Skios

11

Georgie Evers came down the steps of the plane into the hot Mediterranean night, her phone to her ear, waiting for Oliver to answer.

“Hi!” he said at last.

“Hi!” she said. “It’s me! I suddenly saw there was a flight to Thessaloniki! I thought, Thessaloniki? My God, isn’t that in Greece? So I ran all the way to the ticket desk, I ran all the way to the gate! And at Thessaloniki — I don’t believe this! — there’s a flight just boarding…”

She stopped, because she had become aware that Oliver was talking at the same time. No, he’d stopped as well.

“So here I am! I’m in Skios! I’m just getting off the plane…! Oliver? Are you there?”

Because now there was a disconcerting lack of any further response from Oliver. She pressed End and dialed again.

“Hi!” said Oliver.

“Hi!” she said. “We got cut off.”

But he was still speaking.

“Sounds like me,” he was saying. “But it’s not me. It’s just my phone, pretending. Tell it your troubles, though, and it’ll listen patiently and pass them on to me as soon as I remember to press the button.”

Of course. The announcement was only too familiar. But this time it really was a bit of a bugger. She had scarcely expected him to be waiting for her at the airport, since he hadn’t known she was coming. But at least he might have been waiting at the end of the phone. Because otherwise she had no idea where she was supposed to be going. He’d borrowed a villa from someone. But what villa? Where? What was the name of the people he’d borrowed it from?

She tried once more to phone him as she waited for her bag, and again after it had arrived, but there was still only the answering machine. She felt suddenly lost and lonely. Most of her fellow passengers from Thessaloniki were Greek, and when she emerged from the baggage hall even the signs that the waiting chauffeurs and taxi drivers were holding up were in an unwelcomingly incomprehensible script. Among them, though, was one that had an English translation with it: SKIOS TAXI. It was being held up by a man with a bald head and a large belly. In the middle of his bald head was a black wart like a fly.

“Do you speak English?” she asked him.

“Eustrabolgi?”

“Oh, hello, yes, sorry, eustrabolgi, only I wonder if you could help me…”

“I wait Strabolgi,” he said. He turned round and said something to a man sitting on the bench behind him, who heaved himself to his feet and ambled slowly over. He had a large belly, a bald head, and a black wart like a fly on the end of his nose. He held out his hand.

“Spiros,” he said. “Stavros he don’t speak English good. Where you like to go?”

She explained to him about how she was supposed to meet a friend here, only she had missed the plane thanks to the difficulties made by another friend, etc., etc., and then she had suddenly seen there was a flight to Thessaloniki, etc., etc., and her friend’s phone was etc., etc., and all she knew about the villa they were staying in was that it belonged to some people, only she didn’t know their name.

“No problem,” said the man with the wart on the end of his nose. “What?”

She had missed the plane, she explained again, thanks to the tiresomeness of her friend Patrick, with the result that another friend of hers who was supposed to be meeting her here, and who was called Oliver—

“Wait!” said the man. “You want Mr. Fox Oliver?”

“Mystaphoksoliva?” she repeated blankly. And suddenly she realized how easy it was to understand Greek. “Yes!” she cried. “Mr. Fox Oliver! Yes, yes!”

“No problem,” said Spiros. He took the handle of her suitcase and ushered her towards the parking. “I know where. I drive him. Mr. Fox Oliver. Already now he have the bath waiting you, glass of wine on the table.”

* * *

Straight along the path and then left.

It had sounded so easy when Nikki said it. But in the darkness, as the new Dr. Norman Wilfred groped his way around in his white bathrobe, with the bottle of chilled champagne tucked under his arm, he found it difficult to make any sense of the world he had invented himself into. Straight along the path, yes, but none of the paths was straight! They were all elegantly landscaped into the complex contours of the hillside. Then left. But when was a left a left, and when was it a winding straight with a right turning off it?

Here and there small lights kept their eyes modestly downcast upon the ground, or half concealed behind veils of sweet-scented vegetation. Every now and then he heard a snatch of conversation or laughter, but lights and sounds alike only made the surrounding darkness and silence seem deeper. He caught occasional glimpses through the trees of some kind of life — of people moving about, or sitting at tables — but it was way down the hillside below him, and there seemed to be no possible approach.

His surroundings became stranger still when the moon rose above the hills in the east, silvering some of the darkness, plunging the rest into yet deeper shadow. There was something maddening about the timelessness of it all when he was so short of time himself. Somewhere in this great peacefulness those welcoming eyes were turned towards the veranda window that she had left open. But where, where? Already the smile in the eyes was beginning to fade, and at any moment the other Dr. Norman Wilfred would come raging out of the shadows and shoulder him aside. The embowered bungalows were a long way from one another, and even in the moonlight he had to get very close to see the names carved in the stonework. Xenocles, Theodectes, Menander … Leucippus, Empedocles, Anaximander … He realized that he had forgotten the name of the one he was looking for. Demosthenes. No — Damocles.

He would have to give up. Go back to his own room, get a good night’s sleep, and hope that somehow, somewhere, the old Dr. Norman Wilfred was as lost as he was himself.

But he couldn’t go back to his room. He didn’t know the way and, even if he could find someone to ask, he’d forgotten the name of it. In any case he hadn’t got the key.

He was beginning to feel nostalgic for the old days, when he had still been Oliver Fox. As so often in life, though, there was nowhere to go but on, and nothing to do but what you had so recklessly started doing.

* * *

At last, as the taxi swayed and rocked on the dirt road through the mountains, Georgie’s phone rang. She was holding it in her hand, ready and waiting.

“Hi!” she said joyfully. “I’m here! Where are you?”

“On the boat,” said Patrick. “Where you left me.”

It took her no more than a quarter of a second to reconfigure herself.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said.

“Obviously. Who did you think I was?”

“I thought you might be Nikki. My old schoolfriend. The one I’m staying with. I told you! She was supposed to meet me at the airport. At Zurich.”

“You’re in Switzerland already? You said you missed the plane.”

“I found another one. Via somewhere … Belgrade.”

Silence from Izmir. She wound down the window and felt the hot scented night air flowing over her face. She was aware that the man with the wart on his nose was watching her in his rearview mirror.

“What’s the weather like in Switzerland?” said Patrick.

“Oh, you know. The usual. Bit cool.”

“So you’re still in Zurich? Still at the airport?”

“I’m in a taxi.”

“What happened to your pal?”

“Nikki? Busy at her foundation thing. Tied up with her skiers.”

“Skiers?”

“I told you.”

“In June?”

“They go very high.”

“I thought this was some sort of cultural institute?”

“It is. Culture and skiing.”

Another silence.

“Yes, well … Just checking you’re OK.” A special strangulated note came into his voice. “I love you, you know.”

“I know. Me, too — me you.”

She pressed the red button. She tried not to catch the taxi driver’s eye in the mirror.

“Spiros,” he said, and handed a card over his shoulder to her. “You want taxi? Spiros. Not Stavros. Stavros he’s my brother. He drive very bad. Kill you for sure.”

She wasn’t thinking about Greece, though. She was thinking about Nikki, at her foundation thing high in the Alps. She couldn’t remember now what Nikki had said about it. Only something about there being skiing there, or skiers. She thought about the skiers swooping across the whiteness of the high snowfields through the sparkling cold mountain air. And Nikki, up there with them, leading her clear, white, well-organized life. If only she could have been like that!

She pressed a number on her phone, then turned sideways to get away from Spiros, and hid her mouth behind her hand. There were some conversations that even she felt a little self-conscious about.

“Also electrical,” said Spiros. “Also genuine antique amphorae. Also smell by septic tank. Send for Spiros. You don’t like Mr. Fox Oliver? No problem. You phone, you ask for Spiros.”