Beyond the Beach, the Trees
The generator was turned off an hour after lunch and Alastair lay there in the lodge, watching the ceiling fan suspended motionless above him, his sweat wicking into the sheets. Heat descended on the room like a warm, wet blanket.
Outside, he could hear a pair of cleaners chattering in Fijian, their vowels relaxing into the hottest part of the day.
Margot drifted past on her way to the bathroom, the scent of patchouli and sweat washing over him as he wallowed.
He tried lifting his head but flopped back down once she’d gone. The pillow beneath him was sodden.
“Where’s Cassie got to?” When there was no reply he tried again, louder. “Margie? Where’s Cassie?”
Her head poked out of the bathroom.
“She’s got her snorkeling lesson. Then crafts this evening. It’s nice that she’s made friends already, don’t you think? Gives us some time together.”
Alastair grunted. “It would be nice, if it wasn’t so damned hot. This is meant to be a four-star resort. I didn’t realize we’d be living in a sweatbox.”
Margot stepped into the room, lifted her sunhat from the table.
“I like it. Maybe it’s just what you need. Let your hair down for a few days, not throw yourself at everything for a change. It’s okay just to relax and go with the flow. The people here seem happy.”
“The people here are idiots,” he shouted after her as she stepped through the door. Knowing his luck the cleaners would have heard him, and they wouldn’t get the turn-down service tonight.
Alastair tried to nap but it was too hot even for that.
Something buzzed past his ear, a high-pitched whine like a lawn strimmer on helium.
Bloody mosquitoes too. He was slow to swat at it—his arms stuck to the sheets like fly-paper—but when he felt an itch on his leg, he raised his right arm then brought it down with an almighty slap.
He let out an involuntary yelp. When he raised his hand, there was a rough circle of blood on his palm the size of pea.
Damned thing had already fed. He didn’t like to think whose blood might now be smeared across his thigh.
The exertion had brought the sweat back, a wet mask dripping from his forehead and tickling through his hairline. Staring at the fan, he willed the clock to tick around to four, when they turned the generators back on and he might finally—gradually—start to cool down.
* * *
The ferry from the mainland had been fun.
They’d stood together on the deck, the breeze warm as it blew off the sea.
The crew had brought round a tray of pineapple slices and pieces of something moist and fleshy—papaya, maybe?
—that they’d eaten with pleasure, licking the stickiness off their fingers.
The complimentary cocktails had been little more than glorified fruit punch, but they’d been welcome too.
Even the ukulele music piped through the Tannoy hadn’t annoyed him too much.
It was Cassie who’d spotted the flying fish.
She’d been leaning over the railing, holding out her hand to catch the spray, then she shouted and pointed.
A shoal of them, twenty, maybe thirty, skimming above the surface of the sea like water made solid, an improbable dream of a fish that had aimed for the sky.
“Look, Daddy!” she’d squealed, desperate not to take her eyes off them. “Aren’t they amazing?”
“You know they don’t actually fly,” he’d shouted back. “They have to land back in the water, they can only glide short distances. They should call them ‘gliding fish.’”
Cassie and Margot were both ignoring him, their attention fixed on the shoal as it skimmed the tops of the waves.
Alastair turned to catch a waiter’s attention, see if he could get a refill on the “cocktail”—and that’s when he saw him.
A tall man, handsome, his body lean and tanned.
He was standing against the railing in the stern, mirrored glasses pushed up onto his head, a flowery shirt flapping in the breeze.
It made little sense, but Alastair would have sworn he knew him. Only that was impossible.
“Margot?” She resisted at first when he tugged at her sleeve, but after he persisted, she turned. “Do you see that man at the back? Pink Hawaiian shirt?”
She looked past him, shook her head. “I don’t. You know they call them bula shirts here, right?”
He looked again. The man was gone. He’d seen him clear as day, but there was a child stood there now, its parents clinging to both arms as it leaned over the railings. Alastair turned left and right, but there was no sign of him.
“I could have sworn…he was stood just over there. John Simmonds, from school. Grown, obviously—but I’d have sworn it was him.”
“Maybe it was,” she said, turning back to the sea. “Other people take holidays too, you know. Maybe he’ll be at our resort.”
He wanted to tell her that just wasn’t possible, that Simmonds had thrown himself in front of a train not long after he’d left university, but nobody was listening to him anymore. Maybe the cocktails were stronger than they looked. He went hunting for that waiter instead.
* * *
It was almost seven by the time the temperature began to fall, the mercury dropping with the sun.
Margot was sat at the bar, a glass of something fruity in front of her.
To call it a bar was to oversell it. The photo in the brochure had suggested an oasis of palm fronds overhanging a bamboo structure, the bottles lined up along a handcrafted wooden shelf.
The reality looked like it had been constructed in a hurry, using the publicity photo as a blueprint.
The bamboo poles were crooked and cracked, the rope joints having snapped in places and now replaced with thick twists of silver tape.
Cheap electric lanterns had been hung from the roof joists, creating a puddle of light that didn’t quite reach the black wall of palm trees looming inland.
It reminded Alastair of a derelict cottage they’d seen on their way to the ferry terminal, caved in and little more than a skeleton.
Margot saw him coming and lifted her cocktail, causing the little umbrella to swirl coquettishly around the rim.
“Cassie’s off with her new friends, you just missed her. Apparently some of the reef fish glow in the dark. Did you manage to sleep?”
Alastair heaved himself onto a stool. “Not really. Or at all, actually. Too bloody hot.”
“I asked Barney about that—he said the hammocks are a good option? Shade, sea breeze…”
“Who’s Barney?”
She looked at him like he’d just insulted her. “The manager—he met the boat when we arrived. Honestly, sometimes I think you’re barely here with us at all.”
“Sorry.” He waved his hand in front of his face, trying to banish a persistent mosquito. “I can’t think at the moment. I don’t seem to be cut out for the climate.”
She smiled at that. He wasn’t sure whether she was smiling with him or laughing at his inability to adapt.
“Curtis has a tip for that too. Honestly, if you’d just talk to people, they’re more than happy to help. You’re hardly the first pasty Englishman to melt in the heat.”
“Curtis?” he prompted. “Who’s he meant to be, the ma?tre d’?”
“Don’t be obtuse,” she said, placing her drink back on the uneven bar top. “He’s another one of the guests. South African. If you didn’t hole up in our room all day, you might meet a few other people. There’s a lovely couple from Canada who— Oh look, here’s Curtis now. I’ll introduce you.”
Alastair’s eyes had adjusted to the light of the bar, so it took him a few seconds to make out the figure walking toward them through the blackness.
It was only when he stepped into the circle of light that Alastair could make out his face.
When he did, he couldn’t hold back a little gasp of shock.
It was the man from the boat—the man he’d thought was John Simmonds.
In the day since, he’d convinced himself he was mistaken.
Facing him now, though, the same thought sprang into his mind: that this was Simmonds, grown into a man but otherwise unchanged.
If he’d been shown him in a line-up, he’d have sworn to it.
Older, slightly gray around the temples, but undeniably Simmonds.
He couldn’t think why Margot would have called him Curtis.
He realized suddenly that she was speaking—had been for several seconds, in fact.
“—in the city, so you’ll have to excuse his dazed expression. He isn’t used to so much greenery, I think it’s gone to his head. This is Curtis, Alastair. We were just talking about him?”
“Yes, yes.” He hated it when she spoke to him like he was one of her pupils. “Speak of the devil, hey?” No one laughed or commented, so he continued hastily, “But I think we saw each other before. On the ferry here?”
Simmonds—Curtis—shook his head, a smile creeping into the corner of his mouth. Alastair thought it made him look ruggedly handsome, like a young Harrison Ford.
“I don’t think so. I…”
“Curtis has already been here two weeks. He was telling me all about it earlier. I don’t think he would have been on the same ferry as us, would you?”
“I haven’t left this island in ten days. Yesterday I was right here in this bar most of the afternoon, if we’re honest.”
Margot laughed, that high, girlish laugh she employed when she flirted with men, but Alastair barely noticed. The man’s accent was clearly South African. He couldn’t work out why John Simmonds would be talking with a South African accent.
“I’m sorry,” he said, more forcefully than he intended, and sounding anything but sorry, “I might have this confused, but didn’t we go to school together? Your face looks so familiar. I thought you were someone called John Simmonds, but I might have remembered that wrong.”
Curtis offered that half-smile again, and Alastair could practically hear Margot swooning next to him. “You went to school in Cape Town?”
“No,” Alastair replied, “West Grinstead. England. Would have been, what, thirty years ago?”