Page 40 of High Season

Mark and Eric sit at the table, a second bottle of wine between them.

Stretched out on a wooden deckchair, Mason’s thumbs fly against the buttons of his Nintendo Switch.

He’s fourteen now, a teenager. The thought sends a cold feeling all the way through Hannah.

She knows all mothers dread the thought of their children growing up, but this feels different.

She understands what teenage boys are like. She remembers.

Hannah had postnatal depression when Mason was first born.

Baby blues, they used to call it, something that sounded so impossibly twee to describe the vast, awful feeling that threatened to consume her, that kept her awake at night and made her feel like the worst person in the world when she looked at her child and the feeling of overwhelming love that people had promised her failed to materialize.

It was understandable, everyone said, especially when she’d had him so young. It was hard not to feel like she was missing out, when all of her friends moved on with their lives, leaving her behind.

Hannah couldn’t find the words to describe how it was something far worse than that, something much more terrible, more frightening.

Eric was the only person she had told, on a long, dark night, when Hannah had gone to bed with her hair still smelling of milky vomit, unable to remember the last time that she’d slept properly or showered.

“Think of the worst person you’ve ever known,” she said. “The person who’s done the most terrible thing to you.”

“That barber who gave me that shit haircut before the wedding,” Eric said.

“You’re not taking this seriously.”

“OK, OK, fine,” he said. “I’m thinking of someone.”

“OK,” said Hannah. “So what if Mason turns out like that? What if he turns out worse than that? What if we’ve created something that’s evil at its core, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it?”

Eric didn’t speak for a moment. When he did, his voice was so certain that Hannah couldn’t imagine how different their experience of becoming a parent must be.

“I don’t think anyone’s evil at their core,” he said. “I think evil is created. A result of circumstance, and your upbringing, and all sorts of things. And I reckon we’re pretty good people, right? So I think Mason’s going to turn out alright.”

She hadn’t answered at first.

“ You’re alright, aren’t you?” he said into the darkness. “Like, you’re not thinking about… I don’t know. Doing anything to Mason? Because you can tell me if you are, you know. We can work it all out.”

Hannah had rolled away from him then, faced the bedroom wall.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “What kind of person wants to hurt a child?”

She went on medication not long after that, and the bad thoughts mostly went away. But now that Mason was almost at the age when Hannah had done some of the worst and best things of her life, she would look at him and wonder.

“You alright, babe?” Eric says, breaking through her thoughts. “You look off in your own world over there.”

Hannah gives her head a small shake, quickly, before anyone can see, as if she could dash the thought away.

“Fine,” she says.

From inside the house, the doorbell rings. It sounds very far away.

“Hannah?” her mum calls. “Can you get that?”

“If it’s Nic, he’s got a key,” Mark says lazily. “He’ll let himself in, in a minute. Don’t know why he even bothers ringing the doorbell.”

“It’s fine,” Hannah says. “I don’t mind going.”

She wants to be inside again. She wants the cool shade of the house.

A moment to shake off her thoughts, the cold feeling that always sets in whenever she thinks about that dark, terrible time before she got the right pills, before she could look at her own son without feeling a wave of despair.

A rare few seconds to gather herself without one of her children asking her for something.

She takes a few deep breaths in the hallway.

She feels lighter by the time she reaches the front door.

She can see the shadowy shape of her cousin through the misted glass.

She doesn’t see, at first, that there is someone standing beside him.

It doesn’t register, until she’s already swung the door open, smiling, ready to pull Nic into a hug.

She is looking at Josie Jackson for the first time in twenty years.

She looks so different. So much older than Hannah remembers her, the reconfiguration of her features reminding Hannah that she has also aged in the last two decades.

She is surprised that the gut-shock of horror lasts only for a millisecond before it’s replaced by the thrill of familiarity and longing.

She is overcome with the urge to tell Josie everything.

That she went to England, like she always said she would.

That she graduated from university, fell in love.

She wants to squeeze her friend by both hands and squeal, I’m MARRIED, because now that she’s looking at Josie, the thought of being married feels laughably, hilariously grown-up.

They used to talk about this stuff all the time.

What their ideal husbands would be like, how Hannah would have Josie as her bridesmaid, but Josie wouldn’t have bridesmaids because she would elope and get married on a beach somewhere.

All the monumental things that they have missed hit Hannah squarely in her chest, and she stares at Josie, open-mouthed, before finding her voice.

“You’re blond, ” she says.

And just like that, all those lost years disappear.