Chapter Four
Milo
‘I mean, this is fate,’ Jameson grins. ‘You do know that, don’t you?’
In here, though, it’s another story. Not so much the room, but the situation. My own mind.
‘Like, if you looked fate up in the dictionary, this would be it.’ This has been Jameson’s melody for the last nine hours.
Playing it over and over like a one-hit wonder everyone grows to hate.
Fate. Destiny. More fate. Because how else can you explain it?
We make a New Year’s resolution to finally do our project – our something-important-and-real our something-bigger-than-us movie – and after Gabby, Jameson’s assistant, approaches charities and organisations proposing a twenty-minute impactful YouTube documentary, two reply, and he chooses this one because, ‘Well, I chose it for penguins, then realised that’s Antarctica, which is actually like, the opposite direction, haha. ’ And I agreed to do it.
I’ve never spent a single moment in any kind of real wilderness, but since entering recovery, I’ve found comfort and healing in putting myself into unfamiliar situations; ones that prompt me to really stop and think, gather my bearings.
Animal shelters. Museums. Memorials. Anything that connects me to something bigger than me.
But now, of course, I just feel like an asshole.
A stupid Hollywood gimmick who’ll rock up for a few days like a child on a field trip, then disappear back to my apartment with a concierge and its own sushi bar.
‘Jameson, can we stop now,’ I ask, ‘with the fate?’
‘But didn’t you always hope this would happen?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t believe you.’
‘Dude, are you hearing yourself?’ I unroll a T-shirt from my suitcase.
What do you even wear out here besides the coat and all those thermal socks we bought?
Why did I bring a vintage Prince tour T-shirt to an Arctic research station?
And how emblematic. A prop representing the fact that we should not have come here.
I had to Wikipedia search the Arctic before we came, for God’s sakes.
‘Like, this is Allie,’ I carry on. ‘Allie Allie who sold me out. Who literally used me.’
‘Yeah, I heard you, man.’
‘I don’t think you did. It’s just, it’s Allie Lake? On an island, in the middle of the Arctic circle and now we’ve got to go to an even smaller island with her with no escape, no internet. Like, what did they even mean by this is a radio silence area—’
‘It stops interference—’
‘—And all the while you, you’re getting all poetic about fate—’
‘Uh, you’re usually the one who’s poetic about fate,’ Jameson says with a laugh.
I stare at him.
Jameson holds his palms up – two giant basketballer’s hands – in surrender.
His curly hair bounces, then settles. ‘I know. I know,’ he says.
‘I get it, I do. It’s really her. But . .
. can we just take a sec? Like, how do you feel?
’ He stops, then shakes his head, bursts out laughing.
‘Sorry, but this is – it’s two years on, and here you both are.
End of the world. Or beginning of it. Two summers later .
. .’ He’s enjoying this. From the second I told him, he’s been enjoying it, and now he’s thrown his art hat on.
He’s in documentary-maker mode. This’ll be gold dust to his creative mind.
The jackassery in that, ‘How do you feel?’ If I didn’t love him, I’d punch him in the face.
‘She’s supposed to work at a university,’ I say, throwing another shirt back into my bag. Shirts. Why did I bring so many shirts? ‘I checked before I came here. Blamed paranoia. Laughably.’
‘Is that so?’ asks Jameson. He’s wearing that giant Pacman grin on his face.
So much of Jameson’s optimistic, romantic personality is in that Pac-man grin – has been the whole time I’ve known him.
Jameson was born in London, but his parents divorced when he was eleven, and his mom remarried a dude from New Jersey.
They moved in three doors down from me and my parents, and while Jameson stayed in London with his Dad, he came over to the US to visit every summer.
Jameson literally appeared in my front yard one afternoon when we were twelve, and said, full-Pac-man, ‘Hiya! I’m Jameson, do you fancy hanging out?
’ He admitted years later that he’d actually heard my dad yelling at me over the fence and felt bad for me.
A friendship born out of pity, I always say.
He says, ‘Fuck you, dude, I fell in love with you.’
‘Well, that’s what the internet says,’ I reply. ‘That Allie works at a university in the UK. Not the goddamn Arctic.’
‘Oh. Dude. Surely you and me both know not to trust anything we read on the internet.’
Jameson chuckles for longer than I’d like him to.
And I get it. I’d be the same if this was happening to him and I was just a bystander.
It’s funny, right? It’s fun, knowing your best friend is stuck on a remote island with the woman he’s never been able to haul his ass into getting over.
The one he coached me through forgetting, trying to glue me back together again over Cokes and karaoke sessions.
(Always ‘Perfect Day’ by Lou Reed or ‘Breaking Free’ from High School Musical. No in between.)
‘Personally, I think this could be brilliant,’ he says, adjusting something on his GoPro.
‘Like, this is the stuff of life, my man. We’ve wanted to do something like this forever.
Me making a real doc. You, doing something important.
This is life and love and nature and everything connected—’ He brings the camera to his face. ‘How are you really feeling?’
I sit on the edge of my bed, drag my hands through my hair, scrunching my fists to relieve some of the pressure.
‘Don’t film me, man.’
He ignores me. ‘There must be a part of you that feels intrigued, no? Seeing her again. You’re about to have breakfast with the woman.’
‘No.’
‘No?’
I turn my face towards him. ‘The woman traded me in, Jameson. Used me. For money for her project. Money I’d have given her.’
‘So you say.’
‘So the evidence says.’
‘What evidence?’ he scoffs.
‘Uh, all the screenshots were from her end. We talked the night of the leaks and arranged to meet at my hotel, then she cut me off, didn’t show.
No explanation. I go to her house because I’m worried and—’ I stop.
Going back over this is pointless. ‘You know all this. Don’t act like you don’t know this story just as well as I do. ’
He mimics me in a whiny voice, then says, ‘Yeah, but you had her phone, though.’ Jameson has never bought, completely, that Allie was the one behind the leak. He always hoped we’d reconcile somehow. He’s like that; thinks everything and everyone can be redeemed. Love conquers all.
‘She had access to her cloud, J.’
‘Oh, cloud, blah blah . . .
‘Can we just stop? Look,’ I say standing.
‘I’m still in yesterday’s clothes. We need to shower, we need to get ready for .
. . whatever awaits us today. Which I’m hoping is somehow convincing a helicopter pilot to fly me out of here.
Or a spaceman to rocket me out of earth’s orbit. There’re space people here too, right?’
Jameson drops the camera to his lap. The chair is like something from the nineties. White, rough plastic; waffle-holes in the backrest. It creaks beneath his long limbs. It’s like we’re at summer camp or something. ‘Milo, you’ve got this.’
‘I really don’t wanna do this, though.’
Jameson lets out a hissing sound, like air escaping from a tyre. ‘Well, you’ve got to. Even if you just do it for me.’
And he knows I will. Because Jameson is Jameson.
This man has been there for me through everything.
Slept beside me at the hospice when my mother died.
Cleaned up my tiny, horrible rental, filled my fridge, cooked for me in the weeks following.
I barely acknowledged him, sleeping every night on the couch.
He’s treated every rehab visit I’ve undertaken in my life with optimism.
He wrestled the phone out of my hand when Sara’s interview went live and she said that line – ‘He left the movie, then left me.’ ‘Let the world think you’re a prick!
’ he shouted, pulling the phone from my ear.
‘You know you’re not a prick; I know you’re not a prick!
’ Jameson is always there, one ear to the fence.
‘Come on.’ He jumps up. ‘Let’s get started.’
‘I’m going to be stuck with a woman I can’t stand for four days. Come here to help fix something and there she is, my biggest mistake . . .’
Jameson smiles to himself. ‘I mean, it’s a great hook. It’s a love story.’
‘Love story,’ I scoff. ‘Nah. It was just phones.’
And at the exact moment Jameson leans and opens the door, there she is.
Allie, in the corridor, walking past our room.
She freezes. She’s in a rose-pink dressing gown, wet hair waving across her face.
She stares at me. In her hands, a neat pile of folded clothes, bottles of shower gel, shampoo, lined up on top.
Her pale, smooth legs are bare from just below the knee.
Our eyes meet. And for a second, neither of us moves.
Jameson smiles at her, a warm neighbourly smile, and she stiffly returns one. Then she takes off, footsteps in flip-flops disappearing down the corridor.
Jameson shakes his head, an exasperated laugh puffing out of him.
‘Just phones,’ he says to himself. ‘Nothing but phones.’