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PROLOGUE
What was prevalent was the dark streaks of blood all through the sand, and the smell. The smell of blood. She was lying on the beach, amongst the chaos and the wreckage. She looked so serene and I wondered how I could walk away and just leave her there. I bent down by her side. I observed the blood across her dress, and down her legs. I sat back on my heels and held my hands in a prayer fashion. Then I held them out in front of me and saw the blood all over them. I could see it even in the half-light of the moon. I only had a few more minutes; I needed to get away soon. I looked behind me, to the shore where the small motor boat was moored, all ready for me. I looked once more at her lying on the sand. The dark stains marred her clothes; I was barely able to see what the pattern once was.
What would become of her? I wasn’t sure. But I couldn’t think about it anymore. I had to take myself from this island and forget about her and everything that had happened here. What I had been responsible for. I stood and pulled my rucksackonto my back so I had two free arms for balance to wade out to the boat and get on board. I knew every second counted now; they would be coming for me. I looked down at her almost lifeless body once more, then I stepped around her.
I moved towards the shore, then I slowly waded out into the shallows until I reached the boat. I threw my rucksack inside and climbed on board. I sat down on the plank of wood nearest the engine and before I started it, I took one last look at the island. This was the last time I would see it close, or ever again I was sure. Now it was time to go.
I looked at the body on the sand and something told me that she had gone – she was no longer of this earth – and as I started the engine and the boat began to chug away, I kept looking at her and didn’t take my eyes off her until she was just a tiny spec on the small stretch of sand in the faraway distance.
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THEN
Fiji
The sky was drenched a russet orange. Streaks of pink sliced their way through, fighting for space amongst the tangerine canvas. I could only see the sun, only the array of colours sitting behind as it made its way to the other side of the world. It was such a beautiful display that I didn’t want to turn away; I didn’t want to miss one second. There were guitars and a ukulele being played in the bar by three local men. They sang out harmoniously. I heard the music and I watched the colours in the sky; this felt like the closest to God I would ever get.
I could hear my name being called over and over until I turned. It was Dana, my friend. She was Polish and I had met her three weeks ago when I arrived and now it felt that we had known one another all our lives. She worked on the market too here, in Nadi in Fiji. She sold flowers; I sold chocolate.The pay was dismal, but it was all I needed. I had given up everything to be here. I didn’t need anything. Possessions controlled you and I had been close to being in that position, becoming that person, staying where it was safe. Before, it ate me up like the disease, affluenza, the way it had so many of the people I knew back in England. Bruno, the man I had thought I was in love with, was very like them and, little by little, like someone chipping away at a piece of wood to carve it into something, I felt myself becoming someone I did not like or even recognise.
I would be sitting at a dining room table or in a restaurant, and someone would start a conversation about their kitchen, telling me all about how they’d just had theirs fitted or were getting it refurbished. They would talk about the cost of a radiator, the only one that could do for that particular kitchen... That kitchen that would fulfil their every desire once it was complete was the impression I got. It was going to bethe fucking kitchen.But how long would it keep them happy? I’d been given tours of people’s kitchens after they’d had them fitted, after months of hellish endurance of finding the right person, sourcing the correct handles and knobs that would make every bit of difference to their incomplete life. That knobs’ sole purpose was to complete them. Then there was the anecdotes of the incompetent joiner and other tradespeople who had been involved in the saga. The agonising wait for the material, only for the wrong ones to show up. But it was here now, in all its shining glory. The hub of the home was complete. The kitchen of dreams had landed.
‘We’re getting a disco ball for the ceiling. For our kitchen discos!’
Subtext, because we are so cool but we really try not to be, at least not so that anyone would guess.
‘So what’s next?’ I would ask partly out of curiosity about what mundane and banal way they would be spending the next three months of their lives and partly to be polite, to keep the conversation going somehow, whilst I finished my wine.
‘We’re going to transform the basement into a games room. And a gym.’
I want to see the world, I thought but did not say. I had mentioned it to Bruno a few times. Each time he pretended he hadn’t heard me or changed the subject.
Bruno would smile and squeeze my hand, his way of reinforcing what they were saying so that I might get on board and feel all the feels over a pot of Farrow and Ball. I would always smile at him, put him at ease and hope that I never had to have a conversation about moving in together so we became one of them and told the same decorating anecdotes on a loop at various social gatherings. I guess I always knew then that he wasn’t the one for me, even before he did what he did.
So there they were, the people I once knew, putting up floor-to-ceiling mirrors inside a twelve-foot-square windowless box room whilst I listened to what could only be described as heavenly music, whilst feeling as though I was on the brink of touching actual heaven.
The bar I hung out in most evenings was three hundred metres from my tiny flat, which I rented for $37 Fijian dollars a week. It was a basic room with a bed, a portable electric hob – which I occasionally think aligns next to ‘the kitchen of dreams’ – a table in the corner, and an adjoining toilet and shower where I washed my dishes, clothes and myself, thoughnot all at the same time. It’s small but it’s where I have come to call home. Fiji is now my home.
Why am I here? Why have I not bought a home, and stuffed it to the gills, so it resembles that interior design Instagram post I saw? Because it never felt right. I always felt like I was acting in a play, as though all the lines were set out for me to say; I just had to add some spirit to them to make them sound believable. We were still kids, playing at being adults, it felt. Pretending that this was what we all wanted. What we needed to fulfil ourselves. I questioned it daily and often at these soirees I had attended with Bruno. I would regularly veer too off-piste for anyone to get on board, which would warrant hushed tones referring to me as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ and then as time went on, and we attended more dinner parties, I would start to feel him watching me, and then he developed a look, one just for me it seemed. It was telling to stop being me, to fit in and say what they all wanted to hear.
He had tried to mould me, to make me like them. But I would not yield.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried. I watchedLove IslandandMarried at First Sight. I walked around IKEA and did Tough Mudder and Park Run at the weekend. I ate out at the sushi restaurants and went to kids’ birthday parties even though we had no kids. I did it all; I made sacrifices so I could please Bruno. Because I thought I had to do those things to be considered a proper grown-up, accepted and liked. Ultimately, I was doing it for him, to save us, even when I could see the end. But where was the room he made for me? My wishes, my dreams and hopes? Well, there was no room for them in his cluttered life of rugby trophies and chrome and mirrors. The mirrored wardrobe where he could watch us as we made love, next to thecrack in the wall where his fist had landed inches from my face that first time. That last time.
‘Weshould get a glitter ball, babe.’ He had suggested after that dinner party. I had laughed so loud, but the shock of his skin hitting plaster had knocked all the laughter out of me.
He started telling me he had tried so hard with me, but I wasn’t going to budge. And then I made the fatal mistake of turning my back on him. The second blow, at me this time, was unexpected and harder to accept than any narcissistic trait he had suffocated our relationship with.
I found Dana among a crowd around a small table where the three men merrily played their instruments, and they smiled and smiled as though they couldn’t stop if they tried. I recognised the song because I had been here in Fiji long enough. Dana was high. She took something – I don’t know what. She pulled me closer to where I had stopped and perched at the edge of the wooden cabin.
‘Come and dance. Come and dance.’ We weaved our way back to the table. I still felt awkward knowing that people were looking at us. That Westernised conscious effect was somehow still ingrained in me, as much as I had tried to resist. But I would rid myself of it, one day at a time, until I could be my most authentic self without a care. Dana was different; she danced like she didn’t notice anyone around her. How did she do that? How did she always manage to be so unaffected by life? I knew I had spent far too long in the company of Bruno’s friends who were so desperate to be someone else that they had forgotten they needed to live first. Well, no more of that for me. I was here and Iwasgoing to live, and I wasn’t going to care anymore.
I took Dana in my arms and swung her around. She threw her head back and laughed, and the people at the table looked up and smiled. There was a woman in the corner of the bar, her mahogany hair tied up in a bun with a large headband covering her forehead. She was grinning, smiling at us – at me. I held her gaze for a few seconds longer and then looked at Dana again as we spun. When I looked back up, the woman was gone.
That night, when I went to bed, I dreamt heavily. A faceless woman and I in a clinch. I presumed it was Dana, but it could have been someone from my past. She pulled herself away from me and began to walk away. Quickly at first, then slowly. She turned just before she stepped onto the sand and looked down at her feet. They were bleeding. Then she started running towards the sea and was out of sight quickly. I ran after her but she was gone. But I could still hear her. Her voice whispering my name.
Sadie, Sadie,over and over until I woke up.
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