“Morning, lads and lasses!” says a woman emerging from behind the door. “Can all the gorillas come forward, please? You need to pick up your harnesses.”
I’m first in the queue. I look back at the other gorillas, casting them a quick, hopefully not-too-smug smile. Most are too busy communicating with their baboons to notice me.
“Small, medium, or large, pet?” asks the woman. Behind her is a storeroom full of belts and buckles.
“Large,” I say, straightening my spine and revealing my full six feet to her.
She stares at me. “Reckon you’re only a medium, sweetheart.” She hands me a harness. “All about your waist circumference, see.” She motions to the person behind me. “Are you two together?”
“No,” I tell her. “I’m here on my own. Scouting out the place for a work event.”
“Pop it on over there, please.”
I’m going to be honest for the rest of the day. Why shouldn’t a grown woman attend Go Ape on her own? I’ve been wanting to come here for ages, but James has always called it a “glorified kids’ playground,” and it’s definitely not Anouk’s sort of thing. Besides, she’s been more or less off the radar since becoming a mum. With James at work, and nothing to do on this drizzly day, I jumped in the car and drove here by myself. No shame in that.
I go back to the bench and put on my equipment.
“Tricky,” laughs a woman in an orange anorak beside me, as her harness falls to the floor. She snorts with amusement. I move to the other end of the bench.
“Hi, team.” A guy of about my age approaches us, with a ginger beard and a can-do attitude. He’s wearing a black puffer jacket with the company logo on it, and his harness is already attached. “My name’s Matty, and I’ll be taking you on your Treetop Adventure today.”
Matty checks our harnesses and talks us through some basic safety stuff, then leads us out into the forest. I walk directly behind him, hoping that he’ll make conversation with me. He merely looks back every now and then to check that we’re all present. Eight gorillas, five baboons, and two hard-to-tells.
I listen to the squelch of my boots in the mud. You wouldn’t know that we’re so near to Exeter. I love being in places where all you can see is nature in every direction. Here, we’re surrounded by trees and hills. It’s a wilderness of sorts.
Matty comes to a stop and does an about-turn. “Who’s ready for some fun?” he asks, pointing to a rope ladder. The rope ladder is not much taller than I am. “It’s time to practise climbing!”
As Matty explains the colour-coding system and how to deal with a fear of heights, I get out my phone and take a surreptitious look.
“If you want to win this competition,” it says on the Mars Project site, “you’re going to need to be able to fly into the face of danger.”
I wonder what sort of training you’d need to do to go to Mars. Would rope ladders be involved? Probably not, but you’ve got to start somewhere. I put my phone away and concentrate on what Matty’s saying.
Ten minutes later, we get to the zip wires, and I glide weightlessly through the air, with nothing but a small hook to keep me anchored. I feel ready for anything.
3
“I’ve discovered my passion,” James announces, as we walk along Gyllyngvase Beach.
We’re throwing an inflatable red ball back and forth. It was lying on the sand this morning, a gift from the ocean.
“Your passion?” I hold on to the ball for a moment.
“It’s sourdough,” says James. “I’m going to make a starter culture and keep it going for years. I’m going to eat sourdough from the same starter when I’m a hundred.”
Aside from the red ball, other things that have washed up on the beach recently include: three dolphin carcasses, a Lego pirate, and innumerable shards of coloured glass. Flotsam and jetsam. Frothy words, making an ocean in the mouth. They’re types of marine debris. Flotsam is normally the result of a shipwreck. It floats on the water after an accidental spillage. Jetsam has been thrown into the water intentionally. Most likely it was chucked over the side of a sinking ship to lighten the load. People always forget about lagan and derelict. Lagan is attached to a buoy so that the owner can find it again. Derelict sinks to the seafloor.
“Solvig?” James asks. “What do you think? About my bread idea?”
“Eating sourdough. When you’re a hundred. Yum.” I throw the ball back. My arms are still aching from Go Ape.
The flotsam and jetsam of a relationship. It sounds like a nice phrase, but that would make the relationship a relationship wreck. That’s not the way I see me and James. Better to say that I have my own flotsam and jetsam. Things that have fallen away by accident, and things that I threw overboard, abandoned to lighten the load, many years ago. Things that float to the surface when the cracks appear.
This time, I miss the ball. As I pick it up, James points at the sand.
“Look, a sea raft,” he says.
Is that another new tattoo on his wrist? Looks like an ouroboros. Tail eater. Constantly leaving, constantly returning.
“That’s unusual,” he muses. “It’s a by-the-wind sailor. From the Porpitidae family.”
It’s a glutinous disc of cobalt blue. Size of a Ritz cracker. There’s a flap of clear gel on top.
“That’s the sail,” James says. “It blows wherever the wind takes it.”
“A life of freedom,” I respond.
James shakes his head. “Completely at the mercy of the elements. A kind of prison.”
I kneel down, as if to inspect the creature. I find myself inspecting my trainers instead. The sole is peeling away from the left shoe.
“Don’t touch it,” James warns, “because of the nematocysts. Neat, aren’t they? Living at the intersection between air and water. Sails on top, polyps underneath. Organisms that live in and out of water at the same time are—”
“Amphibians.”
“No. Pleuston.” James buys nature books with Latin words in them. He watches programmes narrated by David Attenborough and Chris Packham. At work, he spends his days etching marine life onto people’s skin: a squid on the biceps, a koi carp on the thigh, a stingray on the sacrum. This fetishisation of the sea. Thalassophilia, as it’s known. Try spending ten hours on the seabed, people, I always think, and then tell me about your love of the velvet dogfish.
James has already moved on. “I’m going to capture the wild yeast in the environment.” He’s gesticulating a lot. I think he’s plucking imaginary yeast particles from the air. “I’m going to use it to naturally ferment my bread. Good, eh?”
We trudge towards Gylly Beach Café to warm up. Before we go in, James hands the ball to a little girl in frog-shaped wellington boots. Then he sits with his back to the window, so that I get a view of the sea.
“I can’t believe this is our last day together,” he says, once our drinks have arrived.
“It’s only for a month,” I tell him. “It’ll whizz by.”
“I wanted to do something special. I wish I didn’t have to work this afternoon.”
I lift my cup to my lips and take a sip of black coffee. “This is special.”