Chapter Fifteen
Milo
Not that I don’t want to be near her. No. That’s not it. Not anymore. It’s suddenly worse than that. The more I’m with her, the more I want . . . more. The more I want her.
And that’s bad. Right?
For a lot of reasons. Reasons that go a little like this: We start talking, we get stuck in the same loop, and even when I feel like we’ve cracked through something, we circle all the way back to distrust. And then I keep thinking, well, all right, let’s say we truly let go of blaming each other – can we let it go without knowing how it happened?
I feel I can. I feel Allie can’t. She needs to know who did this – how the leak happened.
And if there was the tiniest chance for Allie and me, what the hell would that even look like?
Allie lives here. At the end of the world.
And me? My life? How does that fit? She treats a slice of limelight – messages, comments, fans – that lasted for a blink in time and space, as the moment her life was exploded.
That shit is standard for me. She’s here because she likes the quiet.
I can never offer her the quiet. My past is not unassuming like hers.
I can’t even bring myself to tell her the extent of rehab or addiction.
How it didn’t end after that one visit she knew about, and how I was starting to struggle again when we first met.
One drink with the crew, then two, then more.
Wouldn’t it be a shameful stain on her quiet, simple life?
Regardless, looking at her this afternoon, up on that cliff, I knew.
It’s all still there, everything I felt for her.
She is something to me. But when we make progress, we argue – literal flares get fired into the sky.
‘Sleep evading you?’ Iris slips out an earphone. They’re wired to a phone which appears to be playing an audiobook. She presses pause on the screen.
I take a seat next to her, on the waterproof mat. A fire burns nearby, a gun nestled next to Iris’s thigh. This whole guns and bears and wilderness thing is strangely starting to feel more normal. ‘Pretty much. Cold. Hungry. Ten billion thoughts.’
Iris nods over at me; quirks a tiny smile.
Like Jameson, Iris always has this little glint in her eye.
We’ve not spoken much. We haven’t had the chance, but the glint is always present.
A level of cool I always aim for and miss.
‘It gets to everyone,’ she says. ‘The quiet. The wild. Boredom. It’s a lot. ’
And while I nod to agree, nothing bores me about being here, which, for someone who always needs something to do – cooking, collecting, seventy-five million half-finished craft projects – is a surprise to no-one more than me.
I like Allie’s world. I like how it makes me feel.
I wanted to freeze the moment today with Male 32 and Female 33, and stay in it with her forever.
Which is . . . new for me. (And sort of scary.)
‘You’ve brought your camera,’ she whispers.
‘Yeah.’ I size it up in my hands. ‘Thought 2 a.m. in the polar summer might be cool to get. Even though . . .’
‘It looks like 2 p.m., and it could be any time.’
‘Right.’ I laugh. ‘Dinner may as well be breakfast.’
‘And cheers for dinner by the way,’ she says.
Lars, Jameson and I fished earlier, standing in a nearby lake, in dry suits and boots, Lars caught dinner.
I caught one small char we threw back, although I still felt like a total hero.
‘I admit, it was creasing me up watching you both. Stars forced to be in wading boots . . .’
‘Hey, I’ve done plenty of wading boots shit in my time.’
Iris laughs, hides it behind her hand so to muffle the sound. Her gloves are fingerless and covered in leopard print. ‘Sure you have. Mr Giant Orange Coat. You look like the inside of a Jaffa Cake.’
‘Whatever that is,’ I say. ‘And I did wilderness movies, you know.’
‘Mm.’ She smirks. Then she leans and picks up a rock, smooths a thumb over it.
Water sloshes behind us. Daylight endlessly beats down on us.
It’s weird. It’s like sleeping with the bedroom light on or something.
Your body gets tired, starts its usual wind down, but the sky’s all wrong.
And damn I miss the nighttime. I never thought I would.
The night-time is something I have to stare down until the sun comes up.
But I miss the reliability of it. I miss darkness.
‘So, how was today?’ Iris asks. ‘Up that cliff?’
It has not escaped me that Iris will of course know everything about what happened back then.
It’ll be Iris who was there on the other end of a phone, when we were talking.
It will be Iris who picked up every piece when it all went to shit.
Just like Jameson did, I guess. Friends.
The unspoken heroes of break-ups. Well. Not that Allie and I were a break-up.
We’d have to have been together for that and we never got the chance.
She’s been quiet since my heart came flying out of my throat and exploded in front of us up on the cliff with the auks.
I sort of wish I hadn’t said it, but it felt like a cleansing thing to do.
A clean, squeaky truth in amongst all the goddamn grit of arguing about the leak.
And maybe this is just blind stupidity or optimism, but we seem to have moved to a weird place, since then.
The blame we directed at each other, slowly being diluted by doubt, and .
. . maybe redirected somewhere else. To someone else who leaked our phones?
‘It was good,’ I tell Iris. ‘I’m kinda fascinated.’
‘By?’ she asks, her voice sounding like two syllables from the music of it.
I laugh. She gives me a sideways look. Half eye-roll and half ‘weeell?’ I love that she’s exactly how Allie described her. Easy come, easy go. Part-labrador. Like Jameson but female.
‘Everything,’ I say. ‘I think what you guys do is just . . . awesome. I feel kind of . . . touched by the bug of it or something. Like I want to hear about bacteria?’
Iris gives a dazzling smile – it’s a victorious smile.
Like she’s succeeded in her mission. ‘Yeah, I love the gaff,’ she says.
‘I love the work, I love the team. I don’t know.
It seems like a lonely place out here, but it’s the only time I’m with the people who make me feel less alone.
And that’s . . . bloody nice. You know?’ Iris smiles over at me, tipping her head to one side, and her smooth, jet-black ponytail follows.
If Jameson and Iris don’t become at least long-distance friends after this, I really, truly will never understand the world.
‘God, why am I getting all gooey and telling you soft shit?’
I grin at her. ‘I have that face.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Yeah,’ I shrug. ‘People tell me things.’
Iris smiles, leans for another rock. She’s made a perfect v-shape on the ground with them. ‘Has Allie?’
I look over at her. ‘Has Allie . . .?’
‘Told you things,’ she says sweetly. Then she drops her voice.
‘Since you arrived. I mean, she says everything’s fine, but .
. .’ She gives a heavy one-shouldered shrug.
‘I’m her best friend. I can tell she isn’t really just vibing along with everything.
Even if she’s putting on the whole hard bastard thing. She does that.’
A noisy sigh hefts out of me. ‘I think, mostly, she wants me gone.’
‘I think so too,’ says Iris. ‘But I also think— Oh!’ She reaches over, grabs my arm. ‘Look!’ Her arm points way over into the distance, and for a moment, I think she’s going to say it’s a bear. But it’s not. It’s an Arctic fox. White, fluffy, snout down, trotting along the cliffside.
‘Oh, whoa,’ I say. ‘Beautiful.’ Together, we watch, trace it across the cliff, silently. ‘But, also, it sort of makes me worry for the eggs. The kittiwakes. The babies . . .’
Iris turns and looks at me. ‘The kittiwakes,’ she repeats. ‘The babies. Hmm.’
I laugh. ‘I . . . I’m kind of into my birds now.’
Iris quirks an eyebrow. ‘I can see that,’ she says, smiling.
‘And what I was going to say was, I think Allie does want you gone, yeah. But I also think she wants you to stay all at once. Because I think, deep down, she wants to fix this. This whole messy thing with you, as . . . fleeting as it was. It’s been a big deal for her. ’
‘It was a big deal for me too,’ I confess, quietly.
‘But after years of knowing that woman,’ Iris shakes her head.
‘What Allie wants isn’t what she always goes for.
She has to weigh it up. The risks. And, to Allie, it’s already happened, her worst nightmare.
It’s all out there. I know you know that, but I think she thinks there’s no way back.
’ From beneath her coat, her shoulders sag and she pulls her face into a grimace.
‘Why did you do it, dude?’ she groans. ‘Seriously, why? The interviews, the piss taking. I was so bloody invested in you two. You just seemed like you had it, you know? Still do. Annoyingly.’
‘I know.’ As I said, measurable by science, this atmosphere, this something between me and Allie. ‘Wait, you don’t believe I did it? Like, you don’t believe the story she does?’
Iris smiles sadly. ‘I did,’ she says. ‘But not for long. I mean, I believed you looked guilty as shit, don’t get me wrong, but – no. I don’t think you did. It never added up.’
I nod. ‘Thanks, Iris. Seriously.’
‘And do you really believe she did it?’ she asks.
Waves bubble rhythmically, calmly, at the shore. The fire crackles. ‘Same answer as you. Did. Guilty as shit. Doesn’t add up now.’
‘Guilty as shit?’ I can sense a hard shield of loyalty behind her words.
I swallow. ‘The Bermuda project,’ I say. ‘It was unfunded, then funded—’
‘It was an anonymous donor. After the leak. Sometimes I used to think it might’ve been you.’
‘What? N-no. It wasn’t me. I always thought she got paid for it.’
Iris shrugs. ‘Not being funny, but thousands of pounds for your romantic one-liners?’ Her serious face breaks into a smile. ‘But, seriously, Milo, it wasn’t Allie. She would never do that.’
I nod. I was so sure back then. From getting blocked out of nowhere, to finding out the research project was suddenly going ahead. It made perfect sense to me. To two-years-ago-Milo. But now. Now, the list is nothing but embers.
‘Anything else you want to know?’ Iris asks.
‘I . . . I’m actually not supposed to be discussing this,’ I say. ‘Allie said. We have an agreement.’
‘What a good boy,’ she grins. ‘Obedient.’
‘I’m just trying to do the right thing,’ I laugh. ‘I mean – she fired a flare earlier.’ And at that, Iris throws her head back and laughs hysterically into her hand.
‘Mate, there was a polar bear,’ she says, gasping for air.
‘It was snow! I didn’t see no bear.’
Iris giggles so loudly, and it’s so infectious, it’s not long before we’re both laughing our asses off, trying our hardest to muffle it behind our hands.
Iris’s giggles taper off, eventually, and we just watch the distant waves in companiable silence.
I wonder how right she is, about Allie wanting, deep down, to heal this.
I feel like I’m at the line, weighing up whether I’m ready to say ‘fuck it’, leave it all behind.
Allie, as far as I can see, is metres away, arms crossed, refusing to move another step.
‘You know what I think?’ asks Iris quietly, going back to her pebble shape on the ground.
‘What do you think?’
‘Regardless of what happened – and you can’t tell her I said this or, you know, flares. But she’s never got over you. She was . . . almost there with you, I think. Falling for you. And watching her with you, since you got here, I think she still is in some way.’
Something deep in my chest clenches, something raw. And out here, in the wilderness, Iris like a connector between me and the trust Allie holds dear to her; trust that feels so far from my grasp, it feels right to say it as the truth bobs to the surface like a message in a bottle.
‘I think I was already there,’ I say. ‘I tried not to be, but – I was there. Falling.’
Iris gazes at me, big brown eyes shining. Her throat contracts. ‘Yeah,’ she says, sadly. ‘And I think it’s clear there’s something still there. For both of you. And I think it’s been sitting, waiting patiently, for you to both find your way back to it.’
And as rain begins to spit, as thick, smoky cloud fills the sky, Iris adds a final pebble to her shape.
The letter A.
I thought I might’ve moved past this point, but the truth still is that I haven’t been able to come close to anything like love since Allie Lake.
And maybe that’s because all the love is still waiting, for her.