I need him to kiss me.
I lift my face to his and claim him, keep on kissing him, until he belongs to me again. At some point during the process he moves me backwards, shuts the door, shuffles me to the sofa and cradles me on his lap. He touches me, takes off my clothes, so I take off his, and we sit together, naked, not passionate so much as still and whole in the dusk, overlooking the dolphin mosaic in the deep blue pool.
We make love. He says, ‘Like this?’ as he strokes me, very gently, and I sit astride him, lower myself on to him, rock back and forth and take pleasure in him. The dusk turns to dark, and the room is shadowed when we disentangle ourselves and pull apart, just enough to let the world start moving again. Questions are coming, with difficult answers. But not just yet. Not yet.
He takes my hands and leads me to the kitchen, then pours himself some water from the bottle next to the sink. The salad looks even worse off than before.
‘Were you going to eat that?’ he says.
‘It was all I bought at the minimart.’
‘Is it wrong to go for pizza instead?’ ‘I could eat pizza.’ Like a normal holiday. The thought of it makes me smile. It’s perfection.
‘It’s freezing in here,’ he says. He puts down the glass and pulls me back into his arms.
‘Terrible.’
‘It’s not even that cold outside.’
‘I know.’
‘Arnie’s here.’
‘What?’ I pull back, look into David’s face. There is a cut just under one eye, drawing attention to the lines of his cheekbones. I see guilt in his gaze, and determination.
‘Rebecca wrote and told me what you’ve been planning. She asked me to come and talk to you. Reason with you not to do this alone. She and Inger are worried about you. So I came; I had to come and find you, and Arnie said he had to come too.’
‘Arnie was worried about me too?’ The idea of it is incongruous with the mental image I have of my father in The Cornerhouse, flirting with the barmaid, drinking until it’s easy to slump in the corner and dream of a different life.
David caresses the back of my neck. We are still naked, and it’s wrong for this conversation. How quickly it’s become serious. And the big questions are here already, knocking on the door. I move away from him, back to my clothes, and start to dress.
‘Arnie sees the future.’
Of course. All men are heroes, villains, sages or sidekicks. Arnie is a wise man, even though I’ve been trying to make him the villain in my personal story. ‘So what did he see?’
‘He saw us all in the cave. You, me, him and Geoff.’
‘Who the hell is Geoff?’
‘He helped me out.’
‘He’s your sidekick.’ So David the Hero has a team. But who have they been playing against? As David puts on his jeans and shirt I think about the cut under his eye, and suddenly I see that he has diverged from me, led his own story into new and disturbing directions. ‘Did Arnie and Geoff help you find the man who attacked me? Is that it?’
David nods.
‘And did you…’
‘I’ve dealt with him.’
Shouldn’t I feel freed by this information? Instead I’m horrified at what has happened, what I set in motion. ‘How? What… What did you…?’
He moves to the open window, turns his back to me, and says, ‘He asked if you could forgive him, at the end. He said he was sorry.’
‘He was sorry?’
‘The police took him away. For a different crime. Another attack. No need for you to testify. It’s done with. You asked me to deal with it, and I did.’
I go to him, press myself against his back, and feel the tension in his shoulders, his legs. ‘Thank you.’
‘Does that help?’
‘Does it?’ I do the only thing I can. I lie. ‘Yes, that helps. Like you say, it’s done with. You dealt with it.’
There never will be a time when it will be done with. No matter what happens to my attacker, no matter what happens to me. It will be inside my head forever, and I will circle it, like a moth around a bulb, forever getting too close to it, forever getting scorched by that memory. Sometimes I think it would be better to be dead, but I go on, just the same.
Yet more cowardice on my part. I don’t deserve David. I’m beginning to think that I never did.
He turns, and hugs me so tight, as if forgiving the untruths we have just told each other. ‘Arnie and Geoff are sharing an apartment on the other side of the complex. Let’s go and get them and plan our next move over pizza.’
‘There is no next move. I’m going to a cave tomorrow, up in the mountains. On my own. You’re going home. It’s the only way I can do this.’
‘We’ll see,’ he says, in a tone I recognise, and I realise this will have to be a negotiation. When a hero walks into a story, he doesn’t do as he’s told.
An Irish bar that claims to serve the best pint of Guinness on Crete is still open, one in a row of seafront eateries that have shut for the season, and it serves two types of pizza: margherita or Irish sausage. Only Geoff plumped for the sausage option. The waiter brought out discs of undercooked dough with scattered blobs of cheese and tomato on the surface. The Irish sausage pizza is huge and floppy, with a peculiarly yellow cheese, upon which the diced sausage floats. Geoff cuts off strips of pizza, folds them up, and pops them into his mouth as if sampling a delicacy. It’s ridiculous to still care about food at a time like this, but I find I do. I can’t help it. That’s part of being human, perhaps: caring about what you smell, taste, see and hear even when you might be dead tomorrow. Because you might be dead tomorrow.
We are sitting outside, between two space heaters that are doing a fine job of keeping the night’s chill away, around a rough, circular wooden table positioned for a view over the pebbly beach and the rippling sea. It makes a shushing sound, only audible when there’s a pause between pop songs coming from the interior of the empty bar. So far we have concentrated on eating, but I have to take control of the situation and turn their attention back to what I’ve come here to do. Without their interference.
‘Here’s what we know,’ I say, hoping I sound like a general addressing the troops in a key moment of a hard-fought war. ‘The Ideon Andron is a cave on Mount Ida, only ten minutes’ drive away. It’s a tourist attraction now, so it’s fairly easy to get to.’ I think of the video footage I watched on YouTube. Holidaymakers stood around the large mouth of the cave in summer heat, waving at the camera, sunglasses reflecting back, and then the scene panned away over to the sea while a Demis Roussos song swelled up to monstrous proportions. ‘There are four chambers, and the… person I’m looking for is in the last one. She’s very dangerous to men, but she won’t hurt me. So I’ll go in alone, retrieve the statue that belongs back on Skein Island, and then call for you to come and take it away, okay?’
‘I thought we were hunting a monster,’ says Geoff, mournfully, like a child being told the trip to Disneyland is off. I remember him from the library. He would come in every month or so and take out an adventure novel – Wilbur Smith or Clive Cussler – and often he’d bring them back late and have to pay a fine. All I really know about him is that he’s a slow reader. Now I find I like him and pity him in equal measure.
‘Who told you that?’ I ask him.
He points at David. ‘I told them what I knew,’ he says.
‘A goddess,’ says Arnie. ‘Fate.’ It’s the first time he’s spoken since his pizza arrived. It lies untouched before him, as does his beer. Pale and with a permanent frown, he looks familiarly hungover. I wonder if he drank too much on the plane.
‘They’ve played the cubes too.’ David shrugs.