Sex, Drugs & No Idea

32: The High Dive

Charlie started drinking early the next day. Not out of any self-destructive inclination, but more because it felt like a day of slightly maudlin and wistful contemplation. He wanted to brood, to think. He wanted to embrace the tortured soul aspect of the situation with Lily––the cruelness of Fate with regards to meeting this brilliant woman, who happened to live a couple of hours from him in California, and the nuisance that was her blighted boyfriend.

So, he was just getting into the swing of things, sitting out on the small balcony and enjoying the first lung-bleeder of the day and the third beer, when Frenchy came out and reminded him that they still had to go and do our dive classes and take the theory test that afternoon.

"Where the hell were you last night?" he asked. "We didn't know where you'd got to."

Charlie remembered hugging Lily goodbye outside the restaurant, the kiss on the cheek she gave him, the smell of her hair as they held onto each other just long enough to arouse suspicion in her boyfriend––had the bastard been there to see it. She'd smelled terrific. And then the slow, thoughtful walk home.

"Just went for a walk, mate. Got some food. Chatted to some people. Nothing too exciting. What did you dickheads get up to?"

"Took it easy. Had dinner. Chatted to those English chicks over there." He jerked his head at the bungalow across the way from ours.

"What're they like?"

"Yeah, man, nice." Frenchy held both hands out, about two feet from his chest. "One's got a massive personality on her."

Charlie had a couple more beers at breakfast and was in an unobjectionably sunny mood during the last of our morning classes––although he did spend a considerable amount of time going to the loo and then having a surreptitious cigarette outside.

After a lunch of khao mun gai and a couple of restoratives, they hopped back into the classroom to take their exam. They worked as a team, answering the obvious questions in about an hour, and would've scored one-hundred percent, if it hadn't been for Charlie duffing the one answer he supplied––with complete and misplaced confidence––to the group. Afterwards, finding that it was only just after three in the afternoon, they decided to hop in the pool and finish the rest of the practical exercises. Charlie conscientiously brushed his teeth on the way down to the swimming pool, thinking that the instructor would be far from impressed if he rolled up stinking like a piss-artist.

"I'm not sure of the exact legalities of diving drunk," Charlie told the boys afterwards, as they headed back to their rooms to get changed, "but I have to say, I was way more relaxed. When we had to take our mask off, drop it and then pick it up and empty it by blowing into it with our nose, I was like a fish on ice."

"When do we have to be on the boat tomorrow morning, guys?" Frenchy asked, as we rounded the corner and our bungalows hove into view, revealing Golem chatting affably away to the two English girls on their balcony.

"Eight sharp," said Will.

"So, a quiet one tonight, then," Charlie said.

#

Charlie's face jerked up from the pillow. He looked blearily around, going through the what, where, how rigmarole.

It's your room, his brain surmised.

He pulled his phone out from his pocket. The underside of his right bicep hurt, as if he'd got sunburned. It was half-past seven.

"Oh no, diving," he groaned in anguish to the world. He rolled off his bed and onto the floor. He got to his feet and noticed that Frenchy had obviously already gone for breakfast.