‘No, he doesn’t,’ Artemis snapped, standing and looking at Clive. ‘He doesn’t need me at all. Neither of you do. All I do is sit around in this house, and clean, and—’
‘For the love of God, Artemis, how many times do I have to tell you to hire a cleaner! I mean, Christ, we can afford one. And to be honest, I’m pretty sure she would do a better job.’
She slapped him. The sound rang through the room followed by a moment’s silence and then the crack of firewood from the grate.
Clive stood perfectly still for a moment and then spoke quietly. ‘You ungrateful bitch.’
His face was red with fury but he didn’t move an inch, his voice slow and deliberate. ‘Do you have any idea how much I do for you and David, how hard I work without ever asking anything from you? We don’t even have sex—’
‘We don’t have sex? No, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have sex,’ she hissed back at him.
Clive’s stature changed then, softening, as if he was stepping out of costume and into a familiar coat.
‘Oh, not this again, for God’s sake! Change the record, Artemis. Nothing happened!’ He looked at her, appalled. ‘Though God knows, no one could have blamed me for looking elsewhere. The moment you had David, you and I ceased to exist … You ceased to exist.’
He let the words hang there. ‘If it wasn’t for our son I would have left years ago.’
The nightmares, which for the past few years had become sporadic, returned to her in engulfing waves that drowned her dreams in the weeks that followed, occasionally crashing into her waking hours.
‘Disturbed sleep is one of the known side effects of paroxetine, but as you know, everything comes at a price.’ Dr Blackman said it as if it was an unavoidable fact. ‘You have the sleeping pills I gave you?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, not knowing what else to say. ‘Should I try something else, adjust the dose?’
‘Could do,’ he said, his expression suggesting that it was anyone’s guess. ‘But to be honest, with drugs there is always a risk. Bad dreams, well, unless they’re stopping you sleeping to the point where you’re physically ill … Maybe it’s not worth quibbling over?’
Quibbling. It was one of those curious English words designed to make the accused feel like what they really lacked was a stiff upper lip.
‘How often are you taking the sleeping pills? Not too often, I hope,’ he added obliquely. Satisfied that he’d answered his own question, he moved on. ‘Now when it comes to the paroxetine, what you absolutely mustn’t do is come off them too suddenly. It can have terrible side effects.’
Artemis wasn’t listening, her mind already moving elsewhere.
* * *
It wasn’t so much despair as a sense of emptiness that subsumed her in the weeks that followed. She found it hard to settle in the house in the hours when David was at school, finding herself in the same spot for hours, staring at nothing. Her son was growing up, wanting to spend more time with his friends, or with Clive when he was home. Artemis had defined her whole identity, her whole life, around him and soon he would be gone, and what then?
Even the prospect of time on the island couldn’t raise any joy. Some nights she barely slept at all; when she did she would wake suddenly, convinced that something terrible was about to happen.
‘You look awful,’ Clive told her when he returned from his latest business trip, just in time for them all to travel to Greece as a family for the holidays.
‘I am having trouble sleeping,’ she replied.
He was frustrated rather than sympathetic. ‘Artemis, this can’t go on. You need to go back to Dr Blackman. Why don’t I call him, make an appointment?’
‘No,’ she replied plainly. ‘I’m fine. I am already following his instructions to come off the pills gradually. I just have insomnia.’
She was lying. The truth was, she didn’t trust him. She had followed his instructions at first, that much was true, but how could she trust him? Clive had sent her to him, she reminded herself as she sat in the middle of the night, after several days with barely a few hours’ sleep, once again paralysed at the kitchen table waiting for light to creep in. What if they were poisoning her? Dr Blackman and Clive could be working together. It was ludicrous, she knew that – she was paranoid. She thought of the words emblazoned across a T-shirt hanging from one of endless racks stacked up across Camden Market: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
She was an albatross, a dead weight. Clive had said it himself; if it wasn’t for David he would have left her years earlier. Perhaps this was his way of getting her out of the picture, making way for a new life with May. May loved David as her own, didn’t she?
Over the following days she started to experiment, taking a few pills and then noting how she felt. It was hard, though, to calculate – to separate the exhaustion from any other observable effect.
The more she thought about it, the more sense it made. Clive never so much as tried to touch her; there was no love there. How could she have been so naive? She was onto them – all she could do right now was stay vigilant, for David’s sake if not her own.
She felt her spine straighten as she padded barefoot up the stairs towards the bathroom, the dawn light beginning to peer in through the hallway window. Locking the door behind her, she looked at her reflection for a moment before popping out the pills, one by one, letting them gather in the clammy grooves of her hand. She paused for a moment, observing them properly for the first time, each a compressed block of chemicals, so innocuous-looking. Each one a web of pollutants ready to filter out into her bloodstream and alter the make-up of her body and her mind. And for whose benefit?
Turning, picturing Dr Blackman’s face – the thin line of his mouth as he doled out instructions – she took a few steps towards the toilet and held her hands in front of her, letting the pills fall into the bowl. Her fingers lingered for a moment on the handle before pressing down, enjoying the sound of the sucking motion dragging each pill below the water.
Her palms itched as the plane took off, a sense of unease tightening around her chest within minutes of the seven-hour journey to Athens, as if her body instinctively understood what was going to happen. As if pulling back and giving in at the same time.
‘Are you OK?’ Clive asked irritably. ‘You’ve been up and down the whole bloody flight.’
‘Fine,’ she said, meeting his eyes. ‘I’m fine.’
* * *
Compared to the house in France, which Clive had paid for in cash the day before they left Provence the previous summer, the little cottage on top of the mountain in Greece felt reassuringly compact. The smell of the wood, heated within the locked shutters, was exactly the same as the first day she came here. Everything around them had shifted and changed, but this house was a constant. She felt safe within these walls, she realised as she made her way upstairs, watching David duck through the space from the landing where she and Clive had slept that first night together, into the adjoining bedroom. He had outgrown it now – he and Clive both had – but for her it remained the perfect fit.
The time she spent alone in the house, on those rare days Clive wasn’t working and so took David for a ride on the back of his motorbike, the two of them disappearing in a plume of dust, Artemis revelled in the smallness of the place, the manageability of it, the sense of security it gave her. She loved how the walls seemed to prop her up.
She hated the excess of space in London, her whole body seeming to rattle with it while David was at school; both the scale of the city and their home reminding her of her own insignificance. She felt equally disconnected to the house in the South of France, where she and David had joined Clive for various half-terms in the intervening year since he’d bought the place. It wasn’t that she hadn’t had fun there; she didn’t hate the houses in London and Provence – she just didn’t care about them. In a way she felt they had nothing to do with her.
The reason she loved this place so muc
h, she realised now, was that even if it did belong to Clive, the memories surrounding this house were her own. Up here, amidst the olive trees, the view that stretched away from the island towards a horizon had been hers long before it was ever Clive’s. Her own childhood memories lingered, just out of sight, close enough that she could hold them in place, but not so close that she couldn’t run from them if she needed to. The walls of the house in Hampstead were steeped in other people’s memories, their ghosts accompanying her along the landing as she moved from one room to another, reminding her of how fleeting her time there would be, of all the lives that were yet to inhabit the space once she was gone.
‘Why haven’t we seen Maria yet?’ David asked one afternoon as they sat on the shore. She was looking out at the sea while he absent-mindedly shovelled stones into a plastic bucket. Clive, never able to sit still on the beach, had gone to get them all drinks from the restaurant.
Artemis tensed. She had been warily anticipating this question from David ever since their arrival two weeks earlier.
‘I’ll call Athena later,’ she lied and sensed her son looking at her in a way that suggested he wasn’t fooled.
She returned her attention to the sea. There were no waves, everything about the beach was still and yet she felt sick. Even in the height of summer only a handful of tourists were stretched out on towels, idly applying sunscreen, flicking through the pages of books in foreign titles.
Maybe she was just dehydrated.
‘Did you buy water?’ Artemis asked when Clive returned from the restaurant.
‘You didn’t ask for one,’ he said bluntly, and Artemis took the beer he handed her, drinking hungrily, as if something inside her sensed time was running out.
‘Slow down,’ he said, watching her, uncertainly.
‘Alexander!’ David shot up and ran to meet the older French boy he had befriended the week before, who was making his way across the beach, his parents settled at the foot of the restaurant.
When he turned to his mother to check it was OK, Artemis smiled, encouraging him to play, but it took everything in her not to reach forward and pull him back to her.
‘David, don’t go too far, make sure I can see you,’ she called after them as he and the other boy started tossing stones into their buckets.
‘You remember we’re having lunch with Francisco tomorrow?’ Clive said, once David was out of earshot. ‘We should get the boat across to Skiathos at around eleven.’
Artemis felt a tightening around her throat. She was so thirsty. ‘Sure,’ she replied, looking out at the water. ‘David and I are going to see my parents tonight …’
‘Fine. I’d better prepare, there are things I need to discuss with Francisco.’
A storm was brewing as they reached the port. Artemis watched the island disappear behind them through the window of the boat as Skiathos appeared on the horizon, the smell of someone’s cigarette drifting in from the deck.
David was sulking in the seat opposite, annoyed to be pulled away from his new friend, who would be at the beach again today, expecting to play with him.
‘Can I go and see him when we get home? I know where he’s staying.’
His voice was whiney, plucking at Artemis’ nerves. She felt herself wanting to snap at him, to lean forward and shout into his face for him to be quiet. She never felt like this with David; she never took him for granted even when he was in a bad mood or pleading at her for something she’d already told him he couldn’t have. Having witnessed the aftermath of Helena’s death, she knew too well how precious a child was, how easily a life could be ripped away.
Today she couldn’t settle. She was tired but it was more than that; she felt frayed. Frayed/afraid, the words suddenly interchanged in her mind. Yet there was no reason to be fearful. Not any more.
‘What time are we meeting him?’ Artemis asked as they stepped onto the port, which was so much busier than it had been in the days when she and her parents would take the boat to visit her uncle. The cafés and bars parallel to the water advertised in English and French, bored-looking waiters leaning against the façade waiting for an influx of lunchtime trade.
‘He’ll be waiting there when we arrive,’ Clive replied, leading them to a car and holding open the door. The driver stepped out, a heavy-shouldered man with a long ponytail.
Clive grinned at him before turning to Artemis. ‘You remember Jorgos, don’t you?’
The lunch passed in waves of conversation, Artemis refusing to look at him, determined not to let him know how uneasy his presence was making her. David’s eyes bulged with delight when Artemis stood to use the bathroom and Jorgos reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin which he gave to David to buy a lollipop from the adjoining bar.
‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Artemis asked quickly and her little boy batted her away, scooting off as she moved uneasily in the other direction, turning only once and spotting the men’s heads moving closer in her and David’s absence.
In the bathroom, Artemis held onto the sink, breathing deeply. She just had to get through lunch, that was all. He couldn’t get to her. Not now.
Except if she knew that to be true then why was she shaking?
When Artemis returned a few minutes later, the conversation stopped. Clive’s face, when she studied it, was etched with emotions she couldn’t read.
They parted company with the men at the door of the restaurant and were nearly back at the port when Artemis remembered the sunglasses she had left on the table. She should leave them, they were only sunglasses, but the thought of not having them made her tense. Or maybe she’d wanted another reason to go back.
‘I won’t be a minute,’ she said to Clive, ignoring his look of intense frustration.
Instinctively, Artemis slowed down as she spotted the men lingering in front of the restaurant door. She stayed where she was for a moment, on the other side of the road, imagining what she would do if she’d had the nerve – what she would shout at him, right here, in front of all these people. Moving away slightly and crossing further up, she made her approach just out of their sightline.
She was building herself up as she walked towards them, working through the words in her mind. Rapist. Clive would never forgive her, but what did it matter? She was moving in behind, so close that she could have reached out and touched him, when she heard Nguema speak.
‘We don’t need him, Jorgos. Not any more.’
Artemis slowed, pulling back, tuning into Nguema’s words. ‘The man is a dead weight. I’ve made arrangements with Jeff.’
At the sound of their voices, any bravado washed away. What was she doing? She turned, moving slowly away, but before she could take another step out of view, to safety, she heard Jorgos calling out to her in Greek.
‘Everything OK?’ His voice struck her between the shoulder blades. For a moment she imagined herself on the floor, his weight pressing against her.
‘Fine,’ she said, a sudden wind catching her so that she held onto the wall for balance. Turning to face the men, she spoke more steadily. ‘I just left my sunglasses at the restaurant.’
When she looked at Nguema, avoiding Jorgos’ stare, his expression was impenetrable.
‘They’ve just closed for the afternoon,’ Nguema replied.
‘It’s fine, I’ll get them another time.’ She turned, suddenly desperate to be away from there, to be anywhere else.
Jorgos’ voice called after her. ‘Ta léme argótera.’ See you later.
* * *
She felt her husband watching her as the boat transported them back towards the smaller island.
‘You’re drinking a lot,’ he commented, returning from the bar holding the beer she had asked for.
‘Not really. I just fancied one.’
She refused to catch his eye.
‘Should you be drinking, with the medication—’
‘I’m not a child,’ she barked back at him and David looked up from his game. She glanced reassuringly at h
er son and he looked down again.
‘I need to talk to you,’ she said under her breath to Clive as they arrived back at the house.
‘Later,’ he replied, brushing her off. ‘I promised I’d take David out. Anyway, you look like you need a lie-down.’
Despite her remonstrations to the contrary, she did feel drunk. In the weeks since they had arrived, she’d been increasingly anxious, and combined with the wine from lunch – and the rest she’d consumed once Clive and David went down to the beach without her – it was making her woozy. She thought briefly about Dr Blackman’s warning about coming off the drugs too quickly. But that could easily have been what he wanted her to think. Besides, she’d felt strange when she was back in London, before the cold turkey. Maybe there it had been the house, the spectres that shrouded it – apparitions of a life that wasn’t hers – that was making her mad. Did she really believe Clive and Dr Blackman were conspiring against her? Truly, she didn’t know what she thought. She was too tired to think. Tiredness made people insane, didn’t it? Or at least it could make you feel as if you were. How was anyone to know the difference?
It was only five o’clock but she needed a nap. Except when she closed her eyes, she saw the men’s faces staring back at her outside the restaurant; there was something in Nguema’s eye that caused her to sit up again, her breath sharpening.
Standing and walking to the bathroom, she rummaged through her washbag in search of face wipes. She was so hot. If she couldn’t sleep, she could at least try to freshen herself up, to feel less deranged than she was feeling now. She felt her fingers move over a packet of sleeping pills she kept for emergencies. Physically relieved by the prospect of sleep, she popped out a pill, her fingers lingering over the packet for a moment before taking out another for good measure.
They weren’t supposed to be mixed with alcohol, but the instructions always said that. And she hadn’t drunk that much. Clive loved to make her feel she was less in control than she was. He had been exaggerating. She wasn’t so drunk, she just needed rest.
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