But there’s Violet (it’ll be Harriet next, I thought, with dread and fascination) in sudden hot tears because on a crowded and sullen Northern Line tube she’s just bought a stupid keyring from a deaf-and-dumb woman every other passenger in the carriage has stonily ignored. The tears because when the deaf-and-dumb woman (sixties, watery blue eyes, a furred mole above her top lip, the anorak and old butter smell of the poor) has smiled and said something incomprehensible, Violet, not wanting to engage beyond the mechanical charity, has responded with a look of puzzlement and okay-I’ve-bought-your-shit-now-please-go-away-and-leave-me-alone. Then, the woman turning away with a look of threadbare weariness, Violet’s realisation that the garbled phrase was ‘God bless you’. It holds her for a moment, this translation, poised on the brink of a shocking grief. The woman’s last look: You can’t understand me because I can’t talk properly; you don’t want me to talk to you because you’re afraid that I’m going to want something more from you – money, love, time, your life; you just want me to leave you alone; that’s all right, I know, but I was just saying thank you. All Vi’s childhood rushes up into her heart – the kids they made fun of, the tiny cruelties, the horrible guilt – all her adult excesses too, and thus with her heart full she looks down at the mute’s keyring. Its gimmick is a little sign language chart in clear plastic. On the reverse, it says: Learn my language and we can be friends! And this, this more than anything hitherto pitches her over the edge and she finds herself in tears, publicly – not discreet weeping, either, but audible boo-hooing and visible, body-shaking sobs . . .
We’re going to show you a familiar object seen from an unfamiliar angle. For ten points we’d like you to name the object . . .
I didn’t want to name any of them, believe me. The mixture of expansive bliss and barely contained panic had me flipping and flopping around on the bed like a landed fish until Harriet – Hell preserve her – got me still by climbing on the bed and lying on top of me.
At which point – shshsh, she kept saying, its all right, shshsh – at which point I’m afraid I capped the entire performance by shitting my pants and bursting into tears.
Hydra is a small island in the Aegean, south of Poros, northeast of Spetses, three hours out by thudding ferry from the sun-and-diesel headache of Piraeus. No cars on the island. No motorized traffic of any kind, in fact; just long-eyelashed donkeys and seen-better-days nags, standing patiently or in existential nullity in the sun by the dock, or clopping in no rush up the pink and silver cobbles, carrying deliveries, tourists, luggage, their burnished haunches sexy as an oiled stripper’s, thin shadows tacked and rippling at their hooves.
You get there, you’ve entered a different time zone. Local population’s less than 2,000. The harbour’s a long crescent inlaid with a single row of jewellery shops and restaurants, with a museum fort at one end and a sprawling cocktail bar at the other. Boats wobble and nod in their moorings. Sunlight bounces off the water and marbles their hulls. The sky is a high, stretched skin of pure ultramarine. Occasionally, stratos clouds. Very rarely, hilarious thunderstorms. In summer the heat and the silence form a tangible conspiracy in the air around you; you can close your eyes and lean on them, drift into blankness or dream. Nothing is required of you. One nightclub in the hills serves touring youngsters and desperate local teens (trapped in paradise, dying to get out), but in the harbour it’s gentle bars with elastic hours and capricious prices where you can talk without ever having to raise your voice. They go in for complex cocktails served like desserts in glasses the size of soup bowls. There’s an open air cinema – a roofless yard with a rattling projector and roll-down screen, where, under the wings of Cygnus and the skirts of the Pleiades, you can watch Hollywood’s spectacles six years after the rest of the world’s stopped talking about them. Intermission’s an indecorous halt at the film’s guessed mid-point (mid-scene, mid-sentence, mid-syllable); then coffee as thick as mercury in plastic thimble cups, a leg-stretch, a Marlboro. All the kids here run around unsupervised into the small hours. Unfortunately, nothing happens to them.
Unsuccessful and inevitably priapic painters (Panamas, nicotine fingertips, boozy breath and artfully uncared-for hair) emigrate here to become big fish in Hydra’s tiny pond. Their skin goes brown, their pleasures simplify, they let themselves go – scribbles of white chest hair over Tiresian dugs, sun-oiled pot-bellies like dark tureens, scrawny knees, languid affairs, the occasional pilgrimage to Athens for worldlier revels. They let the old life of irritated ambition slide away, discover it was an unnecessary encumbrance. Tourists buy their work because they have no idea who they are. It keeps them in silk shirts, cigarettes, whisky.
Hydrofoils come bouncing in as if from outer space every couple of hours, deposit and retrieve their posse of visitors. Or the slower, heftier ferry rolls up with its gradually opening maw and endless disgorgement of gabbling passengers: this is the sort of place tourists stop at for an hour or two, Brummies with attention span deficits – ‘Ent much in the woiya shops, iz there, Rodge?’ – or proprietal New Yorkers with laconic tips on how to reorganize the menus, the donkeys, the language, the island. Tabacs are run, alcoholically, by moustached dads and their chirpy, white-frocked daughters; the dads spend the day smoking, reading the papers, drinking, lifting their grogged heads now and then to bawl or bellow at their girls, who pay not the slightest attention to them, knowing it’s all bluff and bluster, knowing, in fact, that they’ve got these old soaks at their mercy. The dads are no less resigned. Moments of magisterial bullying in front of the customers (whom they suspect aren’t fooled in any case) but what they really want is to stay just as they are, hammocked in afternoon booze, rocked now and then by the brush of a passing daughter’s hip.
And this is what, exactly? A commission from Let’s Go?
Oh boy, I wish it was. I wish it was as simple as that. Listen to this.
‘What time is it?’
‘Seven twenty-three. Calm down.’
‘Yes, I must, mustn’t I. God. Fucking God. How’s your headache?’
‘Coming along nicely.’
‘Are you sure you told them you were bringing me?’
Violet was sitting next to me at the hotel bar on a high stool with her little legs crossed. Short black cocktail dress, black stockings, black high heels, one of which she let hang on her toes. (She’s still not sure whether letting a shoe hang like that is stylish or slutty. She’s still experimenting.) She was so resentful. Resentment hummed around her like a force field, creating – it must be admitted – a terrible sex appeal when it surrounded the milky and generously freckled shoulders, the avocado-sized breasts, the flinty blue eyes and pre-Raph hair. Again, you see, like my darling unmolested Tracy, not at all gorgeous, but irresistibly human, dappled with physical imperfections (the Pricker would have had a field day with Vi’s beige moles and carnelian nodules) and riddled with psychic ones. I couldn’t – I could not – quite shake the image of her in tears on the Tube, nor disentangle it from the one of her endless narcissism before the mirror on the back of her bathroom door. No wonder my head ached.
Which rationalization notwithstanding, I still suspected something darker afoot, some twitch on the perceptual periphery, some edge, some conspiracy, some chill . . .
‘Oh Jesus Christ. Jesus Jesus Jesus Christ. Declan that’s . . . Declan?’