Special Relationship (23 page)

"Oops, where's the sun-cream fairy when you need her?" he asked casually.

"The sun-cream fairy has been reading her book," she replied. "And now she is going to take a dip."

He watched her walk towards the sea and pull down the bottom of her swimsuit to cover her buttocks as she falteringly entered the sea, giggling as she she plunged in.

She swam strongly away from the beach and far enough that Nick could barely pick her out. When she came back towards him, with wet long blonde hair and water droplets sparkling off her bronzed arms and legs, he thought that there could be no more beautiful woman on the planet. It only puzzled him that she could still be single.

She dried herself, with a fresh white towel, looking at him as she shook her head and ran her fingers through her hair. "That was bracing," she said."Even in the sun the sea is none too warm."

They packed and went back to the house where, after she had changed out of her swimsuit and back into shorts, he opened some wine and put some jazz on the music system.

"First drink today, I think?"

"Pretty good by our standards," she laughed.

They talked about the day and how Alex would keep the teddy bear as a memento. "I think I'll call him Victor to remind me that I won and you lost," she teased him. They went to the balcony with the newspapers and and talked easily between themselves as they read.

Alex read more on the Oscar
Pistorius story and discussed the case with him. "Do you think he meant to kill her or did he really did believe there was an intruder in the house?"

"Seems an unlikely story," Nick said. "But then South Africa can be a dangerous place. That is
somewhere I have made use of minders, not that I've been there often."

"The thing I can't get my head round is that if she is sleeping with a guy why she felt the need to lock the bathroom door to have a pee."

She then checked the financial pages and was relieved to see no scandals involving the man sat on the lounger next to her.

They talked of the music being piped softly on to the balcony. "Reminds me of New York,"
she remarked, listening to a piece dominated by the sound of the saxophone. "You know when the vapour rises off the buildings and the sidewalk gratings and you look up and there's a guy, who you imagine has come up from New Orleans, sitting on a balcony playing the sax to the neighbourhood. Sorry, I'm sounding mushy."

He had never liked the description '
soulmate', believing it to be a word used by people who grew their own vegetables and made their own knitwear and did up old Volkswagen vans to spend time "finding themselves". But now he was with Alex he could appreciate the meaning of the term.

Nick brought up the topic of jazz clubs in New York,
particularly the Village Vanguard, which he was intending to go to before he ended up in bed with Katherine. He then realised his mistake when Alex asked him whether he made it there on his recent trip.

"Oh, sadly not, there were some early morning meetings the n
ext day, so, you know, business first."

"You has some
leisure time though."

"Yes, I told you, didn't I, that Katherine and I spent a day at Coney Island.
I'd never been there and, since it's so iconic I couldn't wait to see it."

"You like your seaside places," she remarked.

He was worried that she might ask more about the New York trip. "Have you seen the time? We'd better get ready for dinner. "

She went up to her room to change and shower, and came back down wearing a coral chiffon evening dress, beautifully cut with a high waist and full skirt that contrasted perfectly against her her tanned legs. Nick couldn't hold back. "You look stunning," he said.

"Why thank you sir," she said.

The taxi came ten minutes later to take them back to Bournemouth and the
WestBeach Restaurant which, he had promised her, offered both a great location right on the beach and superb fresh seafood. She was not disappointed as she watched the sun set across the sea and they shared Grand Fruit de Mer.

"Eating seafood can always be a bit messy," said Nick, cracking open a lobster claw.

"But absolutely delicious," she replied. "With all the seafood we're eating we'll look like lobsters by the time we go back." Then she ribbed him. "Mind you, if you don't start using the sun cream..."

He frowned at her. "Alex I have a dark complexion, I don't cook as easily as you blonde people who only became blonde due to your ancestors' lack of sunlight."

She kicked him gently under the table.

Nick told her that when he was about
sixteen and made his first solo trip abroad, to Paris, he had eaten at a seafood restaurant near the Gare Du Nord, waiting for the train to take him back to London.

"The Channel tunnel had just opened and I had an hour to kill before the return train. So I went into the restaurant and ordered some seafood. I can't remember what it cost, but it was dirt cheap, so I was expecting like a few mussels and prawns. They actually came out with enough seafood to feed an army and more implements than you'd need to perform heart surgery.

"Everyone in the restaurant was looking at the English boy who obviously didn't have a clue what to do with all the paraphernalia set before him."

She smiled at him.

"So, feeling very embarrassed, and realising that I had nowhere near enough time to finish the feast before the train departed, I ate all the easy stuff first and made an half-hearted attempt at opening some crab...and then made a hasty exit with the locals looking on at me as though I was an ignorant and stupid Englander."

"But if they could see you now," she said.

He skipped dessert but she couldn't resist spiced plumb crumble with vanilla custard, or 'crème anglaise', as the menu put it. After coffee, and an aged malt whisky, which made Alex think of Tavis, they took a stroll along the beach before she used her iPhone app to call them a taxi.

"Tired?" he asked her on the way back to Sandbanks.

"Not at all," she replied. "I know the sea air is meant to make you sleepy, but it's not working on me. When I get back I was thinking of using your fancy music machine to play some stuff I brought with me."

"Only if you let me listen too," he replied.

Alex went to her room to collect her iPad and then to the living room where Nick was switching through the TV, spending seconds at a time on 24-hour rolling news channels and late-night tacky
game shows.

He pressed the red button to turn the TV off. "Jazz?" he asked.

"Not exactly," she said. "How do I work this thing?" trying to find where iPad fitted into the music system. Nick took the iPad from her and connected it wirelessly. Looking at the screen, he remarked "'Yeah, Yeah Yeahs', I don't know them but a bit of a 70's name. Are you sure?"

"Absolutely.
They are a band from New York started in two thousand and something which is why I feel some connection towards them. I've seen them in New York and at Glastonbury and I just love the music, I love the lyrics and if I was ever going to give lesbianism a try it would be with the singer Karen O, because she is sexy as hell, very clever and has cool to die for."

"OK, I'm hooked." he said, sitting on the sofa.

"Quite loud, but not too loud," said Alex, hitting the volume button on the remote control.

As the music started playing, she sat on the floor with her back to the edge of the sofa, just about within reaching distance of
him but not too close.

"Banking types might not like this sort of music," she said.

"Please don't stereotype me, Miss Anderson, we gave up wearing bowler hats in the city of London years ago."

She laughed at that comment, but as the music played her mood changed.

On the iPad, Nick opened the internet browser to look up the lyrics to the song that was playing. He Googled: "Runaway lyrics and meaning."

"Extremely painful to listen to," said one poster who decided the lyrics were about someone running away from a tragic loss but at the same time wanting to keep the person they had lost close to them.

He looked at the back of her head and knew that she was crying, just like the night before. One verse he translated as the story of her leaving New York for England on the ship. But what was she running away from and who was it that she wanted to keep?

He said nothing as the next track, ' Turn Into', played but did another internet search.

Nick knew what the words meant to her. She was girl who had somehow been dreadfully hurt in her past and what she heard in her head were nagging doubts that she would be hurt again. So she was keeping windows closed while longing to be like everyone else.

She wanted to 'turn into' anyone else, without
, apparently, the hurt that she had to cope with daily.

"Alex, this is fucking you!"
he said when he could resist no longer. "Why are you so scared of relationships, why do you keep people out and what the fuck did you run away from?"
Her shoulders shook but he persisted. She had thought, wrongly, that she'd had such a good day and that she had heard the songs so many times she would be able to get through them without crying.

"It says here that you want to keep people out. This is you Alex! This is fucking you! What has happened to you? And it says that you would like to tell someone about it. Then fucking tell
me."

She
turned around. She was now crying near uncontrollably and he hugged her and wiped away her tears with his hands.

"Alex, I am falling in love with you, please let me in. Tell me what you so desperately don't want anyone to know. If it's a man, he was a fool for letting you go, but this long after you are still missing him? I don't get it. And how comes you are still single after all this time?

"Or maybe, you are not single?" he said directly.

Alex looked at him, the tears still rolling down her beautiful face. "Nick, I am single and I like you a lot but I don't want a serious relationship, not with you or anyone."

He looked at her as confused as ever. Tavis had warned him off this girl because he was convinced she was not who she says she was. Maybe he was right to warn him off.

"Do you mind if I go to bed now? I'm so sorry."

"No, go Alex, but trust me, you are a wonderful, beautiful person with so much love to give and whether that's with me or anyone else I don't know. But please don't let your past rule your future."

She went to bed, saying nothing, leaving her iPad behind.

He played more songs from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and watched them perform at Glastonbury on YouTube. Somewhere in that huge crowd of four years ago would have been one Alex Anderson. The girl who so captivated him and whose mysterious past so puzzled him. Not for the first time he Googled 'Alex Anderson New York' but again he could find no Alex Anderson who matched.

He switched on his phone
and among other messages there were three from Katherine, asking whether he was in Sandbanks, what he was doing and why he hadn't been in touch. He stared at the phone for far longer than it took to read the message.

He then went upstairs with the iPad in his hand. He was convinced clues to her past lay in these songs and he was determined to listen to them over and over until he could make some sense of what might have happened to her.

But after listening to all the tracks several times over he could still only presume the obvious, that she was once desperately in love with someone who cheated on her, from which point, feeling so betrayed, she had been unable to enter a new relationship.

He couldn't sleep, listening to the music while resisting the temptation to spy into her past and present by checking what else the tablet might offer, such as her email.

He plugged the iPad into the mains and continued listening to the words of 'Runaway'. This was what he was she was playing on the way to England, he was sure.

He saw her sitting in the Crow's Nest of the ship, looking at the sea and listening to this music. Seven days of watching the rhythmic, hypnotic movement of the Atlantic would, she thought, help heal her pain. That's why she came here by ship and not by plane. Eventually, exhausted by the effort of thought, he drifted into a deep sleep.

It must have been four in the morning when he was awoken by several mentions of his name. At first he thought he was dreaming but on the fourth or fifth time he heard "Nick" he looked around.

The room was illuminated only by the iPad that was still on the bedside table next to him and he could see Alex standing beside his bed, naked.

"Can I come in?" she asked.

He pulled back the duvet hoping it wasn't a dream and she got in beside him. They huddled together and kissed excitedly before, rolling over and over, bound together and kissing passionately.

He fondled and squeezed her buttocks and lightly explored them. Eventually, with Alex on top, she took him inside of her and they thrust together in harmony looking accusingly into each other's eyes as they did so.