The Girls of Summer

When I arrived here this morning the sea was still far out, the sand stretching white and vast. Now the waves are edging close to my legs, their unrelenting progress beginning to dampen the ground beneath my heels. I should move back. I should gather up my things and drag them to a drier vantage point. But earlier on, as the beach began to slip away, I had made a promise to myself.

If he’s not here by the time the tide comes in then I will go without him.

I shiver as saltwater laps the tip of my toe.

Just a few more minutes. Just a few more minutes and he’ll be here.

‘Rachel!’

Someone is waving one arm in my direction, their figure silhouetted against the brightness of the sky. I lift one hand to shield my eyes and see that it’s Helena. She’s walking quickly, half jogging, and as she collapses down next to me her chest heaves, her breath tangled up in her throat. Her hair is damp and salt crystals are beginning to form and glitter at her neck, a white and grainy sheen that edges in one long streak from her jaw down to her collar bone.

‘They came for him,’ she says, her voice ragged and airless. ‘This morning.’

I’m already shaking my head, clambering to my feet.

‘No,’ I say.

‘They didn’t find him. He’d already left. He got away.’

It takes a moment for me to find the words, for the shapes that Helena’s mouth makes to form into something resembling meaning.

‘He can’t have.’

‘I’ve been to the house. Everything’s gone.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘We knew this would happen, Rachel. We knew they’d come for him, in the end.’

I gather up my bags, staggering in my hurry to get away. She opens her mouth as if to say something before I go, one arm raised up as if to catch me, and then seems to think better of it. There’s nothing she can say to stop me now.

My things are too heavy as I tumble up the beach. My shoes catch in the sand and I bend down to tug them off. I throw them on to the ground so that I can dash to the road, away from Helena and towards him. I flag down a car, a local man who pulls up looking concerned at me, barefoot and weighed down by too many things. I splutter out an address and then hold out a wad of notes, my entire boat fare.

‘Please,’ I say. ‘I’ll pay you.’

He shakes his head, obviously misreading my distress as something more sinister. It takes me a moment to remember that it is.

‘No money,’ he says. ‘I’ll take you home.’

As his car veers up the hillside and away from the dock, I try to compose myself. I take deep, desperate breaths, sucking in air through my nose and exhaling in long hard gasps. My face is wet, and when my tears reach my lips they taste as salty as the sea. As the driver wrenches the steering wheel in a way that only someone who has grown up around these vertiginous roads can, he glances anxiously in the rear-view mirror.

‘Everything OK?’ he asks.

I nod.

‘It will be,’ I say. ‘It has to be.’

How many times have I climbed the hill to this white-painted house, spent the night, left early in the morning with my head spinning? I remember the first time, when he sent a car to pick me up and I wore the nicest dress I had with me. It was flowing and white, and I felt like a Greek goddess. But then of course, that was before. Before the whispers started to curdle the summer air like an impending rainstorm. Before police descended on the island, their uniforms oppressive and dark beneath the midday sun. Before the body washed up, broken on the beach. I heard she had been there for hours by the time they found her, her skin swollen by the sea, her face no longer recognizable.

‘Here?’ the man says.

I nod and wipe my sodden cheeks.

‘Here.’

I abandon my bags at the roadside and rush towards the wooden door. I can already see that it is open. He would never just leave it like that. He worries endlessly about locking up the bar at night. I call out his name as I step into the cool shade of the entrance hall. At first it looks the same: the wrought-iron statue on the side table, the white rug at the bottom of the stairs. Yet his keys are missing from the bowl next to the door, his jacket no longer hanging and ready for him to throw on against the evening chill. I dash upstairs, still calling out for him.

I’m sobbing by the time I reach his bedroom; guttural, animal-like noises. The wardrobe doors are thrown open, shirts scooped off their hangers as if by someone who left in a hurry. Sheets have been torn off the bed and a fallen lamp sits in pieces on the floor as though whoever broke it didn’t have time to clean up. A door to a balcony has been left ajar and thin curtains drift lazily in the breeze, their movement absurdly calm against the chaos he has left behind.

For a moment it feels like everything should stop. The world is still spinning. The sun is still shining. But he is gone. I lie stomach-down on his bed and try to capture the smell of him. I breathe in hoping to find the remnants of his aftershave, a small part of him still left behind, but the white expanse of the mattress only smells of detergent. I wail into a discarded pillow, not worried about who will hear, my body arching into the bed. Around me the house remains cavernous and still, as though nobody has lived here for years. As though none of us were ever here at all.