I knew it was a gamble, asking him to be with me this week. There was no plan B, no back-up place to go if he rebuffed me. I realize also that it was probably a harder decision for him than for me. My love life has been a spluttering series of stops and starts. Mack’s spent more than a decade as someone’s husband, held the same woman in his arms every night. We are at opposite ends, but there’s something about this island, this lodge, a fairy-tale edge-of-the-world feel I can’t easily explain. It’s as if a passing bubble snagged on the chimney last night and settled, snow-globing us inside. I hope it will linger for eight days, a suspended iridescent gossamer, protecting us until a brisk northerly blows in and whips it out to sea, taking Mack with it, leaving me behind. Eight days and seven nights. How many hours will that give us together? I move closer into his warmth and his arm settles around my shoulders, his fingers splayed flat against my hair. I close my eyes as I turn my face into his chest.
‘Two hundred hours of us,’ I whisper. I can hear the clock ticking down already.
Mack
20 October
Salvation Island
PART OF NOT DROWNING IS SWIMMING
‘What are you doing out here?’ I say.
It’s early afternoon and she’s been sitting on the porch steps for a good while now, her dark hair whipping around her face in the wind. I want to tell her she reminds me of an ethereal sea goddess but I don’t because even inside my head it sounds clichéd.
‘Thinking,’ Cleo says, a million miles away.
‘Penny for your thoughts?’ I say, hunkering down beside her. Jeez, it’s cold out here without a sweater.
‘I was wondering whether we need a new rules sheet.’ She smiles, bumping her shoulder against mine.
‘Or we could just have no rules at all,’ I say.
‘I was quite fond of that chalk line,’ she says.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘How about no stalking each other on social media?’
‘Afterwards?’
I nod. I meant at all but especially not afterwards.
She twists her head to stare at me in silence for a few seconds. ‘Still no regrets today?’
I don’t blame her for rechecking. I left her sleeping this morning, needed to walk and clear my head. ‘It’s pretty hard to regret something that felt so damn good,’ I say.
She half smiles. ‘It did feel pretty amazing.’
I pull her blanket around my shoulders too so we’re huddled together. ‘I don’t mean this in the way it’s probably going to sound,’ I say, but I don’t censor myself because if I do it’ll probably come out worse. ‘I needed last night. I needed to be with someone who wasn’t Susie.’
‘And I just happened to be there?’ she says, neutral.
‘No, no. It’s not that you just happened to be there at all,’ I say. ‘It’s that you happened to be you. My head has been stuck in a place where I couldn’t imagine ever wanting anyone else like that.’ An image of myself on the morning of my wedding surfaces in my head; the churn of nerves threatening to bring my breakfast back up, my mother carefully straightening my tie. ‘My marriage. I made vows, I promised to love one person for ever. It meant something to me. Everything, at the time, and it’s hard work letting go of all of that, you know?’
Of course she doesn’t know. How could she? But I do hope that she’ll at least see that my life is complicated. Although actually, right here and now, this doesn’t feel complicated at all. She laid her expectations out clearly: let’s share everything we are for eight days and then never see each other again. It’s cut and dried.
‘Are you sure you want to let go?’
‘Am I sure?’ I shake my head, unwilling to lie to Cleo even a little. ‘I’ve defined myself by my position as a husband and a father for a long time now; I guess I’m trying to work out how to be one without the other. I’ve drifted through the last year like a man clinging to a life raft hoping to be brought aboard again, even though I could see the lights of the ship moving slowly away from me, and … and this is a crappy analogy, I know, but coming to Salvation was the only way I could see to not drown. Does that make any sense?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘More than you know. I’ve been drowning in London too, in meaningless connections and unrealized dreams. Coming here is like a system reset for me.’
‘A system reset, huh?’ I say. I kind of like that way of looking at it.
There’s something else I need to say. ‘I want you to know I didn’t sleep with you as a way to get even with Susie – for Robert, I mean.’