Orla’s delicate brow furrows but Leigh rolls her eyes. ‘Do what you want,’ she says, words barbed. ‘We’re booking a flight for Monday.’
The fan continues to whir. It’s so hot in the room that I feel the tops of my thighs sticking to each other. My sting is oozing. I don’t say anything but turn and leave, feeling their eyes on my back as I go.
*
I’m going to the party on the beach. Maria and Nicholas didn’t even tell me where it’s happening, and for a while I wander around Chora. The main square is lonely and echoing at this time, the shopfronts shuttered. The tiny cobbled lanes seem to have gotten tangled up with each other in the dusk, like lovers under sheets. From my vantage point on top of the hill, I can see frothy lights down by the bay. I follow them and the sound of building music down to the beach.
There are so many people here, milling around in the dying light. It casts a golden glow across their faces, their exposed shoulders, backs, waists. There’s a DJ at some decks, as well as long trestle tables topped with platters. Everything is festooned with bulb lights, and over it all is the gentle hum of the ocean lapping at the shore. I scan the crowd for Maria and Nicholas, finding them quickly. They’re standing alone beside a large group, heads in close, faces serious. I go to wave but then decide I want to watch them for a minute – how they are when they don’t know they’re sharing a space with me. They seem older somehow, more serious. Nicholas looks up, his eyes sweeping the crowd, and sees me. It’s a funny thing to see his face transform; the watched becoming the watcher. They beckon me over and I obey, picking up a flute of Prosecco from a nearby table first.
‘You came, Julia,’ Maria says, her hands on top of my hands. They’re slightly cool. ‘But where are your lovely sisters? Did we not say that they were invited, too?’
I don’t want to talk about my sisters. I don’t want to think about them sitting in that hotel room, booking flights to get away from here, away from a peaceful life that feels so hard-won. ‘No, I’m alone.’
They give me that look I’m so familiar with now. A strange land between pity and understanding. Maria takes my hand and pulls me towards where a crowd of people are dancing. Grinning, she spins me underneath her arm. I’m not a natural dancer, I can’t move my body effortlessly to the beat like she can; my hips are stubborn and I can’t stop thinking about how I must look. Maria doesn’t seem to care. She pulls me in close, so close I can smell sweat and jasmine on her skin. She whispers in my ear, ‘Let go, Julia.’
Nicholas is watching. He raises a glass, drains it, then approaches. Together they frame me, their bodies surrounding me, until I’m no longer sure whose arm is whose. For a minute, two minutes, it’s perfect. My head sparkles with alcohol and I feel as if an anchor has come loose – that I’m drifting freely, pleasantly, into an ocean that never ends.
Then I feel Nicholas’s palm on the small of my back. Maria’s hand is on my cheek, quickly replaced by her lips, wet and hot. My ribcage contracts. My breath quickens. I want to be fine, but I’m not because here are the memories again, furiously clear and unapologetic. Joe’s strong arms pushing me, forcing me into a dark room with no way out.
I sway, feeling faint. Maria is there to catch me before I’ve even doubled over. Gently, they lead me out of the crowd, across the beach and around the bay, to a quieter stretch behind the rock. There’s a carcass of something here. It’s been picked clean.
‘Julia …’ Nicholas stretches out a hand, but all I see is Joe’s – I smell his whisky and cigarette breath, the soft tan of his skin in the half-light. I think I hit Nicholas’s hand away, but I can’t be sure.
He reels back, surprised. His eyes snag on my hair, and I have the sudden sense that he sees me now: the ugliness inside, the wasting skin and the viperous hair and the irises of granite. I need to tell him to stop looking at me, because I can feel something happening. Something dangerous and damaging and out of control. But I keep a hand on his, and I don’t look away.
‘Nicholas?’ Why does Maria’s voice sound so fraught? ‘My love, what’s happening?’
I feel a tug of guilt, but I can’t stop now. Nicholas’s hand is already cold underneath mine, and it’s spreading all the way up through the veins in his arms. Each one is submitting to me. Surrendering.
When I’ve finished, he’s a single, sad monolith. Another rock on the beach, toppled. Maria takes one look at me, makes an ugly guttural sound, and then begins to move backwards, hands grasping at the sand. I don’t want to hurt her, but what else am I supposed to do? Who would she tell about what she’s seen? How would I even begin to explain?
Gently, I place a hand on hers. I repeat what Joe said. His last words to me.
‘Don’t struggle, and it won’t hurt.’
*
The coach doesn’t have air conditioning, so the ride to the airport is stifling and intense. Orla falls asleep on my shoulder while my head lolls back and forth. Leigh keeps her eyes strained to the front of the coach. She doesn’t want us missing the stop. She is sensible and steady as a stone, my sister.
The last week has passed quickly. When I got back to the hotel after the party, dazed and stumbling, Leigh and Orla took one look at me and called a taxi straight to the hospital. My sting was infected, and I had a fever that needed antibiotics. After a couple of days in bed, heaving through dreams of poison and whisky and music and festoon lights, I started to feel better. I told my sisters I wanted to go home.
The airport is air-conditioned and so we drape ourselves across the plastic seats, drinking freshly squeezed orange juice and feasting on the last bougasta we’ll ever eat. I let the sugar coat my tongue, my teeth, trying to make myself sick of it so it won’t be so difficult to leave.
I will the flight to be delayed, but we take off on time. The plane pulls our skulls back into the headrests as it arcs upwards and away from the island. My sisters let me have the window and I crane my neck to look back. There it is, Serifos, nothing more than a craggy lump of rock in the ocean. A heart of green surrounded by endless blue. We’re still close enough to make out figures on the beaches. And down there, facing us, a bay like the one of the beach party. Could it be that same nameless beach? I scan for rocks, toppled in the sand, see nothing. I pull the agate Maria gave me out of my pocket, cradle it in my hand. It’s still warm, but cooling now.
I look past and through the island to see myself reflected thinly in the window. I’m not sure what I expect to see, but it isn’t the person who stares back: clear-skinned, blue-eyed, young-looking. It feels as though none of it was real – that I haven’t been alive for the last month, simply dreaming. I desperately want to have something of Serifos, to know that somehow it healed me. That I’m different to when I came.
I close my fingers around the agate, and when I open it again, there’s nothing but an ocean-smoothed pebble. Grey and cold. My body hums with energy, blood hisses in my veins, and I think, perhaps, the island left its mark after all.
BIRDIE IN THE BIG SMOKE
MELISSA WAN
The Operation
Birdie is on the 10.55 to London. Her train has departed and she sits alone with a notebook on her lap. The carriage is not crowded and her suitcase is on the floor in front of the seat beside her. She is going to London to see a friend who lives in Brussels now but who is in England to attend a wedding. As the train whizzes past fields neatened by speed and distance – a blur of colour and repeated patterns – Birdie thinks about the friend, whom she has not seen in a long time. They remained close after graduating and for a while they wrote to one another. They sent long handwritten letters of love and missing across the Channel but Birdie can no longer remember who last did the writing. Outside the window the cows lie low on the grass, their legs folded neatly beneath them. Until today Birdie had no idea that Crewe was so far away from Manchester: past Stockport, Wilmslow, even Alderley Edge.
Reckoning
Instead of making a start on the new story that has been on her mind for almost a
month, Birdie uses the blank pages of her notebook to make calculations. Birdie cannot afford to be in London for six days but the friend said she could stay with her in the room she has booked in the youth hostel. Until payday, just over a week away, Birdie has £62.61. On Google Maps she checks how long it will take to walk from the station to the youth hostel and she receives a message from her telephone provider: ‘You have used 80% of your data.’
Kindling
While Birdie is on the train she receives an email from the Norwegian she worked with not long ago. He says he will no longer be coming to England as initially planned. He will be staying in Norway. Birdie is disappointed. The prospect of seeing the Norwegian again had rekindled an attraction she once felt quite strongly. It is an attraction that resurfaces with proximity or the prospect of it. He is tall, blond and blue-eyed – not her type – but after spending so much time with him, Birdie began to understand why people married their colleagues.
A Lapse in Decorum
Across the aisle, a man in a green checked shirt sits at a table by the window. He has just been asked to move because he is in someone’s reserved seat. He is sure one of these was available, he says, and the seat owner says perhaps, but that she would prefer to please sit by the window, in the seat she had especially reserved. The man in green moves into the seat beside hers. The train is empty with available seats and Birdie cannot understand why he makes the choice to stay cramped beside the stranger. Now he no longer has the view from the window, the man in green takes out his phone and tries to lose himself in its screen.
A Wake-up Call
Birdie is staying in the friend’s private room in a youth hostel on Noel Street, even though the room has been booked only for one. The friend is paying £400 for five nights. For that money you get to be in Soho, crowded and expensive. The room has a double bed and security is lax. Nobody looks at Birdie, let alone asks what she thinks she is doing there, but the friend is paranoid they will be caught. This paranoia overshadows any joy at seeing one another again and almost instantly their reunion feels like an anticlimax. That evening the friend wants to go to a cocktail bar and eight of Birdie’s pounds go on a Long Island Iced Tea.
Closer
Halfway through her drink Birdie begins to look intensely at her coaster which is swollen with liquid. She has the desire to tell the friend about the Norwegian, about her confused feelings and disappointment, but feels it won’t be of any relevance. Also, the Norwegian is married and Birdie anticipates the friend’s moralising. Over the loud music the friend shouts that she and her husband were recently in a car crash. Though they are okay, they both came very close to not being. Birdie knows they have been thinking about breaking up for almost as long as they’ve been together, but the friend says the crash has brought them closer.
Beauty Sleep
The friend does not want to attend the wedding tomorrow. After their cocktail she lies flat on their bed in the hostel and complains. She does not like the couple and says they are always talking about money. Does Birdie even know how much this wedding cost? Birdie does not. When the friend tells her, Birdie keeps her eyes closed and mutters something conciliatory. That night Birdie will learn the meaning of the phrase ‘paper-thin walls’. She can hear the couple next door having sex but the friend is wearing her earplugs. Her eye mask says, ‘I need my beauty sleep.’
Thief
The next morning Birdie waits in the room while the friend goes down for breakfast. Birdie can hear a man on the phone in the corridor outside. He says, ‘Hello, James here,’ and Birdie thinks he has a voice you could fall in love with. When the friend comes back having eaten, she says nobody took her breakfast token. Birdie smiles in the presumption that the friend will offer the token to her. Instead the friend judges Birdie for wanting to steal breakfast too. Birdie is always stealing something she shouldn’t be. She is stealing the youth hostel’s electricity and hot water. She is stealing a pillow and one side of the mattress and duvet. The friend tells Birdie she can stay for one more night, but then she should probably leave. The room is booked only for one and, anyway, doesn’t Birdie have plenty of friends she could stay with in London?
The Stomach Versus the Wallet
On her third morning in London, Birdie packs her suitcase and leaves the hostel at 8.30 a.m. She trawls the streets to find an affordable breakfast that might also fill her up until dinnertime, when she is meeting a friend who will put her up on his sofa. A steady stream of Londoners pass her by, fractious and defeated from their commute. Birdie sits in a cafe called Fiori. Because it is in Covent Garden it is expensive despite being low quality. Birdie spends £7.20 on a toastie and a pot of tea and stays there for three hours. She chews slowly and asks for a refill of hot water. Birdie tries to write but is distracted. She cannot stop thinking about the fact that she is now alone in London, with little money, having to rely on the generosity of others until her return train on Sunday. Fuming, Birdie writes three angry pages in her notebook.
The Walk
Birdie walks from Covent Garden to Deptford. Deptford is six miles away and it takes her two hours and forty-five minutes, in part because every thirty seconds she has to stop to realign the wheels on her suitcase, which catch. For much of the way she walks along a main road. Birdie learns that this part of the city is not made for pedestrians. Google Maps can no longer calculate a walking route. Birdie is completely surrounded by cars and machines and by the time she reaches New Cross, she has been driven almost to the point of tears.
The Hungarian Cafe
Birdie checks prices through the windows of cafes before she decides whether or not to go in. A cup of tea at the Hungarian Cafe is only £1.80. When she enters, there are two women sitting in the window, but they soon leave and Birdie becomes the establishment’s sole customer. The waiter is an old man in a waistcoat, his hair and moustache religiously white. He stands behind the counter and spritzes the leaves on a money plant. After an hour Birdie feels so guilty about only ordering a cup of tea that she buys a muffin for £2. It is tasty but small and dry, and she resents having to pay twice what she had intended. She phones her mother but her mother cannot talk. Birdie can feel her eyes prickling but is determined not to be so pathetic as to cry. Instead she looks out of the window at the road and makes a list of ‘At Leasts’:
At least I’m not a bus driver always stuck in traffic.
At least I’m not an HGV driver always stuck in traffic.
At least I’m not a taxi driver always stuck in traffic.
At least I’m not a woman who has to shop for her whole family and carry this shopping in heavy bags hanging from the crooks of her elbows.
At least my knees still work.
At least my brain still works.
At least I have never been in a car crash.
At least I have the choice to take contraception if I want to.
At least I can buy flowers if I want to.
At least I sometimes find a pound on the street and even €100 that summer in Naples.
At least I’m not homeless.
At least I could have caught a bus if I really wanted to.
At least I could have caught the tube if I really wanted to.
At least I could even have taken a taxi if I really wanted to.
At least
Laura
A day later, staying with her friend Laura, life looks up significantly. In Laura’s presence the world becomes a better place. Once, Birdie was in love with Laura. When they first met, Laura had long hair down to her waist. She has now cut it to her shoulders but of course this does nothing to mar her beauty, her intelligence or her kindness. She makes Birdie cups of tea and shares a tin of sardine paste with her. Laura reads Birdie a message in which her girlfriend, who lives in Austria, says hi hi hi and sorry she missed her. Birdie likes Laura’s girlfriend. This feeling of warmth towards the girlfriend despite her previous feelings for Laura has been one of the best things to happen to Birdie and she hopes it says someth
ing about her character.
Yellow Pears
In the late afternoon Birdie and Laura go for a walk around Laura’s new neighbourhood of Swiss Cottage. They walk and walk without knowing where they are going, stumbling down cobbled streets, often into each other. They feel drunk without having had anything to drink. They walk past the Freud Museum and Laura shows Birdie the house where Rabindranath Tagore once stayed. They buy a bag of chips to share, which they coat in salt and vinegar, and walk down a small alley where pears have fallen from their trees and onto the stairs. The pears are yellow and the leaves too are yellow and orange and red. Everything is beautiful. When they find a pub, Laura even buys Birdie a pint.
Raclette
Birdie and Laura buy cheap wine, potatoes and salad from the supermarket to accompany the cheese Laura brought back from Austria when she went to see her girlfriend. The groceries come to a total of £9.51, which Birdie happily pays for on her card. The cheese is for the raclette machine. They debate over whether raclette is a French or Dutch invention. Later Birdie will discover it is Swiss. They listen to music and Birdie introduces Laura to Bill Callahan. In her bedroom they listen and laugh to ‘Eid Ma Clack Shaw’. They talk and listen to music until late in the night. Birdie thinks it is funny to joke that Laura’s bed is a piece of crap, but for her remaining two nights in London she sleeps the best she has slept in days.
The Final Supper
Birdie sees the friend she travelled to London especially to see once more in the capital, at breakfast on the morning of their return journeys. The friend tells Birdie she seems ‘off’. They are at an expensive cafe so Birdie only orders a coffee and watches the friend complain about the size of her egg. Birdie finds it hard to remember why they were ever friends. Things have changed so much that their friendship, now, is based entirely on the past and what they once shared. Birdie wonders for how long history and obligation will be enough.
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