Page 4 of High Season

THREE

SIX WEEKS BEFORE THE BIRTHDAY PARTY

On the day before high season began, Josie Jackson and Hannah Bailey broke into the Draytons’ swimming pool.

They slipped down the steps, away from the house and onto the broad, flat terrace that stretched out toward the sea.

They peeled back the cover to reveal the water, newly cleaned and chemical.

They snorted with laughter and hushed each other, even as they both squealed, dive-bombing into the deep end, scattering the quiet of the late-spring air.

They swam lengths as the sun set over the endless flat of the sea. They splashed each other, and saw who could hold their breath the longest. They did handstands, their feet sticking out of the water like flowers breaking through earth. Like they used to when they were children.

Afterward, they stretched out on the ground, their skin wet and stinking of chlorine. The early evening sky was golden, and the water on their bare legs and stomachs glittered.

“Maybe their flight will get delayed,” said Josie.

“Maybe they’ll decide to stay in London this summer.”

“Maybe they’ll decide they’re sick of this house and give it to us.”

Josie nudged Hannah, her elbow sharp in her best friend’s ribs.

“You would hate if they didn’t come,” she said. “You’d be heartbroken. You’ve been counting down the days ’til Blake turns up.”

Hannah wriggled away from her.

“He might not even be coming this year,” she said.

Josie stretched her hands above her head, as if reaching for the last gasps of the day’s heat.

“He’ll be here,” she said. “He will.”

Just then came the distinctive sound of Josie’s mother’s voice, its wiry, perpetually anxious edge drifting down the hill.

“Josie May Jackson, what are you doing with that pool cover?”

They scrambled to their feet before Patricia Jackson could make it down the steps, pulling clothes over their damp bodies, laughing, scurrying to haul the pool cover back on, dashing out the side gate. Leaving only wet footprints behind.

Josie and Hannah first met when Josie was ten, Hannah eleven.

Josie was new to the town, her family having moved to the C?te d’Azur two weeks earlier.

The total upending of Josie’s life back in the UK had come out of the blue.

Her taxi-driver dad had met a bloke at the pub who told him that he could make good money working as a private driver for rich expats in the South of France, and within a month they were packing their bags.

Like many of the transitions in Josie’s life (their relocation from London to Kent after her dad remortgaged their house to invest in a timeshare company that never got off the ground; the time she and her brother had to leave the school her mum said she’d moved heaven and earth to get them into when her dad got into a physical fight with the head teacher at parents’ evening; the summer he’d taken them all to Disneyland and then they’d had to do a midnight flit because he’d borrowed the money from a dodgy moneylender to pay for it), the move was characterized by a flurry of hope and optimism followed by a shift to quiet fury and disappointment.

They arrived in autumn to find the beaches empty, the village quiet, the flurry of high season stilled.

Most of the people who owned the sprawling holiday homes had already gone home for winter, and the work that Josie’s dad had been promised failed to materialize.

Instead, he would spend all day at home, smoking at the kitchen table, cracking open bottles of beer at increasingly early hours of the afternoon.

Josie found herself leaving the house more and more often to escape the simmer of tension.

She ventured along coastal paths, climbed the trees that lined the winding road to their house.

She could stay out for hours, if she had to. Often, she felt like she did.

The first day that Josie met Hannah was a Saturday, the temperature cool, the streets silent.

Josie had been able to feel the threat of an argument settling between her parents in the same way that you can feel moisture in the air before a storm.

The heaviness had sent her scurrying out of the house and—in an effort to fill time—down toward the beach.

She was remembering how her dad had taken the whole family there on their first morning in France, loud and grinning, buying her and her brother ice cream even though it wasn’t quite warm enough, treating her mum to a brand-new swimming costume from one of the boutiques that lined the seafront still making the most of end-season stragglers.

They had been happy. Excited. Her dad had said how great it would be for Josie and her brother, Calvin, to grow up so close to the sea.

Josie had dripped ice cream down her T-shirt, and her mum hadn’t even gotten cross about it.

In fact, she had been beaming, pink-faced, looking at Josie’s dad in a way that she rarely did anymore.

Josie wanted the peace and hope of that day to return. She felt, somehow, that if she could make it to the beach, things might feel all right again.

She found her way to the town easily, navigating the rows of shuttered-up restaurants and shops.

She located the road that ran parallel to the sea, but somehow couldn’t find the path that led onto the beach.

She walked up and down and only found rows of pastel-painted buildings, doors with F ERMé POUR L’HIVER scrawled on hand-painted signs.

Her shoes were beginning to rub, and there was a tightness in her chest. She thought again of her parents arguing.

The black mood that had descended on their new home. She had to find the beach.

That was when she saw a girl sitting on the front terrace of a shop, her head bent over an exercise book. Long, bare legs and strawberry-blond hair. Snorkels and wetsuits strung up above her, swinging in the breeze.

“’Scuse me,” Josie called out. “Do you know the way to the sea?”

The girl’s head jerked up. She frowned. She had light gray eyes, sun-bronzed skin.

“Yeah,” the girl said slowly. “You just need to take the footpath, at the end of the street.”

She lifted her biro to point toward a row of shops.

“It looks like an alley at first. Down the side of that blue house on the left?”

Josie nodded.

“Oh yeah,” she said, trying to sound like she’d simply forgotten. “Thanks.”

She knew that she looked out of place here, with her scruffy ponytail and bitten-down fingernails. Skin that was scorched with freckles, a dead giveaway that she hadn’t spent much time in the sun. Not knowing her way to the sea was surely unforgivable, a sign that she was an outsider.

“Wait.”

Josie turned around. The girl was putting her exercise book down beside her.

“Are you…” she said. “Where are your parents?”

Josie shrugged. Scuffed her shoe against the pavement.

“Back at the house,” she says. “We just moved in.”

“Which house?”

“Up over the hill.”

“You walked all the way down here by yourself?” The girl tilted her head to one side. “Do they mind? You must only be—”

“I’m ten.”

Josie couldn’t stop a note of defiance creeping into her voice. She was small for her age, the smallest in her school year back in Kent. People often thought she was younger than she was.

“They don’t mind you coming down here on your own?” the girl repeated.

Josie shrugged again, slowly this time, reluctant.

“They’re fighting,” she said. “Anyway. Thanks very much.”

She stepped back again, toward the footpath.

“Wait.”

The girl was standing now.

“I was actually thinking of going for a swim,” she said. “I’ll come with you.”

She brushed sand from her thighs. Sand seemed to get everywhere, out here.

“I’m Hannah, by the way.”

“Josie.”

Hannah smiled.

“Let’s go,” she said. “The waves are perfect at this time of day.”

Now, Josie and Hannah left the Draytons’ pool and walked to the beach, back to the exact place where they swam that first day.

They’d been like sisters since then, inseparable for the last six years.

Josie, who turned up here without being able to speak a word of French.

Hannah, who was bilingual by dint of having a British father but had never quite made friends with the other kids at the international school over the hill, on account of always having to spend her weekends helping out at her parents’ dive shop.

Who, Josie now knew, had only gone down to the beach with her that first day because she had seen a small, lost girl and been afraid of what might happen to her.

What could come of a child who didn’t yet understand the sea.

Its depth and currents. The way a wave could seize hold of you and fill your lungs.

To Josie, they fit together like salt and sand, even though they made a strange pairing: Hannah, who at seventeen was almost six feet tall, with long, thin limbs and a sea of strawberry-blond hair; Josie, who was barely five feet, with a squat, compact frame and short, dark hair that she only ever wore tied up.

Hannah, who had developed a way of making herself smaller, hunching her spine and folding her arms across her newly blossomed chest. Josie, who was loud and outspoken.

Who had a habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Who never really cared when she did.

“I’m going in,” said Josie. “Want to come?”

Hannah shook her head.

“It’ll take forever to dry out now the sun’s gone down,” she said. “I’ll wait here.”

Josie stripped off her shorts and T-shirt and waded out until the waves lapped against her waist. Then she held her breath and plunged beneath the surface.

The water was dark, the twilight sky pale and high above her.

She closed her eyes. She started to swim.

When the beach was a distant sliver, the hill a black shadow against a hollow sky, she flipped onto her back and spread her arms and legs out wide.

She floated, starfished, her ears beneath the surface so that she could hear the beat of her own heart.

This was where she felt happiest. Most peaceful. On the edge of something bigger than herself.

When Josie had been submerged for so long that she could feel her skin begin to soften and salinate, she swam back to shore.

Short, sharp strokes that made her arms ache.

Hannah was waiting exactly where she’d left her, tracing shapes in the sand with a stick.

A star. A sun. A spiral. J + H in large, twirling letters.

Josie collapsed down next to her, scattering sand across the sun.

“Good swim?”

“Beautiful.”

Josie leaned back, her elbows in the damp sand.

“I hate this bit,” she said. “Waiting for them all. Feeling like we’re on hold until they get here.”

Josie always felt restless as summer approached.

To her, the divide between the end of spring and the start of summer was clear and defined.

Before summer, this place seemed to belong to her and Hannah.

The beach was desolate. The villas that dotted the hill were quiet, dust sheets thrown over furniture, vast bellies of emptiness.

They would roam the rooms of the Draytons’ house, where Josie’s mum had gotten a job working as a housekeeper after Josie’s dad walked out just a year after they arrived in France.

They would sneak onto the terrace to watch the sunset.

They would do their homework at great wooden dining tables made to seat fifteen people.

Then, high season would begin. Cars pulled up in driveways, families filled the grand estates, and beaches heaved with day-trippers.

Hannah’s parents would work late. Josie’s mother would be perpetually exhausted and irritable, run ragged by the Draytons.

Josie would often have to help out, babysitting the youngest Drayton kid or doing errands down in the town.

At night, there would be bonfires on the sand, the teenage children of their employers carrying down crates of beer, leaving bottles scattered like seashells.

The bay that belonged to Hannah and Josie for most of the year would belong to them instead, and the two girls could only slip in through back doors, handing out drinks at parties or accepting twenty-euro notes in exchange for babysitting work, or the occasional tutoring job for parents who wanted to improve their children’s French.

Hannah tossed the stick that she had been drawing with.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m kind of looking forward to it this year.”

Josie snorted.

“Looking forward to having to work every weekend and be at some posh person’s beck and call twenty-four hours a day?”

“Oh, come on. You hardly have to work. Looking after a few kids for a couple of hours a week. And we could use the extra money. You could use the extra money. Aren’t you saving?”

Josie had been saving for as long as she could remember. She had showed Hannah her piggy bank the first time her new friend had visited the dilapidated house up on the hill that her dad had insisted was a fixer-upper but then refused to so much as replace a lightbulb.

“I’m going traveling, soon as I turn eighteen,” she said. “I’m going to see the world.”

Now sixteen, she stuck pictures of far-flung places up on her bedroom wall, dreamed about different cities the way that her classmates talked about their dream universities. Hanoi. Buenos Aires. Sydney.

“Don’t you think it can be fun?” persisted Hannah. “Everything comes to life in summer, you know? It’s how this place is supposed to be.”

A quiet fell between them. The soft roar of stones rolling beneath the waves.

“I like it better when it’s just us,” said Josie at last.

Hannah stretched out so that her face was turned toward the sky.

“I have a good feeling about this year,” she said. “I think this is going to be the best summer yet.”