of the yacht as it sailed through remote island chains, wondering what was happening on board, who Kitty was spending her time with. Eventually, with her head too full of images, she stopped reading the emails. Stopped thinking about Kitty.
Now a beautiful memory gusts into her thoughts, bright as a kite. She and Kitty, eleven years old, sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor plaiting friendship bracelets. ‘This is yours,’ Kitty had said, holding up a slim cotton bracelet woven with turquoise and yellow threads – Lana’s favourite colours. Kitty tied it firmly over Lana’s wrist, using her teeth to get the knot in exactly the right position. When Kitty pulled away, there was a small smear of strawberry lipgloss on the back of Lana’s wrist.
In return Lana had plaited a pink and white bracelet for Kitty, and the two of them had held their wrists side by side and made the promise, ‘Friends for ever.’
Lana had worn her bracelet for eighteen months, until it had faded and frayed to a dishwater-grey. It had eventually snapped in the bath, so she’d hooked it out and dried it over the towel rail. Then she’d put it away in her memory box with the photo of her mother.
Friends for ever, they’d agreed.
A guilty heat crawls across Lana’s skin as she thinks of that failed promise: she’s cut Kitty out of her life, like slicing a bowline and letting a boat drift out to the open ocean.
*
Lana waits desperately for another news bulletin. She needs to hear exactly what’s happening out on the water – whether the crew have made it to the life raft, whether any of them is injured – but the radio station is playing a soft rock song that comes strumming into her apartment. She paces to the windowsill and snaps off the radio.
She stays by the open window. Outside, the morning light is thin and hazy, a salt breeze drifting into the room. She pushes up onto her tiptoes, peering beyond the treeline to where she can glimpse the sea. It’s one of the reasons she agreed to rent the apartment with its cracked wooden floorboards and noisy electric heaters that she has to huddle against in the depths of the New Zealand winter to feel any warmth.
Now that summer is on its way, she’s grateful for the wide windows that let the light flood in, as she sets up her easel in front of them so she can paint before work. She’s made a life of sorts here: she has a job, a place to live, an old car. Her days may not be filled with friends and laughter and noise as they once were, but perhaps it’s better this way.
Sometimes she thinks of her father back in England in his tired terraced house, spending his evenings alone doing the crossword or watching the news. After all those years of riling against his quiet routines, the irony of how her life has taken on the same lonely rhythm as his hasn’t escaped her. She writes to him every couple of months – just brief letters to reassure him that she’s safe – but she never includes her address. She’s still not ready for that.
Lana arrived in New Zealand eight months ago now, stepping from the plane into the start of autumn, shivering in a sun-bleached cotton dress, her salt-matted hair loose over her shoulders. She’d had a backpack on her shoulders and $500 left of her savings.
She’d spent that first night in an Auckland hostel, lying on a bunk with her eyes closed, waiting to feel it sway and shudder. If someone had walked into her dorm, laid a hand on her shoulder and asked, Are you okay? Has something happened? she would have told them – told them everything; about the canvas backpack thrown from the side of the yacht, drifting in the sea like a body; about how a horizon curves and wavers when there is no land to break it; about the red sarong pooled on the floor of the cabin, soft beneath Lana’s feet; about a kiss in a cave carved from limestone; about how you can look at your best friend and no longer recognize her. But no one had asked. And, as the minutes had crept into hours, and the hours stretched through the night, Lana had pushed down each of those memories, sealing them off.
When dawn had arrived, she’d showered the salt from her skin, letting the water run long and hard, marvelling at its seemingly endless supply. Then she’d pulled on her dress, followed by her backpack, and started to walk. The rubber V of her flip-flops rubbed between her toes; she’d been barefoot for weeks. She’d stopped at a sidewalk café and ordered breakfast and a coffee. As she’d wolfed down a salty bacon-and-egg bagel, a car had pulled up with a surfboard strapped to its roof and a handwritten sign taped to the back window, reading, ‘For sale. $500.’ Lana had got up from her table and asked the car’s owner, a young Spanish guy whose visa was expiring in two days’ time, if he’d take $300. He said if she dropped him at the airport first she had a deal.
Afterwards, she’d driven north with no map, no plan, and no one sitting beside her. It had been odd to be behind the wheel of a car after so long and she kept over-steering into bends, having grown accustomed to the yacht’s helm. The speed and smoothness of road travel unnerved her so much that she’d wound down all the windows to feel the wind against her face.
On that first drive across New Zealand, she’d passed serene dark lakes, endless undulating vineyards and staggering hillsides, eventually arriving at the coast. That’s where she’d pulled up – on a gravel track that overlooked a bay. She’d parked facing the sea and watched as the waves rolled in, beaching themselves on the shore. When the sun had lowered itself into the sea, she’d climbed onto the back seat, pulled out her sleeping bag from the bottom of her backpack and wriggled into it, lying with her neck cricked against the door.
If anyone had asked, Why New Zealand? she could have told them that she’d always wanted to travel here – but that would only have been part of the story.
The truth was, Lana had always known that the yacht was going to return here eventually – just as she’d known that New Zealand was where he was from. Perhaps she’d been waiting all these months because, no matter how hard she tried to forget, she still wasn’t ready to let go of The Blue.
Lana found the sketchbook tucked at the back of the stall between bags of cashew nuts and a stack of sun hats. She eased it from the shelf and wiped the film of dust from its cover. The pages were thinner than she’d have liked, but at least they were a bright, crisp white. She took it to the counter where a Filipino boy with crooked front teeth grinned as he searched for the price.
‘Artist?’ he asked.
She was about to answer, No, when on a whim, she smiled and said, ‘Yes. Artist.’ Why the hell not? She was travelling; no one – except Kitty – knew her over here. She could be whoever she wanted to be.
She left the shade of the stall with the sketchbook under her arm. The streets were busy, the heat of the day stored in the roads which seemed to radiate warmth and dust. Her thick amber hair was piled up in a loose knot, and she used the back of her arm to wipe away the sheen of sweat on her forehead. The heat in the Philippines was like a wall, unmovable and solid, both day and night.
She wove through the crowds, skirting a man who stood in the centre of the pavement wafting a straw fan over the embers of a grill. A smoky charred aroma rose into the air.
Beyond him, a diesel generator whirred outside a stall and she felt the heat kicked out from its exhaust against her bare legs. She dodged two crates of glass bottles stacked on the pavement, then navigated a map of cracks and gouges in the concrete. She was a little disappointed with the stalls, having imagined trailing through them and discovering quirky print dresses or interesting handmade jewellery – but most of the stalls sold the same range of bland T-shirts and sarongs.
On the opposite side of the street a young Filipino boy padded along carrying a cockerel, a dog trotting behind him with a coconut husk in its mouth. Beyond the boy she saw Kitty standing in the queue for