‘Thank you,’ I said, a lump forming in my throat at his kindness. It was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment.
‘So what next?’ Leif asked.
‘More coffee?’ I suggested lightly, playing, I think, for time.
‘More coffee is probably a good idea,’ Leif said. ‘But I think you have bigger decisions to make.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I do know that. It’s just that I still can’t see any options, really.’
‘Well,’ Leif said, leaning forwards. He straightened his back, visibly interrupting himself. ‘Can I?’ he asked.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘Carry on.’
‘Well, I think you should call your mother. At least, it’s definitely what I would do. My mum is great for advice.’
‘But your mother isn’t my mother,’ I said. ‘Otherwise you might feel differently.’
‘That’s true,’ Leif said thoughtfully. ‘Only you can decide. But whatever she’s like, I think she loves you, yes?’
I nodded.
‘And I think you are going to need her help.’
‘But how can she help me, Leif? She’s hundreds of miles away.’
‘Well, I’m guessing you’re going to need money. You said you don’t have too much, right?’
‘That’s right. I’ve got about seventy pounds in drachma left, and a few hundred in my bank, but I’m not even sure if my card works here.’
‘If you need to change your flight and book another hotel, maybe your mother can help you.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I suppose that’s true. Though I’m not sure how she’d get any money to me.’
‘I’m sure,’ Leif said, ‘there are ways.’
‘And you think I should change hotels.’
‘Go to Fira, maybe. Oia is small. If you stay here then you will see him again.’
‘He goes to Fira,’ I explained. ‘His drinking friends are in Fira. So I’d be scared in Fira, too.’
‘Then maybe another town,’ Leif said. ‘You could try Megalochori. Or a beach place like Monolithos or somewhere.’
‘I can’t drive,’ I pointed out. ‘So it needs to be easy to get to. On a bus route or something.’
‘I can take you,’ Leif told me. ‘If you need me to.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t . . .’ I said.
Leif shrugged.
‘I need to change my flight, too.’
‘Do you?’ Leif asked. ‘If you stay in a different place, then . . .’
‘But I’d still end up next to him for the flight home. I’d be terrified.’
‘Ah, of course,’ Leif said. ‘Then we need to sort that out too.’
Tears welled up anew at his unexpected use of the word ‘we’. Because that ‘we’ suddenly seemed to make it all seem possible. I’d been feeling so alone up until that moment.
‘I’ll need to get my stuff, too. It’s all still in the room.’
‘You have a key?’ Leif asked.
I checked my pocket and nodded.
‘Then I see when he is gone. I think the man in reception will help me if we need it. Then we move your stuff to my room. We go to Fira for the travel agency, and we try to change your ticket. And then . . . if you need to stay more nights we book a room in Monolithos. This way, you can walk to the beach. You can still have a holiday, yes?’
I nodded. I was shocked by how wise he seemed and wondered if he wasn’t perhaps older than he looked. ‘Are you sure you don’t mind helping me with all of this? It seems ever such a lot of bother.’
‘Not at all,’ Leif said.
‘But what about your hillwalking?’
He glanced at his chunky watch again. ‘It’s gone nine,’ he said. ‘The walk is started. So I’m free all day.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m ruining your holiday.’
‘Rubbish,’ Leif said. ‘It’s like an adventure for me, yes? Like in a children’s book or something. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to . . . It’s all very serious for you, of course. It’s just that, me? I don’t mind. I like helping you.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, struggling against tears yet again. ‘I don’t know what I’d do other—’ My voice gave out on me.
‘Stop,’ Leif said, reaching across the table to rest his fingertips on my forearm. ‘It’s OK. It’s all going to be OK, right?’
I nodded weakly.
We had another round of coffees and Leif, thankfully, paid. In my distress, I hadn’t thought about the fact my money was still in the room. We climbed silently back up the path. It was so steep that talking and walking were impossible to do at the same time.
The room I had slept in that night had been cleaned. The bed had been made and the floor glistened. A mop was propped diagonally across the doorway, barring me from entering. So I sat on the little wall and waited.
Leif returned almost immediately. ‘He is there,’ he said. ‘He was angry I woke him up, but he’s there.’
‘What did you say?’ I asked him.
‘I said I had the wrong room. They all look the same anyway. He believes me.’
‘Well done,’ I said. ‘What now?’
‘You should wait in our room, I think,’ he suggested. ‘Olav, my friend, is walking, so the room is empty. I can sit on the balcony and read. That way, if he leaves I will see. And then we can go and get your suitcase.’
I nodded.
‘It’s a good plan, yes?’
I nodded again. ‘It’s a very good plan. Thank you.’
‘So, come quickly. Before he gets up.’
My heart raced as we climbed the stairs. If Conor appeared, I decided, I’d just sprint up to the hotel – to safety. In the end, even though there was no sign of him at all, I put Leif’s towel over my head and ran as fast as I could.
Leif let me into his room. It was identical to ours, just with the twin beds pushed to opposite walls where ours had been together to form a double. Though I insisted it was all fine, he ran around tidying up, which struck me as infinitely sweet. When he’d finished, he picked up a book and moved to the doorway. ‘You can lock this if it makes you feel safe,’ he said.
‘It’s fine,’ I replied. ‘He’ll never guess I’m here.’
Leif nodded and silently vanished into the brightness, closing the door behind him.
I sat on his bed for a moment waiting for my eyes to adjust, then stood and wandered around the room.
There was a pile of books on the bedside table, all written in an incomprehensible language I assumed must be Norwegian. There was a map and a compass and a tiny portable CD player with a stack of five or six CDs. Some of these looked Norwegian, but he also had a George Michael album and REM’s Out of Time. I remember those two because I had them at home.
Eventually I sat back on Leif’s bed and lay back to stare at the pattern of light the shutters cast upon the ceiling. My wrists hurt and I noticed only now how badly bruised they were.
I thought about how strange it was to be lying on a stranger’s bed. I noticed the soft musky scent of whatever deodorant Leif wore, drifting from the sheets.
I felt safe, for the moment at least. Though Conor was just yards away, I was hidden in the shadows and Leif was on guard outside. And I wondered at how unexpected it was to be feeling so safe in his company when the presence of the person I’d come away with made me feel so afraid. And then I must have fallen asleep.
SEVEN
BECKY
Our ferry was at nine in the morning, so we got up just before seven.
Alpina was bleating, and the farmer, who would drive us to the port, was already out tending his garden. It was quite cool this morning but the air held a promise of heat to come. We ran down to the beach for a final swim, then showered and packed our suitcases. I actually felt quite tearful as we put them in the car. I could have happily stayed there forever.
The manic boarding process felt stressful again, though not quite as bad as the first time. We were getting used to it, I suppose. The engines shuddered an
d the quay started to slip away and I felt as excited as I have ever felt. There’s something wonderful about that moment when a ship leaves the port, isn’t there?
This time, the ferry had a tiny deck area at the rear so we left our suitcases in the care of our elderly neighbours and jostled our way outside. Other than popping back for food, I stayed there the entire four and a half hours.
The ferry stopped at Sifnos and Folegandros, both of which, seen from the port at least, looked almost identical to Serifos. Only the colour of the rock seemed to change, a deep grey for Sifnos and a lighter beige colour for Folegandros. It seemed a shame to be visiting them without getting off the boat. I couldn’t help but think of all the beaches and kittens and goats we were missing out on.
‘We should have gone to more islands,’ I eventually commented, just as Folegandros was vanishing into the haze.
‘Why?’ Mum asked.
I shrugged. ‘Why not? I mean, we’re stopping at them all anyway. We could have spent two nights on each of them.’
Mum pulled a face. ‘It’s very tiring moving all the time, I think,’ she said. ‘And I’m sure you’ll like Santorini.’
‘I just keep thinking of all the things we won’t see. All the adventures we’ve almost had, do you know what I mean?’
Mum nodded. ‘Well, I’m sure you’ll like Santorini. I mean, everyone says it’s lovely, don’t they?’
There was something fake about her voice. I knew her so well and I’d always felt I could sense it in the ether when something had been left unsaid. I glanced at her sideways and I think she saw that I had noticed. ‘I’m going to nip to the loo,’ she said, turning away. And I remembered the conversation about drachma and how she’d avoided looking at me in exactly the same way. ‘Will you guard these spaces with your life?’ Space on the rear deck was in great demand and short supply.
‘I will,’ I told her.
By the time she got back, I’d worked it out. Or at least, I thought I had. ‘Have you been here before?’ I asked, the second she returned.
Mum handed me a plastic beaker of tea. ‘Here?’ she said obtusely, as if I might mean here on this boat in the middle of the Aegean.
‘Santorini,’ I told her. ‘You have, haven’t you? You’ve been here before.’
Mum sipped her tea. She was buying time. ‘I told you,’ she said. ‘I was here with your Aunt Abby.’
‘You never said it was Santorini,’ I said. ‘Or Greece. You’ve never mentioned it once. Not in my entire life.’
Mum nodded and sighed. ‘Oh, I expect I did at some point,’ she said vaguely. ‘You probably just weren’t listening.’
‘Never,’ I said definitively. ‘Not once.’
‘Well, I just have. So you know, don’t you? Now, I think I might go inside for a sit-down. How long have we got?’
I glanced at my phone. ‘Another hour and a half, I think.’
‘Are you coming?’ Mum asked.
I wrinkled my nose. ‘No, I think I’ll stay here for a while.’
I watched Mum leave then turned back to stare at the sea. I sipped my tea and thought about the fact that Santorini was apparently where I’d been conceived. And now we were travelling back here and there had to be a reason why. Was this some sort of pilgrimage, I wondered? A trip to my father’s grave?
‘Do you have a light?’
I turned to see an incredibly attractive man standing beside me. He was tall and dark with olive skin and hazel eyes. He had the most lustrous hair I had ever seen on a man, at least, outside a shampoo commercial. I suddenly realised that all of this sun and sea, all this relaxation, was making me feel a bit romantic. It had been months since Tom, after all.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Can you hold this?’ I handed him my tea and rummaged in my handbag until I found my lighter and cigarettes.
‘It’s beautiful, huh?’ he asked, once we had both lit our cigarettes. ‘And the air is so fresh and salty, you know?’
I nodded. ‘Well, except for all that diesel.’ I pointed to a ferry passing by in the other direction, a long, black vapour trail of smoke rising from its funnel.
‘Huh,’ the man said.
‘You’re American?’ I asked.
‘Canadian.’
‘Sorry.’
The man shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Except that Donald Trump is not my president.’
‘There are so many islands,’ I commented. We were zipping past another one. ‘I had no idea.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘It makes you want to visit them all, right?’
‘Absolutely. Are you going to Santorini, too?’ I asked, I’ll admit, not without hope.
The man shook his head. ‘Mykonos,’ he said. ‘With my partner.’ He nodded towards the interior. ‘He’s inside feeling seasick.’
‘Right,’ I said, trying to keep the disappointment from my voice. ‘Of course.’
The port of Santorini was quite different from all of the others. The hills behind the port – perhaps they should be called mountains, really – rose steeply, and whereas on the other islands towns had sprung up around the ports, here there was nothing but a jetty and a zigzagging road up the cliff face. And the town, instead, had been sprinkled along the top. From a distance the white houses looked like snow on a mountaintop or icing on a cake.
With a hundred other travellers, we trundled our cases along the jetty and then waited for our taxi to Oia.
Bits and bobs of conversations I’d had with Mum were suddenly starting to make sense for the first time. ‘Were you in Oia before?’ I asked, once I’d shown the driver our address on my iPhone and our taxi had lurched away.
Mum turned from the window and nodded. ‘It was nicer, as I recall, although the main town seemed a bit full-on even back then.’
We’d been given a number to call on arrival but Baruch, our contact, wasn’t answering, so we followed his incredibly detailed instructions and descended exactly seventy-seven steps from the minimart. And there, as in the photo, was our cave house. The door was wide open and the key was in the lock.
The rooms had been carved into the mountainside and had rounded ceilings with bumps and irregularities. Each room led to the next slightly smaller room, in an unusual sort of daisy chain, until finally, deep within the mountain, we arrived at a tiny blue-tiled bathroom. All of the furnishings – the shower cubicle, the washbasin, the shelves – had been carved from the rock face. Only the toilet was made of traditional ceramic. It was a bit like being in a Flintstones house, only designed by Martha Stewart. I loved it.
‘I didn’t realise you’d have to go through one bedroom to get to the other,’ Mum commented, hesitating between the two.
‘Me neither,’ I said. ‘But it doesn’t matter, does it? You should have the bigger one, because you get up first.’
‘But I’ll wake you up if I need the bathroom,’ Mum said.
‘Nothing wakes me up,’ I told her. ‘You know that.’
We dumped our cases on our beds and, drawn by the view, headed back outside. There were two folding chairs which we set up so we could sit and stare at the sea. Looking out over the bay to a series of ragged outcrops and islands was pretty damned amazing.
‘Now there’s a view,’ I commented.
‘I knew you’d like it,’ Mum said. ‘Incredible, isn’t it?’
I nodded. ‘Is this where you stayed with Aunt Abby? Is this the same hotel, I mean?’
‘Not quite,’ Mum said. ‘We were a little bit further round that way, I think.’ She pointed to the left.
‘Will you show me?’ I asked. ‘Not now, but at some point.’
Mum nodded. ‘If it’s still there. There was a staircase down to the sea, if I remember correctly. We could try to find that. It’s only a tiny beach but it’s big enough to swim.’
‘There are proper beaches here, too,’ I said. ‘Huge beaches. I saw them in the guide.’
‘But you need transport to get to the other ones,’ Mum said. ‘I suppose ther
e might be a bus.’
‘You could rent a car,’ I suggested.
‘I’m not sure I’d want to drive in Greece!’
‘Or we could rent one of those mopeds,’ I said. They were buzzing all over the island.
‘I definitely can’t drive a moped.’
‘I can,’ I said. ‘No problem.’
Mum laughed. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said, as if this was the silliest thing anyone had ever suggested.
Deciding to save that battle for later, I got up and headed inside. I peered into the fridge but it was totally empty.
‘Do we need supplies?’ Mum asked. She had followed me and was standing in the doorway.
‘I fancied a cup of tea, that’s all,’ I said. ‘But there’s not even a teabag. I might nip up to that shop.’
Mum nodded. ‘Are you OK on your own? It’s just I’d better wait here in case Barak, or whatever his name is, comes.’
‘Baruch, I think,’ I said, checking the sheet of paper on which I’d printed the instructions. ‘Yes, Baruch, spelt with U-C-H at the end. Do you need anything?’
‘No, no,’ Mum said. ‘Just tea and milk.’ She’d seemed deflated since we’d arrived here. I guessed she needed some time alone to think about her holiday here all those years ago.
‘OK, just tea and milk?’
‘Get some toothpaste too, could you?’ Mum said.
‘Tea, milk and toothpaste.’
‘And some bread and cheese perhaps. Or some crisps or something. Just a snacky thing – in case we get peckish.’
I groaned. Never-ending shopping lists were one of Mum’s specialities. ‘Tea, milk, toothpaste, bread and cheese, then?’ I said.
‘And some chocolate. And some wine? Oh, and coffee, of course.’
‘Hold it there,’ I said, pulling my phone from my pocket. ‘Now, start again, could you?’
Once I had typed the list on my phone, I started to climb the stairs. I was feeling a tiny bit disappointed with Santorini, if I’m honest. It’s not that the view wasn’t wonderful, but I’d been in love with our beach in Serifos. I’d just have to convince Mum about the transport business, I supposed.
I wondered again why we were here. The choice of Santorini, of Oia, was no accident. That much was obvious. Perhaps, just perhaps, Mum had brought me here to tell me about my father. If so, it was about bloody time.
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