Читать книгу The Other Us: the RONA winning perfect second chance romance to curl up with - Фиона Харпер - Страница 22

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The next morning, even before I open my eyes, I feel my stomach rolling slightly. It feels as if the room is moving around me. I bury my head under the pillow and try to go back to sleep.

Ugh. Hangovers.

But as I lie here I think back to the night before. Jude and I had gone out to dinner and I’d had a couple of glasses of wine, but nothing more, and I remember being fairly lucid when Becca and I had our argument about him. Surely I didn’t drink enough to –

There’s a loud noise above my head. My eyes pop open. The roof is low, only a couple of feet away, and I can hear someone walking around on it. I try and focus on the ceiling as I hear someone calling my name.

It’s Jude. Jude is calling my name.

He sounds happy, which is nice, but what’s he doing here in my flat with Becca? I’m not sure she’s ready to face him yet; her loyalty to Dan is still so strong. And how has my bed become a top bunk overnight, my face so close to the ceiling? I also don’t remember that skylight.

‘Meg?’ I hear him yell. He’s no longer above me now, but further away. I can hear a door banging, other noises I can’t identify. ‘We’ve brought breakfast!’

Breakfast. Now there’s something I can get a handle on, I think, as I stare up through the rectangular skylight with the rounded edges. The sky beyond is blue and crystal clear and I suddenly notice there’s a silver handle at the bottom. I reach for it and push it open with my fingertips.

Instantly, the smell of river water hits me, which is weird, because the Thames is at least half a mile away from the flat I share with Becca, and even so, this water smells fresh and blue, not muddy and eel-grey. Without thinking about it, I put my feet on my mattress and stand up, pushing the skylight open with my head as I do so. What I see outside causes my legs to lose all co-ordination and I crumple not only back down onto the mattress but off the bed and I end up in a tangled heap on a hard wooden floor. I seem to be jammed into a tiny triangular space I don’t recognise.

There’s the sound of footsteps rushing towards me, echoing as if we’re in a large box, and then the door opens and I see three faces peering down at me. One of them is Jude’s.

‘Are you OK?’ he says as he offers me a hand.

I latch onto his upside-down face. It’s the only thing that’s made sense since I woke up. ‘I think so,’ I mutter. ‘Don’t know what happened …’

‘You fell out of bed, you muppet,’ the girl behind Jude says. Her long, wavy, blonde hair is hanging past her face as she smiles at me, slightly bent over.

I grab Jude’s hand and he pulls me up. As I find some balance on my wobbly legs, I hear the other person – a guy – say, ‘Well, it was quite a heavy session last night …’

Jude chuckles. ‘And we now have empirical evidence Meg can’t hold her G&Ts.’

I frown at him as I pull my ‘Choose Life’ nightshirt further down my thighs with my free hand. I hate gin and tonic. And I certainly didn’t have any last night. And who are these people, anyway, grinning at me like loons, like we’re all part of some in-joke?

But then I think about what I saw outside.

Instead of chimney pots and TV aerials, low-hanging grey cloud and leafy beech trees, there is blue sky – lots of it – streaked with wispy clouds. And there are mountains. There aren’t supposed to be any mountains in Putney.

I look down at my bare thighs again and that’s when it hits me.

I’ve done it again.

Moved. Jumped. Shifted. Whatever you want to call it …

My knees get a strange crunchy feeling, like fresh cotton wool balls out the packet, and I head floorwards a second time. It’s only Jude’s grip on my arm that saves me.

‘Come on, you …’ he says and plants a kiss on top of my head before hauling me through a narrow door. I stub my toe on the raised threshold and yelp. Jude and the onlookers just laugh again. ‘We’ve got cheese and rolls and meat. And Cameron is going to make his famous espresso if we can get the galley stove to light.’

I sit on a bench with a padded cushion and all the pieces of information that have been hurtling at me since I opened my eyes suddenly snap together to form a complete picture: I’m on a boat. A sailboat. And the room I was in is the cabin at the front, hence the strange shape, and the skylight is actually a hatch. I feel myself relax a little and I breathe out.

Are we in the South of France? That’s where Jude said he was going after the end of term. I think about the mountain I saw, towering over the marina so high it seemed as if it might topple down on us at any moment. I think about the shape of the buildings on the shore, their square towers and terracotta-tiled roofs.

No, not France. Italy, maybe. Although how we ended up here is anyone’s guess.

And how long since I last remember anything? One month? Two?

I’m obviously supposed to know these other two people. From the state of the main cabin – clothes littered around the floor and beer cans and full ashtrays on any available flat surface – I get the sense we’ve been living together on this boat for more than a day or two.

‘Here.’ The girl plonks a mug of water down in front of me. ‘You look like you could do with this.’

She reminds me of Amanda de Cadanet, all swooshy blonde hair and private-school accent, and I consider for a second that I might just be having a rather intense nightmare brought on by watching the The Word while I talked with Becca last night, but then the boat lurches as the wake of a passing ferry slaps against the hull, sending my hand shooting for the table in front of me to steady myself, and I dismiss the idea.

No. This is real. At least, as real as the last ‘jump’ was, anyway.

I sip the water and it seems to help. ‘Thanks …’ I croak, trailing off because I realise I don’t know the girl’s name.

Jude offers me a round, crusty roll and I tear it open with my hands and stuff a healthy helping of ham and slices of pale-yellow cheese inside. The biting, the chewing, the swallowing that follows helps anchor me to this day, this time, more firmly. By the time I finish breakfast I almost feel normal again.

‘So what’s the plan for today?’ I ask and look round, hopefully. Maybe I can play detective and piece the rest of what I want to know together if I’m clever about it.

They all look at me, then look at each other, then burst out laughing again. I feel my hackles rise.

‘It was your idea!’ the nameless guy says. ‘Wow. Those G&Ts really did their job, didn’t they?’

‘Humour me,’ I say, not sounding very humorous at all.

‘We were going to sail down to the island. You know, the one with the palazzo? See if we can moor off one of the beaches.’

I nod as if I know what he’s talking about. ‘Of course we were,’ I say, as if everything is completely normal. ‘When are we setting sail?’

‘Soon as we’re all ready,’ he replies.

I nod again and stand up. ‘Better get dressed then.’ I’ve decided that short sentences and concrete facts are my best friends right now.

As I throw on a stripy T-shirt and some shorts, find some blue-and-white plimsolls I don’t recognise but assume are mine, because my socks, which I do recognise, are stuffed into them, I let the questions come.

Why? I think to myself. Why did it happen again? Was it something I did, something I said? Something I wished really hard in my heart? Part of me hoped it was, because then at least there’d be some rhyme or reason to this … whatever it is. At least I’d have some control, even if I have to work out what the trigger is. The thought it might just all be random doesn’t sit well with me.

And I’ve missed so much! Saying goodbye to all my uni friends – for the second time, anyway, but I’d been looking forward to that bit – the summer ball, graduation … Those were some of my best memories of my time at Oaklands, yet I’ve skipped straight over them.

I peer at myself in the little mirror attached to the inside of the cupboard door. The awful fringe is longer, but not quite long enough to tuck behind my ears, which leaves me looking like an old English sheepdog. I think about the blonde’s effortless honey waves and wonder I can learn enough Italian to get myself a haircut.

We cast off less than half an hour later. By perusing some navigational maps left on a tiny desk to the side of the stairs that lead up to the cockpit, I manage to work out we’re on Lake Garda. I have a vague idea of this being somewhere in the north of Italy, but I’m not exactly sure where. When I get up into the cockpit and sit down on the moulded bench next to Jude, who is confidently manning the tiller, I check out the position of the sun and decide we’re heading south. I refer to the mental snapshot I made of the map and decide we must have been moored somewhere near either Riva or Torbole and are now heading down to where the lake broadens and the mountains become less rugged.

It takes longer than I expect to travel the distance. Hours. But then the only experience I have of boats is the kind with pedals that you can rent by the half hour on a pond in the middle of a park. The sun is right overhead by the time we spot the tiny island Cameron was talking about.

Cameron Lombard, that’s right. I’ve worked out who he is now, and this is indeed his boat. Well, his dad’s boat, to be more precise. Cam is the son of a sporting-goods tycoon and, from what I gather, he’s enjoying an extended gap year after finishing uni two summers ago and has spent most of it bumming round Europe. If I have to admit it, I’m slightly intimidated by Cameron. He’s got that kind of confidence that makes him seem invincible, makes every decision seem like the best plan ever rather than a whim of the moment.

Thankfully, his girlfriend, Isabelle, or Issie – I’m not sure of her surname yet – is much less terrifying, if no less confident. She’s laid back and friendly and talks to me as if we’ve known each other for years.

From the conversation that ensues between barking sailing instructions and having to run around the boat pulling ropes and tying things to kleats (in which I am, yet again, the butt of the communal joke: ‘Watch the boom, Meg! After your dunking last week, I’d have thought you’d learned that lesson!’), I glean that Jude and I bumped into the other couple in Cannes about three weeks earlier, and after a week full of lounging around on pine-fringed beaches and bar crawling, we – well, let’s face it, it was probably ‘they’ – decided it would be a jolly good jape to nip over the alps into Italy and pick up Cam’s daddy’s boat, Vita Perfetta, from Malcesine.

They seem a nice enough couple, I suppose, but I find it awkward trying to relate to them as if I know them, as if we’ve shared close quarters for more than a fortnight now. So, as we sail the last part of our journey, I sit in the cockpit with them, cradling an open bottle of beer, but not actually drinking it, and I let the conversation flow around me like I’m a rock in a stream. I am in the middle of it but I am not part of it.

I try to dip my toe in when the facts are safe and neutral, to capture any bits of relevant information, but when they all start talking about the street entertainer in Riva’s town square the night before, or the amazing moules they had in that little cafe near San Malo, I have to shut up and the river of words rushes around me again, making me feel separate. Apart.

To be honest, it’s not just the missing chunk of time that’s the problem. It’s them. The life they lead. I should count Jude in with me, because we come from very similar backgrounds, but somehow he seems more like Cam and Issie. He talks like them, knows what to wear and what to say to seem effortlessly sophisticated. He fits right in. That, and the fact that I can’t remember the last six weeks of my life, means I can’t help feeling as if I’m an alien that’s been teleported in.

As we near the island, Cam and Jude drop the sails and tie them up – the big one at the back against the big swingy thing, which I now know is the boom, and the front one onto the railings and posts at the front of the boat. The motor putt-putts away as we drift across water that’s the colour of a cloudy emerald. I stand on the deck, one arm wrapped around the mast for stability, and shield my eyes from the sun with my hand. As we get closer to the long strip of rock in the middle of the lake, I let out only one word: ‘Wow!’

Jude comes to stand beside me. He doesn’t need to hold on to anything, just relies on his natural grace and balance. ‘It’s pretty amazing, huh? I can see why you wanted to get a closer look.’

The boat moves past the rounded tip of the island where the palazzo stands. It takes my breath away. It’s all pink and white, like one of the fondant fancies my nan used to serve up when we went round for tea, but there is nothing frou-frou about its architecture. There are bold arches that remind me of Venetian palaces on the Grand Canal, and the house stands majestically amongst the manicured gardens that cover the small lump of rock, proudly facing the lake to catch the rays of the midday sun.

None of us say anything as we motor past a small private dock, to where another boat has dropped anchor off a gently curving beach no more than a few metres wide. ‘Bloody great idea, Meg,’ Issie says from the cockpit. ‘Well done, you.’

For the first time since I jumped into this time, this place, I feel as if I have managed to get something right. Even if it was the ‘other’ me that did it.