Jonathan Lee - High Dive

God, it was obvious. Roy Walsh was blatantly gay.

‘So you’re checking out?’ Freya said.

‘No no,’ said Roy. ‘We’re just running a couple of errands.’

She looked at the bag he was carrying and at the bag the older man was carrying.

‘Maybe we’ll catch you later on,’ Roy said, and something in his eyes introduced a crackle of doubt again. Bisexuality was a thing she’d heard about. Maybe he was bisexual. It must be nice, good, maybe even much better, to pick a person rather than a gender.

When the men had gone she tried to continue the conversation with Karen, but it had lost most of its energy.

HIS DAUGHTER FOUND him in the drying room, trying to establish the veracity of a reported rodent sighting. He was also trying, more half-heartedly, to locate among the laundry Mrs Anton’s lost pearl earring. Being down here made you long for open air, but in the open air it had been drizzling all morning. The coastline had fizzed up like a badly tuned TV. He hated how quickly guests blamed the cleaners for missing items. Did they think there was a nightclub in town where all the cleaner-robbers gathered, wearing just one earring each? Wearing just one stolen sock, and waving around that important piece of mislaid paper that the guest just happened to have left crumpled up right next to the waste-paper basket?

Freya said, ‘I mean, seriously. I just went home, forgot my sandwich, totally soaked, and there’s like a — like a landslide in the hall.’ She looked at him. Wet hair was hanging over her face in threads. The drying room was dark and soupy, full of ambushing damp, but her perfume cut through it cleanly. ‘Like, twenty of them!’

Several thoughts occurred. The first was: good that she’s making her own sandwiches, because those baguettes from Amadeo’s add up. The second was: annoyed or simply pretending to be annoyed? Third: get an umbrella. Fourth and finally, he didn’t know what she was talking about — not at all. ‘Twenty,’ he said, buying himself a little time. He tried to picture things in multiples of twenty but managed to think only of canapés — canapés on a platter presented to Margaret Thatcher, who in this particular vision was for some reason wearing a peach-coloured spacesuit.

‘Those huge prospectuses.’

‘Ah, those.’

‘Twenty!’

‘Right.’

She was wearing a skirt much shorter than was ideal, or even acceptable, but probably it wasn’t a good time to mention it. It was hot down here. Water fell from her clothes. He sneezed and said, ‘There were three yesterday, too. I put them in the kitchen for you. The process for next year starts soon, Mr Easemouth —’

‘Ease moth —’

‘— said. You’re still thinking History, right? Or is it English now? If you don’t apply in time, Frey, it gets tricky.’

‘Mental,’ she said, shaking her head. He waited for more but nothing came; the word was a free-standing judgement.

‘Lots of exciting choices. That’s all I’m doing. I’m giving you choices that I —’

‘Wasn’t given, yeah.’ She shook her head again. ‘God.’

‘Don’t bring Him into it,’ Moose said. ‘You think He’d be running this shit show so badly if He’d got a proper education? Look,’ he said, ‘you’ve seen the pictures on TV. It’s crazy. If you want to have a comfortable life these days, you’ve got to get an education.’

‘You’re that guy. That mental dad. You actually are.’ He thought he saw an earring on the floor. ‘You’ve been in disguise for a while, but it’s you. It was like a sorting office or something had exploded. I told you —’ was she going to cry? Really? To cry at this? — ‘I told you I don’t even know if I want to go.’

‘Then you should apply,’ he said softly, ‘and keep your options open.’ It wasn’t an earring after all. It was a small pebble or a little piece of cheese. He nudged it with his foot. ‘No wonder there are rodents.’

‘What?’

‘If you don’t know yet, then keep your —’

‘University,’ she said. ‘University university university university. University. University. Obsessed! ’

He tried to calm things down, began to succeed, began to think less intensely about the question of how cheese had found its way onto the floor, but then he slipped on a well-meant phrase about the future and that one slip sent him free-falling into an argument. He never let her make her own decisions, he was always trying to interfere, he thought university was amazing because he hadn’t been, so what did he actually know, he always thought stuff he hadn’t done was amazing, he was always nagging, nagging, nagging, nagging, and couldn’t he just see that she wanted a bit of time to think, that she’d just stopped doing exams and exams and exams, all that structure and no time to live, to live , and why was a degree so important, and couldn’t he just be pleased with her results, and had it done him any harm not having a degree, had it really?

‘Well, actually —’

‘No,’ she said.

He tried to stick to questions, because — a useful customer service principle — there was a limit to how aggressive a statement could seem with a question mark at its end. Did she really want to work behind the desk in this hotel for another summer and the summer after that? Did her good exam results at a mediocre state school like Blatchington Mill not show that she had great potential at degree level? Was her pessimistic view of higher education something to do with her mother being a lecturer? Because that’s the last thing Vivienne — yes, why not, let’s bring Viv into it — because that’s the last thing Vivienne, wherever she was now, would have wanted. Defining yourself in opposition to other people was really no way to live.

This last line was the most provocative of all his statements, liable on another day to cause him serious injury, but her eyes relaxed and he watched as her thin arms crossed underneath the V of her sweater. ‘You just want to make me — this is it — into the person you want me to be.’

Which was unfair. Utterly unfair. Because what he really wanted was for her to want to make herself into the person he wanted her to be. Such was the great hope of fatherhood.

The wine-cellar hatch went up and Jorge climbed out, closely followed by Sasha, the latter pink of cheek and laughing, a rare occurrence indeed. ‘Was there a problem down there?’ Moose said. ‘A problem requiring both of you?’

‘ Que? ’ Jorge said. He was fond of feigning incompetence with English when caught fucking summer staff.

‘Jorge,’ Sasha said, tugging at his sleeve, ‘we’ve fixed the problem now, so let’s go.’

Freya said, ‘If you’re so keen to get rid of me, I’ll be buying a ticket somewhere soon, like I said to Roy — to Marbella — so whatever.’

She left. Jorge left. Sasha stood for a moment staring at Moose as if she had a question in mind. She was a changeable girl, Sasha. She could be warm and she could be cold and it could all be within one sentence or glance. She would smile at him but be unable to keep the smile going. She sometimes squeezed his arm. She knew too well the effect she had on most men. He had concluded she had no soul. In the moments when her worked-up warmth faded and her other self was exposed, Sasha was like a house slowly losing electricity, emptying, the TV flickering, the lights fading, the radio’s song dimming, the fridge humming thinly into silence, and this again made him think of his ex-wife.

Sasha said she’d found out that Jorge’s hourly wages were a little bit higher than hers.

‘Not now please, Sasha,’ he said.

She sighed and disappeared up the stairs. The tumble dryers rumbled on and on. The earring was nowhere to be found and neither was the reported rodent.