She’s a part of the universe here – not simply a cog in a wheel, a lonely cog. Everyone has someone: her father has Georgie, her mother has Magnús, her rockstar boyfriend.
India has nobody.
Nobody actually cares where she is right now, and that hurts. She is fundamentally alone.
Tears fill her eyes, which she knows is a ludicrous reaction. She has so much! She’s here on a glorious beach just below a glorious retreat, and she’s crying!
Sobbing.
Keera puts an arm around India and squeezes.
‘Thank you,’ mutters India.
She wipes her cheeks with her arm but the tears keep flowing.
Blast Rose and her opening people up.
India doesn’t want to be opened up. It hurts.
She’s not even on the rack on the terrace and, already, she feels split open.
‘I thought this was supposed to help,’ she says to Keera, indistinctly now because of the tears.
‘It will, honestly,’ says Keera. ‘I did it in rehab and it helped so much.’
‘Why are you here now if rehab worked so well?’ India asks.
‘Rehab deals with addiction and once you get out and you’re clean and sober, you realise all the other stuff that’s wrong in your life.That’swhat I need to sort,’ Keera says wryly.
They’ve reached the start of the beach proper and there’s a walkway through the rocks to the pebbled beach below.
Still holding on to the crying India with one arm, Keera guides them over the pebbles to a part of the beach where someone’s made a giant circle of pebbles on the sand.
‘Thought it wasn’t supposed to be a classic sandy beach,’ sniffs India, because this side is just that.
‘Christos was probably just warning us that there’s pebbly bits too in case we sue him for breach of contract,’ says Keera, laughing. ‘The contrast is cool,’ she adds. Then she laughs. ‘It’s the two sides of therapy seen as a beach: sandy stretches but also lots of big rocks to climb over.’
They both laugh and India rubs her eyes with her hand again, the tears finally drying up.
‘I’m a mess,’ she says and collapses cross-legged onto the warm sand.
‘You’re a work in progress,’ Keera says, shrugging, sitting down on the sand too and pulling her knees up so that her hands are clasped around them.
India’s gazing blankly out at the sea.
‘I’ve been reading this saying online,’ she says to Keera. ‘The heart wants what the heart wants,and I think, is that true? Or is it a stupid saying?’
‘You seem to have a lot on your mind,’ says Keera kindly, ‘and the wholeThe heart wants… stuff … I can honestly say that’s total garbage,’ she adds.
‘Really?’ asks India, appalled.
‘Yeah. The heart is a totally impractical organ and has the emotional intelligence of a banana.’
India laughs at this.
Keera continues: ‘The badly hurt part of us, call it Trauma Central:thatwants what it wants, which is usually some hurtful scenario to replicate our past.’
India’s mouth is an oval.
