Hurt (29 page)

Suddenly he is angry, furious even. What do any of them know of nerves and pain and pure, undiluted terror? He wants to show them – show them what it’s really like, how horrifying it really is; give them the view from his perspective. He pushes his clothes to one side, backs up against the rocky cliff wall so that the plateau stretches out like a diving board, fixes his spot on the sun-bleached horizon and pushes his heel against the rock to propel himself forward. He is running in slow motion – five long strides, a shout from Hugo, and then he is propelling himself through the air, off the edge of the cliff and into the void.

Their screams follow him like an echo. The sun is blinding, both from the blue sky above and the blue sea below. He is not sure which way is up, but that doesn’t matter: he is like an arrow, or a rocket, or a missile, plummeting downwards, headfirst, at over forty miles an hour. He can actually feel the wind resistance like a wall of air; the breeze pushing him towards the left, towards the rocks, the G-force so great that his face feels dug out of his skull and inhaling is impossible. The sound of rushing air obliterates even the roar of the waves; he can hear nothing but the shrieking wind, and the water is still nothing more than a sparkling patch of blue in the distance. He is at once moving at incredible speed and not moving at all – plummeting towards the earth and hanging in the sky. Maybe he will never land at all, or maybe he will die on impact. Unless he hits the water hands first and as taut as an arrow, landing on the sea’s smooth surface will feel no different to landing on a concrete slab. And suddenly it’s there, in front of him, beneath him. He squeezes his eyes tightly shut, every muscle in his body clenched and screaming, the wave of fear meeting him at last as he braces himself for the final smash.

The water wall is brutal. It knocks every remaining pocket of oxygen from his body and batters him as if in fury. But he was lucky: he achieved the perfect rip entry. Anything less and he would be in pieces. He shoots down beneath the surface, deeper and deeper, until gradually he feels his underwater descent begin to slow, becomes aware of the sunlight illuminating a patch on the surface a very long way up. He must kick if he is to surface without passing out, but his legs appear to have gone numb. It takes for ever to reach fresh air, and when he does, for a moment he cannot inhale, his lungs so emptied they seem to have collapsed. But then he is aware of a muffled retching, gasping sound, and feels his ribcage expand and contract like an old, creaky accordion, and finds himself floating, head tilted back, heaving in oxygen. His body has taken over and is doing all the work, his nerves and synapses shot to bits, and for a long time all he can do is float and gasp until he is aware of the rest of him. His arms are slowly coming back to life, aching from the impact, but his legs are dead weights, pulling him down. He manages a slow breaststroke towards the foot of the cliff, steering himself with his arms towards the rocks. There is a small patch of dry earth amongst the shrubs – if he could just pull himself up onto that and curl up and never move again . . .

A fold in time, and he is still floating, still trying to reach the shore, but now he is aware of shouting, and figures on the rocks scrambling down, their movements hurried and frantic. He finds himself drifting through thick weed: the edge of the forest is near, but still he fears he may never reach it. He hadn’t thought about this part: swimming back to dry land, climbing out, surviving. By rights he should be dead.

‘Grab my hand! Grab my hand!’ Hugo is yelling.

It takes Mathéo a while to figure out exactly how to do that, to decide which arm still has enough strength to be raised, but as soon as he does, Hugo’s hands clasp his wrist like a vice, pulling him through the weed and onto the sand, and then he feels smooth rock beneath him, and he is being dragged backwards towards the trees, the air here strangely cold, the sun obliterated by the thick canopy of foliage above.

‘Fucking hell!’ Hugo is flushed and sweaty and breathless, hair sticking to the sides of his crimson face. ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’

Lola and Isabel run over to join him, equally flushed and sweaty, panting with shock and exertion, looking shaky and terrified.

‘Is he OK?’ he hears Isabel ask.

‘I’m fine,’ he replies, sagging back against the trunk of a cypress, still waiting for the nerves in his hands and legs to start responding. ‘That was amazing. Just amazing!’

‘You’re a fucking idiot, you know that?’ Hugo stumbles back between the roots, gripping a stitch in his side. ‘You nearly killed yourself! We – we couldn’t see you for ages! We were convinced you’d hit your head and drowned!’

‘What?’ He still feels comfortably numb, slightly dizzy and faintly euphoric at having landed such a faultless dive. At having survived! He isn’t so pathetic after all! Their loud, panicked shock and bustle completely baffles him.

‘You
knew
how dangerous that was!’ Hugo is still shouting, his face a violent shade of crimson. ‘It’s not like you’re some amateur. You knew! You knew there was every chance you’d fall on rocks, or the impact of the water would kill you, but you just went ahead and fucking did it anyway!’

‘I just wanted to show you . . . I just wanted to show myself. I was just having some fun—’

‘Fun?’ Hugo retorts. ‘
Fun?
Lola tried to jump in after you. I only just managed to grab her in time. She was going to jump without the run-up and go tumbling down the side of the cliff!’

Lola . . . He turns his head to look for her, but she is standing some way off with her back to him, Isabel’s arm wrapped tightly round her shoulders. She appears to be crying.

‘Lola, don’t be silly. I’m fine!’ He lets out a nervous laugh and Hugo rounds on him again.

‘You think it’s funny? You actually think this is all just a fucking joke?’

Mathéo stares up at Hugo, and for a moment thinks Hugo is going to punch him – sees his right hand clench into a fist and begin to pull back, sees his eyes darken and narrow . . .

Then, suddenly, Isabel is there, grabbing Hugo’s wrists, pushing him back. ‘Babe, come on, leave it. There’s no point having an argument. Let’s just go home.’

Isabel turns to toss him his rucksack and boots, then follows the others without a word. Mathéo opens his bag and pulls his T-shirt back on over his soaked swim shorts, so waterlogged they feel heavy and cling to his thighs. It is only when he bends over to pull on his socks and boots that he notices. His leg, covered in bright red gashes from ankle to thigh. He remembers the skim of razors he felt just before reaching for the surface, and all at once it hits him. A rock. He dived in right beside a rock and grazed his leg along the side of it coming back up. A couple of millimetres further across and he would have landed on it, ending his life immediately.

As the water begins to dry on the exposed parts of his body, the salt coagulates in the cuts on his leg, making them sting. Hugo and Isabel have pushed on ahead – still in sight but only just, hands entwined and talking in earnest. As the shock of the dive begins to wear off and his brain starts to thaw, it dawns on him that Lola hasn’t said a word to anyone since he got out of the water. Her shoulders are hunched beneath her rucksack, straggly hair falling into her face, head lowered, trudging solidly and rhythmically over the soft earth and twisted roots of the forest floor. She appears oblivious to him and everything else around her; lost, it would seem, in her own world.

Wincing, he increases his pace to catch up with her and reaches for her hand. ‘Hey!’

At the touch of his fingers against hers, she reacts as if to an electric shock, pulling her arm back sharply, lengthening her stride in an attempt to increase the gap between them.

‘Tired?’ he asks her gently. ‘Let me take your rucksack.’ But as he starts to lift the strap from her shoulder, her arm knocks his away as if in self-defence, startling him so much that he almost loses his footing.

‘Sweetheart, what’s the matter?’

‘Don’t call me that.’

He jolts back, the words hitting him like a fist in the stomach. ‘What d’you mean?’

Her hand shoots up to ward him off as he tries to touch her again. ‘Just – just don’t touch me, Mathéo. Just leave me alone, all right?’

He winces at her tone and shrinks back, stung. ‘Lola, I’m sorry if I scared you.’

‘Don’t be,’ she retorts. ‘But when you next try to kill yourself, do it when I’m not around so I don’t accidentally kill myself too, OK?’

He is aware of a hot, buzzing sound in his ears, the thrumming of blood in his cheeks. ‘I – I wasn’t trying to kill myself—’ But suddenly he realizes this isn’t quite true. Hadn’t part of him wanted to die just then, just so he could wipe the slate, just so he wouldn’t have to go on? Diving from that height between rocks was playing Russian roulette – he knew that, so why did he do it? Perhaps because it would be so much easier, so much cleaner than having to deal with the rest of his life.

‘Whatever. If you want to go on pretending nothing ever happened, that everything’s fine now; if you forbid me from ever mentioning the – the attack, then there’s nothing I can do.’ Lengthening her stride, Lola catches up with the others, and he has neither the strength nor the courage to try to catch up with her or speak to her again.

By the time the villa comes into view, everyone’s pace has slowed almost to a crawl. Bruised from his dive, back aching and leg still bleeding, Mathéo feels light-headed from pain and exhaustion, ready to collapse on the side of the road. Lola has kept her distance the whole way home and is the first to reach the house – he can just about make out her silhouette striding across the lawn, Isabel breaking into a jog to catch up with her as they go through the doors. Hugo stops at the edge of the garden, waiting for Mathéo, his face still hard with anger.

‘I’m going for a swim,’ Mathéo calls out to him, heading down towards the cliff steps. He really can’t face an argument right now. Better let Lola cool off for a while.

He sees Hugo hesitate, then shrug and turn to go inside.

He walks to the far end of the beach, limping now, his feet blistered, face prickling with sunburn. Large boulders the size of huts cluster together at the foot of the cliff-face, creating a small area of shade out of view of the garden or road above. The tide is beginning to drift out, and he sinks down onto the damp but solid sand between the rocks; translucent wavelets lap over his boots and sting his scraped leg. He collapses on his side using his rucksack as a pillow, the wet sand slowly soaking into his clothes, cooling him down. Exhausted, he closes his eyes against the harsh light of the afternoon sun . . .

He is aware of a sharp, rapid, clicking noise deep inside him, resonating through his skull. At first he thinks he is being shaken, that something inside him must be loose and rattling; then he feels the ache in his jaw and is aware of his teeth chattering against the cold. It is dark – the sun has set and the moon has risen, illuminating the sea in the distance and turning the tide pools a glistening, eerie silver. He levers himself slowly to a sitting position, shivering hard, his muscles stiff and unyielding. There is a painful crick in his neck, a sore raised ridge on his cheek; his clothes are wet and he is freezing. For a while he just sits there, hugging his knees to his chest as the afternoon’s painful memories slowly thaw in his brain. From his rocky enclave, he stares out at the smooth, wet sand, indefinable in colour but somehow shimmering all the same, and the edge of the sea, that foamy white line, so far out now as to be barely discernible. His watch reads quarter past ten, which means he must have been asleep out here for something like six hours. For a moment he is surprised the others did not come to wake him when it got dark – then he remembers their fury at his reckless behaviour, the kamikaze dive from that colossal height, missing the rocks below by mere millimetres. Hugo’s accusation that he was trying to kill himself rings sharply in his head, and he wonders again – was he right? Was that actually what he was trying to do? Or was he just trying to prove to himself that he was still a world-class diver, as strong and determined as before the attack . . .? He has no idea; is too cold and achy and shivery to think . . . He hadn’t planned it, that much he does know. But he
had
wanted to take a chance; take a chance in the hope of maybe – maybe escaping something. Something he had done, but also something he still has to do, a confession he has yet to make, a secret he is waiting to unveil: one so terrible that it would change his whole world, destroy a family, rip loved ones apart, sever blood ties and wreck lives for ever.

After ascending the cliff steps and reaching the garden, he is met by the bright lights of the villa’s living room and the fluorescent turquoise of the pool. Brushing the sand from his clothes and holding himself tight in an effort to stop shivering, he crosses the floodlit lawn and pushes open the heavy front door. The scene that greets him is not one he expected. Hugo is sitting on the sofa, his arm around Isabel. In the armchair opposite, Lola is curled up with a cushion hugged to her chest, eyes pink-rimmed and cheeks flushed. There is no chatter, no banter, no DVD and no booze. Not even a card game. All three are just sitting there as he shuffles in, staring at him, stock-still like waxwork figures.

‘Hey,’ he says hoarsely, still hugging himself against the cold that seems to have lodged itself permanently inside him. ‘What – what’s everyone been up to?’

‘Where have you been?’ Hugo asks, an unusual mixture of wariness and concern in his voice.

‘Fell asleep on the beach.’

‘We’ve been worried sick.’ Isabel now. But she doesn’t sound angry – a note of sadness in her tone.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—’ He looks over at Lola, but she immediately averts her gaze.

He can feel his heart. Can tell something is wrong. The earlier anger at his reckless behaviour has dissipated. Hugo and Isabel seem subdued as well as shocked, eyeing him with an air of what could almost pass as caution.

‘Sit down,’ Hugo says stiffly. ‘I’ll get you a drink. Coffee?’

‘No, it’s OK, I’m fine,’ Mathéo says, moving slowly towards the stairs. ‘I’ll – I’ll just go upstairs and have a shower before I cover the place in sand.’