The Sleeper (32 page)

I assumed he was going to introduce me to some girlfriend. It flashed through my mind that she must be pregnant, if he was reduced to telling me about her.

But instead he said: ‘My business. The wine trade. It’s not doing quite as well as I’ve led people to believe. I’ve got plans in place and we can do fine with a few provisos that I won’t go into. But for the moment it’s lurching rather closer than I’d like towards, well … bankruptcy, I suppose. That’s what I’m looking at. Your mother has an idea that things are difficult, but of course one goes through difficult times as a matter of course. This is not like that.’

I remember holding my fingertips on the polished table and watching them meet their reflections. That was because I could not think of anything to say.

‘I know you’re job-hunting, but you’ll find one soon, won’t you, darling? You’re qualified in an excellent profession.’

‘Yes. I’m sure.’

‘You girls had expensive educations.’

‘Right.’

And that was when he told me his backup plan. The thing he would do if I didn’t, somehow, help to bail him out of his mess. He said that Leon had helped him so far but that he couldn’t ask him for any more. He mentioned life insurance. I knew what he was implying.

I hated him. I had only ever hated Olivia before. A whole world opened up before me in that instant. He was vulnerable and needy and pathetic. I didn’t have to court his approval any more. I could hate him. That meant I didn’t have to behave like a terrified sheep, always anticipating what would please him and what wouldn’t. New pathways appeared, shimmering in front of me.

I muttered something.

‘You have no idea what it means to me,’ he said. ‘My Lara.’

I should have told him to go ahead and top himself. He wouldn’t have done it. Businesses collapse all the time. People deal with it, without threatening their twenty-two-year-old daughter with suicide unless they magic up some cash.

I worked as a waitress in a chain French café near Victoria for as long as it took me to save a chunk of cash, and then, instead of giving it to him, I flew to Bangkok with a backpack.

He was apoplectic. I didn’t care. He could have topped himself then, but he didn’t. And then when Jake made his proposal, I realised I could solve everything.

April 8th

Rachel has moved into my hut. We are sharing a double bed, tucking our mosquito net into the mattress around us at night, creating our own little fortress.

We have plans. I need to stay around here, away from London. This is where I want to build a life.

Rachel needs some money. She was talking about going home to NZ because she’s almost out of funds. I’m paying for things for us both while I try to convince her otherwise. And my desire to stay here, and her need for cash, have made me come up with a plan. I told it to her today, in the bar.

‘We’ll go to Singapore,’ I said. ‘It’s not far from here. We can fly there from Krabi, I’m sure we can. Then you can get a teaching job. You can teach English, or work in an English school, or whatever. I’ll find work too. We’ll work hard and share a flat in Singapore, and save our money. Then we could go to Nepal and live in the mountains for a while.’

She agreed that that would be an excellent plan. We are both going to look into it.

She is the only person I’ve ever met who doesn’t think the idea of living on a Nepalese mountain is silly and weird.

April 10th

Oh fuck.

Rachel came up to the hut earlier than me this afternoon. I was still on the beach, half dozing while wondering when I was going to hear from Jake. I was fantasising about throwing the phone into the sea. I had left this book out on the bed, without thinking, and she must have picked it up.

You should never read your friend’s diary. It will never lead to good things. I can imagine her opening it out of curiosity, starting reading, then carrying on, and on, and on as she began to realise the truth.

By the time I got here she had read every word and packed her bags.

‘Drugs?’ she said, as soon as I was close enough. Her face was savage and she looked completely different. ‘You’re a drug smuggler?’

I tried to reason with her. I said, ‘It’s because …’ but she didn’t care.

‘You send money back home, yeah, I know. I read it all, Lara. Your dad, blah blah. I knew there was something you weren’t saying and in the end I just thought, well, I’ll read that book you’re always writing in, and then I’ll know. You carry terrible things across borders, you stupid girl, and you send the money to your dad. That is more fucked up than anything I’ve ever heard in my life.’

Those were her exact words. I will never forget them. She was right.

I asked where she was going. She said she would get her brother to send her some money, and she was going home to NZ. Then she stopped speaking to me. She just walked past. I didn’t move out of the way, so she stepped up on a rock beside the path to get past me.

April 15th

No sign of Rachel. I look for her all the time.

Jake called. Finally. With news.

We’ve got a ‘project’ on. For the amount he’s paying, I can surmise that it must be something major. I have to meet him in Krabi in three days’ time, which means I need to start thinking about leaving Kantiang Bay.

I’m not sure I’ve got the nerve to do it any more. I told him that. He scoffed and said there was no way I was backing out.

I could just run away. He would recruit someone else.

If I do it, it would be the last time, and it would set me up for a new life. I will find a job in Singapore on my own, and I will write to Dad and tell him there’s no more cash coming from me. When I’ve saved up, I’ll go and rent a house in Nepal, exactly as I planned with Rachel, and I’ll write to her and tell her where I am, and perhaps one day she will turn up, walking around the mountainside.

Or I could start that process without doing this job. I could walk away right now. I could catch a plane from Krabi tomorrow, and go on from there, and Jake would never find me. He wouldn’t even try. I wouldn’t have any money, and I’d have to find a job quickly, but that wouldn’t matter. I would manage, because people do.

The money he would pay would buy me a house in the Himalayas outright: I am sure it would. However, it is mad and wrong on so many levels that I cannot begin to imagine what I’ve been thinking of. Have I really done that four times already?

Got to go. Someone’s coming up the steps.

Later

I was terrified when I saw her. I thought she’d come back to tell me off. I accused her of having gone to the police. I was waiting for them to come and arrest me.

In fact I must remember to keep this book properly hidden. I should actually drop it into the sea, and I will. I’m going to lob it off the balcony, straight out across the rocks and into the water.

She says she needed to go away and think about things. She’s different with me – I keep finding her staring and not speaking. But she says she missed me and she couldn’t walk away leaving things like that. We had to talk.

There’s a bonfire on the beach tonight, and as ever when that happens, people have appeared with guitars that they have magicked out of somewhere. Right now some local boys (I think) are playing and singing ‘American Pie’. Rachel and I are about to go down and join them. I could completely manage a load of drinks and a drunken singalong.

Later still (a bit drunk)

We sat down by the water’s edge in the hot night air and we talked. If anyone came close we stopped, but mainly I’ve just spent four hours drinking and talking to Rach. I told her everything, every single bit of it. Dad’s business, Olivia/Olly, the lot.

She wanted to know how I do it. I told her about the trance, the way I am completely confident, acting like the head girl. I told her how I spend the flights reading or writing or watching a film, absolutely in control and perfectly calm. I told her about the icy cool that descends when I see the right bag on the conveyor belt. I described how I wheel the trolley, or carry the bag on my back, right through Customs in the absolute certainty that I look conventional beyond question, without feeling the tiniest bit afraid.

And then I described the high, the amazing, all-encompassing joy of having got away with it.

I started to say that I was considering not doing this last one. At the same time, she started to say that I should, that I should do it one last time since I was so good at it. She asked if she could fly with me, just so she could watch what I do. Then we would be in Singapore together, and we could start our new lives as long as I promised my smuggling money would be mine, not Dad’s. We talked about Nepal. She loves that idea as much as I do. I can see the two of us living on a mountainside. It’s something I’ve always dreamed of, and we could actually make it happen. The money I’ve made out here could have set me up for life, but instead I’ve given it all to my dad so his friends don’t have to know his business went wrong. Rachel says it’s my turn to get something out of it.

I’m going to do it.

April 16th

I’ll miss Jake. I’m unbelievably excited at the prospect of seeing him. I want to rip all my clothes off in preparation, and it amazes me that Rachel can’t see that in me. Perhaps she can. She’s had a boyfriend, but I can’t quite work out if it was a boring Olly-boyfriend (I’m laughing now at how much O is completely welcome to him!) or a Jake one. From the way she talks (bitterly), I think her heart must have been in it.

Anyway, I’ll miss him when Rach and I start our new law-abiding lives in Singapore, working towards the mountains, but I’ll find someone else. I don’t want to be a part of his world in the long term. He’s been amazing, and now I know never, ever to settle for someone safe and dull. I’ll always thank Jake for teaching me that. I’m going to hold out for the next person who makes me tingle from head to foot, who makes me unable to think about anything but sex.

I’m looking forward to this job, and even more so to the moment it’s over: the first moment of my new life. Of course I have to start my life on a different continent from the one where my family live.

I told Rachel all about what happened with Olivia, too, when I read that one-word email – ‘Sorry’ – that must have cost her so much. When I read it, I smiled at how much I don’t care any more, and so I described the scene and made myself (and Rachel) laugh. As I’m lying on the beach and Rachel is off swimming in the sea, I’m going to write it down now, to prove that it has no power over me at all.

I’d been going out with Olly for nearly two years, since the end of my first year at university. He was Mr Sensible. A public school boy with impeccable manners. He liked me because I was eminently suitable for him – a privately educated girl with no apparent wild side. We made the world’s blandest couple. He was, of course, taller than me, broader than me, and a rugby player, with a florid complexion and a fogeyish manner that will mean he’ll really feel at peace with the world on the day he turns forty-six.

So we were heading inexorably towards a dull future. We would get engaged (he would have asked Dad’s permission, I know it), and then have a church wedding, and I’d wear white and be given away, and my sister would glower in the unflattering bridesmaid’s dress I would force her to wear, for my own amusement. Then we’d have two children, a boy and a girl, and Olly would have a career in the City while I’d work part time and coordinate the nanny.

At some point I would have had a breakdown and done something crazy, that much is for fucking certain.

Anyway. I thought we were trundling along happily, having duty sex a couple of times a week and going to bars in Fulham that were full of people like us. We were middle-aged before our time, but this, we thought, was great. We felt quite the grown-ups.

And then, one day, I was in Bloomsbury, walking through Tavistock Square, and I decided, on a magnanimous whim, to go to Olivia’s student hovel and say hello. She was living in a flat in the basement of one of those crumbling town houses. The flat had six tiny bedrooms over two floors, with a minuscule bathroom on each floor, a kitchen in the corridor by the stairs, and a concrete patch of ‘garden’. All the same, its location, in a row of cheap hotels in Tavistock Place, was amazing. Olivia insists she’ll always live in central London. It’s one of her rebellions against growing up in suburbia.

One of her flatmates answered the door. It was the blonde fat girl with the glasses, who always puts her hair in a bun that falls out, strand by strand, hair grip by hair grip, over the course of the day. As soon as I saw the stricken look on Fat Girl’s face, I knew Olivia was up to something.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Is Olivia home?’

I could see her brain ticking over. ‘Um,’ she said. ‘No! She’s not. Sorry. I can get her to call you?’

I was intrigued, so I edged past her into the grimy hallway, and through the front door of their flat. It smelt of curry and stale alcohol and uncleaned bathrooms. The fat girl tried to stop me, so I sped up, passed the bathroom (a man wearing just a towel came out and widened his eyes at the sight of me), tried not to look at the state of the little table at the top of the stairs or the dishes piled in the sink, and rushed down the stairs to the basement level.

Her room was the last one, right under the stairs and beside the door that led out to the courtyard. Fat Girl, in her desperation, yelled out, ‘Olivia! Lara’s here!’

There was a scuffle. Whispers. Panicky shufflings and mutterings. Even then, though, it did not occur to me for half a second. If I hadn’t seen the evidence, I still wouldn’t believe it.

I rushed forward and opened the door, still believing that this was none of my business, even though, it transpired, it was. And there was my sister, quickly doing up a dressing gown cord, and my boyfriend, wearing just a pair of pants, halfway out of the window that led into the courtyard.

The two of them had been shagging for quite some time, it turned out. Olly tried to explain, to talk to me about how things weren’t ‘quite right’ with us, otherwise this wouldn’t have happened, but I couldn’t be bothered with a word of it.