The Sea Sisters

‘Here? It looks pretty rough.’

‘You can look after my clothes, then,’ she said, pulling off her top and wriggling free from her shorts, leaving her in mismatched underwear. Her body was lean and muscular; she thought herself too angular to be considered beautiful, although she’d grown used to the jut of her hip bones and her small breasts, and wasn’t abashed in front of Finn. They’d seen each other’s bodies hundreds of times – she knew the broadness of his shoulders, the way his belly button protruded slightly, seen the coarse hairs spread from around his nipples across his chest.

‘Good London tan,’ she said, referencing the lily-white shade of his chest as he stripped from his T-shirt.

‘Good slacker’s tan.’

She laughed, and Finn took the opportunity to race past her, splashing through the white-water and hurdling small waves before the sea finally took his legs from under him. He tumbled forwards, flattening his body and spreading his arms so he hit the water with a slap, sending silver droplets skyward.

Mia was still laughing as she waded in to join him. The cold water was like a vice at her ankles, which reached its grip to her knees and caused a shaving nick to sting. A gull cawed overhead and she glanced up, watching it glide on the breeze. The seabed dropped away suddenly and water rose over her cotton pants and towards her stomach, which she sucked in away from the sea’s bite. She took a quick breath and then dived under.

When she surfaced her dark hair was slicked to her head like oil. She kicked her legs and swam with clear, smooth strokes.

‘Don’t go too far,’ Finn called. ‘I only do Baywatch rescues on red-pants days.’

The waves rose and fell beneath her. One took her by surprise and white-water slipped over her head like a blanket. She rubbed the water from her eyes and then took off in front crawl, feeling the tightening of her muscles as they worked to propel her forward. On every second stroke she turned her head for air, and felt the weak sun brush her face.

Eventually, when her legs began to stiffen from the exertion and the cold, she slowed and swam parallel to the shore, looking at the cliffs from a new angle. It was an impressive coastline – dramatic, weather-beaten and empty. The space was intoxicating, a physical relief after London where she had felt as if she could never quite catch her breath. Away from the city, away from the memory of who she’d become, it was the first time in months that Mia felt at ease.

*

That evening, they sat on a picnic bench clutching tin mugs filled with hot chocolate. She could hear waves breaking in the distance, a soft rumble, almost like a far-off lorry passing by. She slipped a silver hip flask from her back pocket and unscrewed the cap. ‘Whisky?’

Finn pushed his mug towards her. ‘Good job on dinner.’

Having camped often in their youth, they had mastered one-pot dishes to a level of wizardry. Tonight, Mia had offered to cook, serving noodles with thick slices of salami, simmering with peas, chunks of mushroom, a few cherry tomatoes and a shake of seasoning. ‘Always tastes better outdoors,’ she said, splashing whisky into both mugs. ‘It’s been so long since we’ve camped together.’

‘London parks don’t have quite the same appeal.’

‘True.’ She smiled. ‘But – really – are you enjoying London?’ Finn had moved there after graduation, renting a flat above a butcher’s shop. It backed onto a railway line, and water shook from the kitchen tap whenever a train passed.

‘I do. I did. It was a change after Cornwall.’

‘What, Friday nights at SJ’s didn’t do it for you?’

‘No, I love leopard print and Lycra on fifty-year-olds.’ He grinned. ‘London wasn’t for you, though?’

‘I guess not.’ She had missed the sea with a deep ache and found her dreams were filled with beaches and empty horizons.

‘Is that why you wanted to go travelling?’

She stretched the sleeves of her jumper over her hands and then wrapped them round the mug to keep warm. ‘I was ready for a change.’

‘It’s been a tough year. You deserve a break.’

Do I? she thought. It had been Katie, not her, who stayed stoically at their mother’s side throughout her illness. Mia had closed her eyes to the beakers of pills, the clumps of hair in the shower tray, the new gauntness in her mother’s cheeks – because it was easier. Anything was easier than watching her strong, capable mother wilt. She felt the hard little pebble of guilt that lived in her stomach and she reached for the hip flask, putting her lips around the cool metal mouth.

Finn slung his arm around her shoulder. ‘You okay?’

She nodded.

‘Listen, Mia.’ His voice was serious and she glanced up. ‘When your mum was ill, I know we weren’t hanging out so much – but you did know I was there for you, didn’t you?’

‘Course,’ she said, embarrassed by his earnestness. They had never broached the subject of the four strained months when a wall had reared up between them, stacked with hard bricks of resentment and cemented by Mia’s silence. She wasn’t sure she was ready to now.

Sensing that, Finn pulled his arm back and said, ‘So tell me about Mick. When did you decide you wanted to see him?’

‘I found a photo of him when I was clearing out Mum’s wardrobe.’ In the picture he was standing onstage with a band in front of a banner that read black ewe. The band looked as if they’d just finished a set, their faces red and glistening with sweat. A man with long black hair that had turned damp at the temples stood in the centre, holding a guitar loosely at its neck and staring intently at the camera. Beside him, Mick looked exuberant and fresh in a fitted suit and pointed brown shoes that turned up at the toe. He had no instrument to hold like the others, so he had shot a double-handed finger-gun at the camera and cocked his head to one side with a wink. It was a gesture that Mia would never have made, far too assured for it to look natural on her, yet she liked the picture as she saw a similarity between her and her father in the strong shape of their noses and possibly the curve of their lips, too. ‘I suppose seeing the picture made me curious.’

‘You haven’t been curious before?’

‘Not really. Well, maybe a little,’ she conceded, thinking of a comment her grandmother made years ago that had always stuck with her. Mia had been in the bath, the water turning brackish from the mud caked to her knees. She wriggled and protested at having her hair washed, her grandmother eventually snapping, ‘Such an awkward, independent thing, aren’t you?’ And then adding under her breath, ‘Just like your father.’ The illicitness of that name had lingered in the steamy room for a long moment. Long enough for the comparison to settle deep into Mia’s thoughts.

Finn tilted his mug to his lips, finishing his drink. ‘How come you haven’t talked to Katie about your visiting him?’

Mia thought for a minute. ‘Sometimes when people give you their opinions, they can end up becoming your own. I didn’t want that.’

A car pulled into the campsite, the headlights briefly illuminating them before the engine was cut. A couple got out and began staking out their tent by torchlight.

The few sentences they’d just shared were the most Mia had admitted to anyone, even herself. For now, that was enough. She reached across for Finn’s mug. ‘I’ll wash up.’ Then she hopped from the picnic bench and disappeared to the water tap.

Later, after she’d cleaned her teeth, spitting the paste into a bush, she climbed into the tent with Finn. It was pitched with the shadow of a scrub-covered hillside in the background and the salty breath of the sea to the fore. They lay with their heads on a folded beach towel, poking out of the tent so they could gaze up at the stars. They’d spent countless nights sharing a tent or lying like sardines in the single beds in each other’s rooms. Their friendship was close and easy even now, a gift that Mia would always be grateful for.

‘Shooting star,’ she said, pointing.

‘Didn’t see it.’

‘It’s hard to when you have your eyes closed. You should sleep.’

They pulled their heads inside, zipped up the tent, and lay next to one another, just as they had done a thousand nights before.

*

The ground was unforgiving beneath Finn and he moved his weight onto his side, avoiding a ridge that was digging into his shoulder blade.

Mia was already asleep. He lay listening to the faint murmur of her breath and the crickets singing in the undergrowth beyond the tent. What Finn loved about camping was that life moved at a slower pace. A simple meal took longer to prepare; a bed for the night had to be erected and then dismantled; a shower and change of clothes became a luxury rather than a daily routine. He took more time to absorb the sounds, smells and rhythm of a place, and to pay attention to what he was thinking.

Mia shifted, her hand slipping from her stomach and coming to rest on his forearm. He felt the heat from her skin against his. He could have moved his arm from beneath hers, yet he remained still. Unchecked in the darkness, he found his thoughts straying to a summer’s evening when he and Mia were 16 years old.

They were at a gig watching an American punk band called Thaw, who they’d been lobbying to see for months. Mia had worn a pair of pale jeans ripped across her thighs that she’d bought from a second-hand shop called Hobos. She’d painted silver eyeliner in sharp flicks at the edges of her eyes and brushed something on her cheekbones that made them shimmer. She looked older than the bare-faced girl he’d helped to reel in a mackerel earlier in the day, and the transformation both unsettled and appealed to him.

The band met all their expectations: the arena was pulsing with energy, the mosh pit was frenetic and with each song the crowd grew wilder. Mia was effervescent, dancing wildly with her hands thrown skyward. She turned and shouted something to a burly man with a thick neck who had been standing behind them. The man cupped his hands together and, before Finn realized what was happening, he watched Mia place her foot in the sweaty palms and be tossed into the air. Her body arched backwards, her arms outstretched at her sides like open wings, and she was caught by a sea of hands, crowd surfing over the tops of people’s heads.

The black Beastie Boys T-shirt she wore – one she and Finn shared as they could only afford one between them – rode up her waist exposing her smooth, slender stomach. The lighting crew picked out this ethereal girl with her wave of dark hair and spotlighted her journey to the front. A group of men, sweating heavily and thumping their fists in the air, whistled and catcalled at her. Every inch of Finn’s body tensed at their remarks, and he imagined beating a path through the audience and shutting them up.

The crowd continued to buck and writhe, illuminated by brilliant blue and white laser lights, and he strained to keep Mia in sight. Ducking to the side of a lanky man, he was able to spot the bouncers pulling her over the safety barrier. He didn’t know how she’d find her way back to him and four more songs were belted out before he saw her.

Squeezing through an impossibly tight gap, she stood before him, her cheeks flushed, her forehead glistening with sweat.

‘Mia!’

As the band launched into their final track, the audience surged forward, pinning her against him. Instinctively, he gripped her waist fearing she could slip beneath their feet. Thrust together he felt the heat of her midriff through her damp T-shirt. Unfazed by the crowd, which roared beneath a thick haze of smoke, Mia placed her hands around Finn’s face and kissed him briefly on the lips.

The crowd heaved backwards; Mia slipped free from his hands. She turned towards the band and carried on swaying and rocking. Finn remained rooted to the spot, while a thousand other people danced on.

There are key incidents in everyone’s history – pivotal points on which the axis of life can swivel, and a seemingly innocuous action can flip the entire direction of one’s fate. For Finn, that kiss changed everything. Mia, the girl he’d always knocked around with, became an enigma to him overnight. At school the next day, every ordinary interaction – holding a test tube while Mia added magnesium ribbon, eating ham sandwiches together on the bench beneath a sycamore tree, sharing a pair of earphones on the bus ride home – became fused with his new desire. It was as if he’d stepped out of his body and into someone else’s. He was so unnerved by this shift that he bunked off the final two days of term to give himself space to think.

When school broke up for the summer, Mia cycled to his house with her tent, sleeping bag and a bottle of vodka she’d bribed Katie into buying, and told him they were going camping in the forest that backed onto the cliffs. He could think of no excuse good enough to refuse, so he grabbed his sleeping bag and followed.

That evening, an unforecast downpour drove them into the tent before dusk. They played cards and drank vodka, and Finn stole furtive glances at Mia and wondered how he’d never before noticed that her eyes were the lush green of emeralds. Once the rain stopped, they unzipped the tent onto the dark forest steeped in a rich, earthy smell. They stood in the damp heather, the hems of their jeans turning sodden, and felt drunk and exuberant. The moon that night, a perfect silver disc, looked so spectacular that for no reason at all, Finn howled like a wolf. Mia giggled and then howled, too.

In the seventy-two hours since Mia had kissed Finn, he’d thought constantly of how it would feel to kiss her back. Properly. ‘Mia,’ he said, moving in front of her unsteadily. She looked at him, still grinning. She wore no make-up, and in the moonlight her skin looked luminous. ‘God, you’re so beautiful!’ he said suddenly. Then he reached a hand to her cheek and leant forward to kiss her.

Moments before his lips reached hers, Mia pulled back.

‘Finn!’ She laughed, thumping his chest. ‘I thought you were being serious for a second! Don’t weird me out!’

Finn had bent forward, pretending to laugh too, when actually it felt as though he’d taken a punch in the gut.

He didn’t see her for three weeks after that as he joined his family on holiday in northern France. On that trip, Finn lost his virginity to a seventeen-year-old girl named Ambré, who was working as a cleaner in the park where they stayed. She wore a pink bra and no pants beneath her uniform, and invited Finn to her caravan each afternoon on her three-o’clock break. While he was genuinely thrilled by the arrangement, it gradually exposed the depth of his feelings for Mia. He not only yearned to touch or kiss her in the way he was doing with Ambré, he also missed other things, like the sound of her laughter, or the way she’d bite the tip of her thumbnail when she was concentrating, or the determination in her voice when she’d tell him, ‘I can do this.’ He missed Mia’s friendship – and wasn’t prepared to risk that again.

When he returned home, he and Mia slipped back into their old routine, the night in the forest never mentioned again. A chorus of other girls, and later women, quietened his infatuation and he was grateful that their friendship returned to its usual tune. Yet today, when Mia had stripped to her underwear at the beach, revealing her exquisite slender body, a low note of desire had been struck and had resonated in his thoughts in the hours since.

He knew the great risk of allowing that forbidden note to sound louder, so Finn carefully eased his arm from beneath her hand and, reluctantly, rolled away.

5

KATIE

California, March

Katie pulled down the beige plastic blind of the aeroplane window, closing out the view. She didn’t need to see that they were flying above the clouds, that the ocean was thirty thousand feet below them, or that the white wings of a Boeing 747 were the only thing keeping them from spiralling down to earth.

The first time Katie flew, she had clutched the armrests so hard that her knuckles turned white. Beside her, Mia’s eyes had been wide, her pupils dilated, with what Katie had first imagined to be fear but then, as she’d watched the smile break over her face, recognized to be awe. She couldn’t understand how Mia could be so mesmerized, when her own insides churned with panic. Katie’s fear hadn’t been passed down from an anxious adult, or grown out of horror stories from friends or television: it was something that lived inside her. She was 9 years old then. Flying should have been an adventure.

After that flight, Katie had taken two further plane journeys – and with each her fear grew into something living that would begin hissing at her weeks before takeoff. She’d discovered that the only way to silence the fear was to avoid it: when there was a university ski trip, she signed up after learning they would be travelling by coach; when their mother received a small windfall and offered to take the girls away, Katie said what she’d like to do most was a cruise; when Ed talked of visiting Barcelona, she persuaded him to go to Paris via the Channel Tunnel.

Now, as she twisted the sleeve of her cardigan, turning it tightly between her fingers and then unwinding it and starting again, it wasn’t the fear of the plane’s engine failing, or the capability of the pilot, that concerned her. What made her throat tighten and her heart clamber against her chest was the boxed-in enclosure of the plane, the small seat with its fixed armrests, the two passengers – one asleep, one reading – blocking her exit to the aisle, the seat belt pinned across her lap, the eleven-hour journey that couldn’t be paused. She would be quietly trapped here, hour after hour, with nothing to distract her, so that for the first time since the news broke, she was sitting entirely still. Her mind seized the opportunity to focus on the one word she had been trying to avoid: ‘suicide’.

Suicide was something she associated with the mentally ill, or people suffering from a dreadful, incurable illness – not able-bodied, able-minded 24-year-olds halfway through a world adventure with their best friend. There was no logic to it. But it had happened. There were witness statements, an autopsy report and a police account that said it had.

She had obsessively looked up the word ‘suicide’ on the Internet and was shocked to learn that it was the tenth leading cause of death – above murder, liver disease and Parkinson’s. She had read that one million people committed suicide each year and, staggeringly, that one in seven people would seriously consider committing suicide at some point in their lives. She discovered that drugs and alcohol misuse played a role in 70 per cent of adolescent suicides.

But what the Internet, the witnesses and the Balinese police didn’t know was her sister. Mia would never have jumped. Yes, she could be unpredictable, swinging from energetic reckless highs to crushingly troubled lows, and sometimes it did seem that she felt things so deeply it was as if her heart lay too close to her skin, but she was also fiercely brave. She was a fighter – and fighters don’t jump.

Katie believed this wholeheartedly. She had to, otherwise she was left with the agonizing knowledge that her sister had chosen to leave her.

*

San Francisco International Airport seemed the size of a town. Katie lost herself in the crowd, letting them lead her up escalators, along advert-lined corridors, and down brightly lit stairways, before eventually arriving at the baggage-claim area. She picked a spot at carousel 3, standing several paces back to allow eager travellers space to reach their belongings and disappear on new journeys.

As she waited for Mia’s backpack to pass beneath the heavy plastic teeth of the carousel, she played a game with herself, trying to match pieces of luggage to their owners. The first couple were easy; she knew that the padded black ice-hockey bag belonged to the broad teenager with a lightning bolt shaved into the back of his sandy hair, and that the pair of ladybird-print cases would be passed to twin girls in identical blue coats. It was a small surprise, however, when the gentleman in a tired panama hat reached not for the tan leather suitcase she had predicted, but a sleek silver case with the sheen of a bullet. But then, neither would she have matched the smartly dressed blonde woman in charcoal ankle boots and a fitted blazer to the tattered backpack that she reached for.

Grabbing a worn strap, Katie hauled it from the carousel using both hands. She struggled to put it on, bending her arms in awkward contortions to force them through the straps, and then jumping a little to shift it into position. She felt compressed by the weight of it, and bent forward at the waist to balance out the load.

She trudged through the arrivals gate where a crowd watched eagerly for their loved ones, their eyes moving quickly beyond her to see who followed. A heavyset man in a Giants sweater ducked beneath the barrier and ran forward, throwing thick arms around the boy with the hockey stick. Katie didn’t rush to leave the airport, excited to see San Francisco, as Mia and Finn might have; instead, she joined the crowd on the other side of the arrivals barrier, set down her backpack, perched on top of it and watched.

Time ran away as Katie sat perfectly still, hands placed together in her lap. She began to understand the rhythm of arrivals, anticipating the empty space alongside the barriers between flights, which filled in correlation to the overhead screen announcing the next set of arrivals. If a flight was delayed or there had been a hold-up, then two groups of passengers could arrive at the same time, and the barrier would be pressed taut.

There were fathers collecting daughters, girlfriends being met by boyfriends, husbands waiting for wives, grandparents beaming at grandchildren – but the reunions she searched out were always those between sisters. Sometimes it was difficult to tell which women were friends and which were siblings, but more often Katie knew instinctively. It was in the casualness of how they embraced, the way their smiles were completed when they saw each other, or how a joke quickly passed from one pair of lips to a smile on the other. It was in the same angle of their noses, a gesture they both displayed, or how they walked arm in arm, as they left together.

A woman with fox-red hair spilling over the shoulders of her kaftan placed a hand to her mouth when she saw her sister. A purple silk scarf partly concealed the sister’s bald head, but the strain of illness showed in her sallow skin and gaunt cheeks. The redhead reached out and squeezed her sister’s fingers, then lightly touched her empty hairline and then, finally letting go of whatever composure she’d privately been battling to maintain, embraced her in a long clasp, sobbing over her shoulder.

If someone had watched Katie and Mia, she wondered whether they’d have guessed they were sisters. Katie’s fair features were distinct from Mia’s strikingly dark looks, but someone paying attention might have noticed that their lips shared an equal fullness, or that their eyebrows followed the exact same arch. If they had listened closely they would catch crisply articulated word endings from years of good schooling, but might have noticed that they still mispronounced the word ‘irritable’, both placing the emphasis on the second syllable, not the first.

Vivid memories of Mia flew into her thoughts, details from their childhood she hadn’t thought of in years: lying together in the sun-warmed rock pools that smelt like cooked seaweed; doing handstands in the sea with salt water filling their noses; their first bike, cherry red, which Katie would pedal while Mia perched on the white handlebars; fighting like pirates on winter-emptied beaches with seagull feathers tucked behind their ears.