“I thought you just wanted to talk about Africa?’
“I do. Sorry.”
The silence became awkward. Both of us looked ahead at the yachts and boats out at sea.
“Are you seeing anyone?” I turned to look at him as I blurted out the words.
He didn’t answer, just stood up, his height like a mountain. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Wren. It’s been good catching up.”
I waited until I’d counted to fifteen until I turned around and watched him walking along the path to the huge building, his t-shirt pulling across his shoulders, waist tapered. He was broader now, older. His stubble was darker and thicker and there were a few flecks of grey in his hair.
If the boy Callum had been beautiful then the man was a god.
* * *
I tooka coffee by the sea, watching the lights on the boats. The waves bobbed around the faux beaches, the sky scrapers almost from a different world than the continent we were heading to. Less than twenty-four hours ago I’d been in London, dating a man I didn’t really want to be with. Now I was thousands of miles away, single again, with the person who had gone someway to defining my life.
I watched the ebb and flow of the tide, the lights on a yacht dim and light up as a party commenced, the sound of the call to prayer in the distance. I was in a different world and I had no idea how to control this one.
How did you walk away from something that wasn’t inert, something that could follow you? Had followed you?
That really you’d never let go.
I stood up and headed towards the hotel and my room, somehow knowing that even though my head was racing and whatever inside me had been lit, I’d still sleep.
And everything would seem better in the morning.
Words from a woman I’d never met. A woman who’d had more influence on my life than she’d ever know.
Callum
My father had never called me a disappointment. He’d never criticised me for the choices I’d made or even the time when I made a girl cry in front of him because I wouldn’t go out with her. He’d just looked at me as if he didn’t understand.
I don’t think I did either.
My mother died when I was two. She went to sleep and didn’t wake up. That morning, the housekeeper didn’t show as her daughter was unwell and it was Maxwell and Claire who looked after me, finding food I could eat and even changing my diaper. I have no recollection of that day, not a proper one, but I have a sense of it. Occasionally, when the four of us – me, Max, Claire and Jackson – are together with no one else, I feel it. The four of us together. Survivors.
The next few years were about the four of us and a father who was never there. Without my mother, he had no anchor and simply sailed in his sea of work and law and money, making sure we had everything but parents. We went through nannies like sweets, deterring them with our wildness and my father’s disinterest, and we looked after ourselves the best way we could.
And then Marie came. Two weeks after meeting my father, she agreed to marry him, leave her law firm in New York, and come to Oxfordshire to take on a ready-made flock of four. I had the mother I’d needed – a mother I didn’t want to lose, even though I’d never really had my birth-mum. She’d never been there; never present mentally in our lives. She had post-natal depression, something that had haunted Max made him want to stay single, until Victoria, his fiancée. Victoria, needed to be sainted for putting up with that crabby bastard, he’d avoided relationships that could’ve led to anything permanent for fear of watching someone else he loved go through the same.
I loved my siblings. They drove me fucking mental most of the time – all of them were certifiable – but they’d never let me down. Even the younger ones. Seph and Payton – the twins my father had with Marie – were annoying and amusing on a daily basis, while Ava was one of my closest friends.
The photo she’d taken and sent me this morning was typical her, a selfie where she was covered in paint, with her boyfriend Eli, laughing behind her, his arms wrapped around her. I both loved and hated that she had him, because I wasn’t as necessary in her life anymore.
Callum:Make sure he keeps you laughing like that. Else I’ll have to feed him to Toby.
Toby wasthe tiger at the zoo I’d recently operated on to remove a tumour. The tumour had affected his sight and he wouldn’t be able to survive in the wild, so he was now one of my permanent patients and he hated the very bones of me.
Ava:He was talking about us getting married. Hence the laughter.
Callum:He needs to ask permission from all of us to do that.
Two minuteslater I had a text from Eli. I didn’t read it. We were about to board the plane and I didn’t want my head filled with the goings on at home when we were about to travel to the land of ropey reception and extortionate roaming charges.
I fucking loved Africa. I could hide there and be open about it, the lack of reception always being an excellent excuse for not talking to anyone back home. When I was away, things would change, my siblings moved on, grew, met people. I’d come home and there would be a new sofa in someone’s house, or they would’ve moved or broken up with the ex-love of their life. But it didn’t matter, because I’d been in Africa.
“Excited?” I sat down next to Wren who was looking seven shades of pale.
