The Lie

I’m just about to respond when – “Surprise!” – Al leaps from the top step and lands next to Daisy. Still soaking from the pool, she wraps Daisy in a wet bear hug, and clamps a hand to her mouth. Daisy puts up a half-hearted fight to free herself, but she and Al both know it’s in jest. Al looks across at me, and smiles. “No arguing, you two. We’re on holiday, remember? Oh! Look at that gecko.”

“What gecko?” Leanne makes her way gingerly down the steps. She pulls the grey cardigan tighter around her shoulders but it doesn’t stop her shivering. “What are you two doing? We could hear you shouting from the pool.”

“Here.” Al crouches down on the ground and reaches out a hand to the creature. The gecko speeds away and zips under the bench.

“Leave it.” Daisy tugs at the black strap of Al’s swimsuit. “Let’s get some more wine and go back in the pool.”

“I’ve never seen one of those before.” Al peers intently under the bench.

“Al!” Daisy yanks her swimsuit again, but this time she’s swatted away.

“Not now, Dais.”

The playful expression on Daisy’s face vanishes, and she twists away, wrapping her arms around herself as she turns her back to us and looks out towards the lake.

“I’m going to get my camera. Come with me and grab a blanket.” Al stands up and gestures at Leanne, who’s still standing on the bottom step, staring at us through the darkness. “You look cold.”

“Yeah.” Leanne hesitates. She can sense tension between us and she’s torn between going after Al and staying to find out what’s happened.

“Come on,” Al urges, grabbing Leanne by the elbow and angling her up the stairs, “we’ll grab some more wine, too. I think the hotel manager’s still awake.”

Daisy doesn’t acknowledge Al and Leanne’s departure as they stumble up the steps and crash through the undergrowth. Instead she continues to stare out at the lake. I head for the steps too. Staying and arguing isn’t going to solve anything. We’re drunk, we’re tired and we need to sleep.

“Is this how it’s going to be?”

“Sorry?” I turn back.

“This. Is this how it’s going to be? You and Al making excuses not to spend time with me?”

It’s at times like this that I wonder how much more I can take. Daisy pushes and pushes and pushes, almost as though she’s deliberately stretching the boundaries of our friendship to see how much I’ll put up with. If I stay, she’ll berate me for being a walkover, for not standing up for myself; if I go, I prove her theory that everyone will eventually abandon her. It’s a catch-22 situation.

“Don’t look at me like you don’t know what I’m talking about, Emma. First you wander off when we’re all having fun round the fire, then Al shrugs me off when I ask her to go in the pool with me. And then there was our first night in Kathmandu when you and Al pretended to be jetlagged instead of carrying on drinking with me.”

“We were jetlagged.”

“You were laughing and drinking beer in your room. Why couldn’t you have done that in a bar with me?”

“Daisy, it was one can each, hardly a party. Come on.” I take a step towards her and put a hand on her shoulder. “You need to go to bed.”

“No.” She shrugs off my attempt to drape the blanket over her, swiping it away, knocking it to the ground. “I don’t want to go to sleep. I want another drink and I want to go back in the pool. Where’s my wine?”

She glances towards the bench. The bottle of wine is on the ground where I left it. The gecko has moved back out from under the bench and is a couple of centimetres from the wine bottle.

“I don’t think you need any more wine, Daisy.”

“Don’t tell me what I need.”

She pushes me out of the way and totters towards the bench. The gecko scuttles towards the wine bottle. Daisy slows her pace, inching forward on the toes of her cork wedges as though she’s taking care not to startle the creature. I keep expecting the gecko to zoom off as she approaches, but it doesn’t move. It grips the ground by the wine bottle with its suction-like feet, the only movement the back and forth motion of its eyes.

Daisy stops walking. She bends at the waist and reaches her right hand towards the wine bottle. Her left leg twitches, she steps forward, and she stamps the gecko into the ground with the sole of her wedged sandal. At the same time, she grasps the neck of the wine bottle and whips it into the air. She glances round at me, her expression victorious. “Got it!”

I stare at her in disbelief. She just stamped on the gecko. Deliberately. The pause, the leg twitch, the step. She didn’t need to do any of that to get the wine bottle. She was close enough just to grab it.

“What are you staring at me like that for?” She raises the bottle to her lips and takes a swig.

“You just stamped on the gecko.”

“Did I?” She hops on one leg and grabs her left ankle with her right hand. She hoiks it up for a closer look, squinting into the gloom, then promptly unbalances and has to grab the bench to stay upright. “Fuck.”

“Didn’t you see it? It was right next to the bottle.”

“Was it? I can’t see a thing in this light. Come on.” She loops her arm through mine. “Let’s go and see what the other two are up to.”

Chapter 9 (#ulink_61d3b589-3d5d-59b9-9a31-ccd97f56b211)

“You okay?” Al touches the back of my hand. “You didn’t come to breakfast.”

“I couldn’t find my tablets.”

We’re sitting on the back seat of the rusty, ramshackle bus that will take us to the base of the mountain so we can trek up to the retreat. It’s a lot more rickety than the bus that took us from Kathmandu to Pokhara but, according to Leanne, this journey will only take half an hour rather than a six-hour slog. I made it on the bus first and took a seat by the window, folding up my waterproof jacket to cover the springs poking through the ripped leather seat. Al, Leanne and a sunglasses-wearing Daisy filed on several minutes later. Al immediately tucked herself in next to me.

“Not your malaria tablets?”

“No, the anti-anxiety ones. I looked everywhere. I’m sure I packed them.”

“They’ll be in a side pocket, or something. Don’t worry, I’ll help you look once we get to Skanky Yaka, or whatever it’s called.”

“Cheers, Al.”

We lapse into hungover silence. We didn’t carry on drinking for long last night. When we returned to the patio, Leanne had already gone to bed, and, with no sign of the hotel manager, we only had Daisy’s half bottle of wine to drink between the three of us. By the time I dragged myself into the room I was sharing with Leanne, she was snoring softly.

I glance across the bus. Leanne’s laughing uproariously at something Daisy’s just said. She looks remarkably fresh-faced in her My Little Pony T-shirt and skinny jeans, while Daisy looks like she dragged herself out of bed and crawled into her clothes. She notices me staring and presses a hand to the side of her head.

“You as hungover as me?” she asks.

I nod. “I feel like hell.”

Satisfied with the response, she sits back in her seat and whispers something to Leanne, who glances at me and laughs.

I close my eyes to try and conjure up the memory of Daisy stamping on the gecko, but the images in my mind are blurred by my hangover and lack of sleep. If she couldn’t focus on me without her contact lenses in, and I was sitting across from her on the bench, how could she even have seen it? I’m misremembering what happened. I have to be. There’s no way she deliberately stamped on a living creature, not after the accusations her mum levelled at her when her sister died.

Al snorts with laugher beside me, and I open my eyes.

“I don’t suppose you got a photo of that gecko, did you?” she says. “I just remembered I was supposed to get my camera, but I was so obsessed with finding more booze I completely forgot about it.”

“No.” I shake my head. “No, I didn’t.”

“No worries.” She shrugs. “I’m sure we’ll see loads more.”