‘Cliff-diving, you mean?’ Suddenly Hugo has Mathéo’s attention.
‘No, they weren’t divers. Just nuts!’
‘Have you ever tried jumping?’ Mathéo asks him.
‘Me?’ Hugo snorts with laughter. ‘Do you think I’m crazy? Hitting the water from this height – Jesus! And look how close the rocks are below!’
‘Only at the foot of the cliff. You could clear them with a running dive.’
‘Yeah, right.’
As Hugo and Isabel spread out the picnic blanket beneath the trees and Lola starts unpacking the sandwiches, Mathéo feels overcome by a rush of heat and nervous energy; a kind of invisible adrenalin that seems to fill the air around him. For the first time since he first set foot on the ten-metre platform all those years ago, he feels overcome by vertigo so strong it dizzies him: looking down makes him feel unsteady, light-headed, almost nauseous. Memories of his last dive come rushing back – the humid, chlorinated air, the echoing screams from the kiddie pool, Perez’s booming voice. He remembers how scared he was, how disorientated, how rattled, and how convinced he was that he wouldn’t succeed, filled with that deep pit of certainty that something was about to go seriously wrong. And suddenly, on the edge of this cliff, the feeling is back, even though there is no coach here, no impatient father, no panel of judges or even an audience of squealing teenage girls. There is no one here to judge him, to put pressure on him; nor is there a complex sequence of twists and somersaults he has to memorize visually and kinaesthetically. Up here he is free to just dive – it’s so easy that it’s almost laughable. A simple, pure dive from this height would be accompanied by the sensation of weightlessness, the feeling that you were flying . . . Back when he was seven and first took up diving, he used to feel like that too. That’s why he wanted to join the club, start training every week. But now, ten years later, falling through the air at high speed has become a daily occurrence, more familiar even than brushing his teeth or packing his school bag. Gone is the adrenalin rush, the sense of flying, the feeling of being both everywhere and nowhere all at once.
As he kneels down on the dry earth to unlace his hiking boots and peel off his socks, he notices the others glancing over from their safe haven, well away from the plateau. Lola is saying something, holding out a sandwich wrapped in tin foil.
‘What are you doing?’ she asks him as he unbuckles his belt, slips off his jeans and pulls his T-shirt over his head.
‘I’m gonna dive,’ Mathéo informs them all quietly, turning to face the rising breeze, the bottoms of his swim shorts flapping around his knees.
Hugo stops mid-chew, one cheek bulging comically. ‘What did you say?’
‘With a running dive I’ll clear the rocks.’
Hugo snorts and begins to laugh, but then breaks off when Mathéo fails to join in. ‘You’re joking.’
‘No.’
Hugo hesitates, as if unsure whether to start laughing again. ‘You mean you’re going to kill yourself?’
Lola wipes her hands absent-mindedly on the side of her shorts. ‘Mattie, that’s not even funny.’ She waves the sandwich at him. ‘Do you want egg or ham?’
Suddenly he is fed up. Fed up with their disbelief, with their refusal to take his proposition seriously. They think he is being ridiculous, but what do any of them know about diving in the first place? What do they know of the risks he takes day after day, diving off a ten-metre board and plummeting towards the water at thirty-four miles an hour, twisting and turning and somersaulting through the air? What do they know of the pain of missing an entry by a tiny increment and landing on your shoulder or your chest, having the wind knocked out of you as if being slammed up against a wall? What do they know about having to climb out of the pool in front of thousands of spectators, trying to hide the fact that you are injured so as not to give the other competitors a psychological advantage? Trying to hide how utterly gutted you are that, after all those long hours at the pool, the dive that you had perfected in training went wrong at the exact moment it most mattered and the morning’s press will label you a ‘choker’? What do they know about the long hours before and after each competition at the Aqua Centre, trying out a new dive, missing it, climbing out of the pool and going straight back up to do it again, and again, and again – mistake after mistake, the fear growing so vast you feel you will never escape it? What do they know about a tiny wobble on takeoff that fails to clear you of the board by a few millimetres – nothing noticeable to the naked eye, but enough to have your head clip the side of the board on your somersault, and leave you gunshot and unconscious as you smack against the water’s unforgiving surface? What do they know of doing all that, and then being led to a wood by one of the few men you have ever trusted, slammed against a tree, thrown onto the ground and assaulted in the most heinous way imaginable . . .
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 th
rough 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 p
ainful 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?’