by Sophie Ward
He put his face up to the blinding sky, took a deep breath and forced his arms and legs to move.
*
‘It seemed to take so long,’ Ali said in his perfect English, ‘As though the whole world had slowed down. I washed up on the beach like a newborn.’
‘Your friends must have been scared.’ The young woman frowned at him. She still thought the best of people.
‘Tch. All they cared about was the ball. So,’ he looked out at the sea, remembering why he had started this now uncomfortable story. ‘Please be careful of the current. It looks calm, this little kalos beach, but believe me, it can play with you.’
They both watched as the gentle waves pulled the sand from under their feet and washed back over them. The bay was almost empty, the children still in school and the adults at work. Ali didn’t usually bring guests to this beach, his beach.
‘It feels more like a bath than an angry sea,’ she said. ‘But thank you. For the warning.’
She smiled at him and Ali took this as his cue to leave. The guesthouse had just started the season and Celena and Kostas would be serving lunch soon.
‘It’s Ali, isn’t it?’ She put out a hand. ‘Elizabeth. Do you have to rush back?’
She wasn’t much older than him. A few years, maybe. She had arrived alone two days before and had stayed in her room until breakfast this morning when she appeared on the small terrace in a sunhat and asked directions to the beach.
‘Ask Ali,’ Celena said. ‘He’s the swimmer.’
If he lived to sail the stars, Ali would never be allowed to forget his fall from grace. Ali shrugged at Celena but he’d offered to walk down with the English woman if she could wait a couple of hours. The travel agencies often talked about the ‘personal touch’ and ‘customer satisfaction’, but Ali would only be helpful to those he wanted to help. The woman had agreed to wait and, though he would never have admitted it, Ali had worked a little quicker.
There were only a few of them working at the house that summer. Celena and Kostas, Ali and his father, and a girl who came in to do the laundry. Hanife had gone to London, to work for a Turkish newspaper near a place called Finsbury Park. She had left the island as soon as she could because, she said, it had killed her mother and now it was killing her. Their mother had died of a brain tumour and Ali didn’t see that where they lived had anything to do with it, but Hanife insisted.
‘I don’t want to be the invaded any more,’ she said. ‘I want to be the invader.’
So she’d gone to England to get her own back. Ali didn’t ask her if she felt like she’d conquered the British, she was doing well enough in her corner of north London. She left Ali and their father to run the guesthouse, now more of a hotel, and asked her brother to consider his own future. Once a year, she returned to the island and again for the wedding of Celena and Kostas. At the party, she took Ali’s face in her hands.
‘Don’t torment yourself, Ali eşek. Leave them and make a new life.’
He had watched Celena vow to love another man and had said nothing. Ali didn’t think there was much life left in him.
Instead, he poured all his energies into doing up the house, installing new plumbing and banishing the spiders and scorpions and snakes, the lines of ants in the kitchen and the pools of silverfish in the sinks. He found he was good at outwitting the pests and parasites that bothered less scrupulous establishments. The little hotel was perfect for the new crowd of tourists that flew around Europe wanting to experience the ‘real’ island and not the packaged version. Reality, Ali found, was a private bathroom with hot water and breakfast served under a canopy of grapevines for half the price of the big hotels. The visitors would have been shocked at the authenticity available had they ever ventured to the rural interior. Ali thought he might suggest the trip next time a tie-dyed hippy complained about the wine list.
The Englishwoman, Elizabeth, didn’t seem the complaining kind, or much of a hippy. They walked back to the more sheltered dunes where she had set out her towel, unpacked her bag and now lay on her stomach in a neat, black bikini with a book in her hands. They had spoken about the landscape and the history of the island on the walk down and Ali had found her easy to talk to, which had led to his safety warning becoming more of a personal confession than a professional courtesy. He glanced over at her. She was attractive, soft-skinned and curvy with dark waves of hair that fell to her shoulders. He found himself wondering what her back would feel like if he traced a finger along her spine.
‘Will you stay for a while?’ She shaded her eyes as she looked up at him. ‘Or I’ll have to read on my own all afternoon.’
‘You don’t like your book?’
‘Oh, the book’s fine, it’s the company I’m not sure about.’
Ali took his time to sit down on the sand next to her while he considered what she meant.
‘You don’t like to be alone?’
She frowned. ‘Not really. I know I should, it’s one of the reasons I came here, to get better at it.’
‘You’re planning a life of … solitude?’ The image of the Greek nuns at Ayios Minas came to him.
‘Oh!’ she laughed. ‘No, the opposite probably. But my mother had this thing about being independent and I haven’t been, very, and now’s probably the time to learn.’
‘Your mother sounds very modern.’
‘She is, I suppose. Didn’t take her own advice though. She’s just about to marry her third husband. Sorry.’ Elizabeth put a hand to her mouth. ‘Are you very religious?’
‘Not at all. My mother was modern also, not like yours, but we did not grow up in a religious household.’
‘I thought everyone here was. There are so many beautiful churches.’
‘Yes, but I am not Greek. I am Turkish.’
‘Oh, I see.’
Ali nodded. Of course, she did not see and how could he explain? Would he start with the day he asked his parents why he had to go to Sunday school and they told him not to make a fuss? Or how he thought he had been friends with everyone until they sided with Damon and he was abandoned by the little gang? They blamed him for letting the skinny Greek boy fall from the tree and for stealing Damon’s football and leaving it to float out to sea. After that, he was Ali, not Al, and he understood what his mother had meant about the teacher who tied his legs to the chair. He was different. No, he was not religious, and neither was he Greek.
‘It’s okay,’ he said to Elizabeth. ‘This island is complicated. But it will change soon.’
She looked at him and her face was open. For the first time since he accepted that Celena did not love him, he felt the hope that comes with being wanted.
‘And you,’ he said. ‘Will you be an independent woman, like your mother?’
Elizabeth sighed. ‘Yes, almost exactly,’ she said. ‘Only, with just the one husband, I think.’ She held up her left hand where a pale line circled the fourth finger. ‘He’s an artist. We’re getting married next month.’
The hope left as suddenly as it had arrived. ‘You already have a tan,’ he said. ‘This is another holiday for you.’
‘Oh? Oh, yes.’ She looked startled. ‘I had to get away from them. You know, my mother, her fiancé, my fiancé. We were at this hotel in France my mother always booked when I was young. Younger.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Terribly smart, sun loungers and cocktails by the pool. It was all so, inevitable, as though nothing had changed or was going to change or ever could. I wanted to be sure I was, well, making a choice.’
They looked out at the sparkling sea in front of them.
‘A choice? Not the right choice?’ he asked.
‘That would be a bonus, obviously.’
She took two orange sodas from her bag and handed one to Ali.
‘I suppose it’s a good deal.’ She pushed the metal top off the bottle and squeezed her thumb in her fist to assuage the obvious pain. ‘I mean, we marry each other, me and Nicholas, and we make our way in the world, have children, a boy and a g
irl would be nice, and the world goes on. That’s our place in it.’
‘But …?’
‘Yes. Exactly. But.’
He took a swig of the soda and watched her press her hand down into the fine, white grit.
‘So you take your ring off and run away. If you were to be my bride, I would worry.’
She smiled. ‘He’s not the worrying type. Except for his paintings. He frets about them.’
A flare of anger soared through Ali. Who was this man that he should prize himself so greatly? He drank again from the bottle and knocked the glass hard against his teeth.
‘Bok!’ Ali swore under his breath.
‘Ow. Careful.’ Elizabeth reached across to take the bottle. ‘Your lip is bleeding.’
She was so close to him he could see the light down on her cheek. She wore no make-up and her dark hair framed her artless face in loops and swirls. He put his hand on hers over the bottle, and covered the missing ring.
‘You are more precious than any man-made thing,’ he said, and he kissed her.
‘Oh,’ she breathed and he felt her heart pulse at her temple.
‘Is this what you want?’ he asked, wiping the smear of his blood from her bottom lip.
She looked at him and he saw himself reflected in her clear gaze. He saw the two of them joined together, for one tiny moment in the history of the world, and he saw a future, not with her but near her, something captured from this instant on the beach, his kalos beach, echoing inside her forever.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This is what I choose.’
III Defeat
The football he wanted to rescue floated out of the bay into the open water. Ali watched as it bobbed out of reach. He didn’t want the thing anyway, he had swum off to prove that he could get it but his old gang of friends weren’t paying attention. Far behind him the boys played in the shallows, pushing each other and throwing a beach ball they had recovered from a tourist. Only skinny Damon would be watching.
He had swum too far out. He turned on to his back to try and catch his breath but he needed to swim to the shore quickly. He thought about the time he had reached the rocky edge of the bay where the secret cave had beckoned to the gang all summer. Only Ali was brave enough to swim that far, his uncle’s words ringing in his ears. His uncle was worse than his grandfather for making Ali feel ashamed. After the trip in his car to Nicosia, his uncle had branded him a weak and lazy boy.
‘He’ll never be a soldier,’ his uncle said. ‘We cannot depend on him.’
Ali would show him. But when he had reached the cliff face that looked so mysterious and inviting from the beach, the cave was merely a gap and there was no place to climb up to investigate further. He had clung to the sharp rock until his hands bled and he’d been forced to turn around and start the long swim home with aching arms and not enough breath. It took everything he had not to cry when he reached his friends. Damon had cried when he fell out of the tree but the other boys had blamed Ali for not helping him and nothing had been the same since.
High above him he heard an aeroplane on its way to the British base. Soldiers. He wanted to wave at them, come and get me. He could shout as much as he wanted, no one would hear him, not even from the beach.
He was sinking. He righted himself and tried pedalling in the water but his legs had stopped. He remembered how it felt to push himself back to shore from the cave. The effort, the moment when he knew he might not make it. You could get as far as the breakwater and still drown because you didn’t have the strength to push through the waves. That’s what had happened to the visitor who fell asleep in his boat. He’d lost his oars and jumped overboard to swim back but only made it to the shoreline. The locals had watched him, the Englishman. His body had washed back out. A terrible accident.
He could hear the water, the roar of it, feel the heave and swell as he filled his lungs only to sink again. He cried out now, between gasps and sobs.
‘Yardim! Yardim et!’
Time slowed down. He couldn’t see his friends, the other boys, couldn’t see if they were coming to help. Was his sister waiting for him? Did she sense the loss to come? How he wished he could lie at her feet in the dunes once more, and beg for a drink or a towel, something from the bag she always carried, anything for which he could be grateful and true.
His eyes were salt washed, his body waterlogged like the old sponges in the bathhouse when he was little, as full and heavy as the pregnant women that soaped their children around him. He thought of his own mother, who had borne two children together, how big and uncomfortable she must have been. Was that when her headaches had started? All the time he wondered if it was his fault she was tired and how he would make her better one day, how he could fix her, like Kostas fixed the electric lights. Except now, there would not be a one day.
What would his uncle say? Had he been brave? He had swum out to sea and not come back. He had failed his mission and no one had come to help. The teacher who tied his legs to the chair in class was right; he was different. He was not Al any more, part of the gang. He was on the outside, looking in. He pushed up one more time but only his hand rose above the waterline. He was outside, he would always be outside. He was part of the water. He would lie on the seabed every day and every night. Would he be cold? No, you cannot feel when you are dead. This is cold, this sinking, this filling and falling, slowly, silently to the bottom of the sea. You are not dead yet. Not dead. Not.
3
Sunbed
To be a Bat
Thomas Nagel wrote that if we accept a bat has its own conscious experience then there is something it is like to be a bat, but we cannot imagine what that is like because it is so outside our own experience. The same may be said for any conscious organism, including other humans. There is the physical knowledge of another person but can there be an understanding of what it is like to have their experiences?
But I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.
Thomas Nagel The Philosophical Review
Elizabeth Pryce turned to her husband at the exact moment he closed his eyes.
‘Are you going to sleep?’
Nicholas started and grabbed the arm of the wicker chair in which he had chosen to recline while the Atlantic darkened, though that event was still some way off. ‘What?’
‘You’re falling asleep. It’s not even six o’clock and we’re due at the Olivers’ at seven. Really,’ Elizabeth took the glass tumbler from his hand as she stood up, ‘we’re not dead yet, Nicky.’
She left the glasses in the sink and went to her bedroom to get ready for the evening, switching the television on and turning up the volume for the evening soap opera marathon as she passed. It was not that she minded Nicholas having a nap quite; he always had been relaxed enough to drop off at any second, but she had begun to count up the amount of time she spent awake and alone over the course of a day and to find it creepy.
At her dressing table, she swept a cream blusher over her cheeks with her fingertips and peered into the mirror to rub it in. Since they had left England she had very few people to talk to on a casual, daily basis. She was still busy, of course, with her classes and the house and Nicky to take care of, and how many women on the far side of their fifties could claim to be as fit and attractive as she was, studying capoeira with the masters? But much of her day was spent in her own company, or that of her husband, and it was hard not to feel, on occasion and especially at night, that she was fading like a once vivid stain on a sheet that with every wash grows paler until you forget it had ever existed.
I do exist, she thought, warming to her theme with a swipe of the mascara brush along her thinning lashes. I am not some insipid Anita Brookner heroine, wilting amongst the mahogany furniture in Maida Vale. I am still a catch.
‘Do you find me so boring?’ Elizabeth stared at the reflection of her husband who had wandered into the bedroom and was looking rather hopelessly for his socks on the end of the bed. ‘So boring that you can’t stay
awake for a few minutes and have a conversation?’
And it was like that, she remembered, and swivelled round on the footstool to better address him. It was as though she were the cue to drop off, to stop concentrating and drift away. He didn’t fall asleep when he was working; he created works of art. Big, beautiful canvases filled with colour and heat. He did not, she blinked at the thought, fall asleep in his oil paint the way he had done into his dinner more than once.
Nicholas Pryce stood still for a moment and waited for his wife to finish.
‘I’m terribly sorry, my darling. Have you seen my socks? I feel sure I left them on the bed.’
His tone was entirely reasonable.
‘I expect they’ve gone to look for your cardigan so they can reminisce about the good old days. It’s eighty-one degrees outside.’
‘Is it?’ Nicholas kissed the top of his wife’s head as he sauntered to the bathroom. ‘If only I looked after myself as well as you look after yourself, my love, I doubt I would feel the cold so much.’
He closed the door behind him and Elizabeth grabbed her dress from the wardrobe and slid it over her head. Nicholas had always preferred negative attention. Absent father, repressed mother, she thought, smoothing the bias-cut satin over her hips. Her own mother had been a therapist. Freudian. In the days when a woman practising Freudian analytic psychotherapy was slightly daring. Elizabeth had grown up with the flip dismissal of her mother’s friends as egoists, Oedipals, neurotics. How easy it had seemed to categorise the human psyche as though each were the result of a knitting pattern. All terribly masculine and hearty, like assorted tweeds.