Say You Never Met Me

by Martin Yallop

  The inside of the office had reminded him of the inside of the airport and he felt depressed despite the bright sunshine and sparkling Mediterranean light.

  Earlier, George had looked out of the window as the plane was taxiing in the first, dim light of dawn. As far as he could see, Larnaca airport was distinguished by being completely undistinguished. The usual flat areas of tired, coarse grass dotted with little signs with seemingly random numbers and criss-crossed by the concrete of runway and taxi-ways was bounded on the right by the sea and on the left by low buildings and parked aircraft. He noticed that Cyprus’ main airport was unusually well endowed with equipment. Everywhere he looked from the bus carrying him and his fellow passengers to the terminal, he could see dozens of parked sets of steps, baggage trolleys and conveyors, trucks, toilet tenders, tugs and all the mechanical and motorised paraphernalia of aircraft, cargo and passenger handling. Closer inspection revealed that much of the paint was blistering and that rust was peeping though the yellow paint. It seemed that in the past beneficent authorities had been generous with their equipment budgets. The terminal building had seen better days, too. Everything worked but had the air of fatigue caused by having been working hard for several decades. Toilet tiles were worn, stained or occasionally missing altogether; lighting was dingy, baggage conveyors creaked and customs officials lounged on tired chairs behind well-worn benches. He admired the little duty free shop in the baggage hall and wondered why he had carried fragile duty-free bottles clinking and clanking all the way from London. Nothing could have prepared him for the scrum of waiting relatives in the meet and greet area as he emerged. With no one to meet or greet him he eased his way through the peering, craning and hugging crowd, hunched to control his baggage trolley as it rattled over the uneven concrete towards the taxi park. He had spent the rest of the day exploring the town. He had strolled west towards the airport – out along the coast and back weaving through narrow streets of houses with closed shutters, ornate doors that had seen better days and crumbling render falling away from stone and mud brick walls. Much later he discovered that this was the district inhabited by Turkish Cypriots until they had fled or been driven out when the island had been divided nearly thirty years before and it was now occupied temporarily, if thirty years is temporary, by the Greek Cypriots driven in their turn from Famagusta and Kyrenia. Only at the furthest extremities did he find more resort restaurants and bars lining the beach and by then he was almost at the airport. Back in the town centre he had drifted in and out of shops with familiar British names, Morgan, Marks and Spencer, Bata, The Sock Shop, The Body Shop and Woolworth, the last obviously an up-market department store in Cyprus. He could see that night club artistes would have no difficulty whatsoever in spending any money they received and wondered if there were families going hungry and shivering in cold winters in remote villages of the Ukraine while their daughters flaunted Italian leather, imported silk and French cosmetics in the streets of Cyprus. He could have been depressed had he not stumbled across a pedestrianised area of bars near what seemed to be a fort. Their signs suggested they were sometimes home to a couple of rock bands. Wandering out of town to the east, he found the clubs around the port roundabout about half a mile before he found the tank farm of the refinery. At that time of day the clubs were closed but George browsed the faded photographs outside the topless bar and the badly painted signs over the closed doors of the ‘dancing’ clubs. He noticed that the names on several of the signs were spelled differently on the same establishment. Between and around the clubs were cheap hotels, grubby car workshops and the ubiquitous kiosks selling newspapers, cigarettes, sandwiches and everything else. Most of the area was unpaved and, surprisingly in a Cyprus summer, the road was lined with wide ditches half full of thick, greenish water inhabited by shoals of tiny fish. George thought it seedy and desperately depressing and left to walk back to the town centre without trying to make a closer examination of any of the clubs.

  As a boy he had often made minnow traps to catch the tiny fish to be used as bait to catch pike. The traps had been set in the stream that ran a mile from his home, close to the little-used ford that submerged the country road to a depth of several inches and followed it for almost a hundred yards where it ran under the trees overhanging from the high banks. His parents rarely drank wine but whenever they did, George had begged the empty bottle and knocked out the round piece of glass in the middle of the recessed base. Usually the body if the bottle remained intact and re-corked, baited with bread and secured to the bank with a piece of string, the trap could usually be guaranteed to contain a dozen or more finger-sized fish when it was retrieved a few hours later. He had never actually found the courage to impale any the sticklebacks or minnows on a hook and had never caught a pike but he and his best friend had spent many muddy hours splashing in and beside the stream as well as unsuccessfully spinning for the pike with artificial lures from the banks of the local lakes. He was secretly relieved at not actually catching and having to deal with a pike. It was during the pike-fishing fad that George’s father had bought one home. At the time, George was given to understand that the pike had been a gift from a business contact who had caught it but, many years later, it dawned on him that it had probably been acquired at some effort or expense as a kindly consolation prize for his lack of success at the lakes. George’s mother had been away, visiting relatives or undergoing one of her many minor operations in hospital, so George senior had announced that the pike would be cooked and eaten. It had been soaked overnight in salt water in the bath – no other container was large enough – and served for dinner. It tasted of nothing in particular except mud and almost all of it had been quietly consigned to the dustbin.

  Back at the sea front esplanade with the be-shorted and in-vested tourists, George walked twice past all the pavement restaurants before deciding where to eat. He did not know why he had studied them all twice. They all served more or less the same food at more or less the same prices. Only the awnings and the seat cushions differentiated one from another. He finally settled on a fish restaurant with colourful photographs of the dishes on offer displayed on the pavement. It was a day for fish and photographs. The waiter who emerged to take his order of bream and chips and beer was the shape of a Teletubby, had thinning hair drawn back into a lank ponytail and spoke English with a Midlands accent.

  “Where are you from?” George asked, expecting to be told Wolverhampton or Birmingham.

  “Limassol,” the man replied giving George a slightly puzzled look as if the answer were obvious to anyone but a vaguely stupid foreigner.

  The arrival of a salad and taramasalata he had not ordered jerked George back to the present. Instead of wandering around the streets and eating in restaurants, he needed to do something about making contact with foreign girls who might be able to tell him something about a connection with the clubs and brothels of northern Europe. Tomorrow. He was tired and hot and needed a siesta.

  Chapter 32

  Deborah was worried about Marianna. The girl from eastern Albania still had not arrived in Sofia. The other three were booked to travel at the end of the week and Deborah had arranged to meet them at Heathrow, put them up in Croydon and brief them about Jill’s arrangement with Nicholas but there was no word from Marianna and no reply from the telephone in her mother’s home. The local Albanian police seemed disinclined to get involved. She had planned that two of the girls would share the room vacated by George and the other would sleep with her but Conrad and Lydia, as usual sitting so close together they might have been joined, had another suggestion. They would go and look for Marianna. In his quiet way, Conrad said he would drive and they could sleep in the truck. He knew his way to Trieste and Pogradec was only (‘only!’ thought Deborah) another four hundred and fifty or five hundred miles. They would treat it as a holiday. Deborah’s objections that Lydia would be conspicuous and vulnerable to some of the racists she knew to haunt Eastern Europe and the Balkans were swept aside by Lydia
herself. There was no way – NO WAY – she would be separated from her beloved Conrad and NO WAY she would expose him to the attentions of pretty Yugoslav girls, or French girls or Swiss girls or any of the others. Conrad just looked down at Lydia from his lanky height and smiled. They would set off in a couple of days and hope to report back within a week.

  Deborah had swapped her night off with Angela so that she could meet Natasha, Anna and Irma at the airport. The flight was late and the three girls’ baggage must have been almost the last to appear on the carousel so by the time they appeared in the arrival hall, Deborah was getting very worried. Had they missed the flight? Had something gone wrong with their paperwork so they had been prevented from travelling or been refused entry by British Immigration? Had they changed their minds or somehow managed to travel on another flight to another country so they could simply disappear into the European workforce? She was so relieved when they eventually emerged, struggling behind trolleys piled with bags and cases, that she was almost in tears. Her relief, however great, was nothing compared to that of the three girls at finally arriving in England and arriving as legal travellers with a right to be there and all four dissolved into a weeping, laughing group hug while the stream of new arrivals behind them checked and then divided and flowed around them. Back in South Croydon, still surrounded by mountains of bags, they drank wine and then coffee and then wine again while Irma rummaged for gifts from Deborah’s parents and Anna recited the several messages, warnings and pieces of parental advice she had promised to pass on. Deborah was to be very careful. Her parents were very proud of what she was doing. She was not to get involved in the sex trade. She was not to put herself in any danger. She was not to get too involved with George too quickly. She was to look after the four girls – they were sure Marianna would turn up – whom her mother and father had taken to their hearts. She was to be brave in the face of difficulties. She was to come home immediately if she felt unhappy or out of her depth. She was to telephone them more often. She was to ask for money if she needed it or even if she didn’t. And above all, she was to be careful. She was reluctant to destroy the atmosphere of a joyful reunion by raising the subject of Marianna but Natasha did it for her by looking at her very intently and asking the question. Deborah took a deep breath and plunged it. There was still no news. By now Conrad and Lydia were in Albania trying to trace her. They had made the journey to Pogradec in three long days of driving; spending the nights in camp sites sleeping in the back of the truck to save money. Crossing France and Italy had, of course, caused no problems; nor had the drive south along the Dalmatian coast of Croatia and Bosnia. It was a good road and people were used to seeing more adventurous tourists or remembered them from before the war so a German man accompanied by a black British girl caused little comment. This had changed, however, when they turned east and left the coast and Tirana airport behind. They had arrived in Pogradec just as it was getting dark. They caused some curiosity, not all of it friendly. They felt conspicuous and sensed a passive, watchful hostility. They had difficulty finding somewhere they could park with access to water and toilets but eventually managed it. The next day they had gone looking for Marianna. The address they had been given turned out to be in a remote suburb – almost a village before it had been overtaken and submerged in urban sprawl - and led them to an anonymous door in a low, concrete block of flats. There had been no reply to their knocks but they had expected that and knocked on neighbouring doors. Two had remained closed. A third had produced an elderly woman who said yes she knew Marianna’s family. The mother was her friend but they had gone away and she did not know where. She could tell them nothing more. She seemed suspicious and reluctant to give foreigners even that limited information and had shut the door firmly to cut off further enquiry. A local supermarket owner also knew the family. They had left owing him money and he too would like to know where Marianna was hiding. If they found her would they please tell her to pay her bill. They had been about to give up for the day when a young woman had approached them. She took them nervously behind a building and, looking anxiously about her, she said she had heard what they said in the supermarket. She was friend of Marianna who was in big trouble. Had they come to help her? Did they have any money? Marianna owed a large amount of money to a man who was very bad so she had had to run away with her family because the man would try to get the money from her mother if Marianna did not pay. Where had she gone? She had gone to Sofia in Bulgaria. Her cousin had offered to drive her. She could get there in a day in her cousin’s car. She said she had friends there and was going to England but her friend had not believed her because it was impossible. Nobody could get to England unless they paid somebody a lot of money and Marianna had no money. Carl and Lydia had thanked the girl with sinking hearts. The news that Marianna had fled to Sofia was not news. Where could they find the cousin? He had also gone away, not come back. Perhaps he had stayed in Sofia. Nobody knew. The trail seemed cold and they thanked the girl and she scurried furtively away. Carl and Lydia had decided that the next day they too would take the road towards Sofia and hope to come across some clue. They had set out early, glad to escape the sinister atmosphere of their car park but had only gone a couple of kilometres before Carl pulled up, complaining that the steering felt odd. Two of the wheel nuts on the front, left-hand wheel had gone. The remaining nuts were less than finger tight. Another couple of minutes and the wheel would have come off. Badly frightened, they had taken nuts from the rear wheels and returned to Pogradec with only three out of four nuts securing each of the rear wheels. Lydia had wanted to go on but cautious Carl would not undertake the long drive to Sofia. The garage where they stopped had said they would get new wheel nuts from Tirana and that would take a day or two. They could park in the fenced garage compound. Later that day, they had been stopped in the street by two policemen and taken to a police station where they were asked to explain their business. Carl had produced some nearly accurate documents showing a delivery in Trieste and their explanation that they had taken the opportunity to take a few days late summer holiday while in the Adriatic may not have convinced the police but it was sufficiently plausible to deter further enquiry and they had been given coffee and driven back to the garage. That was when they had telephoned Deborah and, as far as she knew, they were still there a day later. She had not heard from George at all and was now starting to worry about him, too. The three girls were very subdued while she told the story.

  Chapter 33

  In fact, things were looking up for Carl and Lydia. Despite the language difference, Carl and the garage owner had discovered their shared passion for engines and Carl had spent several hours happily machining a special flywheel – heavy on the edge but light towards the centre - for his new friend’s restoration project – some sort of vintage racing car Lydia had never seen but which might have been an early Jaguar. She just knew it had leather seats but did not have a CD player. Whistling quietly to himself as he worked with lathe and micrometer, Carl exuded absorbed contentment that infected Lydia sitting in the corner of the workshop. More important, the garage owner had often worked on Marianna’s cousin’s car and knew the family well. It seemed he was some sort of relative, a second cousin or something like that. To their huge relief, he had brushed aside a couple of unwanted enquiries from sinister looking men who wanted to know about Carl and Lydia, the reasons for their presence in Pogradec and the basis of their interest in Marianna. Peter, the garage owner, had sent the questioners about their business without telling them anything except that he was repairing the truck owned by tourists visiting the region. Initially he was just as reluctant to answer Carl’s and Lydia’s questions about where the family was now but Lydia kept probing.

  “You have a family, don’t you, Peter? How old are your children? Where do they go to school? What are they good at? So, if the boys will join you in the business, what about the girls? Really! That’s good. Can they do that in Albania or will they have to leave? What will happen if y
ou don’t have enough money for university? Yes, but if the bank won’t give you a loan and you have to borrow it privately, won’t you put yourself in the power of these people who are after Marianna? I know it’s difficult, Peter, but we have to try to stop this if we can, don’t you think? You know, don’t you, that if you tolerate this, then your children will be next.” Eventually, after half a day of gentle but unremitting pressure from Lydia, Peter cracked and told her where Marianna and her mother were hiding. Lydia hugged him. When the wheel nuts arrived, Peter would not accept payment saying that Carl had more than earned them through his work on the car. On his advice they set out at first light in the opposite direction to Marianna’s secret location and drove for an hour towards Tirana, then stopped for half an hour to allow any following traffic to pass them. When they left the main road and headed back towards Pogradec, they stopped twice near main junctions with clear views of the road behind them so as to make sure they were not followed. It was still early when they swooped back into town and startled Marianna’s mother in her nightdress. They almost snatched a still frightened Marianna and her clothes and headed straight for the border with Macedonia, pausing, as before, on high ground and at intersections to make sure they were not being followed. They arrived gratefully in Sofia in late afternoon and left Marianna, still bemused at the suddenness of her escape, in the care of Deborah’s father, to collect her visa from the British Embassy and travel to London. After a night’s rest they headed north again, driving in turns past the edge of the Transylvanian Alps and without stopping except to refuel until they entered Hungary. Over the border they stopped for two days in a quiet campsite. They needed a break and Lydia needed to eat. She had lost nearly three kilos in less than a week. They planned to reward themselves with a leisurely trip home and expected Marianna to arrive in the UK before they did which was just as well as things would be crowded in the little, terraced house in South Croydon.