But the man on reception – the same guy who had fixed me up with a room – shook his head. ‘No, we only need one,’ he said. ‘We have your husband’s.’
‘Do you know where he is?’ I asked, ignoring the husband reference for the simple reason I’d become bored with correcting him.
He shrugged. ‘Why? You are friends again?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘No, not really. Not at all.’
He shrugged again. ‘A friend phoned for him. A man called Mac? English.’
‘Mike?’ I suggested.
The man nodded.
‘So Conor won’t be back till late.’
‘He says he will be here for dinner,’ the man said. ‘He reserved a table for two at the front. Do you want me to give him a message?’
I glanced at Leif who shook his head almost imperceptibly.
We sat in the hotel restaurant and tried to come up with a fresh plan over lunch. Leif ate some fish baked in tomato sauce while I nibbled at a salad. I had pretty much lost my appetite.
There seemed to be no point changing my flight home to an earlier one until I’d got my passport back and, until I had got it back, I didn’t dare move to another hotel, let alone another town. Leif sat and chewed at a fingernail while I tried to think. But my mind remained totally blank. I seemed to have run out of options.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said eventually, ‘but I can’t think of any ideas at all.’
Leif nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Me neither. Me either?’
‘Neither,’ I said. ‘You were right the first time.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want to phone your mother?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, tearing up just at the thought of it. ‘Maybe.’ When all else fails . . .
We walked up to street level and about a quarter of a mile to a phone booth. Leif had a calling card that he said was cheaper than the hotel phone.
Though it was by far the most likely possibility, it hadn’t even crossed my mind that Mum might be out. I suppose I was so wrapped up in what I was going to tell her and how she might respond that the most obvious outcome escaped me.
Afterwards, it took me a few seconds to spot Leif. He was seated at a respectful distance on a wall, looking out to sea. ‘That was quick,’ he said, when I climbed over and sat next to him.
‘She wasn’t there,’ I explained, handing back the calling card. And then tears, more damned tears, started to flow. I couldn’t tell you if they were tears of relief because I hadn’t had to explain to Mum that I wasn’t in Cornwall with Abby, but in Greece with a man – a monster – or whether it was because the fact of not being able to speak to her had left me feeling even more alone than before. It was probably a mixture of both of those, actually. Because there were certainly plenty of tears.
Leif wrapped one arm awkwardly around my shoulder. ‘It’s going to be OK,’ he said, over and over. ‘Hey, it’s going to be OK. Leif is with you. Leif is here.’
Once my tears had subsided, Leif asked me what I wanted to do. I replied that I didn’t know. My brain seemed to have ceased to function.
‘Maybe we should go to a beach,’ he suggested. ‘I’ve been walking so much, but not too much swimming. Not so much beach.’
‘But what if we miss Conor?’ I asked.
‘He’ll be back tonight. He has a table booked. We have six hours. Swimming is better than sitting, no?’
‘Sure,’ I said, though I wasn’t sure this was true. ‘Have you got a car to get to the beach with, or is there a bus?’
‘A bike,’ Leif said. ‘It’s craysee fun. You’ll see.’ I liked the strange way he’d pronounced ‘crazy’.
We stood and started back towards the hotel. ‘There is a red beach I heard about,’ Leif told me. ‘We could go there. It is very beautiful, I think.’
‘It is,’ I told him. ‘I’ve been there.’
‘Then a different one,’ Leif said. ‘There are many. I will ask at the hotel.’
Leif’s bike was a dusty green scooter. He gave me the crash helmet and wore wrap-around sunglasses to protect his own eyes. Hardly anyone we saw wore their crash helmets but I was too scared to go without.
I had to put my arms around Leif’s waist as there was nothing else to hold on to. And this felt incredibly awkward at first – overly intimate really. But as he banked around the corners and up and down all the hills I got used to it. He’d been so very, very kind to me that I was starting to love him in a way. I wasn’t in love with him. Though I’d come to understand, belatedly, that my attraction to Conor hadn’t been love, I still had no idea what the real thing was supposed to look like. But Leif was cute and funny. He smiled all the time. He made everything seem easier and had been incredibly nice to me. So he was kind of hard not to love, really. I wondered why I’d come away with Conor. Why couldn’t I have met someone who was actually nice, like Leif, instead?
My mind was obsessing about Conor and my passport and my bank card, and then Conor again, in an endless, messy loop. But as the scenery buzzed by, I managed brief snatches of presence, tiny bursts of awareness of where I was and how nice it still was to be whizzing around Santorini’s dusty roads on a scooter.
We parked at the top of a dirt road and walked for ten minutes down the track to Caldera Beach. It was another little bay bordered by reddish rocks. The sand this time was almost black.
There were parasols and sunbeds available but Leif didn’t seem to consider them and, seeing as I had no money, it certainly wasn’t going to be my suggestion. Instead, we chose the far end of the beach where the rock face provided some shadow and we spread our towels out on the scorching sand.
‘Do you swim?’ Leif asked, pulling a bottle of water from his bag and offering it to me.
I nodded and took it. ‘Not brilliantly,’ I said. ‘But I float quite well.’
‘I’m not so good, either,’ Leif told me.
‘I know,’ I told him. ‘I saw!’
We paddled around in the shallows and let tiny fish nibble at our toes. We swam (badly) and wove in and out of the little fishing boats that were moored there. Later we lay at the water’s edge with the tiny waves rippling around our feet.
‘Tell me about Laura,’ Leif said eventually. ‘I don’t know anything about you.’
I told him I was a secretary. And I told him I lived with my mother.
‘OK,’ Leif said. ‘But that’s just what you do. It’s just where you live. What about you?’
‘I’m not sure I understand.’
‘OK,’ Leif said. ‘What food do you like?’
‘Oh, that’s easy,’ I told him. ‘Seafood: prawns, calamari, scallops, cockles, whelks. Anything that comes from the sea.’
‘The calamari is amazing in Greece,’ Leif said. ‘The best, I think, in the world. And what music do you like?’
‘Britpop mainly,’ I said.
‘This is Blur. Oasis . . .’
‘Yes. I’m more Blur than Oasis,’ I told him. You had to be one or the other in the nineties. ‘The Verve. The Stone Roses . . .’
‘I like these too,’ Leif told me. ‘And Radiohead. You know Radiohead?’
‘“Creep” is an amazing song,’ I said.
‘Yes, amazing.’
‘I have your George Michael album too,’ I told him. ‘The one you have in the room.’
‘Listen Without Prejudice? It’s Olav’s actually. But I like it.’
‘The one I can’t get out of my head at the moment is that Blur song,’ I told him. ‘They’re playing it everywhere here. I think Greece must be a bit behind.’
‘“Girls and Boys”?’ Leif asked.
I nodded.
‘I love that song,’ he said. ‘It makes me want to jump around and go crazy, you know?’ He had pronounced the Z of ‘crazy’ like an S, once again.
I sang the first few bars and Leif laughed. ‘You even do the good accent,’ he said.
‘Ah, well, it’s Essex innit, mate,’ I mugged. ‘It’s a
bit like the accent in East London where I come from.’
‘You have a very nice voice when you sing. I sing like a . . . I don’t know . . . like The Scream,’ Leif said.
‘The Scream?’
‘It’s a painting. By Edvard Munch. It’s quite famous. Like this.’ He sat up and clamped his hands to his ears and pulled a grotesque face.
I laughed for the first time in what felt like days. ‘I know it,’ I said. ‘I actually know the one you mean.’
‘Well, that’s how I sing,’ Leif grinned. ‘Or maybe this is what other people do when I sing.’
We were back at the hotel by seven. When the concierge confirmed that Conor was still out, we had a drink in the restaurant and waited.
‘What will you do?’ Leif asked. The concierge had told me that there were definitively no spare rooms this evening. Not even dirty ones.
‘I don’t know,’ I told him. ‘I need to think.’
One of the tables in the restaurant had a reserved notice on it and I wondered if it was Conor’s. Did he really imagine we would sit together for a candlelit dinner? Knowing him, he probably did. He probably thought he could talk his way out of the whole thing with that golden tongue of his. Plus, he had taken my passport hostage, of course.
Though Conor’s table remained quite empty, we didn’t dare leave in case we missed him. So we took a spare table at the back, and ordered food for ourselves.
Leif had mussels in saganaki sauce and I plumped for the calamari – I’d been thinking about it all day.
The waiter came back to offer us Conor’s table, which had a far nicer view, but after a moment’s reflection, I declined. I feared that he would see Leif’s presence as provocation – especially if he was sitting with me. And I worried that Conor would punch skinny Leif out cold.
Other than an offer – accepted – to taste each other’s food, we spoke very little over dinner. We were both, I think, too nervous about the upcoming confrontation.
As we finally moved on to coffee and dessert, and as the night grew darker and the temperature fell, the likelihood of Conor’s arrival seemed to fade, so I worried instead about where to sleep.
I still had the key to our room, of course; I just felt too scared to use it. But after a couple of glasses of wine and in the absence of other options, I decided I’d have to be brave. If I turned the key in the lock at least Conor couldn’t get in.
At the end of the meal, I discovered I could add it to ‘our’ hotel bill. So that is exactly what I chose to do.
Leif insisted he wasn’t comfortable with this but I reminded him that Conor had stolen all my money. ‘It’s me inviting you, not him,’ I told him. ‘It’s the least I can do.’
‘OK,’ Leif said. ‘If you must.’
At eleven, Leif bravely rapped on our door. When it became evident that he really wasn’t there, I checked the room once again to see if my bumbag had magically reappeared during our absence. It hadn’t.
I stepped back out into the moonlight, to where Leif was keeping watch. ‘I’m going to sleep here, I think,’ I told him.
‘You’re staying here?!’ Leif asked, apparently astonished.
‘I can’t see I have other choices,’ I said. ‘You heard what the man in the hotel said.’
‘You’re not scared?’ Leif asked.
I nodded quickly and swallowed with difficulty. ‘But I’ll turn the key. He won’t be able to get in. And if I scream, you and Olav will come to help me, right?’
Leif scratched behind his ear. ‘No,’ he said simply. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘You won’t come if I need you?’
‘No, I don’t think you can stay here.’
‘I’ll be fine. If I turn the key . . .’ I started again.
‘He will break a window,’ Leif said. ‘Or kick the door. I saw what he was like. It’s too dangerous.’
‘I’ll be fine, Leif,’ I insisted. ‘He’ll . . .’ But my voice failed me. Because I knew Leif was right. Break down the door was exactly what Conor would do if he came back drunk and couldn’t get into his room again.
‘Come,’ Leif said, holding out one hand.
‘Come where?’ I asked.
‘We need to talk to Olav.’
We found Olav in the room. He was listening to music on his headphones and smoking a joint in the dark.
Leif spoke rapidly in Norwegian and waved his hands around in the clouds of smoke until Olav, looking bemused, stubbed the joint out and opened the windows and doors.
‘I don’t mind the smoke,’ I told Leif.
‘I do,’ he said. ‘I really do. This is my bedroom.’
Once the windows were open, Olav, a huge Viking of a man, came back to face me.
‘This is Laura,’ Leif said. ‘Olav.’
We shook hands and said shy hellos.
Leif carried on in Norwegian and as the conversation went on, it got faster, then louder, and even what people might call animated. It went on for so long that in the end I sank into the armchair. I tried to interrupt them once or twice to find out if they were arguing about me. But Leif brushed my interventions away with one hand. ‘Just hang on,’ he said. ‘Please.’ And in the end things calmed down again. Some kind of truce appeared to have been negotiated.
‘It’s decided,’ Leif finally announced.
‘What is?’
‘You’re in my bed. And I will share with Olav.’
I protested. As much as anything else, I couldn’t see how two six-foot men, one of whom was the size of a small mountain, could possibly share a single bed. But the men, apparently, had made their minds up.
‘Please,’ Olav said. ‘I don’t want to talk about it any more. It’s decided.’
‘I can sleep in the armchair,’ I offered, my final attempt.
‘You will sleep in Leif’s bed,’ Olav said. ‘There is no more discussion now, please!’
And because my attempts at being nice seemed to be making him angry, and because other people’s anger right then made me feel scared, I caved in to what seemed inevitable. ‘OK, thank you,’ I said. ‘That’s very, very kind.’
The two men top-and-tailed it and this apparently made them laugh. Which lightened the mood dramatically.
‘What are you laughing about?’ I asked.
‘I can’t tell you,’ Leif said. You could hear the smile in his voice. ‘It’s too rude.’
‘Oh, please,’ I insisted. ‘I don’t mind.’
Through laughter, Olav said, ‘Leif says my feet are too big. He says they touch his nose. I told him that’s not my feet. It’s my d—’
‘Olav!’ Leif interrupted. ‘Please.’
‘It’s OK, Olav,’ I laughed. ‘I get it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Leif said. ‘Now you know why I don’t translate the words of Olav the poet.’
Olav said something softly. It sounded rhythmic and rather pretty.
‘What was that?’ I asked.
‘You really don’t want to know,’ Leif said.
This made Olav guffaw heartily. ‘Hey, at least it rhymes,’ he said.
‘Yes, but she doesn’t need a translation.’
‘I’ll take your word on that one,’ I said. ‘Goodnight boys.’
‘Goodnight, John boy,’ Leif said.
I lay there for a while listening to the men’s breathing and marvelled at the fact that they had The Waltons in Norway. As someone started to snore, I began to listen for Conor’s return and wondered if he’d give me my passport back in the morning. I reckoned Olav could probably find a way to persuade him. Then I thought about the fact that the concierge might tell him I was with Leif, about the fact that he could still turn up raging drunk, and felt suddenly terribly awake. It was going to be a long night.
NINE
BECKY
The next morning, I was up extra early. We’d spent a nice enough day chilling out in Oia, but the most exciting thing for me was that Mum had caved in about the bike. I was itching to get up to street level to
rent one. It was only eight o’clock when I stepped outside, but Mum was already up, sitting on our little terrace looking out to sea.
‘A penny for your thoughts,’ I said, making her visibly jump.
‘Oh, you know,’ Mum said. ‘This and that. Actually, I’m not really thinking at all. I’m just trying to wake up.’
‘It feels cooler this morning,’ I said, crossing the terrace and resting one hand on her shoulder. She seemed to be radiating melancholy. It was a mood that had frequently occurred during my upbringing, but one for which I’d only rarely been able to identify a cause.
She reached up and patted my hand. ‘No, it’s this temperature every morning,’ she said. ‘It starts to heat up about now.’
After we’d had breakfast in the hotel, I went up to discuss scooters with Baruch.
He was on fine form that morning. Like Mum, he warned me to be careful of Greek drivers. He told me which beach was his favourite and gave me a business card advertising ‘Nick’s Bikes’.
‘Is everyone in Greece called Nick?’ I asked. So far, we’d met a farmer, two taxi drivers and now a bike rental agent, all called Nick.
‘Not everyone,’ Baruch quipped. ‘Just most.’
I took the card from his fingertips, thanked him and turned to leave. I was feeling pleased with myself for having remained calm in his presence. I felt I had finally managed to put him in a box marked ‘Extremely cute minimart cashier’. Nothing more, nothing less.
But as I reached the doorway he called out, ‘I wish I could come with you to the beach.’
I paused and looked back. I studied his features and tried to decide if his words actually meant anything or whether he simply couldn’t resist being charming.
He shrugged cutely. ‘Damned shop,’ he said, gesturing at the aisles.
‘Close it for the day,’ I told him, trying to sound cool. ‘Come!’
Baruch grinned. ‘My uncle would kill me,’ he said.
‘Oh well,’ I laughed, starting again towards the door.
‘Tomorrow,’ Baruch said. I wasn’t sure if it was a question or not.
I froze and turned back once again. ‘Tomorrow what?’ I asked. Something fluttered deep inside my chest.
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