Enemies to Lovers

Chapter 3

3

I sleep in late because it took ages for me to nod off last night, even after a long day of travel and our profanely early start. I was too buzzed after the volleyball game, too wired. After we won, in a fit of glory I turned round to give Jamie a high-five, but he’d already crossed the net to Laurie and Alex to give them shit, as if the victory was his alone and I was nothing.

‘Told you I’d win,’ he’d laughed at them.

‘Yeah, fair play,’ Laurie had agreed.

Kate had found my bikini top and so I took off his T-shirt not long afterwards, gently folded it and left it on top of his rucksack, without a word. I wasn’t about to say thank you, only for that to be ignored, too. Does Jamie seriously not realise that I’m the reason we won?

All I could think about, after I sneaked away to my room up in the eaves, was that if Jamie is going to be on this holiday, I’m going to have to stop trying to ignore him and engage in some sort of level of earthly being that means I actually ignore him. He’s going to be around for the rest of my life, I imagine, so I need to move on from my abject humiliation and arrive at cool, calm and detached.

I have led you on. I am not good for you. Please forgive me, and let’s not speak of this again …

Those words haunt me, but by god I have heeded them. I won’t ever speak of them again.

I’m pulled from a painful walk down a horrid Christmas memory lane by my phone vibrating. I turn over in bed to reach for it. It’s Hope.

Hope

Morning, gorgeous! Please find attached, for your consideration, THIS gem of a German find from last night

A photo of a blond-haired muscle-man, asleep, comes through.

Me

I see the souvenirs continue to stack up in scores

Hope

You’d better not be slut-shaming

Me

I think I was, but that was wrong of me. Although – surely snapping sleeping dudes is … questionable?

Hope

Hold on, let me wake him for consent.

Okay, here’s an awake one!

The blond-haired muscle-man has piercing blue eyes and a boyish grin. His cheek is pink on the side he’s apparently slept on, and he’s reaching out one hand to beyond the camera, presumably to touch the photographer’s leg.

Me

He’s very handsome! Does he have a name?

Hope

Hold on, let me ask him. He’s already gone back to sleep

Okay, it’s Gunther

Me

You didn’t know that before you slept with him?

Hope

FLORENCE GREENBERG! Enough of the judgement!!

If you were getting laid, you’d be way less uptight. You do know that, don’t you?

Me

You might have mentioned it a few hundred times. I’m probably just jealous. ENJOY YOUR SOUVENIR.

Also. Jamie is here, unfortunately, crushing whatever libido I might otherwise have had …

Hope

WHAT

HOW

WHY!

Me

I guess he was invited? There’s a family email chain I’m not on, so I missed the details …

Hope

Sod it, ditch the fam and come meet me in Prague! It’s not too late!

Hope has already done Paris (Jean-Pierre), Brussels (Anya), Amsterdam (Lukas and Julia, at the same time) and Copenhagen (Karl on the train there and, I believe, two Oscars). I would be the miserable, unadventurous friend if I travelled with Hope, which I knew from the start and that’s why I said no to the trip. She’s determined to sow her wild oats and make up for the time she lost to her poor mental health. All power to her! Honestly, I respect her choice, but I just don’t have it in me. I wish I did.

Me

I’ll bear it in mind

Hope

No you won’t

Me

You’re right. I won’t

I automatically pull on my running gear from the suitcase, sprawled out on the spare single bed opposite mine, because that’s how I start every morning, come rain or shine. I’ve always loved running, but now my mental health depends on it. It was a saviour after my breakdown. I don’t realise that it’s almost 11 a.m. until I get downstairs, though, and the heat is already fierce. If I run now, even in just shorts and a sports bra, I’ll melt … and probably miss the start of lunch, which as we’ve established is a no-go. This is a family of hungry gannets and they leave no crumb behind – as will be evidenced by breakfast, where there’s no doubt barely a slice of bread left. Huh. I feel oddly cross at myself. Perhaps it will be cool enough later this evening for a run. I’d hate to miss one, especially on holiday. I need to stay mentally sharp, keep my demons at bay.

I loiter at the kitchen door that leads to the veranda, deciding what to do. The villa is beautiful. This is by far the nicest family holiday we’ve ever been on. For as much as they annoy me, we’ve never been a family that grew out of all taking a trip together once a year. It wasn’t really a hard choice to turn down Hope’s Europe adventure and come to Greece with everyone instead. Even when we were teenagers, my brothers and I never rebelled like some of my friends did. Mum and Dad are largely good company, luckily, so we always get at least a weekend in somewhere.

Normally we all have to pay our own way, but this year Mum pulled down a tax-free lump sum of her pension to really show us a good time – her treat (!) – and also to build a ‘she-shed’ at the bottom of the garden, so she’s got somewhere special to do her pottery. It’s funny, being in the terrifying stage of my life where I don’t know what to do for the next thirty or forty years, but Mum has essentially lived most of her life, and gets to enjoy a retirement where her biggest decision is going to be what to have for lunch. Is there a way I can just fast-forward to retirement, too? It seems nice. Cosy. I like cosy. I’ve fallen into academia because it means I don’t have to take a chance. I can stay where I am and keep doing what I’ve been doing, and that suits me fine. I worry that anything else could make me end up back how I was. The uncertain has a tendency to do that. I like to keep things as I know them to be.

The windows here have pale-blue shutters to keep the sun out in the day, and the small-but-perfectly-formed kitchen has a two-hob stove. The entire place is a maze, with shelves filled with books other guests have left behind, and the odd board game that we’ll no doubt argue over. It’s all built over a million different levels, culminating in our very own private pool … which, of course, now that I step outside, Jamie is already in, goggles on and obnoxiously massive arms propelling him through the water at speed. Classic Jamie, showing off his physical prowess at every opportunity. Mum’s there, in the shade of the vine-covered pergola, flicking through a paperback thriller she bought at the airport. I planned all my reading before we came, devouring the ‘hot reads for summer’ lists in all the Sunday supplements and assessing the chart positions of the latest hardback releases. As in reading, so in life: I can’t risk surprises. So I’ve got three literary masterpieces that are ‘good’ for me, but actually quite boring. I’ll probably end up stealing Mum’s thriller when she’s done.

‘Morning,’ I say as I pad over, and she looks up at me with a lazy smile, a tiny espresso cup beside her.

‘Morning, darling,’ she tells me, taking in the sight of me. ‘I’m glad you slept. I think you needed it.’

I try not to bristle at the uninvited suggestion that, by needing sleep, I must somehow have been in sleep deficit, which I hear as: ‘You must do a better job of looking after yourself, darling.’ I can’t help it – I’m forever searching for the real meaning behind Mum’s words. She’s incredible; I am not. That does not escape my attention. I pour myself the last of the orange juice and sit down to join her, changing tack to ask where everybody is.

‘Oh, here, there and everywhere,’ Mum says with a wave of her hand. ‘Kate and Laurie have gone for an explore, down past where we ate supper on the beach last night, the little lovebirds. Alex and your dad have gone into town to scope out somewhere to eat tonight and to pick up a few bits.’

I chuckle. ‘Presumably “a few bits” means an inflatable doughnut for the pool and, most likely, water pistols?’

Mum chuckles, too.

‘They have previous,’ she notes. ‘So I’d imagine it does, yes. Although I hope they remember actual sustenance, too. Nibbles for the fridge and whatnot.’

I give a non-committal hmmm , because I don’t have that much faith in my brother staying on-track, and he and Dad are a bad influence on each other. I slice open the last chocolate croissant (there’s one left – a bona-fide miracle) and chop up a banana, making a sort of banana-choco sandwich. Mum’s focus shifts away from her book and over towards me, which I can tell means she’s about to say Something Meaningful.

‘Whilst we’ve got a moment alone, darling,’ she starts, turning the corner of a page and closing it.

I chomp away, the only sound between us the noises of my food and Jamie’s slap-slap-slap through the water. I look into her blue eyes. She’s very Helen Mirren: soft features that add up to be more than the sum of their parts. Her nose isn’t remarkable, or her eyes or her smile, but somehow all together she’s beautiful. And urgh, dare I even say it, but Mum is also kind of sexy, too? She doesn’t flaunt it, doesn’t try to dress like a twenty-year-old to be relevant, or whatever. But she embraces her femininity and loves a cinched-in waist or a just low-enough top. Like now, in her swimsuit and sarong: it’s a one-piece, but low in the back to show off her curvy bits, and scooped to give her enough cleavage without being tacky. Her sarong is tied to one side, so it reveals a sliver of her runner’s legs, and she’s always got pedicured feet in a brilliant red. Oh my god. Do I mean that she’s a MILF? I think I do. I mean, you’ve gotta hand it to her, she’s definitely not become invisible in her retirement. Mum is more naturally put together in her sixties than I am in my alleged prime, that’s for sure.

When I swallow, Mum adds, ‘I’ve been wanting to check in.’

I know she means well. I do. But it makes shivers run down my spine, because this is the role I play now, since everything happened. I’m the delicate little doll everyone needs to look out for, which I understand, because when my breakdown was at its absolute worst I had mentally checked out. By that point what was happening was probably worse for the people who love me than it was for me. But with Mum, I feel … I don’t know. Weak. Veronica Greenberg is Superwoman: she does it all. She headed up an IT firm for thirty years, raised three kids and absorbed Jamie as her own when he needed her two years ago, too – no questions asked, even though she must have had her hands full with me and my problems. She runs every day, cooks meals from scratch and always has a spare gift bag for presents, and extra lip balm in her handbag that she lets you keep.

And I did an amazing job of being like that, too, even as a little girl, even as a teenager. I wasn’t surly or rebellious – I was responsible . I was exactly like Mum until I hit my mid-twenties and then I wasn’t like her at all; and now it’s all anyone wants to talk about with me, despite the fact I’ve been doing all right for a while now. I’m better. Mostly. I was really bad for about year, and it’s been a year of recovery. Recovery might never end; just like an alcoholic will always be an alcoholic, I might always be anxious. But I’m committed to looking after myself. I’m doing okay.

‘I’m fine, Mum,’ I say, smiling to prove my point.

‘I wasn’t implying that you weren’t,’ she protests, reaching out a hand for mine. She gives me a squeeze. ‘But I’ve been meaning to say: I don’t want you to make a misstep, taking this job full-time. You could take a pause, you know. There’s no rush for teaching. You’ve been at university for so long, I worry you’ll be there for ever simply because it’s comfortable. First Newcastle and then Edinburgh … If you wanted to take a year off – six months even – and come home, think about your options, you could do—’

‘Okay,’ I tell her, nodding. I squeeze her hand back. Obviously I will never do that, never move back home at twenty-bloody-six. I’ll bet she never took a career pause and never made a misstep, either. God, I’d be mortified to go back home. I wish we could talk about something other than my mental bloody health.

I finish off my banana-chocolate croissant and gulp down the rest of my juice. I look in the coffee pot, but there’s none left. I’ll make some more in a minute. If I walk away now, Mum will think I’m cross, and I don’t want her to think that. I want us to be how we used to be, when we’d talk about TV and art, and running technique, and not my bloody feelings .

Jamie pulls himself out of the water in one easy swoop, grabbing the towel he left on one of the sun-loungers. Now I really can’t get up to make coffee: I refuse to let him chase me away. It’s like I forget he’s here until I don’t, and that winds me all over again. Urgh .

‘Am I interrupting?’ he asks, droplets of water dripping from his sandy-blond hair onto his shoulders, rolling over the mounds of his upper arms in a way that many cultures could label seductive, but I happen to think is messy, because he’s dripping perilously close to the crockery. The sun reflects in fragments off the blue of the pool, and either the birds have just started chirruping in the trees because of Jamie, or else they were chirruping all along and I wasn’t paying attention. The terracotta-coloured tiled floor is warm underneath us, the leaves of the tall olive trees as still as soldiers on guard. The light makes him glow, like one of those salt lamps, all glimmering and hazy and … disgusting.

‘Of course not,’ Mum says, and Jamie’s eyes flicker towards me with that look : the blank, almost aggressive one. I instantly look down into my empty coffee mug. ‘Sit, sit, sit,’ Mum tells him. ‘You’re very good to do all those lengths. Keeping fit, it really is the cornerstone for a happy life, don’t you think?’

‘Absolutely,’ Jamie replies, picking up the coffee pot like I did and finding – exactly as I did – that it’s empty.

‘Oh, let me,’ insists Mum. ‘I finished it, so I should brew another. Be right back.’

She clasps my shoulder as she stands up and then disappears, leaving me and Jamie annoyingly alone. Jamie leans over for the jug of water, thick fingers reaching for the handle, wrapping themselves around it in a flush simple movement, like he owns the place, and I watch from under my eyelashes, horrified. I want to find a reason to leave. I don’t want to be here with him, all wet from the pool, gulping down water with his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down noisily. He runs a hand through his hair as I sit mute, looking at my lap, and he puts on his sunglasses. They’re bright red and square-framed. They look ridiculous. So, what, he spends a few months a year on the seven seas and now he thinks he’s some chic European?

I can’t do this. The floor suddenly feels too warm, the air even stiffer. Everything is closing in. I can’t sit here, as Mum gets back and starts clucking over Jamie’s wellness routines and the sun grows fiercer. I just can’t do it.

I’m saved by my phone lighting up, Hope’s name on the screen.

Hope

Well, that was a fun morning! What you up to? Do you want to talk about J***e being there?

Me

Lol, thanks for redacting his name. He’s like the-man-who-shall-not-be-named

Hope

We can name him if you want, but personally I don’t think he deserves it

Me

He doesn’t. Although! I am ignoring him in a very mature, grown-up way

Hope

Oh, yes, the MATURE ignoring. I’ve heard of that!

I glance up at Jamie, who, beneath his sunnies, is musing at the far edge of the table, like he’s enjoying the awkwardness, like he’s seeing who will break first. It’s psychopathic.

Me

What are your plans today? Send more pictures!

I don’t know what I’d do without Hope. It helps, so much, to have somebody in my life who has been through what I’ve been through, who has seen their own personal hell and figured out how to navigate it. We went through a phase of calling people who hadn’t had breakdowns ‘normies’, which we haven’t done in ages … But seated beside Jamie, I feel he’s as much of a normie as there is. The word comes to me easily. And since he’s a normie, I cannot let him have a hold on me. I’ve come too far for that. I haven’t weathered a personal hell just to let a man who didn’t know a good thing when he could have had it bug me any longer.

I push back my chair to scurry away. But as I’m about to declare that I’m going upstairs to get changed, Jamie says, ‘It was very generous of your parents to invite me.’

I freeze at being addressed directly, half standing, half seated, like I’ve got tummy ache or need a poo. What am I supposed to say back? Agree with him falsely, or say I’m happy he’s here …? I can’t lie. I’ve never been able to, even as a kid. Plus, it’s unnerving that he doesn’t sound his usual hostile self.

My phone vibrates again. It’s a photo of Hope’s laptop screen, a picture of Bluey playing on it. It’s one of our favourite episodes, where Bingo has weird dreams and both the kids are up in the night and don’t let their cartoon parents get much sleep. By the time I turn my attention away from my phone, Mum is coming back with the coffee. Jamie is looking at me, watching me look at my phone. I think he’s spied the Bluey photo – more for his ‘Flo Is Not Worth It’ evidence bag. I find myself murmuring an odd noise to excuse myself, a gurgled ‘Mmmmnhyansosokk’, before hot-footing it back up to my room, seeking solace in my phone.

Me

Jamie being here is painful! I need some Bluey !

I have led you on , I remember, as I burn in shame, collapsing onto my bed. I am not good for you. Please forgive me, and let’s not speak of this again …

I hate this, I hate this, I hate this.

I manage to sneak off down to the beach without having to re-join Mum and Jamie at the breakfast table, where they’ve graduated to playing a game of cards. I already caught a glimpse of Dad and Alex by the hire car, unloading a plethora of floating devices shaped like wildlife and several water guns, as predicted. As I hear Mum whooping triumphantly, presumably because she’s trumped Jamie, I snake my way down the winding steps from the house to the beach, a sweep of curved paradise with hardly anybody on it.

I can see some hazy dots of people at the far end, but other than that I have the place to myself. Me, the book-I-won’t-actually-read and my beach towel, printed with a Penguin Classics cover of A Room of One’s Own , get settled in the shade of a big tree with a perfect view of the horizon. Staring at the sea, I think about my chat with Mum – about pausing instead of misstepping, and coming home instead of going straight into teaching full-time. Most people would kill for a chance to pause, no matter how old they are. Look at Hope, hopping on a train to Interrail around Europe and maybe even beyond, if the mood takes her. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do next, she simply wants to heal and live life (her grandmother left her a substantial amount in her will, which I suppose helps). Folk take jobs they don’t really want as a way to pay the rent and keep building a life. What does it say about me that I’d look a gift horse in the mouth? But the truth is that I don’t know what I want to do with my life. Laurie is right – what I do is very … niche. My PhD explored representations of the ocean in early modern English literature – ironically, working on the idea that it can mirror risk and possibility. I say ‘ironic’ because I don’t do much risk-taking. The teaching was a way to earn money to pay for the PhD, and then they asked me to stay, so I said yes, just like that.

I don’t know how other people do it, how they choose what to do with their lives. Is it because there are two types of people in the world, ambitious and not ambitious – and I am not? And if I’m ‘not ambitious’, does that make me lazy? Surely there are different types of ambition: I might not want to wear power-suits and work in a skyscraper, nor do I really think I want to be a stay-at-home mum whilst my partner wears a power-suit and works in a skyscraper. Can a person be ambitious for peace? For serenity? That’s all I want. I only seem able to get it if I take a little white pill every morning and stick to the same routines, day in and day out.

When Mum said a pause can be better than a misstep, what I heard was: I know you’re scared.

Is it that obvious?

Why isn’t everybody else confused about the life they should build, like I am? I fish my phone out of my bag and text my lifeline.

Me

What do you do when you start thinking about the future? Not spinning out, but like … musing?

Hope

Tell myself nobody cares

Me

Oh, cheery!

Hope

Lol, not in a bad way. Just that like, when all is said and done, I’m not going to be remembered in the history books. Nobody cares what I do! People are not going to sit around me on my deathbed and issue their final score for how well I did life

Or wait, if they do, I want the criteria to be like, how much I followed my heart. Not like, other people’s criteria – being sensible and jobs and family and all that

Me

That’s where I get stuck. I’m terrified of the end-of-life scorecard that says I failed!

Hope

I know, babe. All I can say is … I’m here, and I see you, and you’ll get there. You’re doing so much better even in the time I’ve known you!

‘Penny for your thoughts?’

I’m so in my head trying to unpick all this that I didn’t even realise Kate and Laurie have come down to the beach, too, and are casting shadows over the pale sand with their forms.

‘Just thinking about the future,’ I say, clicking my phone locked and slipping it back into my bag. I try to sound breezier than I feel, as they roll out their towels and fuss about getting sorted. They’ve brought food down – bread and dips and crisps and some water – so I can’t be too mad at their arrival.

Kate laughs. ‘Might I advise you not to?’ She throws a bottle of water at me and then spreads out the picnic.

I chortle. ‘Says the woman who still looks eighteen, is a trainee lawyer, married and still has a sense of humour.’

She steps back from the food and holds out an arm to spray on her sun lotion. ‘It’s true,’ she sing-songs, rubbing the oil up and down. ‘I am quite the catch, aren’t I, Laurie?’

‘Indeed you are,’ he agrees, scooping up some creamy hummus with his pitta. Through a full mouth he adds, ‘That’s what makes us such a match.’

I snort teasingly. ‘I think you got my share of self-esteem, too, you know. Surely it’s not healthy to regard yourself as highly as you do.’

Laurie gets up with a wink and takes the sun lotion from Kate, spraying her back without her asking. His easy gesture of love isn’t lost on me. Kate’s the best thing ever to have happened to him. When they fell in love five years ago, we all saw this whole other side to him: considerate and complimentary and thoughtful. He was no longer my jackass of an older brother, the one who used to burp into my water bottle for school and close the lid, so that it tasted like sick at breaktime. He has … grown up. At least for Kate. Obviously he’s still a jackass to the rest of us.

Jamie appears at the bottom of the steps from the house then, too, with Laurie waving him over to what was my sacrosanct and peaceful spot and is now the official meeting point – like a family holiday is supposed to be about us all spending time together. His thighs move like honey-glazed hams stuffed into Ralph Lauren shorts, a backward baseball cap making him look like a high-school jock. He doesn’t walk, but struts .

‘Hey, man!’ Laurie greets him, holding a fist so that Jamie knocks into it with his own. Jamie looks over at us and barely nods, but I have to admit it is a greeting of sorts. Duly noted that he doesn’t ignore me when my brother is around, then – probably doesn’t want to get into Laurie’s bad books. I think that might be worse. ‘You feeling the holiday vibe?’

‘Yeah, I am,’ Jamie replies. ‘I’ve just been annihilated at cards by your mum, though. She’s a shark!’

‘Oh yeah, Veronica Greenberg is a smiling assassin. Did you have money on it?’

‘A fiver,’ Jamie hoots. ‘She saw me coming!’

‘Mug,’ Laurie laughs. ‘Absolute mug.’

Jamie and Laurie kick a football about, calling each other names and getting increasingly close to what even I can tell is red-card kind of behaviour. Eventually Kate tells them they’re getting sand in the food. They come over to the shade of the tree and sit down to nibble at the snacks, too, before Kate suddenly decides to pick up on our conversation from before.

‘You know what I’d love for you?’ she asks, licking errant olive oil from where it is running down her hand to her forearm.

‘I can only imagine …’ I say, crossing my legs and arching an eyebrow. Jamie opens a packet of dried figs, offering one to all of us. I take one, but don’t eat it. I hold it, waiting for Kate’s declaration.

‘A gap year,’ she declares. ‘A year of doing nothing.’

‘I had a gap year,’ I remind her. ‘Before my degree.’

‘Which one?’ quips Laurie, winking at Jamie to get him in on the joke, unable to resist a jab at my choice of a life in academia.

‘I’m ignoring that,’ I tell him.

‘Didn’t you spend it working in the local pub, and then working on a tortoise rescue programme for twelve hours a day?’ Kate asks.

Jamie is looking away from us and out to sea, but I can feel him rolling his eyes at me.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘In Costa Rica. I did six months there.’

‘And did you actually see any of Costa Rica?’ Kate presses.

More eye-rolling – I just know it.

I shrug, not liking being the topic of conversation. ‘I saw plenty of it. From the beach. Where I worked.’ When she puts it like this, Kate makes me sound so square. ‘But I liked the turtle rescue programme. I didn’t need to be off every night with the others, getting drunk and coming home at 4 a.m. I can’t live on two hours’ sleep, even when I was eighteen I couldn’t!’

‘Exactly.’ She nods, satisfied that she’s proved her point, flicking her choppy blonde hair over her shoulder dramatically. She’s in a red one-piece swimsuit with frills on the shoulders and at the thighs, and looks like a model for Reese Witherspoon’s clothing line. She’s warmed up to her theme now and starts wafting a hand as she says, ‘You need a month in Seville learning Spanish and sleeping with sexy waiters. And then a season in a ski resort, getting drunk and sleeping with tourists. Oooooh, you could do Australia and New Zealand. Bali! If you got into yoga in Bali, I’d bet you’d meet all kinds of people. Have you ever heard of ecstatic dance? It’s like sex, but with your clothes on. They’re mad for it up in Ubud, I’ve heard.’

‘Kate, I don’t think you want me to travel so much as get laid?’ I suggest, noting that she’s the second person today to tell me such a thing.

Laurie puts his fingers in his ears and starts to sing loudly. I roll my eyes. It’s such a cliché – older brothers who can’t imagine their younger sisters are desirable to other men. I realise Jamie is looking right at me, with that stupid look on his stupid face. It’s like he agrees with Laurie: I should be an asexual being. Like he hasn’t already made that crystal-clear.

‘Laurie,’ Kate coos, once he’s stopped blocking out the noise of his little sister’s imaginary sex life, ‘Flo is very hot and deserves to enjoy being hot, both by being outwardly appreciated and inwardly pleasured. We’re all adults here.’

‘Hmmm, are we, though?’ Laurie bats back, because to him I will always be a gangly twelve-year-old.

Jamie coughs and says, ‘I’d rather not hear about Flo’s sex life, either, thanks.’

Kate ignores them both and continues to focus on me. I wish she wouldn’t. I wish she wouldn’t in general, but especially now that Jamie is here. I don’t want him to know anything about my life. Right now I can convince myself he hates an imagined version of me, but if we keep talking about how sad and pathetic I am, I might have to admit he dislikes the actual me, and with everything that happened during my PhD it has taken a lot of work even to have this much low self-confidence. I’m a work-in-progress, and the hardest part about that is being okay with being ‘unfinished’ – especially surrounded by the high achievers of my family: Laurie and Kate are lawyers; Alex is a doctor; Mum is, as discussed, Veronica Greenberg; and Dad … well, he’s the glue that keeps us all together, god bless his heart.

Oh. Shit. Kate is looking at me like she’s expecting me to speak. I think I zoned out as she continued to dissect My Life And Everything That Is Wrong With It.

‘Hmmm?’ I say. ‘Sorry. I was just having a hallucination about what it would be like to have a sister-in-law who knew how to shut up and read a book.’

‘Ha ha,’ Kate says. ‘I’m only trying to help. I mean, Jamie, after your parents died, you realised that life is short and so followed your bliss or whatever, didn’t you?’

I can’t believe she’s directly referenced the death of Jamie’s parents. But that’s Kate. She names the elephant in the room.

Jamie takes a deep breath and shrugs in a nonchalant way that seems very practised, if you ask me. He blows out air from between his lips, making him pout like he’s saying ‘prune’, like I’ve read the Olsen twins do when they’re being photographed.

‘Come on,’ Kate presses, and I’m secretly thrilled the spotlight has turned onto somebody else. I know the bits about Jamie that he shares directly with my family when I am there, and I get occasional titbits through the way he’s spoken about when he’s not there, but seldom do I hear about Jamie in this context, from the man himself. That’s what felt so special about Christmas – that suddenly we had so much to learn about each other. We only scratched the surface, though. Kate smirks at him, amused by his reluctance to go on record with his life’s mission statement. ‘Seriously,’ she says. ‘Almost six figures a year, from sailing boats around the world, isn’t a bad way to spend your days …’

Almost six figures?

Jamie leans back on his forearms, sinking his over-developed frame into the sand because he’s the only one of us not sitting on his towel.

‘Not all who wander are lost,’ he says, and Kate hoots out a laugh. Laurie shakes his head, smirking.

‘Mate, you’re the jammiest bastard I know. Honest to god.’

I can’t tell if they’re poking fun at me. Jamie earns all that money, swanning about sailing for half the year? Surely not.

But once again he gives very little away, and as I take the chance to study his feet, of all things – the annoyingly clean, squared-off toenails, the light dusting of hair on his toes, which weirdly isn’t repulsive so much as a stamp of his masculinity, if you’re into hairy men – I feel him looking at me. Again . I don’t know what comes over me, but I dare to match his gaze, and even though we’ve both got sunglasses on and so I can’t properly see his eyes, I am 100 per cent sure we’ve just made eye-contact. He sighs, then turns his head away.

‘I’m going to cool off in the sea,’ I say, getting up and heading down to the water quickly. I’m cross that my quiet afternoon of reading has been hijacked by a group of people who don’t know how to exist in sociable silence. Also, with Jamie. I’m annoyed by Jamie, and I’m annoyed that I’m annoyed by him.

As I go, Kate shouts, ‘Your arse looks amazing in that swimsuit, babes!’

I deliberately chose something that covers me up a bit more today, after Bikini-gate yesterday, and I spin around to give her the finger. I do it with a smile to let her know I’m only half serious, cementing the fact with an over-the-top bum-wiggle.

Kate screeches, yelling out, ‘Yassss, queen!’ I throw her a cheeky grin, pleased to have made her laugh, and that’s when I see Jamie shaking his head disapprovingly. Well, excuse me for having some fun , I think, before diving into the cool of the gentle waves. Like, I get it: you’re mad I exist, too.

I head out a little way and lie on my back, like yesterday, practising the deep breathing my therapist taught me – in through the nose, out through the mouth. Bonus points if you put your hand on your heart and give a little massage of reassurance.

I’m okay , I tell myself. I’m okay . This is what happens: all my thoughts get noisy and loud and threaten to overwhelm me: uni, the PhD, what comes next, stupid boys being stupidly judgy with their stupid head-shakes …

Then there’s movement in the corner of my eye. Jamie.

Okay, this dude is making it really hard to avoid him, given that he seems to be in every breath I take today. He walks with so much swagger, too, like he belongs anywhere he chooses to be. What must it be like to be that sure of yourself? I can’t even begin to imagine.

‘The water feels warmer here,’ Jamie says, when he’s closer. ‘You’ve not peed in it, have you?’

‘What?’ I say. ‘ No .’

I realise too late that he’s pulling my leg, and it flusters me. I clamber out of the water in a panic. I do not want to have to talk to him, or try to talk to him and be disregarded, or waste energy pretending he’s not there, when he’s very obviously trying to get my back up by following me in. Just leave me alone, dude . Jesus.

I barely manage to issue a simpering ‘Enjoy!’ but I do, because I am mature and level-headed and determined not to be outwardly rattled. All over again I flush with frustration that the first time I have to see Jamie since everything happened is for two whole weeks on a family holiday. That is some intense exposure therapy, goddammit.

‘Flo …’ he says, like he’s telling me off.

‘No thank you,’ I retort, and I’m not sure what that even means. No thank you, I do not want your words? No thank you, I do not want you? I hear him sigh, an expulsion of air that I take to mean I have disappointed him, and I could turn round and scream at him, shout at him for being here, for daring to show his thoughtless, horrid face, but I don’t. Instead I scamper up the beach, dripping everywhere, focusing on nothing but the sand in front of my feet and willing myself not to cry. It’s not actually that hard when I’m this angry. I don’t want tears. I want to break something.

‘That was quick,’ notes Laurie. He and Kate are eating cherries and competing over who can spit the stones the furthest. ‘Did you get scared by a jellyfish?’

‘No,’ I shoot back, settling onto my towel. I can’t explain any further, so I leave it at that. I grab my sunhat and pull it over my face so that I can have a little snooze – or just a great excuse to ignore them all.

‘What’s got into her?’ Laurie asks Kate, in a fake stage-whisper.

Kate tuts. ‘Leave her be, she’s fine,’ she says.

But I’m not.

It takes everything I have in me not to cry.