Chapter Eleven
Belle
‘Oh … I like it here.’ Jake nods along to the kick drum like a bopping parrot, arms spread wide, face tipped up to the sun with his eyes closed.
I know that feeling – the summer warmth on your skin, when you want to soak it up, bathe in the golden rays, truly let go.
He would have loved Ibiza. Too bad he never got to experience it.
‘Where are we? Surely not Great Yarmouth?’
‘We’re in Ibiza, Jake.’
Sometimes when I’m walking through London on a warm day, I’ll be pulled back to this memory without warning.
It’s always something small that does it: any heat on my skin, the smell of salty air from the chippie down my high street, sun cream on someone passing, or the perfume I wore that summer catching in the back of my throat.
I’ve always thought nostalgia is the oddest sensation: the pleasure of the memory and the ache of it, sitting tight next to each other, inseparable, since the happiness of it only exists because the moment is gone.
For that one long weekend, it was us girls against the world.
Twenty-seven, feral for life, experience and, well …
dick! I’d picked myself up, polished myself off and packed up my belongings.
I’d moved to London and, with help from Vik, perfected my CV, landing me my first PR job. Life was truly starting.
We’d booked this trip as colleagues, using it as an excuse to actually get to know each other.
I’d arrived a little reserved, holding myself slightly apart the way I did back then, not wanting to embarrass myself, get things wrong.
We left Ibiza as friends for life. I have vivid memories of feeding each other ham straight from the packet at 2 a.m. to sober us up, wetting ourselves laughing over first-kiss stories in the hotel with pre-drinks, and then, of course, skinny-dipping in the sea at midnight, howling under the moon, tits out.
We were one step away from sunning our vaginas to charge them up on the hotel balcony.
Daniela wore the evidence of our blossoming friendship as a badge of honour – in the form of a bruise on her chin from her worm on the dance floor – for the next week and a half.
I don’t need to crane my neck to know exactly where we are.
I thread through the sweaty, half-naked bodies, past the jacuzzi, the swimming pool, and towards the balcony of the beach bar overlooking the sea.
We pass girls draped across sunbeds, plastic boobs in the air like coconuts lined up in a shy.
A lifeguard is standing close by. He isn’t watching the water.
Jake is following close and I don’t need to turn around to know he’s fallen behind somewhere around the sunbeds.
Fuck, I’d love another drink right now. Beach bars are great when you’re slightly tipsy, but when sober, they’re … a lot – all Lynx Africa and sticky sun cream, mixed with Malibu and Coke. My heels stick a little to the floor, as drinks gets spilled while people dance, but nobody cares.
I stop, letting a girl trying to take a selfie pass. She repositions, spinning, trying to catch the light on the best side of her face.
‘I actually don’t think I like the party scenes in this film,’ Jake shouts behind me. ‘Why is everyone so jacked?’
I turn as he reaches out and tries to touch the bicep of some hench lad who is standing next to us, wearing nothing more than Speedos and a gold chain around his neck.
More men are stationed nearby in groups, gripping beer bottles by the necks, peeling off labels to distract themselves from conversation.
‘No one looks like they’re actually having fun?
’ He shrugs. ‘Fuck, if this were me and I was alive …’ He shakes his head, doesn’t finish the thought.
Something across the pool has grabbed his attention – a man whose tan abruptly ends at his collar and the tops of his arms, like he’s wearing a pasty T-shirt somehow embedded with chest hair.
Jakes stares for a long moment, squinting. ‘Why is his head a different colour to his body?’
‘If you were partying here, you probably would have hated it,’ I say. ‘Too loud, too many people doing this …’ I mime someone checking their reflection in their phone screen, pouting.
He laughs, nodding. ‘Yeah, exactly.’
I don’t point out to him that he’d been doing the exact same thing moments ago, checking out and mentally comparing himself to every guy at this bar.
‘Come on, we’re just over here.’ I wave him forward.
We stop once we reach the balcony. It’s hard to miss us.
As the sun sets golden amber over the sea, us girls are wild and free.
Arms outstretched, jumping to the beat, spinning each other around, Cheshire Cat grins on our faces.
We are truly alive and living every minute of it.
The surrounding crowd watches jealously, too in their own heads and aware of their appearance to fully let go, heads bowed towards black screens, taking posed group pics, making small talk with the opposite sex.
These girls, though, they are without a care in the world.
No camera phones in sight, they dance truly like nobody’s watching.
I watch as young Belle pulls an impressive slut drop to the floor, tongue in cheek, literally, with her friends cheering around her, whooping and hollering.
I wonder if my knees could still do that now? They chant to the music, hand in hand.
This girl – younger me – stands out like a disco ball: shining bright, in a way that makes everyone around her catch the light too.
Her skin isn’t bronzed but dusted in freckles; her bleached hair has grown out to sandy roots, an unintentional ombré she’d never have chosen deliberately, but that she’s grown to love.
Thank God I finally ditched those bleach-at-home box-dye kits – they made my head itch like ants had taken up residence there.
I’m beaming at her, I realise. She’s still grieving, deep down, but underneath it all, she’s just present. Living for the moment. Chasing her dreams, not forgetting to make the most of every second along the way. My jaw is clenched – I find this out by unclenching it.
What is that? Jealousy? I’m jealous of myself, apparently. That’s new.
The girls are clinging to each other now, in a four-way bear hug, laughing as they go, and I find myself trying to remember the last time I danced like that with them.
Not just the polite bopping you do at a work Christmas party when someone drags you to the dance floor after only two mulled wines.
I reach for the memory but can’t find it; it must be further back than I expected. A birthday? Whose? I can’t remember.
Why did I decide not to do a hen party, again? Why would I miss an opportunity to have a proper, wild, and rite-of-passage send-off, with these queens by my side? I know the official answer: I was busy. Wedding planning is relentless if you’re doing it properly, which I was, mostly alone.
I remember thinking it wasn’t necessary.
That a weekend trip would have meant more money and more time spent away from planning the actual dream day.
More time off, plus logistics on top of logistics, so I just pushed it aside.
That’s the excuse I gave Rachael, anyway, when she’d asked – the first, second, and third time.
Then she’d stopped asking. Timothy had said that it all felt like a lot, too, given everything we had on.
I actually think I might have been the one to say it first.
Either way, it feels like such a shame. I wanted one last hurrah with these girls. I wanted penis pinata, penis straws, penis sashes. I wanted the lot and I wanted it with them.
Younger me does a spin, grabs Daniela’s hands and they turn in a circle like they’re nine years old and playing ring-a-ring o’ roses, except to a Diplo track instead of a nursery rhyme.
I’m still trying to relax my jaw, actually massaging it with my palms now, as Jake hands me a drink. It’s bright pink and garish, with a layer of blue at the bottom and complete with an orange slice and straw.
‘Cheers,’ Jake says, raising his glass as well as his brows.
We clink glasses, very politely, which feels ridiculous given the setting. The drink tastes chemically sweet.
We stand still and sip for a moment, until a woman in a neon-yellow bikini walks past and does a double take at us – or rather, at our glasses: two garish drinks hovering in the crowd at chest height, occasionally tilting. She turns to her friend. We watch her friend’s face do the same thing.
I reflexively back away, grabbing Jake by his sleeve.
‘We should probably—’
‘Yep!’ Jake agrees.
We shuffle into a gap between the bar and a speaker, loud enough that no one will pay much attention to anything other than themselves and their end goal of trying to catch the barman’s attention.
Jake winces next to me, lowering his glass. ‘Terrible drink, this,’ he says, one hand massaging his jowls.
‘It’s an Ibiza beach bar, not a cocktail championship.’
‘Tastes like that time Vik put four bags of Skittles in a bottle of vodka and then set it off in the dishwasher.’
‘I think that’s basically what this is.’ I grimace, dragging my tongue across my teeth.
Jake looks at his drink, takes another sip and then scans the crowd. ‘Who were you here with, anyway?’ he says. I can see him analysing, still comparing himself to the men around us.
‘That guy.’ I point with the straw in my glass. There stands Nat. God, he was hot.
Jake follows my eyeline just as Nat approaches younger me, places his hands on my hips and we sway side to side. I lean my head back on his chest, eyes closed, and we grind like something from a Nineties R they’re instead fixed on that chest. I remember the feel of my hands pressing down on that chest as I rode him.
The way my skin had goosebumps from the too-cold air conditioning, even as everything else was warm.
The sound of his laugh when I’d knocked the hotel phone from the bedside table with one arm, and how neither of us had stopped to pick it up, the dial tone becoming the soundtrack to our night.
Along with the sound of our skin slapping together.
It wasn’t meaningful in the way that true love is meaningful, but that evening with him felt like the relief my body needed.
I’d been so careful for so long, with who I let in and let close.
Especially after Vik, who I can admit now was a mistake born out of grief.
This felt like something else, completely freeing.
To be enjoyed without apology. I have to stop myself from blushing.
Jake’s still muttering along to himself beside me. ‘I’m not threatened! Why would I be threatened? Just because he looks like that, and I’m literally deceased … Fine. This is fine!’
Nat spins me around, kisses me intensely, and I feel the balcony shift around them – not slow motion, exactly, more like the volume dropping and everything else fading in the background, the girls screaming at the edge of it all. The whole thing narrows down to the two of them in the middle of it.
‘Rebound holiday shag. Classic. I get it.’ I slap him lightly on the arm, and he laughs, nudging me back. ‘So, apart from him being a walking advert for protein powder, why was this so significant? An Ibiza one-night stand was important to you, was it?’
I get goosebumps. Not from the question, but from knowing the full answer.
‘You’ll find out.’ I smirk. ‘To the end?’
Jake exhales in the humid heat. ‘To the end.’