0568188_DCD32_david_nicholls_one_day

Emma looked at him levelly. ‘Why are you talking like that?’

‘Like wha’?’ Dexter laughed defiantly, but the young couple were shifting uneasily, the man looking over the ship’s side as if contemplating the jump. Dexter decided to round up the interview. ‘So we’ll see you on the beach, yeah? Maybe get a beer or summink?’ and the couple smiled and headed back to their bench.

Dexter had never consciously set out to be famous, though he had always wanted to be successful, and what was the point of being successful in private? People should know. Now that fame had happened to him it did make a certain sense, as if fame were a natural extension of being popular at school. He hadn’t set out to be a TV presenter either – did anyone? – but was delighted to be told that he was a natural. Appearing on camera had been like sitting at a piano for the first time and discovering he was a virtuoso. The show itself was less issue-based than other shows he had worked on, really just a series of live bands, video exclusives, celebrity interviews, and yes, okay, it wasn’t exactly demanding, all he really did was look at the camera and shout ‘make some noise!’ But he did it so well, so attractively, with such swagger and charm.

But public recognition remained a new experience. He was self-aware enough to know that he possessed a certain facility for what Emma would call ‘prattishness’ and with this in mind he had been investing some private effort into working out what to do with his face. Anxious not to appear affected or cocky or a fake, he had been devising

an expression that said hey, it’s no big deal, it’s only TV and he assumed this expression now, replacing his sunglasses and returning to his book.

Emma watched this performance, amused; the straining for nonchalance, the slight flare of the nostrils, the smile that flickered at the corners of his mouth. She pushed her sunglasses up onto her forehead.

‘It’s not going to change you, is it?’ ‘What?’

‘Being very, very, very, very slightly famous.’ ‘I hate that word. “Famous”.’

‘Oh and what would you prefer? “Well known”.’ ‘How about “notorious”?’ he grinned.

‘Or “annoying”? How about “annoying”?’ ‘Leave it out, will ya?’

‘And you can drop that now, please?’ ‘What?’

‘The cockney accent. You went to Winchester College for Christ’s sake.’

‘I don’t do a cockney accent.’

‘When you’re being Mr TV you do. You sound like you’ve left your whelk stall to go and do this ’ere fancy telly programme.’

‘You’ve got a Yorkshire accent!’ ‘Because I’m from Yorkshire!

Dexter shrugged. ‘I’ve got to talk like that, otherwise it alienates the audience.’

‘And what if it alienates me?’

‘I’m sure it does, but you’re not one of the two million people who watch my show.’

‘Oh, your show is it now?’

‘The TV show on which I feature.’

She laughed and went back to her book. After a while Dexter spoke again.

‘Well, do you?’ ‘What?’

‘Watch me? On largin’it?’

‘I might have had it on. In the background once or twice, while I’m balancing my cheque-book.’

‘And what do you think?’

She sighed and fixed her eyes on the book. ‘It’s not my thing, Dex.’

‘Tell me anyway.’

‘I don’t know about TV . . .’ ‘Just say what you think.’

‘Okay, well I think the programme is like being screamed at for an hour by a drunk with a strobe-light, but like I said—’

‘Alright, point taken.’ He glanced at his book, then back at Emma. ‘And what about me?’

‘What about you?’

‘Well – am I any good? As a presenter?’

She removed her sunglasses. ‘Dexter, you are possibly the greatest presenter of Youth TV that this country has ever known, and I don’t say that kind of thing lightly.’

Proudly, he raised himself onto one elbow. ‘Actually, I prefer to think of myself as a journalist.’

Emma smiled and turned a page. ‘I’m sure you do.’ ‘Because that’s what it is, journalism. I have to

research, shape the interview, ask the right questions—’ She held her chin between finger and thumb. ‘Yes, yes,

I believe I saw your in-depth piece on MC Hammer. Very sharp, very provoking—’

‘Shut up, Em—’

‘No, seriously, the way you got under MC’s skin, his musical inspirations, the trousers. It was, well – untouchable.’

He swatted at her with his book. ‘Shut up and read, will you?’ He lay back down and closed his eyes. Emma glanced over to check that he was smiling, and smiled too.

Mid-morning approached and while Dexter slept, Emma caught her first sight of their destination: a bluegrey granite mass rising from the clearest sea that she had ever seen. She had always assumed that water like this was a lie told by brochures, a trick with lenses and filters, but there it was, sparkling and emerald green. At first glance the island seemed unpopulated except for the huddle of houses spreading up from the harbour, buildings the colour of coconut ice. She found herself laughing quietly at the sight of it. Until now travel had always been a fraught affair. Each year until she was sixteen, it had been two weeks fighting with her sister in a caravan in Filey while her parents drank steadily and looked out at the rain, a sort of harsh experiment in the limits of human proximity. At University she had gone camping in the Cairngorms with Tilly Killick, six days in a tent that smelt of cup-a-soup; a larky, so-awful-it’s-funny holiday that had ended up just awful.

Now, standing at the railing as the town came into

clearer view, she began to understand the point of travel; she had never felt so far away from the launderette, the top deck of the night bus home, Tilly’s box room. It was as if the air was somehow different here; not just how it tasted and smelt, but the element itself. In London the air was something you peered through, like a neglected fish tank. Here everything was bright and sharp, clean and clear.

She heard the snap of a camera shutter and turned in time to see Dexter take her photo again. ‘I look terrible,’ she said as a reflex, though perhaps she didn’t. He joined her, his arms holding the rail on either side of her waist.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’

‘S’alright,’ she said, unable to recall a time when she had felt happier.

They disembarked – the first time she felt that she had ever disembarked – and immediately found a flurry of activity on the quayside as the casual travellers and backpackers began the scramble for the best accommodation.

‘So what happens now?’

‘I’ll find us somewhere. You wait in that café, I’ll come and get you.’

‘Somewhere with a balcony—’ ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘And a sea view please. And a desk.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ and, sandals slapping, he strolled towards the crowd on the quay.

She shouted after him: ‘And don’t forget!’

He turned and looked at her, standing on the harbour wall, holding her wide-brimmed hat to her head in the

warm breeze that pressed her light blue dress against her body. She no longer wore spectacles, and there was a scattering of freckles across her chest that he had never seen before, the bare skin turning from pink to brown as it disappeared below the neckline.

‘The Rules,’ she said. ‘What about them?’

‘We need two rooms. Yes?’ ‘Absolutely. Two rooms.’

He smiled and headed off into the crowd. Emma watched him go, then dragged the two backpacks along the quay to a small, wind-blown café. There she reached into her bag and pulled out a pen and notebook, an expensive, cloth-bound affair, her journal for the trip.

She opened it on the first blank page and tried to think of something she could write, some insight or observation other than that everything was fine. Everything was fine, and she had the rare, new sensation of being exactly where she wanted to be.

Dexter and the landlady stood in the middle of the bare room: whitewashed walls and cool stone floor, bare save for an immense iron-framed double bed, a small writing desk and chair and some dried flowers in a jar. He walked through louvred double-doors onto a large balcony painted to match the colour of the sky, overlooking the bay below. It was like walking out onto some fantastic stage.

‘You are how many?’ asked the landlady, mid-thirties, quite attractive.

‘Two of us.’

‘And for how long?’

‘Not sure, five nights, maybe more?’ ‘Well here is perfect I think?’

Dexter sat on the double bed, bouncing on it speculatively. ‘But my friend and I we are just, well, just good friends. We need two rooms?’

‘Oh. Okay. I have second room.’

Emma has these freckles that I’ve never seen before scattered across her chest just above the neckline.

‘So you do have two rooms?’ ‘Yes, of course, I have two rooms.’

‘There’s good news and there’s bad news.’ ‘Go on,’ said Emma, closing her notebook.

‘Well I’ve found this fantastic place, sea view, balcony, a bit higher up in the village, quiet if you want to write, there’s even a little desk, and it’s free for the next five days, longer if we want it.’

‘And the bad news?’ ‘There’s only one bed.’ ‘Ah.’

‘Ah.’ ‘I see.’ ‘Sorry.’

‘Really?’ she said, suspiciously. ‘One bedroom on the whole island?’

‘It’s peak season, Em! I’ve tried everywhere!’ Stay calm, don’t get shrill. Maybe play the guilt card instead. ‘But if you want me to carry on looking . . .’ Wearily he made to get up from the chair.

She put her hand on his forearm. ‘Single or double bed?’

The lie seemed to be holding. He sat again. ‘Double. A big double.’

‘Well it would have to be a pretty massive bed though, wouldn’t it? To conform to The Rules.’

‘Well,’ Dexter shrugged, ‘I suppose I prefer to think of them as guidelines.’

Emma frowned.

‘What I mean, Em, is I don’t mind if you don’t.’ ‘No, I know you don’t mind—’

‘But if you really don’t think you can keep your hands off me—’

‘Oh, I can manage, it’s you I worry about—’

‘Because I’m telling you now, if you lay one finger on me—’

Emma loved the room. She stood on the balcony and listened to the cicadas, a noise that she had only heard in films before and had half suspected to be an exotic fiction. She was delighted, too, to see lemons growing in the garden; actual lemons, in trees; they seemed glued on. Keen not to appear provincial, she said none of this out loud, simply saying ‘Fine. We’ll take it.’ Then, while Dexter made arrangements with the landlady, she slipped into the bathroom to continue fighting with her contact lenses.

At University Emma had held firm private convictions about the vanity of contact lenses, nurturing as they did conventional notions of idealised feminine beauty. A sturdy, honest, utilitarian pair of National Health spectacles showed that you didn’t care about silly trivia like looking

nice, because your mind was on higher things. But in the years since leaving college this line of argument had come to seem so abstract and specious that she had finally succumbed to Dexter’s nagging and got the damn things, realising only too late that what she had really been avoiding for all those years was that moment in the movies: the librarian removes her spectacles and shakes out her hair. ‘But Miss Morley, you’re beautiful.’

Her face in the mirror seemed strange to her now, bare and exposed, as if she had just removed her spectacles for the last nine months. The lenses had a tendency to make her prone to random and alarming facial spasms, ratty blinks. They stuck to her finger and face like fish scales or, as now, slid beneath her eyelid, burying themselves deep in the back of her skull. After a rigorous bout of facial contortion and what felt like surgery, she managed to retrieve the shard, stepping out of the bathroom, red-eyed and blinking tearfully.

Dexter was sitting on the bed, his shirt unbuttoned. ‘Em? Are you crying?’

‘No. But it’s still early.’

They headed out in the oppressive lunch-time heat, finding their way towards the long crescent of white sand that stretched for a mile or so from the village, and it was time to unveil the swimming costumes. Emma had put a lot of thought, perhaps too much, into her swimsuit, settling finally for a plain black all-in-one from John Lewis that might have been branded The Edwardian. As she pulled her dress over her head, she wondered if Dexter thought she was in some way chickening-out by not wearing a

bikini, as if a one-piece swimming costume belonged with spectacles, desert boots and bike helmets as somehow prudish, cautious, not quite feminine. Not that she cared, though she did wonder, as her dress passed over her head, if she had caught his eyes flickering in her direction. Either way, she was pleased to note that he had gone for the baggy shorts look. A week of lying next to Dexter in Speedos would be more uncomfortable than she could bear.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but aren’t you the Girl from Ipanema?’

‘No, I’m her auntie.’ She sat and attempted to apply suntan lotion to her legs in a way that wouldn’t make her thighs wobble.

‘What is that stuff?’ he said. ‘Factor thirty.’

‘You might as well lie under a blanket.’

‘I don’t want to overdo it on the second day.’ ‘It’s like house paint.’

‘I’m not used to the sun. Not like you, you globetrotter. You want some?’

‘I don’t agree with suntan lotion.’ ‘Dexter, you are so hard.’

He smiled, and continued to watch her from behind his dark glasses, noting the way her raised arm lifted her breast beneath the black material of the swimming costume, the bulge of soft pale flesh about the elasticated neckline. There was something about the gesture too, the tilt of the head and the pulling back of her hair as she applied the lotion to her neck, and he felt the pleasant