Chapter Nine #2
But she’s not. She wouldn’t kid – and least of all, with me – and we’re now stopping completely. Polly and Lars are tearing forward in their boat, but we aren’t. We’re just here, bobbing in icy, icy waves. I bet it’s a-thousand-knife-edges levels of cold. I bet it’s deep.
‘Are there whales in here?’ I ask. ‘Like, killer ones or . . .?’
Allie says nothing. She radios over. It’s all weird language I don’t really understand, but then she mutters, ‘We’ll have to paddle.’ Then she says a hefty, ‘Fantastic.’ Paddle?
‘We’ll have to do it the manual way.’ She leans over me, untying an oar . . . Oh, God, an oar? I don’t know how to oar, is she serious? She’s squashed against me, we have no choice, this boat is tiny, and we are drowning in equipment.
‘Here.’
She passes me an oar, then begins untying another.
‘We’ve got to row our way over?’ I ask.
‘Yes.’ She brandishes her own oar with a sigh. ‘The engine’s failed. Happens. It’s because of the ice. So, we need to paddle. Together. It’s better that way. Preserves energy.’
She sits in front of me, her back to me.
‘It’s called sweep rowing,’ she explains. ‘Where you have one each. We have to make sure we’re synchronised. Thankfully, we don’t have far to go. I’ll count: one and two . . .’
‘Three?’
‘No.’ She tuts. ‘One and two, and on two, you row. In this’ – she demonstrates – ‘direction.’
‘OK. Yes, captain.’
Within moments, Allie and I are rowing. You seriously could never write this shit. I’m saying nothing, and Allie is just repeating ‘one and two, one and two’ like she’s testing a mic.
‘We’re doing OK, right?’ I add.
She just nods, while repeating one and two.
‘Look, I know this has been hard. But, I was thinking, people work with people they don’t get along with, people they don’t like, all the time, right? So, maybe, we can actually do the whole professional thing—’
She scoffs a laugh. Then says, ‘Feather the oar, don’t dunk it—’
‘I am.’
‘You’re not—’
‘Jesus,’ bursts out of me. ‘When’re we going to stop this shit?’
Silence. Allie’s ‘one, two’ stops. The boat stills.
‘What?’
‘Like, I’m trying. OK? And I don’t have to. You know? You did this.’
‘Me? What is this, stick to the story no matter what. Nobody’s listening here, Milo. No newspapers, no press, no fans . . .’
‘Stick to what?’
‘Your well-crafted story.’
‘I don’t have a story,’ I laugh.
‘No?’
We don’t paddle. We don’t move. We’re just bobbing, oars still in our hands. Her hair bristles in the wind in front of me.
‘You seemed firmly in your story when you went on TV,’ she says, wobblily. ‘In that stupid meme T-shirt of my messages, laughing about it—’
‘What else was I supposed to do? I was hurt.’
My shoulders sag. I do regret The Really Late Show.
It felt cheap to capitalise off it. But I wasn’t thinking.
I was . . . drunk. In total denial that I even had another problem, because, ‘Hey! At least it wasn’t benzos!
’ Everything felt like it does on alcohol.
Doable. Like nothing. And I leant into it.
My publicist, Sue; my agent, my buddy Ben, all telling me to lean into the discomfort and betrayal, and own it like it was mine.
‘Play it like a damn tune, I say,’ one of the producers had said.
The show had the meme T-shirt waiting for me in costume.
Screw it, I thought. Allie had her money.
She had what she wanted. What about me? Everyone seemed to be eating it up anyway, and yeah, I guess it was the biggest temporary injection of external validation I could’ve ever hoped for.
Especially after Dad. Especially after Allie erased me from her phone (and life).
I wanted the fawning. I wanted to be the good guy.
‘What does it even matter to you?’ I ask her. ‘You did it. You got what you wanted.’
Allie looks up at me. Her eyes are watery. ‘Stop,’ she says. ‘Please just . . . tell the truth. Admit it. It’s just us here.’
‘Admit what?’
She laughs, tearfully. ‘That you leaked the messages. I mean, what does it even matter? It’s done. Nobody cares anymore—’
‘No,’ I say. The boat bobs on the waves. The waves have turned us at an angle. I dunk in the oar and swoop through the water to turn it again. ‘No, I won’t because I didn’t.’
Allie is silent, stunned.
‘I mean, what even is this, Allie? Did you forget? Are you so enmeshed with the story that you just believe it? We were meant to meet. Remember? Then you’re blocking me. On everything. Out of nowhere.’
Allie’s shaking her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I blocked you because I didn’t want to do what you wanted me to. What your publicist suggested.’
I freeze. This feels . . . weird. Like the world has suddenly frozen.
‘What? My pub— my publicist? Who?’
She turns and looks at me. ‘Your publicist,’ she repeats. ‘You told me you were going to speak to her. Then she called me. Sue Lewis or whatever her name was.’
My heart falls through my body. ‘What? W-when did this happen?’ Sue wanted to talk with Allie. I remember she took her number down, but – she never picked up.
‘You said to bear with you,’ she says, voice wavering. ‘I was going to meet you the next day. Then she called me, said you’d confided in her about everything . . .’
‘I did, but . . .’
‘And she said to roll with it. To come to the hotel, to lean into the attention, because everyone was invested and we could both gain from it. I was already getting messages and people had turned up to take selfies outside of June House, and I just thought . . . fuck you. So that’s why I blocked you. ’
I shake my head. ‘Allie, that – that shouldn’t have happened . . .’
‘You orchestrated it.’
‘What are you saying? You – you didn’t leak it? You think it was me?’ Is this not a story she’s sticking to, or playing dumb? Did she really not do it? Shit. I feel like I’m gonna throw up.
‘I said I wasn’t doing this here,’ she remarks, sitting up straight and angling her paddle back into the water.
‘And I heard you,’ I say, quietly. ‘But . . .’ My voice falls. ‘Do you really not know how it happened?’
‘You know I don’t.’
‘And neither do I.’
She says nothing.
I stare at her. I can’t think straight. No.
No. I feel blindsided. I can feel it, that familiar, old squeeze of panic in my throat, where the world feels unpredictable.
A tiny, old spark blinks within me. A habitual yearn to mute it with something – a drink.
It burns out as quick as it happens. But this is .
. . heavy. Something I’ve known as fact, something I’ve believed for two years .
. . there’s a crack suddenly running through it.
But what about the funding money? She had none, then she had it all.
Her old friend, Andrew. He’s a funding strategist. Works with newspapers – the type of newspapers that slam people like me for wearing the wrong suit to a gala.
I looked him up. Everything pointed to it being Allie.
Her cooking this up, between them. But now . . .
‘Research,’ she says firmly. ‘Filming. You’re meant to be here to research and help and film, right? Why don’t we just go back to agreeing that you do your job and I do mine.’
‘Fine,’ I reply, even though it’s the last thing I want to do. I can think of nothing else to say. I feel like there’s a pinata above us and we just took a first bat to it, released a flurry of lies and truths and I don’t know yet what’s what. Because if Allie didn’t leak the phones, who did?
‘One and two,’ starts Allie again, and together, in tandem, we row closer and closer to land.