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Ada sensed she was being dishonest with herself but she didn’t know in which direction so she ducked her head under the water and opened her eyes. The salt stung them but the reward was a bumpy base of sand that she disturbed with her big toe, breaking the pattern that had formed overnight and would form again tonight until someone had the sense to rub their toe through it tomorrow. She came up for air then ducked under again and held her eyes open longer, feeling the pale green light draining the anger out of her hidden places and replacing it with salt.
When Ada came up again, she called out to her parents who looked up and waved to her. ‘Watch this!’ she said, and she ducked under again and went into a handstand, her legs bent awkwardly at first, her knees not pointing quite the way knees are supposed to. And then she straightened them and walked on her hands through the sand, disturbing more and more of it, the tiny white particles floating around her face and clouding her view. She came up for air and her parents applauded her and one of the small children stood up from her sandcastle to applaud her too. And Ada thought of nothing except how much she needed to blow her nose.
They headed back to the house and Gabby was watching Top Model on the big TV downstairs, Orion sleeping on her chest. Diana said, ‘I’m glad you’ve given up on the whole screen thing, darling, honestly that baby can barely see ten centimetres past his nose right now.’ And Gabby said, ‘Yes, though if anyone is going to infiltrate a newborn’s subconscious it’s Tyra Banks.’ Ada lay down next to her and gently stroked the top of Orion’s head. ‘Are you going to learn to smize little guy? Do you wanna be on top?’ and Gabby started to laugh and tried to hold it in so she didn’t shake and wake the baby. Ada had made her laugh and she watched two episodes with her sister before going into the kitchen to make dinner.
Hank showed Ada how to turn on their outdoor barbecue but he called it ‘firing up the grill’ and she let it heat while she made some brown rice. She steamed some broccoli and pan-fried some leftover sweet potato chunks. She put salt and pepper on her snapper fillets and then added a dash of Old Bay Seasoning, which she had only seen mention of in rambling American food blogs. She grilled the fish, three minutes each side, and put together five perfect plates. A scoop of brown rice, slightly wilted broccoli, gooey sticky sweet potato and hot fish. She squeezed lemon over the fish and brought a wedge to the table in case anyone wanted more.
Everyone came to the table and Orion immediately started crying. Gabby tried to leave to feed him but Richard said, ‘It’s OK, eat first,’ and took the child out the front of the house to stand on the even lawn. Gabby shoved a couple of bites of everything into her mouth – ‘Breathe,’ said Hank and Gabby ignored him – then pushed her chair back and went to collect her wailing baby. Richard rejoined the table and everyone sat, tense, until the sound from the next room quieted and then they could eat. ‘What’s on this fish?’ asked Diana and Hank said, ‘Old Bay Seasoning! A secret of the south,’ and he winked at Ada. She pierced a piece of broccoli, felt repulsed and spooned the plain rice into her mouth instead. When Hank had finished eating, he carried Gabby’s plate into the living room and fed her tiny pieces while she fed Orion and eventually the plate was cleared.
Gabby smiled at Ada and said, ‘I really appreciate you doing all this cooking,’ and Ada said, ‘It’s no trouble, I do most of the cooking for my flatmate too,’ and Gabby said, ‘You’ll make someone a lovely wife one day.’ Ada felt her stomach twist, not at the words but at how obviously Gabby was joking. Because why couldn’t she do that? Why shouldn’t she.
When Diana had cleared the plates, they said goodbye, and as he let them out Hank said, ‘Tomorrow is your last full day, isn’t it? What will we do without you,’ and Ada said, ‘Maybe your parents will come over more?’ Hank said, ‘Ah yes, your sister would love that,’ as though the three of them were sharing a funny secret, and Ada wondered if Hank knew this was the first secret she and Gabby had shared in their entire lives. In the car she realised Hank had mentioned a brother in his email and she hadn’t seen or met this man. She asked her parents about him and Richard said, ‘Matthew! We met him at the hospital. Does something in retail, can’t remember what,’ and Ada thought maybe Hank understood her and Gabby after all.
Ada walked into the tiled house and her phone lit up and the most recent message was from Stuart. He said he was waiting up and she realised she’d forgotten they were supposed to talk. This wasn’t like her – Mel described her as ‘obsessive’ and sometimes ‘love addicted’ – and she considered that maybe her entire personality would be different without the internet. Maybe everyone’s would, even people like Sadie who set themselves up at least partly in opposition to it.
Ada pulled a bottle of rosé from the fridge and poured a large glass and said, ‘I’m going into my room to make a call if that’s OK.’ Diana nodded and didn’t turn around from
her spot in the pantry. ‘Don’t be surprised if these are gone when you’re done … whatever these are … almond-butter almonds? So the almonds have … almond butter on them. OK, I have to try this,’ and Ada felt briefly pulled to a seat on the couch and a handful of those atrocities. But she carried her wine into her all-white room and climbed up onto her all-white bed and spilled a spot of rosé on her pillowcase and picked up her phone to call.
Stuart answered and he was also sitting in bed, his face lit under the fairy lights like a canal boat, speckled and lovely. She raised her glass of rosé and said ‘hi’ and he raised a tumbler of something dark and said ‘hi yourself’ and then he said, ‘Could I turn my camera off?’ and she said, ‘No?’ and he sighed deeply. Ada asked him about his day and he told her about going for a late breakfast with his flatmate Paul, who was recently dumped by his boyfriend and suddenly wanted lots of company in the middle of the day.
Ada said, ‘Wait, I didn’t realise any of your flatmates were queer?’ and Stuart said, ‘You met Paul with his boyfriend the night you stayed over. Don’t you remember? I was asleep, I guess.’ Ada remembered the two pale men she had run into who she hadn’t read as partners at all. She tried to explain this, that she had thought they were both straight, and Stuart said, ‘Why would you assume that?’ She knew he was poking her, provoking her, trying to question her politics and her sense of her own identity. She didn’t know what he’d get from that but she met him halfway and said, ‘I guess I’m prejudiced against northern people,’ and he said, ‘Everyone from the south is,’ and she said, ‘Yeah and Australia is way south,’ and then they were mostly back on track.
Stuart said after breakfast they’d gone to see the exhibition at the Tate that Ada had been so interested in and she thought this might be provocation too or it might just be insensitivity, which she had long learned not to take too seriously when it came from men. Perhaps that was sexist of her, she had said to Mel, but it was also kind of survival. You can engrain sensitivity into men over time but expecting it from them up front would narrow your dating pool pretty substantially. And Mel said, ‘And we’re against narrowing dating pools?’ and Ada said, ‘Yeah, fair point.’ But anyway, Stuart was young.
Ada asked questions about the Tate exhibition and Stuart seemed to be put off-kilter by this and that’s how she knew that mentioning it had been bait after all and not guilelessness. He told her about an older trans artist who did a piece addressing the legacy of the AIDS crisis and a young lesbian artist working with found objects. And she said, ‘All sounds very earnest, I guess I’ll stick with my commercially successful glass-blowing,’ and he said, ‘How do you get away with saying the stupidest shit?’ and she said, ‘Because if you say it confidently people assume you’re actually smart under all that.’ Then she said she was going to put him face down on the bed so she could go and refill her wine glass and he said, ‘No, show me the house,’ and then he said, ‘Anyway, shouldn’t I be putting you face down on a bed?’ She thrilled a little and didn’t say that it could actually go either way.
Ada took her phone for a walk through the cold tiles, angling it down so he could see her toes, painted a shiny coral, crossing the floor. He said, ‘Woah, fancy feet,’ and she said, ‘Yes, we had a bit of time to kill a few days ago so Mum and I went to a beauty place in a strip mall and got pedicures.’ She pulled the phone back up so he was looking at her face and he said, ‘Say strip mall again, I don’t know what it means but it sounds hot,’ and then she turned into the kitchen where her father was eating olives at the bench. She waved the phone in his face and said, ‘Stuart, Richard, Richard, Stuart,’ and Richard said, ‘Nice to meet you,’ and returned to his olives and his news app.
Ada poured her wine and headed back to the room and when she settled in, Stuart looked annoyed. ‘You didn’t tell me I’d be meeting your dad, I’m wasted,’ and she said, ‘Trust me, my dad is used to meeting my wasted friends and lovers,’ and he said, ‘Wow, you can make a guy feel so special.’ Ada held the phone away from her, turned it to the window and said, ‘Look at that sunset, the sky goes fully postcard-pink here,’ and he said, ‘It’s nice. Sorry I’m being weird.’ She turned the phone back to her face and said, ‘It’s OK, I know it’s late there.’
Stuart didn’t ask any questions about the baby or her family but he was interested in what she’d bought from the Goodwill and even a little in what she’d been cooking. Then he asked her what she thought she’d work on when she got back to London and she said honestly, if a job doesn’t come up soon she might need to temp for a while. He said, ‘Or you could move in with me. Imagine how cheap the rent would be on my shitty little room if we split it,’ and she said, ‘Don’t joke, I might do it if I get desperate,’ and he said, ‘I’m not joking, are you?’
And then Ada lay on her side, holding her phone close to her face as the room got darker, her glass of wine balanced precariously in front of her on the bed. ‘What do you want us to do, Stuart?’ she asked and he inhaled and she thought an onslaught was coming but then he let the air out and didn’t say anything. She said, ‘What do you want me to say to you? Are you looking for guarantees?’ and he said, ‘It’s normal to look for guarantees.’ Ada was quiet for long enough that he asked if she was still there and then she said, ‘I think it is normal, but isn’t this too soon for that? We’ve been talking, what, a month? And we’ve spent one night together.’
Stuart said that wasn’t that basically how her sister had got together with Hank. ‘They fucked once and then they decided to be together.’ And Ada said, ‘Yeah but they’re older than us and anyway what, do you want to put a baby in me? Because I don’t know that your flatmates would like that.’ He said, ‘Do you want a baby some day?’ and she said, ‘With you?’ and he said, ‘Any baby,’ and she said, ‘No, I don’t want just any baby.’ Then silence again.
Ada noticed Stuart’s eyes fluttering and asked if he needed to go to sleep. He said he did but ‘before I do, can we make a plan?’ Ada said sure, maybe, I don’t know, what plan? And he said, ‘Any plan. I need to know that there is a plan we could make together, like in the future.’ And Ada said, ‘OK how about this, how about I guarantee that within two weeks of me getting back, we can see each other. It’s expensive coming to Liverpool, though.’ Stuart said, ‘Then clear your bedroom for me,’ and Ada said, ‘I can’t just clear out a person, she’s not a broken chair.’ More silence and Stuart said, ‘We’ll go somewhere else then,’ and Ada said OK and then she watched as he fell asleep in front of her and then his phone tipped forwards and everything was dark. She hung up.
It was getting late now but Ada headed out to get another glass of wine. She heard her dad brushing his teeth in the bathroom and wondered what he had thought of Stuart. Nothing much, probably. She had barely told them anything about this guy except that he was an artist in Liverpool and from that they had likely surmised a lot of accurate things about his life. She hadn’t talked about Sadie because ‘a playwright from Perth’ wouldn’t sum her up as neatly and she couldn’t face telling these people who loved her about inertia and how she had hurtled towards someone who would neatly step out of the way.
Ada sat on the couch next to her sleeping mother and noticed there were two almond-butter almonds left in the bowl. Ada knew her mother’s appetite, so like her own, and felt moved at the willpower it would have taken her to leave some behind. Ada popped one in her mouth and felt it roll around, tacky and sweet. She decided to decide. It was Stuart who had asked her to choose, while Sadie, she was sure, never would. And so, inevitably, it was him.
THIRTY-TWO
01/10/2017
Sadie Ali
08:48
