Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [21]
She stared at him as if he were mad. ‘I can honestly say I’ve never thought about it at all before about seven o’clock this evening. And now that I am thinking about it, I’m bloody terrified.’
‘That’s the point, Nat. You’ve got to feel the fear and do it anyway.’
‘Shut up. You sound like some stupid self-help book.’
‘And you sound like a big girl’s blouse.’
‘Are you trying to goad me into doing it?’
‘I promise I’m not. You don’t wanna do it, you don’t do it. You won’t hear about it from me.’ His face was suddenly serious.
And Natalie felt a little bit safer. That was okay, then. She didn’t have to do it.
She awoke, feeling like a sixty-year-old, after an incredibly uncomfortable night. Every time Tom had moved above her, the slats of the rickety bunk had creaked alarmingly. She hated sleeping-bags – you couldn’t spread yourself out in them. But she didn’t moan. She ate the condemned man’s breakfast in silence, while Tom chatted away animatedly to the fleece family. He was good at that: he could talk to anyone. She tried to imagine Simon in the bunkhouse. He wouldn’t have stayed, of course, but if he had… He would have been terribly rude and funny about the other people there. About their clothes, their fresh-faced enthusiasm and their accents. Funny, but cruel.
They saw the viaduct about a quarter of a mile away, and it got taller and taller as they drove towards it in the instructor’s grubby Land Rover. Clive, one of the young guys escorting them who, rather like policemen, these days, looked un feasibly youthful, told them it was about a hundred feet high, but he was clearly lying – it was at least a thousand. The guys, completely blasé about the task ahead, started tying their knots and arranging their ropes. It still didn’t feel real to Natalie. She wasn’t that sort of girl – she didn’t do things like this.
‘Isn’t there supposed to be a wall or something for your feet?’ she asked Clive. ‘Nah!’ He smirked. ‘This way’s much more fun. Trust me. Just you and the rope and the air. Best feeling in the world.’ She doubted that. A wall would have been better. ‘This is typical of you,’ she spat at Tom, who was climbing into his harness.
‘How?’
‘Remember that diving-board?’
Natalie had been eleven. It was one of those endless hot summers that didn’t seem to happen any more, the kind where all the grass goes beige and parents sit around drinking in the evenings and forget to put you to bed. Susannah, Bridget and Natalie had gone swimming. Mum hadn’t – she wanted to be in the garden, she said, not in some noisy, sweaty, cacophonous indoor pool that stank of chlorine and hormones. They’d been allowed to take their bikes, and Suze had packed a rucksack with some drinks and crisps in it. Bridget kept calling it an adventure, and Suze kept telling her to shut up. Her idea of an adventure was a little less tame.
On the way down the road they’d seen Tom and Genevieve, sitting listlessly on the long low wall at the front of their house – Patrick had been at Scout camp in Dorset – and they’d shouted at them to catch them up.
And Tom had made her go off the five-metre diving-board. He’d dared and goaded and practically bullied her into it.
‘Bloody hell, Nat. You certainly know how to bear a grudge.’
‘I remember it as if it were yesterday.’
‘But it wasn’t. It was 1977, or something ridiculous. I hadn’t remembered it at all until just now. In fact, even now you’ve said it, I barely remember it.’
‘That’s because you weren’t the one who did a belly-flop – which was agony, incidentally – and who lost their bikini top.’
Tom laughed. ‘Did you? Really?’ He scratched his head. ‘You can’t have had much worth looking at – I’d have remembered if you had!’
‘I had… something worth looking at. But that’s not the point. It isn’t funny!’
‘Look. This is different. You’re fully dressed, aren’t you? You’d have to go some to expose yourself doing this.’ He pulled on the harness, which was tight round both thighs and his middle.
‘It isn’t different. It’s about you making me do things I don’t want to do – that I’m not