Chapter 22 - The Island

Bonfires, Fairy Wings, Marijuana Butter, a Van.

Erik and Rhia were Caleb’s idea of the dream couple, the ones he wanted us to aspire to. That was how they were sold to me, and I let myself believe it for a while, because I wanted at least one set of these people to be what they claimed.

They weren’t like the others. Erik and Rhia ran a wellness business up in the hills, some blend of bodywork and breath and movement they spoke about as a calling rather than a job. They laid their hands on people for a living and called it healing, and people paid for it and left glowing. They talked about the body as a temple, about energy the way other people talk about weather, about alignment as though they meant something far larger than the spine. They were, by their own account, not a couple with clients but a couple with a vision and a gift. I have thought since that there is almost no appetite a human being cannot dignify with the right philosophy, the way there is almost no chair so hard it cannot be made bearable with the right cushion, and Erik and Rhia were the most highly evolved specimens of the art I ever met. They lived on a property with bees and a garden and a dome tent where they held ayahuasca ceremonies, they went to Burning Man, and they spoke of desire as a sacrament and love as a thing one was not meant to hoard. This was the version Caleb had been reaching for all along. Not the tacky one, in a gritty club on an industrial estate. The enlightened one, with a philosophy bolted on, so that what we were doing could be growth instead of what it was.

Getting there was an expedition. The island was three and a half hours away, we needed sitters for two nights, and the festival tickets cost more than I let myself think about. We took my work van, the white one I use for styling jobs, and threw a mattress in the back so we could sleep in it. We started drinking on the drive down, both of us, and by the time we were an hour out Caleb was in the very best of his moods, laughing and singing, music up, windows down. To him this was a holiday. Sun, an island, a wild festival, our kind of people at last. I had packed a bikini and a sarong, which is the international uniform of a woman who thinks she is going to the beach, and it tells you the calibre of intelligence I brought to the weekend. I was drinking because I was nervous, which is a different reason to be drinking, and the two of us in that van, one singing and one steadying her hands around a bottle, tells you exactly where each of us stood before we had even arrived.

Erik met us practically at a run. He came at us hopping foot to foot, near enough prancing with excitement, bare-chested under a waistcoat, in a pair of ridiculous furry trousers and a top hat with something glittering in the band, wearing the most sustained expression of delight I have ever watched a grown man hold. He looked like a cross between Willy Wonka and Mr Tumnus, a faun who had done well for himself. He called us dear friends and gorgeous ones, folded us into long hugs, and told us the weekend was going to be magic, and he said magic the way other men say I’ve booked us a table, as a service he personally provided. In his messages he had called me divine, and goddess, beautiful soul, every line dusted with sugar, and in the flesh it was the same, only more. There was something about him I couldn’t place and still can’t, magnetic and just faintly off, as though somewhere in him a wire didn’t quite connect, and yet he knew every single person there and moved through the crowd like its sun. He sent us round the back to park the van by a bonfire already ringed with twenty or thirty people, and behind it the beach house they’d taken for the weekend was a full party, the friends they’d gathered from everywhere streaming in and out in costume and bare feet, smoking, drinking, the whole place loose and humming.

Inside, the drugs were going round on plates. Not metaphorically. Actual plates, passed hand to hand with the small social ease of someone offering you a vol-au-vent, pills and powder circulating through a beautiful house full of beautiful people. A man I was quietly told owned shopping centres was doing lines off a side table with the relaxed proprietorial air of someone at his own barbecue. And that was the first thing that worked on me. If a man like that was here, doing that, in the open, then surely it was fine. There were children pattering around amongst it, for God’s sake. Everyone else seemed so certain, so successful, so at ease, and I was the one spinning, the one privately deciding this was not entirely appropriate behaviour, which even to me sounded ridiculous. I am Mary Poppins, I thought. Loosen up, Eva. Relax.

Rhia wasn’t there when we arrived. She came out later, and I’ve thought since that the not-being-there was the first sign, though I didn’t read it then.

Because getting us to the island had taken some quiet arranging, and I only understood its shape afterwards. Erik had organised the whole thing over WhatsApp, in a chat with just the three of us, warm and personal and thick with endearments. Rhia had been on another thread entirely, and somewhere in the gap between those two conversations she had simply never been told we were coming to stay with them. It is an absurd thing to be able to hide from your own wife. He had hidden it. And the festival was the day it surfaced.

He was walking us round the yard, hands on our shoulders, presenting us to people like the guests of honour we had apparently been invited to be, when Rhia came out of the house and saw us. Her face went stern before her manners could catch it. She crossed the yard and said, to him and not to us, “Can I please see you inside,” and the two of them disappeared, and were gone a long time. We were left among strangers, and through the window I could see her arms going, the unmistakable choreography of a woman letting her husband have it. Everyone in the yard did the polite thing of pretending there was nothing to see, which at a gathering of self-described free spirits is its own small comedy. Erik came out first, breezy, told us she’d only be a second. Then Rhia came out, composed, and came straight to me.

She sat down beside me and said she was so sorry, that she hadn’t known we were coming. She was about ten years older than me, and up close she was the kind of beautiful that had clearly once stopped rooms, elegant and long-necked and regal, except that the regalness had worn thin, so that she looked less like a queen now than like a showgirl at the end of a very long run, the glamour still there and the tiredness showing straight through it. Not a word of her conversation directed toward Caleb. All of it to me, woman to woman. And I said what I would have wanted said to me, that it was awful she had been put in that position, that I was mortified, and that honestly she shouldn’t give it another thought, I was more than happy just to have a weekend away and make a new friend and have a good night with no strings on it at all. I meant it, and she could tell I meant it, and she softened and relaxed, relieved. She smiled, then shook her head sighing, apologising for her Erik, that he made decisions without her and sprang them on her and left her exposed and unprepared, and that it drove her out of her mind. And I sat there and told her I understood completely, because I did. I understood it completely.

And I did something then that I want you to notice, because it matters for everything that came after. I found Caleb, and I told him plainly. She didn’t know we were coming, I said. She’s not up for anything, and that’s completely fine, let’s just enjoy the weekend and not expect anything to happen. I said it clearly. I set the thing down between us like a plate on a table. And I believed I had settled it.

He was not pleased. “Ah, fuck,” he said. “We came all this way. What a fucking wanker.” Because Erik had spent weeks dangling the promise of it, the enlightened expansion, the four of us and the philosophy to justify it, and now the plate had been cleared before it was served, and Caleb had driven three and a half hours and paid good money for a sacrament that wasn’t going to be administered. That was the register underneath all the temple talk, when you got down to it. A man annoyed he wasn’t going to get what he’d been sold.

But you cannot say a clear thing in a place like that and have it stay said. The whole property had been tuned to a frequency of loose, dreamy, everybody-loves-everybody abandon, and a plain sentence dropped into it simply dissolved. As the night went on the dancing turned flirty and the air turned soft, and Rhia didn’t seem to mind Erik draping himself over me, and Caleb kept up his attempts on Rhia and read something encouraging into the general glow. I watched him talk himself back out of what I’d told him. I watched the small hope rekindle. Everyone was so free. Everyone was so lovely. How could it not be, after all. That is the particular cruelty of a place like that. It makes a clear no illegible. It turns a boundary into a mood you might be talked out of, and it did the talking so that neither of us had to.

We went down to the festival together, and for a while it was almost the day I had packed for. It was enormous, five or six stages going at once, food stalls, bodies everywhere, the crowd all high and loose. There was a woman dressed as a mermaid who turned out to actually be one, who dived the reefs up north and got paid to be photographed by tourists, and meeting an off-duty mermaid felt no stranger than anything else in a place that ran on dream logic. You could smell pot on the air the whole time. Cocktails kept arriving in my hand. I got quite drunk.

And here is where something happened that had never happened to me before in my life, and I have to tell it honestly even though it doesn’t flatter me, because it explains everything that came after.

Everyone was drunk on me.

I don’t know how else to put it. From the moment we arrived, people gathered around me. They stroked my hair and touched my arms and called me angel, divine, an old soul. They looked into my eyes and told me they were like pools, that I had been here before, that I had an aura, that I felt things more deeply than other people did. They said these things like spells, forecasting over me, cooing, girls and boys alike, tender and rapt and mostly not even sexual, just this great warm wave of being wanted near. Even Rhia doted on me, softly. Erik was the only one whose hands were plainly hungry, but even he wrapped it in praise, amazed aloud at my very existence, as though I were some enchanted creature that had wandered in out of the dark. I had spent my whole life feeling I had to earn being wanted, working for it, managing for it. And here, for one night, doing nothing at all, I was the anointed one. It would be a lie to tell you it didn’t feel like a drug. It felt precisely like a drug. It was the fog I couldn’t see through, and it had been mixed to my own private recipe.

And Caleb got none of it.

I didn’t clock it at the time, and it is blinding now. He stood in the middle of all that worship of me and received nothing. People turned to him and said, isn’t your partner beautiful, she radiates, you’re a lucky man, treasure this one. They congratulated him on owning the thing everyone wanted and gave him none of it to keep. He was the man who possessed the angel, and beside her he was furniture.

And Rhia would not throw him a rope. I watched her dance with him, if you could call it dancing, facing him without once meeting his eye, never letting his hand land, keeping a clear foot of air between them the whole time. She would dance, but she would not be touched, and she made a man understand he was getting precisely nowhere without saying a single word about it. Caleb turned his charm up, all of it, the full wattage that had always worked on everyone, and she stayed cool and just out of reach.

At one point the music took me and I went with it, away from all of them, deeper into the crowd. It wasn’t that I wanted to dance so much as that I wanted to escape, to get away from every one of them and all the nonsense, to stop performing the flirting and the dancing, to stop having Erik on me and managing Caleb and hands and hands and hands, and just be alone inside a loud song with the drink in my blood and nobody wanting anything from me. And for a few minutes I had it. And then I felt a body press into me from behind, arms round my waist, and I turned and it was a boy half my age, a cricket hat on, face paint everywhere, grinning down at me, breathing on my neck. And I felt a hot flush of irritation, because there it was again, the same thing, the only thing anyone in this place seemed to want, following me even into the one corner I’d found to be by myself in. I stepped out of it and made my way back, and realised only then that I’d simply walked off and left everyone and they’d been looking for me, and I noticed that I didn’t much care, and the not-caring was its own small piece of information I wasn’t ready to read.

Some time that night I ended up beside a young woman, years younger than me, tomboyish and lanky with dark rings under her eyes, and we fell into talking. She was bleary and working through a cigarette, half-laughing, and she told me, with a sideways smile and no ceremony whatsoever, that she was a sex worker, in for the festival. She discussed her clients with the mild professional fondness of a woman describing a decent employer and a manageable commute. One of them, she said, paid her to urinate on him. She had, in fact, a whole roster of gentlemen who wanted precisely that, and she spoke of them without judgement, without drama, and with the faint pride of a specialist who has found her niche. I nodded along and laughed in the right places and said oh, how interesting, the way one does, while some quiet tectonic plate shifted behind my face. I had arrived on this island under the impression that I was a reasonably worldly woman. I was learning, at speed, that I understood approximately nothing about anything at all. Because I had once believed, with my whole heart, that sex was a sacred thing, the most private thing, something you shared with one person you loved and nobody else. Caleb had spent the last year wearing that belief down. It’s just an experience, he’d say. It’s just bodies. It doesn’t mean anything, our love is what means something. And I had resisted him, and resisted him, and slowly stopped resisting, and here by this fire was one more weight dropped onto his side of the scale. A cheerful girl for whom sex was neither sacred nor even especially interesting, just a service, conducted for some men specifically in urine. I sat there and felt my old belief tip a little further toward his. Maybe it really was nothing. Maybe I’d been the naive one all along, clutching something precious that everyone cleverer than me had already worked out was just weather, just transaction, just skin. It wasn’t disgust I felt. It was the vertigo of a value I’d built a life on beginning, quietly, to come loose.

Then we went back up to the fire, I could dress this part up in silk if I let myself, and I am not going to.

It was heady, and the headiness is the whole point. The fire was loud with music and ringed with people, everyone full of drugs and me full of drink, the strangers glittering and beautiful and forever saying enchanting things, and I felt I had stepped clean out of the world. Rhia and Erik wanted to give a massage, and it was done as a ritual, in turns, and this, I understood, was Erik’s own territory, the laying-on of hands he did for a living now offered up as sacrament by a fire. Everyone massaged me. Then all of us together massaged Caleb, then Erik, then Rhia, round and round, until somewhere in it the clothes were gone and we were down to sarongs loose as sheets, and all of it had been made to feel like ceremony, like tenderness, like the most natural thing in the world. I had by now taught myself to float above this kind of thing. I could set my body down on a blanket and take myself up past the smoke and the fairy lights and hover there, and nobody ever noticed the woman had gone out of the body.

Then the massage tipped over into kissing, our partners swapped without anyone appearing to decide it, Caleb with Rhia and Erik with me, arms and legs tangled into new arrangements. Erik drew me to a blanket just off to the side. I looked back once and thought I saw Caleb and Rhia having sex, the shapes of them moving, and something in me sank and then went numb, and I felt separate from all of it, from my own body most of all. I would learn later they weren’t. Erik was all over me like a rash, kissing, licking, dramatic and loose and faintly ridiculous, muttering about the divine creature I was and the shape of my body against the stars, all of it nonsense, all of it nothing. And then he knelt up in front of me, and I remember looking at him in the firelight and thinking, in a flat, surprised way, what is that, because it was small and red and, God forgive me, it looked like a lipstick. Not a well one, either. And then in one motion he was on top of me and off me, and he had finished, inside me, that fast and with that much pressure. There had been no word and no question. There were rules even in this world, their own rules, that you did not finish inside anyone and that you asked first, and he broke both in the space of a breath. I am going to stop there. I will give you the plain shape and leave it. It happened. I had not said yes.

And as fast as he had done it he was up and gone, leaving me shell-shocked and bewildered on the blanket, darting off to draw Rhia away from Caleb, and she went with him, and they lay down together in the open by the fire. Later I would learn he’d managed it because of what he’d taken, that the drugs let him rise again and again, that this was part of the evening’s design and not an accident of it. And later still I’d learn that Caleb had got nowhere with Rhia at all, that the whole night he had been reaching for her and she had been pushing his hands away, telling him no.

So there it was. Erik had now had both of us, one after the other, and the two people left behind by the fire had nothing. I had something done to me I couldn’t yet find a word for. Caleb had been refused by the one woman he wanted, and had watched another man take her, and take me. And of the two of us, it was Caleb’s hurt that filled the air. He got up and stormed off into the house for another drink, and I lay back and pulled the sarong around me and watched the fire, tired of it all to my bones.

And that was the precise moment the women dressed as fairies came to me. I kid you not. Grown women, wings and paint and glitter, like something out of a children’s book, and they were so soft with me, kneeling around me, stroking my hair, calling me precious girl and gentle one and angel, murmuring about the stars and the cosmos and astral travel and the beautiful energy pouring off me. One had a pot of marijuana butter and peeled back my sarong without asking and began smoothing it over my stomach, telling me it would soothe me and take me deeper. I felt like Alice after the bottle, grown all the wrong size for the room, and I lay there and let it happen, because bizarre as it was it was also soothing. Around the fire there were people making love and people singing, people smoking and dancing, children and dogs asleep in the halo of the flames, everything flickering in the dark. Painted faces and glitter and kind, drugged hands and sleeping children and the drums. None of it was real and all of it was happening, and I could no longer have told you where the tenderness ended and the violation began, because those two things had been folded together so many times in my life by then that I had lost the recipe for telling them apart.

Then Caleb’s face appeared over mine and broke the spell. He motioned for me to follow, took my hand, pulled me up off the blanket and away from the fire, and I went, because going where Caleb led was the oldest reflex I had.

I thought he wanted to talk. What he wanted was to rage. It came out of him in the dark of the van, drunk past all sense on a night of rum, a torrent of grievance against Erik and Rhia. He wanted to march back and have it out with Erik, man to man. He was livid, above all, that Erik had cheated, that he’d taken something to keep himself going, that he’d rigged the night in his own favour and taken one woman after another while Caleb got nothing. And there, if I’d had any laughter left in me, was a thing worth laughing at: a man affronted not by what had been done, but by the discovery that his rival had come to the party with performance enhancers.

And I did what I always did. I managed him. She didn’t know we were coming, I said, she was angry at Erik, none of this is about you. He said she’d led him on. He’d been so nice to her, and she’d let Erik go off with me and given Caleb nothing, and she could at least have said something. She was embarrassed, I said. It isn’t personal. Don’t take it personally. And there it was, the sentence I have never been able to unhear: me, in the back of a van, soothing my husband because the woman he had spent all night trying to seduce had declined him. I was comforting a man for the failure of his affair to launch. And I did it without a flicker of irony, because I had swallowed his whole philosophy by then, the one that held our love was the real thing and the rest was just play, just practice, just bodies. It was an elegant theory, and it asked only two things of the wife: that she feel no jealousy, and that she stay lovely enough that it never had to be tested. I had agreed to both.

He called her a fucking old biddy on a high horse. Who did she think she was, pushing him away, when he was younger and taller than her Erik and, he’d have told you, the better-looking man. And then the fury cracked, and out of it came something I had never once seen in all our years together, not over his own children, not over me. He began to cry. Not tears. Great heaving belly sobs, a grown man coming apart in the back of a van. And it was not for his son, asleep in a stranger’s house across the water. It was not for me. It was because an older woman had said no to him and another man had had his wife, and he felt, to the very depths of himself, that a terrible injustice had been done. Him. I reached for him and he pushed my hand away, the exact gesture he was raging at her for, and the drink took him, and he cried himself to sleep.

And I lay awake beside him in the van, still faintly sticky with butter, and I couldn’t even reach the anger I was owed, because I could see his side of it. That is how far gone I was. I could see his side.

It was the morning that finished me.

He woke before I was properly awake and reached for me, and there was none of the night’s grief in it, none of the softness he had always at least performed. The van door was open. It was broad daylight, people already up and drifting around the dead fire, and he turned me over and took me roughly, and I said no. I said it plainly, out loud. “No, Caleb. Stop it. Enough.” And he did not stop. Every time before this, across all of it, Caleb had needed me to want it, or at least to say that I did. This was the first time I said no and it simply did not matter.

And then, through the open door, he saw a young woman walking past, and I realised it was her. The one I had sat and talked with the night before. She recognised me too. And my husband, still inside me, still moving, my naked body pinned under his, lifted his head and hollered out the open door for her to come and join us. Propositioning the sex worker in broad daylight, mid-thrust, across the body of his own wife. He was growling it, urgent, like something that had stopped being a man. I was aghast. I said it again, out loud. “No, Caleb. Stop it. That’s enough.” And he carried on as though I had not spoken.

She looked in. She took it in, all of it, me underneath and him calling out and what it plainly was. And she said, with a flippant wave of her hand, that she didn’t want to spoil our beautiful experience, and she walked on.

There was nothing beautiful left in that van for her to spoil, and the care in how she declined is one of the few mercies I have kept from the whole weekend, that a bleary stranger passing an open door held more tenderness for what she saw than the man inside it had shown me since the fire went out. Her no worked, in a sentence, without breaking stride. Rhia’s no had worked, all night, on the dance floor and at the blanket. Two women, in one festival, whose refusals landed clean. And me, the third, the anointed one, the angel everyone had been drunk on, lying in the back of my own work van with a no that had stopped counting, and that saying it out loud, twice, in daylight, changed nothing at all.

When he had finished I pulled away from him, sharply, and would not look at his face, and would not be touched. What I felt then wasn’t rage, or not only rage. It was something with no single name, fury and grief and humiliation all folded into one another, the particular sickness of having been passed between two men in a single night and handed, by not one person in that place, so much as an ounce of grace. Used, and not even seen being used. I got dressed with my back to him, shoving my things into bags, and I said the one clear thing I had left. I want to go home. And for once he didn’t argue, because the weekend had curdled for him too, and there was no more weekend to be had here, no version of the beach or the festival either of us could stand to keep playing at.

But we had to say goodbye first. Of course we did. You cannot simply flee a place like that, you have to observe the formalities. So we went into the house, and there they were in the kitchen making breakfast, and they offered us some. Erik, still bubbly, still bright, flicked me across the backside with a tea towel and said something admiring about it while he tended his eggs, entirely untouched by anything, the night before meaning less to him than his breakfast. Rhia was busy talking with other people and gave us only a quick goodbye over her shoulder. And I stood there holding my bags and smiled and said our thanks, because that is what you do, and then we left.

The drive home was three and a half hours, and Caleb talked for most of it. He went over the evening again and again, turning it in his hands, assessing it, working out what had gone wrong, what was the matter with Erik, what an arsehole, what a user, how the whole thing had been set up to suit him. On and on, the full forensic post-mortem of his own wounded night, and he never once noticed that I wasn’t answering. That I wasn’t there. I sat with my head against the window and watched the world go by and I could not have told you what was true, or right, or wrong, or real, about a single thing anymore. Everything I thought I had understood about sex and love and people and myself had been taken apart on that island and handed back to me in pieces, and I had no idea how they went together, or whether they ever had.

All I could think was that I wanted to go home. And I don’t only mean the house. I had a house, and it was three hours away, and we were driving to it. I mean I wanted to go home to myself, to some place inside me where I recognised the furniture, and I understood on that drive, with a quiet that frightened me more than any of the noise had, that there was no such place. I was homeless within myself. I belonged nowhere. Not to that fire, not to those people, not to the man narrating his grievances beside me, and not, any longer, to me.

And then we got home, and the strangest thing of all happened, which is that nothing happened. Life closed back over the top of it like water. I unpacked the van. I had a day of tidying the house. Caleb went off to work on the new build, and neither of us said a word about any of it, and after a while he behaved as though it had never occurred, and I let him, because by then I had a whole silent country inside me full of things that had never officially occurred. I put the island in with the rest of them. Another thing that happened and didn’t. Another room in the house nobody was allowed to enter.

I didn’t tell myself it was over, because I didn’t believe it was. I just put it down, the way you put down anything too heavy to keep holding, and I didn’t pick it back up and I didn’t look at it. It was what it was.

The only thing Caleb worried about, in the days after, was whether I might be pregnant. Not how I was. Not whether I was alright. Whether Erik, finishing inside me against the rules, might have left a problem that would need solving. He never once asked me how I felt about any of it, and here is the part that shames me most, worse than anything that happened on that island: it did not occur to me to ask myself either. My feelings simply weren’t a place either of us thought to look anymore. I had a body that things had been done to, and a marriage concerned with the practical fallout, and somewhere in the middle a woman whose inner life had become so irrelevant, even to herself, that she forgot to check whether she was in there.

My body was less willing to let it go than the two of us were. Not long after, I was at the doctor, because something had gone wrong down there, an infection with a clinical name and a stubborn character, the kind of thing that arrives uninvited and declines to leave. It would come and go for the best part of a year. There is a grim, unpoetic honesty in the body that the rest of us lack. I could put the island away with everything else that had never officially happened, but the one part of me that had actually been there kept insisting otherwise, kept sending up its small red flag long after everyone else had moved on and gone back to their eggs and their tea towels. He had broken the one rule even that place had. My body spent a year reminding me of it.

I wasn’t even angry anymore, and that disturbs me the most looking back, because anger would have meant I still thought I deserved better. What I felt instead was resignation. A dull, settled sense that this was simply the shape of my life now, a thing to be endured rather than changed, a weight I had been handed to carry, and that the only thing left to do was carry it and brace for whatever came next.

And something did.

It was not long after that Caleb got the message.

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Next Week: Chapter 23 - The Unicorn