It takes them an hour to reach hole seven. There are no more holes-in-one. No more flukes or trick shots. Just a lot of really terrible playing. A lot of out-of-boundary hits. A lot of swearing. Mostly from Sunny, with the occasional cry of fuck! from Viv. A woman walking along the promenade gives them a dirty look but they don't care because the competition is hotting up and there are still eleven holes left to play, if they can make it round the course before it shuts.
"How long did you live here?" Sunny asks as she putts the ball into the seventh hole after only three swings. She's not getting any better, but she does have the occasional bit of luck and the holes aren't arranged by difficulty level so there is respite between the ones that try to trip her up.
"Only a couple of years," Viv says, swinging her hips as she gets into position. "I don't remember it at all but my dad loved it here, so it seemed like the obvious choice when I wanted to move."
"How come you guys left in the first place?"
"My mum died when I was a baby and Dad thought he wanted to stay here but it was all too much after a while." She whacks the ball and sends it flying. It chips the boundary and bounces off. "Fuck."
"I'm sorry," Sunny says. She never knows how to handle other people's grief when she doesn't even know how to handle her own, and she's never sure when or if it's appropriate to ask for the details. The curious gremlin inside her wants to know what happened but she's pretty sure that's not all right.
"It is what it is." Viv shrugs as she collects her ball. "I don't have any memory of her. I couldn't even sit up when she died, let alone form long-term memories." She smiles and holds up the ball and says, "I'm gonna get it in this time."
"If you say so."
It takes her eight more shots.
As they walk to the eighth hole (which is not far; this place is designed for kids), Sunny gravitates towards Viv until they're close enough to bump elbows. Neither of them jerk away. Sunny leans a little closer, and they bump again.
"What about your dad? Is he still in Bristol?"
"No," Viv says on a long sigh, and Sunny dreads what she's about to say next. "He moved back to Naxos once Stella and I had both moved out."
"Where's Naxos?" She tries to pull up a mental map but it's pretty empty, with only the vaguest outline of the continents with occasional pins. She can place Black Sands and London; she has a decent idea of where Australia and New Zealand are and Russia's pretty much impossible to miss, but more than that? Not a chance.
"It's an island in Greece, where he grew up." Viv leans against a low wall that makes up part of the course for the ninth hole and rests her wrists on the handle of her club, which she holds steady between her feet. "I was pretty upset about him moving more than two thousand miles away but he said if we let him go, he'd pay for both of us to fly out and stay with him twice a year."
"Pretty good deal. Is it a nice place?"
"Gorgeous. The sea is turquoise and the beaches are beautiful and it feels so rustic. Everything's so homey. It's a wonderful place and he's so much happier there."
"That's nice," Sunny muses, her mind wandering to pretty beaches and bright blue seas. She salivates at the thought. Though she lives by the sea, it's the cold and grey water of the North Sea. Not quite the same as the Aegean Sea lapping the shores of a Greek island.
"Mmm. Yeah, it is. He left a few years ago and it's been good for him. I don't think he really processed Mum's death until he got out of the country, and that's a long fucking time to have carried all that around with him."
Sunny drops her ball and lines up her shot, trying to judge the slowly spinning vanes of the wooden windmill. It's like judging the perfect time to drop a two pence piece in the rolling penny machine on the pier, and she is spectacularly shit at that game. Both her timing and her hand-eye coordination are subpar, so her pennies always end up on top of the pile rather than moving it along.
"How did your dad end up in Black Sands when he was born on a Greek island?"
Viv's smile turns nostalgic and dreamy, and a little sad. "He fell in love."
"With your mum?"
She nods. "She was in Naxos on holiday. She was there on her own after a break-up and she ended up in the café where Dad worked. He offered to be her tour guide and, well, the rest is history. She turned her week's holiday into a month and when she went home, he went with her."
"True love," Sunny murmurs, tapping the ball. She's timed it perfectly; if only her aim were better, it would've gone straight through the windmill to the other side.
"They were soulmates. He always says that when he talks about her. I think that's why he's never been able to move on." She hops off the wall to take her shot and this time she doesn't spend ages working up to it, just hits the ball and sits back on the wall. "Stella and I tried to get him to date when we were, like, eight and ten and wanted a mum, but no dice."
"Does Stella remember your mum?"
"No. She was barely two," Viv says, and Sunny's struck by a deep sadness at the thought of having children who don't know her long enough to remember her after her death. "Anyway." She stands and brushes off her shorts. "Enough about my dead mother. Any more questions?"
Only about a thousand. But Sunny needs a moment to figure out which to ask so she smiles and shakes her head and they carry on with the game.
*
"I'm not kidding, it's gone!" she cries out in exasperated surprise after a solid five minutes of searching for her ball. One minute she was aiming at the fifteenth hole – it has now been more than two solid hours since they finished breakfast and Sunny's beginning to realise that when the players are incompetent, crazy golf can be quite the workout – and now the ball has vanished. When she hit it, it looked like a clean shot, but it went a bit too far and apparently blinked out of existence.
"It has to be somewhere."
"It's really not." Sunny emerges from a fake hedgerow, her legs scratched by the sharp plastic petals of pretend posies. "I've scoured the place. It's disappeared."
"Did a seagull take it?"
"Oh my god. Maybe."
"Is it on the beach?"
"I don't think I hit it that far," Sunny says, but she hops over the fence anyway and treads carefully across the sand so it doesn't seep through the holes of her jelly shoes. They're starting to chafe a bit but she doesn't care; she's having way too much fun to care about her inadequate footwear and the potential for blisters.
"Jesus, Sunny, where the hell did it go?" Viv's upside down with her arse in the air and her hair all over the place as she looks inside the tunnels of hole sixteen and the cave of hole thirteen.
"Maybe it just woke up in another universe," Sunny jokes. It's getting easier to make light of her situation now that she is committed to it. There's no going back, so all she can do is laugh about what happened and try to learn everything she missed.
"Seriously, what the hell? It's totally gone."
"I told you!" She uses her club to hook a pebble out of the hole and taps it across the green before she hits it. She's aiming for the rockery that makes up most of hole seventeen but instead she hits Viv right in the centre of her left buttock.
"Oi!"
"Sorry!" She blushes at the accidental advance, but when Viv stands up, she's grinning, hands planted over the back pockets of her shorts.
"You wanna piece of me?"
Sunny's blush deepens. Viv doesn't miss it. There's a wicked glint in her eyes as she sashays over, hands tucked into her pockets now, elbows sticking out. She puts on an exaggerated runway walk, walking right on the tips of her tiptoes as if her sandals are six-inch heels, and Sunny's ribcage can't contain the expanse of her lungs and the flutter of her heart.
"Oh, you do want a piece of me," Viv says in a low voice. Sunny gulps. Every time she thinks she's getting a hang of this life, another curveball whacks her in the middle of her forehead and has her seeing stars.
"I..." Her throat is dry. Her voice cracks. Viv's attempt at serious and sultry cracks too when she laughs, the sound like fresh rain after a month of heat. Sunny wants to bathe in that sound. "Are you trying to put me off my game? I'm still gonna win, you know, no matter how much you shake your arse at me."
"Sure about that? Looking kinda ballless there, honey. That's gonna make it hard to win."
Sunny lunges forward and plucks Viv's ball out of her hand and says, "We're sharing now."
"Oh we are, are we?" Viv stands to one side, arms folded, eyebrow raised.
"Sharing's caring. If you care about me, you'll share your ball."
Viv's head tips to the side, that pretty little smile playing at the corners of her lips. "Then by all means, go ahead."
It's hard for Sunny to focus with Viv's attention so fixed on her so she doesn't try. The club connects with the ball, which soars across the course and lands right in the hole, doesn't even graze the rim.
"Fuck yes! Hole in fucking one, baby!" Sunny cries out, but Viv's lack of reaction sobers her.
"Oh, my little honey bee," Viv says, shaking her head. "I don't think it counts as a hole in one if it's the wrong hole."
"What?"
"That's number sixteen. We're not there yet."
"No it's no—" She cuts herself off when she follows the line of the course and realises, yes, she was aiming in the wrong direction. "Shit. Can I get an extra point, though? Because that's pretty fucking cool."
"You can have all the extra points you want, you're not winning this game." Viv squeezes Sunny's waist as she passes her to collect the ball and take her go, and Sunny's so distracted by the contact that she misses Viv take her shot. She's trying to unscramble her head, which is currently feeling as though someone shook it up like a game of Boggle and she's struggling to find sensical words amidst the jumble of letters.
Several minutes pass before Viv trudges back over to her and presses the ball into her hand and says, "Eight, though I'm sure you were counting. Reckon you can beat that? You're already on one from that shit first go."
"If I can't beat that, I'll buy you dinner," she says.
Viv rubs her hands together. "Ooh, I can't wait. What're you gonna buy me? I think I fancy a Chinese tonight. Maybe Thai..." She plays with her bottom lip as she thinks about it and Sunny, forcing her head into the game, manages to make it to the hole – the right one this time – in five.
"Tough luck, butternut," she says, holding her golf club up like a trophy. "Dinner's on you tonight."
"In which case, I'm bringing you leftovers of whatever I can make out of the stuff in my fridge." Viv tuts and says, "If only you'd let me win, I'd have brought you leftover Thai food and now you're gonna get half a spinach omelette."
Sunny is not a fussy eater. Anything goes. Especially when she has to cook for herself – she can't be bothered with making food that looks good or makes sense, taste-wise. It's all about ease for her, even if that means a ring-pull tin of tuna and a sachet of instant rice five nights in a row because she hasn't bothered to shop yet and can't bring herself to be more inventive. Food is sustenance, so a spinach omelette sounds just great.
*
"Okay, I'm not being funny but this course must be possessed or something," Viv says as she stands at the start of the final hole on the golf course, her hand up to shade her eyes from the early afternoon sun. It's not yet the end of April but it feels like a hot summer is on its way already, the warm spring so far making way for a heatwave once June hits.
"Why? Did you see a ghost?" Sunny's sitting on a bench with one foot up, her cap in her hands as she fiddles with the strap at the back.
"Uh, I think I lost my ball?"
"No way."
"Yeah, uh, it's gone."
"The golf gods said we're too shit to deserve to finish." She hops off the bench to aid Viv in her search but after ten solid minutes, they both come up empty handed.
"Damn it," Viv says. "I was so gonna win."
"Were you fuck!" Sunny barks a laugh. "I was definitely winning."
"You do know you win by having the lowest score, right?" Viv arches a thick eyebrow, ruffled by the breeze. "If anything I think losing both balls means we're both losers."
Sunny gives her a dirty wink and says, "I'm pretty sure no balls means we're both winners."
Viv laughs and then sighs. "Damn. What an anticlimax." She loops her arms through Sunny's without thinking as they walk back to the shed at the start where a man sits guarding a bucket of balls and a tub of clubs. Sunny barely manages to walk straight, all of her energy put into trying not to overthink the contact because it's totally normal, she walks arm in arm with her friends all the time, so why is this doing funny things to her insides?
She knows why, of course. But she's still getting used to it.
When they return the clubs, the heavily bearded guy in charge looks them up and down and says, "The balls?"
"They vanished," Sunny says.
"Huh?"
"They disappeared around the last three holes. Nowhere to be found. Do you happen to have a poltergeist?"
The man scrunches up his thick eyebrows and his wrinkled forehead like he has never heard anything so ridiculous, and he taps a sign on the wall with his knuckle. "Two quid, then."
"What?"
"You don't return the ball, you pay a pound. You girls owe me two balls so now you owe me two pounds."
"They're here somewhere," Viv says, "but wherever they are, we just can't find them."
"I don't care." He shrugs and pushes out his bottom lip. "You either give me the ball or the money."
Sunny digs in her pocket and finds a couple of pound coins, which she hands over with an eye roll. That was supposed to be her bus money to get home to change and then back to work for five, though at this rate she won't have time to go back before her shift starts. It's already lunchtime and part two of the date she's planned hasn't even started yet – when she factored in time to golf, she didn't think it would actually take four hours because that's stupid, how the hell did it take so long? Several people overtook them and she reckons they cheated, or they gave up after so many shots. Not Sunny and Viv. No, they kept going until they got the ball in the hole, or lost the ball entirely.
"Total rip-off," Viv says as they leave, just loud enough for the guy to hear if he's listening. "I mean, if you go to the river next to the proper golf course just outside town, you can scavenge hundreds of balls for free. Rich bastards don't care when they lose them, they just buy a new box."
"Next time we'll scavenge beforehand, then. We'll paint them and go armed and ready for the ball-thieving poltergeist."
"Deal."
*
It's warm for April but not quite warm enough for lying out on the beach so aside from a handful of dogwalkers, those eager types with sturdy shoes and jackets for every weather type, the sand is quiet as Sunny and Viv walk along it to the board game café at the end of the promenade. When Viv's hand finds Sunny's, she doesn't resist: she allows her fingers to be caught and she revels in the novelty of a girl holding her hand, the novelty of this whole life.
Sunny is not ordinarily a fast mover. She likes to cultivate the people in her life like a gardener carefully choosing which plants to grow and tending to them until brilliant blooms blossom with hard-earned friendships nestled amidst the petals. The first eighteen years of her life were spent mostly in the company of her parents, the people she loved and trusted most: she had friends at school, the people she hung out with, but she never had a best friend as a child. She got on with everyone in her class, a social floater who drifted between the groups depending on her mood, but she never had those ride or die friendships that she read about.
It was the same in secondary school. She isn't in touch with anyone she knew before the age of eighteen. From a young age, Sunny learnt from her mothers that it was best to err on the side of caution when it came to opening up to people and as a child of the eighties, a girl who realised she was gay at the grand old age of eight in 1983 in the midst of the panic surrounding HIV and AIDS, she kept herself to herself. It wasn't until she started university ten years later that she told anyone other than her parents about her true self, when she hedged her bets that Ravi and Fraser could be trusted – a pretty big risk, considering back then she had thought they were straight as fuck.
In the years since – too many years, Sunny realises; time is moving too fast – she has grown herself a garden of friends. People she loves, people whose opinions she values and whose hearts she knows are true. In almost seven years, she has carefully chosen four people: Ravi; Fraser; Delilah, and Fenfen. And now there is a fifth, someone she chose in another life, and they are holding hands, and Sunny has already shared so much with her. The garden has grown another flower, from a seed that she doesn't remember planting, and now it's in full bloom. It's a little scary. A little disorientating.
But as they walk across the sand close to the sea, so waterlogged it can't slip away beneath their feet, it hits Sunny that she doesn't want to dig up this flower that sprung up out of nowhere. She doesn't want to wind back time to a moment before she pushed this seed into the soil and watered it each day. Even though she doesn't remember the tending, she can appreciate the flower.
It is the first time in the eight days since she woke up in this life that she has realised that she definitively does not want to leave, and it hits her so hard that she stops walking, jerking Viv to a stop too. Her throat is thick, like she has dry-swallowed a chalky tablet that won't go down and she can't get her words out when Viv asks what's wrong.
"Hey, are you okay?" Viv asks again, her thumb rubbing circles over the back of Sunny's hand. Sunny's able to nod as she picks through the weeds in her brain for the words she needs.
"I don't want to go back," she says at last.
"We don't have to ever go there again," Viv says. "I don't think either of us are particularly skilled at crazy golf, anyway. We can find other places to waste our time."
"No, I don't mean that. The golf was fun. I mean I don't want to go back to before. To last year."
"Oh." The word sounds sad but Viv is smiling. "I didn't realise you'd wanted to go back, really."
Sunny gives her an awkward kind of smile, like a kid caught out. "I was freaked out for a while. Not gonna lie, I still freak myself out when I think too hard about it because it's pretty fucked up, but yeah. I wanted the easy option. I wanted to go back like none of this ever happened."
"And now you want to stay."
"Now I want to stay."
"Because of me?"
Sunny looks at her feet, wiggles her toes and wishes she'd painted her nails, and lets out of a breath of a laugh before she looks up and meets Viv's gaze. "You're the only difference."
She pushes the toe of her shoe into the sand, digging a hole that fills itself in when the wet sand collapses.
"Come here," Viv says, pulling Sunny in for a hug. All the physical contact today is going to blow Sunny's head off, so much touch she's unused to. "Look at you, getting all emotional." Viv chuckles and strokes Sunny's hair, poking out from under her cap. "I know I can't do it justice when you don't hold the memories and never will, but I can't tell you how amazing the last year has been. It guts me that it's gone for you, but that doesn't change how I feel about you and it doesn't mean all the great shit didn't happen. Just that I'm gonna have to work extra hard to make sure you know how much you mean to me."
"I guess I'm lucky in a way," Sunny says into a pink curl that blurs her vision. "I get to fall in love with you all over again."
Viv's hug gets tighter, until Sunny chokes and they pull apart, and she sees that Viv's eyes are wet. She stares into those irises, as dark and crushingly deep as the Mariana trench until Viv laughs and blinks and looks away and a tear escapes.
"I'm not crying," she says, swiping at her cheek with her thumb. "That's just a bit of extra eye moisture, it's a well-documented side effect of living by the sea. Really moist eyes."
"Bollocks."
"It's true, the air is so moist it makes everything else moist and—"
"Oh my god, stop saying moist." Sunny watches as another tear wells and tips over the edge of Viv's lash line, evading thick black eyelashes to trickle down her cheek. Sunny lifts a curious finger and presses it to the salty tear to brush it away, staring in fascination at the glistening freckles that dot Viv's cheeks like flecks of paint on a canvas.
Viv covers her mouth when her eyes fill and tears leak from both and Sunny's brain disengages long enough for her to place her hands on Viv's shoulders and press her lips to the curve of Viv's cheek, tasting salt and sunlight.
This is something big, Sunny thinks when her heart fizzes and pops like the spark of a lighter. And not big like a heart attack. Big like this is the person I am destined to be with. Big like this is who destiny wants me to be with so who am I to disagree?
If this week has taught her anything it's that the world is more powerful than she can ever know and there are forces at work that she cannot see, so much more going on behind the scenes that she will never understand. Her mind has been wrenched open and the stars and their secrets have poured in to fill the gaps, and Sunny may not know much in the grand scheme of the universe but she knows now more than ever to let destiny do its thing.
So yes, she wants to stay. She wants to open her heart to all the possibilities of the future, a future with Viv; she wants to shed her fear of what she has lost because look, just look at what she has gained. A rose quartz of a woman, brighter than the pier lights reflecting off the sea once the sky grows dark.
Sunny feels dull in comparison, but she doesn't mind. She has never wanted to shine but Viv? Viv was born into radiance, and Sunny can't tear her eyes away.
*
I hope you're enjoying this long-ass date!