Make or Break by Catherine Bennetto (5)

CHAPTER FIVE

‘Did he call you back?’ I said as soon as Annabelle answered.

‘No, he texted.’

‘And?’

‘He said: “It’s lovely. Hope it’s going OK with Mum away. Give the pumpkins a kiss from Grandpop. With clients now so turning phone off. Love Dad.” ’

My stomach sank. He was lying. ‘So you asked him how Scotland was and he replied “It’s lovely.”?’

‘Yes,’ Annabelle said, as Pete laid a sympathetic hand on my knee. ‘Oh. No, wait . . .’

I waited.

‘I asked him how the trip was.’

‘Annabelle!’

Pete rolled his eyes and removed his sympathetic hand.

‘Sorry,’ she said, not sounding sorry at all.

I shook my head. ‘Did you text him back?’

‘Yes.’

I waited. It was like getting blood out of a banana. ‘And what did you say?’

‘Oh,’ Annabelle said, and I could hear the dull click-click of her tapping at her phone. ‘I said, “OK. Have fun.’ ”

‘That’s it?’

Annabelle could sense my disappointment. You’d have to be blind, deaf, dumb and dead not to.

‘Yeah . . .’ she said. ‘Maybe I should have asked him something else.’

‘Yes, you should have. Ring him back.’ I said, as Trust pulled up outside ornate metal gates in a long high wall.

‘He said he was turning his phone off, remember?’

‘God dammit, Annabelle!’

‘Oh calm down,’ she said. ‘You’ve got yourself in a flap. He’s with a client, Jess. A client. You’ve misread the whole thing and are just working yourself up. Did you pack the medicine I gave you?’

‘No, Annabelle, your medicine is weed and weed is illegal.’ Annabelle said her CBD oil was 100 per cent pharmaceutical and contained no mood-altering THC, but I wasn’t so sure. ‘I have to go now. I’m at the bridesmaid brunch. If you hear from Dad, call me, OK?’

‘Sure,’ Annabelle said with the slow assurance of someone appeasing a paranoid elderly woman at a retirement home. One who thinks her appliances are filming her in the tub.

I kissed Pete goodbye, hopped out of the van and, after speaking through an intercom, stepped through the automatically opening gates. A path wound through immaculate gardens towards an enormous white house. It looked like two huge glass and concrete shoeboxes on top of each other at opposite angles. I got to the end of the path and a man in a white suit directed me around the side of the house to the pool and gardens. Priya had hired the house for her family for the wedding weekend, which is why Pete and I were able to stay in her apartment. Her fiancée, Laurel, and her family had a house in another part of town. They’d meet the next day at the service and a day later head off on their honeymoon for two weeks. They may have been a British Indian lesbian and a white American lesbian getting married in South Africa, but they wanted to do at least that part traditionally. Pete had been very good at filling me in on all the proceedings during the plane trip. Interspersed with fielding my theories about Dad, of course.

‘Jess!’ Priya shot across the lawn. ‘Oh my god!’ She threw her arms around my neck. She was so tall my nose hit her collarbone. ‘Thank you for coming! Thank you, thank you, thank you!’

‘Thank you for the flights!’ I said, gripping my best friend’s thin frame in a tight embrace.

She waved away the acknowledgement and looked at me with familiar evaluation. Priya had always been able to tell when someone needed to ‘talk it out’.

‘You look a bit shit.’ She slung an arm over my shoulder; I put mine around her waist (her height meant my arm had to angle upwards) and as we walked towards the other girls gathered under white brollies by the pool, I filled her in on the Dad situation.

I explained about the inappropriate touching, and gave Annabelle’s theory countered with mine – he was having an affair with a woman named Maxima with caramel highlights and great sandals and they were going to start an eco-resort in Malawi. (My hypothesis had gotten more elaborate the longer I went without sleep.)

‘God Jess, it’s Teddy Roberts! He’s so not having an affair!’ Priya clutched her thin waist and laughed. She had a loud, honking laugh, which infected everyone around her. ‘It’s like that time you watched that old Ricki Lake episode and started worrying that Pete was your cousin and made him take that online DNA test!’ She honked louder and pulled me into a tight hug.

In the face of her scepticism my anxiety waned. The champagne cocktail shoved in my hand before my bag was even off my shoulder also helped. Priya introduced me to two actresses from her show (I wondered which one was the vomiter who’d upset congenial Trust), and then I greeted her parents, cousins, sister and primary-school friend whom I already knew. We ate brunch, drank Pimm’s and champagne cocktails for an hour then Priya took me inside to try on dresses. She wasn’t having bridesmaids in the traditional sense; it was more in name than job requirement. Myself, her sister, her friend from primary school and two of the four cousins were being dressed in the same hue – blush – but in every other sense we were just one of the guests.

‘Everything is super-casual.’ Priya chatted animatedly as we padded across the marble floor to the master suite. ‘We threw it all together in a couple of weeks. When we found out we had a hiatus in filming we just decided to go for it! I mean, who wouldn’t want to get married in a place like this?’ She was fizzing with excitement. ‘Plus Cape Town is so gay-friendly, it just seemed right, you know, babe?’

I did and gave her a hug. I tried on the dresses; we talked hair, make-up, holidays and sex for a while then went back outside, lay on pool loungers and consumed Pimm’s like it was water and we were desert wanderers. As it neared nap time I began to fade.

‘Babe, go home,’ Priya said when a snort-like snore woke me up and had the rest of the party giggling. ‘I need you in top party form tomorrow, OK?’

She walked me to the gate where Trust was snoozing in the van. ‘Wear whichever one you like,’ she said as she handed over the dresses in a zip-up dry-cleaner’s bag.

I nodded and climbed in the back of the van, my eyelids desperate to crash down and stay there.

‘See you tomorrow when I’m a MRS!’ Priya shrieked, then dissolved into her honking laugh.

Back at the apartment, which Trust helped me locate via security gates, access cards and keys, I found a note from Pete saying he was at the rooftop pool. I said goodbye to Trust, who Priya had told me was to be our personal driver for the next two weeks, had a quick cold shower to wake me up, changed into my bikini, balked at the sight of my body that had been under multiple layers since September and followed the apartment complex map to the pool. I found Pete on a lounger, his muscled chest glistening with sweat, a Lonely Planet at his side, talking enthusiastically with the pool attendant about paddleboarding at a local beach. Paddleboarding?! Was that not just a large floating platter upon which you stood, snack-like, above peckish sharks?

I hung out at the pool for a while, but between Pete and the pool attendant’s conversation about leaping off mountains with a backpack that may or may not open out into a non-ripped, non-tangled, easily steerable parachute, or the best places to abseil (duh . . . the answer is nowhere), I couldn’t get a word in. I went back to the apartment, lay on the bed in my bikini and fell immediately asleep.

I woke an hour later with a taste in my mouth like I’d been sucking on one of Pete’s gym socks. Pete lay asleep, shirtless, on top of the covers next to me. He looked so sexy but I decided against pouncing amorously on him, what with my breath akin to a sewer rat’s undercarriage, and instead got up and pulled out my laptop. I’d been plagued by hallucinogenic anxiety dreams where Dad, in a tropical beach shirt, was with Mistress Maxima on her yacht in Jamaica flipping Malibu bottles behind his back to the sound of the song ‘Kokomo’. Somehow my Dad had morphed into Tom Cruise in Cocktail and I needed to find out what was going on before I went 100 per cent crazy. I was going to email Dad and just ask him outright where he was. My logical self said I was wrong and everybody else was right but I had an illogical self who was currently front and centre and needed sedating. I opened my emails and saw one from Lana.

I opened the confirmation form. Lana had booked one night in a luxury hut, all food and drinks included for the Monday before Pete and I flew back. We would have a private sunrise safari where we would get to see the Big Five and then meet rescue cheetahs at the game reserve’s rehabilitation centre. I squealed and jumped up and down. I was going to touch all the wildlife and cuddle them and get all up in their faces! I tapped out a reply telling Lana I loved her more than Netflix and Zach Braff and the chocolate shelves at Wholefoods, then pressed send and tapped out one to Dad.

I clicked send, then opened his company’s website. In the Africa region, Barney and Irving Private Island Brokerage had three islands for sale in the Seychelles, one on Lake Kariba in Zambia, one in Mauritius and two in Madagascar. Satisfied that there was a legitimate reason for Dad to be in Cape Town, I closed down the webpage. But then the persistent niggly feeling reared again and I opened Google and typed ‘Teddy Roberts, private island sale South Africa’. Nothing came up, so I tried a variety of ‘Teddy Roberts, South Africa/Edward Roberts, South Africa’ options. Nothing obvious came up except an E. Roberts was having an exhibition at a gallery in Cape Town. I clicked on the link and it took me to a webpage for a restaurant/gallery called The Baroness, which I recognised from one of Pete’s TripAdvisor printouts (it had been highlighted in pink which meant he’d thought I’d like it) and, according to Google Maps, was only ten minutes away.

I knew it was a huge leap (OK, a giant one that only a partially mad person might make) to think it might be Dad, especially considering the website had said the exhibiting pieces were ‘various mixed-media erotica’ and Dad only ever painted very average landscapes, but we needed to eat, so why not combine a little irrational investigation with a drink and a meal?