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‘Late,’ she soothes. ‘Go to sleep.’
He wraps his arms around her and despite the heat she relishes the embrace. When the family aren’t in residence, and there are no rental visitors like last week’s Russians, they get to spend three, sometimes four nights a week together like this. When they cannot, she aches for him. I want to come home. I want this to be over. Let me come home. They can’t keep me now. Not after what I learned tonight.
I won’t sleep, she thinks. God knows I need to. But it’s too much. It’s too much. And she tumbles instantly into unconsciousness without even being really aware.
*
Moments. Only moments since she was last awake. He comes quietly into the room, sits on the bed and hands her a café con lexe as she comes awake.
‘What time is it?’
‘Nearly seven,’ he says. ‘I let you sleep in.’
She drains half the cup in a single draught. ‘Oh, my God,’ she says. ‘I need to be back at work by noon.’
‘Better hurry up, then,’ he says, and whistles his way back to the kitchen to throw together some sandwiches so they can breakfast on the water.
He has some pots on the bay below the Casa Amarilla. They can potter about on the water, and then he can come in close to land and she can swim to shore and climb up to work on the staircase carved into the cliff below the garden. It’s a convenient way to cut out her commute – and besides, for Mercedes Delia, being on the water with no prospect of being in it would be the cruellest of tortures. She loves her husband, but she’s been in love with the sea her whole life.
He turns on his radar screen as they enter the bay. Guides them to the first pot by the bleeps from the transmitter attached to its marker buoy. She looks at his boy-toy and shakes her head. Almost a thousand American dollars he paid for it, and she still doesn’t see the point.
‘You used to just go straight to the pots,’ she grumbles as they crawl across the water, his eyes on the screen.
‘Yeah, I didn’t really, though, did I? You’re romanticising. Do you really not remember what it used to be like, going back and forth looking for the bloody things?’
‘Pfft,’ she says, because she knows she’s wrong. ‘I mean. Look. It’s right there! What do you need a screen for?’
‘Because I led us to it with the screen, stupid.’
He cuts the engine. Picks up the boat hook and pulls in the first buoy and starts to haul the rope in, hand over hand. ‘Come on, Mersa, you don’t think the fact that we’re pulling in twice the catch this last couple of years is a coincidence, do you? It’s because we’re not spending hours looking for the pots. I’ve twice as many now. Because of technology.’
‘Hunh,’ she says.
‘And besides. I like knowing where you are when you’re off swimming.’
‘Hunh?’
He keeps hauling. Hand over hand.
‘Hang on,’ she says. She glares at the transmitter he attached to her sea-belt a few months ago. ‘You said it was for emergencies. Are you telling me it’s on all the time?’
He doesn’t reply.
‘Oh, fuck you, Felix Marino.’
He looks over at her, and there’s a touch of hurt on his face.
‘No, don’t look at me like that. I’m not a child,’ she says.
Felix shakes his head, turns back to his pots. ‘Don’t care.’
‘You watch me?’
Felix takes a deep breath. ‘Oh, Mercedes.’
She looks at the tag on her belt with distrust. Maybe I could take it off, she thinks. Too many people watching too many others, in this world.
‘It’s not that I don’t trust you,’ she tells him, ‘it’s the principle. How do I turn it off?’
