If you want to live so much, her mind needled her,then why did you run away from Mark Gardner last week? Kissing him would have been living.
Ellie turned onto her back to float and rest for a moment.Because I’m not ready for anyone to… see me, yet, she thought.I will be. One day. Just not now. Not a man, anyway.
Ellie thought of her lawyer friends. The women in the group were always quietly competing about who could be thinner. Ellie had dieted seriously for two weeks before going on holiday on the yacht, even though she already worked out or ran every other day. Now she lay and gazed up at the sun, comparing Petra and Simona and the rest of them to her lawyer friends. She felt pretty sure that none of them would be caught dead in a wetsuit or a baggy T-shirt or any of the floral swimsuits and rubber hats that the other women were wearing to swim in.
Had it always been so easy not to care what one wore? Ellie felt a kind of grief for her past self that had never been allowed – or had never allowed herself – to eat ice creams and chips and float on her back in the Cornish sea, feeling the sun on her face. Even more so, she felt a grief loosening in her heart about never having women friends like these, who didn’t seem to care about cellulite and fat, but were in love, and happy, and had friends that liked them enough to get up early and go swimming with them in all weathers.
She wished she had had friends like these women.
And she missed her mum.
Ellie felt a tear escape her eye, and then another. She looked around her, but there was no one nearby to witness her crying. Relieved, she let herself cry. It was a strangely freeing experience. In a way, it felt like the salt water and the sunlight were taking away her sadness – washing it clean on this beautiful summer’s day.
One of the most difficult things about having cancer herself was that her mum had had it, and died. Despite her doctor’s reassurance that the operation had been very successful, and since Ellie was so young she was more likely to make a full recovery, she was paranoid that she too was going to die. That’s what happened to people with cancer, wasn’t it? Sooner or later, it got you.
Ellie felt fear roil up in her guts and grip her chest. She started to breathe quickly, and panic took over. What if the cancer came back? What if she died? These were the phantoms that kept her awake at night, staring into the ceiling of her bedroom at the beach house. She hadn’t talked to Fee about her fears. She didn’t know how.
Ellie started to kick and flail in the water. She tried to slow down her breathing.It’s okay, it’s okay, she told herself, but panic had taken over. She started to imagine that she could see threatening shadows in the water. Were there sharks in Cornwall? She didn’t think so, but there might be. She imagined that she felt something brush against her leg. Involuntarily, she screamed. Water rushed into her mouth as she submerged and kicked herself up again. Her chest started to ache.
‘Hey. Hey! Ellie. You okay?’ Petra had swum over and was treading water next to her. ‘It’s okay. I’ve got you.’ Petra gently held Ellie’s arm, steadying her in the water.
‘I’m sorry.’ Ellie was crying, mortified, but she somehow couldn’t help it. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Stop apologising, silly. Let’s get you back on land.’ Petra leaned back into the water. ‘If you lie back, I can guide you in. Just float on your back.’
‘No, I can do it. I can swim,’ Ellie insisted. ‘I just… I don’t know. Got spooked.’ She was trying to come back to normal breathing, but fatigue swept her body and mind. ‘I panicked.’
‘It’s okay,’ Petra repeated. ‘Let’s swim back together, then.’
‘You don’t have to,’ Ellie insisted.
Petra gave her a determined look. ‘I want to.’
Slowly, Ellie began to do the breaststroke, and she and Petra made their way back carefully to the shore.
‘You can put your feet down now,’ Petra said, as they were halfway back. ‘The sand shelf comes in here. Look, it’s safe.’ She stood up in the water.
Ellie felt a wash of relief fill her as she felt sand underneath her feet.
‘Okay.’ She concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. Soon, she was in the shallows, and walked carefully to where she had left her things.
Feeling weary, Ellie sat on the sand, wrapped in a towel, watching the rest of the women as they took their time in the water. Nobody else seemed to have noticed her panic, or Petra rescuing her.
‘You don’t have to stay with me. I’m fine.’ Ellie looked up at Petra. ‘Thanks, though. I don’t really know what happened out there.’
‘One of those things. Don’t worry about it.’ Petra drank some water and shaded her eyes from the sun which had now risen and was glinting on the water. ‘Anything you want to talk about?’
‘Oh. No. I’m fine,’ Ellie lied. In fact, her heart was still beating hard in her chest and she felt a little faint, though that may have been to do with not having had any breakfast. But she had only just met this girl, and there was no way that she was going to talk to her about her feelings.
‘Well. What d’you think?’ A woman, probably in her late fifties, with short silver hair and a friendly face came out of the water to stand next to Ellie, wrapping a lurid beach towel around her thighs and middle and zipping up a hoodie over the top of her faded swimsuit. ‘Will you come again?’
‘Maybe.’ Ellie looked up, shading her eyes. After what had just happened, she wasn’t sure. She didn’t want to freak out every time she got in the water, but before that had happened, it had been lovely, being in the sea. ‘I’m Ellie. Just staying at the beach house for a few weeks while my motorhome gets repaired.’ She cleared her throat. ‘But it was a lovely experience.’
‘Clare.’ The woman shook her hand, and returned her gaze to the sparkling sea. ‘It is, isn’t it? I joined the group about a year ago. I was actually the solicitor that handled Mara’s inheritance of the beach house, funny enough. Small world.’ She sighed. ‘I live up the coast a bit, but I’ve really got a lot out of it. The swimming group, that is,’ she clarified, opening a bag and extracting a Thermos. ‘Coffee?’
‘That would be great. Thanks.’
Clare rummaged in her bag and brought out another cup, filled it with black coffee and handed it to Ellie.
