Cally's Way

by Jane Bow

  v

  The early morning moon, peeking in through the tattered blind, made bars of light across the bed. A current, nearly too sweet to bear, was coursing through her. She pushed herself up onto an elbow, the sheet grazing her breast, to watch Oliver sleep.

  One of his arms was tucked under his head. The other rested on her hip under the sheet. How long were his lashes, how smooth in sleep his weathered skin, pinked by the sun near his newly buzzed hairline. The line of his jaw held a sensitivity in sleep that did not match the musculature of his shoulders and arms or the insignia tattooed on his bicep. She would lean down, feather his cheek with her eyelashes and watch his eyes open. But wait.

  Listen for a moment to the hush of the waves on the beach across the road. Walk again through the magic that had charged their every move in some new, indefinable way, even after making love, his chest rising and falling under her head, his hand tracing the line of her back as splendidly the night drifted, then shifted again into this rising current. Even now his sleeping breath, each exhalation a tiny exclamation point, stirred her in a way no man ever had before. There was a mole in front of his ear. She bent closer to kiss it—

  And felt his stickiness between her thighs.

  Realization was a tunnel, slippery black. Inside it, last night replayed: Vivaldi’s violins, her body still wet under his towel, her mind juicy, limp — Insensible. Incomprehensible. She sat up. Irredeemable.

  How many times? Deep, deep, deep. With no protection at all.

  Oliver’s eyes opened. Took in her rigid body, knees tucked up, arms hugging them.

  “What’s wrong?” He lifted his hand to touch her arm, but she was already swinging her feet to the floor, rummaging through the tangle of clothing on the chair, trying to remember when her last period had started.

  “Cally?” He came up onto his elbow. “What is it? What’s happened?”

  “I have to go.” Her shirt and sarong, stuffed into her bag last night, were enough to take her back down the promenade to her hotel.

  “You’re not sorry?” Hurt, concern.

  “Oh no. No, no.” But she dared not look at him. It was her fault.

  Behind her, Oliver’s feet hit the floor. If she turned to him she would drop her sandals, climb back into his bed. Miss her plane, lose her job, and if she were pregnant, what then?

  A breeze brushed the blind, rippling the bars of moonlight. She tried to control her hands enough to tie the sarong around her waist, tried to think what to say.

  His arms came around her, his chin nuzzling her hair.

  “Come back to bed, you have time—”

  “No, Oliver!” She twisted out of his grasp. How else to stop herself from giving way, giving away her life, all she had to lie here six months from now, swollen with pregnancy. But she had to look at him, face his hurt. “Do you always have unprotected sex?”

  “Oh.” Startled understanding, one hand reaching up to rub the fuzz on his head, “No. I don’t—” He looked confused. “You’re not on the pill?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut.

  Low grey clouds were flying in from the south, butting up against the mountains, chilling the air when she reached the seaside promenade outside. Down on the beach, the waves broke, spread white foam up the sand, and were sucked back out: one after another after another. Just like her breath.

  He did not follow her. She had a plane to catch and the path to her future was one-way. He knew that.

  Ares had been up for hours. His and Aphrodite’s children, Eros, Terror, Trouble and Sorrow never stopped squabbling. Only the baby, Bliss, and her mother were still asleep. Now, as Cally hurried away down the promenade, Ares smiled down at the goddess’s astounding beauty then shook her awake. The day’s first light, piercing the clouds to lay patterns on the rolling surface of the sea, belonged to Zeus. But still shimmering with last night’s love, Aphrodite, ruthless as ebony, old as art, danced a whole sequence of choices above the morning waves.

  Wisps of cloud feathered the sky as her plane circled over Knossos, where King Minos was said to have imprisoned the Minotaur in a labyrinth. Stupid myth. What queen would have illicit sex with a bull then birth a monster with a human body and a bull’s head who fed on innocent young men and women? Behind Knossos, the snow on Mount Psiloritis, Crete’s highest peak, was peach coloured. As the plane’s landing gear retracted into the underside of the wing, waves on the island’s north shore receded below. Somehow she must do the same — retract last night, yesterday, the last three days. Let them recede.

  Please, she bade whichever of the gods had been toying with her, please let me get away with this one mistake.

  A Greek businessman in the aisle seat beside her took some papers out his briefcase. She would do the same, would look ahead, toward Mumbai. Would not think about Oliver. There must be a doctor in the Athens airport. She would ask for a morning-after pill.

  The marketing plan she had written was in the journal she kept in her handbag: how the logo on every little black condom packet would be Zeus’ thunderbolt, how women would keep the little black packages in their handbags—

  Moronic, all of it. She turned her face to the window, away from her neighbour and the stewardess offering coffee, pretending to be asleep. Far below, the blue Aegean was dotted here and there by sunlit specks — fishing boats, ferries. Laceworks of white foamed against island shores. And now she could not hold back what seemed to be a landslide of feeling — memories that, held by her body, were beyond her control. By the time the plane’s wheels bounced onto the Athens runway, its backdraft brakes roaring, her nose was running, her breath catching in little hiccoughs, triggering her cough. The tears coursing down her cheeks, dropping onto her pant suit, must be streaking her mascara. She was fishing in her handbag, searching for a tissue when the businessman beside her handed her a pocket-sized package of them, smiling kindly.

  “My Kríti, she is a pitiless lover, yes?”

  vi

  The airport coffee bar was jammed with travellers standing around chest-high tables, sipping from frappé glasses or tiny Greek cups. Conversation, cigarette smoke, unintelligible public address announcements, and hissing steam machines competed with the news coming from a television mounted on the wall at the back. While she was wondering if she could pull her suitcase close enough to the counter to place an order without running over anyone’s shoes, the television picture switched to a crowd of screaming men outside a factory. Behind them a shaft of smoke corkscrewed into the sky. ‘EO Petrochemicals, Mumbai,’ said the tag at the bottom of the screen.

  EO? In Mumbai, India, where the Condoms for Zeus were to be made. Where she was being sent because “something has come up.”

  The television picture switched to an outflow pipe that ran into a trench beside a tin-roofed slum then back to the rioters, who were throwing rocks. One of the factory’s windows shattered. The coffee bar became quiet, everyone watching as smoke and flame filled the television screen.

  “Excuse me,” she asked a nearby man who looked as if he might speak English. “Can you tell me what’s going on?”

  “Mmm… how do you say… a leak in the factory. Terrible.” He shook his head. “Many people drinking poisoned water. Many sick. Three dead. Now some angry men are burning the plant for… for…” His face contorted, his English vocabulary not extensive enough to cover the motivations of hysterical mobs.

  “Revenge?” Because the company she was about to join was dumping toxic waste into their water? Because Americans were evil, must be destroyed, even if it meant flying planes into skyscrapers full of innocent office workers—?

  She backed out of the coffee bar.

  “I need your help with the media,” Gordon Sinclair had said, and “Ali Haddad will tell you what to say.”

  To be a puppet, a pretty female one, that was her assignment in Mumbai. Uninformed, unaccountable, dropped in, told what to say, and then removed as soon as the news cameras went elsewhere. She pulled her suitcase to a seat at
the end of a line of built-in metal chairs. The air was warm, but she was shivering in spite of her summer suit, the world moving too fast, the way it had after her mother’s death. What to do? What to think?

  Oliver’s image pushed into her mind. “EO?” he had said last night at dinner, frowning. “What do they make?” And when she did not know: “You should know, don’t you think —?”

  Cally dug out her cell phone.

  “This is Celine MacAllister,” said Slee’s voice mail, “I’m away from my desk right now but if you’d like—”

  Get on your plane, go to Mumbai, she would counsel. You have a contract with EO and you’re already two days late. You don’t want to lose this job before it even starts. As for the environmental problem, now that it’s in the spotlight it will be fixed.

  But now Cally was back in grade ten, accusing her father, who worked for an international food company, of being a moral criminal after one of Miss Stayner’s World Issues classes. How could he justify making his company’s shareholders rich by producing Sugar Bears and Cinnamon Flakes and all the other health-free cereals North America was feeding its children? “Miss Stayner says the only way the human species can save itself is to stay out of the grocery store’s packaged-food aisles,” she had told him. “Eat fresh, buy local.”

  Johnny had looked at the spoonful of Cocoa Puffs that was halfway to his mouth. “Fresh and local in Overhampton in February? I wonder what Miss Stayner eats for breakfast.”

  “Bran probably.” Her father had screwed the lid onto his travel mug. “Does your teacher live in a heated house, Cally? Does she drive to work, pack a lunch, store her leftovers in plastic? Don’t let anyone kid you, sweetheart, we are — all of us — complicit in the state of this world.”

  Some more than others. Gordon Sinclair, who had made the decision to have the condoms made in Mumbai, would probably insist that he did not know about the leak. Hiring her suddenly, out of the blue, was coincidental.

  A lamb whose slaughter would affect nobody, she needed to talk to someone.

  Not her father.

  Sam, then? No, even if he weren’t out guiding tourists through some of Australia’s wild rapids, he would not think before advising her about where to tell Gordon to shove his condoms. Johnny would be in a meeting or outside of cell phone range in the oil fields.

  A Greek family towing several carts of luggage lowered Grandma into the seat beside her, Mother chiding Father, aunts and uncles weighing in, teenagers plugging in their earphones, toddlers holding onto whoever was handy, while a steady stream of departure announcements rent the air. She stood up, gesturing that this seat, too, was free.

  Maybe Slee had just gone to the washroom or for coffee. She called her again.

  “This is Celine …” She waited for the beep.

  “Slee!” Her voice trembled then broke into a spate of coughing. “They’re rioting at EO’s plant in Mumbai.” Pouring out her troubles to a machine. Pathetic.

  The path of least resistance was forward. She found the airport doctor’s office. It would not open until after her plane had left. The morning-after pill worked for seventy-two hours, but how to find one in Mumbai? How even to ask? By the time she got to New York it would be too late.

  Last fall’s destruction of New York’s World Trade Center had triggered security checkpoints all over the world. Here in Athens, the lineup could have been the United Nations: squat Greeks, saried Indians holding onto their children, Africans black as Nero, high-pitched sun-pink British holidaymakers, Europeans in stylized jeans, oversized Americans in T-shirts. Inching ahead between cordoned posts that funnelled them toward the security gate, she found herself behind a young American woman of about her own height and build, a couple of years younger, wearing grubby jeans, a T-shirt, and hiking sandals. She was shoving a beat-up knapsack along the floor with her foot. A sleeping bag, coffee mug, and one-burner camp stove were attached to it.

  “Bummer, eh?” said the girl, as if hailing from the same continent gave them something in common.

  She must have looked confused.

  “Going home,” sighed the girl. “Such a drag.” She gave her knapsack a kick.

  “Why go then?” Oliver’s words, on the sunlit Preveli mountainside. She felt their stab.

  The girl looked at her with interest. “Money ran out, so I have no choice. Gotta work.”

  She nodded.

  “I hear you. Where?”

  “San Francisco, to intern in my father’s corporation: prison if you ask me. But he says if I refuse to go on in school …”

  A gap opened ahead of them as a family pushing two trolley loads of carry-on baggage reached the gate. The girl hoisted her pack, moved forward, and then dropped it again.

  “And get this, he knows I’m broke — I’ve been backpacking for nearly a year — but still he expects me to turn up tomorrow ‘in proper business attire.’” Another sigh. “As if. I think he’s trying to punish me.”

  She imagined the girl’s plane circling over rows of houses, factories, box-stores, a concrete grid of streets. Her father would be waiting in one of the glass towers clustered at the city centre: summer slacks, open necked polo shirt — pink, making a statement — salt-and-pepper hair. Imposing his rule, he expecting to be obeyed because if you didn’t win, you lost and that could not be allowed. That’s how the world worked: think this, want that, do this, kill that. The patterns were as clearly defined as the yellow lines in an Overhampton parking lot. It was a game Cally had played all her life, the only one she knew, the one that had shaped all her plans and coerced her desires. Her cough returned.

  “Are you okay?” The girl reached into her pocket, peeled back a package of mints, offered one.

  “Thanks,” she croaked.

  They shuffled ahead between the cordoned lines like cattle at an abattoir. Cool mint flavour trickled down Cally’s throat. Then the front of the queue opened ahead of them. The security guard spoke into her walkie-talkie then waved them forward, her hand out for their boarding passes. So she could fly to Mumbai where, mouthing the words she was given, she would explain to those rampaging men, whom EO was paying just enough to afford their tin-roofed shacks, and to the world, that the plant they worked in was not really poisoning people—

  Sometimes new choices, born beyond the reach of comfortable reasoning, arrive just in time to waltz with what we think we have to do.

  “Hey!” She caught the girl’s arm. “Wait, I’ve got an idea for you.”

  Two hours later, the Californian was enjoying a movie somewhere over the Bay of Biscay, Cally’s new summer dresses and matching sandals in her knapsack, while Cally sat on a bus headed into Athens, a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and a New York Giants hoodie in the suitcase at her feet, with the camp stove and sleeping bag.

  “Are you sure about this?” The girl had been nonplussed.

  A brew of exhilarated fear had escaped Cally with the force of a fart.

  “Nope. The only thing I know for sure is that I should not get on that plane.”

  The Pendeli mountain east of the city was a hill really, white cliffs showing where the marble for the Parthenon temple to the goddess Athena had been cut. Athenian slaves would have dragged the stone across this plain.

  Time — that was what she needed, to stop, to calm down. To think. Time and a morning-after pill.

  Modern Athens was pastel-coloured concrete, shops, apartment buildings, car dealerships, and little railed parks. Athenians were waiting for buses, eating breakfast pastries, and zipping in between the cars and smoke-spewing trucks on motorcycles. Dogs who did not seem to belong to anyone waited patiently on the curbs for a break in the traffic. Syntagma Square, where the parliament buildings were, seemed to be the city centre. Cally got off the bus.

  Narrow cobblestoned streets led her into Plaka, the old city. She let a plate of pastries in the window of a sidewalk restaurant talk her into having breakfast. She was the restaurant’s only customer. Athenians did not seem to settle in
for breakfast. The people she saw on the street were hurrying to work, pastries and coffee already in hand.

  The waiter was delivering a cappuccino when her cough, erupting, reminded her of her penicillin. When had she last taken it?

  Yesterday morning, before Oliver—

  She asked for a bottle of water then closed her eyes and sat up straight, willing herself into the present. Take control. Check your watch. There was still time to change her mind, to stop this craziness.

  The waiter brought her water. “Will there be anything else?”

  “Yes! One of those chocolate croissants, please.” What the hell.

  Flaky and sweet, it smelled freshly baked. When she bit into it, the filling oozed onto her tongue, dripped onto the inside of her wrist. Was it the chocolate that set off a new avalanche, too sudden to stop, of memory: his kisses, his arms, his muscles taut as he held himself above her, his gold-flecked eyes—

  How to bear it?

  Back out on the street the cough started again and would not stop. A hand took hold of her arm, steadying her: the restaurant’s tout.

  “You go back inside, yes? Maybe sit down?”

  She shook her head. A doctor, that was what she needed. Did he know of a clinic?

  He pointed further down the street.

  “Two blocks, turn right, then left. You will see the pharmacy with a green cross outside. The doctor is next door.” He looked at his watch. “Opening very soon now.”

  Early sunlight had not yet reached into the old city’s maze of shops, where merchandise was being hung and propped and laid out: hats, scarves, T-shirts, sunglasses, postcards, religious icons. Fruit stalls showed her into a market square: fresh vegetables, bread, honey, wine. Dead fish stared up at her. And there, a little way down the street on the far side, was the pharmacy’s neon cross. The old man rolling up the metal shutter over its doorway wore a white coat and a handlebar moustache. A second man, middle-aged, carrying a takeout coffee cup, came down the sidewalk, stopped to chuckle at something the pharmacist said, then took a ring of keys out of his pocket to unlock the door beside the pharmacy: he must be the doctor.