Benjy peels the sandwich apart and licks the jam from each slice in turn.
Smile, says Alex. Click.
Hey. Dominic sits down beside Angela. He loves her again. Not loves, maybe, but feels a comfort in her presence which he has not felt for years. He is the one who cares. This does not need to be said. He can spend his forgiveness at his leisure. He’d gone to the toilet in the hotel and texted Amy, Thinking of you must keep this short love D xx. He wonders if Angela is actually sick, psychiatrically. This, too, is a consolation. What do you make of that? He nods towards Daisy and Melissa who are sitting on a ruined buttress, talking.
Her calves ache and she has a blister on her left heel. Perhaps Melissa’s leading her astray. Yesterday, when she walked off, Angela had seen it all from her own point of view. Which was Dominic’s point, wasn’t it? Maybe it will be good for her.
Why does the religion thing upset you so much?
She didn’t want to talk about this now. Because she thinks she’s right and everyone else is wrong.
Doesn’t that cover pretty much every teenager in the world?
Angela felt Karen’s presence.
Actually, said Dominic, I think she’s scared that she’s wrong and everyone else is right. He could hear himself play-acting the wise man, but that didn’t stop it being true.
And suddenly Louisa was walking past them towards the bar, staring straight ahead. Dominic thought she might have been crying, but Angela was throwing a wet wipe at Benjy, saying, You have jam all over your face, young man.
♦
White skin and loads of black hair, said Melissa. Like, on their back as well. That is definitely the grossest.
Big muscles. Daisy laughed. Or tattoos. I hate tattoos.
I’ve got a bluebird on my arse. Melissa paused. They were on the edge of the enchanted forest, kings and their judgement far away. I’ll show you later if you promise not to tell. And drop the liquor of it in her eyes.
Well, I guess I’ll have to make an exception in your case. Daisy wondered if the church was a bluebird tattoo. Doubt, that canker in the heart.
Prince Albert had a ring through his penis so he could tie it to his leg. Must have been a monster. Melissa laughed and everyone turned and wondered what they could be talking about.
OK. You win. That is definitely the grossest.
So… Melissa touched Daisy’s arm, to show her she wasn’t mocking her. Tell me about the religion thing. It wasn’t envy. More a kind of zoological fascination. And that steeliness…Maybe there was a little envy there.
Daisy paused. She had imagined this moment many times over the past few days but now that it was here…How did she say this without dispersing the nameless thing that hung in the air between them? Don’t you sometimes wonder if everything is pointless or whether it has some bigger meaning? The Alpha line. She wished she could have been more original.
Sometimes, I guess.
Shakespeare, the pyramids, human beings… She looked at Benjy playing his Nintendo and really did think it was astonishing. It can’t be an accident, can it? I mean…How could she express all that wonder? You look up into the sky at night and it’s beautiful but it’s terrifying, too. Don’t you think that?
Sort of. But did she? Her fears lurked nearby with their feet on the ground.
What if you couldn’t stop thinking about it?
I guess I’d take some really strong antidepressants. Melissa laughed. It was precisely what she would do.
I feel invisible sometimes. I look at myself and there’s nothing there.
Melissa felt a shiver of recognition. Alex’s attention drifting away. But she wasn’t ready to cross this river.
I used to act, said Daisy. As in, you know, drama, plays…And when I was someone else, then I knew who I was. She’d never said this before.
You should act now.
What?
It’s an exercise we did at school. You pretend to be someone else for the whole day. Blind person, deaf person, someone with a limp, someone who can’t speak English. In truth she had never really stopped playing the game.
So what would I be?
Melissa smiled. I think you should be a real bitch.
Was it possible to be someone else? The forest, that faerie magic. My mistress with a monster is in love.
♦
She would never be unfaithful to him. Foolish, perhaps, misguided, but never unfaithful, never dishonest. How odd that her revelation should make Richard certain of this. She wanted people to be happy. Was that the problem, pleasing other men, doling out her favours so prodigally? He wondered if he was simply the first half-decent man who had come along. He was disturbed, too, by the thought that these men had been, what? more adventurous? rougher? more masculine? and that she accepted his shortcomings in return for his reliability, his respectability, his money.
Jennifer’s affair had precipitated the end of their marriage, not because of the betrayal or her failure to hide it, but because he cared so little. He couldn’t imagine her giving herself or being taken. He thought of her as passionate at first. He had never quite known what women wanted, and he was both aroused and relieved to find someone who was so explicit about her needs, but there was always something mechanical about their coupling and he came to realise that the passion was at root an anger whose source he never fathomed.
Did the drinking excuse Louisa’s behaviour or compound it? Perhaps everyone possessed a darker self kept at bay by circumstance. Who knows what life his mother might have led if his father hadn’t died so unexpectedly? Airport novels shelved according to their height. The green melamine bowls.
They had crossed the top of the dyke and were walking into a chill wind rising out of the valley. He zipped the front of his orange waterproof. Misty rain, wisps of cloud trailing up the valley like ragged white curtains.
♦
They’d reached the gravel track above the house. You OK? Dominic was calling. I’m fine. Angela paused before heaving herself over the stile. She needed a hot bath and Savlon and the sheepskin slippers she hadn’t packed. She looked up. English Oak. Quercus robur. She’d done a biology degree in a previous life. Pedunculate, not sessile, because of the stalks under the acorns. She parcelled the knowledge and gifted it to children who forgot it straight after their exams. Or before. Mitochondria and ribosomes, the carbon cycle, Banting and Best. Nature with a capital N. How strange that she disliked it en masse. Walks on the heath and the occasional safari park with Benjy. Penguins and fruit bats. That was her limit, really. She’d been passionate once, collecting moths with a torch and a muslin net. Blair’s Shoulder-knot, Magpie, Goat, Codling. It all faded. Hard to feel passionate about anything now. She thought about her mother. It was physiological, of course. Myelin breakdown, neural tangles. But you couldn’t help wonder. Being bored of life, wanting to let go.