Chapter 7
SEVEN
A few days after that, Sam spent the night away again. This time, though, it wasn’t up north to see Ava but down south, to Exeter, where he had a regular client.
I didn’t say, Is that really where you’re going?
and Sam didn’t say, I’m honestly going there, I promise.
But we both knew what the other was thinking, and Sam kept in touch with me all the journey down, sending me a photo of sheep in a field from the window of his car and then one from a farm shop where he’d stopped to buy a jar of the honey he knew I loved.
It was meant to make me feel better, but it didn’t.
Perversely, it made me feel worse – like Sam felt I didn’t trust him.
And the relief I felt when I saw the photo made me realise he was right, I didn’t.
I couldn’t any more. And that made me feel worse still.
All that day, I was on edge, snatching my phone if it buzzed with a notification and sometimes snatching it if Jamie’s buzzed and I thought it might be mine.
At home in the evening, alone with Milton, I found myself scrolling through my phone again.
I looked at Sam’s Instagram, but I knew there’d be nothing to see there – he used it purely to showcase his videography work, and artistic footage of elegant university buildings would tell me nothing I wanted to know.
Ava didn’t appear to have an Instagram account, and her Facebook profile was locked down so tightly I couldn’t even see if she ever posted on it.
So, like a particularly inept detective looking for clues I wasn’t sure even existed, I poured a glass of wine and turned to my own Facebook profile.
My posts from the past four years were mostly of Sam and me: selfies of us together, pictures from restaurants we’d been to and holidays we’d taken, and of course loads and loads of pictures of Milton.
Before that, my feed revealed the glamorous and not-so-glamorous life of a yacht stewardess: spectacular table settings, piles of dirty laundry, nights out in bars whose location I couldn’t remember with people whose names I’d long forgotten.
After graduating, I hadn’t felt ready to do what my friends were doing – putting down roots and getting on with their adult lives. The urge to stay on the move – or, as I couldn’t quite put it, even to myself, to keep running away – hadn’t left me.
So, armed with the experience I’d gained working in bars and restaurants in university holidays, I applied for the yacht stewardess job.
I spent six months scrubbing toilets, making beds and ironing – and discovered I loved it.
Later, when I got promoted and graduated to making cocktails, serving meals and escorting guests onto shore, I discovered I loved that even more.
What’s more, I was good at it. I could get by on very little sleep.
I was never seasick. I could keep smiling in the face of the most demanding, rude or lecherous charter guests.
I got on well with my fellow crew members, although the transient nature of the job meant that friendships and romances were fleeting. Funnily enough, I didn’t mind.
Somehow, I kept it up for eight years. I was earning good money and saving almost all of it. I’d been all over the world. I had a reputation and could pick and choose the jobs I took.
I had no idea what I planned to do next, but not having a plan was my plan.
Then Covid happened. I was in the Caribbean, about to start a new gig on a new boat with a captain I’d worked with before, when everything was cancelled – just like that. I had no job and no prospect of another for what felt like it could be forever.
I had nothing to do and nowhere to go except back to my mother’s, via weeks cooped up in soulless quarantine hotels.
There were loads of photos of that on my feed: the three meals delivered daily, the Sudoku puzzles, the Yoga With Adriene.
I’d been so bored that documenting my boredom seemed like the only way to survive it.
But if quarantine was bad, the months with my mother were the worst of my life.
The two of us coexisted in her Bayswater flat, polite strangers with nothing in common except our genetic material and a whole lot of water I’d thought had forever passed under the bridge.
Our conversations revolved around what to watch on television and what to cook for dinner, careful diplomacy surrounding every decision.
Occasionally, understandably, she’d burst out with, ‘You really do need to decide what you’re going to do with your life, Georgia. You can’t live here forever.’
‘It’s not my fault there’s a global pandemic happening.’ I scowled at her, sullen as a teenager. ‘I never asked for this. I never asked to be born, come to think of it.’
Mum looked at me, her face cold. Then she turned and left the room, saying under her breath but loud enough that I could hear, ‘You’re not the only one.’
The fact that my conception had been a mistake and my existence a chain that shackled together two people who didn’t even like each other was a fact I’d internalised early, and it had never left me.
Determined not to let Mum see me crying, I returned to my laptop and carried on frantically combing LinkedIn for jobs.
It took me two more months before I got a customer-facing role at a swish private bank, which I soon realised I’d been offered because I was cheap, efficient and could sustain a pinned-on smile no matter how much shit people threw at me.
Not long after that, when such gatherings were allowed, I saw Sam at Molly’s birthday party and went home with him that night. Six months later, I was headhunted for the job at Devereaux Partners, which meant significantly more shit but also a lot more money.
At last, I was able to afford a flat of my own – or, even better, of mine and Sam’s. At last, I felt like my life was back on track and there was no need to run away from anything any more.
I scrolled back up through my feed to the photo of us outside our front door, smiling delightedly, the keys in my hand and a bottle of champagne in Sam’s.
But that wasn’t the memory I was searching for tonight. I wanted to look further back, back to when I first encountered Sam at university – Sam and Ava.
From the day I arrived to study history of art, I’d been disappointed.
Not by the university, which was bewildering and beautiful, or by my course, which interested me far more than I’d expected – but by myself.
It seemed like in my haste to leave childhood and home behind, I’d forgotten that I was going to be stuck with me and all the baggage I brought with me.
Of course, things got better, as they always do.
I made friends – mostly with Molly, but with a few others too, finding myself on the periphery of the circle that centred around Sam and Ava.
I dated and hooked up. I moved out of uni halls into a house share with Molly and four other girls. I ended up with a decent degree.
The pictures were all there still, even though I couldn’t recall them being taken, still less posting them.
Me and Molly before a formal, our smiles bright with lipstick.
Me and Molly and a group of others whose names I couldn’t remember, holding pints of beer in a pub.
Me standing in between my parents at my graduation, a black-gowned buffer between their visibly hostile faces.
There didn’t seem to be any images of Sam or Ava anywhere, not a hint that I’d even known them.
Frustrated, I flicked through to Molly’s feed, scrolling rapidly back through years of images, the most recent showing us together after my return to London; later ones, while I’d been working overseas, showing her with Ben and various men she’d dated before him, before her own move to London; then further back still to her own university photos.
And there was Ava. I almost didn’t spot her at first because she was one of a group of about twenty people, standing and kneeling on a riverbank in the rain, grins on their faces and an oar held aloft over their heads. Of course – the university rowing club.
Molly had been obsessed with rowing in her first years of uni, I remembered, before reluctantly dropping it in her third year to focus on her studies.
Tall and long-limbed, she’d apparently been a bit of a natural at the sport, despite never having rowed before.
Petite Ava had been a cox, a role I’d never truly understood no matter how many times Molly had tried to explain it to me.
That was how I’d first encountered Sam. In fact, he was there in one of Molly’s photos, in the background, recognisable to me now because he still had the same tousled hair and because I loved him so much, I’d recognise him anywhere, even though at the time I’d barely registered him.
But he’d been there, on a night out with Molly and her rowing-club friends.
He’d been there because he was half of SamandAva.
After that, I’d noticed them together more often on campus, always together, Ava always with her purple backpack slung over her shoulders.
Back then, I hadn’t thought either of them would have any significance in my life – they were just acquaintances of Molly’s, people I might smile at or say ‘hi’ to if we encountered one another. I couldn’t have guessed I’d end up falling in love with Sam.
But I had. And now Ava was back in Sam’s life. The happiness, the togetherness we’d had for the past four years had been disrupted and everything had changed.