Skios

31

Wilfred lay facedown on the soft grass, watching his hand trailing in the stream in front of him. His fingers were softly undulating in time with the water weed around them. Yes, and there was the trout, flicking lazily through the weeds. He watched it edge nearer and nearer. He could feel its cold scales on his quietly tickling fingers. And then, whoosh! It was in his fist! In the air above his head! In the keep-bag he had improvised out of creeper! In the hot ashes of the oven! On the table under the stars! On the fork he was lifting up to her smiling lips …

“So,” said Stavros, nodding at the suitcase beside him, as the taxi bounced along down the unmade-up mountain road, “airport?”

Georgie’s smiling eyes were shining in the candlelight. She moved closer and closer to him. The trout had vanished from the picture. “Yes?” she whispered.

“Yes,” said Wilfred. “Yes. Yes!”

“Not a problem,” said Stavros.

Not a problem. Wilfred slowly emerged into the light of day. Stavros. Of course. Taxi. And he himself was not Wilfred, sharing home-caught trout under the stars with Georgie, but Dr. Wilfred, on his way to give the Fred Toppler Lecture at the Fred Toppler Foundation.

They bounced on down the hillside. He was flung sideways by the hairpin bends, and up against the roof by the potholes; he had presumably been flung around in much the same way ever since they had left the villa, but had been too involved with the trout to notice. Now that he was conscious of his surroundings, though, he realized that in the air-conditioned chill of the taxi his wet clothes were hanging noticeably dank upon him.

He dragged his suitcase over from the front seat. There was something subtly alien about it. And even before he had lifted the flap of the luggage tag to check he knew with a sudden dull certainty what it would say. It wouldn’t be Dr. Norman Wilfred. It would be exactly what it had been before.

Yes. “Annuka Vos.”

Of course. Naturally. They had sent the same bag. The wrong bag. The transvestite’s bag.

And all at once he was hit by a bolt of black lightning. Every single thing had gone wrong since he had arrived on this horrible island. He was Dr. Norman Wilfred, for God’s sake! Not a helpless victim of forces beyond his control, but a rational human being in a rational world! He was used to something better than this! And he had been mocked and humiliated! Led around like a bear on a rope by idiocy and incompetence, by chance and misunderstanding, by coincidence and two moles on a shoulder blade!

The suitcase sat there beside him, the visible embodiment of all his frustrations. He opened the window and heaved it out. It hit an outcrop of rock in the track with a satisfying crunch, rolled over and over in the wake of the taxi, burst open, and scattered a long trail of clothes in the dust.

The taxi stopped. Stavros turned and looked out of the back window, and then at Dr. Wilfred. His mouth was slightly open. The carapace of apparent indifference that taxi drivers develop to the waywardness of their customers was visibly dented.

“Not mine,” said Dr. Wilfred.

* * *

Annuka took the T-shirts and chinos she had ironed back to the bedroom, hung the chinos in the wardrobe, and laid the T-shirts away in the chest of drawers. There seemed to be no tissue paper to fold in with them, but perhaps it didn’t matter too much. It was only for a week.

She turned back to the still hopeless muddle of clothing on the floor. Men! She picked up a small tangerine-colored garment. Underwear. Tangerine-colored underwear. Also lime-green. Sky-blue ones. Black underwear so scanty that they were scarcely underwear at all. She looked at it all in surprise. None of the underwear that Oliver had left scattered around her floor had ever been anything like this. He had obviously been running a little wild since she last put him out.

She was about to iron them, but somehow the iron hung in the air above them. Tangerine underwear, lime-green and sky-blue underwear, black underwear so scanty that they were scarcely underwear at all — they weren’t things that she wanted to put an iron to. If they had belonged to her, or to some other woman, it would have been a different matter. But to a man …

She folded them all thoughtfully, and put them away unironed.

* * *

Stavros had got out of the taxi and walked back to the long slew of clothing that stretched away up the track from the eviscerated suitcase. Dr. Wilfred could see no reason to accompany him. He looked at his watch. They should be getting on. The adrenaline began to drain out of his bloodstream. What was Stavros up to? What business was it of his what his customers chose to throw out of the window?

He turned round in spite of himself and looked. Stavros was picking up random items of clothing and letting them fall again. In the sunlight their colors appeared brighter than they had at the airport. Now he was holding up what seemed to be a pair of high-heeled silver diamanté shoes.

Under the men’s clothing that he had seen at the airport a layer of women’s clothing must have been concealed. So was Ms. Vos a double agent? A trans-transvestite? A woman dressed as a man dressed as a woman?

Stavros tossed the shoes down on the track with the rest of the clothes, walked slowly back, and got into the taxi again. His face was expressionless.

* * *

Annuka picked up the next heap of clothing on the floor to sort out. It wasn’t clothing, though. It was gauze netting. Yards and yards of torn gauze netting.

Heap after heap of it she picked up. She shifted the heaps from hand to hand, gazing at them in bafflement. Why would Oliver pack half a suitcaseful of torn gauze netting to go on holiday? Or even half a suitcaseful of untorn gauze netting, and then tear it?

With a slowly dawning dismay, the truth came to her. It was a bridal veil.

She sat down on the bed, as if the floor beneath her feet had become all at once uncertain. The Oliver she had known for seven long and difficult months had sprung surprises enough on her. But this was something else again. What she now had to envisage was an Oliver with a secret penchant for dressing up in — yes, it was obvious, now she had found the veil — women’s underwear and see-through bridal outfits. Which he then rent, perhaps in some sickening symbolic representation of defloration.

She looked round the room for any further evidence of ritual perversion. A whip. A crucifix.

From a rail above the far side of the bed hung more swathes of gauze netting, this time still intact. From the hooks on this side hung torn shreds and scraps of the same stuff.

Oh, yes. Mosquito netting.

Her outrage slowly began to subside. He had simply had a bad night. Had thrashed about in his sleep, or flailed wildly against a plague of invading mosquitoes.

As her outrage subsided her irritation returned. She angrily beat the undersheet smooth, thrashed the pillows against each other, and snatched up the duvet from where it was nervously skulking on the floor. How characteristic of him to offer her such a thrilling new cause for dissatisfaction, and then to snatch it away again.

Though there was still the underwear. Her outrage returned.