Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [28]
He’d told the course organisers that they’d done this before – apparently if you hadn’t had at least one session you couldn’t progress to the Eskimo Roll. He’d also told them that the two of them were planning to go whitewater kayaking in the Rockies that summer, on honeymoon, but he hadn’t shared that with Natalie.
She was talking to the hippo now. Typical Natalie – she’d make a friend wherever she was. She was one of those girls people wanted to be with – they wanted to tell her things. He remembered her at school, always in the thick of it in the playground. Not the leader, necessarily – they were often the ones who got into fights, and Natalie had never been bossy enough to be kingpin. Just popular. The kind who was always next to the birthday girl at the party.
Good at girlfriends. Lousy at boys.
Mark Johnstone popped, unwelcome, into his head. The first in a long line of lousy boyfriends. He and Natalie had ‘gone around’ the year of O-level options. This, from what Tom could gather, meant walking everywhere as though you were spot-welded together, hands clasped so that the simplest activity was almost impossible, and snogging anywhere and everywhere, with little regard for who might be eating a sandwich in the vicinity. She was so not fun that summer. She’d gone all grown-up. Funnily enough, it was one of the only times in his childhood that he could remember crying, other than with pain when he’d broken something, which he had with monotonous regularity. Leg, collarbone, wrist, other leg… Everything was changing and he hadn’t liked it. It was frightening. Now he supposed it had been about not wanting to grow up, but at the time he had thought it was about Natalie, and why she wouldn’t go bike-riding and den-building in the woods any more. His mum had caught him crying on his bed, when he’d thought no one else was around. Angry boy tears, snotty and aggressive. But he’d let her hold him. She told him that girls grew up faster than boys, and that girls changed in different ways from boys. She told him that the Natalie he loved would be back. Or, rather, that he would catch up with her, eventually.
He’d hated Mark Johnstone. Not because he was jealous – he knew now he hadn’t been capable of those kinds of feelings then – but because he had sucked all the fun out of Natalie while he was sucking her face off in the common room, and Tom had lost his best friend.
They’d stopped going around eventually, of course. Mark Johnstone told everyone that Natalie was a lousy kisser and wore huge knickers, but Susannah had told Tom that really they had broken up because he had tried to make Natalie put her hand down his trousers at the cinema and she hadn’t wanted to.
‘What are you laughing at? Is it me? In this wetsuit?’
Tom wiped his eyes. ‘No, of course not. I was just thinking about something, that’s all.’
‘Well, I’m thinking about D, and it’s not looking good for you, mate.’
In the end getting into the kayak was the tricky bit, even in the shallow end. By comparison the Eskimo Roll was a piece of cake.
And the best bit was that she was much better at it than Tom was. She was cautious, and more aware of her balance. Tom kept trying to go faster than anyone else and reaching out too far with his arms and the paddle, which tipped him over. He would roll under and come up splashing and spluttering, looking like a seal in shock.
Natalie was weak from laughing at him. ‘I can’t believe we only got to C before I whipped your arse at something! How fantastic! I can hardly wait to tell Rose… and Serena… and Rob… and Lucy.’
‘Tell anyone, and I’ll definitely take you pot-holing.’
‘P’s my letter!’
‘Worked it out, have you?’ That pleased him. Enough to soften the blow of being humiliated in the pool. Even the fat girl could stay afloat.
Anna
Anna picked up the willowy lilac Lladro figure and ran the cloth under it. She sighed. She had been dusting some of these objects for nearly forty years. Now there were lots more things, of course. Furniture and books, photographs and ornaments. She remembered when it had