Simply Heaven Read Free Page B

…’
    And later still I say: ‘Yeah, OK. This is totally …’
    And at five thirty or so, dawn beginning to make itself known in a serious way through the French windows, I say: ‘Rufus?’
    ‘Melody,’ he says.
    ‘Did you really say that that ham was made by someone called Twanny Mifsud?’

Chapter Three
Truth Game
    ‘I was head boy of my school,’ he says. ‘Well, they didn’t call it that, but …’
    Well, I can’t do that. I wasn’t a delinquent or anything, but most of my year twelve ambition was geared more towards popularity with first Liam Costello and then Troy Carver than it was to popularity with the faculty. Our piles of stones seem to be evening out again. Five minutes ago, I had only one stone left, was that close to whupping his backside, but I’m already back up to six. I’m going to have to put some effort in.
    Genius. I pick up a stone, put it on the heap between us. ‘All my education was free on the state.’
    Rufus waggles a finger at me. ‘That’s cheating. Prior knowledge.’
    ‘Take it like a man.’
    ‘OK.’ Rufus picks up a stone of his own. ‘Well, if you want to play it that way. I’ve never been the recipient of state education.’
    ‘Now, that really is cheating.’
    He shrugs. ‘Your petard, my darling. Take the hoisting …’
    An impasse. That’s the trouble with the truth game. If you start playing tactically, it gets boring. I mean, obviously you don’t want to be the idiot drunk who misreads the point and starts sharing intimate detail they’re going to remember with sick horror in the morning, but you’ve got to keep it moving to keep it interesting. Especially if, like Rufus and I have been doing for the past five days, you’re using it to share information without looking like you’re getting heavy. I look away over the sea to give myself time to think of something. And for the gazillionth time, I’m hit by the blinding beauty of this place.
    Ask me about Gozo, and I’ll tell you: it’s blue. Gold and blue. Huge azure skies, sea that dapples its way from whitest turquoise to near-black royal, stones soft and crumbly like Cheddar cheese, houses casually fronted with decorative sculpture of wedding-cake complexity. It’s blue and gold, with the scarlet of festa banners hung across streets, pink-marbled plywood plinths that raise plaster saints above the heads of Christians. It’s the place I found my love.
    And I’m giddy with love. I never thought I’d feel like this again, after Andrew did his disappearing act. I’d thought this was it: me, alone, own two feet, travelling the world and looking after myself, and here I am now, rushing like a hippie. I feel like I’ve got vertigo. I feel like I’m standing on the highest cliff-top, all the splendour of creation spread out below me, and I feel exuberance and terror rolled into one lurching wave of elation. It is delirium, this love. It consumes my waking thoughts and seeps, mellifluous, into my dreams, so that, each time I surface, it is with a new shock of my God, but you’re real . I didn’t know. I didn’t know.
    He is – Oh Lord, I don’t believe in all that love-at-first-sight, consuming passion, not being able to be happy when you’re away from someone thing. I thought that the Our Song, We Just Couldn’t Help Ourselves, Our Place, I Just Knew, Do You Remember The Moment When … stuff was the province of people who didn’t have enough in their lives, who needed to add drama to their histories, and I’ve had enough drama already to last me a lifetime. I’d thought the love-at-first-sight thing was a justification for losing your self-control, an excuse for all those greedy little acts of adultery that shatter other people’s hearts.
    But Rufus. To me, he’s all of humanity, and a creature set apart. This familiar stranger, this ordinary man: he’s a hero in my eyes. I want to fight his enemies, embrace his friends, leaf through his baby photos, wash his back when he’s