“You’re moving to Lanzarote?” I said.
“Tenerife. I’ll take over the old hotel while my father-in-law goes and starts up the new one. Eventually I’ll get to start up my own if it’s a success, and I don’t see why not. Location is perfect, right on the beach, and it’s only going to get hotter there—warmer winters. Alex is already looking at condos. We’ll rent out our place here.”
I don’t remember what I said next or if I said anything at all—just sort of mumbled a burp and looked around. Glass and steel was all there was. Canary Wharf, the ugliest place on planet Earth. A spreadsheet of empty buildings dolled up with shitty Instagram-slut-hut cocktail bars. Mini-golf and £30 salads.
“Of course I’ll miss you,” he said. My heart soared and I hated it for doing that. “You’ve been my best mentor here.” It deflated just as quickly. “But hotels is what’s always been my main thing, my goal. That’s what I was doing at uni before I came here. Remember? We talked about hotels before. George? You OK, mate?”
Best mentor.
“No,” I said. I didn’t remember. He had never said anything about hotels. What was there to possibly say.
“Ah, maybe I was telling Ollie.” So then he started telling me, about how he had worked at a hotel in Dorset growing up, starting in the kitchens—they served fresh seafood, he’d go fishing every morning with his pops you see—working his way up, cleaning rooms, coordinating with tour companies, working the front desk. It was there he learned his charm, he said, his ability to make anyone fall in love with him. He said those words exactly.I know how to make anyone fall in love with me.He mimicked his routine: “Good afternoon, darling, let me takethat suitcase for you and help you out of your jacket, too nice of a day innit, where’ve you come from today, you don’t look like you need a holiday, you look like you’ve just come back from one, all fresh faced, you’re a cheeky one—you’re going to be the cheeky one this week aren’t you, you’re going to get me in lots of trouble, mind the step, let me help you, take my arm.” They would fall for him hook, line, and sinker. Thousands of people are already in love with him, George, what are you thinking.
In the bowels of the fake-flower-adorned cocktail bar, I felt mummified. A glaring neon sign behind Callum read in a swirly fontvibe shift bitch. He was a blinding pink eclipse. I wanted to close my eyes and unbend my spine, flip backward, and push myself out from under the weight of the Earth and all its gravity and the LOVE that I had let harpoon me.
This empty pang was what I felt as Simon held me now, in this tent dripping with condensation, in this bed unimaginably softer than the one we had at home. It was always Simon holding me, not me holding him. Simon giving me his body’s bare warmth and me absorbing it like a cold stone.
In the morning, we rode back home as changed individuals. Prince Edward and ten men, all on horses, rode out with us. The next new moon was a week away and if a dragon was really going to appear, then fine, let it appear and eat us, I dared it. I had no reason to believe this world had anything more to offer than the vacuousness of the one I had left behind, with all its boys and banter. We arrived at our smallholding and the prince sneered at the state of our land.
“If you really are a time traveler, someone should inform you there are much easier ways to live than like this.” He dismounted his horse and inspected our stone hut, tested the creaky frontdoor, sidestepped the divots in the clay ground. The fine hem of his cloak was already taking on dirt and dust. He made an adjustment so it wouldn’t drag. He surveyed our empty meadows, the canal we had dug, our skinny animals.
“Right then.” He sighed. “I’ll have my camp in that far corner. Two men with me—my scribe and my messenger—plus three men in the opposite field.” He snapped his fingers left and right. “You remaining five, head to Scarborough for supplies. I’ll have the constable summon a patrol along the coast. I’ll write a letter. I don’t want the king thinking we haven’t done our due diligence.”
Five men rode off and the remaining five unpacked and set up tents. Already they were trampling and slipping over the banks of the canal. The footpaths and trails Simon and I had hewn were meaningless to them. Their horses were shitting everywhere. The prince laid claim to our house, pulling his scribe and messenger inside, slamming the door behind him.
This left Simon and I on our own and at a loss. Any sense of strategy or way ahead was gone. Again that pang, that yawn of grief. Simon looked at me with that look—that nothing look, where had I seen it before?—it was beyond how I had once looked at Callum, it was more like the way my ex had looked at me when we first moved in together: a shrug of empty-headed happenstance. That’s what it was. We had arrived at a place, unaware of the finality. Maybe we moved in too soon, maybe we moved in too late. A set of expectations had not been laid out. We had been giddy and freewheeling when it was all decided—am I thinking of now or am I thinking of then?—when we found the place in Greenwich, the place outside York, the view over the river, the creek, the easy commute, the seclusion of the forests, the sunsets,the bathroom battles at bedtime that are so fun and cute at first until the dreamscape erodes into something uncanny, something gray and unclaimed; the goats need milking, the plants need watering. By the end of it all, it wasn’t a flat, it wasn’t a building, it wasn’t a home. It was a hut. A roost for seagulls and spiders. A warren of unpaid bills and now a sneering, snotty prince.
Every year there’s at least one suicide at Canary Wharf. A morally bankrupt banker hits pavement, train, marble floor, and for one day a billionaire somewhere in the world has trouble getting in touch with his account manager.
Mine was a slow-moving, deathless self-combustion. It was limbo. It was the sudden realization of the barren earth I had been pouring myself over until I had run out of myself. There was nothing left of me. Callum had taken it all.
But the thing about Callum was that he had a blind spot. That night at dinner, as he detailed his hospitality tricks and how he could make anybody fall in love with him, he couldn’t see that he was confessing to all the wool-pulling tactics he had used on me—and that had to be the ultimate sign of a master, that even his confession could still be so charming. This was a cheeky chap striptease of vulnerability and it forced me to reward him even still, to fawn and say, “Nooo, I think Tenerife’s a great idea, it makes total sense. I’ll make sure the commissions pay out the way they should”—out of control of my own words. I paid for the meal. I felt tears sting the corners of my eyes as I hugged him goodbye and said I had left something back at the office and had to go back. “No, no, you go on ahead,” I insisted, and I left. I hid my face as I walked back to our building alone, strode throughthe lobby, took the lift up. I went to my computer and logged on to our billing platform, the creaky old system we used for commissions and legal money laundering. I pulled up his accounts. I clicked here and there. And I fucked Callum as hard as I knew how to fuck someone. The way I had always wanted to.
I avoided Callum at work for a few days until payday, when his commission was half its usual sum. It took him another week to figure out it was me and what I had done, the avalanche I had started. I was already dead to myself so being dead to him came as no shock. There was no confrontation—there couldn’t be one because there was no “right” way to do the wrong I had been doing for him and all the others. Callum simply evaporated like rain on Tenerife. There was no goodbye.
It took another month for a compliance officer to come for me next. A security complaint was raised—a serious one. I was invited to a disciplinary. Several. The clucking henhouse of HR did their song and dance, mental health terminology bandied about like hot pokers. My systems access was downgraded. I felt oddly at peace as my world fell down around me. There was a bizarre comfort in never seeing or speaking to Callum again, how it confirmed my suspicion that I had been used, that these people would never amount to anything more than the amusing little fantasies they projected of themselves onto the walls of the dark empty room inside me.
When everything was over and done, I found myself with the dogs, with the boyfriend about to leave, with the days that never amounted to anything more than a sequence of time and breaths, all while I felt the oddest, strangest sense of contentedness. As wrecked and ruined as I was, I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
11
There was no plan. There was direction to obey, but no plan. And as the days wore on, it became clear this was the unspoken, agreed consensus among the soldiers and Prince Edward. Dragon or no dragon, we had all been given an order by the king, and here we were, sitting and doing the thing, trying to occupy our time with meaningfulness, but really just watching the sun roll across the blue sky. The upside was that it was finally summer. The surrounding fields shimmied green waves of alfalfa. Our chickens praised the warmer weather and cooed more like joyful parrots than chickens. Crickets, grasshoppers, butterflies, and all the songbirds that feasted on them were sprinkled across every vista like film grain and the only thought I could keep in my mind was “This place...” like a sigh. This place, this place, this place.
The first two days, there was an attempt at appearances—ignore the nature and get to wartime work. One of the soldiers tutored Simon and I in sword fighting and how to improve ouraim with a bow and arrow. The prince watched us struggle, amused. We’d run military drills, practice combat stances, memorize the weights of different weapons, and avoid the issue of what exactly we had been tasked with going up against. The strictness quickly devolved into lightness and the drills became more like camp games, and everyone looked forward to the nightly meal from Scarborough, which would arrive with great ceremony. Pheasant and chicken and veal—often all stuffed inside each other. Dark liquors over steak-like cuts of grilled vegetables I didn’t know were available out here. Wine and mead, wine and mead. This place, this life.
Nobody dared talk about whatactuallythe dragon might be. The soldiers seemed to have varying degrees of credulity about it, happy just to be here and not at a battlefront. The prince seemed to have forgotten what we were here for too, distracted by worry more for his absent lover, Piers. He spent most of the days inside, reading and writing letters with his scribe. By late afternoon he’d march around with on-the-fly orders ranging from the position of a tent flap to the stacking of firewood. One day he made us all skinny-dip in the canal, which then became a daily ritual. There was an erotic, masculine charge to everything—the physical exercise, the endless preparation and riling each other up. There was the stiffness of formality and discipline, the wonderment at the exotic mystery of what was to come, and finally the liberation of laughing it all off, stripping down and admitting one’s insignificance, jumping into cool fresh water. Inside these rhythms were spaces where even Simon and I could relax, forget about any supposed terror, and enjoy each other. We swam in the canal and wrestled each other, wrestled the soldiers, played games, and lounged. Sunsets danced on the narrow water.
“Look at the vortex,” I said. I clung to the side of the canal and stopped swimming. I let the pull of the water take over, stretching me out. “I don’t know what causes it.” Simon on the other side was pushed in the opposite direction and a shallow swirl formed between us. His face was adorable as he marveled at it.
“We dug the switchback too deep here, so there’s an undercurrent,” he said. “The water can’t complete the turn.” He reached his arm like a hook over the vortex and dipped a single finger into the water. “It’s kind of beautiful.”
“You’re kind of beautiful,” I said.
Simon smiled. Beads of water glistened off his shoulders and dark curls. Between his eyes, the water, and the sky was an unbelievable blue beyond all blues, and on his cheeks, faint summer freckles had begun to appear like tiny dots on a pear. He swam through the vortex and we kissed. We fashioned a boat made of twigs and watched it sail down the rest of the canal, hypnotized.
By the end of the week, all discipline was lost. The day of the new moon came and we acted as if there would be no dragon at all. If anything, we’d see an environmental glitch like a geyser or a rare spotted owl and all the hearsay would be explained. The dragon would be a vibe more than anything.
Only Simon kept up the combat training, wanting to master the regimental weapons he had been given. On that last day, he stood in the meadow alone with his bow and arrow doing target practice. Everyone else lazed about, binging on leftovers from the night before, watching the day’s long shadows continue their slow turns.
