by Mandy Baggot
‘He was hot,’ Heidi continued, joining Beth on the sofa and finally ridding her mouth of the bacon bits.
‘Who? Derek?’ Beth teased.
‘No, your guy. Spiros,’ Heidi said, thumping the brochures down on the table and reaching for the wine.
‘His name was Alex,’ Beth breathed.
‘So, you do remember him.’
‘Vaguely,’ Beth said, waving a hand then grabbing a salt-and-vinegar crisp with her fingers. Her wedding band glinted sarcastically. ‘Only because we kept making him play “She Wolf” by Shakira.’
‘Well, all I know is I remember how fucking free I felt in Greece,’ Heidi said with a heavy sigh.
‘That’s because we were twenty-one with no ties or demanding clients or… anything to think about except which bikini to wear to the beach the next day.’
‘God, I miss that feeling!’ Heidi exclaimed. ‘I mean, when we were twenty-one, we didn’t realise how lucky we were. And we definitely didn’t know what to do with all that freedom.’
‘I think we gave it a pretty good go,’ Beth admitted with a smile.
‘But now,’ Heidi said, sitting forward on the sofa, a hand snaking towards the wine bottle, ‘think what we would be like equipped with ten years of life experience.’ She grinned, tongue tracing her bottom lip. ‘For example, I now know I’m definitely into women and you now know—’
‘I don’t have time for a holiday,’ Beth interrupted.
‘You have seventeen days to take before December.’
‘What?’ Beth said, watching Heidi open the bottle of wine. ‘Have you spoken to HR? Because that information is confidential, even to my best friend.’
‘I bribed Colin with a custard doughnut.’
‘I’m going to get him fired.’
‘Can the ex-Mrs Mountbatten still do that? I was hoping, for my sake, you might have lost your sway there.’ Heidi opened the wine and looked round the room full of antiques. ‘Any glasses in here that cost less than a month’s salary?’
Beth got to her feet and went towards the Art Deco cocktail bar Charles had got her mother for an Easter present. Cadbury’s Creme Eggs had never been enough here. Producing two bright green glasses with gold stems, she held them up for inspection. ‘I have no idea how much these cost.’
Heidi grinned. ‘Let’s pretend they’re rare examples of someone’s early work as we tip Aldi’s Chardonnay into them and browse brochures.’
Four
Almyros, Corfu, Greece
One week later
Alex Hallas’s shirt was sticking to his skin as the relentless July heat beat down from a royal-blue sky. On his back was a giant and heavy bag of kumquats. Ripe, orange and hopefully ready for the task he had destined for them. He needed to deliver these superfoods then get back to the car hire office within the hour. Unravelling the rope round the broken gate of his mother’s land, he shoved the ironwork with his hip, gaining access as rapidly and quietly as he could. Immediately, the goats took interest, trotting across the sun-bleached field towards him, bleating a greeting. Dark eyes moving to the one-level house, he silently prayed his mother was sleeping. It wasn’t siesta time, but still there was every chance…
‘Aleko!’
Or not.
Alex held his breath. Hearing his full name in his mother Margalo’s deep, gravelly voice made him stop walking. He held onto the sack of kumquats, the weight bearing down even more. Where was the sound coming from? Should he reply and pre-empt things? He didn’t want her lingering too long in the pasture.
‘Mama,’ he called back. ‘Where are you?’ He took a couple of steps towards the little white cottage, hoping she was inside. Because if she wasn’t inside then she was outside. And if she was outside there was a possibility that she could discover—
‘Alex,’ a quieter, almost frightened voice called out. ‘I am here too.’
Alex closed his eyes and bit back frustration and a pinch of panic. His cousin, Elektra. This was not good. And he still didn’t know exactly where they were.
‘Come, Aleko,’ his mother called. ‘We are in the barn.’
Now the heaviness of the sack on his back really started to burn. And, before he went to his mother, he needed to find somewhere to hide it.
*
‘Elektra,’ Alex greeted, smiling at his cousin who was standing next to their ancient farm machinery and looking nervous. There was sweat beading on her top lip, straw strands amid her long, dark and slightly damp curls, and her thick-framed glasses were halfway down her nose. ‘What are you doing here?’
Alex watched Elektra open her mouth to speak, but it was Margalo who replied.
‘Do not pretend this is a surprise.’ Margalo pointed an accusing finger at him. ‘You arranged to meet her here and I want to know why.’
Straight to the point. His mind was whirring trying to think of an appropriate response. Certainly, it could not be the truth. Therefore, all he had was bluff…
‘We arranged to meet?’ He put on a confused expression, followed up with a hand to his head as if trying to conjure up a diary of appointments. ‘I don’t think so.’
Elektra started to cry, a faint, nasal whimper, and it was then Alex realised his mistake. She had obviously arrived early, early enough to have been fully interrogated by his mother. That was why she had straw in her hair and… was that a scrape on her knee?
‘Aleko!’ Margalo roared. ‘Do not lie to me!’
He could do this. He could do it. He just had to hope that Elektra had not given up everything. His eyes flicked to the large trough of water in the corner of the dusty shed… surely not interrogation erring on the side of waterboarding.
His mother shuffled forward, her slippers sending dust motes into the dry air. Her grey hair was wild and untamed. She was still wearing her nightgown. He needed to start talking.
‘If I was meant to be meeting Elektra today then, Elektra, I am sorry, but I do not remember.’ He swallowed, caught between saving his own neck and not wanting to make things worse for his cousin. ‘I simply had a little time and I thought I would use this to make some lunch for you, Mama.’
The very next time he walked into the church, St Spyridon himself was going to strike him down. He looked straight at Margalo and chanced a smile. The trouble was, his mother was not someone who was easily fooled. She was also not someone who was easily placated once she was riled.
‘What lunch?’ she demanded to know. ‘Where are your bags of food for this?’
Alex waved a hand like this was inconsequential nonsense. ‘We have food in the cupboards.’ He racked his brain for the contents of the pantry. ‘I will make saganaki and… a pasta salad.’
‘We have no cheese!’ Margalo informed. ‘I tell you this last night. And…’ She was back to pointing again, a finger moving from him to the crying Elektra and back again. ‘Even if you forget you are meeting with Elektra today… you must surely remember why you are meeting her.’
‘Why I am meeting her.’ Alex hadn’t meant to say that aloud.
‘The point of the meeting,’ Margalo continued, eyes fixed on him hard. ‘Whenever this meeting shall be.’
‘I…’ Alex began.
‘It is a private situation,’ Elektra burst forth, wiping her nose with the sleeve of her denim jacket.
‘There is no private when it comes to family,’ Margalo insisted, padding slowly forward again, slippers flipping up more dust.
‘Come on, Mama, everyone is entitled to a little seclusion.’
‘This is not privacy,’ Margalo said, closing in on Elektra like a creeping panther ready to strike. ‘This seems to me like secrets. I do not like secrets.’
Alex bit his lip. He wanted to say something, disagree. If his mother did not like secrets, why was it, whenever he brought up the subject of his father, she closed the gates of conversation like it had become a hard border?
His mother began to cough then. It was a wretched sound that mimicked something between the grindi
ng of a bandsaw and a poor chef’s attempt at ripping open fish guts. Alex closed his eyes and waited for it to be over. Finally, she managed to clear her throat.
‘Secrets are not good for my already weak heart,’ Margalo said, rasping a little.
Alex held his tongue. What was the point? Particularly when he was on the back foot in this situation. He would say something else. His cousin beat him to it…
‘There are no secrets, Aunt Margalo,’ Elektra bleated. Her expression, however, said the exact opposite. His cousin may as well have held up a sign of confession.
‘No secrets,’ Alex said quickly. ‘Just a… surprise.’
His mother stopped focusing on Elektra then and snapped her head round, regarding him.
‘A surprise? What surprise?’
He could tell she genuinely wanted to believe him, but he also knew he wasn’t out of the woods yet. And now he was going to have to come up with something plausible once he had bought a little time.
‘Mama,’ he said, softening his features like he did when funds were running low and he needed charm to delay invoice payment on chicken feed. ‘I cannot tell you. Then it would not be a surprise. And it is a good surprise, I promise you that.’
Don’t lay it on too thick, Alex.
Margalo seemed to inhale right from the depths of herself, until finally air expelled from her mouth. ‘OK.’
‘OK?’ Alex and Elektra said at the same time.
Alex cleared his throat to say something more confidently, but Margalo interjected.
‘And now Elektra will go back to her job or home or wherever she is supposed to be, and you will make me lunch.’ Margalo lurched forward and Elektra took a step back, falling right into the basin of the wheelbarrow.
‘Are you OK?’ Alex asked, going to her aid as she kicked and bucked and tried to get herself back out again.
‘Stupid girl,’ Margalo cursed. ‘Why do you not look where you are going?’
‘Mama,’ Alex said, turning to her as Elektra righted herself, brushing the dust and straw from her clothes. ‘You go inside, out of this heat, then I will come in and make you lunch.’ He had to have a few moments alone with Elektra.
‘You will not be long,’ Margalo stated, beginning to shuffle towards the door of the barn. As always, it was not a question but an order.
Alex followed her and stopped in the doorway, leaning against the wood. He watched his mother move across the grass and dust, until finally she disappeared inside their home. Then he turned back to Elektra, ready to talk.
‘I cannot do this any more, Alex!’ his cousin exclaimed. She pushed her glasses back up her nose and threw her hands into the air. ‘She threatened me with the water trough. My hair got wet.’
‘Elektra, I am so sorry I was late.’
‘It’s too much to do this in secret. It’s not fair on me.’
‘You think it is fair on me?!’ Alex exclaimed, returning the frustrated gesticulation. ‘It is OK for you. You can escape her. She is not your mother. She is not pushing books on mechanics under your nose every five minutes.’
‘She is my auntie and that is bad enough,’ Elektra sniffed, wringing out strands of her wet hair, droplets falling to the ground. ‘And she scares me.’
‘She scares me too,’ Alex admitted with a sigh.
Elektra shook her head. ‘Look at us. I am twenty-five. You are thirty. We are both frightened of an old woman. That cannot be right.’
‘What isn’t right,’ Alex began, ‘is that I have to work a multitude of jobs just to feed the animals and pay for the electric and the water and the food. And still that is not good enough. Still she wants me to join your father in his business.’ He sighed, kicking at the ground in frustration. ‘There is nothing left for me, Elektra. I do not know who I even am any more.’ There was little money but, more importantly, no time. That’s what got to him the most. The fact that, for as long as he could remember now, there wasn’t a spare hour in the day when he could listen to music, plug in his turntable and lose himself to the sound. He took a deep breath, emotions caught between misery and defiance.
‘Sorry,’ he apologised, not wanting his exasperation to appear directed at her.
‘I get it, Alex. I really do.’
‘Elektra, you know how much I appreciate your help with this,’ Alex said sincerely. ‘I could not do this without you. You are the brain that is going to make this project work.’ He smiled. ‘And then, eventually, we will both be able to do what we really want to do. You will get your big job at a laboratory on the mainland and I will finally make music my living.’
Elektra blew out a breath and looked a little more hopeful. ‘If we are both not murdered by your mother before that.’
Alex shifted one end of a large bench and Elektra hurried to help him with the weight. ‘When she said you were in here, I was terrified she had discovered the pit.’ Putting the bench down, Alex rolled a lawnmower away too, revealing a trap door in the floor of the barn.
‘There was no way I would let that happen, no matter what she threatened me with. This is everything to me,’ Elektra insisted. She helped him throw open the door and the cool, dark air rose up from deep beneath the ground. Elektra began to descend carefully, pulling a switch for light as she disappeared from view.
‘I’ll make lunch,’ Alex called. ‘Then I’ll go and get the next batch of kumquats.’
‘Where are they?’ Elektra wanted to know, her voice sounding far away now.
‘Hopefully not being eaten by the chickens.’
Five
Paralia View, Almyros Beach, Corfu
‘Oh my God, doesn’t this feel good?!’
Heidi had been saying that same sentence since they had ordered wine at high altitude. It had been said at Corfu airport, and at every stop the transfer minibus had visited on their way to wherever they had just stopped. Beth still wasn’t quite sure. There had been gasping at palm trees on the way, then leaning into Beth’s lap to take photos of the view down the mountain as they zipped up the coast road. Finally sharing anecdotes about their last trip to the Greek island with a family from Leeds who, as pleasant as they seemed, Beth hoped never to see again now they knew she had once lost her knickers shinning up a lamppost for a dare. All the stories from 2009 seemed to be spilling from Heidi’s loose lips.
Beth climbed down out of the vehicle now, her sandals hitting dusty ground. She still felt as crazily out of control as she had when she’d given Heidi the advanced passenger information for the flights her friend had booked last week. Why she had agreed to this she still didn’t know. Except the holiday had virtually fallen into their laps. One of Heidi’s friends from yoga class had an uncle with a property here in Corfu and it was surprisingly available, in July, for two weeks. Beth had been extremely dubious about the state of said property, given the vacancy, but, having checked out the photographs on the web page, and having been entirely sick of Heidi’s whining about the ‘total evaporation of Beth’s sense of adventure’ she had given in and agreed. It had also been quite satisfying to tell Charles – and Kendra, who she had subtly stage-managed to be in the room at the time – that she was heading off on holiday to ‘kickstart her new life’. She had almost seen the hygge rising up out of her former husband like a demon was being banished.
‘Beth!’ Heidi exclaimed, taking her suitcase from the man who had driven them here. ‘Doesn’t this feel so good!’ She grinned at the minibus driver. ‘Thank you so much for your excellent driving.’
‘Parakalo,’ the driver replied, fingers smoothing over his dark moustache.
‘You’re very cute,’ Heidi continued. ‘Do you have a sister?’
Beth grabbed her friend by the arm, leading her round the bus and catching up the handle of her own case that had been deposited on the side of the track. Yes, it definitely couldn’t really be called a road. A blast of hot air from the exhaust as they walked behind the vehicle was followed up by a much more blissful sight.
‘Fuck me!�
� Heidi exclaimed, jaw dropping as she came to a standstill, hand going to the straw hat on her head.
Beth took a breath, her insides completely concurring with her best friend’s statement. The sun tickling her back, her eyes took in the full expanse of pale sand just a few metres from where they were standing. Beyond the wide, long beach, was the ocean, waves rolling back and forth, bubbling and inviting, the sunshine dancing on the crest of each white cap.
‘Can you believe our luck?’ Heidi asked, inhaling and exhaling like she was blowing up a lilo. ‘Right on the beach! Literally at one with the sea and sand. I can just feel all of life’s good stuff pumping through the earth.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ Beth admitted. It was. Completely. But she still felt a little out of sorts. What was she doing in Corfu? Single. Without Charles. Her mum gone. Instinctively, her third finger brushed against her fourth and there was that band of platinum she still couldn’t get off. The dental floss method was the last thing she’d tried…
‘Right,’ Heidi announced, her fingers delving into a natural straw bucket bag she’d picked up in Gap on their last-minute holiday shop. ‘There’s a key for the house in here somewhere.’
‘Is this it?’ Beth asked, striding forward to the lemon-painted one-level property right ahead of them. Bits of it were peeling off, but it simply made it look authentic and aged. There were two hanging baskets that were well tended to, bright pinks, purples and whites spilling over its edges, next to a small covered terrace that led to the bright, light blue front door.