A guilty secret, p.10
A Guilty Secret, page 10
When I saw her, supine on a sun lounger, it was obvious. No one else could have been her and you couldn’t mistake her for anyone else.
She was wearing a brilliant turquoise bikini, her skin bronzed to perfection, sunglasses covering her eyes, showing off the perfect arc of her cheekbones.
We’d kept in touch since school, two privileged lost souls, both as bad as each other. Alex and Serena had always had their ambitions: Alex for film school and Serena for sailing. And Carrie had never moved in quite the same circles, but Mae and I had attached ourselves to each other as we drifted uselessly about the world.
My shadow passed across her as I came up and she immediately stirred and raised herself onto her elbow to stare at me over the rim of her sunglasses. Blue-green eyes and a mouth waxed red with lipstick that had barely smudged.
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
All at once, the adrenaline of the last two hours, two days, two weeks drained out of me, pummelled by all the bleak thoughts in my head. I felt weak as a kitten; I was desperate to sit down. It took everything in me to crank up a smile.
‘Hello, stranger,’ I quipped. ‘Long time, no see.’
She rolled onto her side and snorted. ‘Hardly.’
I tried to get an opening read on her, but my head was swimming and my eyes were still half-blinded by all this light.
Her bare shoulders glistened and the skin of her thighs glowed, reflecting shimmers from the pool. She was right: it was only a month or so since she’d last visited me in Madrid – a flying visit, one indulgent night out at the city’s top restaurant, me trying and failing not to let my coke problem show.
She’d never mentioned anything about speaking up then.
‘I was passing through,’ I answered. ‘Thought it would be nice to drop in on you in return.’
The heat was intense, sweat dripped off me, but – as always – she seemed utterly cool. She was good at that. As I remembered it, she always had been. I lowered myself onto an empty sun lounger, the pale wood burning the underside of my thighs. A wrinkled towel was draped over the end, no doubt the property of one of the other guests.
‘Missing me, huh? But how exactly did you know I was here?’
I held her eye, trying to make her feel like I was testing her even though in the end all I said was, ‘You share ridiculous levels of information on the ’Gram.’
‘Ugh. Whatever.’ My lame challenge didn’t seem to have fazed her one bit. ‘I was trying to get away for a bit. If you wanted to see me, Victor, you could have just called.’
Nearby, someone splash-dived into the pool again, spraying us with icy water. A couple of drops landed on the tanned skin of her forearm but she made no move to brush them away. Instead she pushed her sunglasses back up over her eyes and lay back under the sun.
If she was rattled by my surprise appearance, she was doing a damn good job of not showing it. Meaning what?
Meaning I didn’t fucking know.
Just ask her, I hollered at myself internally. You’ve come all this way, man, for God’s sake, cut to the chase.
But I didn’t. Instead, I just sat there with this beautiful woman in this beautiful hotel, letting my suspicion and paranoia bloom.
A waiter drifted round the edge of the pool. Mae cocked her head to me. ‘You want a drink? Let’s go inside, shall we? Get out of this heat.’
She pushed herself up and shook out her hair. It was almost impossible not to look at her: she was like something out of a fashion magazine, in her bikini and sarong, the Prada sunglasses, those perfect lips. I noticed the other men and women round the pool watching her as I stood up too, aching muscles protesting, following her into the shade of the indoor bar.
She slipped up onto one of the barstools and I climbed up beside her, shoving my dusty travel bag out of sight at my feet.
‘What’s your poison this month,’ she asked, pushing up her sunglasses. ‘Beer? Spirits?’ Maybe she was planning to get me drunk, film me, force me to confess …
‘I’ll have whatever you’re having.’
The bartender came over. ‘Two Pink Ladies,’ she told him.
His eyes flickered over me, assessing. Touché. Whatever.
‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘Anything else, ma’am?’
‘No. Thank you, Emile. That’s all for now.’
‘Prego.’ He faded away, leaving the two of us alone again. My tongue felt like a wet sandbag in my mouth.
‘So, where are you headed to?’
‘Headed to?’
‘You said you were passing through.’
My head throbbed. Did she really not know anything? ‘Oh yeah. Right.’ I gave a nervous laugh. ‘Not sure yet. I just wanted to get out of town for a bit. Like you.’
She stared at me, eyes piercing. ‘Really? How come?’
I looked back at her. ‘Why d’you think?’
Emile approached, interrupting us, to deliver our drinks. ‘Thanks, darling,’ Mae said, smiling up at him. She lifted her shiny glass and clashed it against mine. ‘Cheers, then,’ she declared as the waiter slipped away. ‘To old friends.’
The cocktail was pink and sticky and sickly with pomegranate seeds that caught in my teeth. But at least it was cold; at least it was liquid. Hair of the dog; maybe just what I needed. I drank down half of it in one go.
‘It’s divine here, isn’t it,’ she said. ‘Just the right place to get away from it all. That is, until your washed-up friend decides he’ll gatecrash.’ She was grinning at me with a bite in her smile.
Fuck this. I was tired of this dance. If she wasn’t going to come out with something, I would.
‘You’re right,’ I told her, setting down my glass again. ‘I wasn’t just passing. I came here specifically to find out if it was you.’
She pulled back – and it did seem genuine. ‘If what was me, Victor?’
I made myself fix my eyes on hers – both easier and harder since she’d lifted those damn sunglasses off. ‘You know.’
She almost glared at me. ‘Do I?’
I waited a beat, but I was no good at this. Never mind that I could hardly trust a single thought in my head right now, every staring contest we’d ever had at school – or since – she’d won.
‘Fine.’ I wiped the sweat from my palms and pulled my phone from the pocket of my shorts. I clicked the email app open and slid the phone across the bar to her, the fucked-up message displayed vividly on the screen.
Very slowly, Mae picked it up, blotting the screen with her sun-creamed fingers. She read it. My heart galloped miles before she set my phone down again.
‘And – what? You think I sent this?’
‘Well … Didn’t you?’
‘Really, Victor?’ She fished in her bag and pulled out her own phone, clicking it open, just as I’d done, and slid it across the counter to me. ‘I did not send that email … But maybe you did.’
I stared down. Her screen showed the exact same message, only with the name Victor swapped out for Mae.
‘I didn’t,’ I said immediately, an instinctive response of self-preservation.
‘You sure?’
‘Of course I am. That would be ridiculous. Why would I send the same message to myself?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps you’ve got a guilty conscience. Perhaps you did it in a …’ she side-eyed me ‘… drug-addled haze.’
I shook my head and pushed her phone back to her. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I definitely didn’t.’
‘Well, neither did I.’
I shifted on my seat. ‘So who did, then?’
For all her seeming transparency, I still wasn’t completely sure it hadn’t been Mae, and that she wasn’t enjoying having me here, watching me wriggle.
‘Carrie? Serena?’ Mae rested her fingers on the elegant stem of her cocktail glass, spinning it round and round. ‘If it wasn’t you then my money’s on Carrie.’
My breath eased. We were on the same page. ‘Mine too.’
I waited.
She took another long drink of her cocktail, then set it down and delicately wiped the smudge of pink foam from her lip.
‘Uh … Mae?’
‘… Yes?’
I shook my head in disbelief. ‘Well, what are we going to do about it?’
‘About what?’
I threw up my hands, almost knocking over my drink. ‘About this! Forget about whether or not it’s even Carrie. Didn’t you see the article she attached? For heaven’s sake, Mae, they’re digging up the land.’
She didn’t react in the face of my hysteria, just went on swirling her sickly pink drink.
‘Mae?’
‘Listen, Victor. You’re spinning out right now, in your comedown. Chill out. Who would ever make the connection? Anyway, it was just a silly game.’
I stared at her again, in disbelief this time. Withdrawals aside, no way was this nothing. How could she remain so unruffled and so beautifully composed? She even yawned, her fingers pressing against her drink-stained lips.
‘You’ve got to be joking,’ I said.
She turned to look at me again now, fixing me with that dark turquoise gaze. I was aware of Emile, the bartender, hovering somewhere in the gloom behind my shoulder.
‘Come on, Mae,’ I hissed, ‘we can’t just do nothing …’
‘I told you to chill out. You think I haven’t considered all these eventualities over the years? One random email? It’s our word against Carrie’s. And the land? It was years ago. By now there’ll barely be anything to find.’
I did my best to hold firm for one beat, two beats, even though by now my eyes were stinging and I was desperate to blink … Three beats. I gave up.
She took my arm and leaned against me, gesturing to the sun, to our surroundings.
‘Look around you, Victor. Once you’re over this … blip, you’ll get it. You’re telling me that we can’t just “do nothing”. And I am saying, trust me, Victor, that’s exactly what we’ll do. Absolutely nothing to jeopardize this.’
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CHAPTER 17
Victor
2019
All right, maybe I was being a coward, but after a couple of hours in Mae’s presence I also no longer seemed to care. The panic that had propelled me here floated somewhere in the distance, magicked away by Mae’s charm and composure, and I was lying flat out on the huge white bed in her room.
I had my own room reserved in a more modest hotel downtown, but it was seven p.m. now and I still hadn’t checked in. Mae had winced when I’d told her where I was staying – why are you acting like a pauper, Victor? – and the thought of going there was hardly appealing now. There was an unspoken agreement that I would spend the night here, maybe even a few days, giving myself some more time to dry out. Spreading my arms across the wide bed, my haze thickened: lethargy, indolence, dissolution.
‘I need to start getting ready.’ Mae was nudging my shoulder, shaking me awake.
I rubbed my gritty eyes and sat up. ‘Ready for what?’ I must have fallen asleep, since my Patek Philippe now read eight thirty p.m.
Mae told me she was going to a party, on the yacht of some guy she’d met, an investor in tech start-ups, kind of old but filthy rich.
‘You should totally come with me.’
‘Yeah … I didn’t exactly bring clothes for that.’ I plucked at my crumpled Gucci shorts and sticky T-shirt.
‘Hmm.’ Mae looked me up and down. She was wearing a thin blue robe – not one of the hotel dressing gowns, naturally, but something unique and elegant of her own. ‘I’m pretty sure we can find you something.’
I’d seen clothes boutiques nearby; perhaps they opened late.
I groaned, rolling myself up from the bed. ‘I’ll need to take a shower, at least.’
‘Of course.’ She gestured behind her. ‘Be my guest.’
Mae stood aside to let me slip past her into the bathroom, and as I closed the door and locked it behind me, I could still hear her out there in the bedroom, clattering about. I had to laugh. Despite her own immaculate appearance, Mae’s hotel room was a mess. She had left the Do Not Disturb sign on while she was out by the pool so housekeeping hadn’t been in and the bed was a muddle of kicked off sheets and three-quarters of the room’s surfaces were littered with dirty crockery. The room was huge – she’d secured a whole suite. Even for Mae, that was extravagant, and I reckoned there had to be someone else in the picture contributing to the cost.
I stripped off, catching sight of myself in the gilded bathroom mirror. Tall, broad, still well-toned despite my recent punishing behaviour. So different to how I’d looked as a teenager when I was thin as a rake and people had described me as ‘lanky’ instead of ‘slim’.
When I came out again, wrapped in a white terrycloth robe and steam-broiled, Mae was laying a set of clothes out on the bed.
‘Where’d you get these?’
‘The wardrobe,’ said Mae. ‘I have a … friend who sometimes keeps a change of clothes here. He’s built like you. Tall and slim. I think these will fit.’
I looked at her appraisingly. ‘A friend, huh?’ Perhaps that explained the suite.
‘He won’t mind. I’ll tell him that you needed to borrow something. Just put them on while I fix myself up.’
She was already shrugging herself out of her robe, revealing that tanned skin and the bikini again. Up close, she stank of sunscreen and bright girl-sweat, and for a moment I saw her as a teenager again, impulsive and mysterious and intense, then she slipped away and that moment passed.
I flopped on the sofa, not ready to get dressed yet. In my comedown, everything took twice as long as it should. Under the crockery on the coffee table, I found a magazine, folded open at an article featuring Serena Whittingham, our friend, who we’d just been talking about. The page had a wine stain on it, a ring of red cutting across her bronzed cheeks. Serena was a famous yachtswoman these days, garnering hundreds of thousands of pounds in sponsorship and featuring in lifestyle magazines like these. In the shot, she leaned from her craft at an impossible angle, abs like fists. She’d been ridiculously strong, even as a sixteen-year-old. They probably hadn’t Photoshopped those muscles one bit.
I slid the magazine away again and gathered up the outfit Mae had offered me. In the bedroom, I pulled on the trousers and the shirt. She was right: these clothes fitted perfectly despite my long frame. Her friend and I must have matched inch for inch.
Once I’d done up the buttons and the fly I looked at myself again in the mirror. The shirt was an excellent colour on me: deep wine red against my tanned skin. I adjusted the cuffs and slicked my wet hair back with my palms. It had grown long over the last few months because getting it cut had been the last thing on my mind and now it framed my jaw like a mane.
‘Not bad.’
In the bedroom mirror, Mae was outlined over my shoulder, in her blue robe again, blonde hair glistening wet.
I turned to face her. ‘He has pretty good taste, your friend.’
She took a couple of steps towards me, coming right up close. She cocked her head, coyly. ‘He does, doesn’t he?’
Standing this close to her, my heart jittered, the remains of the coke oozing out of my pores. I still wasn’t sure I entirely trusted her. Now that the shower had woken me up a bit, there was something about how she’d reacted when I showed her my message. Genuinely caught off guard; she hadn’t sent it, I was almost sure of that. It was something else. It was this studied play of casualness. Too perfect. Too extreme, as if she was fighting tooth and nail not to let even a sliver of concern show. As if there was something sickly shifting underneath. Something she knew but wasn’t saying.
Something she’d rather obscure and drown in a night of drunkenness and partying than tell me about.
Mae and I walked to the yacht from her hotel room, Mae dressed in a shimmering black jumpsuit, her eyes blackened with kohl to within an inch of their life. She truly was a sight to behold as she held my arm and teetered across cobbles on the way down to the dock.
The yacht, too, was almost grotesque in its opulence, moored at the far end of the marina. The other boats that cluttered the bay shrank in comparison. This craft was something else. A super-yacht.
‘Who shall we say you are this time?’ Mae asked as I escorted her down the curved harbour steps and onto the wooden pier that ran almost the whole length of the boat. It was close to ten p.m. and cooler now, but there was still light in the sky and the smell of salt and seaweed from the slapping waters below us caught in my nostrils: pungent and sexual.
I glanced at her. ‘This again? Why not just say I’m your friend? And old school friend.’
She slapped my arm. ‘Come on. That’s boring. We never do that.’
She was right. I’d lost count of the number of lies we’d told when we went out together. There was that time at Le Gavroche when she’d taken the sommelier to one side to explain I was her gigolo. The episode in Montreal when I’d posed as a therapist eloping with his patient. That time at Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival when the two of us pretended to be brainwashed survivors of a cult.
