insane, but I looked away and giggled. Somewhere in the back of my mind, London Tess gave me a disgusted look. But I liked Al. He reminded me of my granddad. He reminded me of everyone’s granddad. And he just seemed so nice.
‘Do you live nearby?’ I asked, slipping my feet out of my leather flip-flops and wiggling my toes until they had disappeared into the sand. ‘It’s so gorgeous here.’
‘I do,’ he said, pointing over at a little cabin a way down the beach. ‘That’s me. Just in the summer, though. The wife never likes to be away from the city in the winter.’
The cabin looked too tiny for anyone to live in it, let alone two people. ‘You’re married?’
‘Was,’ he clarified. ‘I lost Jane two years ago. Still not very good at remembering she’s not here any more.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ I winced. Hurrah! Another awkward conversation! ‘Were you married for a long time?’
‘Thank you. We were married fifty years,’ Al replied, clearly used to fielding condolences. ‘I do miss the old girl, but she’s in a better place now. No one wants to drag these things out, do they?’
‘They don’t,’ I agreed readily. Amy and I had a reciprocal pull-the-plug-pact that I secretly worried I would never be able to see through. I was not concerned about her ability to make the same tough decision. ‘So you’re retired now?’
‘Semi.’ He shook the misty look out of his eyes and wiggled his bare toes at the sea. ‘I was doing something I loved and then I was asked to stop doing it. Now I’m not sure what to do with myself.’
‘I understand completely,’ I nodded, not wanting to ask unwelcome questions and make him feel awkward.
‘So is there a Mr Vanessa?’ Al asked in classic elderly-relative style. ‘A paramour back at home?’
‘It’s a bit of a long story.’ I heard my voice break ever so slightly and pressed my fingernails into my palm to distract myself. ‘But to make a long story short, no, there is not.’
Al nodded gravely, his baseball cap bobbing up and down. ‘Ahh, to suffer the slings and arrows of young love again.’
My spluttering laugh squeezed out a lone tear that I wiped away quickly before Al could see. ‘Quite.’
‘These things all work themselves out when you’re young,’ he said, smiling gently. ‘Tell me more about these photos of yours. Have you been doing it long? Must be a bit of a big shot if you’re taking pictures for this fashion magazine.’
‘That’s actually an even longer story than the boy nonsense,’ I said, slipping the camera strap back around my neck and hoping that the longer I wore it, the more I would feel like a real photographer. ‘I used to do quite a bit of photography stuff, then I did something else for a while, but I lost my job so now I’m back into it.’
‘I’m glad you found your way back,’ he said. ‘You looked so happy when you were taking those pictures, like you were in another place.’
‘Just concentrating,’ I laughed, oddly unable to accept the compliment. Usually I rolled around in professional praise like a pig in shit. ‘Just trying to get it right.’
‘Trust me –’ Al tapped me on my uninjured knee – ‘when you get to my age, you can tell these things. I know when someone’s got a passion for something. You were a million miles away.’
‘I suppose I was,’ I said, looking down at the camera. She gazed back up at me with love. Maybe this was meant to be. Or maybe Al was a crazy old beach bum who didn’t have a blind clue what he was talking about.
‘Don’t waste time worrying about the things you don’t have,’ he went on, imparting his pensioner wisdom. ‘This is what you should be doing.’
‘I hope you’re right.’ I unconsciously stroked the camera case and looked at Al. He was nodding sagely.
‘I always am,’ he said, hopping to his feet far faster and with more grace than I ever could and holding out his hand again. ‘Well, I have places to be, things to do. What a pleasure it was to meet you, Vanessa.’
‘And you, Al,’ I said, sad to see him go. ‘Thank you for being so kind about my pictures.’
‘Just honest,’ he corrected me as he took off in a jog. An actual jog. ‘Hope to see you again.’
‘Maybe I’ll jog back to the cottage,’ I murmured, turning to look at the mile or so I’d wandered in the past couple of hours. Hmm. Maybe I’d just have a lovely walk.
The walk back to the cottage might not have helped me look any better in my bikini, but it did give me time to think and develop a little bit more confidence in my photos. So far I hadn’t quite managed to cock up entirely, but I wasn’t doing terribly well with my double identity. I was still very much Tess, and, as I’d established, Tess was not working for me. I needed to work on Brand Vanessa. Obviously my Vanessa wasn’t going to be quite the same as the original, but there was definitely some room for improvement on my previous personality. Settling down at the desk, I pulled a pad of thick white paper and a couple of coloured markers out of the drawer. Coloured markers made everything better. I drew a thick black line down the middle of the page, and on one side, at the top, I wrote ‘TESS’, and on the other ‘VANESSA’.
‘Right – work mode,’ I whispered, shifting around to edge the last remaining grains of sand out of my bikini bottoms. ‘What is Brand Tess?’
Taking the cap off my green pen, I started with words I was sure of. Loyal, honest, dedicated, hardworking, a good friend, quite funny, relatively clever. Genuine. I stopped. I had run out of steam worryingly quickly. Looking at the list over and over, I began to wonder, was I a good friend? Amy and I had been besties since before we were born, and, yes, I had plenty of work buddies, but how many other genuine friends did I have other than shithead Charlie? Who was I forgetting? My sisters were hardly beating the door down to hang out with me. With gritted teeth I added some more words to the list that I didn’t like nearly as much. Shy. Walkover. Lazy. Boring.
I sort of knew I was boring. Amy might not have had a steady job in ten years, but she was always trying something new or going off on an adventure. Before this, the furthest my passport had taken me in the past two years was on a work trip to Brussels, and I’d spent most of the time throwing up after some dodgy moules frites. And I’d only had the moules frites because someone had made me. That was the old Tess Brookes, someone who thought eating shellfish and chips was a wild night out. The girl who had been waiting for her best friend to fall in love with her and kick-start her life. But my life didn’t need kick-starting; it needed a crash cart and a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart à la Mia Wallace. By coming to Hawaii and pretending to be Vanessa, I’d effectively Pulp Fiction-ed my own existence. But what now?
I had to change. I couldn’t sit through another meal blushing at Nick Miller and start sobbing on the beach every time a complete stranger even hinted towards a romantic interest back at home. If Tess was boring and lazy and cowardly, what was Vanessa? I took the lid off the red pen.
Bitch. Slut. Selfish. Mean. Gorgeous. Lazy.
Well, what do you know – we had something in common: we were both lazy mares.
‘Not that I would mind adding slut to my column as well,’ I told the empty room. The empty room was sympathetic.
Not only had sleeping with Charlie been the worst idea since Amy had tried to make toast at university by ironing a loaf of Kingsmill, but it had also reminded me that my ladyparts didn’t exist exclusively to cause me agony once a month and keep hot-water bottle companies in business. I had the raging horn and there was nothing I could do about it. Well, there was quite literally one