As the famous bridges across the Tyne come into focus through the mist, my phone comes back to life, buzzing its presence in my pocket. I check the message from Laura, sent just before midnight last night.
Beth came to the house – thanks to you. She told me what you did. How could you, Kit? I’m staying at Ling’s tonight but we need to talk, big time, when you get home.
The shock, the sharp vertigo tilt, is so physical that for a moment I think the ship has struck something, and I don’t stifle my cry in time.
‘You all right?’ says Richard in concern.
‘Must be sea-sickness,’ I try to say, but a kind of slur comes out. ‘I’m just going to sit down. I’ll be fine, honest.’
‘You look like shit. You were all right ten seconds ago. Shout if you need me?’
I nod, then collapse on to a bench. Even sitting down, my pulse is skipping like I’ve just sprinted. How the hell – why would she – and why now?; what has Beth said? The woman on deck, the woman drinking beer in the photograph, Krista were shapeshifters of my own making. I had been so busy superimposing Beth’s face over all these others, I had never conceived that she might go to London.
I re-read the message even though I’ve already memorised it.
She told me what you did.
Everything I’ve got left is going into not screaming. Fifteen years; fifteen years I’ve been protecting Laura from a truth so awful and painful I don’t even let myself think about it. I realise, as the boat crests a wave, that I have been wrong to think of time as linear; of my life moving in one direction away from one event. It’s a twisted circle of ribbon, a Mobius strip. The years fold in on themselves, until I am back in Cornwall, my cold hands moving over hot skin, gold paint coming off on my fingers in a reverse Midas touch, and the only fixed point in my history seems to be the night I spent with Beth.
Chapter 50
KIT
9 August 1999
With forty-eight hours to go before totality, Ling put into words what we were all feeling. ‘This festival is going to go down in history as one of the most expensive flops ever.’
She was right. Tall, fluttering flagpoles, designed to act as markers in the throng, were spaced out in an empty field. It looked less like a thriving hub of counter-culture than a golf course on to which some ill-equipped, inappropriately dressed people had mistakenly wandered. Our little stall was doing ok, mainly because the tent was a bubble of trapped warmth from the generator and the urn. Our first customer of the day was still here, two hours into a nice drunken stupor, greasy dreadlocks spread like tentacles across the mats.
‘This weather can do one,’ said Mac. He glared at me and Ling like it was our fault. We clicked as a foursome but with Laura missing, it didn’t work any more; I was back to the old days, playing gooseberry to Mac and his woman of the week. The three of us had been niggling at each other all day, taking out our various disappointments on each other: Mac was angry about losing money; I was pissed off with the weather; Ling was finally coming to understand that Mac was not so much a really fun bloke as a pathological addict. Since we’d arrived in Cornwall, he had been either drunk or high, hungover or coming down. Tiny, delicate Ling’s doomed solution was to try to match his appetites. That morning, they were both drinking tea laced with whisky. After half a dozen cups of chai, I was completely wired and pissing cinnamon. Our speakers were throwing out gentle ambient music but I had one earphone hooked into a pocket radio, tuning in twice an hour for the weather forecast.
‘We’re doing better business than lots of the others,’ I said, although that wasn’t hard. Jon, the bloke in the organic burrito van, was virtually in tears as his ingredients mouldered and his staff idled behind the counter.
‘It’s your bloody fault,’ said Mac.
‘What?’
‘You and your bloody pie-charts or whatever, working out the sun, making me come to Cornwall. We should’ve gone to Turkey like I wanted to. Just put it on the credit card.’
‘That is exactly the opposite of what you suggested,’ I said. ‘If you remember, you were the one who wanted to stay in England. That’s why I spent a whole week doing those sodding weather charts for you.’
‘You just wanted to look right-on in front of Laura. She got all excited about the West Country, and all this Fairtrade shit everywhere, and you just went with it.’
‘This has got nothing to do with Laura and everything to do with the Gulf Stream,’ I said. ‘Cornwall ought to be sunny. It’s not. There’s nothing I can do about it.’
He was like a dog with a scent. ‘You know what your problem is?’
I braced myself; he had so many to choose from.
‘You’re pussy-whipped. Under the thumb. Now you’ve finally found someone to shag you, you don’t care about anything else.’