He notices my hesitation. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Charlie, Isak still works here,’ I say gently. ‘I’m doing the session with him.’
He stares at me, his mouth dropping open. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes.’ I sit down on the sofa and look at him, pleading with him to understand.
He is not at all happy.
‘Why does it have to be him?’ he asks me.
‘Does it matter?’ I reply with a frown. After all, this is me, not Nicki, we’re talking about.
‘No, I guess not,’ he says.
But he’s a bit off with me for the rest of the morning.
He takes April to the beach while I make my way back to the activities-and-excursions hut. There are a few people already getting kitted up with harnesses and helmets when I arrive.
I feel a flurry of nerves.I am actually doing this.
A good-looking man of about my age comes over with a clipboard. ‘What’s your name?’ he asks.
I tell him and he scans his sheet of paper and crosses me off. ‘I’m Isak,’ he says and I jolt. His grip is firm and efficient as he shakes my hand. ‘Emily here will sort you out for equipment. We’ll leave in ten minutes.’
I can barely take my eyes off him after that – it’s so surreal to finally meet him in person after reading so much about him in Nicki’s diary. It’s almost as if he’s some sort of celebrity.
He’s slim with closely cropped dark hair and interesting grey eyes. He’s not much taller than I am, with wiry, lean muscles and freckly, tanned skin. As he talks to the other climbers, I detect a mild Swedish accent. His English is excellent.
There are five of us in the group – two young couples and yours truly – and we walk together past the restaurant where we ate breakfast and down to the beach. There are a few buildings that aren’t connected to the resort out here: a café, bar and a shop with colourful clothes and beach toys piled up outside under a veranda. I spy a number of bright orange, green and blue monkey puppets dangling from a stand and think of April, but we’re already moving past the building to the rocky shore. We make our way carefully between the sharp rocks, beside the soaring cliffs to a small beach. I look up to see a big overhang jutting out from the cliff face several storeys from the ground. Some climbers are already trying to navigate it.
‘Is that where we’re going?’ I ask Isak worriedly, fixating on a bare-chested, muscled man, dangling from the underside of the overhang. Ropes attach his harness to a hook and his friend is holding his rope at the bottom, butstill...
Isak glances at me with a smirk. ‘No, that’s for the more experienced climbers. We’ll be tackling this little cliff face, here.’ I get the feeling he’d quite like to laugh.
‘Thank fuck for that.’
At that comment, he does.
Isak spends some time talking us through the steps before we’re finally ready to be hooked up to the safety ropes. I decide to go last, figuring I can check out how the others fare before I make a total tit of myself.
‘Okay, Bridget, up you go,’ Isak says, holding my rope and belaying me from the bottom. I have his full attention at last, but I don’t know quite how I’m going to broach the subject of Nicki when I’m clinging to a rock face with my fingers.
‘Good,’ he calls encouragingly as I put one hand in front of the other and hoist my entire body weight up. I’m going to ache after this, I just know it. I put all of my attention into concentrating and decide I’ll find a way to talk to Isak later once I’ve really impressed him.
Obviously, I don’t really believe I’ll impress him at all, so I feel kind of proud when I don’t do too badly.
‘Well done,’ he says with what I think is admiration as my feet hit the rocky, sandy shore. ‘Is that really your first time?’
‘Yep.’ I nod.
‘Very good. How long are you here?’
‘Almost a week.’
‘You should sign up for a course. I think you have a knack for it.’
‘Thanks,’ I reply, feeling my cheeks brighten.It’s so uncanny that this is Nicki’s Isak!
