“What are you doing?”
“Escaping.”
Even though he was asleep, I didn’t want to be left alone with Harold. “Wait for me.”
We headed out in no particular direction but soon found ourselves at the port, drifting alongside a fleet of decrepit fishing boats and freighters, and set off aimlessly along a jetty that pointed out to sea. On one side of the jetty the water was smooth, oily, but on the other it slapped up against the rocks in angry waves. Caleb and I had been walking along the jetty for half an hour or so when it seemed to narrow, and the sea became rough on both sides. The concrete under our feet was wet in places, and once or twice a wave washed clean over it.
I looked over my shoulder to see how far we’d come. Expecting to see the port behind us, I was shocked to discover nothing there at all. Everything, all the freighter hulls and fishing boats, had been washed away, and the only thing left was the sea. On the horizon was a dim orange glow, the faint promise of dawn. I wondered if my eyes were playing tricks on me, and, a little more slowly, I traced the line of the jetty as it arced away from us. But still, nothing was there except ocean.
“Caleb, stop,” I said, feeling panicky. “Turn around.”
“What is it?”
“Behind us. The port isn’t there.”
He scanned the horizon in the direction my finger pointed, then turned right around until he was facing out to sea. “It’s that way,” he said, as if I was a complete moron.
“What do you mean?”
“We turned around about ten minutes ago and started to walk back.”
“What?”
For a few minutes I watched him continue to walk in the wrong direction, away from the port, and was too stunned to say anything. When it was obvious he wasn’t going to wait for me, I trotted after him. “Caleb, you’re going the wrong way. You’re heading out to sea.”
He looked over his shoulder at me and frowned. “No, I’m not.”
He waited this time while I examined the horizon in both directions, looking for some kind of landmark. But there was nothing. I was completely lost.
“You’ll just have to trust me,” he said.
His stride was confident as we set off in the direction he indicated, but my legs had become jellylike, uncooperative, and I struggled to keep up. For another five minutes we walked in silence, then a chugging noise that had been in the background grew louder behind us and I turned to see a lantern bobbing in the air, some fifty meters offshore.
“What’s that?” I said, peering at the ghostly vision.
“Have you totally lost your mind?”
I looked again at the bobbing light, and saw that it was bolted to the top of a pole, that behind it was rigging and a white cabin. It was a fishing boat, heading back to port, and as it pulled alongside, a couple of fishermen who’d been pouring fish guts over the stern waved at us.
“Kalimera!” yelled Caleb, and one of the fishermen called back, “Kalimera!” and held up a still-flapping fish.
“That means good morning,” said Caleb, turning to me. “Come on, race you there!”
I tried to run but could manage only to trot, and as we neared the wharf the sky began to lighten and I saw, with relief, that we were back on the docks where we had started. Circled by screeching cats and gulls, the fishermen had already started unloading their catch, and the salty smell of fresh seafood wafted over to us.
Caleb bounded toward the boat and started negotiating with the fishermen in a flurry of pidgin Greek. While he did so, the first sun of the morning burst over the horizon, dipping everyone, including Caleb, in soft, golden light. Despite having had no sleep, Caleb’s hair, cheekbones, eyes, and lips were at their pristine best. In three years’ time those features would be testosterone coarsened, ravaged with stubble, but that morning he was caught in the last instant of perfection before boyhood ends, and staring at him gave me a pain in my chest.
I hadn’t noticed that one of the fishermen—so tan he looked like a sandal—was nodding in my direction and saying something to Caleb that was making him shake with laughter. He handed Caleb a fish wrapped in newspaper and slapped him on the shoulder. When he trotted back, Caleb was still chuckling. “Guess what he wanted to know?”
I looked at the giant fish. “If you had a refrigerator?”
“No.” Caleb grinned. “He asked if we were on honeymoon!”
“Who?”
“You and me, dick.”
“And what did you say?”
“That you were my mother!”
His insult hurt, and I was too tired to hide it. “I’m not that old.”
“I know you’re not,” said Caleb, giving me a friendly biff on the arm. “And that’s why I told him you were my sister.”
Daylight arrived quickly, and with it, heat. There hadn’t been time to shower the night before, and I was desperate for one now. As we retraced our steps along the port, the surrounding streets clattered to life. Roller doors flipped up to reveal hidden shops, and awnings unraveled over café tables that had been stored away for the night. Searching the sun-glazed streets for a familiar landmark, I realized for the second time that day that I was utterly lost.
“Do you have any idea how to get back?” I asked Caleb, who had stopped at a kiosk to buy sweets for breakfast.
“I was following you,” he said, shoving a square of lurid pink bubble gum in his mouth.
After clumsy negotiations, Caleb got directions to a Hotel Triton, which we thought was the name of our accommodation. We’d found the port easily enough that morning, but the route back was convoluted and seemed to take longer than the way there. We cantered the last few streets, and as we piled into the Triton’s lobby streams of sweat ran down the groove of my back. Harold stood at the desk grilling the night concierge—“How could you not have seen them leave?”—and barely keeping it together.
“Here we are!” said Caleb, heroically.
Harold whipped around and glared at him. “The ferry leaves in twenty minutes—I’m not even going to ask where you two have been.”
“Fishing,” said Caleb, and held up his prize.
“Not now,” I said, and shooed him toward the stairs.
In a state of panic, we stuffed clothes into suitcases, and hurriedly checked under the bed for stray socks and underpants. Clothes sprouting from his half-zipped backpack, Caleb called out to me, “I don’t care if we miss the ferry. This hotel’s fucked, and Harold’s a cock.”
Running for the ferry, we retraced our steps for the third time. Caleb jogged with the fish under one arm and tried to keep abreast of Harold, who was surprisingly nimble, while the best I could manage was a lopsided scuttle, held back by fatigue and wayward suitcase wheels. When I had dropped too far back behind the others, I picked up the suitcase, and the plastic handle burned painfully into my hand.
Up ahead, a grim-looking ferry called the Achilea honked its departure horn, and the gangplank swung away from the dock as we drew alongside. Harold waved frantically at the shipping steward, who was methodically fastening a small metal gate, and started shouting at him in a mishmash of English and Greek. For a tantalizing moment, the gangplank shivered while the steward decided our fate.
“Please, please!” begged Harold. “My mother is dying!”
“Your mother?” said the steward, his English perfect.
He lowered the gangplank and showered us with condolences while we filed past, silent with gratitude. The main ferry cabin was stuffed with squeamish tourists and rowdy locals whose grandmothers, children, and breakfasts were spread out on every surface. Already it smelled as though the toilets were overflowing, and we ventured outside to the aft deck and a row of wooden benches. But after so little sleep, I couldn’t stand the idea of sitting upright for six or seven hours on a plank of wood, and when I moved to a shady corner of the deck and collapsed against a funnel, Caleb followed. Harold was giving us the silent treatment and remained on the bench, inspecting his ankle where the strap of hi
s orthopedic sandal had rubbed a blister.
The ferry chugged out into the harbor, and I closed my eyes and sank into my suitcase. A few minutes later, a warm weight fell against my shoulder, and a swatch of hair tickled my neck. Caleb had fallen asleep on me, though who knew if he had meant to. With bright sunlight burning an orange pattern on the inside of my eyelids, I tried to imagine how we’d look to strangers, or even to Harold, but I lost consciousness before I could make a decision about what if anything to do about it.
Some time later, I woke with a jolt and Caleb rolled off my shoulder and onto the deck. “Ouch,” he said, sitting up and noticing the patch of drool on the shoulder of my T-shirt. “Did I do that?”
I was surprised by how little I minded. “It’ll dry out soon enough.”
He looked around at the sun-blazed ship. “How long was I out for?”
“An hour maybe? I don’t know. I’ve been asleep too.”
The ferry swung round unexpectedly, and the change in direction threw us out of the shade. “There’s still ages to go,” said Caleb, pulling a sweater out of his knapsack. He scrunched the sweater into a ball, placed it in the crook of his neck, and leaned against my shoulder again. “I’m going back to sleep,” he said.
Where his bare arm fell against mine, my skin goose-bumped. He sighed a couple of times and relaxed into sleep. To lean on me once had been careless, but to do it twice was something else, and before I could stop it, my pulse quickened, and a warm feeling spread over me. It was followed by an ugly jolt. What was I doing? Caleb was barely sixteen—a half-formed newt who drank and smoked but didn’t yet shave. Nothing could come of this, nothing good.
I needed a bathroom, but not so badly that I was prepared to get up and look for one, and soon fell into a clenched half sleep. The ferry chugged on and on, and periodically I gazed across the railings to the edge of the sparkling sea but saw no land. The hours started to sag and lose all shape, until it seemed we had spent our entire lives at sea on this crusty ship. Next to me, Caleb’s legs were folded girlishly underneath him, and his wrists hung limply in his lap. He looked vulnerable, like a child who had fallen asleep on an adult he trusted, and I felt ashamed of the path my thoughts had taken, the way my body had reacted.
An hour or so later, it was Caleb who walked unsteadily to the railing and stared out across the frothing wake. After hours of inertia, my own legs were stiff and uncooperative, and my contact lenses were like sandpaper against my eyes. I joined him at the railing, feeling queasy and dehydrated and terminally zonked. He pointed toward the starboard side at a cluster of blue-black fins on the horizon.
“That’s Skyros,” he said. “We’re almost there.”
Chapter Seventeen
Auckland, 2001
I hadn’t seen or heard from Ludo in months when he called out of the blue inviting me to lunch. He said he was coming to Auckland on business, and maybe I’d like to meet him at one of those new al fresco places on the Viaduct Basin that were springing up to cater to the Americas Cup. Ever since securing the prestigious event, the city had gone all St. Tropez, or tried to, and in the formerly industrial quarter next to the harbor a miniature gin playground was hastily being built. To cope with the expected influx of seafaring Eurotrash, thousands of Aucklanders had upped their intake of champagne and oysters, while women, single and married, had been enthusiastically taking French lessons to better seduce any incoming Eurosailors.
I had been doing neither. In fact, I could hardly bring myself to go down to the harbor and look, such was my contempt for anything to do with the enterprise.
A hundred yards out from the restaurant I identified Ludo, sitting on the terrace in a beige linen suit. The restaurant he’d chosen was all white, even the floor, and at midday already full of red-faced gents sucking oysters from their shells and trying to chat up their waitresses. I’d come straight from the office, where we spent all day on the phone, and felt scruffy and incongruous in sneakers and an ill-fitting shirt. As I approached my father, the jerks at the next table openly appraised me, and I tossed my hair and scowled at them to let them know how little I appreciated it.
“You look different,” said my father, shaking my hand, formal as ever, and pulling back my chair in a show of chivalry. “Have you had your hair cut?”
“I dyed it. Supermarket red. You look younger. Have you had work done?” Hard as I tried to temper it, my sarcasm was always out of control around Ludo.
He ordered a dozen shucked oysters and ate them in front of me, washed down with champagne, pausing at regular intervals to ask if I was sure I didn’t want one.
“No thanks. They taste like snot to me.”
He didn’t like it when I was vulgar, but I enjoyed the look on his face when I was. “Order whatever you like,” he said. “It could be a taste of things to come.”
“What does that mean?”
He sipped his champagne and winked. “You’ll see.”
That sounded ominous, and I perused the menu while waiting for the charade to come undone. Unless I’d done something wrong, or they needed collecting from the airport or a last-minute babysitter when they were in town, I never heard from Ludo or Rowan. I’d received no invitations to spend Christmas with them since the time four years earlier when I had failed to turn up with Lily’s present and arrived the next day with such a foul hangover that I’d passed out at the dinner table after one too many of my father’s aperitifs (apparently, Rowan had held my head over the toilet while I spewed, though I did not remember, or subscribe to, that part). When I came round, Dad and I had a huge row over the past, a continent he refused to revisit, and the argument had ended with me hurling a framed photograph of his children at the wall. The frame had smashed, and I had left the house immediately, hitching all the way into Hamilton at two in the morning. Ludo had gotten in touch with me a few months later to say we ought to meet on neutral territory from then on, which I understood to mean that Rowan had finally banned me from the ranch. So this was how it was: a few times a year he took me to lunch. Once or twice I’d seen my father cruising the streets of Auckland in his late-model four-wheel drive—he came up for business all the time—and though I’d thought about waving to him I never did.
The restaurant menu was convoluted seafood, and I ordered something prawny with pink lobster mousse that said it came in a basket with fish-egg decoupage. Waiting for this impossible creation to arrive, I asked politely after Rowan and the children and my father’s business and listened to the latest installment of their mishaps and triumphs. Rowan had fallen from her horse in the last round of dressage at an event in Christchurch—she was competing again—and Simon had taken up rowing and was already trying out for the New Zealand under eighteen team. Lily apparently had developed “weight issues” and did nothing all day except sit in her room and listen to “God-awful head-banging music.” Out of all of them, she was the one I could most relate to.
Ludo wanted to know what I’d been up to, and I gave him the abridged version: work was the same, but someone on the community newspaper I worked for was leaving, and I hoped to get a promotion by the end of the year.
“Good for you,” he said. “It’s great to have a taste of a career before you settle down. That way you can pick it up again later if you get bored.”
I had long suspected that my father measured my worth, if he measured it at all, in the proximity of wedding bells and booties, and even though I knew his attitude was deeply sexist, it still hit me where it hurt. His frequent attempts to matchmake for me with blockheads he worked with only made things worse. During dessert, he even hunched his shoulder toward the jerks at the next table and with a wink said, “Gee, there sure are a lot of hunks at this place.”
“Dad,” I said, as one of them turned and looked in our direction. “Please don’t.”
But he either hadn’t heard me, or was determined to humiliate me, and before I could stop him, he was waving at the men and smiling in my direction. “You see?” he said, when the
y waved back. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to meet a guy.”
“I’ve already met someone,” I said, quietly.
“Great,” said my father. “What’s his name? What does he do?”
“You won’t know him,” I said. “So there’s no point in telling you.” I traced a pattern on the tablecloth with my finger. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
Ludo tried to refill my glass from an empty champagne bottle, and even though I protested, he insisted on ordering another one. “We’re going to need a toast,” he said.
“To what?”
“All in good time.”
The champagne arrived and was opened with ceremony. Dad put his briefcase on the table and took out a checkbook. On the top line he wrote my name, then he started on the figures and kept adding zeros. When he was finished, he handed it to me. “Voilà!” he said.
At first I thought it was a joke, that you couldn’t write personal checks for that much, but when I looked at Dad his expression was too expectant for it to be fake.
I said, “What did you do—rob a bank?”
He looked bashful, almost as if I’d guessed the truth, and said, “Of course not. It’s only what you deserve.”
“So I robbed a bank and forgot about it?”
He chuckled, as if he was stalling, and carefully folded his napkin. “It’s something I’ve wanted to give you for a long time, but haven’t been able to until now. I think I told you business is booming.”
I put down the check on the white linen tablecloth and stared at it. Underneath my father’s signature was printed PIPER ENTERPRISES LTD. The check had my name on it and was crossed in the top-right-hand corner so no one else could cash it, but I left it on the table while I picked at dessert, a pot of creamy white stuff that smelled sort of fishy.
“You don’t seem very excited,” said Ludo, pouring more champagne into my already full glass.
The Girl Below Page 21