Sun Damage Read online

  Sean wasn’t sure, but the name was familiar.

  I’d been smiling to show I was engaged. Now I picked up her book, a bestseller about two sisters growing up in war-torn Sudan, and asked her how she was finding it. I’d cried when I’d read it, but I’d seen the unbent spine and caught the fleeting upturned quiver of her nose so, before she could answer, said, ‘I gave up, too hard to get into.’

  ‘I know, right?’ She slipped off her espadrilles, getting comfortable.

  ‘I mean give me a good magazine any day.’

  She pulled out the copy of Vogue I’d already spotted in her bag. Tra-la.

  ‘Ooh,’ I said, as if it was an enormous bar of chocolate she’d produced, or a small puppy.

  I could feel Sean’s eyes on me, approving. He’d taught me how to do it, reflect a person back at them. People like others to be the same, for their lives to mirror theirs, and I was good at that. The more closely you align your interests or opinions, the more likely they are to trust you. The Chameleon Effect, he told me it was called, or Egocentric Anchoring. Human nature would be another term for it.

  When our order came, she ate like a woman who loved her food, cracking open claws, pulling at the flesh, sucking greedily at shells. She said no to the bread – some sort of intolerance – but she snaffled down the chips, chomped at the char-grilled chicken. ‘These prawns,’ she said, bringing a quiver of pale pink to her mouth, ‘are as good as the ones in Ibiza last summer.’ Her lips glistened. ‘Have you been?’

  ‘No, but I really want to,’ I said.

  ‘Oh my God, you must. Todd, my ex, and I had a ball. You’d love it. It’s just one long party.’

  The breeze dropped; the heat sank and turned to something solid like jelly. She changed into her bikini, using the cubicle out the back, and we took our coffees down to the beach. Sean persuaded her to take his sunbed and he sat between us, facing the sea, cross-legged under the parasol. She lay down before undoing her sarong, unfolding both sides like a fancy menu. Closing her eyes, she let out a small sigh. Her eyelashes were blue-black against her freckled skin. Her stomach was pale and curved. Sean leaned back and caught my eye. He was enjoying himself. It had begun to bug me how much he liked to get one over on a certain kind of woman. Revenge on the society mother who'd ignored him? Or on the fiancée who’d ditched him? Either way, he didn’t like women to be better than him. It was important, around Sean, to lay low.

  On Lulu, I was looping back and forth. I’d felt bad because she was a failed actor, and then OK again because it seemed like a hobby. She was loaded, that was obvious: even without parents who lived in Dubai ‘for tax’, I’d seen the price tag on the espadrille. I liked her appetite, the way she ate, her zest, but then she’d say something snooty about Essex girls or ‘the French’, and I’d think, you deserve what you get. I thumbed through her magazine: expensive clothes, and ridiculously strapped sandals – another world. It contained a free sample of face cream. I peeled it out of its metal foil. It smelt of hot plastic.

  As her energy dropped, she started moaning – about her mother, who was interfering, and her friend Boo, who was irritating; even her ex-boyfriend, Todd, who, to be honest, did sound quite the creep: ‘He was waiting outside the bar when I came out, to see if I needed a lift home, and I’m like “are you fucking kidding me?”.’ But none of it seemed to trouble her. As she droned on, with her eyes closed, I studied her un-creased face, just flickering, and found myself wondering what it must be like to be her, to live inside her skin. She had grown up loved, cosseted. And for some reason, in that moment, I felt a skewer of such intense curiosity, such a painful kind of longing to feel that for myself, I had to look away.

  The sun had lowered into a pinky haze on the horizon, the water melted to liquid silver, when the waiter came down with our bill. Brown seagulls were teasing the waves. Up at the bar, they were raking under the tables now, clearing and clattering, getting ready for the evening shift. Sean had started preparing our escape, and Lulu was leaning on her side, her elbow doing the heavy lifting, her eyes watching his mouth as he seeded thoughts of the following day: a plan to take a boat out to the islands, where we could find a quiet bay, swim, get away from the crowds. There was a lovely hotel with a restaurant, though stuck-in-the-mud little sis Ellie here wasn’t keen. His arms rose lazily to encompass the emptying beach, the pockmarked sand, and then paused in mid-air, as if welcoming the waiter into our midst.

  ‘My shout,’ he said, scrambling to his feet. ‘Definitely on me.’

  Lulu tried half-heartedly to protest. ‘No, no, I ate so much. I drank all that wine.’

  But Sean had ducked out from under the parasol and, reaching into the back pocket of his navy shorts, produced the CDG black leather holder he’d filched from the American student in Madrid. He handed his credit card to the waiter, then keyed in the number and stood back, entirely nonchalant.

  I watched him. He’d timed the mention of the boat trip just right; not actually inviting her, but leaving the possibility hanging that we’d meet again, that the relationship had a future. The bill he’d treated casually – hadn’t even checked the amount – and how deft his finger-work with the wallet: the way he flipped it open with the thumb of one hand, cursory, practised, as blasé with the contents as any arrogant hedge fund manager or whatever he’d told her he was.

  The waiter – the older one with a crucifix nestling in his salt and pepper chest hair – was having trouble. He apologised in French; Sean, unconcerned, told him it didn’t matter. The waiter tried a second time, and a third, and then, shaking his head, handed the card back.

  Sean tutted in frustration. ‘Damn. It’s got damp I think.’ He rubbed it on the side of his shorts and then looked at it closely. ‘I dunno.’ Flicking open the wallet. ‘The other’s Amex and I’m not sure that you . . . ?’

  I took up a handful of sand and let it run out through my fingers.

  The waiter shook his head.

  I breathed in slowly and pushed myself up. ‘I’ll go back to the room,’ I said. ‘Get my wallet.’

  Lulu stirred into life then. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Stay there,’ she said. ‘It’s fine. Let me.’ Finding her card in a dinky hessian purse (‘LOVE’ spelt out in silver beads), she slotted it into the machine. She didn’t even glance at the bill, still scrunched in Sean’s hand, with its itemised list of our day’s expenditure: the early morning grands crèmes and sunbeds, and ice creams, the aperitifs, the cocktails, the rosé, the food, les petits cafés.

  ‘Pay me back another time. Tomorrow.’

  ‘You’re a doll.’

  ‘Or,’ she began, ‘I don’t know if you’re doing anything later. I mean we could go back and shower and then . . .’

  ‘Sorry to be a wet blanket,’ I said. ‘John – you know we’ve promised?’

  He nodded slowly. ‘Damn.’

  I explained, underlining the weight of this previous commitment, about the aunt who lived up in the hills with whom we’d promised to have dinner. I was sorting my stuff while I talked, handing back the magazine, and her fancy lotion, not looking at her, not quite ready to see her disappointment. Sean was dusting the sand off his legs and shaking his hands through his hair. Lulu flapped her sarong out, rolled it and re-wrapped it, and then the three of us walked back up the beach, around the side of the bar, and to the road.

  Sainte-Cécile is on the far left of the French Riviera as you look at the map, a fair hike from St Tropez, not far from the fleshpots of Marseille. Which is not to say it doesn’t have its own grandeur. Monopoly villas scatter the dark green hillside above and rows of white yachts line the harbour, the occasional Russian oligarch holed up on the horizon in a vast gleaming cannister. We were around the headland from the main port, in the blue-collar, low-rent end of town. The hotels that lined the main drag, a dusty, utilitarian stretch, were mainly modern boxes with ragged outbuildings, though a few had palm trees and patches of grass, maybe even a fenced-off pool. I thought Lulu would head for one of thos
e, but she stayed with us – moaning again about that impending job of hers – until we reached the flat, unprepossessing entrance of La Belle Vue.

  ‘Oh, you’re here too?’ she said as we went through the sliding doors. The small reception area was sometimes unattended, but that evening a neat blonde young woman was sitting behind the desk. It was hot in the room and she was fanning herself with a Hertz car hire leaflet. ‘Were you also late to book?’ Lulu said. ‘I don’t know whether there is a convention in town, or whether it’s just the French’s absurd obsession with August, but when I tried there was just nothing.’

  It wasn’t good, her staying here. Too close for comfort. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’ I tried to speak softly. The receptionist, pausing her fanning, looked up.

  ‘I’m this way,’ Lulu said, pointing to a fire door on the right leading to a staircase.

  I gave her a careful, damp hug and turned to the back door. My skin felt sweaty and tight; in my head I was already crossing the courtyard towards the annexe and our quarters overlooking the car park. I would run a shower. It was all right. It was over. Our day on the beach was gratis. All expenses paid. The best kind of scam when the victim doesn’t even realise they’ve been scammed. Tomorrow, Lulu would find a note; a family crisis that meant we’d suddenly had to leave. By the time she read it, we’d be gone. On to the next place. We’d talked about Monte Carlo.

  But Sean hadn’t moved. One hand was propped against the wall, the other roaming beneath his T-shirt, massaging his chest, the pressure of his palms both efficient and sensual.

  ‘I mean, I don’t know what time we’ll be back tonight,’ he said. ‘But maybe if it’s not too late and you’re still up for it, we could have a nightcap?’

  ‘Oh. Well.’ She brought her hand to the back of her hair and twisted the clip, turning her hair into a fresh knot. ‘I’ll probably have supper at Raoul’s, so . . .’

  A couple of mosquitoes were floating up and down against the glass of the back door.

  ‘We’ll be lucky to escape from Aunt Marie,’ I said. ‘You know how she talks.’

  Sean still hadn’t looked at me. ‘I don’t suppose at her age she’ll be looking to pull an all-nighter.’

  I knew he had sexual encounters. Usually, he kept them discreet.

  ‘She doesn't live that close,’ I said. ‘A longer drive up into the hills than we always remember.’

  I was expecting him to step towards me then. He didn’t, and I felt fresh alarm. Was this a new form of punishment?

  I put my hand against the glass and pushed. The door swung open more easily than I expected, and I knocked over a pot of geraniums. The earth as it spilled looked like ants.

  I could hear them laughing as I bent to scoop it up.

  Chapter Two

  It’s possible you’ve heard of Sean. Full name: Sean Wheeler. He’s gained some notoriety, what with being in the papers. But, equally, maybe you haven’t. When someone has power over you, it’s easy to lose perspective, to think of them as a bigger deal than they are.

  We’d been together at that point for three years. The day we met, in Anjuna, a hippy hangout in Goa, I’d been at a low ebb. If it hadn’t been for him . . . I don’t know. That day was the beginning of something, or maybe the end. Whatever you want to say about him, I owed him a lot.

  Not to be self-pitying about it, but my childhood was a shit show. Fourteen addresses. Eleven schools. Not that I’m blaming the system; all those demons, they come from inside. You only have to look at my sister Molly, and how differently her life has worked out, to see that.

  Joy was in her early teens when she had us, and it was fine when her own mother was around to help. There’s a picture of the two of us in matching dresses and matching socks, matching bows in our hair. But our nan got cancer and after that Joy did her best, but it went wrong by degrees. There was weed and booze and different boyfriends, and one, Pete, liked her to stay over at his. In the end it was a neighbour who shopped her. Police broke down the door and we were taken away and bought toothbrushes in Superdrug – that’s what I remember anyway. I got to see my file once and it described mouse droppings and dog excrement in the bedroom, and how the neighbour pushed packets of biscuits through the letter box. Yet that’s not what sticks in my memory. I remember being in the park, pushing Molly on the swings and still being there as it got dark, keeping her busy scrubbing the little rocking pony things with a packet of wipes; a cardigan hanging on the climbing frame that smelt of someone else’s washing powder. And the sound of the planes at the emergency placement that first night; counting them in every three minutes, and worrying about Pete’s dog, and if he’d been taken away too.

  It was push-me pull-you after that. We’d have a few months ‘with Mum’, and urgent referrals and spates of temporary care. Foster families. Some with their own kids, some not. Different smells. Different food. Fish fingers. Dumplings. Rice’n’peas. You’d go to school thinking everything was normal and then be picked up at the end of the day by a woman you’d never seen, and taken somewhere else. There were review meetings and contact meetings and toasted sandwiches at Costa for dinner. I'm not sure we were always that clean – I remember trying to wash my shirt in the toilet after a girl told me I stank. I used to get into fights, defending Molly from kids in her class, and I got a note in my file that said I didn’t know how to deal with emotions, though I think maybe I was never given the chance to try. One thing you learn when you’re in the system – your version of events is only your opinion.

  Eventually, we were taken in by a couple in Hastings, who were open to the long term. It was a chance for a new start, our care worker said. We were lucky, she said, to be placed together. I wanted it to work, so I don’t know why I fought so hard to make it fail. The settee had a weird texture, like bristly velvet, and the seats were moulded so it only fitted three people. Usually none of them was me. It was a bungalow and it had windows you could only open at the top, like a freezer compartment in a fridge. Food was hard; I got it into my head I was being poisoned. And there were so many rules – at home, at the new school. I got in with a bad crowd, like the boys down at the arcades – though it was the good crowd that did for me: the girls with their lacy bras and their holidays in Tenerife who’d taunt you for wearing the wrong Nike trainers. It was one of them who persuaded me to break into a teacher’s house. Of course, they scarpered, leaving me to take the rap. The betrayal made you feel crackly inside, like you could start a fire, which was something I later did.

  Permanent breakdown, they call it. It all happens so quickly, when they want you gone. Molly stayed. She was calling Mrs Ormorod ‘Mum’ by then. Better off without me, that was their conclusion. I think it’s what hurt most of all, the feeling that, all the time when I thought I’d been protecting her, I’d been making her life worse. I still see her. We’re still in touch. But I think – well, I kind of know – that she’d rather we weren’t.

  Fairlight House, where I was sent next had a padded ‘quiet’ room and locks on the fridge, and all the house parents had training in how to restrain a child without being accused of sexual assault. I gave up on school and spent most of my time in town with the older kids, begging for cigarettes, getting into trouble with shopkeepers and security guards. I began to drink too much – it helped with the panic attacks and the loneliness, the last of which, frankly, was a bit unfair. I mean, I was never on my own. I was surrounded by people all the time. But then that’s psychology again. It’s a joke. I’d think, I want to go home. And then I’d think, where the fuck is home?

  At eighteen, I got a new social worker, Karen, who found me supported lodging for transitional care-leavers, basically a bedsit, and started trying to talk to me about vocational training. One day, she mentioned this charity in Nepal, and said I could get funding. She said it would be character-building, and I had this idea then that maybe I could really build a new character – you know, properly start again. But when I did get out there, I felt even more myself, more
of an outsider. The other volunteers, ‘off to uni’ in September, wanted to know where I’d gone to school, where I lived, to place me. For them, it was less about character-building – or even well-building – and more about full moon party nights and white-water rafting, and I’d soon had enough. I hitched a ride to Kathmandu and cut loose.

  For a couple of years, I scratched together a legitimate living. I’d get a bed in exchange for odd jobs – an eco-lodge in Siem Reap, a houseboat in Srinagar. But it was a tough, lonely existence. I began to develop a hatred for those backpackers and one night, after I’d seen a noisy group leave a restaurant without paying, I followed them, and later, nicked a wallet from one of their bags. I told myself it was only tit for tat. Even the richest of them, I’d noticed, weren’t averse to hiding market jewellery up their sleeve or swiping a bottle behind a barman’s back. I got more ingenious after that – as the months and then years passed. I pretended to be their friend, went from ‘borrowing money’ for a phone call to incorporating misdirection into an engineered situation where they’d ‘break’ or ‘lose’ something precious (‘look after this gold necklace while I have a quick swim’). They’d literally throw cash at me to ease their guilt. When I started dealing dodgy weed, I’d tell myself it was practically a public service – a load of travellers getting their kicks from nothing more damaging to their health than oregano. It made me feel I was getting my own back at the Nike-taunters at school. Anyway, what did it matter? I was only proving them right, being the low-life they’d thought I was all along.

  That day in Anjuna three years ago, I was running out of steam, down to my last rupees. A trick, one I now know as ‘The Flop’, when you engineer an accident involving a small vehicle – in this case a moped – had gone wrong. There’s a knack to it, like a footballer’s dive; the aim is to manoeuvre your body out of the way, but to use a prop, a bag or stick, to create impact, and your best acting skills to ape moderate injury. Cry or hold a limb at the right angle, and people nearly always pay you off – they’re in a hurry, or their insurance is dodgy – but in this case, I’d misjudged it. The guy was an arsehole, and I was sitting on the side of the road in the straggled outskirts of town, nursing not a generous pay-off, but a bleeding leg and a bruised ego, when I saw a man in a polo shirt leaning against a tree. He crossed over and produced a tube of antiseptic cream from his cross-body canvas holdall. We got talking, and he ended up buying me a vegetable roti in one of the shacks that lined the main drag. He was older, but handsome – the sort of looks that made you think you were the only one who’d noticed – but when he brought out his wallet to pay, I saw the photograph of a blonde. I’d had a few bad experiences with married men and, as soon as I’d eaten, I cut and run, taking the exit that led under a tarpaulin straight from the toilet to the street.