Time of My Life (28 page)
‘Yeah, well, that’s because I heard about you all the time,’ she smiled.
Heard. Past tense.
‘Well, welcome,’ she said, looking at Life shyly. She was sweet. I was going to destroy her.
‘This is my friend Cosmo.’
‘Cosmo, cool name. Nice to meet you.’ She held out her hand and he wiped his salt-and-vinegar-greasy fingers on his jeans before shaking it.
‘Is Blake around today?’ I asked, looking around.
‘Yeah. Doesn’t he know you’re coming?’
Translation:
Is this arranged? Are you getting back together? Should I be worried?
I smiled sweetly. ‘I wanted to surprise him.’
‘Wow. Great. So, I’m sure he’ll be really stoked to see you but he’s very tied up at the moment. He’s getting ready to train the first group of divers. Are you guys part of this group?’
‘Yes. Yes, we are.’
Life looked at me as if there wasn’t a hope in the world of him diving with me but I appreciated that he didn’t say anything.
‘How long have you been working here for?’
‘The past month, ever since it opened. Blake was very kind to give me the job. We wrapped on the TV show and after that I just didn’t want to go home, you know? I love it here.’
‘It’s a long way from home.’
‘Yeah, it is,’ she said, rather sadly. ‘But we’ll see.’
‘We’ll see?’
‘Yeah. We’ll see what happens. Right, well, I’d better get this group ready and I’ve to bring a coffee to Blake, he always likes it first thing.’
I could tell her a thing or two about what else he liked first thing. I smiled tightly and watched her as she clapped her hands to get everybody’s attention, then issued polite orders, made a funny joke, and then, after she had herded everybody into the correct positions and they all knew what they were doing, she ran out of the cabin with a steaming hot coffee in a styrofoam cup.
‘You’re on your own, sweetheart,’ Life said, stuffing another crisp into his mouth.
‘You’re afraid of diving?’
‘Of course I am,’ he said. ‘Especially if she’s preparing your parachute.’ Then he chuckled and wandered off to turn his nose up at more of Blake’s photos.
I assured Life that he didn’t have to do the dive but in order to see Blake I had to go along with the day’s schedule. He had driven me here so that I could make a go of things, so he knew his role was to go with the flow. I didn’t want to hang around for hours waiting for Blake like a stalker, because clearly I wasn’t that.
I wasn’t.
Life and I followed the group outside onto a grassy area. It was only ten a.m. and already it was warm. Before us was two miles of runway and to the right was the airplane hangar. As basic as the set-up was I was proud of Blake for following his dream, for achieving it. It felt bittersweet that it was without me, that it wasn’t me about to take the training class, that it wasn’t me sitting in the cabin sorting through applications and greeting customers. He had taken my dreams –
our
dreams – and moved on without me. Here I was, a mere spectator standing among a gaggle of girls waiting to see him as if he was a pin-up star, which of course he was now. If you subscribed to
Love to Travel
magazine. Which I did. There were nine of us in total. The four from the B&B, three fans of Blake’s, and Life and me.
‘Where is he?’ one blonde asked her friend and they both looked at each other and giggled.
‘Are you going to ask him for his autograph?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m going to ask if I can have his children.’ They both cackled again.
Life looked at me, his eyes dancing like he was laughing at me. Since we’d arrived at the ‘Portaloo’ he seemed to have got his spark back, but I wasn’t sure it was for all the right reasons. The door to the hangar made a large booming sound as it was unlatched and began to open. It slid back slowly, revealing the plane inside, then when the door was midway open it revealed Blake standing in front of the plane, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, the top unzipped and falling down around his waist, revealing a tight white vest that showed his protruding muscles beneath. He was too far away to see his face but the body, his shape, was recognisable from space. He looked pumped and ready for action, he looked amazing, then he slowly started to walk towards us, like a scene from
Armageddon
. His parachute was attached to his waist and he pulled it along behind him, the weight of it so great that it was like he was walking against a gale-force wind. Sometimes the parachute material would catch the wind and it would pick up behind him, ballooning slightly and then falling to the ground again.
‘Oh. My. God,’ Life said, finally pausing from eating his crisps.
I felt proud of Blake, and proud that Life could see him like this. People were drawn to him, he had an aura, this was a perfect example.
‘What a gobshite,’ Life said and threw his head back and laughed.
I looked at him in surprise. Then the three lads and girl from the camper van started laughing and I was angry.
Harry looked at me in disbelief. ‘Is this the fella?’
I ignored him. The other women in the group were cheering, whooping and clapping, delighted by the opening introduction. I joined in with the polite applause, the cheering I did on the inside in a soprano High C. Blake smiled and looked at the ground shyly in an
aw shucks, gee whizz, you guys
kind of way. Then he detached his parachute and walked the rest of the way to the group with his groin wrapped up in a harness as if he was gift-wrapping his sizeable manhood. He finally reached the group.
‘Thanks, guys,’ he said, beaming, raising his hands to calm the applause. It had the desired effect and there was silence.
Life chose that moment to finish eating his crisps and crumple the packet into a ball. Blake’s head turned as Life noisily stuffed the crisp bag into his jeans pocket. Blake looked at him and then at me. And then his face broke into the largest smile. My stomach did a triple Axel jump, the crowd roared and I stepped up to the first position on the podium, accepted my flowers, dipped my head for the gold medal and listened to the national anthem while second and third scowled and plotted ways to break my legs.
‘Lucy Silchester,’ he smiled, then looked back at the curious group. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, meet the love of my life.’
From the corner of my eye I saw Jenna slip back inside the cabin. It was possibly the happiest moment of my life and I would have punched the air with delight were it not a ridiculously sad thing to do. Blake told them to take a moment to chat amongst themselves while he came over to me, his arms spread wide, ready for a hug. I fell into his arms and my head naturally went to his chest, my right cheek resting against him, his arms wrapped around me tightly as he kissed the top of my head. It was the same, it was all exactly the same, we slotted together like a jigsaw puzzle. Two years, eleven months and twenty-one days since I’d seen him, since he’d sat me down, after we’d made love the night before, and said that he was leaving me.
All of a sudden anger rushed through me as I remembered how he’d brought me breakfast in bed and then sat at my feet and began explaining his complicated, turbulent mind. He had been so awkward, so uncomfortable, so unable to look me in the eye that I thought he was about to propose. I was
afraid
that he was going to propose and then when he was finished I would have done anything for him to have proposed. And then while I lay in bed with a heavy tray of food and coffee resting on my thighs he stood before the wardrobe, scratching the back of his head, and tried to figure out what clothes he should pack for his new single life. If indeed it was a single life he was headed to, and if he hadn’t been seeing Jenna behind my back for the first few weeks of filming the travel show. And then on the same day that I had lost my boyfriend, I had gotten drunk and lost my career and my driver’s licence, shortly afterwards my home when we put it on the market.
He hugged me tight two years, eleven months and twenty-one days later and all the love I had felt for him, every single day since then, vanished and was replaced by anger. My eyes opened suddenly and I saw Life looking at me; he was smiling, enjoying the sight of us embracing. Confused by my sudden emotional shift, I let go of Blake and peeled myself away from him.
‘I can’t believe you’re here,’ he was saying, his hands holding on tight to the tops of my arms. ‘You look great, this is great.’ He laughed and I let the anger settle as I relaxed under his gaze.
‘Blake, I want you to meet a special friend of mine.’
Blake was slow to turn away from me, he seemed a little disconnected then. ‘Yeah, sure. Hey, how are you doing?’ He shook Life’s hand quickly as if he was doing me and him a favour, then returned his gaze to me. ‘I’m so happy you’re here.’
‘Me too,’ I laughed.
‘How long are you staying for?’
‘I just popped by to say hi. I wanted to see the dream realised.’
‘Stay and do the dive with us.’
‘OK. We’d love to.’
He looked confused by the
we
; then he glanced at Life quickly again and back to me and said, ‘Oh, yeah, sure.’ Then he made his way back to face everybody on the grass and he started the lesson on how to position the body when free falling. I was an expert on that.
‘Sorry about that,’ I said to Life as I observed him on the ground copying the positions.
‘No problem,’ he said. ‘He looked really pleased to see you. That’s great, Lucy.’
‘Yeah, it is,’ I said nervously. ‘So are you going to do the dive?’
‘No,’ he said, moving to the new position, ‘I just like the view from here.’
I looked ahead of him to the cute blonde girl with her bum in the air and I rolled my eyes. ‘Come up in the plane at least.’
‘No way.’
‘Are you afraid of flying too?’
‘No, it’s the hurtling towards the earth at astronomical speeds that terrifies me.’
‘You don’t have to dive. Honestly, just come up there with us, I want you to see. It’s a twenty-minute flight, the views will be nice and then you can come back down with the pilot the old-fashioned way.’
He looked up at the sky to make the decision. ‘Fine.’
I followed Blake to the aeroplane hangar to help gather the equipment.
‘Does your girlfriend not do the dives too?’ I asked him, trying to keep my tone casual and uninquisitive when really my sanity and lifelong happiness depended on his answer.
‘Girlfriend?’ He looked at me, confused. ‘What girlfriend?’
I almost danced on the spot. ‘The girl doing the paperwork in the other cabin,’ I said, not wanting to say her name out of fear that he’d think I was a stalker who’d been following her around for years, despite the fact that she and I had talked an hour ago. ‘The girl who works on your show. There she is.’
We looked out and saw Jenna leading everybody to another area. She was all smiles and she said something and everybody laughed, including my life, which bothered me.
‘Oh, her. That’s Jen.’
Jen, not Jenna. I hated her even more.
‘Why did you think she was my girlfriend?’
‘I don’t know. She just seemed your type.’
‘Jen? You think?’ He looked at her thoughtfully, and I didn’t like what he was thinking. I tried to get his attention again but short of clicking my fingers in front of his face I wasn’t sure what else to do. I stepped in front of him, side-stepped kind of casually to block his view of her, which worked because he looked away and concentrated on the equipment. We were quiet for a while. I hoped he wasn’t thinking of Jenna. I desperately tried to think of something to say to make him change his thoughts but he got there first.
‘So is he your boyfriend?’
‘Him? No,’ I laughed. ‘It’s the oddest thing, actually.’ I had to tell him the truth, I was
excited
to tell him the truth. ‘You’ll love this, you’re so into this kind of thing. I received a letter from him a couple of weeks ago from the Life Agency, have you ever heard of it?’
‘Yeah.’ He stopped with the equipment and looked at me. ‘I read an article when I was at the dentist about a woman who’d met with her life.’
‘Was she standing beside a vase full of lemons and limes?’ I asked excitedly.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, anyway,
he’s
my life. Isn’t that kind of cool?’
I expected him to be impressed, he used to be so into that kind of thing, reading book after book about self-development, self-empowerment, self-searching and anything and everything to do with oneself. He used to always talk about different religious theories, reincarnation, life after death, so many exploratory searching works about the human soul that I knew this would be the ultimate for him. Meeting Life in the flesh; I was so sure he thought he’d never see the day when I would reach such depths. I was so sure he would be so enthusiastic about it that I spoke with more passion than I did about anything, because he was into that kind of thing, because I wanted him to know I was too, that I had changed, that I had new depths he didn’t even know about, that he could love me.
‘He’s your life?’
‘Yes.’
‘And why is he here?’
From the questions he might have seemed interested, but believe me, he wasn’t. It came across more like,
he’s
your life, and tell me again
why
is he here?
I swallowed, wanting to back-pedal, but I couldn’t and I felt it would be disrespectful to my life not to sell him properly after he’d driven me here for a surprise and gone along with my little ‘get Blake back’ adventure. ‘The idea is that we spend some time together, to get to know one another. When people are busy with work and friends and other distractions, sometimes we lose sight of the important things. Apparently I’d lost sight of me.’ I shrugged. ‘But not any more. He’s everywhere I look. But he’s funny. You’ll like him.’
He nodded once, then went back to his equipment. ‘You know I’m going to do a cookbook?’
That was an unusual key change but I went with it. ‘Really? That’s great.’
‘Yeah,’ he lit up. ‘It came about because of the show I do – have you seen it, by the way? Lucy, it’s such a ride, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. Anyway, we were going to so many different places, experiencing so many cultures and just the tastes and smells and sounds were so inspiring that whenever I came home after travelling I wanted to replicate what I’d tasted.’
‘That’s great, you always loved cooking.’
‘Yeah, and I don’t just replicate it, that’s the idea of the book, I give it my own twist. The Blake twist or the Blake taste. I think that’s what we’ll call it.
The Blake Taste
. The publishers love it, they say it could even transfer onto the screen so I could have a separate show from
Wish You Were Here
just based on the food I eat when travelling.’ He had lit up, his face was animated, his words were hopping a mile a minute, he was so excited he could barely get them out in the right order. I watched him, fascinated that I was seeing him in the flesh, that he hadn’t changed one bit, that he was still the passionate, energetic, beautiful man he had always been. ‘I’d love for you to taste some of my recipes, Lucy.’
‘Wow, thank you, I’d love that,’ I beamed.
‘Would you?’
‘Of course, Blake, I really would. I’d like to get back into cooking myself, actually. I just kind of stopped. I suppose I got out of the habit. I moved to a smaller place, the kitchen isn’t as good as the one that we—’
‘Oh, man, that kitchen,’ he shook his head. ‘That was some kitchen, but you should see the one I have now. I’m using this amazing oven; it’s a built-in multi-function stainless-steel PyroKlean oven. It offers you forty different programmes for fresh and frozen foods and you just enter the weight of the food and the oven automatically selects the best setting, then it controls—’
‘—the cooking time and switches off when the meal is done, using the residual heat to save energy,’ I interrupted.
His mouth dropped. ‘How did you know that?’
‘I wrote it,’ I said, proudly.
‘I don’t understand, you wrote what?’
‘The instruction manual. I work at Mantic. Or at least I did until yesterday. I translated the manuals.’
He continued to look at me in such an unusual way that I had to turn around to make sure it was me he was looking at, at all.
‘What is it?’
‘What happened to Quinn and Downing?’
‘I haven’t worked there for years,’ I laughed. Then, though I tried to keep it casual, I added more seriously, ‘Didn’t Adam tell you anything about me over the past few years?’ I meant it. I thought that everything I was doing was going back to Blake, I thought he knew everything about me and I knew nothing about him. For the past few years I’d made decisions and created lies thinking they’d be working their way back to him, and he didn’t even know what had happened on Day One, the day that he left me and I lost my job.
‘Adam? No,’ he said, confused, then smiled and his face lit up again. ‘So let me tell you about this Moroccan pie—’
‘He thinks I cheated on you,’ I interrupted his recipe. I didn’t plan to say that, never ever in all of my conniving thoughts and pre-planning plans; it just came flying out of my mouth.
‘Huh?’ He had been about to talk about saffron and this had put a spanner in the works.
‘They all do.’ I tried to keep the tremor out of my voice, the tremor not of nerves but of anger; it was building again and I was fighting hard to keep it under wraps.
‘Blake,’ called a guy who stuck his head in the door. ‘We have to get a move on.’
‘Coming now,’ Blake said and he picked up the equipment. ‘Let’s go,’ he grinned. My anger once again dissipated and I found myself with a mushy smile on my face.
The plane held six people, which was three groups. Harry was strapped to Blake, and the young fertile lady who wanted to have Blake’s babies was strapped to another instructor named Jeremy – the one whose timely arrival had stopped me from exploding at Blake in the equipment room – and she was staring at Harry with jealousy over having pulled the short straw. Life was wearing an orange jumpsuit with goggles over his eyes; he was sitting on the floor between my legs with his back against my front, and every now and then he looked at me with absolute disgust and terror.
He turned around again as we took off. ‘“The view will be nice,”’ he hissed at me.
‘It is a beautiful view,’ I smiled calmly.
‘“And you can land with the pilot,”’ he said angrily. ‘You tricked me. You lied to me. That’s one big lie,’ he said with venom in his voice.
‘You don’t have to jump,’ I said, trying to be relaxed, but really I was worried. I couldn’t afford for Life to tell a humongous truth. Not here, not now, not with Blake so close that our feet were touching.
‘Then why am I attached to you by an umbilical cord?’
‘You can pretend to have a panic attack. We can go back down if you want, I just wanted to, you know, do this one more time with him.’
‘Pretend? I won’t need to bloody pretend,’ he said, then faced front again and ignored me for the rest of the journey. Harry was absolutely terrified looking and was green in the face; I could see his body trembling. Our eyes met.
‘You’re going to love it. Just picture Declan with no eyebrows.’ He smiled, closed his eyes and took deep breaths. Blake and I watched one another as the plane left the ground and we went up to the sky. We couldn’t stop ourselves from smiling; he shook his head again out of disbelief that I was there. We climbed up to two hundred feet. We flew for twenty minutes and finally we were ready for action. Blake opened the door and wind blasted inside as the countryside below was revealed to us like a patchwork quilt.
Life uttered a tirade of unrepeatable expletives.
‘Ladies first,’ Blake shouted, moving aside for Life and me.
‘No, no, you go ahead,’ I said firmly. ‘We’re going to go last.’ I tried to give Blake warning eyes to hint that Life was afraid but Life had turned around again to stare at me.
‘No, I insist,’ Blake said. ‘Just like old times.’
‘I’d love to but … he’s a bit nervous, I think it’s better if we watch first. Okay?’
Life was fuming. ‘Nervous? I’m not nervous. Come on, let’s go.’ He started shuffling on his bottom to the edge of the plane and I was pulled along with him. I was flabbergasted but wouldn’t argue with him, so I checked that the tandem harness and parachute were safely secured and we moved to the edge of the plane. I couldn’t believe Life was doing this, I had been expecting us to go back down with the pilot. I had been disappointed all the way up and now I was ready, adrenaline was pumping.
