Chapter Ten
Allie
I have never looked forward to stodgy camp couscous and salami more. I’m hungry, and we have spent the entire day in Cote Rock, setting up the camp, which takes a lot of energy and time. And that’s on top of the extra energy given to actually getting to the island with nothing but oars and rage.
First there’s our temporary lab for Polly and Iris’s bacteria, and our sleeping quarters, which we’ve partitioned off to separate us – Polly, Iris and me – from Jameson, Lars and Milo.
That’s a strange feeling. Knowing nothing but a tarpaulin sheet will separate Milo and me tonight, as we sleep, but I’m grateful to not have to sleep in the same space as him. I can’t even imagine that.
Building a camp with him was hard.
Sitting here, around a crackling, smoking campfire, eating couscous and salami – an easy-to-store wild-camping favourite – opposite him, harder.
The dinghy – unbearable. Something happened on the dinghy, too.
And now, for the first time in two years, I feel real doubt.
I feel doubt that he did it. And that frightens me.
Because . . . what does that even mean? And what about The Really Late Show and the laughter?
What about the interview and magazines and the memes about it he posted on Instagram?
But then, if he didn’t do it and he really believed it was me . . .
Ugh.
I don’t even know.
And what’s harder, is there’s no space to think.
He’s everywhere.
I work, Milo is there. I set up the lab, Milo’s voice is there, floating over from the shore like a familiar song.
I eat dinner, Milo is there. The quicker I can finish this meal, the quicker I can go to bed, crawl into my sleeping bag, hope that I survive both polar bear attacks and the sheer amount of dread seeping into my skin, that feels like poison, and this day can end—
‘Who fancies a little getting to know you session?’
Oh, no. I look up from my meal. We’re sitting in a loose, straggled circle on a mat at the entrance of the tent. Polly is beaming with her question as she stands with her own empty camping bowl.
‘I, um . . . We should rest?’ I start to say, through chews, but it’s of course lost amidst a chorus of ‘sure!’s and ‘yeah!’s. Jameson and Milo are sitting opposite me beside empty camping bowls, bottled water in their hands. Milo doesn’t appear to react.
Iris, from beside me, nudges me. ‘It’s all good, amigs,’ she whispers.
We’ve barely found the time to chat, Iris and me.
She’s been talking a lot to Jameson and his camera, directing them both, as if his GoPro is another person, with her finger across the horizon, but she keeps checking in with me.
In her last check-in, she said, ‘I just need you to clarify you’re not going to, like, dinghy off when we’re all asleep.
’ Then, ‘I know you’re in hell, but I have to say, I’m going to take Jameson home with me in a little jar. ’
Polly slaps her hands together, stands authoritatively, like a teacher at the edge of the circle. ‘Who’s heard of the human knot? Come on, Lars, you’ve heard of the human knot, right?’
Lars laughs, sitting with his leg cocked, wrist resting on top of it, a bottle of Mountain Dew hanging from his fingers like a beer. ‘I’m a knot expert, baby.’
Iris leans into me. ‘It’ll be OK,’ she whispers.
‘Think of the doc. I really think it’ll be worth it.
’ She’s hook, line and sinker, isn’t she?
She’s even speaking like them: ‘doc.’ But that’s Iris.
Had her heart broken more than anyone I know, but still loves people.
Attaches to them. Borrows little parts of them.
Trusts them because not trusting feels worse.
But I know she’s right. Jameson has millions of followers, and Milo, the enormous reach of Hollywood. It really will raise so much money.
But this is some unknown game called the human knot. I can’t imagine the human knot has ever benefitted a single human soul. Unless the human knot consists of being bent into a pretzel and thrown out to sea as an act of euthanasia.
‘It’s a great ice breaker and a lot of fun,’ continues Polly.
‘I played it at a family reunion last year, back in Canada, and it even thawed my grumpy wife.’ Did she just look at me?
Blurred at the corner of my vision, I can feel Milo looking at me too.
We haven’t spoken a word since the dinghy.
And now I’m the person in the group who needs thawing. Great.
Polly explains the rules, which sound both simple and agonising.
We have to stand in a circle and hold two mystery hands, at random.
Then we simply have to unknot each other without dropping hands.
But we can only make a move when we each answer a question about ourselves.
‘Like truth or dare, without the dare part. And if you don’t want to answer, you can’t move. ’
Within moments, Iris is collecting up the dirty camping dishes and rinsing them in the ocean – bears sniff out food, so it’s important no old food is near the camp – and we’re all making a standing circle.
The campfire smokes and cracks behind us, and the sky, despite it being 8 p.m., is still light, but thick with cloudy, thunderous gloom.
It feels like an early autumn evening back in the UK.
But unlike an autumn evening, the sun simply won’t go down here.
A party guest who never wants to leave, still drinking on the lawn when the bin men arrive, and the neighbours leave for work.
Milo stands two people away from me, Iris and Lars between us.
If I aim over to the right, I should avoid his hands altogether.
I feel uneasy about our conversation on the boat.
The way he said, ‘I was hurt.’ I know how that feels.
I often wish I hadn’t done the podcast. It was live, it was unplanned, I felt I couldn’t just walk off stage in front of all these amazing, supportive women.
But I was hurt too. Even Sian told me once, and harshly, that it was a mistake, but once she’d read my diaries, she was out to say anything that would hurt me as much as she was, and I understood it.
I would often say I wished she’d see them, so we could air everything, but I still wish we’d had a conversation.
Sat at June House’s kitchen table, months before.
Mum used to make us. A proverbial banging-together of our heads.
Instead, I’m only left with regret about the way things unravelled, in the end, with my sister.
June House. The B that in small, millisecond glimmers, it feels safe with him.
Familiar. Like I’m sharing space with someone I’ve always known.
Jameson goes next – Milo asks him his favourite childhood memory, and as Jameson tells an anecdote about him and Milo getting trapped in an old greenhouse in a heatwave, all because he was hiding from a girl he fancied, I somehow now, in trying to shift myself from an uncomfortable position with Lars’ leg somehow twisted around mine, have Jameson’s arm across my chest. He is essentially hugging me from the side.
‘Hello,’ says Jameson. ‘Kind stranger.’
‘Hello,’ I reply. ‘Kind stranger.’
And he gives me the most shit-eating, enjoying-every-moment-of-this, schoolboy smile.
Iris takes her turn, confesses she went to a psychic once who told her she would marry a farmer she is still waiting for.
‘Extra fact,’ I comment, my arms stretched now, across the circle. ‘His name was Sorcerer Duncan.’
Milo laughs loudly at what I say, which, despite myself makes me laugh too, and as we try to unknot, Jameson is now beside me, Polly has her back to us, and Milo is stuck hugging Iris, who has the total giggles.
Poor Lars seems to be sinking to the ground.
OK, perhaps this game was not the disastrous suggestion I initially thought it to be.
‘All right, Mildred,’ announces Jameson. ‘Your turn. Uhhh, what’s the . . . OK, OK, I’ve got it. What’s the most romantic thing someone’s ever done for you?’
Oh. I had not expected that at all. Nor how I’m interested, for some reason, to hear his answer.
‘Jesus . . .’ Milo laughs. ‘Seriously?’
Jameson and Iris are both giggling. I’m so hot for some reason, I worry my head might explode. Mostly because it seems everyone – even Polly – has glanced over at me. Lars might, if he wasn’t splayed out on the floor, all arms and legs, like a praying mantis.
‘Um . . .’ I glance up at him. He actually appears to be a little embarrassed. Shifting eyes, chewing the corner of his mouth.
‘Maybe he has too many to choose from,’ teases Polly.
‘Maybe he has none,’ I mutter under my breath.
‘Sorry, did you say something?’ Milo meets my eyes. He’s two people over from me, an arm stretched across the circle. There’s a tiny quirk of his mouth.
‘I just . . . I have pins and needles, so can you just hurry up and answer.’
‘Yes, do it for Allie,’ says Jameson. ‘I mean, she can answer if she feels she might know.’
Iris is now in a fit of giggles. Little shits, both of them.
‘OK, OK,’ says Milo. The circle falls quiet. ‘I think it’s got to be: she let me read her to sleep. And – yeah. It was . . . the best.’
He smiles, looks over at me. As everyone coos and swoons, I look away. There’s a warm buzz travelling up my body and I don’t even want to acknowledge it.
We unknot some more, and the group are suddenly freer, most facing outwards, but Milo and me . . . somehow, suddenly, we’re in the centre of the circle, just inches between us, opposite each other.
A hand squeezes mine. Iris grins over at me. I squeeze back.
‘Your turn,’ Milo says, voice low, opposite me. The campfire crackles. Waves crash. This is quite unbearable. I want to run. Equally, I don’t want to move from looking at him. His voice. His honeyed eyes. His mouth. Him.
‘I’ve got one,’ says Lars. ‘What’s your one-pass celebrity crush? You know. A celebrity you’d kiss if you could.’
Oh my God.
Lars is asking me this because of an inside joke.
He once told me he paid ￡120 to meet Helen Mirren at Comic-Con and hoped she might fancy him.
She didn’t, but they had many photos taken together and she signed his cigarette lighter.
I had then told him I didn’t have celebrity crushes.
Luckily Lars is just as oblivious to my viral moment as Polly.
‘That’s some crazy bullshit, Allie,’ he’d insisted. ‘Everyone has one!’
The circle falls quiet.
‘Bloody hell, Lars,’ I say, embarrassedly. ‘I told you, I don’t have one.’
‘False!’ shouts Lars. ‘She’s not telling the truth.’
‘I am,’ I say. ‘I don’t have celebrity crushes and Lars doesn’t believe me.’
‘Not even when you were younger?’ asks Polly. ‘When you were a teenager? Not wanted to plant one on one of . . . I don’t know. The New Kids On The Block?’
‘Ha. Bit before my time, Polls.’
Everyone stares at me. Milo’s Adam’s apple bobs. My face burns. Iris’s hand squeezes mine, comfortingly.
‘I . . . find it hard to fancy strangers,’ I say. ‘Or think about kissing them.’
Jameson laughs. ‘OK, but what if they’re a celebrity but not a stranger?’
The atmosphere is taut, like a stretched bow. The fire pops. Wind hums.
‘Well,’ I say, ‘then that would change things. But – that wasn’t the question.’
I look up to meet Milo’s eyes, and his mouth lifts, in a tiny half-smile, eyes glinting with .
. . something. My heart thump-thumps. Then, without waiting, I make a move, and then Lars apologises, says he has to move, too, regardless, because he has cramp, and we’re unknotting again, people are laughing again, Lars straightening his arm and striding in front of me, and Jameson pulling Milo across the circle.
The taut bow of an atmosphere, loose again.
We answer more questions.
Ice is broken.
When the game is over, I’m holding two hands. One is Polly’s. The other, the one who squeezed mine, was Milo’s.