Make or Break

‘You’re beautiful,’ Jimmy said, brushing my fringe off my face and kissing me delicately on the lips.

I lay next to him, smiling, naked and exhausted. It had been an energetic couple of hours. I was sweaty, hungry, thirsty and completely drunk on Jimmy. We kissed for a little longer, all the restraint we’d shown for the past few days cast off as we ran our hands over each other’s bodies. We could have stayed in bed for the rest of the day but I was starving. And Jimmy was craving hangover food. I jumped in the shower, smiling to myself, and then got dressed into some spare clothes I’d taken to the festival.

‘I’ve hidden some crisps at the very back of the cupboard with all the fancy china,’ Jimmy said from his sitting position in bed, a sheet covering his nakedness, as I sat on top of the covers, nodding. He’d had to hide his emergency snack food from clean-eating Diego and I’d told him that at home I kept my unhealthy treats on Dave’s shelf of the fridge so Pete wouldn’t know I ate Jaffa cakes and cheap eclairs from the Tesco Metro. ‘And there are marshmallows in an unmarked paper bag at the back of the liquor cabinet. And there might still be some ice cream hidden in the bottom of the freezer in a box labelled . . . you know what? It’s probably easier if I come up. It’s hidden everywhere.’

‘OK,’ I said, relieved. I’d already forgotten the location of the pretzels, the caramel waffles and something Afrikaans that sounded like ‘coke sisters’; I didn’t know if I was looking for a girl band CD, a food item or cocaine for ladies.

‘I should probably have a shower,’ Jimmy said, reaching for his shorts on the floor. ‘But that can wait—’

We were interrupted by the door banging open and Diego holding up a clutch of paper bags stamped with the name of a café, his eyebrows raised in the universal eyebrow-language of ‘look what I’ve got!’

‘—because there’s crescent shaped GLUTEN TO BE HAD!’ Jimmy shot out of bed, dragging the sheet with him.

‘Yoh! I don’t need to see that!’ Diego said, shielding his eyes from a flash of Jimmy’s nakedness. ‘And neither does our sweet girl here!’

From behind his hand shield, Diego’s brow lowered and his eyes flicked from me, looking innocently back at him, to Jimmy, struggling with a pair of shorts, his bare butt white in comparison to the tanned rest of him. Diego gave one final side-eye look of suspicion before turning on his heel and leaving the room.

I leapt off the bed and followed him up the stairs, while Jimmy hopped about on one foot trying to put on his shorts and panicking in case the gluten got eaten before he was dressed.

‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ Diego said, climbing the stairs on his toes, his smooth calf muscles tensing with each step. ‘But Jimmy gets very excited about gluten day.’

‘Diego is very pedantic about when gluten can enter the home. Fridays only,’ Jimmy said, catching up with us and trying to pass Diego, who was purposefully making his already large frame take up all the stairs.

After our heavenly gluten lunch of abundantly filled croissants followed by glazed handmade doughnuts, which Jimmy had devoured without uttering a single word, he and Diego sat at the kitchen island fighting over a crossword. Pamela pottered around the kitchen making bone broth, intermittently offering up possible answers, and I received a phone call from Pete.

I hopped off my stool, headed out onto the balcony and stood under the open brolly, sheltering from the rain. ‘Hello,’ I said coolly, catching Jimmy’s brief glance of curiosity.

‘I’m at the apartment, where are you?’ Pete said.

‘At a friend’s.’

‘What friend?’

‘Just a friend.’

‘Oh,’ he said, sounding put out. ‘When are you coming back? Soon?’

I looked inside through the open balcony door. Jimmy and Diego were stuck and Diego was googling. Jimmy was getting angry about the googling because googling is cheating. Diego was saying there was no disclaimer on the crossword that said it needed to be completed without Google. Jimmy was saying there should be and that it takes a while for society to catch up with all the corrections to laws the advance of technology necessitates. Diego was giving him a ‘you’re a dick’ look and they were embarking on an adult squabble over the pen. Pamela was walking past with a bunch of carrots, laughing.

‘No,’ I said down the phone with a smile. ‘No, I’m staying here.’

‘Staying where?’

‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning.’

‘But we fly out—’

‘I’ll be back after breakfast.’

I hung up, flicked the phone to silent and watched Diego and Pamela congratulate themselves for figuring out that seven down was ‘Guadeloupe’ and Jimmy sulk because googling was not ‘figuring it out’.

I trotted back inside and stood next to Jimmy. ‘Can I stay one more night?’ I said in his ear, while Diego read out the next clue.

Jimmy grinned and slipped an arm around my waist. ‘Of course you can,’ he said, his lips close to my ear making all the tiny hairs on my neck stand up. ‘I’ll get my shift covered at work.’

‘Seven down is fourteen letters for a 1974 comedy western and Google says it’s something called Blazing Saddles but I think it’s—’ Diego looked up and saw Jimmy and me mid-kiss. ‘Heeeeeeeeeeeeey?’ he said, making the word last as long as Django Unchained.

After the crossword was completed (illegally according to a huffy Jimmy) and Diego had been updated on the fact that Jimmy and I were now ‘people who kissed’, and we’d watched Diego immediately get on the phone to Ian and excitedly (and somewhat like a fourteen-year-old girl) update him that Jimmy and I were now ‘people who kissed’, we looked out at the rain. It was still very much an indoor day.

‘Movies and popcorn on the sofa?’ Jimmy asked, and I couldn’t have thought of a better way to spend a rainy afternoon.

Jimmy’s idea of movie-watching was to bring out three DVD box sets of 1960s TV series: Hogan’s Heroes, The Munsters and Get Smart. Their cardboard sleeves were tatty and well-used.

‘They’re hilarious!’ Jimmy said off the back of my downcast expression.

‘They’re ancient,’ I replied, looking at the back of The Munsters. ‘They’re over fifty years old!’

‘Timeless classics,’ he said, taking it out of my hands and loading it into the DVD player, which was also a relic to my mind. ‘You’ll see.’

‘They’re all his father’s favourite shows,’ Diego said, walking into the room with a gym bag and his keys dangling from his index finger. ‘They used to watch them at the weekend together when Ian and Jimmy were young. Jimmy watches them so he can feel close to his father even though the two of them are estranged.’

‘Would you stop psychoanalysing me?!’ Jimmy said, stalking back towards the sofa and taking his place next to me. ‘I don’t care how much Dr. Phil you watch, you’re a personal trainer, not a psychologist.’

‘You think I don’t need psychology to get those mafutas back on the treadmill after squeezing out four babies and then having their husbands run off with a younger model who is actually a model?’ Diego said, heading to the front door. ‘I psychologise all day, my bru, and you,’ he pointed an outstretched finger at Jimmy, ‘are a poy-key of problems.’

I turned to Jimmy, who was scowling and making a fist-grinding motion in his palm at Diego, who, with a wink in my direction, swished his lycra-clad, muscled butt out of the front door. ‘A poy-key?’

‘Yep,’ he said, turning his attention to the TV remote, his face still arranged in a glower. ‘P-O-T-J-I-E. It’s a cast iron pot you put over coals and cook curry in. It’s delicious.’ The anger seeped away from his features. ‘Diego has the best recipe for Cape Malay chicken.’ He paused to think. ‘Shall we do one tonight? I’ll ask Diego.’ He affected a scowl but his petulance was being superseded by affection. ‘When I decide to talk to him,’ he said as he typed out a text to Diego about potjie for dinner that night, his eyes gleaming.

Towards the late afternoon, after surprising myself by laughing my head off at a whole season of Get Smart, the rain cleared and in the subsequent calm Diego made his Cape Malay curry in the potjie on the beach while Ian, Jimmy and I took turns to pop back into the house to refresh our drinks. We sat in cream-coloured canvas deck chairs and ate curry from bowls on our laps, our bare feet in the damp sand. Ian brought candles and luxurious blankets outside after dinner and we sat in the fading light watching the sea and sky become similar shades of blue-grey and the diehard surfers paddle across the gentle swells in black wetsuits. When Jimmy went back inside to get a last round of drinks, Ian turned to me.

‘Jimmy really likes you,’ he said.

Diego looked up from packing up the potjie.

I smiled. ‘I really like him.’

‘Maybe you can convince him he needs to be back in England. Maybe you’re enough of a pull.’

I watched Diego put wet sand on the hot coals and thought about Pete and Annabelle and home. I wondered how SA-tanned, smiling Jimmy would fare back in brick-and-rain London. It would be like trying to plant a sunflower in rubble.

‘Things with me are complicated,’ I said.

Ian watched me for a moment then nodded, indicating he would speak no more on the subject.

At the end of the night, once we’d trekked our beach dinner kit back inside and were all heading to our beds, Ian turned to me once more.

‘You’re a very special girl,’ he said, pulling me into a hug. He smelt of Yves Saint Laurent and salt air. ‘I hope things . . .’ he glanced at Jimmy, who was watching us with a mixture of curiosity and fondness. ‘I hope things work out.’

I smiled. I’d known him, Diego and Jimmy for only ten days but for some reason in that time I’d relaxed into their lives like that was where I was supposed to be. Like they’d been waiting for me to come along and I’d fitted in perfectly, like ‘Guadeloupe’ in seven down.