Chapter 3
3
Boathouse Cottage, St Aidan
Rocks and hard places
Monday
M iles might be a world-class plonker, but this time he was as good as his word. By the time I’d walked along the beach to St Aidan and back to get some dinner and a bag of carrots for Pumpkin, Miles had gone and I had Boathouse Cottage to myself. I took a moment to soak in the emptiness of the long kitchen diner, with its high ceiling that follows the sloping planes of the roof and ends with a living area, also known as the tranquillity zone, which is so far away it’s literally in the distance. Then I dropped my bags on the floor by the island unit and headed off to eat a sandwich and Hula Hoop tea while I watched the sun set over the bay from the sun lounger on one of the terraces above the end of the cottage. As Pumpkin’s coat turned to gold in the fading light in the field below, I had to pinch myself to make sure the sound of the rushing waves in the distance was real. Then I went inside, stretched out on the immense sofa with Pumpkin still in view, jotted down a few lines about today, and put my head on my pillow with my notebook tucked under my cheek.
But instead of closing my eyes and drifting into a deep exhausted sleep, my mind replays the night of Scarlett’s wedding. Over and over.
When you look back on life there are watersheds– significant moments that separate the past from the future so decisively, it’s not like you’ve changed valleys, it’s more like you’ve moved to a different country entirely.
Mum dying was awful, but we pulled together afterwards and carried on in a way she’d have been proud of because we knew that was what she wanted.
But Scarlett’s wedding marked a different kind of line in the sand for me. Before it I was this ditsy girl with the crazy long list of exes. The one who showed the world how to party and then some. I might have already been slowing down a little by the time I was twenty-six, but after the wedding, I completely left that person behind.
It wasn’t actually about what happened that day with Miles. That was annoying and confidence-sapping, but what came next was the kind of thing that stopped my life as I knew it and changed how I felt about myself forever.
I’ve spent the time since trying to erase it from my mind, and I’d imagined I’d succeeded. But yesterday’s unexpected collision with Miles has brought it crashing back into my consciousness and in the early hours I can’t stop it banging around my brain.
Me and Mason had started out so well. There was no hope of anyone from my own circle reaching Scarlett’s lofty requirements for my plus one, then one Saturday a few weeks before the wedding I ran into a guy on the dance floor at a friend’s party. I asked the question– do you have a suit?– and instead of rolling on the floor laughing, he told me he had a wardrobe of the things and offered to show me them. True, we were both wasted at the time, but I’d asked every hot guy in Somerset for months with no luck, and meeting him felt like serendipity.
Better still, having the wedding to focus on was like fairy dust for the dates that followed. Instead of yawnsville IT-manager work talk, we focused on exciting things like how to get to deepest Cheshire by seven in the morning, how many suit-hanging hooks his executive Beamer had, how many different sex positions we could manage in his car. Better still, when we had a Zoom call with Scarlett she was so taken with him she sent me three giant thumb emojis on the sisterly WhatsApp chat while we were still talking .
As we set off on the day, I was pinching myself that for the first time ever at a wedding, I was going to have a guy of my own to drag onto the floor when the first dance finished. Then, at five in the morning on the way there, we hit traffic on the M5 and Mason got out a hip flask, said alcohol and sex, there’s a lot to like about weddings , and it went downhill from there. When he fell off his chair during the toasts it took every bridesmaid except the pregnant one to coax him upstairs for a recuperation nap. When I went to check on him later and he was snoring with a bottle of whisky on the pillow and porn on the TV I mostly felt relief that he wouldn’t be coming down again.
I went up to bed at midnight, checked he was still breathing then went to sort out my hair. I was pulling out the pins when I saw him in the mirror behind me– belt undone, shirt open. I can still hear my own voice, ringing out across the bedroom.
I don’t want to sleep with you, Mason, not tonight .
Then he’s spinning me round, trying to kiss me. And I hear his reply.
We’ll see about that .
His laugh as he rams me against the wall. The surprise when he takes hold of the milky white satin of my shoulder strap, the shock of how one pull rips the front out of my dress. How my boobs are striped with tit tape.
Me lurching forwards, feeling the spike of my heel embed itself in his foot. Knowing from the flintiness in his eyes that I’d hurt him, then him muttering ‘ you cockteasing bitch ’ and then my face hitting the wall and my cheekbone exploding with pain. Then him yanking my arm so hard it’s crunching in its socket, then the floor rushing towards me. Me crashing down against the striped velvet tub chair. The pain shooting up my arm when I put my hand out to break the fall. Him walking away.
And then a long time later, he’s looking down at me huddled in the chair.
Girls who get drunk and fall off their heels. You never learn, do you.
He’s squatting down, squinting at my cheek.
You can’t go down to breakfast looking like that. We need to leave .
Then we’re pushing clothes into suitcases, and hurrying through reception.
* * *
I know what happened in that hotel room was nothing compared to what some people go through, but it’s like a stone that I carry around in my chest that weighs me down. Before it I was light, it was easy to fly, but I took that carefree self for granted. This has tethered me to the ground.
I used to be wafty and ephemeral. I used to live life like nothing mattered, and now I know better. I used to feel invincible, but that certainty and self-belief was shattered in a single second. One crushing blow. My face smashed against a wall, my arm wrenched, the pain exploding as the bone in my wrist splintered.
And the most devastating part is that if I’d been a better, cleverer person it could all have been avoided. And it has always felt it was all my fault.