‘Yeah, it’s crazy, isn’t it? Listen, Bianka, thank you for the talk last night. I thought about it in my room after, that I haven’t ever really talked to anyone in years, the way that you and I do. Not even Andreas. And about, uh, Andreas, I feel like I might have overshared a little bit. I didn’t mean to give the impression that our marriage isn’t solid or whatever. I’d had too much to drink, and—’
‘Charlotte. Don’t sweat it. I didn’t think that at all. I don’t even remember exactly what you said. Besides, what you said about everything at home feeling really far away resonated with me too.’ Charlotte smiles gratefully and Bianka returns it, before gazing back out to the sparkling sea. Cala Azura is so beautiful she feels she could almost cry.
‘Thank you for saying that. I guess I didn’t realize it feels good to just talk about stuff.’
They fall silent for a while, watching a wide-winged bird swoop down low to the surface of the sea and emerging with a twitching little fish. ‘Being here, I can’t help but think about my mother, you know? It’s like she’s here, in everything.’
‘I don’t think you ever told me her name. What was it?’ Bianka watches Charlotte’s eyes travel from the sea and up into the hillside behind them, where her mother’s house sits in the midst of its old citrus tree grove, only the chimney and ivy-clad archway visible from the beach.
‘Ximena.’
Bianka repeats it.
‘Hee-men-ah. I don’t think I’ve heard it before.’
‘Her name used to annoy me. When I was little, I just wanted her to be like all the other moms at school. You know. Prim Oslo West ladies with pearl earrings and blown-out blond hair. My mom was like a little Spanish hurricane, all flower prints and gold hoop earrings and bright-red lipstick and loud laugh.’
‘She sounds very cool. Like you.’
Charlotte nods pensively. ‘Oh, I’m not cool. And I’m nothing like her, at all. I’m the most average person ever.’
‘I very much doubt that. I don’t think there’s anything especially average about you.’
‘Well, you don’t know me very well.’
‘Yet.’
Charlotte nods and laughs and their eyes meet and it happens again; that slight shift in the atmosphere between them, when the air becomes charged. Charlotte seems to sharpen her senses and takes Bianka in more consciously, really considering who the person lying next to her is.
‘I feel as though you know so much about me already. And I still don’t know that much about you.’
‘Well. You can ask me anything you want.’ I just might not answer, thinks Bianka, careful to maintain a relaxed smile.
‘What was your girlfriend like?’
‘My girlfriend?’ Bianka returns her gaze to the sea, its surface still and clear.
‘Yeah, you mentioned that you’d had a girlfriend at university.’ Bianka gets the impression that Charlotte had been wanting to ask about this, waiting for the right moment. She’s pleased that this is something she’s curious about; she’s been waiting for her to ask. And she’s been thinking about what she’d say when the moment would come. And what she wouldn’t.
‘Yes. A very long time ago now.’
‘So what was she like? And what happened?’
‘She was a bit like you.’ Bianka watches Charlotte carefully, her heart beating faster at her own words. She was just like you, she should have said. Charlotte looks surprised but not horrified. Rather, a faint smile plays on her lips.
‘Really?’ Charlotte laughs a little, then flicks her long, wet hair over her shoulder in a move Bianka interprets as quite consciously suggestive.
‘Mmm,’ she says. Then she stands up, facing Charlotte directly for a long moment before picking up her bikini from the sand, then putting it back on. ‘Let’s head back up, shall we? I think the others are making breakfast.’ Charlotte looks momentarily confused, then disappointed.
‘I was just getting warmed up there,’ she says.
Bianka starts on the stairs cut into the limestone cliffs, then turns back to Charlotte with a big smile.
‘Come on,’ she says, taking her hand and pulling her gently along. When she releases her grip, Charlotte doesn’t, not for several long moments.
Always, always leave them wanting more, Bianka thinks to herself, and powers up the hillside toward the house, not looking back, feeling beads of sweat run down the back of her neck and in between her breasts, her heart pounding hard in her chest.
Thirteen
Storm
He wakes late with a start, and for a long while lies in bed, disorientated, looking at the soft light streaming in from the window blinds, but then he remembers it’s the first week of the summer holidays and he’s back in Wimbledon. And this time, it’s just him and his dad. He smiles to himself. He stays in bed for ages, scrolling on his phone, enjoying the thick, pleasant silence in the house, as profound as if the house has been sealed whole into a soundproof cocoon. His dad is probably in his home office, tapping numbers into his phone or speaking into his headset to someone in Sao Paolo or Tokyo or Reykjavik, but it’s Bianka’s absence that makes all the difference. Usually, she manages to create noise of some kind almost all the time. If she’s not shouting, she’s laughing shrilly, or speaking loudly on the phone, or hoovering, or moving furniture around, or emptying the dishwasher in the demonstrative, passive-aggressive way of the extremely hard put-upon. She never seems to just be, in the way that Emil is, or Storm himself.
Storm pulls on a clean pair of boxers and a T-shirt, fished from the still-unpacked suitcase open on the floor and heads downstairs. The scent of eggs and bacon wafts toward him from the kitchen and as he gets closer, he’s surprised to hear his father humming loudly to the song on the radio, some vintage country tune. He searches the unfamiliar cabinets for a bowl and the box of cornflakes. He feels light, happy, energized at the thought of the empty, quiet days of holiday stretching ahead. Now all he has to do is work up the nerve to call Madeleine Vinge.
‘We should hang out sometime,’ she’d said, offering her smooth, tan cheek for Storm to kiss when he was leaving. And since then, they’ve been texting back and forth constantly. At the thought of hanging out with Madeleine in person again, his heart seems to drop into the hot pit of his stomach.
His thoughts are interrupted by his father’s soft chuckle. ‘Earth to Storm. I repeat, Earth to Storm,’ says Emil.
Storm snaps out of his dream-like state reliving the moment his lips grazed Madeleine’s dry, soft cheek and he stares at his hand pouring milk all over the table, missing the cereal bowl by several centimetres. His cheeks flush and he instinctively glances around as though Bianka might be there after all, ready to start screaming at him. Ever since he was little, whenever he’s spilled something, she’s gone ballistic. But now she isn’t here, and nobody starts yelling. Instead, his father swiftly mops up the milk with a cloth, before wringing it out and repeating.
‘You were light-years away there, kiddo,’ he says when he’s done, sitting down across from Storm who is chewing his cornflakes slowly, his pulse still pounding in his ears from the stress of the spillage.
‘Mmm.’
‘Good thing your mother wasn’t here,’ Emil says, chuckling again, as if the way Bianka behaves toward Storm is remotely normal or amusing. Storm looks up abruptly, making Emil glance away. He doesn’t say what he wants to say – She’s not my mother, please, please stop calling her that – but he keeps fixing his father with a cool glare.
‘I need to ask you something.’
