Chapter XX Cosima #3
The straightforwardness of it appealed to Cosima.
They picked, separated, cleaned. She didn’t have to talk.
She could spend whole days and weeks trawling the sand, retrieving crumpled plastic bottles and crisp packets, and she found it almost meditative: the repetitive action; the feeling of being engaged in something mindless yet meaningful; the sense that she was simultaneously making progress while knowing the task would never be completed.
However often they tackled a stretch of beach, the following week it would need to be cleared again.
‘Hi guys,’ Cosima says to the gap-year students, two German boys called Heinrich and Rudy and one Welsh girl whose name she can’t remember.
‘OK, so we’re going to head towards that end,’ Cosima signals eastwards, towards the posh beach club and, beyond it, the old temple, ‘and make our way back to here. I’ve got everything we need.’
She downs the rest of her coffee, placing the cup on the sand, and unzips her backpack, taking out the fabric rubbish sacks printed with the Clean Bali Beach logo (two hands meeting across a wave). She hands them out, along with a face mask and a pair of gloves for each volunteer.
‘Sorry to sound like your mum,’ she says, ‘but have you remembered to put sunscreen on?’
The three of them nod.
‘Cool. Let’s do this.’
On the walk down towards the temple, the Welsh girl whose name, it turns out, is Holly, tries to strike up conversation.
‘So … how long have you been here, then?’
Cosima squints at her, lifting her palm to shield her eyes from the sun. Holly has freckled cheeks, frizzy hair and a burned nose that is already flaking.
‘Two months,’ Cosima says.
‘Wow. Nice tan.’
Cosima laughs but doesn’t follow up. She’s not in the mood for talking. Alas, Holly is chatty.
‘So what brought you to Bali?’
Cosima sighs.
‘The usual thing. Wanted to travel and do something good while I’m at it, y’know?’
She spots a plastic six-pack ring at the edge of the shoreline.
She bends to twist it out from under wet sand.
Holly stands watching her, arms crossed, the hem of her denim cut-offs digging into blotchy thighs.
Why doesn’t she do something? Cosima thinks, annoyed by her inaction.
There’s plenty of rubbish she could be collecting.
‘It’s funny,’ Holly says in her sing-song accent as Cosima puts the plastic ring into her waste-disposal sack. ‘I could have sworn I recognised you. It’s like I know you from somewhere.’
Cosima’s throat constricts.
‘That’s weird.’
She carries on walking, more quickly now, trying to shake Holly off.
But Holly keeps up with her and the sound of Holly’s sandals slapping wetly against her feet starts to embed itself in Cosima’s thoughts.
Slap, slap, slap. Pause. Slap, slap. Pause.
Slap. She can’t reach for her usual calm, can’t concentrate, and she almost misses an empty bottle of arak, the label brown and ripped but the glass still miraculously intact.
She picks the bottle up by its neck, slips it into the bag and reminds herself to breathe.
Yeah, thanks Byron, she thinks. She turns to see Holly still staring, still standing with her arms crossed, the empty rubbish sack hanging from one hand.
‘No. It’s true. I do know you. You’re that girl.’
Holly’s face clears. She’s pleased with herself now. She’s got the satisfying serotonin spike that comes when the elusive fact you were trying to drag up has finally surfaced.
Cosima sees Rudy and Heinrich a few feet ahead of her. If she quickens her pace, she can catch up with them and start talking about something – anything – else but then Holly is next to her again, with her chafing shorts and her slapping sandals and her sweaty, red face.
‘You’re the politician’s daughter,’ Holly says, her Welsh accent becoming more pronounced in her excitement. ‘The eco chick.’
Cosima keeps her head down, pulling the brim of her cap lower over her eyes.
‘Isn’t your dad, like … in jail?’
In the sand: a piece of blue rope, coiled into itself like a fraying ammonite.
Cosima focuses her gaze on the twist of each fibre and the bleached-out azure of the dye.
She calculates how much effort it will take to work the rope out of an entangled clump of seaweed with her clumsy, gloved fingers.
She tries to ignore the pins-and-needles sensation that trickles down from her scalp into her arms, her stomach, her legs.
She remains, as much as she can, in the here and now.
Her panic attacks usually happen when she’s in crowds of other people – noisy bars or crowded tourist spots – and she is used to spotting the warning signs and taking herself to a quiet place to regulate her breathing.
But here, on the wide expanse of Canggu beach with nothing but hot, whipping wind between her and the horizon, she feels simultaneously exposed and trapped.
A sharp pain lodges itself beneath her left shoulder.
Holly is looking at her with a collector’s gaze, as if Cosima is a rare butterfly, wings pinned onto velvet, and now Holly’s face is getting smaller and smaller and Holly’s eyes are dotted pixelations and all around Cosima there is a glittering darkness and a black sky with shooting neon stars and her body spirals through space: an astronaut adrift in zero gravity.
And then.
She.
Falls.
Into.
Silence.
Cosima’s eyes flicker open. Three faces peer over her. She is on the ground. Beneath her, a solid warmth and the scratch of sand at the nape of her neck. A soiled, rotten smell. She turns her head to see the dulled scales of a dead fish glinting at her through strands of washed-up seaweed.
‘You fainted,’ Rudy is saying, stretching out his hand to help her up off the sand. Cosima doesn’t take it.
‘I just need to rest here for a bit.’
‘Oh my God,’ Holly is saying. ‘I didn’t mean to … I’m so sorry … I just thought. I mean … I just couldn’t work out where I knew your face from and then—’
Heinrich places a hand on Holly’s arm.
‘Shush,’ he says, not unkindly. Holly stops speaking. Cosima’s nausea subsides. She tries to prop herself up to a seated position.
‘Careful,’ Rudy says. ‘Do you want us to get you a Coke or something?’
She nods, gratefully.
‘Yeah. Anything sugary.’
‘I’ll go,’ Holly says.
‘Ya. Me too,’ Heinrich adds.
The two of them drop their rubbish sacks and start making their way to the nearest beach café.
When they’re out of earshot, Cosima starts apologising.
‘I’m so sorry. God, how embarrassing. I’m meant to be the one in charge.’
The words come out in a muddled rush.
‘Don’t worry,’ Rudy says. ‘I used to faint all the time. I got nosebleeds.’
She tries to stand but her legs are too weak. Rudy doesn’t say anything. Instead, he takes off his gloves and his face mask and sits cross-legged next to her.
‘Nosebleeds, huh?’ Cosima says.
He shrugs, his face serious.
‘School was shit,’ Rudy says.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Me too. For whatever Holly said to you.’
She sighs.
‘It’s not Holly’s fault. My dad was arrested for—’
‘I know.’
This surprises her. She had thought, foolishly, that she would be able to leave everything that had happened behind, thousands of miles across several oceans.
She never spoke about her family to her fellow volunteers.
The only person who knew about it was Derek and even they didn’t talk about it that much because, for different reasons, they both found it too upsetting.
‘How?’ Cosima asks.
Rudy laughs.
‘The internet.’
‘Oh. Right. Yeah.’
The story had been everywhere. Stupid to think that Bali was the one place she could ignore it.
Her father had been arrested and charged with five counts of bribery.
The new Prime Minister, Richard Take, was said to want to make an example of his former colleague.
The day after his ‘unprecedented’ election (this being the first time the Conservative Party had cited ‘highly extenuating circumstances’ in order to change the rules and allow a late-declaring candidate to stand), Take had given an interview to the Sunday Times, calling for ‘due process’.
‘Ben Fitzmaurice certainly has questions to answer,’ Prime Minister Take told the reporter. ‘The wheels of justice must turn for him as they would for any other citizen of this great country, and these alleged payments will be investigated without further delay.’
Three of the payments were said to have been made to two senior Tipworth police detectives seven years ago, just after Ben’s fortieth birthday party.
That was the time, Cosima knew now, when Martin had been pushed out by the Fitzmaurice family and, with nothing left to lose, had told the authorities about the Vicky Dillane cover-up.
He had revealed – finally – that it had been Ben drunkenly at the wheel that night, driving the speeding car that had killed her.
The final two payments had been made more recently, in the wake of Fliss’s accusations against Andrew Jarvis. Fliss had told the police everything and, yet again, they had taken the Fitzmaurice cash and made it all disappear, as if none of it mattered. As if Fliss’s life didn’t count.
And Fliss, who was told her memories were madness, had walked into the sea one night and died believing her life was an inconvenient truth to the people she loved. It was Felicity, in the end, who was sacrificed.
‘Must be tough,’ Rudy says now.
‘Yeah.’
Cosima starts to cry. The tears, when she feels them on her face, are a surprise.
She’s been so good at not crying, at not allowing herself to be sad or scared or lonely.
But here, on Canggu beach, sitting next to a German called Rudy whom she barely knows, she realises the truth.
She misses her parents. Their absence is a dull ache she wakes to each morning.
Rudy pats her back, gently. It is oddly soothing.
‘Can you talk to him still? Your father, I mean?’