The Riders

Fifteen

ARTHUR LIPP PUSHES OPEN HIS doors and steps out onto the wind-ripped balcony with his head near bursting with pain. The flannel gown flaps on him. His sparse hair is ruffled and instantly his eyes water in the wind. It surprises him after thirty years to quite suddenly hate the onset of winter. Certainly, the confounded tourists are gone with their tee-shirt slogans and sunburn, and prices have come back to normal in the tavernas. The dust has been sluiced off the alley walls and the donkeyshit from the dizzy steps by the first rains, and the mainland peninsula stands pink and clear across the gulf, the air sweetened by the change. He should be ecstatic as an Englishman seeing the first snow — the Englishman he once was.

But the outlook is loathsome, he has to admit it. For the first time, he dreads the long, cosy quiet of winter, and now, the very year he wants to escape it, fly up to Norwich to see his mother, to Chamonix to visit his old chums, the Bluster Boys from Cardiff, or to bloody outback Australia where everybody talks through their big, healthy teeth, he hasn’t a ghost of a chance. The Crash he thought he’d escaped has come for him after all. A few unsound portfolio moves. A series of bluffs that came undone. And then a humiliatingly gauche spending spree on that Danish undergraduate in the autumn. Suddenly he hasn’t enough for a civilized fortnight at the Grand Bretagne in Athens. The honest word is stranded. At least for a few months he’s in the same league as poor pathetic Alex, and at the very thought he whimpers with rage and dashes at the tears with the back of his hand.

Boats sway and tip in the harbour between the deserted moles and the great houses of the buccaneers of history. He turns his back on them and goes inside, forces the doors shut and confronts the ponderous and intolerable sound of the clock on the bureau. Beside the clock lies the little crayon drawing of the island with its spidery inscription, To Mister Arthur from Billie S.

Lipp places his hand on the rosewood desk and sees his body-heat fog the varnish. Well, he thinks, they escaped in good time. This island’s gone to the pack. There’s something rotten at its core, something we’re all making day by day.

With only the clock and his hangover to give him company he spends the hour before his first drink thinking of them, those strange Australians. The woman with the legs and the fierce hunger to be noticed. The sponge-haired child with the wild accent. And the big friendly shambles of a man who followed them like an ugly hound, loyal and indestructible in his optimism, in his antipodean determination to see the best in things. Such a family. The original innocents abroad. He wonders if he’s ever encountered a man as strange as young Scully. For the past thirty years men his age have all come as angry young lads, but Scully was so easygoing as to appear lazy. Arthur saw him work, though. Like a black, he worked, for Fotis the stonemason. He was just unnaturally sanguine, and goodnatured to the point of irritation. Seemed to like nothing better than to dive like a hairy seal all around the island and when your contempt for him rose to the back of your throat, he’d drop by with an octopus or a few fish for soup, as if to shame you. Salvation Army. It explained a few things.

Scully and the daughter, like two peas in a pod, smirking at each other across the taverna table all the time like retards. Thick as thieves, they were. Talked a language all their own. He envied him that, the closeness, the companionship. And she was a clever child. Picked figs for him out of his own tree. Asked him about Victor Hugo and let him ponce on for hours.

A family of primitives. He can’t honestly say he doesn’t miss them slightly.

The sight of those luscious brown legs. The easy smile of the lad. The polite way he failed to kowtow to his betters. Simply the freshness of them.

Well, stay home on your own big island, he thinks, and do yourself a favour and never leave. Never grow old. Never chase the hard buttocks of Scandinavians. Do not stand for winter, by God. And never leave your teeth in a glass of Newcastle Brown Ale at night, lest ye become a sad, sick travesty like someone we all know but do not quite care for.

Gravely, and with a great horrible smile cut into his round face, he unscrews the Stolichnaya and pours a breakfast inch without catastrophe.

Sixteen

QUITE SUDDENLY, AND WITHOUT A change in direction, the jet lumbered out of the cloud and into the world again. Scully who had not slept or rested his mind a moment, could instantly see past his sleeping daughter’s head, the harrowed stones, the great gullies, the expressionless mountain faces of the country below. It was late in the day and the land crawled with shadows. Only weeks ago he left Greece sad enough to feel he was leaving his homeland all over again, but now when he saw it he felt nothing, not even dread.

Stewards came down the aisles smiling grimly. Billie woke, saw the sea looming beneath them as the plane banked. She looked at him with an expression he couldn’t read.

‘Greece again,’ he said.

She put her hands in her lap and looked down on the brassy sea. He put his fingers in her hair and she shook him off gently.

• • •

IN THE MAULING TRAFFIC, Scully knew they’d miss the day’s last hydrofoil to the islands. The light was going and the taxi got deeper and deeper into chaos, so he resigned himself to a night in Piraeus. He could smell the difference winter had brought to Athens. The stinking nephos was largely blown away by sea winds, and the place was only as foul as a regular city. The ubiquitous raw concrete was freshened with rain and Athens seemed subdued, humbled by the onset of winter.

Near the Zea marina they got out and walked under the streetlights to a little hotel he knew. The wind put the hair in their eyes, but it was an easy walk uphill.

‘It’s just tonight,’ he said. ‘The first boat goes early. Hungry?’

Billie nodded.

Behind them the masts of the harbour jounced in the weather, and the rain came on through them, chasing Scully and Billie to the hotel door.

• • •

‘WE’LL SLEEP TOGETHER, WHAT D’YOU think?’ said Scully, pulling back the curtains to look down into the street.

Billie sat on the double bed and looked at the fan of drachma notes beside her on the coverlet.

‘Stops us being too lonely, eh?’

Silently she began to weep, and Scully sat beside her, held her gently, and felt that first shaft of hatred return to him like heartburn. How could you do this, Jennifer? What’s happened to you that you could do this to us? He felt his teeth meet hard and shake his jaw, but the feeling receded. He looked about this cold bare little room.

‘You can tell me, love.’

Rain sprayed against the long unshuttered windows and Billie said nothing.

• • •

NEXT DAY THE SUN WAS out and the sea beyond the marina was choppy but madly lit and blue. The sky was clear, the air fresh as they went aboard the hydrofoil which idled grotesquely against the wharf. A few off-season tourists had taken seats in the strange aeronautical interior, but most of the passengers were islanders heading home with shopping. Their crates and bags were piled in the aisles. A bearded man guarded a stereo, and a woman, an islander he didn’t recognize, had a German Shepherd in a pine crate.

They sat astern and the craft backed out of the harbour past the forlorn yachts of the summer set and turned at the open water beyond the mole to rise up on its limbs like a great insect under the power of its diesels. Scully led Billie out onto the rear deck into the fresh air as the hydrofoil charged out into the Saronic Gulf. He saw Lykavitos and the Akropolis clear against the sky. He saw the fluorescent weal of the wake. He hooked his fingers in the strap of Billie’s backpack. Greece. Just the colour of the water, the firm, plain outline of the stone and sky gave him memories. From the cabin came the solemn howl of a German Shepherd all at sea, and Scully managed a laugh.

After half an hour they cut past the undistinguished mound of Aegina and turned for Poros. The dog went on like a siren. The sun lit the deck.

At Poros the expatriate drunks and the Athenian rich were making the most of the sun on the terrace at the Seven Brothers and the sight of them caused Scully to think clearly of Jennifer for the first time that day. He hadn’t planned anything beyond simply turning up. He didn’t know what he would say, how he would proceed. Now he imagined her breakfasting at the Lyko or Pigadi, rolling up her khaki pants to get the sun on her legs. Or maybe the trousers wouldn’t be fitting her now. A skirt. Yes.

A couple of tourists disembarked at Poros, and an American Scully knew from Hydra came aboard. Scully was grateful that the man, a party animal with a rich mother in Boston, sat up front and promptly fell asleep. It looked like he’d made a night of it.

The pastel frontages, the flags and tired mules on the waterfront fell behind as the hydrofoil surged seaward again. Scully looked through the small tartan case at his feet. An optimist’s bag. A two-day trip bag. A Scully bag. And in the bottom, rolling about in lint and gum wrappers, three white candles.

• • •

SCULLY FELT THE FIRST CHANGE of note in the big diesels and knew that Hydra was looming. He was facing sternward and couldn’t see it, but he sensed the shadow of it falling on the water. He took Billie inboard and arranged the backpack on her shoulders, straightened her up a bit and kissed her.

‘This is it, Bill,’ he murmured. ‘Let’s just take it as it comes. We’ll get a room and go quietly.’

Other passengers stirred now, and the German Shepherd began to vomit. A horrid stink arose. Handkerchiefs came out. The dog sounded like an old man trying to clear his throat.

When the hydrofoil docked and the hatch fell open, there was an athletic scramble for fresh air, and the little crowd of onlookers parted in alarm as passengers bolted for the wharf.

Scully strode out onto the smooth flagstones with Billie’s hand in his, and he saw the shuttered, wintry waterfront with its ragged pastel walls, empty balconies and idle mules. The water of the harbour was still, the moles bare but for a few men mending nets, and the yachts and cruise ships were gone. Up behind the harbour the island rose into the sky, its houses packed into the space between mountain peaks whose slopes showed patches of green he had never seen. The terracotta tiles of a thousand Venetian roofs blurred sweetly in the sun, and from the hills came a showering of goat bells falling on the breeze. A couple of tavernas were open by the water, but he was thankful it was still too early for the late breakfasters. He found the lane past the bakery where the smell of dough and heat and carraway seeds was overpowering. There was a line of mules outside Pan’s Bar, and men were laying concrete on the corner, laughing with cigarettes in their mouths and ouzo on their breaths. Scully’s heart jangled as he saw the familiar sidestreets and alleys, the bougainvillea, the little square with the lemon trees and their whitewashed trunks, the cats going through the garbage outside the pharmacy where even now old Vangelis stood coughing into his hands. Here and there a woman swept her steps or whitewashed her front wall, but there were few people in the streets and no tourists.

They went up the long steps toward the little hotel he had in mind, somewhere discreet and back from the water a way. He wondered if they’d been seen already, if Jennifer had been standing by a high window or on a sunny terrace when the boat came in. What was she thinking? Would she send a message, just appear, panic? She could be packing her bags this moment. He paused halfway to the hotel on a little terrace from where he could see a strip of sea, and the mountain breeze caught about his ankles. In the house above, a woman sang in a deep, stern voice. He knew the song, but had never been able to follow the Greek well enough to understand it. Billie stood passive beside him, scuffing her feet on the smooth granite flags whose centres were hollow with wear. Scully hummed a few bars and caught himself shaking there in the sunlight.

• • •

HE KNOCKED AT THE HEAVY courtyard door and waited in the narrow lane. A small dark woman with an enormous bust under her black pinafore pulled the door back. With a broom in one hand, she regarded them.

‘Kyrios Scully?’

Scully stuttered, unnerved to be known by someone he didn’t recognize. Was she someone Jennifer knew? ‘Er, neh, Kyria, kalimera, um, hello.’

The woman ran her hand through Billie’s blonde curls and ushered them into the courtyard where sunlight piled in through the bare grapevines and lit her hanging gourds and her stone stairs.

‘Uh, Kyria, do you have a room… domatio?’

‘Neh, neh, poli’

She led them to the stairs where cats lay indolent in the light, not moving as they stepped over them. At the head of the stairs she opened a door onto a large room with several beds and wide doors opening to a balcony.

‘Kala,’ Scully stammered. ‘Kala, poli. We’ll take it. Efkaristo.’

‘Is very good place, you come back.’

‘Yes. Yes.’

‘Cheap for you.’

‘How about two thousand drachs?’

The woman pursed her lips doubtfully but shrugged in the affirmative. ‘Endakse.’

‘Okay, good.’

She brought them towels and soap, opened the doors and left the room, beaming. Scully took the pack off Billie’s shoulders and walked out onto the balcony. The fishhook of the harbour lay plainly below, and he looked out at the gulf and beyond it the mottled mass of the Peloponnese where the faraway smoke of charcoalers smudged the air above the peninsula.

He wondered where she would be. Unless she’d organized something from Australia, she wouldn’t have a house yet. Maybe a hotel by the water or a spare room in one of the expats’ houses. He tried to think. Where would be go after bolting in some kind of panic? God, the thought of her having a breakdown in some bare room twelve thousand miles from home. What else could make you act like that? Surely it couldn’t be a way of making a point. You couldn’t be right in the mind to do this to people you love.

Scully felt his fingernails in his palms and tried to shake it off. It was not time for macho bullshit. No breastbeating, no torrent of recriminations. Just be prepared to listen, he told himself; don’t go shitting in your own nest.

He felt Billie’s hand on the back of his leg. One of her shoelaces was undone, so he knelt and retied it and looked into her troubled face.

‘We’re gonna go down now and look, orright? It’s a small place — we’ll probably find her before lunch and she’ll explain why it happened. Everything’ll make sense somehow, and then I think we’ll understand. I just want you to be brave and let us sort it out. Let her say what she has to say, okay? Sometimes people having a baby can be very nervous — flighty, you know, like a horse. Now are you sure there isn’t anything you want to tell me first?’

Billie’s eyes began to fill as she shook her head.

‘It’s alright. I’m gonna fix it up.’

• • •

ON HIS WAY BACK down the jumbled steps to the harbour, feeling bilious and goosefleshed, Scully stumped through spokes of light that ran between the smooth white blocks of houses, and he only faintly sensed the brief heat of the sun’s concentration. He was lighter without all the northern clothing he’d been wearing, and despite all this weirdness, he felt more himself because of it. Jeans, sneakers, cotton windcheater, the old Scully uniform.

At the waterfront with its summer marquees peeled back to let in the sun, there were a few tables set outside tavernas here and there. Fishermen, old sailors, and a few gold-toothed muleteers sat in the kafenion playing tavla and shooting the breeze. The gold merchants, the postcard stalls and claptrap tourist joints were shuttered up, and no speakers played ‘Zorba’ across the water. The bank was open and sleepy and the hardware-cum- liquor store had its doors wide to the water. The Up ’n’ High was closed, the Pirate Bar looked forlorn without its summer Eurotrash. The place felt cleaner, happier for winter.

He ducked back off the waterfront and headed for the Three Brothers. In the lanes, islanders gave him troubled greetings, as though trying to place him, or even, he thought, trying not to place him, as if he was the last man they wanted to see this morning. He felt them turning, each of them, to watch him go. Living here the three of them had been distinctive, even among the xeni. No one forgot Billie and that rude awakening of blonde curls. She had been such a vivacious ambassador, easing their way every place they went, and here on Hydra she gave them respectability as well, the illusion of soundness, of family solidity.

Scully smelled pine and linseed oil as he passed a workshop whose saw fell silent. It was dark inside the double doors and he was blinded to its interior by the sunlight, but called a greeting and pulled Billie along when no answer came. It’s as if they smell disaster, he thought, bad luck. Am I imagining it, or are they uneasy? They’ve seen her arrive and then me, put two and two together, and they smell trouble.

In the market square, the butcher hacked at a goat carcase, cigarette in his mouth. Scully did not speak as he passed.

In the lane outside the Three Brothers, a few tables stood in the sun, their plastic covers pulsing lightly in the breeze. Inside were a couple of old islander men with great smoke cured moustaches and waistcoats who greeted him dully, and in the corner was Max Whelp whose eyelids hung low as the ash that drooped from his cigarette.

‘Max,’ said Scully without sitting down.

Billie stood by while the old men pulled comical faces at her.

‘Scully? You idiot, what are you doing back?’

‘Where are they all?’

‘The scum, you mean?’

‘If you like.’

‘Fuck em.’

‘There’s a kid here.’

‘Fuck em twice. I’m banned. That fucking Alex!’

‘You look terrible.’

‘Strange, you know, but I feel better every day. 1963 I came here, Scully, and I’m feeling better every day.’

‘Yeah, sure.’

Max pulled himself more or less erect and looked Scully up and down. ‘Didn’t you go back to the colonies?’

‘Where you banned from, Max?’

‘The Lyko. The smug bastards. Hm, that’s a pretty girl.’

‘It’s my seven-year-old daughter, Max.’

‘Lost-looking. Like her mother.’

‘You’ve seen her, then.’

Max Whelp stubbed his fag out, looked hard at Scully and laughed. Scully hauled Billie out of there and headed back down to the water.

‘When I was a boy on the farm,’ said Scully to the child, ‘my mum used to tell me to beware of worthless characters. I thought she was a bit hard on people, you know, being a farmer’s wife and everything, but I found out otherwise when I came here. Max is a worthless character. Don’t ever go near him.’

Billie held his hand and was jerked into a run to keep up with his long driving strides.

The Lyko, then. Okay, the Lyko. He didn’t mind owning up to it: the expats had always intimidated him. In their presence he felt the complete farmboy, the toolslinger, the deckhand. He looked at them sometimes and felt his knuckles drag on the ground. They were world-sodden, tired, confident, and while you were learning Greek out of a two-buck Berlitz, they were unavoidable. Before Greece, Scully had never met people with hidden money, with independent means, and they fascinated and frightened him. They were Oxford graduates, poor aristocrats, American bohemians, artists and faded lower-order celebrities whose hopes had somehow fallen away. There was a mercenary from Adelaide who he quite liked, and a defrocked priest from Montana who came down from his hilltop eyrie now and then, but the ones who worried him were the ones you saw every day without fail, the ones who staggered down to the waterfront morning after morning and stayed till the wee hours, drinking, sniping, recalling better days. They lived for the youthful influx of summer when they could mingle with the fresh and the novel, when they could whine entertainingly and fall in love, strike poses, relieve each other of the burden of old gossip. They were bright, funny, lordly, talented for the most part, and almost completely idle. To Scully they were like bookish inventions. He learned not to bristle.

Jennifer found them engaging. She loved their backlog of stories, she envied the poets their old words, the sculptors their hands, idle or not, and the heirs their independence. She liked to swim with some of them in the afternoons, or meet them for dinner a few nights a week, and Scully went along, often as not for something to do. To Scully in private Jennifer told cynical jokes about the expats. The two of them rolled their eyes at the mention of oily Rory, the Canadian stud who wrote novels in his few daylight hours, or the two nice queers from Spain who carted a Steinway a thousand steps up to their house with a donkey and two old men. Scully knew why she liked these people. They were not boys and girls who’d followed their parents’ dreary instructions, gone to a sensible school, dated sensible boys, closed off all possibility of spontaneity and ended up as bureaucrats whose job bored them rigid and whose only act of defiance, late in their twenties, was to marry a little beneath themselves. Jennifer admired poor Alvin the gold dealer, who needed a bottle of vodka a day just to sign his own name. Alvin, she said, had class. He just refused to be browbeaten by commonsense, by the mean, the average, the sensible. She liked Lotte the destitute German princess who sublet her rooms in the summer and slept with every guest, male and female, and charged extra for services rendered. And there was Alex, who truly was a worthless bastard, who dined out on his friendship with Francis Bacon, his collaboration with Leonard Cohen, and his fling with Charmian Clift. Alex was a carbuncle, but Jennifer saw his painting talent as awesome, despite his not having squeezed more than a toothpaste tube since the early seventies.

Scully floundered among them all, at parties on terraces high above the harbour, or picnics they took in big rolling caiques to Dokos or Palamidas down the other end of the island, but he learned to survive and he saw what pleasure it gave Jennifer. He didn’t need much to keep happy. He had the water, after all. He dived for octopus and walked the rugged hills with Billie. He had some space and plenty of sunlight, and a bit of work with Fotis the stonemason to keep his hands rough and the cupboard full. Maybe she was right, perhaps he was too easily contented.

On the mole at the edge of the harbour, an old man pounded an octopus, throwing it down at his feet over and over again. The water tanker tied up ready to pump its load into the town reservoir. Scully strode out along the arm of the wharf to where the little tables of the Lyko stood in the sun by the water, their plastic cloths flapping benignly. Scully hesitated a moment, took a breath. Was he imagining that sudden lull in conversations out on the terrace? He hauled Billie ahead and weaved through the door, into the smoky fug of fried feta, cigarettes, coffee and fresh bread. The furniture in here was simple and occupied. He saw the faces. In such a small place, the expats became a crowd, a nation unto themselves, and they faltered in their chatter as Scully fronted the bar.

‘Good God!’

Arthur Lipp twisted hugely on his stool and butted out his Havana. Scully felt the field of upturned faces.

‘G’day, Arthur.’

There was a long moment of discomfort and silence. Old Lotte shoved a white cat from her table and blushed gloriously. Bertie and Rory-the-Dick smiled thinly and Alvin raised his shaking hand in greeting.

‘You look terrible, me little convict mate,’ said Arthur.

Scully shrugged. Arthur rolled the dead cigar between thumb and forefinger, unnerved. A man Scully didn’t know got up and went out. At the door he seemed to hesitate and look back. Arthur pursed his mouth. The man went.

‘Do I look that terrible, Arthur?’

‘How terrible do you need to look? Have you suddenly found ambitions?’

Scully pulled Billie up onto the stool and sat down himself with his chest against the bar.

‘Honestly,’ said Arthur, ‘you look bereft.’

‘Bereft.’

Scully was never able to figure out exactly what it was that Arthur did. He knew the old bugger had been here on the island thirty years, that he was a London Jew who drank screwdrivers for breakfast, that he always had some mysterious project on the go, that he took calls from London and New York but never quite disclosed what business he was in. In his sixties, he was bluff, beefy, loud, evasive and tended toward the pompous. A strange, lonely man with a kindly, magisterial streak. Scully had developed a grudging regard for him. He was a bit of a character and the unofficial king of the expats. Every summer, it seemed, the old goat fell for some luscious backpacker in a halter top who took his dough and gave him the bum’s rush. He was a creature of habit. Beyond that he was unknowable.

‘Bereft,’ said Arthur. ‘Quite.’

‘Where is she?’

‘She? She?’

Scully smiled, felt Billie pressing into his side.

‘There’s no she,’ said Arthur. ‘The little bitch took off back to Copenhagen the last day of summer. Left her bloody diaphragm in the bathroom cupboard.’

‘That’s not who I meant, Arthur. You know it.’

Everyone else went back to carefully talking at their tables. Back in the kitchen, Sofia cursed and whanged pans about. Arthur looked at him and then at Billie. A little sheen of sweat appeared on his large brow.

‘Come on, Arthur, let’s not piss around.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘I’ll give you a description, then. Tall, long black hair, serious suntan, long legs, as you once told me when you were smashed, Australian, practical, friendly, smart, married.’

‘Can’t help you.’

Billie looked at her knees. Her fists were clenched just above them on her jeans. Scully looked at her, saw Arthur glance down uncomfortably himself, and looked back out at the harbour through the smudged panes.

‘I’m sorry, old boy.’

‘About what?’

‘That there should be trouble.’

‘Are you expecting some trouble, Arthur?’

‘I’m just offering my condolences, you ignoramus. Behave yourself.’

‘You mean —’

‘I don’t mean anything, Scully. I liked you as a couple, that’s all. Come up to my place for a drink later. How long are you staying?’

‘Everyone looks a bit shellshocked,’ said Scully loudly.

‘Well you’ve only just left us tearfully on the wharf a few weeks ago. We thought you were in the colonies.’

‘And Jennifer?’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘It’d be easier if you just told me,’ said Scully.

‘Told you? Told you?’ Arthur scowled and looked hard at him in a vexed and questioning way. He slapped his hand down on the bar. ‘Does anyone want to tell him? Please, our Scully wants to be told!’

But only a few faces looked up. Someone smirked, someone else shrugged.

‘Whatever it is, no one’s telling you this morning, Scully.’

‘I didn’t think you’d be such a prick about it.’

‘Could be your primitive manners,’ said Arthur lighting up his cigar. ‘Buy your child something to eat. She looks all in.’

‘You’re so fuckin sorry for us, you buy her something.’

‘Be an adult, lad.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Your wife? You want me to tell you where your wife is?’

‘I think I’ve had a breakthrough here, Billie.’

‘She’s your wife, boy. Have you mislaid her somewhere?’

‘Mislaid!’ giggled Rory.

Scully got off the stool.

‘Rory,’ said Arthur, ‘you’d better go. Our friend has large calloused hands and your balls will be fasolia if he gets to them.’

‘You got that bloody right,’ said Scully between his teeth.

Rory got up and left, and then in twos and threes, so did everyone else but Sofia’s deaf uncle Ioannis who smiled up gaily from his newspaper.

‘Well, that was pleasant,’ said Arthur. ‘You seem to have everyone suitably on-side. I think I’ll be off as well. I can’t afford being biffed about at my age.’

It shocked Scully to see the fear come to people’s faces, their instant expectation that he would do them harm. He felt stupid, misunderstood.

‘Why don’t you just tell me what’s going on, Arthur?’

‘Why don’t you get off my sodding back and find out for yourself? Where did you come from?’

‘Ireland.’

‘To do this?’ Arthur waved his cigar at the empty taverna. ‘To make a fool of yourself?’

‘I’ve always been a fool to you people.’

‘It’s only that you were such a terrible working-class puritan, Scully. It embarrasses you to see people having a good time and not paying for their sins.’

‘Most of you can’t seem to pay for your drinks, forget sins.’

‘An insecure man is never a heartwarming sight. Less than sparkling company you might say.’

‘Fuck you, Arthur.’

‘Feed your child.’

Arthur stuck the Havana back in his mouth, gathered up his week-old copy of the Sunday Times, and left them there with Sofia studying father and child coolly from behind the counter.

Seventeen

FATHER AND DAUGHTER SAT IN the sun on the terrace at the Lyko with plates of calamari, tzatziki and salad barely disturbed before them. Scully bought the food to placate Sofia after driving her custom away with his presence, and besides it was time they both ate, but his gut was tight and acidic and Billie merely picked at a piece of bread, legs dangling lank from her chair. Water flapped at the sea wall. Across the little harbour a donkey bawled itself hoarse.

‘What d’you think, Billie? You think they know? Of course they know. See how they look at us — we’re a bloody embarrassment.’

Billie’s eyes passed over him a moment, and then she looked away past the mole where a man in a little wooden boat was jigging for squid.

What the hell is the woman doing? he thought. I’m here, I came, and every bastard on the island is watching me squirm. What else does she want? What have I done? What can I do? Give me a clue, something to go on.

Just after one o’clock, Scully ordered a half jug of kokkineli and a Milko for Billie. They sipped without speaking as curious islanders sauntered by, shaking their heads. The resinated rosé soothed him a moment.

Wait it out, he told himself. Calm down. Give her time. Just being here is enough for now. Sit tight.

At two, Billie shucked back her chair and went inside to the toilet. Christ, why wouldn’t she speak to him? He hurled his glass out into the harbour and sat back. He ate some squid, sponged up a little of the yoghurty dip with the bread, and thought back on his life here with Jennifer to find a wrinkle in things, something that might have brought this on. He’d been patient here. It was easy to be patient in a place you loved, but he honestly believed that he’d acted well here. It wasn’t like Paris where he was being ground to a pulp by the city itself, but even in Paris he’d made no waves for her sake. London was the same. Hell, it was always the same; he was always ready to give way for her sake. He loved her. That was all it came down to. In Greece it was easy to love her, easy to wait for her to find whatever it was that might let her relax at last and be herself.

Hadn’t they been happy, the three of them?

Look at this place! A world without cars, without paperwork, without a calendar half the time, amongst good simple people who were content to live and let live. Old Fotis the stonemason was a gentle taskmaster and the work was satisfying and inconstant. There were long days on the pebble beach for just the three of them, the mountain walks, mosquito coil evenings out on the terrace with muscat grapes heavy overhead and the rats riffling through like relatives. Long letters home, endless meals, collaborations on the Mickey Mouse colouring book and readings from Jules Verne. There was the golden colour of their always bare skin. Songs. Silly moments. There was the day Billie learnt to swim, like a Sunday School miracle. In the afternoons he would come down from the mountain where that great house was taking shape in the side of the cliff, to the cool terrace of their place by the shore where a few cold bottles of Amstel waited and Jennifer and Alex wound up the day’s lesson. Billie coming in from the Up School on the horse with the neighbours’ boys. Oh, yeah, they’d been happy or he was worse than stupid.

He was even more or less happy about Alex and the daily painting lesson which kept the old fart in drinking money. Alex Moore. Worthless, as Scully’s mother would have said, but likeable enough. His paintings hung in some good American collections, but all Scully could go on were the canvasses from the sixties that he saw in some of the bigger expat houses on the island. They were better than good, as far as anyone who had finished high school in his twenties and bombed out of university could tell. Alex had pissed it all away and had done nothing but cadge and bludge and weasle and whine since men first went to the moon.

Having the smoke-cured old blight there every day and for half their meals took some taking, it was true, but Jennifer felt she was getting somewhere. She was so infectiously excited that Scully simply wore it. The house at the edge of the sea soothed him. She came to bed at night with the sweet musk of ouzo on her breath and the creamy moonlight on the sheets and they made love like in the old days.

Looking back, Scully saw nothing to strike a real note of warning. True, he occasionally argued with Arthur or one of the expats’ summer friends, and he was cranky when the meltemi blew its guts out in August, but then everyone was shitty with chalk in their eyes and the sea too dangerous to swim in, and the heat sucking the sweat from you.

Billie returned from the toilet. She had splashed her face with water and her cotton sweater was blotched with it. She moved her sneakers in small circles on the smooth flags.

Scully sat with the taste of resin in his mouth and tried to think. He hated to drink wine during the day. It did exactly this, it stopped your brain.

Just then, Arthur came wheezing back along the wharf, his white ducks sweaty and soup stained.

‘Sofia’s trying to shut up shop, Scully.’

‘Hmm?’

‘It’s afternoon. She wants a rest. You’re sitting out here like yesterday’s milk.’

‘I fed my child.’

Arthur sat down. ‘What the sodding hell has happened to you?’

Scully smiled and ran his fingers through a puddle of kokkineli on the pine tabletop. ‘That’s what I’m here to find out, Arthur.’

‘Get back on the hydrofoil, save yourself a horrible scene.’

‘Now why did Rory leave in such a hurry this morning, you think?’

‘Because he’s vain. He was terrified you’d mar his great asset.’

‘Mar, now there’s a word.’

‘There’s a hydrofoil at six.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought Rory, though.’

‘Rory is a dung beetle.’

‘You’re quite right, no change. I don’t suppose she’s up at Lotte’s?’

Arthur closed his eyes against him.

‘You’re not going to tell, then.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, there’s nothing I can tell you but get off this island for everybody’s sake.’

Scully’s head pounded. Some shadow flickered at the back of his mind, something trying to get his attention, but it just wouldn’t come. He kept seeing Alex’s yellow face, his long smoky forelock.

‘Tell me, where’s Alex these days? It’s not like him to mar a gathering by his absence.’

Arthur’s teeth met beneath his moustache in a click audible enough to startle Billie. A raw nerve there, to say the least.

‘He’s not keeping company, just at the moment.’

‘You’re kidding. Has the world gone mad?’

‘He’s up the mountain.’

‘Now you’re just winging it, Arthur.’

‘Shut up, Scully.’

‘It’s just that it’s a long way from a taverna, isn’t it.’

‘That’s the point.’

‘He’s quit drinking?’

‘Well, it remains to be seen. He’s looking after the place you and Fotis built for Bertie’s Athenian chum.’

‘Up at Episkopi.’

‘Don’t go up there.’

Arthur put a hand on Billie’s head with a look of real pity. His skin was smooth and deeply tanned, and with his down- turned moustache he was like a great seal shining there in the sun.

‘Arthur, what do you mean, don’t go up there?’

‘I mean, don’t go up there! Have the Irish turned you stupid already?’

‘Is he alone?’

‘Sofia wants you to go.’

Scully slapped some money down and stood up. Billie got up mechanically beside him.

‘Go home, boy.’

Scully mouthed that word. Home. He wasn’t sure where it was just at the present.

‘How long have you been here, Arthur?’

‘Thirty years. You know that.’

‘Did you stay too long, you think?’

‘That remains to be seen.’

‘You remain to be seen.’

‘I do at that. That’s my achievement.’

‘Not everybody remains to be seen, Arthur. Like my wife. She did not remain and neither is she seen. By me, anyway. Every other bastard seems to have a secret, though.’

‘You’re drunk.’

‘No, but I’m unsteady. C’mon, Billie.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Oh, probably back to the hotel. Siesta, you know.’

‘Six o’clock, the boat goes.’

‘I won’t be on it.’

‘For Christ’s sake, don’t go up there!’

• • •

SCULLY LED BILLIE UP DONKEYSHIT Lane into the maze of houses, steps and alleys built vertically into the hill. They were like teeth in the jaw of the mountain, these houses whose whitewashed walls and bright-painted doors hid lush courtyards and shadowy cellars, whose glossy blue shutters lay ajar for the quiet rest of afternoon. On a small terrace before a taverna that bore no name, they came upon a chained dog that broke Billie from her trancelike gait.

She veered to where it stood beneath a bare fig tree. The dog watched her a moment, ears up, but sank back onto its haunches as she came close. It was the poor dog from the hydrofoil. Scully recognised the Shepherd and its owner who came out sweeping expressionlessly onto the terrace.

‘Kalimera!’ said Scully.

The woman stopped, inclined her head toward him and went on sweeping. The taverna was closed. Its geraniums stood naked in olive oil tins on the terrace.

Billie patted the dog on the snout and the two of them walked on up the hill, climbing toward the street of the Sweet Wells and the great houses from the buccaneering days of the last century. At Kala Pigadia they found level ground awhile and saw the harbour and its terracotta roofs far below. They walked on past the sound of hens laying behind rubble walls, past a tethered horse and three scrofulous cats eating from the same upturned bin. House shutters were closed and no people were about as they moved along the spine of the mountain and the ridge of ruined mansions that had begun to fall, piece by piece, into the long scree gully that twisted down to the village and marina of Kamini. The air was cooler up here, the Saronic Gulf a mere strip of sea below. Classroom chants floated across the wall of the Up School. Billie pressed her hand against the rubble parapet and listened. He could only wonder what she was thinking. He let her stay till she’d had enough. He said nothing. What could you say? Soon they came to the old people’s home with the soughing eucalyptus outside the gate, and then the walls became farm walls, cemetery walls as the land above and below the smooth stone road became orchard and field and the steps began to fall away before them.

Scully just followed his feet. The fields, steep and riven between the trackless bluffs of the mountains, had gone green and were tufted with wildflowers. There were stone sheep folds with thornbrush gates like pictures from a kid’s Bible. Shepherds’ huts lay tucked into hollows. A breeze cooled the sweat off their brows as Scully and Billie followed the path down through the rugged gorge country where the breeze became a wind in their faces, funnelled between haggard cliffs and balding bluffs, gulched and rock-strewn all the way down to the tiny village of Vlikos where a dozen whitewashed houses found the water’s edge. Scully felt it press into his cheeks, that wind, as he followed Billie beneath the familiar ruin of the stone bridge to the bottom of the scree gully where a donkey stood tethered to a lone pine and boats lay upturned like steeping turtles on the stony beach.

The emotions came like a fresh gust. He was thankful for the closed shutters of the siesta, to be able to pass through unseen and unjudged on the clay track between the houses of his old neighbours. But he paused a moment outside the place with the dark green shutters, knowing Billie would anyway.

The rocky yard fell away to the water in a maze of apricot, almond and plum trees. The figs were finished, the grapes and olives also. Four rivergums sprawled ironically in the ravine beside the house where they once hurled coffee grounds and olive seeds from the terrace of an evening. Sultry nights when bouzouki music trailed across the water from fishing boats and the mauve mass of the Peloponnese glowed on after sunset with the fires of the charcoalers. Just on dark he would climb from the water, his spear catching whatever lights were on, with a bag of octopus or a groper-like rofos with its gills still heaving. The air sharp with smoking grills and laughter from other houses.

Scully picked his way alone down the little ravine. Billie stayed up on the path, biting her lips, watching him creep across the dry, crackling ground beside the old house, up to the green shutters, up against the window itself. He crept in under the trellis of the bare grapevine, his heart mad in his neck. The granite terrace, the cubic substance of the whole house and its mirror shadow. A conspiratorial shush from the shorebreak below, the tumble of pebbles. Hadn’t they been happy here? After all the bedsits and borrowed apartments and shitty pensiones, hadn’t this been the dream place? So like home, and yet fresh, clear, new.

But the looks on the faces of those worthless mongrels in the Lyko this morning — the downcast eyes, the suppressed giggles, the shuffling embarrassment out in the street. Arthur’s horror at the mention of Alex Moore. It made you wonder. Had he lived in some Pollyanna blur all this time? Was he missing something? Was she miserable and bored? And worse?

He peered in through the half-open shutter of his old place and saw a man and a woman asleep there. Middle aged. Arms cast about like kelp from the stones of their bodies. Strangers. In his bed. Queer, but the sight of them brought back a memory. That one thing. That old embarrassing thing. He stared in at the twisted sheet and the overturned shoes and thought of the day he came down the mountain from work to the empty house. The strange feeling he had. Billie playing with Elektra’s kids next door, her mile wide accent echoing up the dirt lane. The easel and some daub on the stretched canvas. Alex’s bloody fag ends all over the terrace. And the bed all torn up like a dog had been in it. It took the longest, longest time for the dread to seep into him, that unfamiliar poison hitting him as he casually straightened the sheets and then ricked them back like a lunatic, scrabbling all over for some sign, some nasty wet mark that wasn’t there. Nothing. And somehow there was no comfort in finding nothing. The blind infant rage of jealousy. God, how pathetic. Was there anything more pitiful than a howling man rifling his own bed for someone else’s sperm? She came in on him like that, dripping from the sea and cheerful and he wanted to die from shame. Homesickness, he said, don’t worry. He cried in her arms. She pushed him down on the bed, salty and slick, fierce with lust, and he never gave the business another thought.

Until today. Just now. Looking in on these strangers. Once you open the door you can’t easily close it. You let your mind off on its leash and you have to go where it does. What did he expect, coming to the island? A rescue mission? A meeting? A quiet reckoning? Certainly not to be standing outside his old house entertaining the kind of thing he was thinking of now. Of that nicotine-stained old wreck slipping it to his wife. Of the afternoons they had, the bottles of wine and shady grottoes they might have found, of all the stupid brainless things he was letting himself think now, and thinking them with a kind of cold pleasure. Thinking about that baby now, of the marvellous heartwarming fact that it might not be his, and that Jennifer had set him up in some simple Irish decoy and gone home to cash in her chips and fuck off back to the great man. What a shitheaded moron he was! What a blind fuckwit! What an understanding little dickhead.

He bolted up the ravine and onto the path to where Billie stood mesmerized.

‘Someone else lives there now,’ he said, hearing the quaver in his voice.

She took his hand a moment and he sensed an opening in her, a pressure of tenderness. She tugged him in the direction of the harbour and for a few paces he let himself be led. But then he dug in.

‘Episkopi,’ he said. ‘This way.’

Billie flung his hand away. He reached for her but she fell down in the dirt with her head between her knees. So she knew. God help him, his kid knew. She was told at the airport.

‘C’mon,’ he croaked, ‘I’ll piggyback you.’

He stood there as the wind plied between them. Crickets hissed around. He heard her get up and dust herself off, and when he opened his eyes he saw her setting off along the road to Episkopi.

• • •

AT PALAMIDAS, the little oil-streaked bay beneath the island mountain, Scully took Billie on his back and slugged up the winding track through the gnarled olive groves, feeling the child’s breath against his neck, her body relaxing against his as she slipped into sleep. He felt the smoothness of her ankles beneath his callouses. He just didn’t know how something like this could be abandoned. What was there after a child, what could you want more?

He didn’t know what to expect up at Episkopi, how he would act. Why was it easier to hope that she’d gone crazy? After all, her mother had ‘episodes’. At sixty she’d been found running naked through the streets of Perth. Madness was its own excuse, it was everybody’s absolution. What a shit to think that way, what a coward.

Sweating and panting Scully came to the pine country and the final doglegs of the track as it found its way to the summit. What a joke it was to think of Alex and her living in the very house he’d been building while they were at it out on the terrace this year. Think of the irony. Such a civilized business, thinking of irony. What a master of self-control he was. Think of the irony, Scully. Don’t go in like a thug. Think of the kid, for Godsake.

At the brow of the incline in a small clearing stood a chapel white as a star there above the sea. There was fresh dung outside and he stopped a moment and sniffed. His stomach tightened strangely. Horse dung, a magical smell. He stood a few moments, looking at the dung and the chapel, blowing a little after the long climb. He stumped over to the door and touched it, pushed it gingerly back on its hinges. Behind him, a stand of quail flushed unseen and caused him to flinch.

A musty breeze circled out of the dimness of the place. Scully stepped inside. It was cool. The narrow windows let in rods of light ahead, and against the gable was a simple sanctuary and altar. An ikon, a sad Christ face all gold and burgundy, was animated by the three candles that burned there in the silence. Scully’s mouth went dry and his arms ached. He had a horrible weak urge to kneel here on the concrete floor, but with the child on his back he was spared the exercise. He pursed his lips to speak, but the silence of the chapel was overpowering, so he turned for the door and saw, framed in the light, a woman. He flinched and grunted. She had a black dress and shawl.

‘Yassou, Kyria,’ he said in greeting.

Her eyes were black and on her feet were wide, men’s shoes. She held a twig broom in her hands and inclined her head towards him and stood aside to let him pass.

‘Efkharisto,’ he whispered. ‘Thank you.’

She pointed her broom across the flat ridge where the road continued on across the spine of the island to Episkopi.

She knows, too, he thought. The wind lapped around her shawl and she did not move. She kept pointing along the road and her face was expressionless. As he came by her through the door, he saw the gob of spit hit the gravel before him and heard it again behind. He turned and saw her calmly making the sign of the cross against her flat chest.

He stumped off up the road, too angry to pause and drink at the cistern beside the track. The child was a sack on his back. All around him the pines sounded like an inhaling choir. He went on, determined now to get it over with and get on the hydrofoil at six as Arthur suggested. He might just make it. Say his piece, whatever it was he had left to say when it came down to it, and piss off back into the smoking ruins of his life.

• • •

UP FROM THE FINAL STONY gully, he came into the ragged conglomeration of huts, hunting lodges and houses that was Episkopi. A few mules were tethered outside a pillarbox lodge that echoed with snores. Scully felt drool running down his neck. He hiked the kid up on his back a little and walked on through to the big fresh whitewashed house at the cliff where the island fell away to the open sea on the other side.

The house was broad and plain and seemed to have settled into the topsoil of this bony edge of the mountain. The solitary fig stood before it, casting a black rag of shadow at its feet. The grey shutters were ajar and as Scully came up closer, he heard the sound of a tin whistle fidgeting from inside. He was footsore, perspiring, thirsty, and all his rage had left him. He looked up at the house he’d cut and carried the blocks for with nothing more than sadness.

‘Alex?’

The tin whistle faltered and stopped. A low voice. Or voices.

‘You there, Alex?’

A scuffling sound, a chair kicked across a stone floor. Scully slipped Billie from his back and let her stand groggy beside him. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and then his hands, and braced himself at the door. He was way past irony, further past violence.

In his rumpled cardigan and bifocals, as he tipped the heavy door back, Alex Moore didn’t look anything but guilty. His hand went to his mouth. He stepped back, looked across his shoulder a moment and then back at them.

‘Oh. My stars. Billie girl!’

‘Hello, Alex,’ said Scully.

‘Scully!’

‘Ask us in, Alex.’

Eighteen

ALEX STOOD IN HIS DOORWAY a moment, swaying, scratching his head, and Scully thought maybe he should thump him one after all, just to get things rolling, but the old man suddenly backed away indoors and Scully took Billie’s hand and followed.

The interior was a raving shambles. There were bottles underfoot and saucers brimming with fag ends, cheese rind, olive pips. Every surface was covered with old pages of the Observer. The place stank of retsina, of smoke and bad food. On the big pine table lay a block of creamy paper, a bucket of tubes, a jar of pencils and nibs, and a small raw canvas on a stretcher, all lying there ceremonially untouched.

‘You heard, then,’ said Alex, pushing open the doors onto the terrace.

Scully followed him out into the clean air.

‘No bastard told me anything.’

‘Well, you must have known something.’

‘Guess I had my suspicions.’

‘Well. Here it is. Here I am.’

Scully looked at the defeated curve of the little man’s back and then glanced again around the house. It’s a sign, he thought. She’s lost her mind. The little shit’s using her while she’s not in a fit state. No one would come and live like this without having fallen off the edge of the world somehow. This isn’t bohemian, it’s Third World.

‘Didn’t last long,’ murmured Alex. ‘I’m a living wreck. It always starts well, doesn’t it, a resolution, a new thing.’

‘So she’s gone?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Oh, come on, Alex, don’t shit me.’

‘Well, you are the first to come gloating. If the others were capable of the walk, that’s what they’d all do.’

‘What’d you think I came all this way for, the smell of your dirty socks and the view from your terrace? I want my wife.’

‘Your wife?’

Alex’s Adam’s apple twitched.

‘Billie, go inside.’

‘Scully, I —’

‘I just want to take her home, get her some help, Alex. It’s alright, I’m not gonna do anything.’

‘Jennifer.’ Alex leaned against the cool wall and looked down the blackened slope to the sea. Billie stood by the door expressionless and unmoving. A cat slid between her feet, leapt up to the parapet and stood before Alex expectantly.

‘Where is she, Alex?’

Alex smiled and looked at him with moist eyes. ‘You’re looking for her here, with me? My dear boy, are you well?’

‘I’ll go up myself. Billie, stay here.’

Room by squalid room, Scully went through the place, his disgust and fear mounting as he opened cupboards and poked under beds. The main room upstairs had its share of bottles and crusts and stubs, and the four-poster bed was tormented with grey linen and blankets which he prodded fearfully in the gloom. He sat on the bed a moment, staring at the assembly of pill bottles on the table beside it, and knew finally that she wasn’t here, that she’d probably never been there at all. There would have been some relief at least to have seen and known the worst. And that was it — he saw how much crueller it was to know nothing at all.

When he came back down onto the terrace, Billie sat with her back to the house wall and Alex had his head in his hands. A breeze lifted up from the sea, bringing with it the carbon smell of burnt country. He knew that smell from his own continent. The afternoon sun lay across the water and a yellow haze crept up on the horizon to seal out the distance.

‘Alex, I’m sorry.’

The old man wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his cardigan and smiled hopelessly.

‘You know, it’s very flattering, really. I haven’t had a scene like this for ten years.’

Scully opened his hands and closed them.

‘You see it has an ugly irony, this scene, even without a child present,’ he murmured with his neck bent meekly. ‘Because you see, Scully… well, it’s just plain bloody funny, really.’ Alex laid his almost transparent hand along the parapet. His nails were yellow, he smiled his saurian kiss-arse smile. ‘Because I’m, I’m not up to it, any more. I’m fucking impotent. Hah, now there’s a phrase!’

‘Alex —’

‘Why don’t you stay for dinner?’ the old man said, clapping his hands together feebly.

Scully laughed. ‘Oh, my God!’

Alex laughed a long time with him but his guffaws grew into sobs that bent him in half, and Scully stood there a while, watching the poor wretched bastard cry, before going across and putting a hand on his back.

‘It’s alright, mate.’

Alex straightened and clutched at him.

Scully felt the other man’s head against his chest, his breath hot on him. He glanced at Billie who had already looked away. The afternoon died around him, the six o’clock hydrofoil came and went and night came on quickly.

• • •

AFTER SCULLY GOT THE FIRE going with olive twigs and chunks of almond wood, he went through Alex’s sorry kitchen and found sheep’s yoghurt, garlic, a cucumber and a few things in cans that he went to work on while Alex played the tin whistle to Billie. On the table stood a bottle of rosé from Patras and a litre of Cretan red. Billie stroked the cat and smiled weakly now and then during Alex’s shaky rendition of ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’. With all the lamps lit, and some tired old pasta boiling on the stove, Scully cleaned the place up a bit.

‘You’re spoiling me,’ said Alex.

‘Well.’ Scully smiled, couldn’t help himself. ‘You’re used to it, aren’t you? Let’s face it, Alex, you’ve been pampered all your life.’

The old man assented grandly with a flutter of eyelids.

‘How long has she been gone?’

‘Two days,’ said Scully. ‘I went to the airport to collect them and only Billie got off the plane. Hasn’t said a word since.’

‘What about the police?’

‘Maybe after I’ve tried everything else.’

‘My God, we’re both in the wars,’ said Alex pouring himself a glass of rosé and emptying it in one gulp.

‘Things are bad for you too, then,’ Scully said, looking at his own empty glass.

‘I came up here to work. Dear Arthur suggested it. Trying to save my life and talent, he fancies.’

‘Not working.’

‘No, I’m lost, my boy. You know they used once to take their old people up to the cliffs in baskets, on this island. When they had become a burden. In harsher times. Used to throw them off, you know. Gives a new twist to the old fogey’s sport of basket- weaving, don’t you think? Or being a basket case.’

Scully watched him drain another glass, and finally just poured himself one.

‘I used to be a painter, Scully, and then something of a cocks- man and a scoundrel, excuse me, dear, and nowadays I’m lucky if I qualify as a scoundrel.’

‘Oh, you’d scrape in,’ said Scully, watching the old bugger hammering the wine again.

‘You think so?’ said Alex brightening.

Scully brought tzatziki to the table with some wrinkled olives, three boiled eggs and some fettucine in garlic and kalamata oil.

‘Poor man’s fare tonight,’ he said sitting down. ‘Billie, come and eat something, mate.’

The three of them sat with the fire snapping peaceably behind them. Outside the wind pressed about in the silence. Scully watched Alex chewing tentatively, as though his teeth were sore. He sucked down more rosé. He looked like a greedy little boy.

‘Don’t waste your life, Scully. Or hers,’ he said, motioning with his head at Billie.

‘I don’t plan to.’

‘She’s a nice girl, Jennifer.’

‘Yeah. I always thought so.’

‘But no artistic instincts whatsoever.’

‘What?’

‘Well, besides sensibly deserting domestic bliss.’

Scully poured himself the last of the rosé to ease his discomfort. ‘She wants to be something creative,’ he murmured.

‘It’s not something to want. It’s something you have. It’s a curse. One she doesn’t have.’

‘You weren’t saying that to either of us when we were paying you to teach her. Sitting out on the terrace with the easels up and all that.’

‘My dear boy, I needed the money and it was no ordeal. She has the most delectable pair of legs.’

‘You are a bloody scoundrel,’ said Scully just managing a friendly tone.

‘Well, all is not lost.’

Billie finished picking at her food and slid off her chair to return to the cat. Scully thought he’d better finish up and go.

‘I think Jennifer missed something she wants to get back, that’s all,’ said Alex with grease down his chin. ‘She’s something of a snob, a dilettante. She wants recognition. She wants to be more interesting.’

‘Yes.’

‘And she has wonderful legs.’

‘Is she on the island?’

‘I’ve been here for weeks and see no one but old Athena who looks out for me down there at the chapel. I couldn’t say.’

‘You’ve got no idea? No one you think she might… be with.’

‘The expats? No.’

‘Rory?’

‘Good God, no, give her some credit. Rory’s a reptile.’

‘I think he’s modelled himself on you.’

‘Badly, badly.’

‘No one?’

‘One of the islanders? No, they couldn’t keep a secret longer than a nanosecond, though plenty would have had hopes, I dare say. A summer fling that stuck, perhaps?’

‘Hadn’t thought of that,’ said Scully. ‘A tourist, you mean?’

Alex shrugged. Scully thought of it. It meant she probably hadn’t come back here at all necessarily. And the baby? Oh, why did there have to be the baby? But he still knew nothing. There might have been no fling, no other man. She might have arrived in Ireland by now, having expected Billie to pass on some message. God, his head was fit to burst.

‘I’m sorry for all the money,’ said Alex without much conviction.

‘She’ll slit your throat in your sleep when she finds out.’

‘I’d have thought she’d be rather flattered. Tell her about the legs part.’

‘Alex, she’s serious. I don’t think it’s a fad. She really wants to be something more.’

‘You’re too soft on people, my boy. You think the best of them. She just wants to be noticed.’

‘What happened to you, Alex?’

‘Me? Oh, the opposite. I became too interesting. To myself and others. I became a sodding entertainment. I stayed too long.’

‘Why don’t you just leave, get off the island?’

The old man laughed. ‘In a basket perhaps. I don’t know how to live in the world anymore. Thirty years is a long time.’

Alex sighed, opened the litre of Cretan red and poured himself a glass, leaving Scully’s empty again.

Scully reached for the wine and poured a long glass. It tasted as dark as it looked.

‘I suppose you’ll go back to town and tell them I’m up here with nothing to show for the great retreat. I can see the gloating tradesman’s look on your face even now.’

‘Have an olive, Alex.’

The old man pressed his fingers into his eyes and sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Scully. I’m a pig.’

‘Scoundrel is the polite term, I believe.’

Alex laughed, his eyes tearing up again.

‘You can’t paint?’

‘Your wife and I have that in common now. So, what will you do? Now that you’re a deserted husband.’

Scully drank off his wine, poured himself another, and looked at his scarred hands. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t follow them, it’s undignified.’

‘I don’t care about dignified. I’ll follow. Anyway, I have to think about it a bit. What about you?’

‘I’m going to put myself out of my misery. Cheers!’ Alex gulped at his wine and closed his eyes with pleasure.

‘I’ve gotta go.’

‘Yes, there’s a child to consider. You could stay here,’ he said hopefully.

‘Thanks, but we’ll hoof it.’

‘Wait, I’ve got something for you.’

Alex scurried upstairs while Scully straightened Billie’s pullover and retied her shoes. There were bluish shadows beneath her eyes and she reacted irritably to his touch.

‘Here it is.’

Scully stood and helped Alex with a battered folio which he laid over the table, across the food and unwashed dishes. From it the old man drew a yellowed sheet of paper which Scully accepted silently. It was a pen-and-ink drawing of a Parisian street scene, richly detailed and quite beautiful.

‘Rue de Seine,’ said Alex. ‘Nineteen-sixty.’

‘I was three years old in nineteen-sixty.’

‘Just promise me you won’t show it on this island. Those vipers have had their last laugh on me. Bacon liked that one.’

Scully felt giddy with wine and fatigue. It was a real piece of work, even he could see it.

‘Thank you, Alex.’

‘Here, roll it up. Say hello to that girl when she turns up. Tell her to go back to bureaucracy. As a form of parasitism it’s far more efficient. Speaking of which, you wouldn’t have a few spare drachs, would you?’

Scully dug in his pocket, laughing.

• • •

THE NIGHT WAS CLEAR AND sharp. There was no moon and the gravel track unwound dimly. The island was silent as Scully carried his daughter across its spine and down through the piney groves in the shadow of the mountains. It was late when he found the wide flat path above Kamini and came by the cemetery with all its lit candles and shrines. He stopped by the wall feeling Billie asleep against his sweating neck, and watched the flickering at the heads of tombs where cats slunk about fattened with shadows and bristling at the rattle of plastic flowers. Sweat turned cold on him, and looking at that little lake of candles, he was afraid without knowing why. He went on, almost at a trot, until he began the descent into the harbour of the place he had once loved.

He came finally and sleepily to the hotel whose courtyard door was still ajar, and he took Billie upstairs, fumbled noisily with the key as she slid down his back, and got her in to lay her on the bed. He undressed her and slipped her beneath the blanket. Starlight sloped in faintly through the balcony doors and the fishhook of the harbour shimmered below. He needed to sleep, needed to think, but the water reminded him hopelessly of other nights, and he left Billie sleeping, crossed the courtyard and slipped out through the gate.

Nineteen

ALEX MOORE SHUFFLES BACK from the donkeymen’s hut with the bootleg ouzo clutched coldly to his chest. The stars hang down through the sighing pines in the most irritating and painterly fashion. The earth is uneven, so bloody terrestrial ahead of him.

The big white house yawns before him, empty, virginal — yes, face it, virginal in every imaginable sense — and he goes stooped and bagtrousered up the steps to the heavy door and the waiting silence.

Out on the terrace he pours himself two fingers of ouzo and doesn’t bother with the water. Damnation, what he’s done with two good fingers in his time. He laughs aloud and hears the nasty little crone sound of it. Here’s to you, Scully, this one’s yours, you poor creeping jesus.

Alex feels the papery smoothness of his palms brushing together. Out in the distance the late slice of moon tracks across the water in a showy effect that’s quite risible in anyone’s terms. The whole dreamfield of the Aegean warps off into blackness. He lights a cigarette and watches the prissy little glow of it out here in the waning night. Look at that moon. God making a mockery of good taste, a final petty insult.

He finds himself thinking of those heavenly caramel legs, stretched before him on the terrace down at Vlikos. If he’d been up to it, would he have? She was such an eager beaver, and thwarted ambition is so sexy. After all, isn’t that what they went for in me all these years, my heroic and erogenous failure, the glory of my tremendously fucked-up life? I should know.

Alex tries to think of who did, but no one springs to mind. He tips the glass off the parapet and drinks straight from the bottle. What a prize she’d have made. Poor simple Scully. She was a bomb waiting to go off on him. And such a nice boy, cooking and cleaning and buying a man in extremis a bottle. Something terribly provincial in that kind of niceness. The patience of Job and the face of the Cyclops. A strange lack of pride. Women want monsters, doesn’t he know?

He lurches up and opens his fly, pulls his poor dead dick, the old John Thomas, his faithful loannis Tomassis, out into the moonlight. A real man should take it out into a field and shoot it the way he would a lame horse. He pours ouzo over the beaten little bugger and feels it sting righteously. Like a lump of jade in his gut, green and ragged and heavy, he feels his envy for that poor little shit, Scully. Hatred. A stone in him of real hatred for what he has despite it all. The also-rans will inherit the earth, the whelps, the meek and the fucking nice, and that’s what he can no longer stand.

Alex throws his head back and lets the ouzo trickle down his neck, first rate to the bitter end. Voilà!

Twenty

THE ALLEYS WERE EMPTY and the whole town smelt of exhausted geraniums and chalky whitewash as Scully wound his way down the labyrinth of steps to the harbour. Along the waterfront the lights still shone but the last taverna was closing. He bought an ouzo from a sleepy man and his wall-eyed son who swept around him and stacked chairs against the wall. Scully sat half in the light and sipped, listening to the sea chop outside the mole. Caiques and smaller boats tossed lightly and turned at their moorings. Across the smooth flagstones cats went stalking. Scully’s back ached from hauling Billie and his feet were sore, but inside now there was a curious deadening, a rising blank. He had a second ouzo which he drank quickly so as not to keep the men awake any longer. A little tipsy, he bade them goodnight and walked out by the water, where tiny mullet flickered under the lights.

He was dead inside now, but it didn’t stop him remembering. Quiet nights like this back over in the village at Vlikos. Breathless nights with heat still radiating from the stones of the island, when the house was heady with the smoke of mosquito coils and the drapes hung lifeless against the walls, and the little cluster of houses lay in darkness. The only sound the tinkling of goat bells up the mountain. Those nights, under cover of darkness, the two of them left Billie asleep and slipped down naked and giggling to the pebble beach. The water was cool and black. They stroked out between moored boats, stirring up trails of phosphorescence that clung to their bodies like strings of tiny pearls. Old Sotiris, soaking his feet below the local taverna, would puff on his cigarette at the end of his long day and not see them out in the darkness. Some nights he played his battered guitar and sang mournfully, unaware of their presence.

In September, the night she came back from Piraeus with the pregnancy confirmed, they made love down there on a smooth ledge where his back pressed into the rock and the water surged through her slick legs as they clamped about him and her breasts glistened in his face. He held her buttocks in his hands as she rose on him. On the cliff above, mules clattered along the track. She pressed him hard into the rock, hard into herself, the flat of her hand across his face until she cried out like a bird, a surprised, plaintive sound that travelled across the water, across his skin as a sudden burn. Scully was never so happy. He had the life he wanted, the people he loved.

Scully walked up by the old cannons at the head of the harbour and looked down at the roof of the grotto. The sea was fairly placid but a change was upon it. He stepped down over the smooth rocks and found the swimmer’s platform the town fathers had built for the tourists. For a moment, he sat, looking down at the faint light on the water. The sweat of the day, the shock, the worry, the fear and disappointment were rancid on him. There was dust in his hair and grit in his shoes. There was no one about — stuff it, a swim was better than a bath, and he needed something, some good clear sensation to sponge off such a bastard day.

He stripped and hit the water in an ugly flat dive that stung his belly and rang his balls like bells, so it took him ten seconds or more to realise just how cold the water was, and to know suddenly how much booze he had on board. Submarine light, a phosphorescent glow struck the ceiling of the grotto and lit the submerged rocks with a ghostly ice blue that pulsed and surged like the garish pool of a five-star hotel, a blue that slipped further from him the longer he watched.

‘Ugh!’ His shock was audible. He struck out in a frenzied crawl, the hurried stroke of the dam swimmer, the creek scrambler, the Pommie tourist, the pissed and careless idiot. He punched the water. It burned pale in his eyes, and when he rested to check his progress and calm himself, he saw that he’d made no ground at all, and the grotto was slipping to the right. He went at it again, measured and hard, kicking straight and postponing every second breath, stretching himself, making cups of his hands as he raked downward, till lights spattered his vision and the taste of ouzo rose in his sinuses. His breath was gone. He couldn’t do it. God, he couldn’t do it. The grotto slipped further round. He went into a hopeless, panting breaststroke and saw the grotto disappear altogether, swallowed by the black featureless bluff that reared like the face of God. Scully stopped swimming. He hung there, hyperventilating. He turned on his back. That blackness was too much to behold. His nuts felt like snapper sinkers.

Geez, Scully, he thought, you’ve really made a day of it. A class act. Making an arse of yourself in a thousand ways, and now this. Live stupid, die young.

He felt the first twinge of cramp in his toes, up his calves.

Scully, you’re a loser.

That vast field of black towered above him.

Spineless, that’s what. A stumblebum. Of course she left you — there’s nothing to you.

Cold eddies tweaked at his limbs. He could feel his body closing down and he began to shake. There were no stars in the sky anymore and his ears roared with a cruel lapping sound. He guessed this was the moment when you were allowed to feel sorry for yourself. The blow to his head shook him right through and suddenly it was more than he could stand for. He rolled angrily on his belly to face down this last humiliation and saw the otherworldly mass of the harbour mole sliding past an arm’s length away. The flashing light of the navigational beacon blurted in his face, and a small wave picked him up and dumped him splayed and spluttering on the cold glossy rocks where he lay too sick and sorry to be either grateful or amused. He held on and thought glumly of his clothes right around the other side of the harbour and the long naked walk under lights that awaited him.

Twenty-one

FROM A DREAMLESS PIT OF sleep, Scully came to himself alone in bed with the shutters shuddering and his head a stone on the end of his neck.

‘Billie?’

He lurched upright. ‘Billie?’

He saw his grazes and bruises as he dragged on his clothes. He lurched out into the corridor and down to the bathroom, but the communal door was ajar and the smelly room empty. Three at a time he went down the stairs into the courtyard where rain speared in and cats congregated in tiny patches of shelter in the corners of walls where withered grapevines and dripping painted gourds rattled in the wind.

‘Kyria? Kyria?’ he called, his voice breaking.

The heavy oak door to the kitchen opened.

‘Neh?’

The little woman wiped her hands on her apron and narrowed her eyes at him contemptuously. Scully stood in the rain and saw behind her, sitting by the range with a bowl of soup in her lap, his daughter who looked up curiously at him.

‘Oh, oh, good-oh.’

Right there in the rain, across the kalamata tins of battered geraniums and the wall of bougainvillea, he stood aside and puked until the door closed on him.

• • •

IT WAS AFTERNOON when Scully woke again. He showered gingerly, packed their things and went down to collect Billie. The rain had not let up and the wind bullied across the courtyard where his mess was long gone. He knocked at the door and the woman looked him up and down, stepped aside to let him in.

‘Signomi, Kyria. Etna arostos. Sick. I am very sorry. Um, we’ll go now. Thank you for looking after my child. How much? Um, poso kani?’

Scully put some bills on the table and the woman shrugged.

‘C’mon, Bill.’

Billie stood up, hair freshly brushed, her mouth and cheeks raw with the spreading rash, and came to him. Kyria Dina stooped and kissed her thick curls, and then Billie put her hand in his and they went out into the rain, across the courtyard, and into the alley where water ran ankle deep in a torrent gathering from the mountain, the high town, the Kala Pigadia. They made their way down, hopping from step to dry step without conversation.

• • •

THE WATERFRONT WAS DESERTED and awash with storm water that spilled across the wharf and into the harbour. Boats lunged against their moorings. The sky was black above the sea and the swell ponderous against the moles.

At the flying dolphin office, the clerk informed them that there would be no hydrofoils and no ferries today. The harbour was closed, and no vessel was allowed to venture out. Scully looked out at the heaving sea. Even the Peloponnese was just a smudge. Things could change, he knew, and a boat from Spetsai or Ermione might come by if the swell dropped. But it would be quick turnover at the water’s edge, so the only way to be sure of a passage was to wait the day out close by. He gathered himself giddily and headed for the Lyko. There was no choice — it was the closest to where the boats pulled in, and besides, nothing else was open. And, God help him, he had to make sure.

The taverna was smoky and full, but aside from the rain thrumming against the fogged panes and the crackling of the charcoal grill, it was quiet. The pale ovals of faces turned momentarily, then obscured themselves. Scully hefted his case between chairs and tables and led Billy to where Arthur Lipp folded his newspaper and cleared space for them at his table beside the bar.

‘You might as well sit.’

‘Hello, Arthur.’

‘You look terrible.’

‘I feel terrible.’

‘Not terrible enough, I fear.’ Arthur pulled at his moustache and regarded him carefully.

‘Gee, thanks.’

‘You went up to Episkopi.’

‘Yeah, I did.’

‘You can’t be told, can you?’

‘What, am I in school? I thought my wife was there, Arthur. I went to see.’

‘Your bloody wife!’ Arthur tossed his paper aside. ‘For God’s sake, man, she’s left you, so why don’t you just take it on the chin and go home!’

‘Why don’t you mind your own business, you pompous little shit?’

‘Because it’s your business and our business now!’ yelled Rory from a table across the way.

Scully stood up. ‘Look at you fuckers sitting around day after day like some soap opera! What business of yours could possibly interest me?’

Arthur Lipp sighed. ‘The final business of Alex Moore.’

Scully looked down at Arthur whose tan had gone yellow and his eyes quite pink.

‘I didn’t interrupt any work, if that’s what you mean. He hasn’t done a thing, poor bugger.’

‘Poor bugger indeed.’ Arthur looked away. ‘What on earth did you say to him?’

‘I had dinner with him — hell, I cooked dinner for him. Stayed a while and walked back. What d’you think I’d do to him, beat him up? He’s an old man. I apologised for busting in, cleaned up his kitchen… anyway, he said you could all get stuffed.’

‘Stavros Kolokouris the donkeyman found his body at the bottom of the cliff this morning.’

Scully looked at Billie. She shouldn’t he hearing this, none of this today, or yesterday or the day before. This wasn’t right.

‘The police have set out to recover the body. It’ll take them a good few hours without boats.’

‘He… he gave me…’

‘They’ll want to know if he was pushed.’

‘There wasn’t a note?’

‘Why, write one, did you?’ yelled Rory.

‘I —’

‘Save your story,’ said Arthur, not unkindly.

‘You mean the cops want to see me?’

‘Well, they know you were up there.’

‘Shit, thanks for putting in a good word.’

‘You were seen,’ said Arthur.

He caught Rory’s glance, grabbed his case and Billie’s backpack and hoisted her along with him, through faces and talk and smoke into the wild clean air of the harbour. In blasting rain he dragged child and luggage along the waterfront. Sponge-crowded windows ran with the blur of water. He came to a lane that led to the Three Brothers. Lying miserably on its leash in the rain, was a big dog so saturated as to barely look like a dog anymore. Scully and Billie swept by it and ran to the door and the smell of frying calamari.

Fishermen, muleteers, old men and loungers drank coffee and ouzo and played tavla. Scully saw a table by the wall and claimed it.

‘Eh, Afstralia!’

It was Kufos — the Deaf One — rising from his chair.

‘Yassou,’ said Scully, dripping onto the plastic tablecloth.

Kufos strode over, gold teeth glinting, his keg chest expanding as he came.

‘Leetle Afstralia!’ he said, digging Billie in the back of the neck with his thumbs. ‘Ti kanis?’

Scully motioned for him to sit down and the old caique captain flicked up the wicker-bottom chair and sat.

‘No happy today, ah?’

Billie shook her head.

‘You come back to Hydra?’ he said to Scully. ‘So fast.’

‘Only for today,’ said Scully with a shrug. ‘For Piraeus, no boats today.’

‘Ah, too much this!’ said the skipper, making waves with his hands.

‘Yeah.’

Scully always liked Kufos. He was a proud and arrogant old bugger who liked to curse the tourists and take their money. He had been a merchant seaman and he told Scully garbled stories of Sydney and Melvorno and the girls he’d left weeping behind. Nowadays he ferried xeni around the island and fished a little for octopus, but he preferred to sit out under the waterfront marquees and watch the tourist women in their bikinis. He was a fine sailor, and given credit on the island for being the last man to call it quits when it came to a big sea. Scully ordered him an ouzo.

‘Sick, this girl?’

‘Sad.’

‘Kyria in Afstralia?’

Scully smiled noncomittally.

‘We need to go to Piraeus.’

‘Is too much. Finis, today. No dolphin, no boat.’

‘Yeah, I know. But would you go?’ Scully said, leaning into the man whose grey whiskers were as stiff as a deckbrush.

Kufos looked doubtful.

‘For maybe three thousand drachmae, Captain?’

Scully wrote the number in the plastic with his fingernail and the old man pursed his lips.

‘Four thousand?’ Scully murmured.

Kufos scratched his chin.

‘Okay, five, then.’

Plates clashed in the kitchen and men laughed and argued around them. The drinks came and the waiter, unasked, laid a bowl of soup before Billie. She looked at it a moment, its steam rose in her face and she took up the spoon.

‘Five thousand,’ said Scully. ‘It’s fifty dollars. Not even to Piraeus, just to Ermione across the channel.’

Kufos sipped his ouzo and sat back a while, watched Billie eat her soup. She paused after a few moments and the old man wiped her face with a paper napkin.

‘This is good girl. You like my boat?’

Billie nodded. She seemed to have rallied somewhat. She was a little more responsive. He knew he had the old man close to a deal. It was time to go. He didn’t know where to go, but it was definitely time to get off this island. He felt certain Jennifer wasn’t here. She might never have been here. She might have caught the six o’clock hydrofoil yesterday while he was at Episkopi. She had plenty of warning, if she hadn’t wanted to see him. And now with this Alex business he was panicky, feeling trapped. At the very best, if the cops were relaxed about it, it would take time and the trail would cool. What bloody trail — he just had to get off the island.

Outside the rain had stopped and the dog caught his eye, rising to its feet to shake itself. Water blurred from it and Billie slipped off her chair.

‘Don’t go far, love.’

Billie passed by the crowded tables and headed for the door. Scully saw now; it was the dog from the hydrofoil again.

‘Ermione is too much.’

‘Fifteen, twenty kilometres.’

‘Too much this,’ Kufos said with the wave motion again.

‘How about Hydra beach just across there. That’s less than ten.’

‘Signomi, Kyrios Afstralia. My boat she is too much slow for this. You take taxi Niko.’

‘Nick Meatballs?’

‘Neh. Is fast. Volvo Penta.’

Scully sat back. Meatballs was the biggest macho on the island. His taxi was the envy of every man and boy. Seventeen feet. 165 horsepower sterndrive and a sliding perspex canopy like an old Spitfire fighter plane. Forty knots on a smooth sea, no sweat. Joan Collins and Leonard Cohen had been among his passengers last summer. Meatballs was a living legend.

‘Pou ine? Where is he?’

Kufos shrugged, seeing the money elude him.

Scully ordered a bottle of Metaxa for the old man and offered his thanks. Then there was a growl and a scream from outside, and the whole taverna was in uproar.

Twenty-two

SCULLY RAN ACROSS TABLES to get outside where Billie sat bellowing inside her mask of blood. Her eyes were blank and wide as coins. Scully held her rigid in his arms and spoke quietly to her in the moments before the terrace was overrun with shouting men and women. With his fingers he probed her face for the wounds and found punctures in her cheek, her forehead, an eyebrow. With his handkerchief he wiped the gore away for a moment and saw that there was a gash in front of her ear and a hole in her scalp that showed a flap of fatty tissue. He tried to soothe her, calm her before anything else, but it was impossible with all the yelling and the many hands that reached for her in sympathy. He hoisted her on his hip in time to see old Kufos beating the dog to death with his unopened bottle of Metaxa, and he ran for the hospital.

Along the cobbled alleys slippery as creekbeds, Scully slid and lurched, leaving a bright trail on the stones. He saw the open eyes and mouths of people at their doors as he plunged across the square and through the ghostly trunks of the whitewashed lemon trees to the clinic steps.

He found a dim corridor, an empty room, then a roomful of bored people with their backs to the walls. They rose, startled, fearful, shouting, and then the mob came behind to surge in with their roars and bellows and great indecipherable swathes of language. He wanted to shout, to demand, but his breath was gone and he could not think of enough words in Greek.

Two women in white stiff-armed their way through the crowd and their eyes widened and their businesslike boredom evaporated. The child’s face was so disfigured by lumpy, dark blood, and her clothes so spattered and gluey with it, that it was hard to know what she was, let alone what the problem might be. They grabbed her, but Billie clung to him. Her nails pierced his clothes and found his skin. Men shouted across him to the staff who dragged them both into another room where a male doctor waited with a cigarette and a stethoscope.

The doctor motioned kindly, almost jovially as the nurses continued to pry Billie from Scully’s chest. At the big stainless steel sink they held her arms and head and swabbed her face. Her eyes were mad. Cattle eyes. Killing yard eyes. Her screams felt as though they could shave paint from the walls. The staff squinched up their faces. They lost any composure they might have planned on displaying when she bared her teeth and lunged at all those dark, hairy forearms locked about her.

‘Ochi, ochi!’

The doctor howled as Billie latched onto his wrist, gnashing and growling. The others let go in an instant and Billie crashed back against her father’s chest.

‘That’s it! That’s enough. She’s fucking hysterical, she’s scared out of her mind, for Godsake!’

‘Scully?’ someone called behind him.

He wheeled and saw Arthur with Kufos who had blood and brains all down his tunic.

‘Tell them to give me some stuff and I’ll fix her up myself! She’s shitscared.’

‘What are you going to do, sew her up on your own?’ cried Arthur.

‘Just tell em.’

‘What about the scars?’

‘Oh, Jesus Christ, help me!’

Screaming, screaming. Circus. Nightmare. Slow-motion pantomime. Scully’s sinews sprang in him like wires. His spine creaked with fear and hatred. He was drowning in noise, flapping hopelessly between words he couldn’t recognize. He tried to soothe Billie, almost sobbing his pleas to her, while Arthur and Kufos argued with the staff who shook their heads and waved their hands in outrage. Back and forward, the words, the scowls, the pleading, the slapping of fists and hands, and then when Scully realized he wasn’t breathing anymore, he turned with Billie in his arms and bolted from the room with the crowd parting fearfully before him. Down the long antiseptic corridor, the anterooms with their lordly portraits, and out onto the rain fresh steps beneath the sky where he roared until he felt her hands on his bursting throat and her voice in his ear.

‘Stop. Stop, it hurts!’

Twenty-three

ARTHUR BROUGHT ANOTHER BOWL OF hot water and Scully gritted his teeth and cut the patch of matted hair with the nail scissors. Billie closed her eyes and sucked in a breath as his fingertip pressed the flap of scalp down and took up the disposable razor. Arthur averted his eyes. Scully felt his arse tighten as he applied the blade to the wound and shaved the ragged skin. He saw the tears run from her tight-shut eyes and kept at it until the wound was clean and bleeding freshly again. The scalp lifted enough to sicken him.

‘You can’t sew that, Scully.’

‘Gimme those strip things, will you? We’ll press it flat and get it together again.’

‘The hospital wants you to sign a form.’

‘Just wash those scissors again, will you?’

Billie began to whimper as he squeezed antiseptic into this last gash.

‘You’re a brave girl,’ he murmured with a quaver in his voice. ‘Nearly finished.’

‘Kufos came for me,’ said Arthur.

‘Yes,’ Scully said, wiping the bald patch dry.

‘He said you wanted Nikos Keftedes.’

‘Arthur, the strips, okay? She’s in pain here.’

‘The sea’s treacherous out there,’ Arthur said, wrestling a pack of steri-strips open.

‘Here, hold the flaps down with your thumbs.’

‘Oh, dear. You should have —’

‘Just put your thumbs… right, I’ll bind it closed. Hold tight, love.’

Billie cried out as the men’s fingers pressed at her. Her feet rose into their bellies and her back arched from the sofa. She was sweating and the strips wouldn’t stick.

‘More strips.’

No light came in through the unshuttered windows now, and the wind harried the glass. Scully smelled the tobacco closeness of the Englishman as they worked on grimly with the child squirming and crying out. He whispered and crooned, hating the bluntness of his fingers.

‘That’s got it.’

‘Thank Christ.’

Scully took Billie in his arms to steady himself. Her face was livid with wounds, swollen and plastered in spots, her hairline ragged above one eye.

‘Thank you, Arthur. Can you sell me a blanket?’

Arthur stopped fussing with the bowl and implements. ‘Sell you?’

Scully reached down and grabbed the small suitcase and the child’s backpack in one hand and hefted Billie onto his hip.

‘The cops’ll be back about now.’

‘You’re not saying you really did it?’

‘I’m saying I want to go.’

‘They might chase you, you know.’

‘Maybe.’

‘What the dickens happened to you?’

Scully laughed sourly. ‘You could say I’m having a bit of a rough trot just now.’ He felt his mouth losing shape as he said it, and the Englishman put the bowl down, went to the window and lit a cigar.

‘I just have to know.’

‘Why should you be the only one getting answers?’

‘He was a friend.’

‘He talked about how they threw old people off the cliff in baskets. I didn’t think anything of it. I was preoccupied, I guess. I’m really sorry, Arthur. It’s horrible.’

Arthur puffed on his cigar, trembling a little. ‘Of course he was making that little bit of folklore up. Vain little prat.’

The house was cold and quiet. Its seaman’s furniture gleamed darkly. The Persian rug across the marble floor looked thick and deep enough to sleep in. On the wall across Arthur’s shoulder was a small canvas that both of them lit on at the same moment.

‘One of his,’ murmured Arthur unsteadily.

‘I know.’

The painting was a luminous landscape, quite simple. Bare, pale rock. Sleep-blue sky. Perched on a granite cliff over the water was a small, white chapel.

‘You know the chapel?’

‘Just before Molos.’

‘Yes. The wine chapel. A sea captain with a load of wine from Crete was caught in the worst storm of his life, just in sight of this island. He prayed to the Virgin to deliver him and he promised that if he lived he’d build a chapel in her honour. That’s what happened. He mixed the mortar with his cargo in payment. Cement and wine. The wine chapel. Alex’s favourite. Not hard to see why. At least that piece of folklore is real.’

He left Scully and Billie alone in the living room. Scully looked at the painting and thought of the afternoons he’d swum below the place spearing octopus and rofos with the sun on his back and the water moving across his body like a breeze. In the water there was always a stillness denied the rest of the world, a calm hard to recall standing here shitscared and shellshocked. Underwater there was just temperature, no time, no words, no gravity. It was the kind of thing monks disciplined themselves for, junkies destroyed themselves chasing. Is it what dolphins and birds had now and then, a still point in the centre of things? Murderers? Marathon runners? Artists? Is that what Jennifer was after, this total focus? It was something worth feeling, he had to admit.

Arthur came back in with blankets, painkillers and some food.

‘Ten minutes from now, outside the Pirate Bar. Fifteen thousand up front.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I’ll help you down there.’

‘I thought Kufos might come by.’

‘He’s as pissed as a rat, I’m afraid.’

‘You mean he didn’t break the bottle?’

‘The Metaxa? No. He’s a big hero tonight.’

‘Poor bloody dog.’

‘Well, it’s a quicker death than the traditional mothball in the minced beef.’

‘The owner should be shot.’

‘The owner is Kufos’ wife. The Albanian.’ Arthur waved aside his open mouth. ‘Don’t ask. Let’s go, shall we?’

Twenty-four

ALONG THE DARK SHUTTERED WATERFRONT in the storm, Scully held the shivering child to him and saw Arthur ahead holding grimly to the luggage that bucked and swung in the wind. The sky was starless and whining. Masts lurched amid the shriek of rigging and the seance groan of hawsers. Scully felt himself gone from here. He was almost faint with relief. His eyes ran in the wind and his hair ripped back from his head till it ached at the roots.

Beneath the statue of the hero, its head lit wildly by an upstairs window, the shadow of a man came forth. Arthur met him and Scully heard their hissing. He waited, feeling light, careless, away.

Arthur came back.

‘Forget it, Scully. He wants twenty thousand.’

‘Give it to him,’ said Scully, holding out the flapping wad.

‘The price is too high and the sea is too bloody rough.’

‘Tell him we go now.’

‘For God’s sake!’

‘Give it to him, Arthur.’

‘You’re not thinking!’ said the Englishman, the pale palms of his hands flashing. ‘You’re overwrought, Scully!’

‘Let’s go.’

Scully felt his body unwinding, the heat leaving his temples and feet, and he knew that if the boat didn’t leave he’d simply spring from the wharf and hit the water swimming. He saw the flash of Meatballs’ teeth, the twinkle of his fingernails as he took the money. The Greek led them down between fishing boats to where his taxi laboured in the swell.

‘Was she here, Arthur?’ Scully asked as Meatballs slid the canopy back.

Arthur scowled. ‘I can’t get a straight answer out of anybody. Rory and his chums say things, but can you believe them? Seems certain she’s not here now.’

‘Fair enough. Thank you.’

‘Well, what a pleasant visit.’

‘I’ll miss the funeral.’

Arthur grunted, shrugged and walked back down the mole.

Scully watched him a moment before stepping down into the taxi. The big Volvo started and purred. Meatballs cast off fore and aft and the boat eased out among the pens. Billie lifted her head to see the lights of the town rising above them like Christmas.

Meatballs throttled down hard.

‘You sit! Sit!’

Scully went back to the upholstered bench as the canopy slid shut above them. The Volvo began to bawl. The lights of the Maritime School blurred by above. The boat rose to the plane and then the water beneath them began to harden up as they left the harbour wall.

The first wave crashed across the bow as the navigation lights went on. Water streamed down the windows. Meatballs wore a green halo from the glow of his dashboard. With the harbour police and the moles out of sight already, they rode down into the trough and broke the back of the next swell with a crash that jarred Billie and Scully to the deck. Shaken, the two of them clawed back up and looked for ways to brace themselves. The luggage raced about at their feet. Meatballs shoved a cassette into the tape deck so that bouzouki music screeched through the little cabin. Scully held himself in position and watched Billie’s face as they ploughed on into the darkness.

The sea came at them from every point. The boat pitched, rolled, plunged and fluttered. The prop screamed free of the water and hit again. The fibreglass hull shuddered — Scully felt the impact in his teeth. Already he was withdrawing into the deckhand’s stupor, the blankness that kept him sane all those years ago. When it got too awful out there in those days, you simply shut down inside and carried on in autopilot. The deck lurching and heaving, the chop breaking in cold sheets across the wheel- house and the stinking bait washing through the scuppers. Dreamy, that’s how he was, with that animal Ivan Dimic at the wheel and the ropes fidgeting from their coils to race over the side. The stinking pots clashing up onto the tipper full of lobsters and sharks and writhing octopus. Yes, Ivan Dimic, last of the fleet to leave and first to return. He fished all day at full throttle, hungover and vicious. From the flying bridge, shrieking down on your dripping head. His was the kind of bestial voice the mad heard, only the man was as real as the torment. Buy first, pay last, and always get your punch in before the other poor cunt sees you coming, that was Ivan’s philosophy. Scully stayed with him for the money of course, outrageous in those boom years, and because he believed that things could only get better, that he was capable of getting on top of it. But he didn’t come from the same stock as Ivan and the crews he knew in his fishing days. Scully simply wasn’t a fighter and the only way to win Ivan over was by force. The deckhand’s revenge. Oops. Over the side twenty miles out. It happened. But not for young Scully. All those February mornings hacking back into the easterly, Scully imagined himself elsewhere. But tonight there was only so far out of himself he could go.

Billie began to vomit. There was no way to direct it anywhere; he couldn’t hang on and help her as well, so he took the steaming little gouts against his jacket as he hugged her to him. It slicked the seat and filled the cabin with a bitter stink. The poor little bugger. He felt her hands at the back of his neck and hated himself for his stupidity and clumsiness, for letting this happen to her, for being in this insane situation. What else could possibly happen to her? She was so strong, so resilient, but how much could a kid take? He thought maybe he should have stayed, but what use was he to her in jail on a Greek island? There was no telling what could happen with the business of Alex, how things might turn out. He might have gone to a pharmacy, got the doctor out to Arthur’s, but the cops were too close and he simply couldn’t risk it. And the sight of her mad with fear amongst all those screaming people, the nurses wrestling her down like an animal. No, he couldn’t do it to her. He had to pray that she understood, that she knew him well enough to see that this was not normal, that this wasn’t what he would ever do unless he had to. But it wasn’t right, it shouldn’t be like this, she shouldn’t have to endure it and the enormity of it cut him to the blood. Some father, Scully, some father.

Meatballs turned, scowling.

‘Ermione no good! Hydra Beach we go! Hydra Beach!’

The boat rose out of a trough and hung bawling in the air so long Scully could feel it moving laterally in the wind. When it hit water again, Billie’s tartan suitcase burst open and flung underpants, razors, paper all over. He let it go and hung on.

‘There’s nothing at Hydra Beach this time of year! I gave you two hundred bucks!’

‘Hydra Beach. Only this.’

Water sluiced back across the canopy and the bow buried momentarily. It was claustrophobic underwater. Strings of pearly bubbles pressed against the screen. The boat shuddered and ground up into the air again. They were an hour out already and Scully knew it could take a lot longer to get down the coast to Ermione. It might take half the night at this rate.

Billie stiffened. The wound in her scalp had begun to bleed again and she was too weak to even cling to him anymore. The deck slopped, and at his feet, half curled and blotted, lay Alex’s sketch of the Rue de Seine, its buildings solid and angular, its pavements thick with people, dogs, cars, its high window perspective stupidly reassuring. He found himself staring at it, looking out through its window at the solid earth below.

‘Hydra Beach, Afstralia!’

Scully looked up at Nick Meatballs and saw him scared and greenfaced, all the macho bullshit gone. His lips were creamy with spit. Scully looked about for signs of lifejackets — none — and just then the bouzouki clamour fell silent, and the shouting voice of a man on the radio receiver was audible between clashes of static.

Imagine a breakdown in this shit, he thought. All those granite islets. The cliffs of Dokos.

They rolled heavily and crashed sideways into the water that pressed black against the glass.

Alex would be lying on a slab in Hydra harbour by now. The cops ringing around. The wake being planned. Arthur passing the hat. Buried as an infidel, no doubt. No matter how long you stayed you were always a foreigner in or out of church, alive or dead. Was it me, Alex, because of me?

‘Afstralia?’

‘Okay, Hydra Beach.’

‘You smart boy!’

‘Tell me about it.’

He looked down at the smudging Rue de Seine and saw women on the pavement, their hips high with walking. He wanted to go there, to be inside that picture with its smells of Chanel and coffee and cake, to be inside the life of it, in its steady, perfect composition and lightness of touch, but the real world, the twisted nightmare around him had hold too tight. The sea sucked and grabbed and hissed and snatched and Billie’s sweat glistened greenly. There was no going into the neatness of the imagination. He could only pray for her to forgive him, to take what was left of him, to strike him dead, to save him.

Twenty-five

DEEP IN SOME BIG, MAD story, a Jonah story, a Sinbad story, a Jesus and the fishermen story, the kind that’s too true to be strange, too dreamy to be made up, Billie hung onto Scully’s jacket and heard the sea growl and saw the sky go underground with her. Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry he was saying, like a ship’s engine driving her along, pushing her across the waves of sickness and pain and pictures that wrenched her. In her head, too, she heard the song from the Up School floating across the wall.

Something, something, parakalo,

Something, something, parakalo…

Her head was too crowded, she was forgetting Greek. What was it they were asking for? For everything to be still? For everything to go back to the way it was? For it all to stop?

Billie saw the poor wet dog. The way its eye moved slowly. The big, pink inside of its mouth and the meaty smell of its breath. And all the people. Yelling at her. The gold in their teeth, the blood stinging her eyes like Pears shampoo. All of them pushing and trying to take her away, twisting her arms, their hairy soft hands all over her. And Scully holding on, his face like a pumpkin, fat and bulgy with fright. She saw the newspaper in the lady’s teeth, his hand on her hair, brushing her like a dog, saying words too soft for language. His big heart there in his shirt, the love in his neck. He didn’t let go, he didn’t let them. The fat cigar, the stink of Mister Arthur’s cigar. Gentle fingers on her face. Every shot of pain the chime of an aeroplane toilet sign — ting, ting, ting. A white face in the cloud. Somewhere, too, a tin whistle pweeting. Another surge of people and glass doors peeling back like the sea for Moses and Scully’s busted face on the other shore beneath the chiming, tolling, swinging bells. Him not letting go, their fingers making bloodknots and bimini twists and not slipping, tied properly, not giving an inch. The dog had no one now and she had Scully. She was the lucky one.

Something, something, parakalo,

Efkaristo poli…

Yes. She had Scully’s heart whamming in her ear like a bell, like God singing.

Twenty-six

SCULLY FELT THE VOLVO BACKING down and knew suddenly that he’d been asleep. The sea was different, the swells long and even. The canopy slid back and a burst of air rushed in. He stood and saw lights, the shapes of houses, a beacon, a mole. They hissed into lee water, throttling down and Scully saw it was Ermione after all.

Billie sat stunned and pale while he got down and shoved their things together. He snapped the case shut, and fitted the little backpack to Billie.

‘You know people here?’ he said to Meatballs, unsure of whether the bloke had changed his mind or found the port by accident.

‘Neh, some people,’ Meatballs said as they slid in among moored boats.

‘Get me a taxi, then, a car. To Athens.’

They swung in against the slimy black fenders of the wharf and Meatballs killed the motor and leapt up to secure them. When Scully hoisted Billie to the dock, the Greek was gone.

The wind was cold and it had recently rained here too so the air was bright and liquid as they stood between clunking boats. Scully brushed the girl’s hair, careful to avoid her wounds. He dipped his handkerchief in the sea and wiped their clothes as best he could.

‘You okay?’

‘Yes.’

She looked terrible under the wharf lights.

She closed her eyes and her heavy curls bustled in the wind. ‘It hurts.’

Scully dug out some paracetamol. Was she too young for paracetamol? He found a tap and cupped her some water in his hands. She shuddered at the taste of the pills and held the crusty bowl of his hands. Drinking like a dog.

Out to sea the lights of Hydra showed faintly now and then.

‘Afstralia!’

Scully turned and saw the boatman’s face in the flare of a cigarette lighter.

‘Taxi.’

‘Good.’

‘For Napflion.’

‘I want Athens.’

Meatballs shrugged.

‘Okay, what the hell.’

A battered Fiat stood at the end of the mole. A rotund little man got out buttoning a lumber jacket and opened the boot. Scully shook his head at the open boot and climbed in.

The car smelled of cigars and garlic. It was sweet and homely after the boat, it’s motion smooth and straightforward. Never before had he thought of cars as such luxurious conveyances. Down sleepy streets they went, a numbness coming over him.

‘Napflion, neh?’

‘Ochi,’ said Scully, ‘Athini.’

‘Athini?’

The driver pulled over beside a dim taverna and twisted around in his seat.

‘Neh; said Scully, ‘Athini.’

The driver put on the interior light and looked carefully at them. Clearly, he didn’t like the look of things. There was blood all down Scully’s denim jacket, and he was unshaven and looked like a crim. Billie’s face was swollen and showing the first bruises. Her hairline was savaged and little pieces of sticking plaster hung off her. She reeked and looked stolen at worst, neglected at best.

‘Dog,’ said Scully, showing him the wounds, making a set of jaws out of his hands. ‘Dog, dog, it bit her, see?’

‘Hydra?’

‘Ochi, Spetsai. Happened on Spetsai, we came from there just now.’

Scully pulled out twenty thousand drachs and laid the fold across the seat between them.

‘Athini, endakse?’

The man pursed his lips and sighed. Scully smiled raggedly and took out their passports, showed him the pictures.

‘Papa the driver said to Billie, pointing at Scully.

‘Neh,’ said Billie, nodding wearily.

‘Postulena?’

‘Billie Ann Scully.’

He smiled at her and handed back the passports. But it was with a lingering look of concern that he took the money and turned out the light. They were well into the mountains before Scully felt sleep coming at him like a faint wind across water.

• • •

ON A SLICK PALE SEA with the rising sun behind him, Scully watches the rope in the winch and sees the cane pot break the surface of the water, bristling with feelers. It crashes onto the cradle at the gunwhale, smelling of salt and rotten bait and cabbage weed, alive with the cicada click of rock lobsters. The boat surges ahead and a mad school of silver trevally chases leftovers in the clear reef water. Two dolphins break ahead and the world is good, the sea lives, the sky goes blue forever.

• • •

BILLIE WOKE IN THE DRY mountain air and saw nothing beyond the curving road. With his head back and his mouth open, Scully slept on. She watched him in the dark as the man in front sang quietly to himself, and the night throbbed on out there beyond her hurting face. She thought about that castle, the tower down the hill from Scully’s little house. There were birds around it like a cloud. The whole world still except for birds. She wondered if you could love someone too much. If you could it wasn’t fair. People didn’t have a chance. Love was all you had in the end. It was like sleep, like clean water. When you fell off the world there was still love because love made the world. That’s what she believed. That’s how it was.

• • •

SCULLY WOKE IN THE PARKED taxi. He saw the empty driver’s seat, the keys gone from the ignition, his daughter sleeping beside him, their belongings scattered in the dark at their feet. He saw the dimness of the park across the street, and with a spasm of dread, he registered the police station right beside him. Police. For several seconds he listened to the cooling tick of the motor, then he gathered up their things and shook Billie.

‘Let’s go, let’s go.’

The child came to quickly and got out beside him. Together they crossed the deserted street and slipped into the darkness of the park. The air was cool and damp and Scully’s mind skittered. He led her to a clump of bushes that smelled like thyme and gave them some cover. Behind was the bus station. He painstakingly read the sign. Korinthos. Corinth. No sign of life there either. Scully squatted down to think. Was the driver in there reporting them as suspicious characters, a couple of strange looking xeni? A child looking battered and stolen, a man with desperado written all over him.

‘Scully?’

‘Shh.’

Scully saw the driver emerge from the police station with something in his hand. A piece of paper. He put his hand to the door of the Fiat and stopped. He hunched down to the back window and stood up to look around.

‘Kyrios?’ he called faintly. ‘Mister?’

The town was so still his voice carried plainly across to them, little more than a whisper.

‘Scully?’ Billie tugged at his sleeve.

Scully watched him carefully. He thought of the long wait till dawn and the first bus or train out of here.

‘Scully?’ the kid murmured insistently.

The taxi driver pocketed the sheet of paper and walked around the car once, looking up and down the street. Scully thought of the cops on Hydra. They’ve sent out a warning to the mainland. Do they know in there? Then why did the driver come out alone, and what’s on that piece of paper? He’s stalling for time. They’re waiting inside, for more men, for a call from Hydra to confirm. And where can you go, a couple of conspicuous foreigners in the offseason before dawn in Corinth when the trains aren’t running yet and the streets are bare?

Billie was halfway across the park before Scully could take it in. She walked forthrightly, as if determined, or angry, and she didn’t look back. He gasped and stood up. The driver swivelled and grunted in delight. He threw up his hands and laughed. Scully saw him open the door, chattering and still looking about, and that’s when Scully gave up, grabbed the gear, and stepped out into the open.

• • •

WHEN THE TAXI PULLED AWAY with the driver still telling him how be became lost in the wide, squat city with the xeni asleep in the back and how he stopped by the police station for directions, Scully had already decided not to go to Athens at all. Athens was the airport and the airport meant deciding where to go immediately, and he just didn’t know where to head for right now. For the past ten hours or so he’d just been moving, going blindly. Hydra was becoming a series of migraine flashes. But he knew Athens was wrong and he had to rest and think, decide with all his mind, not just the white hot bit that ran when everything else shut down.

He was working up the Greek words in his mind to break it to the chattering driver, when he noticed that they’d slipped onto the new expressway heading west instead of east. He saw the sign for Patras and heard the driver gasp.

‘Patra!’

‘Patra is okay,’ said Scully, ‘Patra endakse.’

‘Patra?’

‘Yes, keep going.’

A blaring semi blasted past and the driver snatched his worry beads from the rearview mirror. They drove on as the great barren scape of the expressway unfolded. The air smelled of monoxide and pine resin. Billie slept again and Scully held his hands between his knees for the hour it took for the port city to come into view in the wan light before dawn.

Twenty-seven

SCULLY WOKE IN THE CHALKY light of afternoon. He lay still. On the bed beside him, with her back to the scabrous wall, Billie scratched in pencil on a sheet of Olympic Airways paper. Her face was taut with concentration, so like the beleaguered intensity she was born with — that expression which implied that only willpower and doggedness had gotten her out into the noise and light of the world. But now her brow was grey and green with contusions. He wanted to touch her but he daren’t. He listened to her shallow breathing, the scrape of her pencil, and after a minute or two she looked down. Her mouth moved hesitantly. She went back to her sheet of paper.

‘Drawing?’ he murmured.

She held it up. A house. A tree. A bird. The bird’s nest was huge as a sun in the branches of the tree.

‘Ireland?’

‘Heaven,’ she breathed.

He saw that her tee-shirt was on backwards. The Ripcurl tag flapped beneath her throat. He hadn’t noticed, not last night, nor all yesterday. Today it was the pharmacy — first thing. There was no excuse today.

Billie picked up another sheet of paper, the ruin of Alex’s pen- and-ink of the Rue de Seine.

‘When is a dream… kind of not a dream?’

Scully turned on his hip. He savoured the husky tone of her voice. ‘When it’s real, I guess.’

She nodded.

‘I’m sorry about all this,’ he said. ‘I had to do it. Go looking for her.’

Her face closed over like a moving sky. She went back to her sketch and he lay there flattened against his pillow.

After a long time he got up and ran her a bath. It had cost an extra ten thousand drachs not to have to share the shower down the hall. He was low on cash, but there was no question of not having a bath, not the way his mind was working at dawn. He emptied the case and found some spare dressings and some swabs. Billie ignored him. The water bored into the big enamel tub. He unbuckled his heavy diver’s watch and took it over to her.

‘Here, you can wear this in the bath.’

Billie held her arm out and he strapped it on. It ran round her wrist like a hoop. The last hole on the strap might have fitted her ankle. She twirled the dive dial. A ratcheting sound from another life.

In the bath she let him swab her wounds. She clung to the lip of the tub. Scully felt the floor cold on his knees. Her puckered gouges seemed clean, if firm. Maybe he could get an antiseptic ointment here in Patras. He had to keep the wounds closed to minimize scarring, but clean, always clean. He needed more gear. And what about tetanus? She had shots at five. He took her himself. He recalled how damned stoical she was about it. How long did a tetanus shot last? Ten years? Five? Five, surely five. And the dog. He couldn’t help worrying about the bloody dog’s papers. Were they fake? Kufos swore black and blue. Arthur said they were for real. Geez, the idea of a series of rabies shots. That would be the end of her. No, she was safe there.

He held her head cradled in his hand the way you bath a baby. She let him tilt her back into the water, her eyes trusting. He couldn’t help but think of his mother bathing his head like this the day he hitched back to the city delirious with his face smashed and bloated, the poison purple in him, the way she held his head and dabbed at his holes.

Billie lay back with the water over her ears, her hair waving like seaweed. He didn’t know why she trusted him. Maybe she knew him better than he could have imagined. Maybe she didn’t trust him at all. He washed her hair gingerly and let her soak till the water went cold. He tidied up their things and soaked stains from their clothes. He scrubbed them with soap, rinsed them several times and rolled them in towels to speed their drying.

‘We’ll get you a hat today,’ he said brightly. ‘Till your hair grows out at the front. A Greek captain’s hat, what d’you think?’

She lay on the bed, head tilted back, mouthing the words of a song he didn’t know. He hung their clothes in the open window and stood watching her a long time.

• • •

THE SUN WAS FIRMLY ON their backs as they climbed the wide steps to the kastro above the town, Billie with her new hat covering the worst patches, Scully impassive behind his sunglasses. The walls of the old town were heavy and worn, reverberating with the sound of mopeds as young people darted through the narrow streets.

They sat and ate tsipoures at a small place with the sun on their legs and the sea below. Neither said much. The fish was good and Scully had a half-bottle of the same brand of rosé he’d drunk with Alex. The taverna terrace was all but empty.

A woman alone at the next table smiled at Billie and made a face. Billie looked at her plate for a moment, but looked up again and poked her tongue out. Scully put down his glass.

‘What happened to your face, darling?’ the woman asked in English.

Billie pulled the hat lower. Scully looked at the stranger a moment and saw a straw hat, mirror glasses, black bobbed hair and a sleeveless dress the colour of watermelon. There was an ouzo on her table, a jug of water and a manila envelope.

‘I got bit by a dog,’ said Billie.

‘Oh my God, you poor lamb.’

Scully smiled perfunctorily and went back to his fish. A tiny germ of pique lit up in him.

‘Let me see,’ said the woman.

Billie tilted back her hat and exposed the swellings, the shaved patches and blue-yellow bruises.

The woman clucked and lit a cigarette. Her skin was white and Scully saw immediately the bruising on her upper arm and wrist. She smiled as if in acknowledgement, in collusion somehow. It made him want to leave.

‘And what became of the dog?’

‘Beg your pardon?’

‘What happened to the dog, darling?’

‘It got killed.’

‘Very good.’

‘Beaten to death with a bottle of brandy,’ said Scully without warmth.

‘Bravo.’

‘Poor dog,’ said Billie.’

‘Oh, no, your father did well.’

‘Her father didn’t do it,’ said Scully.

‘You are not the father?’

‘I didn’t kill the dog.’

Scully saw himself — mouth open — in her sunglasses. It wasn’t a happy sight. Pale. Hostile. Guilty. Blinking. Below his reflection was her too-wide mouth, a smear of lipstick on her teeth and a cigarette.

‘Eat up, Billie,’ he said, turning to his meal.

There were ships leaving the harbour now, blowing columns on the breeze. The Adriatic was the colour of chrome.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the woman. ‘I’ve forgotten my manners since the church this morning. They have Saint Andrew’s head there. It disturbed me. He was the one who first signed an X for a kiss, did you know? At the bottom of letters. How many times I have done that. They crucified him on an X. Especially. It upset me.’

‘Well, X marks the spot,’ said Scully.

‘The boat for Brindisi doesn’t leave till ten tonight.’

‘Must be hard for you,’ said Scully, motioning to a waiter and forking out some drachs. The big-handed Greek took his money gruffly and bade them goodbye. Billie looked back at the woman as they left, but Scully went ahead as though she had never been there.

• • •

FOR AN HOUR AFTER THE pantomime at the pharmacy, Scully sat on the long harbour mole watching boats come and go: trawlers, caiques, ferries, the occasional liner, all peeling rust and pouring diesel smoke, their horns bleating, decks smelling of fruit, fish, flowers, wine, cigarette smoke. The wharf was scattered with mangy backpackers and the well-dressed middle class of Patras promenading with their black-eyed children, their Mercedes keys a-swing. The briney stink of the sea washed over Billie and Scully as they shared a bag of pistachios, wincing as their thumbnails became sore. They spat the shells into their laps and swung their legs.

‘Everywhere,’ he murmured, ‘all over the world people are going places. Ever think of that?’

Billie looked at him guardedly.

‘Every single day.’

She nodded.

‘To be a real traveller you’ve got to not care much, just enjoy the trip, you know. The going. That’s why I’m not much of a traveller. I just want to get there. Like “Star Trek”. Zap — that’s how I wanna get there.’

Billie nodded again, and smiled. But it felt like charity. He watched her as she got up in a tinkling shower of nutshells and walked over to the water’s edge where gulls hung like bunches of scrap paper in the updraught on the mole. There she was, all his life amounted to, apart from a couple of good buildings and some memories. Wasn’t she enough? The sea butted its head against the wall and he watched, wondering.

• • •

IN THE HOTEL STAIRWELL, Scully shoved stupid amounts of coin into the phone to get an international connection. Billie sat on the stairs with her backpack on and the tartan case at her feet. Pete’s phone rang out. He’d be down the pub, no doubt. The coins cascaded out and he went through the performance again, dialling Alan and Annie.

‘Hello?’ A crackly, subterranean line.

‘Alan?’

‘Scully!’

‘The very same.’

‘What’s happening? You put the wind up me the other day.’

‘Tell me straight — have you seen her?’

‘Jennifer? Where are you, Scully?’

‘Can I trust you?’

‘Scully, it’s me for Godsake.’

‘Swear to God.’

‘Swear what?’

‘That you haven’t seen her.’

‘I swear it. Where’s Billie. Scully, where’s Billie?’

‘With me.’

‘Where are you? Lemme come and get you. Where?’

Scully pressed the tips of his boots against the wall. It was tempting, no joke. Let Alan come, let friends come. Let someone come and fix this whole business. But he couldn’t wait that long. Just the thought of Jennifer out there somewhere. Sick. Confused. Injured somehow. Or sweating on some disaster with the mail — waiting somewhere obvious without any way to contact him. Such a jumble of prospects and counter-thoughts. For a moment here he thought he might have chucked it in for the taste of the quiet moment, like this hour on the wharf without anxiety — the sound of the sea and birds and the sight of Billie — but the cold gnawing of not knowing was like a rip dragging on him. Not London. Not Hydra. He couldn’t stay here like this.

‘Scully? Please, where are you?’

‘Mate,’ he said. ‘I’m all over the place, believe me.’

He hung up and caught his change. Billie got resignedly to her feet.