them all and get some more sleep – but he doesn’t want to spend days fighting jetlag.
He rolls his shoulders, trying to loosen them, and decides that an early swim must come first. He throws his case onto the bed and grabs from it a musky-smelling towel, which will have to do. Flinging it over his shoulder, he makes his way through the campground, listening to a crow cawing indolence to the sunrise. He passes Maya’s door, and wonders if she is awake, whether she might want to come. He could find out more about Desi, see if they have caught up yet, but he doesn’t want to wake Maya this early.
He strolls over the dunes towards the ocean. He loves this time of morning, everything fresh, the beach an unblemished stretch of sand, as though the sea has neatly remade its bed as it retreated. The water is beautifully calm, so he floats on his back for a while, hardly moving, staring at the sky, thinking about Kate, and everything she hasn’t told him.
A few days ago he had never heard of White Wave. But that’s who Ian said Kate worked for – at least, she had when he’d met her a few years ago in Thailand. There was a chance he might have his facts mixed up, but Jackson didn’t think so. His memory had been so specific. ‘It was 2006,’ he’d told Jackson that night on the boat, sitting down next to him, still absorbed by the picture, shaking his head. ‘I was on a trip to the Similan Islands off the coast of Thailand, surveying the whale sharks and the reef there, seeing what state things were in, a year after the tsunami. Kate was working out of the same dive shop in Phuket. She was part of a group doing a series of clean-up dives to try to restore some of the damaged reef. I’d never heard of the group before, but I was full of admiration – they were all tourists or travellers, paying their own way, simply trying to help out. The stuff they were getting from the bottom, it was amazing: statues, beach umbrellas, televisions, you name it. Kate was leading the group.
‘When I came home, I always recommended White Wave to people – I’ve been on the website quite a bit, and seen her name mentioned there. The last time was on their home page, when they announced the deaths of Kate and four others in the Japanese tsunami. I was sure that’s what I read, but perhaps it just said they were missing. I don’t know what they were doing there, but I was upset to hear it. It was absolutely tragic after all she’d done. Life has a way of being completely fucking ironic, hey?’ Ian had added, rubbing his injured leg.
He had wanted to ask Ian to find out more, but knew how strange that would look. Why couldn’t he ask her himself? So on the journey home, Jackson had spent every spare moment on the internet, hunting down all the scraps of detail he could uncover about White Wave.
He has read their blurb so many times he knows it off by heart.
An environmental charity, White Wave was founded in response to the Asian tsunami of 2004, dedicated to community and environmental restoration projects. Run and staffed entirely by volunteers, our projects are hands-on, ambitious, and locally sustainable.
For moments as he researched, Jackson had almost forgotten about Kate, finding himself wanting to join in with these skilled people making a small but meaningful difference to other parts of the world.
But absolutely nowhere on the website, or on any other site, has he found mention of Kate. Not even searching through their site history. The notification that Ian had seen has disappeared.
Back in his caravan after his swim, Jackson opens the photo of Kate again and stares at it. If Ian is right, and Kate has told him absolutely nothing of this, it raises a few uncomfortable questions. How close had they been, really, if she had chosen to hold back huge chunks of her life? How much could you understand someone in a few weeks? Jackson doesn’t like knowing so little about a woman who is on his mind so much. He tries to console himself, thinks about all the parts of his life that he hasn’t revealed to Kate yet. Hell, he hadn’t even told her that Desi was in prison, only that she would be home