Skios

8

Dr. Norman Wilfred touched the Send button of his phone and his intercontinental ballistic missile departed in the direction of Manitoba. For something composed with two thumbs in a strange airport it was a remarkably powerful piece of writing. There would be body parts scattered over a wide area of Canada. He could resume his visit to Skios with a calm mind.

Now, where had he got to…? Flight bag! Yes, still safely between his feet. So, suitcase …

The dark spate of luggage on the carousel, he discovered, had become a drought-stricken trickle, and, even as he looked, his one remaining fellow passenger claimed his bag and departed. Dr. Wilfred was left on his own in the baggage hall, like the last boy at school to be picked for the football team. A disintegrating cardboard box came wearily into view … a ten-foot-long camouflage canvas holdall … and yes, his suitcase with the familiar red leather tag. But even as Dr. Wilfred reached out to take it he saw that the suitcase itself wasn’t familiar at all. There was something subtly but unmistakably alien about it. Somebody else, evidently, had hit upon the idea of a red address tag. He opened the flap on the tag. Yes. Someone called Annuka Vos.

He let the suitcase go on its way. The cardboard box shuffled slowly back round the track, ashamed that no one wanted it … the ten-foot-long holdall … the alien suitcase … That seemingly endless spring of luggage behind the flaps had finally dried up.

Box again … holdall … alien suitcase … And suddenly all three of them became motionless, as if they had at last given up hope of ever finding owners. A great silence fell over the baggage hall.

The bastards had lost his suitcase. Of course. First you see your entire life’s work mocked by some nasty little nobody in Manitoba, and then the airline loses your bag.

The waiting glass of chilled white wine beneath the stars, the lightly tanned skin and the discreetly blond hair, had vanished as if they had never been.

Skios! He’d somehow always known it was going to be a disaster.

* * *

“I’m sorry,” said Nikki. “I had a great speech of welcome prepared, but somehow it all went out of my head.”

They were walking side by side to the car park through the beautiful heat of the night and the hot smells of subtropical flowers and herbs.

It wouldn’t last very long, this wonderful new life of his, realized Oliver. He would only need to say one wrong thing. How many bright paths he had seen opening in front of him before! How many times he had then suddenly found himself falling into the darkness! Sooner or later he would once again be talking himself out of his embarrassment. People thought he didn’t feel the embarrassment, but he did, he did! Did the climber not mind falling or the sailor drowning? Of course they minded! They dreaded it! That was the point — the risk! There was nothing that made you relish every moment of being alive so much as knowing that at the very next you might be dead. Or might somehow still, even as you fell, find some overhanging plant to grab, some passing piece of flotsam to cling on to. “I got a bit confused, etc., etc. Possibly by your being the most beautiful woman I have ever, etc., etc. I really thought for a moment that I actually was, etc., etc.” There was always some faint hope that it might work. It never had, so far as he could remember. But there was no logical reason why the future should always have to be like the past.

On the other hand, though — oh God! — she might suddenly realize that he was Oliver Fox! Had Oliver Fox’s reputation reached Greece yet?

And even if he got away with it, he had perhaps only one night before Georgie arrived. He was going to have to live this short new life of his with single-minded intensity.

Nikki unlocked a car with the body of a bus and the wheels of a giant excavator. She laughed.

“You don’t look at all the way I imagined!” she said.

The familiar first twinge of disequilibrium passed through Oliver as bracingly as a gulp of vodka.

“Why?” he said. “How did you imagine I looked?”

“Well … the way you do in your photograph. The one in your CV. But you’re much more … I don’t know…” She was going to say “more surprising,” “more handsome,” “more wonderful.” “Younger,” she said.

He thought about this. “Yes, well, that’s because I am,” he said. “Younger. Than I was then.”

She laughed, not understanding. He laughed himself. He couldn’t understand, either.