Chapter Thirteen #2
She, smirks, bringing binoculars to her eyes. I don’t know how she can look into those things. I like my eyes right on the floor up here – a little memo to the brain that it’s all good, we have steady ground beneath our feet.
‘I know you don’t agree with what we’re doing,’ I say. ‘The doc.’
She breathes out, drops the binoculars. ‘It’s not that. I just think there are other ways, I suppose, without—’
‘Two dickhead celebrities attached?’
‘Two dickheads?’ she deadpans.
It almost gets me – I almost apologise for being unprofessional, saying dickheads. ‘Ah. You mean you can only see one, right? Ouch. Again.’
For a while, we say nothing. Allie watches birds, scrawls in a notebook – rough flight traffic numbers, she says distractedly, as she observes, serious, counting in her head.
And up here, high up, adrenaline pulsing, that part of me that’s untethered, all heart and no logic, has gathered.
I sort of want to reach out and gently push her hair behind her ear.
I want to be closer to her. And yeah, yeah, what about the professional agreement?
What about everything? That part is still there too, shaking its judgemental head at me.
But right now, it’s weaker than the brainless animal part that wants to be near her, finally.
Touch the soft skin of her face, run my thumb across her jaw, her bottom lip—
A bird cries above us, and I recognise it, by the call. And before I’ve even thought about it, the excitement of it, of recognising the sound, takes over. ‘Ivory gull,’ bursts out of me.
‘Huh?’
I follow it across the sky. ‘All the white. Ivory gull.’
I tip my face away from the sky. Allie is gazing at me, pink lips parted. ‘That is an ivory gull,’ she says, practically beaming, despite herself. ‘That’s . . . Well done.’
‘Ha. Yeah.’ I smile. ‘I’m more of a bird guy than I was, I guess?’
Because of you, I want to say. I read about them because of you, never scroll by a picture of them, still check the cameras. But I don’t. Instead, I wave back to Jameson, who’s filming the horizon, down on the ground.
‘Does it feel less scary now? Being out here?’ I ask her.
‘Yes,’ she replies, thoughtfully. ‘Probably the opposite now. It’s one of the only places I feel genuinely safe.’
And now I leave an intentional silence. Something warm pools in her eyes, like a dawn sun, and I will for it to stay there. It’s like I’ve put in the right combination code; drawbridge lowering.
‘It’s like . . . awful things can happen. Hearts break. People leave, people die, you lose things, and I can feel totally alone, but this . . . it just continues. I think . . . I think it’s the only thing I depend on.’
And there she is.
Allie.
Captain Lake.
This is the Allie I met. This is the Allie who lives in my head.
This gun-wielding, seagull obsessed (‘there’s no such thing as a seagull really, Milo’), stubborn, gorgeous genius.
This is who I worried wasn’t real. But it’s her.
And if it’s her, was it this Allie who smashed my heart open like a crab apple on the highway?
Is it possible I really was wrong? Is there something else – someone else – to blame?
‘Is there nothing for you to depend on back home?’ I ask. ‘On earth.’
‘I don’t know,’ she says, quietly.
Down below, Iris and Jameson laugh, the sound carried on the wind.
‘What about you?’ she asks.
‘On earth? Ah, man,’ I sigh. ‘Uh – work, firstly? It’s the North Star of my life, I guess.
Just – being able to chip away at humanity.
Find another layer you didn’t know existed in you because you stepped into the soul of this other person.
Getting at what it is to be a person in the world.
’ I look up at Allie and she smiles at me.
‘But I used to think other things were the work. Everything outside of myself, I guess? That’s the shit you shouldn’t depend on. ’
‘Like?’ asks Allie.
‘Accolades. Parts. Reviews. Photos. Cash. If this director thinks this, and that co-star has that. My damn hair. Fuckin' . . . jackets . . .’ I laugh. ‘It’s kind of why we wanted to do this. Be somewhere none of that truly matters. Create something where none of that matters.’
‘Mm,’ she nods. ‘Nobody cares about you here. I meant . . . the birds. The things that live under rocks, of course.’
‘Sure. The ivory gulls are what you meant.’
Allie smiles then, carries on watching, writing things down, and I watch Jameson setting up a tripod.
And right now, I feel like – it’s worth it.
If someone had told me I’d be thinking this yesterday on the dinghy, I’d have laughed.
But all of it feels worth it – the heights.
The aching legs. Cold-cold bones. The bad camp food.
Even the confused throb of sitting here so close to Allie but feeling a whole solar system apart from her.
She used to fall asleep next to me. She used to send me photos – selfies and those whacko breakfast props and themed clothes Sian bought . . .
‘How’s your sister?’ I promised myself I wouldn’t try to catch up, but it’s like a drug or something. The more she shows me, the more we talk, the more I want to know. The greedier I get.
But instantly, I wish I hadn’t asked. If asking her about this place was the right combination, this was the wrong one. She looks at her lap. ‘Um, she’s . . . She has a job at a camp now. A holiday camp? Has her own caravan there. She works a lot. Entertainment, lifeguarding, all that.’
‘She lives there?’ The diary. The diary floats to the top of my mind like scum I wish would dissolve.
It appeared to just be found, by fans, hours after the leak.
Published in a public drive under Allie’s name.
It’s another thing on my crumpled evidence list – another thing that made me totally sure I’d been screwed over by Allie.
Because she used to talk about showing Sian the diary because they found it hard to talk these days, stopping the whole bed and breakfast venture.
The themed mornings. The gnomes. How Sian was bad at talking and so was she.
‘Wow, so . . . the bed and breakfast. The farmhouse . . .’
‘June House.’
‘Yeah. That’s it. You’re . . . so it’s done?’
She looks at me sharply. ‘Done?’
‘No, I just meant . . . I know you hated it and—’
‘It was a bit more complicated than hating it, Milo. I didn’t hate the house, I just .
. .’ She stares out across the sea, runs her fingers the wrong way along a small white feather in her lap.
‘We sold it. We had to. Dad found out. He wanted his share. He found us,’ she says that simply.
That short, emotionless way old pain sometimes sounds when spoken.
‘The leak . . . I don’t know, I guess he got wind of it.
He found out about the house. It’s distinctive.
My grandad – his dad – lied and said he’d sold it to pay off business debt, but really, he signed it over to Mum before he died.
He was always so apologetic for Dad and everything he did.
Dad went to a solicitor, he had an inheritance claim, and .
. . that was it. We had to sell it to pay him off. ’
Shit. The list – the list is practically ash now. Because how could she have been behind the leak? It’s one thing upending my life, but upending her own?
She fiddles more with the silky white feather in her hands.
She looks so sad. I think of the beams behind her as we’d video chat.
The way her face was always lit by warm, brandy-coloured light.
All those weird plants behind her. All the things she told me about her mom.
The way her mother had wanted it to be a kind of retreat; free rooms for families who needed it.
I loved the idea. Hated how sad and tired her sister’s vision of it seemed to make Allie.
‘God, Allie. I’m sorry—’
‘And I know you think that’s what I wanted. I talked about it a lot, I know. I’m sure you feel like the leak was a . . . blessing in some way to me.’
‘Allie, I would never—’
‘And I thought it’s what I wanted. To be free of it.
June House was just . . . It became a sad place to be after Mum.
’ She clears her throat, shakes her head.
Anger glistens in her eyes. ‘But now I just feel like I failed her. I should’ve got over my grief enough to find a way to make it work, somehow, for all of us.
I should’ve made it a success. Told him, up front, found a way to pay him off. Kept it.’
‘You were grieving, Allie—’
‘At least Sian tried though,’ she continues. ‘However misguided. I just – sulked. Moaned about it all. And now it’s gone completely. And if I thought we didn’t talk before, now it’s . . . so much worse.’
I feel like I’ve been kneed in the gut.
‘Allie, I’m really sorry.’ And before I even consider what I’m doing, my hand lands on hers and I hold it.
She freezes, like someone turned her to stone all of a sudden.
I retract it. Stupid. That was really stupid.
I look at her. ‘Allie . . . You . . . Do you really – really – think I leaked the phones?’ I want to ask her if she did it, but she looks so sad, I can’t possibly put her under the spotlight of that question.
And sitting here with her, I think I feel sure that .
. . she didn’t do it. Jeez. Am I saying that?
Really? So, now what? If it wasn’t Allie, how did it happen?
She doesn’t speak. She hesitates and does the tiniest shake of a nod.
‘I didn’t,’ I say. ‘I didn’t.’
Allie stares at me.
I can barely breathe.
‘The day we completed the sale,’ she says, shakily, ‘was the day your magazine cover came out. The XN Mag cover.’
I close my eyes.
The cover. The topless one with the damn roses.
The viral cover that finally got me clean.
Seeing it staring back at me at a bodega as I bought beer.
In the line for the register, a stray tuxedo cat at my feet, I stared at my own face on the rack, and suddenly, I wanted to die.
It was like my chest had been hollowed out.
I missed Allie. I missed myself – whoever that even was.
I put the beer back and called Jameson outside, in the pouring rain. Nobody but him knows about it.
‘Allie, I’m . . . I’m sorry, but I was not good, I—’
‘And also, on Instagram,’ she cuts in again. She’s talking like she’s a faucet, finally twisted open. ‘Posting photos of the stupid memes of our messages.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘I was . . . screwed, Allie. I was hurt.’
‘You seemed just fine,’ she says. ‘You know, even if I was to suspend my disbelief and believe somehow you didn’t do it, I just kept coming back to those things. If he was innocent, a victim, he would not do those things. And you did. And you seemed just fine.’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘From what I saw—’
‘From what you saw. But that’s not real, Allie. It’s TV. It isn’t who I am or was. And you – you talked to a live audience. What about that?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I . . . I felt I couldn’t walk out. And I didn’t think I wanted to be heard, but I realised I did. I did. Because I didn’t do it.’
‘Neither did I!’
And then her eyes widen even more, and she stares past me. Ugh, I shouldn’t have said that. She now looks like she might actually kill me – but then she stands.
‘Down!’ she shouts below.
And a huge bang erupts.