Twisted Heart (2 page)

Holly hugged me in her black and gold Speedo wetsuit, glutes duly strengthened, corn-blonde hair hidden under a small white rubber helmet, a bold, black competitor number 85 stencilled in waterproof ink on to her upper arm.

‘You look different,’ she accused.

‘No – same old.’ I blushed as she held me at arms’ length.

‘Oh yeah, Tania – look at you! Skinnier, for a start – if that’s possible. And paler.’

‘I travelled between cities; I stayed out of the sun.’

‘Wow, I love that little red purse. Where did you buy it – Paris? How much did it cost?’ She didn’t wait for answers, just zapped through every item of my clothing from head to foot, wanting to know where I bought it, what size it was and not believing me when I told her European sizes were different than ours.

‘No way. Size six is a size ten – that’s gross!’

I smiled and shrugged. ‘I almost got my hair cut by a top London stylist.’

‘No way!’ she shrieked. ‘You’ve had beautiful long hair ever since I’ve known you. You can’t chop it off.’

‘So I didn’t,’ I pointed out. Me and long hair go together – something to hide behind, or to brush and style and occasionally be vain about, I guess. ‘So you’re ready?’ I asked, gesturing towards the gathering crowd of triathletes, a mix of toned guys and girls, all with stencilled numbers and swim goggles strapped around their white swimming caps.

‘This is a regional championship event.’ Holly put me in the picture. ‘No elite athletes are taking part, but Amos invited coaches from the national camps to take a look at the talent.’

‘Amos?’ I quizzed, without too much genuine interest. If I’m honest, I had one eye on the cars pulling into the lot, looking out for you know who.

‘Yes – Antony Amos,
the
Antony Amos!’

‘The movie director – yeah.’

‘Come on, Tania, pay attention. Amos is sponsoring this whole deal.’

‘I guess he can afford it.’ From the profits of his endless gore-fest movies. It was well known, mostly taken for granted in Bitterroot, that the locally born director was a money-making machine, which was how he’d come back home and spent gazillions setting up the New Dawn community – giving something back if you like.

‘Half the New Dawn kids here have entered the event,’ Holly went on. ‘They’re going to be tough to beat.’

‘Do they divide the guys and girl into two groups?’ Aaron looked concerned that his girlfriend was about to plunge into the lake with a hundred guys bulked up to the size of your average Super League player.

Meanwhile I was finally paying attention – not to Holly but to the dozen or so figures in wetsuits, numbers stencilled on their arms, strolling down from the row of log cabins set against the rocky hillside – a distance of maybe two hundred metres. Again, they were a mixture of boys and girls, and obviously residents of New Dawn.

‘Here come the juvies,’ Aaron muttered, looking even more worried.

‘Explorers,’ Holly corrected. ‘That’s the name they give them here.’

‘Yeah, everyone knows they’re kids in rehab, whatever fancy label they stick on them.’

Holly didn’t agree. She stared Aaron down. If she hadn’t been conserving her energy for the competition, she might have given him an even harder time.

The juvies, the explorers, the boot-camp/brat-camp residents of Antony Amos’s New Dawn log cabins – whatever you want to call them – approached the lake in their sleek wetsuits, bare armed and bare calved and, I had to admit, looking downright Neanderthal. That’s the reason they grabbed my attention.

Especially number 102. He came down the hill, between some tall junipers, out of the long shadows on to the beach. The top half of his wetsuit lay in folds around his waist, leaving his chest and shoulders exposed to the early morning sun. And, wow, I’m talking serious muscles. They bunched up around his neck and shoulders then smoothed out over his chest and abs in sleek, undulating curves. There was no body hair on view – did he wax? But the hair on his head was long and blond – kind of Viking. Anyway, primitive and strong was the overwhelming impression.

Then there was number 98. He was taller, more basketball than football, rangy and loose-limbed. His dark hair was cut short, his skin was mixed race, maybe more white than black in his family history but anyway beautiful. His wetsuit fitted like a second skin, and actually yeah, I admit I was looking at these guys like objects. Then again, I’d just spent part of my two-month escape to Europe in artists’ studios attending life classes, looking at naked bodies and trying and often failing to make the appropriate marks on paper and canvas.

Two girls followed through the trees, carrying their swimming caps and goggles in their hands. One wore her dark hair in two thick braids and looked scarily serious, like she didn’t ever smile. She scowled and didn’t make eye contact with anyone as she reached the crowded beach and gave off don’t-mess-with-me signals, which the other girl had to heed.

Her buddy wasn’t like the others, I noticed. She was more delicate and nervy. There was no strutting her stuff, no guard up against the curious stares of the Bitterroot crowd. I mean, we were all staring at the juvies and not necessarily in a friendly way, with a fair amount of suspicion in the ether.

‘Whose idea was it to make the event this big?’ Aaron sighed. ‘Why not limit entries to regular college kids?’

‘Because the New Dawn team want to push the envelope,’ Holly told him.

‘This is part of a new reintegration programme. From what I hear there’ll be a lot more so get used to it.’

‘I’m not … I didn’t mean it that way.’

‘I know you didn’t,’ I sympathized, preferring to think that Aaron was worried about sheer volume of entries, envisaging all the athletes sprinting together into the lake, jostling and shoulder-charging for the best starting point to give them the shortest distance to the finish line.

‘So where’s Orlando?’ Holly asked as she spotted Grace and Jude climbing out of his red Cherokee. She waved again and beckoned our buddies over.

‘On a plane somewhere …’

‘I thought you said he’d be here Friday.’

‘Yeah,’ I spoke over her. ‘That was the plan.’ And he wasn’t here, was he? All for the sake of three hundred dollars.

Just then my phone buzzed with a text message. Orlando. ‘He’s in the airport as we speak,’ I reported through gritted teeth as Jude and Grace joined us.

‘Look at you – you look so cool!’ were Grace’s first words. She looked like the old, pre-dark angel Grace – soft, fair-haired and curly with wide grey eyes, all over golden, as if evil had never touched her on Black Rock and there’d been no Ezra, no seduction, or any attempt to drag her on to the dark side and steal her soul. I can’t tell you how happy this made me feel.

Grace’s hug was gentle, her open smile told me how glad she was to see me back. Likewise Jude.

‘Where’s Orl—?’

‘Don’t ask,’ Holly warned.

‘So tell!’ she invited, her eyes still smiling.

‘Tell you what?’

‘How come you didn’t stay away until the year end? Was it Orlando? Did you miss him too much?’ Joined-at-the-hip, loved-up Grace obviously couldn’t imagine being apart from Jude for two days let alone two months and again I took this as a good thing, given what they’d been through at Black Eagle Lodge earlier this year.

‘Actually it’s my mom,’ I told her. ‘She’s in hospital for tests. The neurology department at Denver General – a brain scan, other stuff.’

‘Oh, Tania,’ Grace sighed, and she slipped her arm through mine.

‘No results yet, but I wanted to be home with them.’

‘Europe can wait,’ Jude agreed.

Gulping back my emotions, I switched topics. ‘I did have an awesome time, met some amazing people.’

‘Went shopping, bought some fabulous clothes,’ Holly added, quieter since I’d dropped in the news about my mom.

‘Visited the Louvre, saw the
Mona Lisa
. It’s so small – no bigger than this!’

‘So you’re still planning on being an artist?’ Grace asked as I sketched out a small rectangle in the air. We huddled together to let the stencilled competitors pass on their way to the starting point, skull caps on, goggles down, wading into the water.

‘Wish me luck.’ Holly took a deep breath. Her goggles made her look like a sexy aviator.

‘Go, girl! Good luck! Get out there and whup ass!’ we said non-ironically. We all really wanted her to win.

‘Right now I’m more into film,’ I told Grace. ‘The early experimental stuff – Andy Warhol, Gillian Wearing, Stefano Cagol.’

She looked at me like I was an alien. ‘Stop, my brain hurts.’

‘And this from the psychology major!’ We laughed and watched Holly step into the water with one hundred and twenty other competitors.

There was a whole heap of noise, a lot of splashing, high expectations. Beyond the swarm of swimmers at the lake’s edge was an expanse of calm, silvery water, broken only by an island in the middle of the lake – a low, misty green mound with pine trees surrounding a rocky peak – and way beyond that the dam that diverted Prayer River to allow this lake to form, so old and familiar it almost seemed part of the landscape. But it wasn’t. The twenty-metre barrier was built fifty years ago to a design by an engineer called Luke Turner. He created a lake where before there was only a river running through a valley, drowning ranches, pasture land, streets, hotels, houses – the entire frontier town of West Point – in order to provide water for Bitterroot.

Back when I was eight years old we had a school visit from one of the workers on the construction project – a really old guy who described in detail how they built the dam and flooded the valley, how they watched the water rise above barn rooftops until only a couple of church spires and the island with the pine trees were visible – nothing else. Church spires with crosses that you can still see in a dry summer when the water level drops.

Aged eight I spent a long time wondering what happened to the graves in the West Point churchyards. Did they dig them up and move the bodies before they let the water in?

I didn’t remember that until now, staring out at the smooth surface of the lake beyond the triathletes. Somehow it seemed connected with the water snake of my nightmare, the two-headed monster, even though there was no logical link, only the cold sensation on my skin, the fear of the murky depths beneath the silver surface.

But I love water, I reminded myself – the way it buoys you up when you lie on your back with Orlando and stare at the stars. Midnight swimmers.

And because water is the opposite of fire. ‘Nowhere to run!’ Zoran Brancusi had mocked me as I fled for my life through the smoke. Fire lights up the sky, turns the world to ash. A tree had exploded into flames above my head, the dark land had burned.

The yells and splashes at the water’s edge demanded that I shut out the past and concentrate on present time. Breathe, focus on the race, remember that Orlando was this very minute driving from the airport towards the lake. Be still, my beating heart.

‘Do you see Holly?’ Grace asked me. ‘Did she get a good position?’

Jude, Aaron and I all tried to pick out our girl in the mêlée. Aaron was the first to spot her black and gold suit. ‘See, over on the right-hand side.’ He explained to us her starting strategy. ‘She didn’t want to get stuck in the middle. She wanted to avoid the crowd.’

The mid-section contained many of the bulked-up New Dawn competitors, who were using their elbows and shouldering opponents aside to hold their position in the pack, so I thought Holly’s plan was a good one. ‘This is worse than football,’ I sighed, picking out numbers 102 and 98. ‘Does anyone ever get hurt?’

‘There’s an open-water survival technique,’ Aaron told us. ‘If you get behind a bunch of slow swimmers, you protect your face from getting kicked by swimming catch-up style with one arm braced out in front of you. But the best plan is to start on the outside the way Holly is doing, and work hard at the beginning to stay way out in front of the others. She’s been working on her surge power.’

‘You bet she has,’ Grace murmured. We all knew Holly and her will to win.

‘So when does it all begin?’ Jude wondered, looking around for a guy with a starter gun.

It wasn’t a gun but a klaxon, as it turned out.

A young guy came down the hill – a little older than the other New Dawners, but not by much – not more than twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. He was dressed in a white T and jeans, dusty hiking boots and a black Stetson. It struck me he was the only guy this side of a movie camera who could make a Stetson look cool, like he wore it to keep sun and rain off his face, not for any other reason.

I’ll take a little time here. He loped out from under the trees carrying the klaxon that would start the race, looking around the beach area with startling blue eyes that seemed to take in every detail. He observed, he waited for competitors to notice that he’d arrived. Only when he was happy that he had everyone’s attention did he set off across the pebble beach towards the edge of the lake.

‘Would you look at that!’ Grace said under her breath. We girls had long-term boyfriends – we weren’t meant to register our admiration of stranger hunks, not when one of those boyfriends stood next to us and the other was en route all the way from Dallas to join us.

But stare we did – at a guy who, come to think of it, could have stood
in front
of any movie-camera lens and passed the hunk test with his perfectly shaped jaw, full lips and columbine-blue eyes that would stop your heart dead. And the rest – long limbs, triangle torso, slim hips …

‘OK, so you all see the green chequered flag to the left of the island?’ Stetson guy asked the athletes. He didn’t have to raise his voice to make himself heard – he’d been spotted and the competitors had immediately fallen silent. They looked at the distant flag and nodded. ‘This is a one-and-a-half-kilometre swim,’ he reminded them. ‘You reach the flag, swim around it in an anticlockwise direction then head back here to the shore. Got it?’

The competitors nodded and fired themselves up for the start.

‘See the boats?’ our guy asked.

It looked like he was in sole charge. He pointed out two small boats, motors idling in an inlet about two hundred metres along the shore. ‘They’ll come and help out if they see anyone in trouble.’