Chapter 4 #2
“Are there more of our friends coming?” Sasha leans forward so that she’s speaking straight into Sendilen’s ear. “Or are they already on the boat?”
He hesitates this time. “I believe there are more people arriving on a later flight. I could not say exactly who they are.” There’s something a little mysterious about him, and it’s hard to say if it’s because of his professional discretion or there are secrets he’s been instructed not to reveal.
To be honest, the whole thing is insane.
Ade just expected us to travel halfway across the world with less than two weeks’ notice.
I might have been doing something important.
I absolutely wasn’t, and I’m so glad he invited us, but he couldn’t have known that.
I’d had to confirm my attendance by email to an unnamed assistant too.
I couldn’t even ring to talk it through with him.
We leave the city behind and are soon zipping down long, straight motorways between sugar fields. I only know that they’re sugar fields because of a Wikipedia article I read. We don’t get much of a sugarcane crop where I’m from. The English countryside isn’t exactly known for its tropical climate.
“Dodos,” I say aloud instead of just thinking it, as more of my reading comes back to me.
“I’m afraid you’ve arrived too late to see any.” Sendilen sounds smoother by the minute, and Sasha finds this hilarious.
“I came here as a kid, and there weren’t any around then either,” she says, still smiling. “Maybe we bumped into one another.”
Am I wrong in thinking that her voice has a hint of flirtatiousness in it? Either way, Tom doesn’t care. His head turning back and forth, he looks out of the window, like a dog trying and failing to fix on one spot.
Sendilen, on the other hand, is good at everything.
He knows just how to distract from whatever thought has entered Sasha’s head by changing his voice to sound like a very dry tourist guide.
“We’re in the south of the island. Some of the wildest countryside on the island is down here.
There’s one walk in particular where you pass seven waterfalls. They’re known as the Seven Falls.”
He half turns to smile at me, and I feel that I’ve been let in on one of his secrets.
His little speech has the desired effect: Tom and Sasha shut up, and the car falls quiet.
Somehow, this is far worse than the chatter that preceded it.
I keep having half-second flashbacks to the last time we were together – to when all the positivity of our first years at university was erased with shouts and arguments for reasons that I never fully understood.
The tone of Sasha’s voice on the plane reminds me of her I’m-so-over-this posturing before we all found better people to live with for the final year.
Tom’s drunken slurring brings back the memory of when I found him in my room in the middle of the night, peeing in my rubber plant.
And in and out of every other image, I see Ade.
We make it to the marina and pull up beside a sleek black boat that is bigger than my flat.
This still isn’t enough to impress Tom. “I’ve seen swankier.”
Our driver gets out of the car and shakes his head despairingly as soon as he’s sure the idiot in the back can’t see him. I leave the vehicle too, and I swear that it’s five degrees hotter than when I got in. The air doesn’t so much caress my body as give it a good slap.
“This is not your friend’s yacht, Mr Ledger,” Sendilen says as he opens the door for Sasha, and Tom climbs out on the other side. “This is the boat that will take us to him.”
It’s a fairly small marina with a few unglamorous fishing boats scattered around it, so perhaps a yacht like Ade’s can’t even dock in mere, everyday human facilities.
The water is that exquisite blue I saw from the plane.
The sun is shining and, now deprived of the car’s air conditioning, I regret not taking the time to remove the heavy outer layers that I’d chosen for a chilly London spring.
I’m the last to clamber aboard and the boat zips away from the land.
The wind rushes across my skin, and as soon as I have a steady place to sit, I yank off my jumper with a robin on it to avoid boiling like rice.
I’ve already decided that I will never go home again.
Why do so many people live in cold places when there are far nicer hot ones?
With all the money that there is in London, couldn’t we simply move the whole city to a desert somewhere, plant a load of trees to encourage rainfall, and be a lot happier?
A cheery captain waves from the controls as fine white spray splashes up in a regular rhythm.
The only thing stopping me from pinching myself is the sound of Tom retching at the front of the boat.
At least he had the decency to spare us that particular spectacle.
Sasha looks out to sea, as if she’s worried about what lies ahead, and I can’t honestly blame her.
Judging by the conversations I heard on the plane, and her reaction when she saw me, there are worse things in life than being single.
She and Ade were always very flirty too.
That’s something else that’s come back to me.
If she is anything like me, the thought of our imminent meeting is running on a loop through her head.
And to make it worse, she has to insert the figure of her mess of a husband into any fantastical version she can concoct.
Sasha was always a bit of a mystery to me.
Her thoughts were rarely imaginable behind her dark eyes.
Perhaps it was the confidence that comes with being so beautiful, but I remember finding her strangely distant, even as she left her mark on every party and night out we ever had.
I want to ask if she’s okay, but something stops me.
I feel as if whatever small connection we once shared has been severed by time, and anything I say now will be intrusive.
“Was it easy for Tom to get time off work?” I ask this perfectly banal question, if only to cover his moaning.
Her head whips in my direction so fast that I’m sure she must have hurt her neck. She examines me for a few seconds, just as she did when we met at the airport.
“Off work?” she answers, and then the world comes rushing back to her.
“Oh, yes… I mean, no, it wasn’t difficult.
” She adjusts her tone. Her demeanour changes with it, and she suddenly plays the proud wife.
“He’s hugely respected at his company. When he says he needs a holiday, the bosses accept it. ”
Perhaps it’s his drunkenness that makes her show off Tom’s credentials. I can see how badly she needs to prove that, despite appearances to the contrary, the dear fellow is a terribly big cheese.
“And you don’t act anymore?” I hope that my voice is light and only mildly interested, but as I say the words, I realise that I shouldn’t know this about her. I only found out because of the conversation I overheard on the plane.
She tilts her pretty head and glances at me across the bench in the middle of the boat. “That’s right. I gave it all up to focus on…” She hesitates then changes what she was going to say. “I needed some me time, so Tom goes to work for the both of us.”
I want to ask how far she got in her acting career, but as I know the end of that particular story, there’s no way of phrasing it without sounding unkind.
“What about you?” she asks when I don’t say anything for a few seconds. “Are you still writing?”
It’s hard to know whether she really cares about the answer, or she is playing the part of someone who cares, but I tell the truth.
“No, I…” Well, I hesitate for about five seconds and then tell the truth. “I’ve been doing the same job for nine years, and I hated it more than I can say. So when Ade sent me the invitation, I quit.”
“Wow.” This apparently wasn’t what she was expecting. Her truly green eyes widen and her lips part. “That’s just so you, Bridge. You’re amazing.”
That certainly wasn’t what I was expecting, and I fail to produce a response.
“You were always more liberated than me,” she hurries to explain. “I’m not the kind of person who could give up a job on the spur of the moment. I would need to sit down and write out a list of pros and cons. And even then, I would agonise over the decision for months.”
“There’s nothing special about me.” I don’t mind compliments if I’m worthy of them, but I feel the need to correct her. “I haven’t written so much as a limerick since we left uni. I took a mindless office job to forget the fact I have no talent.”
Her eyes glisten, and I’m afraid she really will cry this time. I suddenly feel as if it’s her I was insulting but, before I can apologise, there’s a shout from the front of the boat.
“For goodness’ sake,” Tom complains, and Sasha instinctively shoots to her feet. “I can’t actually believe it.”
“What’s the matter?” Sendilen pokes his head over the windshield (or whatever sailors call that part of the boat).
Tom staggers back to us, looking as white as a sail. It’s hard to say whether it’s his drinking, the recent sickness or what he has now glimpsed that has brought about the transformation. He slowly raises his arm and extends one finger to reply. “That.”
I see what’s caused his outburst a moment before he explains, and I’m a little light-headed myself. Ade’s yacht is titanic.
“That’s not a boat,” Tom says in a voice distorted with envy. “It’s the lost city of Atlantis.”
I wander closer to the prow to make sense of the colossal vessel that, in two minutes’ time, will block out the sun as we pull up to it.
It has at least six storeys, all glossy, shining white, and I think I might know why the top decks are cut off at such a dramatic angle.
Now that I think about it, it was kind of cheap of Ade not to fly us here by helicopter if there’s a helipad on board.
The whole thing looks like the image of a space yacht that a child might draw.
There are spinning things and antennas on the roof of the bridge deck.
And each level has long rows of windows that I bravely predict will give the most beautiful views of the Indian Ocean.
I’m already picturing the swimming pools, bowling alleys and champagne bar that we are about to discover.
I’ve never been a materialistic person, but that’s probably because I’ve never seen a ship like this before.