Make or Break

Around 1 p.m. I realised Pete hadn’t arrived so checked my phone and saw I had a missed call from him. I spread my towel on a lounger in the shade, lay down and dialled his number.

‘Hey!’ he answered. It sounded like he was in a car. ‘Did you get my message?’

‘No, I just phoned you back. How was the hike?’

‘Oh my god, Jess,’ he said. ‘It was unbelievable! It’s this track called Skeleton Gorge. It goes through a ravine and at the top there’s a lake! Heaps of other people were walking it and they were cheering each other on and singing. And everybody seems to know Goat.’

‘Sounds amazing! I can’t wait to see the photos,’ I said and felt a pinch of guilt I hadn’t gone with him. ‘So are you on your way here?’

‘No, the hike is one-way so we’re in a taxi back to the car at the other end. But Jess,’ he lowered his voice like he didn’t want his fellow passengers to hear him. ‘Goat and his cousin are going snorkelling with seals and they’ve invited us along. We can swing by the BBQ and pick you up in half an hour?’

‘Snorkelling with seals?’ I laughed. ‘In the ocean where sharks hang out? And isn’t it totally freezing?’

Priya had said the ocean in Cape Town never gets above an icy fourteen degrees, which confirmed I was never going in there.

‘You won’t be freezing, you wear wetsuits.’

‘A dark shiny wetsuit? Sort of like a dark shiny seal?’

‘Jess—’

‘You want to swim with seals, dressed as a seal? If a shark is heading out for lunch you’ll be the slowest seal on the menu.’

‘I really want to do this,’ Pete said, a small plea in his voice. ‘My god, this place is amazing! Please come?’

‘I can’t.’

‘Come on, Jess, I thought this trip would be a great time for us to, you know, reconnect and stuff.’

‘What?’ My stomach dropped. ‘You think we’re disconnected?’

Pete sighed. ‘Look, I’m just saying that this time here is a great opportunity for us to spend some proper time together. Between my job and Annabelle we hardly spend any time together. It’s important.’

‘Oh, right. I agree. Totally. It’s just, the thing is, I’m a bit tipsy.’

‘You’ll be fine.’

‘Probably more like a lot tipsy. If they did a breath test, hey . . . do you think they do breath tests for snorkelling? They should. You could totally drown if you were so drunk you used your snorkel as a straw – I mean, it looks like one big straw and for a drunk person—’

‘Jess?’

‘Yes?’

‘Are you coming or not?’

‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘You go though, OK?’

‘Are you sure?’

I looked across the garden. Priya was gathering players for a game of pool volleyball, Laurel’s head was thrown back in laughter at something somebody had said and the elder family members were gathered around a table under a white brolly, getting along famously.

‘Yeah, I’m happy here by the pool,’ I said, raising my hand to be included in the volleyball game.

‘You’re two steps away from death at all times, remember?’ Pete joked.

‘Ha! Then I’ll have to stay in the pool, won’t I? Snakes can’t swim, right?’

‘Yeah, they can.’

‘God! It’s not safe anywhere! Online flights to South Africa should come with a warning. Like a pop-up box that says, “Are you sure you want these flights? Please check the left box if you are OK with imminent death at all times. Enjoy your flight.” ’

‘You’re a weirdo,’ Pete said with warmth in his voice.

‘Pete?’ I said, getting serious.

‘Yeah?’

‘I love you and I don’t want you to be eaten.’

‘I won’t be. Have you seen the size of Goat? They’ll definitely go for him before me.’

I heard Goat make laughing protests in the background. We arranged to meet back at the apartment and I hung up feeling like Pete and I had two very different holidays in mind. I shook my head. I would go home, buff my starting-to-tan skin, put on something short and flirty and take Pete to one of the restaurants Priya had recommended.

Trust dropped me back at the apartment at 5 p.m. I looked at the lift, inviting and quick, especially with an afternoon of cocktails in my system, but instead turned, and with my sandals dangling from my hand, began a barefoot, stamping ascent to our sixth-floor apartment. Priya and Laurel were leaving for their ‘tech free’ honeymoon at an eco-resort at 3 a.m. the next day. They’d return the day after Pete and I left, and Priya had given me strict instructions to enjoy the apartment, hit all the places she’d listed, trust in Trust and have a ‘fucking good holiday, babe, you deserve it’. An hour later Pete came home fizzing with exhilaration.

‘Hey!’ he said, dropping his gear bag and launching himself onto the bed where I was looking at my inbox void of emails from Dad admitting to having joined the South African diamond mafia. I got a waft of manly sweat and sea salt when he kissed me. ‘Look at this!’

He pulled his phone out and, with eyes gleaming, showed me a picture of him on an inflatable boat with a gigantic outboard motor. The sun glinted off soft undulations on the ocean’s surface and Pete sat on the boat’s edge with a mask and snorkel pushed on top of his head. He looked ecstatically happy.

‘Did you see seals?’ I asked.

‘Did we see seals?’ Pete grinned.

He swiped through photo after photo of endlessly clear blue sky, sapphire ocean, hundreds of seals, the fins of a pod of dolphins, penguins, dramatic cliffs and colonies of seabirds. I felt truly jealous. I was disappointed in myself for being scared of sharks (and jellyfish and swordfish and undetonated 1940s underwater mines and spontaneous tidal rips). And a bit upset Pete had gone on the trip when he was supposed to be with me at the BBQ. If he’d waited until the next day I’d have gone too. Perhaps not in the actual water dressed as lunch, but at least on the boat trip. I decided to agree to whatever was Pete’s next desired pursuit. As long as it didn’t involve sharks or water or heights or caves or snakes or— STOP! I would do whatever he suggested.

‘The Cederberg climb?’ I said as we took delivery of our tapas-style dishes.

The Uber driver had dropped us off outside an old factory building (I’d told Trust to go home to his family) and we’d taken a glass exterior lift up to a seventh-floor exposed-brick-and-pipe/black floor-and-ceiling restaurant. The interior was dimly lit, so the 360 views of the harbour and city were the focus. It was intimate and lively at the same time and the two glasses of champagne, flippy summer skirt and Pete’s interest in my low-cut top had made me feel sexy and excited about life. But then Pete had mentioned, in a leading and hopeful manner, that there were spaces on the seven-day trip, and my life-loving mood had taken a nosedive.

‘Is that the one Goat was talking about at the wedding? The one that was brutal and dangerous and all that?’

‘It’s a measured risk,’ Pete said in a measured tone.

‘How exactly do they measure it?’ I said, getting out my phone and googling The Cederbergs. A quick scroll told me what I needed to know. ‘They have snakes and cliffs and scorpions and leopards. You don’t want to go, do you?’

‘Leopards are shy. You’d be very lucky to see one.’ Pete popped a dumpling in his mouth, avoiding the question.

‘Pete?’ I said, putting my phone to the side and looking directly at him.

‘I think it’s an amazing opportunity.’ He shrugged one shoulder.

‘But it’s for seven days,’ I said, trying to reign in my mounting frustration. ‘Today you said you thought we needed to reconnect? Going away without me is not “reconnecting”. It’s the total opposite.’

Pete sighed like he’d known what my reaction would be and had already been getting aggravated by it. ‘I just feel so energised by this place. Like I’m in the right place for me for once!’

‘For once? What does that mean?’

‘I feel . . .’ He glanced at the people either side of us. ‘. . . stifled sometimes. Like I could be doing these amazing things but I can’t because of my job and where we live and stuff.’

‘Where we live? England, you mean? You want to move to South Africa – is that it?’

‘No,’ Pete sighed. He picked up another dumpling from one of the shared platters and plopped it on the mini plate in front of him. ‘It’s just that most of our life seems to be organised around Annabelle and Streatham and driving to my job and it’s just so . . . so regulated.’ He looked up at me. ‘Don’t you ever feel like you’ve had a door open to you for the first time and you can suddenly see so clearly that you’ve been living a half-life?’

At Pete’s mention of Annabelle I realised I hadn’t called to see how Katie’s therapy had gone. It was the first time Mum wasn’t there to pick Hunter up from school. Had the lady from the nanny service known Hunter couldn’t eat normal biscuits because he’d go supersonic and end up leaping from the tops of large furniture items like a demented flying squirrel? I clicked back into Pete’s monologue about how the world is a vibrant, exciting place that must be climbed on and swum in and run along. Planet Earth was one big jungle gym and he wanted in on it.

‘I mean,’ he looked at me, ‘are you happy just being a PA and going to work and yoga and Annabelle’s, and for every week just to be the same?’

‘I’m not just a PA, and you know it!’

I looked at him; dark rings under his eyes, pale English skin that had pinked under that day’s sun and an expression of desperation. Or was it exasperation? We’d been on heaps of holidays together but never before had we seemed on such different wavelengths. Before Annabelle had Katie, Pete and I would hit all the major European cities. We loved walking, seeing the sights, climbing the ancient steps, eating all the food. We’d been happy with our regular mini breaks to Paris and Barcelona, and our once a year medium-sized breaks to Turkey or Greece. When Katie came along Annabelle needed help and we’d pretty much dropped our lives to be there for her. I knew we’d get back to how we’d been before. One day. It hadn’t happened yet, though, and I didn’t realise Pete was feeling so frustrated. I leant across the table and grabbed his hand. He was tired and just needed a few days to relax into holiday mode.

‘Shall we skip dessert and just go home?’ I asked, giving him a flirtatious look from under my lashes. ‘I’ve got the best day planned for us tomorrow.’

Pete gripped my hand and nodded but he looked resigned. Our eyes met across the table full of picked-at food and tea lights, and I tried to push down my feelings of uneasiness.