out okay for Sigourney Weaver.’
‘Someone paid her millions to do it, though,’ she says. ‘Besides, I like my hair.’
From my observations, Cleo’s hair is a useful barometer for her mood. When she’s lost in her work, with her laptop on her knees and a notebook propped open beside her, she twists her hair on top of her head with a pencil shoved through the knot. Sometimes when she’s at the top of the hill, sitting on the boulder-of-reception, it streams out around her head Medusa-like, antennae searching for a signal. It’s a curtain she steps behind whenever she feels like opting out and a theatre of crazy waves on the rare occasions I’ve seen her truly let her guard down.
‘My bum’s gone numb,’ Cleo says.