Jonathan Lee - High Dive

‘What do you think of John’s trainers?’ Susie said. He’d left them, together with a small rucksack, a stone’s throw from their chosen position.

Gulls had arrived. They were studying the sea. Freya shrugged. ‘They look fine. Pretty average trainers, if you ask me.’

‘Huh,’ Susie said.

Freya turned to confirm that this ‘huh’ was a ‘huh’ of disapproval, which it was. She looked at Susie’s hands. They were in her lap, unmoving. Ordinarily Susie’s hands were in motion, gesticulating desperately while she explained the extent of some little-known injustice in El Salvador or Israel, or worrying at the wooden beads on her necklace as she panicked about whether a boy liked her or not. Today her beads caught the sun and sent milky spots of light up into the shadowy area under her jaw. She managed always to look misplaced.

‘OK,’ Freya said. ‘Forget about his trainers.’

‘An African kid,’ Susie said, her voice suddenly raw. ‘That’s who makes that brand. A sweatshop.’

‘Is that definitely a fact, Sooz?’

Susie raised a wispy orange eyebrow. The limits of knowledge in its strictest sense rarely marked the confines of their conversations. When they were in people-watching mode it was all about how much detail you could apply to a life before it crumbled; how plausibly you could deform people’s histories. ‘We can make a guess,’ Susie said. ‘We can guess that, like most branded trainers, they are made by children overseas.’

Here it was again: her habit of rushing her attention to stories of exploitation, as if the words themselves were a form of emergency aid.

‘I didn’t buy John’s trainers,’ Freya said.

‘But you buy other ones.’

‘So do you.’

‘Plimsolls.’

‘Sweatshops.’

‘Made in Northamptonshire! In nice places!’

‘The manufacturing isn’t down to me, Sooz. It’s not my problem.’

‘Whose problem is it, then, Frey-Hey? Your tennis shoes. Those nice heels you wear to work?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Exactly,’ Susie said, and shook her head as if she’d won.

‘So you basically asked me about his trainers as — what? — a kind of trap?’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Susie said.

‘A trap so that you could say that I represent some kind of Western ignorance?’

‘Maybe you do,’ Susie said.

‘Because I buy shoes?’

‘It’s an idea.’

‘Because I don’t ask the girl in Coast Sports a hundred questions before I get myself some trainers for running, or a swimsuit for swimming?’

‘It’s an idea.’

It was an idea. An annoying one. Freya let it drift out to sea. She focused on the sight of Surfer John catching the crest of a wave. It was a small wave, and his balance didn’t last that long, but for an instant he was serene.

She loved the moment when waves broke, the moment when the walls of turquoise grew toppings of white foam that spread along their length and hung, bubbling in the air, as the wave curled itself into a forward roll. She loved seeing water crashing against the West Pier, its delicate legs. She thought John must love these moments too. It seemed wasteful, somehow, that they hadn’t spoken about it.

‘Do you ever think about your mum?’ Susie said.

‘What?’

‘Your mum.’

She hesitated. Motivations. ‘No.’

‘Whatever. Just asking.’

Freya shut her eyes. ‘If I’m ever a parent, Sooz, I’m going to remember that the only rule, basically, is that you shouldn’t take sides. You shouldn’t say stuff about the other parent. Our cleaner says —’

‘You have a cleaner?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How much do you pay her?’

‘I don’t know. That’s not … It’s Sandra from the hotel, she only comes once a fortnight.’

‘Interesting.’

‘Sooz, cleaning’s what she does.’

‘Through choice?’

Freya sighed a deliberately heavy sigh. ‘I’m not a receptionist through choice. We’re not forcing her. And what I was going to say about my mum is that —’

‘ You are not forcing her.’

She tried to unpack this, find the trick in it. ‘That what I said.’

‘Huh.’

Freya picked up a large stone. A big seagull waddled towards the maybe-detective and flew off with his doughnut wrapper. Suddenly the only thing all the other seagulls wanted was that exact doughnut wrapper. She turned the stone over in her hand.

‘Look,’ Susie said, ‘I’ve got something to ask you.’

‘What?’

‘You know I said about that protest?’

‘What protest?’

‘Outside the hotel, when Thatcher arrives.’

‘You didn’t tell me about any protest.’

‘I did. I fully did. But anyway, they won’t let us in the hotel, obviously. We’re protesters. It’s them against us. So there’s a limit to what we can do. But I was thinking you’d be perfectly placed to, like, get involved …’

‘What are you after, Sooz?’

A pause. ‘Stink bomb.’

‘What?’

‘Something like that, anyway. Shake things up a bit. Show her how we all feel about her. That her policies, that her attitude —’

‘Stinks.’

‘Yes!’ Susie said. She looked astonished that her message had got through.

‘But I’m not even sure I think that,’ Freya said.

Susie shook her head and lay back on the stones. All at once the joy seemed to fly right out of her. ‘Pathetic,’ she said to the sky. ‘I knew you wouldn’t do it.’

One of the reasons why Susie wasn’t in Freya’s Top Five Friends any more — why a couple of people Freya never really saw at all had managed to edge Susie out — was that she never fucking listened. Her inattentiveness turned your worries into insignificant trifles, things which floated free of reality. Susie prided herself on being honest and open about everything, confronting issues other people would prefer to keep below the surface, on doing lots of stuff for charitable and political causes, on nothing she did being for herself, but when she grew silent it was a tactical silence, it served her needs. Every little gesture was intended to have an effect on other people. Silent like she’d been over the trainer comment. Silent like she’d been when Freya had gone to Sally Lander’s party even though they were supposed to hate Sally Lander. Silent like she’d been when Freya had asked Sarah to be the one friend who joined her and Moose on a camping holiday in the Lake District two summers ago.

Suspicious of beaches, Susie was. Unimpressed by oceans. It was an attitude which seemed at odds with her membership of Greenpeace, but, there you go, that was Susie. She thought anything picturesque was frivolous. She was always asking Freya why she wore lipstick on nights out. Like many people who felt that their talents were under-acknowledged, Susie spent a lot of time looking at her watch.

‘You’re annoyed with me,’ Susie said.

‘No.’

‘You’re always annoyed with me these days. I’ve left, like, six messages at the hotel these last few weeks. I even saw you, last Monday, disappearing into the kitchen, and I asked Karen whatserface, the one with the dead sister —’

‘Brother.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It probably does to her.’

‘To see if you had two minutes for a talk or anything, and she came back from going to find you and said — one hundred per cent lying — that you weren’t working today. And why would she even say that?’

Freya didn’t respond to this. There were things in her life, small fractions of the whole, that she chose never to look at. It was easy. She did it all the time. She heard herself saying, ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘But we were going to hang out.’ A stitch of grief had sewn itself between Susie’s eyes.