if you drop it in the water, that’s the third one this year.’
‘I paid for it,’ he said through a rigid jaw, ‘and if I do drop it, which I won’t, I’ll pay for a new one.’
‘It’s just, it’s the waste?’
Heath reached for another bottle, the eye tattoo winking with the flex of his bicep, and uncapped it with his teeth. Four beers down and it was still too early to tell whether drinking would make him relax around Izzy or stoke his irritation with her. Either way, he was too busy to be interrupted: on the Instagram phase of his nightly cycle through Cat’s social media accounts. He’d already done Twitter and Facebook, and after Instagram, would have to work his way through what he thought of as the associated accounts, the people she called her friends, and the ‘man’ she called her husband. The associated accounts were in some ways more revealing than Cat’s own, as a friend might catch her dropping her guard, exposing the misery behind her heavily filtered life. When it happened, he could go to her. She could only pretend for so long, even to herself, to be totally jazzed about this life Ed had given her, this life of farmers’ markets, group holidays in Provençal gîtes, charity fundraisers, and strawberries and cream at Centre Court, and fucking golfing holidays.
It was a low-activity evening: Cat had liked a couple of things but hadn’t posted herself. If he was lucky he’d only have to go through the cycle once and he’d be done in under two hours.
‘Oh, why d’you have to—’ began Izzy, but the tablet pinged with a notification, and this time Heath snatched it away from her outstretched hand. A new post, a touching attempt at an arty selfie. She was in the garden, aureole around silhouette on the back wall of the Grange, the tumbling violet moor an invitation, an unmade bed laid out behind her. Heath felt the usual sick stirring deep under his belly. He shifted position, hiding himself under the bubbles in case Izzy thought it was for her, then returned to his study of Cat. Why had she kept her face in shadow? Had she been crying? Tears made most women ugly, but when Cat cried her face bloomed pink and white.
Izzy stopped mouth-breathing on the back of Heath’s neck and appeared in front of him. Christ, she was all done up for seduction. Her hair described the barrel of a curling tong, and she was dressed in an awful chiffon kimono thing she called cruise wear. It was supposed to be floaty and seductive, but it was covered in sequins and getting close to her felt like pressing up against a rose bush.
Another ping. Ed had just made his annual Instagram post. Heath was on it in seconds. It seemed that Ed was doing a life-drawing class in the Scottish borders as part of a stag weekend. The charcoal sketch was crap and the woman they were drawing wasn’t even attractive.
It meant, though, that Cat was on her own at the Grange for the first time in ages. He could be there in forty minutes. Pulse hammering, he got out of the tub just as Izzy sank into the bubbles.
‘You can have it to yerself,’ he said, heaving himself over the edge. He dried himself roughly on a towel, pulled on a tracksuit, took a bottle of Laurent Perrier from the drinks fridge, wrapped it in a towel, and threw it into his sports bag.
‘Where are you going? It’s nearly nine o’clock.’
‘Gym,’ he said. Izzy looked at the green bottles lined up on the edge of the hot tub, but she had learned, at last, not to challenge him.
His feet found their path in the divots and tufts they’d walked for as long as he could remember. He could’ve run the route from the Heights to the Grange in ten minutes, but he didn’t want the champagne to fizz, and anyway, he needed to clear his head and think about how he would say it. Below and to the west was the first estate he’d ever built, shoebox houses whose tiny gardens were mocked by the moor. In front of him, the dipping midsummer sun made a thin gold thread on the horizon. A single dazzling bead shone through a hole in the rocky crag that marked the midpoint between her house and his. He’d kissed her for the first time at the foot of those rocks, when they were both fourteen, kissed her, and that was as far as it had gone, the wanting getting worse over the years, and the conversation grinding in ever-decreasing circles. It had taken him years to realise they were all excuses.
‘Foster siblings still count,’ she’d said at first.
‘Don’t be daft. There’s no law against it.’
‘In the eyes of society, though.’ Since when did she care about society? Though they’d been raised under the same roof, she was not his sister; he was her possessor, not her protector, and they both knew it. Whatever they had, it was something thicker than blood.
Then, as they got older: ‘It would destroy our friendship, Heath, can’t you see that?’
‘Let it!’ he’d roared. ‘Let it … smash this misshapen thing and put it back together a new way, the right way.’
Her head had gone into her hands. ‘Will you listen to yourself? Smashing, misshapen. You’re so bloody intense. It was all right when we were kids, but you can’t want to carry on like this for ever.’
It was all he did want. He couldn’t remember a time he hadn’t wanted it, from the inseparability of their childhood to the present physical ache for her that was so constant he wore it like an extra body part.
‘I mean, come on,’ she’d laughed. ‘Can you honestly see us pushing a trolley around Waitrose together, going to parents’ evening?’
‘Waitrose?’ This was coming out of nowhere.
‘I suppose not. The rate you’re going, we’ll be lucky to afford Morrisons.’
He’d been horrified. ‘This is about money?’ She knew he was struggling, but he’d never thought it mattered to her. To his shame, tears pricked his eyes and made a stone in his throat. He turned his face away.
‘No. Or – not only. It’s about – a kind of life I want.’
‘A life you think you want.’
She’d rolled her eyes. ‘This is exactly what I’m talking about! You don’t know me as well as you think you do.’
‘I know you better than you know yourself.’
But it had niggled at him for months afterwards, and because she seemed to believe that she meant it, he’d gone off to prove himself, starting as a labourer and going in with a mate, flipping properties from Salford to Harrogate. He’d worked on himself, too: got strong and lean. And while he was watching the money stack up, picturing her face the day he walked back into Cat’s life, Ed had stepped in, all breeding and family money and red chinos – and she’d fallen for it. The image of them together, of Ed’s hands on Cat’s skin, was a film Heath couldn’t stop watching even when he closed his eyes. The sick knot of desire inside him, deep and low, tightened like the balling of a fist.
Heath approached the Grange from the back, took their old path along the side of the house, stopping at the window where he and Cat had spied on Ed and Izzy a lifetime ago, taken the piss out of their wooden toys and their side partings. How had they gone from that to this? He leaned against the stone lintel and closed his eyes, not against the memory, but the present. His longing was so powerful that he could almost smell her.
He opened his eyes to see Cat on the other side of the glass, looking past him, out onto the moor. He took a beat to savour how she looked when she didn’t know she was being watched. Her hair was a mess
