Page 14 of The Next Chapter

‘Yep, me too,’ he agrees. ‘If it makes you feel better, Noah keeps looking at you,’ Seb then mutters out of the side of his mouth.

I immediately swivel my head around to find him. He’s talking to Blake and his foster dad. He tilts his head back a little and laughs at something their foster dad says.

‘Ah!’ I call as my kayak bobs violently.

‘Please, be more obvious about it.’ Seb steadies my kayak.

‘He does not.’

‘He does.’

‘He’s probably worried he’ll have to rescue me when I go under.’

‘Maybe. We should try to talk to Lola when we can.’ Seb glides off, distinctly predatory.

I’ll have to leave Lola to him for now, since my own efforts are probably best spent concentrating on not drowning.

It’s a lot trying to do that, while also taking in what your long-lost birth mum is saying about the local geology at the same time.

I think I catch the words ‘former glacier’, but I can’t be sure.

‘That’s Blà Bheinn,’ Lola says, pointing up to her right at one of the taller mountains in the distance. ‘Over two thousand feet of climb. But you’ll not find a better view on a morning than from the top, ’specially if it’s a clear day.’

Oh good, there’s my vomit once more.

Noah hangs back again to check that I’m okay, and I have a sinking feeling that he’s been dispatched by Lola to keep an eye on the woman straggling along at the back.

Seb is way off the mark about Noah looking at me. And anyway, I’m almost certain that my future husband will be into indoor sports. Colin had a squash buddy.

The only person seemingly having less fun than me is Harper. Every time Blake lifts his arms up like he’s having fun, or smiles a big toothy grin, she looks like she wants to murder her foster dad with her bare hands. It’s probably a good thing that there’s a whole heap of loch between them.

With some effort and a fair bit of splashing, I make my way over to her.

‘Everything okay?’ I pant, annoyed that all the sponsored exercise I do doesn’t seem to have made one iota of difference to my arm strength.

She side eyes me. We’re bobbing again and I think Lola is talking about a secret loch somewhere behind a line of trees.

‘You look like a drowned rat,’ Harper says.

‘Trust me, I feel like one.’ She gives me a dirty look and paddles away.

‘Sorry,’ her foster mum, Sharon, I think she’s called, mouths to me from the other side of the group.

I wave it away because it really doesn’t matter.

And anyway, I don’t want to admit that I’m drawn to Harper’s overt hatred of everyone and everything.

That would be exceptionally strange, even by my low standards.

We carry on. Lola’s predictions that none of us would fall in turn out to be right. Even when I get a precarious wobble going trying to eat my second all-bran breakfast bar, I don’t topple over.

I struggle along behind the pack, hearing maybe one word in ten that Lola says about the local area and reminding myself that I’ll never have to step foot in a kayak again after today.

I do notice that Lola has spoken to everyone in the group aside from me.

That’s the sort of thing you notice when you can’t stop looking at someone.

The whole time, I’ve been conscious of where she is, looking for some sign that there’s common ground between us.

Like, does she snort when she laughs sometimes?

Or does her fringe have a mind of its own too?

So far, I’ve got nothing. I mean, Lola has a fringe, a blonde one tinged with grey. But it just sits straight and obedient, a little bit wispy. Nothing at all like the out-of-control frizz magnet that sometimes graces my forehead.

She’s chatting now to the middle-aged man who’s here with his wife.

I know for a fact that she’s already spoken to him once, I’ve seen it.

At least Seb has managed to talk to her.

I could hear him declaring loudly that we were the foremost personal memoir ghost writing business in the North of England.

Which is true. We also happen to be the only personal memoir ghost writing business in the North of England.

‘How did it go?’ I whisper when he paddles over to me.

‘Not sure. She didn’t say much. Just went really quiet, actually. But I’ve planted the seed.’

I’m almost certain this is not what Dad meant when he urged me to get in touch with Lola. But the more I see of her, the more the thought of getting to hear her memoirs without her knowing who I am… well, it’s starting to appeal. Like, a lot.

The truth of it is that now, I’m more curious than ever about Lola. All those questions I had as a child are back, but the answers I’ve spent a lifetime telling myself don’t make sense anymore. I don’t know how to feel about her. And I hate how messy it all is. I don’t like mess, as a general rule.

Mercifully, we’re almost done. I can see the shore by the hotel up ahead. I power my arms, praying that they don’t give out on me now. Not when we’re so close to dry land.

‘You’re really getting into the swing of it all now.’ Lola’s voice takes me so much by surprise that my kayak rocks dangerously with all of the flailing I’ve got going on.

She reaches out a hand to steady me and for a moment I’m obsessed with that hand. I want to photograph it and compare it to mine, but later when no one’s around to see how weird I’m being.

‘Thanks, I’ve had a really lovely morning.’

I feel very proud of what I consider to be the first sane sentence I’ve ever muttered to her, but Lola just chuckles, like she knows I’m lying. Which I am. It’s been traumatic.

‘If you like to read, the hammocks in the garden are a good place to go,’ she tells me. How does she know that I like to read? Some weird genetic-based telepathy? Or just the fact that my performance this morning screams ‘BOOKWORM’?

‘I’m reading a really good book on J. Robert Oppenheimer, actually,’ I tell her, and she nods, like this might be something she already knows.

‘You know, the guy who invented the atom bomb. They just made a film about him,’ I say, thinking please God brain, shut up.

‘They think he didn’t say the whole “I am death” line after that initial test. It’s fascinating.

’ Lola frowns. ‘It’s not that I’m, like, into weapons of mass destruction or anything, I’m the opposite, probably a pacifist, to be honest, though who isn’t these days? ’

I’m out of breath by the time I come up for air. The chances are, if I announced to Lola right now that I’m her daughter, she’d think she made the right call all those years ago.

We aren’t moving anymore. We are the only two people floating as everyone else makes their way back to shore.

‘I’m a pacifist too,’ Lola says. And then she’s pushing away with her paddles, leaving me behind.

I obviously know that Lola is a pacifist. It’s on her Wikipedia page that she protested against the Iraq War.

In the grainy photo of her there, one of the last before she disappeared from public life, she’s in front of the Washington Monument with a ‘choose peace not war’ T-shirt that she’s wearing as a dress.

She glides smoothly onwards. Did she quit the band to take up kayaking?

Seb circles back for me as everyone else starts to drag their kayaks out of the water.

‘What did she say?’ he asks quietly, lining up next to me as I begin a slow paddle.

‘Nothing important,’ I reply, thinking that really, it was a bit of an unusual first proper conversation to have.