On the walk down towards the temple, the Welsh girl whose name, it turns out, is Holly, tries to strike up conversation.
‘So … how long have you been here, then?’
Cosima squints at her, lifting her palm to shield her eyes from the sun. Holly has freckled cheeks, frizzy hair and a burned nose that is already flaking.
‘Two months,’ Cosima says.
‘Wow. Nice tan.’
Cosima laughs but doesn’t follow up. She’s not in the mood for talking. Alas, Holly is chatty.
‘So what brought you to Bali?’
Cosima sighs.
‘The usual thing. Wanted to travel and do something good while I’m at it, y’know?’
She spots a plastic six-pack ring at the edge of the shoreline. She bends to twist it out from under wet sand. Holly stands watching her, arms crossed, the hem of her denim cut-offs digging into blotchy thighs. Why doesn’t she do something? Cosima thinks, annoyed by her inaction. There’s plenty of rubbish she could be collecting.
‘It’s funny,’ Holly says in her sing-song accent as Cosima puts the plastic ring into her waste-disposal sack. ‘I could have sworn I recognised you. It’s like I know you from somewhere.’
Cosima’s throat constricts.
‘That’s weird.’
She carries on walking, more quickly now, trying to shake Holly off. But Holly keeps up with her and the sound of Holly’s sandals slapping wetly against her feet starts to embed itself in Cosima’s thoughts. Slap, slap, slap. Pause. Slap, slap. Pause. Slap. She can’t reach for her usual calm, can’t concentrate, and she almost misses an empty bottle of arak, the label brown and ripped but the glass still miraculously intact. She picks the bottle up by its neck, slips it into the bag and reminds herself to breathe. Yeah, thanks Byron, she thinks. She turns to see Holly still staring, still standing with her arms crossed, the empty rubbish sack hanging from one hand.
‘No. It’s true. I do know you. You’re that girl.’
Holly’s face clears. She’s pleased with herself now. She’s got the satisfying serotonin spike that comes when the elusive fact you were trying to drag up has finally surfaced.
Cosima sees Rudy and Heinrich a few feet ahead of her. If she quickens her pace, she can catch up with them and start talking about something – anything – else but then Holly is next to her again, with her chafing shorts and her slapping sandals and her sweaty, red face.
‘You’re the politician’s daughter,’ Holly says, her Welsh accent becoming more pronounced in her excitement. ‘The eco chick.’
Cosima keeps her head down, pulling the brim of her cap lower over her eyes.
‘Isn’t your dad, like … in jail?’
In the sand: a piece of blue rope, coiled into itself like a fraying ammonite. Cosima focuses her gaze on the twist of each fibre and the bleached-out azure of the dye. She calculates how much effort it will take to work the rope out of an entangled clump of seaweed with her clumsy, gloved fingers. She tries to ignore the pins-and-needles sensation that trickles down from her scalp into her arms, her stomach, her legs. She remains, as much as she can, in the here and now.
Her panic attacks usually happen when she’s in crowds of other people – noisy bars or crowded tourist spots – and she is used tospotting the warning signs and taking herself to a quiet place to regulate her breathing. But here, on the wide expanse of Canggu beach with nothing but hot, whipping wind between her and the horizon, she feels simultaneously exposed and trapped. A sharp pain lodges itself beneath her left shoulder. Holly is looking at her with a collector’s gaze, as if Cosima is a rare butterfly, wings pinned onto velvet, and now Holly’s face is getting smaller and smaller and Holly’s eyes are dotted pixelations and all around Cosima there is a glittering darkness and a black sky with shooting neon stars and her body spirals through space: an astronaut adrift in zero gravity.
And then.
She.
Falls.
Into.
Silence.
Cosima’s eyes flicker open. Three faces peer over her. She is on the ground. Beneath her, a solid warmth and the scratch of sand at the nape of her neck. A soiled, rotten smell. She turns her head to see the dulled scales of a dead fish glinting at her through strands of washed-up seaweed.
‘You fainted,’ Rudy is saying, stretching out his hand to help her up off the sand. Cosima doesn’t take it.
‘I just need to rest here for a bit.’
