Make or Break by Catherine Bennetto (21)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The next morning, I sat in the middle of the bed under a starched white sheet watching the cerise and orange sunrise blister up behind the harbour. Once the sun was fully up and the Monet-esque sky had turned a pale blue, I made a coffee, opened the doors to the balcony, slid back under the sheets and watched gulls swooping down towards the docks while anticipating Pete’s arrival home and wondering what feelings it would bring. He’d been away for a week in a country that had awakened something in him that neither he nor I knew had been there.

A little later I pottered around the tiny kitchen, lamenting my lack of putting anything in the fridge for breakfast. I missed my routine of getting up and heading to Jimmy’s, hopefully arriving in time to eat paleo pancakes and share music industry gossip with Diego, while waiting for Jimmy to emerge bleary-eyed and bare-chested. I texted Jimmy, asking what Lucy was up to and just to say ‘Hi’, then went into the bathroom. Moments later my phone pinged. I skipped back to the bedroom in just a towel, harbouring a thrill in my chest that Jimmy had texted back so quickly. But it was from Pete.

I looked at it for a few moments and then felt an intense sting that not only was he not coming straight back, he hadn’t even asked how I was. For all he knew I’d been alone for the past seven days, going to all the touristy places, unable to turn to someone and share the joy of the new experience. I threw the phone on the bed and jumped in the shower.

‘And he didn’t even call to ask if I was OK!’ I paced the room in a bra and pants, my hair twisted up in a white fluffy towel and my phone to my ear. ‘I could have been bitten by a snake and be lying on the apartment floor bleeding from my eyes (that’s a boomslang, by the way; you don’t die immediately but you bleed out from your eyes, nose and fingernails like a scene from Kill Bill), or have swelling limbs, bursting blood blisters and cardiac arrest (that’s the puff adder, a fat, lazy snake that hangs out in people’s gardens), or be lying in a pool of sweat and saliva, dead from asphyxiation caused by complete body paralysis (that’s the black mamba, a vicious little bastard). And what about the safari?! I could have been rammed by a rhino; I could have been shot by a poacher who thought I was a rhino (although I didn’t wear grey on purpose for that very reason); I could have fallen out of the jeep and landed on a rock in an unlikely yet lethal angle causing immediate death. I could have choked on biltong. It’s so freaking chewy, I can’t believe they eat that stuff! Have you ever tried it? Ew, gross. Seriously though, Annabelle, not only did he not call, he didn’t even ask in his text how I was or if I’d been having a good time?!’ I stopped in front of the bedroom mirror. ‘On a side note, I’m really tanned.’ I recommenced pacing. ‘So, what should I do? Should I dump his ass? Should I be happy he’s found things he loves doing – even if he’s involved me in precisely none of them and has suddenly turned into this selfish asshole? I should break up with him, right? But we’ve been together for six years! Six years! How can he change so much in one week? What should I do? OK, so call me when you get this. Love you.’

When I hung up I had no anger left. How cathartic it was to be able to yell and rant uninterrupted to a non-judgemental answer machine! I dialled Jimmy.

‘Hi,’ he said, his voice croaky.

‘Hey! Whatcha doin’?’

‘Sleeping.’

I checked the time on my phone. It was 10.17 a.m. – a time Jimmy and I would usually be cruising along hot roads in his shitty Mitsubishi, taking turns to show how supremely cool we were in our music choices. ‘Why so late? Big night?’

‘This is the time I usually sleep in till,’ he said through a yawn. ‘I got up early when you were here because I didn’t want you to be alone in one of the greatest places in the world.’

I fell for him a little bit just then. ‘Oh.’ I didn’t know how to respond without sounding gushy so I barrelled on through the moment. ‘Pete isn’t coming home. He’s going to Langebaan.’ (I pronounced it ‘lang-barn’.)

‘Lunga barn.’ Jimmy chuckled softly. He sounded like he was still lying down. ‘You OK with that?’

‘He’s going so I have to be, I guess,’ I said. ‘What are you doing today?’

‘Working on my script. Submission cut-off date is in four days and I’m quite behind.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘So, you can’t come out to play?’

Jimmy laughed. ‘No, I can’t come out to play.’

‘Bummer,’ I said.

‘Why don’t you come here?’ Jimmy said. ‘Diego should be home soon, so you can hang with him. And I can stop and have lunch with you?’

‘I’d better not. I don’t want to distract you.’

‘While you are dazzling company, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to concentrate with you nearby,’ he said. ‘Come on, Diego would love to see you again.’

I thought about it for a moment.

‘And so would I,’ he added.

The big gates to Ian and Diego’s buzzed open and as I walked up the path past the Buddha heads and the black sculptural ball that had water running over it and was supposed to be relaxing and meditative but just made me want to go to the toilet, I saw Jimmy standing at the open door in shorts and no T-shirt and I felt my face stretching into a wide grin.

‘I’ll have a coffee with you but then I’d better get back to work,’ he said, shutting the front door behind me. ‘That OK?’

‘Of course!’ I said. ‘I can make the coffee, you keep working.’

I pottered around the kitchen getting out Jimmy’s favourite mug: a white one with Queen lyrics around the side, and my favourite: a pale blue one with a happy cartoon cow on it. I’d never actually made anything in their kitchen but I’d watched Diego every morning so knew my way around by proxy.

Jimmy had set himself up at the kitchen island and it was littered with notes and script pages, pens and his laptop.

Over coffee Jimmy told me a bit more about the festival he was going to the next day. It sounded completely mad to watch a concert while floating on a river in the middle of nowhere. I really wanted to go but it had been sold out months previously, so, although Jimmy still had a spare ticket for me, we wouldn’t be able to get Pete one.

‘Do you ever wonder how many murderers we walk past in a day?’ I said as I reached the end of my coffee. ‘I saw a man dragging two heavy plastic bags down the street and I thought – they could be filled with heads. Mine could have been one of those heads! Amazing when you really think about it. How close we come to death each day.’

Jimmy blinked. ‘OK!’ he said, straightening a pile of notes officiously. ‘I’d better get to work. Do you need something to read? Here,’ he said, sliding a pile of Interiors magazines towards me. He gave me a quick smile that said, ‘you do that, and I’ll do this’ then hunched over his script.

I ignored the magazines, cupped my chin in my upturned hand, my elbow resting on a pile of notes, and watched Jimmy flick his attention from his laptop screen to his script pages to his notes and back again. When it became apparent my staring was bothering him (he told me to stop staring), I picked up my phone and scrolled through Facebook for a bit. All my friends in England were bemoaning the January weather and their self-imposed ban on drinking and socialising for the month. I couldn’t relate, what with my winery-visiting and the ceaseless sunshine. They were in hibernation and I was feeling a sense of liberation. I wondered if those two words were opposites and liked how they rhymed, so got on Google and found that ‘aestivation’ was actually the opposite to hibernation. But as it meant ‘the prolonged torpor or dormancy of an insect, fish or amphibian during a hot dry period’, I thought it sounded exactly the same as hibernation – just in the summer instead of the winter – and decided to email the Oxford Dictionary and suggest they look into the matter.

I put my phone on the counter, swivelled in my stool and looked out of the open glass doors to the beach below. Paddlers paddleboarded, surfers surfed and sunbathers stretched out their toned, tanned forms on brightly coloured towels. I swivelled in my seat again and turned my attention to a fruit bowl, picking up each piece of fruit and testing it for ripeness. That done, I scanned the room. Behind the fruit bowl on a carved wooden stand was a new recipe book. Balance Bowl Recipes, the title said in swirly red letters. And underneath, ‘Nutritionally balanced meals in one bowl. Balanced, Beautiful, Beneficial’.

‘You know squirrels?’ I said, frowning at the pages of the recipe book of one-bowl meals mathematically balanced by the correct quantities of magnesium and carbohydrate and whatever.

‘Not personally but as a concept, yes,’ Jimmy said with a grin. He continued to look at his laptop, his right hand subconsciously banging a pen on his script like a student in a boring science class.

‘They eat nuts.’

Jimmy gave me a sideways glance.

‘How come we’re told to have a multi-coloured, five-a-day, varied complex carbohydrates, proteins and fats diet and a squirrel can just eat nuts and be perfectly healthy? Do squirrels get allergies? Do they get cancer or diabetes? Where do they get their vitamin C from?’

‘Why don’t you google it?’

‘Good idea.’

The room fell silent save for the scratch of Jimmy’s pen on A4, the ever-present squawk of gulls and the pounding of surf coming through the wide-open doors to the balcony.

‘Huh. I was wrong,’ I said, reading from my phone. ‘Squirrels eat dirt too. And bark. And some fruit and insects.’

I put my phone on the countertop and watched Jimmy strike out a couple of lines on his printed page and write down the side in barely legible markings.

‘How do you get your ideas?’

‘Dunno,’ Jimmy said, his eyes scanning his stapled script pages. ‘They just turn up, I guess.’

I picked up a piece of paper with a bunch of notes all over it. ‘You know that saying “Pluck it out of thin air”?’ I said.

Jimmy took back his page of notes and put them on the other side of his laptop, out of my reach. ‘Yes.’

‘Do you think that means Everest air? Because it’s so thin up there? Like saying, “it’s so difficult to get what you want you have to go to the top of Everest and pull it out of the sky up there”?’

Jimmy laughed then turned back to his laptop with a grin. ‘You are so distracting.’

‘Sorry!’ I said, making an ‘oops’ face.

We grinned at each other.

‘Wow, you’ve written so much,’ I said, flicking the corner pages of his script like a pack of cards. ‘What’s the word count? Must be massive.’

‘Around eighty thousand I think,’ Jimmy said, sliding the script out of my reach and pushing an Interiors magazine into its place.

I picked up the magazine and began reading.

‘Do you ever think there are too many words?’ I said after reaching the end of a very wordy, highfalutin article that said nothing more than ‘designer goods are best’. ‘I sometimes think there are too many. I mean, environmentally it’d be wise to lose some. If only for the environment. Remonstrate. No one needs that when ‘protest’ will do in much less time, effort and space.’

Jimmy sniggered and scribbled more notes. ‘Shhhhhhh.’

Silently chastising myself for being unable to keep quiet, I went back to the magazine, but it was boring. I honestly didn’t care if monochrome table settings were back or not. I looked at Jimmy, absorbed by his pages of notes. ‘I should go home.’ I slipped off the stool and reached for my bag on the floor. ‘I’m distracting you.’

‘No, you’re not!’ Jimmy placed his hand on my arm. ‘Stay.’

I looked back at him, uncertain.

‘Diego will be here soon.’

‘Yeah, but—’

‘And I like having you here.’ He smiled and his earnest expression sent a bloom of warmth across my chest.

‘Are you sure?’ I said, looking pointedly at the huge pile of notes he had to get through.

‘Definitely,’ he said with a firm nod. ‘Why don’t you watch a movie?’

‘But you won’t be able to concentrate.’

Jimmy shook his head. ‘I don’t even hear it. It’s like white noise.’

‘If you’re sure?’

‘I am,’ Jimmy said, taking my bag from me and putting it on the stool on the other side of him.

‘All right.’ I smiled.

I made my way towards an armchair that had an inviting shaft of sunlight but Flora, up until then curled in a tiny ball in the corner of the sofa, lifted her head, jumped down and scampered ahead of me. She leapt onto the armchair, turned around and sat, her front paws resting just off the edge of the chair, giving me a black-eyed little stare that said, ‘My seat.’

I narrowed my eyes and returned her look with one that said, ‘You’re a dog, you belong on the floor.’

‘You’re new. You sit on the floor.’ She glared back.

‘Dogs shit in public.’

‘Humans have pap smears.’

‘Dogs get thermometers up their arses.’

‘You have to wax your vagina.’

‘You have to lick yours!’

‘Stop fighting with my dog.’

I turned around and saw Jimmy looking highly amused by Flora’s and my stare-off.

‘She started it,’ I said, searching for and eventually finding the TV remote sitting neatly in a mother-of-pearl tray alongside some glass bowls full of shells, a couple of expensive candles and a silver candle-snuffer. I looked over at Jimmy, who was still watching me. ‘Back to work!’ I said with a ‘go, go’ flap of my hand.

Jimmy laughed and turned towards his script pages. Ignoring Flora’s sniff of triumph, I curled up on the sofa and tried to figure out the TV. After a few minutes of getting nothing but a black screen with ‘HDMI 14’ in a little box in the corner I flicked it off and picked up another magazine. It took an embarrassing amount of time before I realised it was in Afrikaans. And was for gay males.

‘Learning anything?’ Jimmy said.

I turned in my seat to see him grinning.

‘I couldn’t work the TV.’

Jimmy hopped off his stool and grabbed the remotes. ‘What do you feel like?’ he said, pushing a few buttons and getting an alphabet tile search page on the screen.

‘Hmmm . . .’ I said, putting the magazine to the side. ‘I think I feel like watching something where they wear capes.’

Jimmy frowned. ‘Like Superman or Batman?’ He began navigating the alphabet tiles with the remote, spelling out B-A-T.

‘No, the old-fashioned swoopy ones. Like they wear in Harry Potter.’

‘So, maybe something medieval-ish then? Like Robin Hood Prince of Thieves?’

I wrinkled my nose.

‘How about Lord of the Rings or Twilight? Vampires wear capes, don’t they?’ He deleted B-A-T and put in a T-W.

‘No, that sounds depressing. Something fun like Harry Potter. With the magic of Harry Potter.’

Jimmy stopped typing. ‘So, you want something that has capes like Harry Potter, is fun like Harry Potter and has magic like Harry Potter.’

I nodded.

‘Do you just want to watch Harry Potter?’ Jimmy said with a twitch of amusement on his lips.

I thought about it for a minute. ‘Yes.’

Jimmy, eyes wide, turned towards the TV to begin typing in Harry Potter as the front door opened and Diego and Pamela walked in carrying groceries in cloth bags.

‘Sweet girl! You’re back!’ Diego said, dropping the bags on the kitchen counter. I stood to meet his burly hug.

‘For the love of Tom Petty, god bless his talented soul, can you please entertain this noisy girl,’ Jimmy said.

‘It would be my pleasure.’ Diego wrapped an arm around me and guided me to the kitchen. ‘I’m going to teach you my mother’s, god bless her talented soul, recipe for salmon.’

Jimmy packed up his writing things and headed downstairs while Diego flicked on an Afrikaans radio station and he and Pamela sang along to it while attempting to teach me how to cook. Ian came home for lunch at 1 p.m., Jimmy took a break and we all ate poached salmon on the balcony. Jimmy cackled in delight upon hearing that in the middle of a very serious meeting that morning Ian’s phone had rung, and Ian had been very unimpressed that Jimmy had changed his ringtone to Right Said Fred’s ‘I’m too Sexy’.

Ian and Diego left at the same time, giving me another round of goodbyes and hugs and promises to keep in touch; then at 4 p.m. Jimmy bundled me in the car, his bartending clothes lying on the back seat, and drove me home before heading to work.

‘So, I guess this is another goodbye?’ he said, this time pulling up at the doors like usual.

‘Yeah, maybe,’ I said, not knowing if Pete would actually make it back from the kitesurfing event tonight. ‘No. I dunno.’

‘How about we just do, “see you later” then?’ Jimmy said, smiling.

‘OK,’ I said, unwilling to get out of the car.

I sat there for a moment, looking at the interior of the car I’d spent so much time in. The sand on the floor, the various bottles of suntan lotion, the spare sunglasses with scratched lenses he kept in the cup holders. David Coverdale from Whitesnake coming through the speakers, calling himself a drifter.

‘Jess?’ Jimmy said.

‘Yeah?’

‘I gotta go to work.’ He gave an apologetic shrug.

‘Yep, sorry,’ I said. I opened the car door with a sigh. ‘OK, well, have fun at the festival tomorrow. I’ll call you to say goodbye before we fly.’

Jimmy smiled and nodded.

In the apartment I changed into my bikini – I was now an even golden colour – and headed to the rooftop pool with a book that I didn’t intend to read. Instead I lay on the lounger, the late sun low enough to beam straight into my eyeline and thought about Jimmy and Pete, my flat and my job, and if Pete and I would try to sort things out. And if I even wanted to. Just as I was about to nod off my phone rang. It was Pete.

‘Hi,’ he said. I could hear the sound of pounding surf and wind. ‘You OK?’

‘Yep,’ I said.

‘OK, great,’ he said. ‘Look Jess, Goat is the guest of honour at this kitesurfing party tonight.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘So, the van is staying here. But I could look at getting a taxi back . . .’

‘Right.’

‘But it’s like, in the middle of nowhere and . . . I mean it would probably be really expensive, if I could get one, not that I’m sure I could, but if I did it’s about two hours’ drive so I reckon I wouldn’t get in till really late . . .’

‘You want to stay away another night?’

‘No,’ Pete said quickly. ‘Well, yeah. It makes more sense, don’t you think?’

‘I guess,’ I said, my voice devoid of any emotion. I’d lost the inclination to give a shit.

‘The thing is, there’s another kitesurfing event all day tomorrow. So, if I stay tonight I may as well stay for the day tomorrow too. And I reckon they’ll end up staying the next night as well because of how long the event goes on for, so . . .’

‘So, you’re saying that if you stay tonight then you may as well stay two nights and you’ll be back on Friday, the day before we fly out?’

‘Well . . . yeah . . .’ he said, managing to sound contrite.

‘Fine. Whatever. See you when I see you.’

‘Jess—’

I hung up.

Without saying it out loud, we were both aware that our relationship was pretty much over. Pete had left after four days of the trip and was coming back the day before we left. I looked up Giselle’s Instagram page and scrolled through her pictures. She’d posted a lot of photos and a lot of them were of Pete. Nothing incriminating, but they clearly enjoyed each other’s company and she certainly seemed smitten with him. Stupid girl with a stupid name that sounds like a species of antelope and is derived from the Germanic word for ‘hostage’. Yes, I looked it up one night.

Back at the apartment I called Jimmy.

‘That spare ticket still available?’

There was a beat where Jimmy was quiet, then he spoke with a smile in his voice. ‘Yeah, yeah it is.’