Of course. They’ve all had their own visions of Moira, caused by the water containing her essence. No wonder Geoff looks enthusiastic about going to meet her. He probably thinks he’s going to find some fantasy female with flowing hair and bouncy breasts – a Greek pin-up girl. ‘She will kill you if you get too close. Or you’ll kill each other.’
‘Don’t worry about us,’ says David. ‘We’ll take you to the cave, we’ll wait outside. When you shout for us, we’ll come in. We get it.’
But I don’t believe him. I don’t feel in control of them. They have their own agenda; I can read it on their faces.
‘We all need to be there,’ says Arnie. ‘This won’t work unless we’re there. David, go and order me a – an ouzo, is it? Whatever they drink around here.’
‘You’re sure?’
Arnie nods. As soon as David has left the table, he looks at Geoff. ‘Push off for a minute, lad, all right?’ Geoff gets up, uncomplaining, and slopes off in the direction of the sea.
I’m alone with my father for the first time in months. ‘Right,’ he says. ‘It’s like this. This is David’s fight, not yours. It’s not a woman’s place to take on Fate. You know that.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘The only way this is going to work is if you let David take her on. He touched her, on the island, didn’t he? And somehow he survived. It’s made him too powerful. Like in the big stories of old. Like Ulysses, and Theseus, and all that.’
‘Even those heroes couldn’t beat Fate.’
‘But you think you can?’ He slumps back in his chair, and puts one hand on his forehead. ‘Don’t argue with me, Marianne. I’ve seen it.’
And that, in his eyes, should be the end of the argument. He’s a wise man. Born that way. He has a natural advantage over me, over all women.
He is utterly full of shit and he will never see it. How he loves the high ground, doing what he thinks is best, thinking it’s the only way. Forging letters from my mother and destroying the real letters, deciding I should never know the truth, making such decisions in the name of being a father. And yet failing to be a father in the way that mattered – by listening to me.
But he will listen to me now.
I pick up my beer and throw it in his face.
He is astonished. The beer drips from his grizzled hair, his eyebrows, his nose and chin. He opens his mouth and shuts it.
I hand him a napkin. ‘Didn’t see that coming, did you?’
He mops at his face.
‘So it turns out you don’t see everything after all. You don’t see me. You never did. That’s because I am not under Fate’s control. I’m not a hero or a villain. I don’t have to be David’s little helper, and I will never be able to predict the future. That’s because the future isn’t already written for me. Only men are controlled by Moira, not women. Now do you understand why I can win this fight? I’m not under her control. I’m not under anyone’s control. Not even yours.’
He doesn’t reply. He crumples up the napkin and drops it on the table.
‘I’m sorry that my mother left us and chose a different life. But that was her choice. Not yours. And you have always been too much of a fucking idiot to understand it.’
I stand up and walk off, down to the beach, to where Geoff is picking up pebbles and attempting to skim them across the waves. He’s rubbish at it. I watch him for a while, feeling Arnie’s gaze on my back, making my shoulder-blades prickle.
‘Not enough wrist,’ I tell him, and pick up a stone to demonstrate. It skims three, four, times, before losing all energy and sinking to the bottom. My father taught me how to skim stones when I was very little. We used to go to Camber Sands for holidays, and I’d amaze the other kids with my skimming ability.
I turn around and look up, to the bar. Arnie has gone. He’s probably inside, complaining to David about me, telling him they should leave me behind in the morning.
Over my dead body.
Geoff tries to emulate my skimming style and fails dismally. ‘I never could do this,’ he says.
‘Practice.’
‘That’s what everyone says, but I’ve been practising all my life at everything and I’m still rubbish. Do you know what it’s like to not be good at anything? I bet you don’t.’
‘David said you were a big help to him.’
He looks pleased with this. ‘Yeah, I did a good job, clearing that whole mess up. Sam said—’ He claps a hand over his mouth.
‘It’s all right. I know who Sam is.’
I know enough, anyway. More than I want to know. She’s in David’s life when I am not, and I have no right to hate her for that. But I do anyway.
The sea moves quietly, drawing closer to my feet, then pulling back: an eternal pattern. Behind us, the pop music from the bar changes to a slower song. Geoff sings along, words about not wanting to fall asleep, not wanting to miss a thing.
Suddenly it seems important to find out more about him. ‘Don’t you listen to music at home sometimes?’ I ask him.
‘Not really. I watch telly. Do you like EastEnders?’
‘No, not my kind of thing. Do you live alone?’
‘With my parents.’
‘They must be getting on. I hope you don’t mind me asking – how old are you?’ He looks on the wrong side of middle age but his behaviour is so young, even immature. It’s difficult to get the measure of him.
‘Look,’ says Geoff. ‘It’s not really a big deal, is it? I don’t mind talking about stuff if you like, but I get the feeling you should concentrate on what we came here to do, right? Who cares if my favourite colour is yellow? I’m here to help David. He’s the important one.’
There is nothing I can say to that.
I wish there was something else in his life. I wish he wasn’t just a sidekick, had not been born that way. He is prepared to die for my husband, and he will get nothing in return.
I want to give him a memory that is not about David. So I reach out to him, and take his hands. I pull him into a rhythm, a step to the left, a step to the right, and we dance out the song while he sings along.
He knows every word.
‘This is it.’
The mouth of the cave yawns wide.
A bird overhead makes a curious sound, like a laugh, loud and mechanical. I look up into the clouds, but can’t see it.
It’s been a long morning. The men didn’t leave without me. When I awoke, David was waiting with coffee and a croissant, of all things, claiming to have found them in the minimart down the road. He watched me eat, and told me to wear practical clothes. I picked out trousers and a jumper, utilitarian, and he nodded. Then we went to find Geoff and Arnie.
We shared a car to get here: David driving, Arnie in the passenger seat, looking even worse than before, even though the only beer he swallowed last night was by accident when I threw it over him, Geoff in the back seat with me. The ring road around the island was clear, easy to negotiate, but when David turned off to take the mountain road it became pebbly, potholed. About a mile back we started to encounter debris on the road: rocks, branches. In some cases David had to stop the car and Geoff helped him to move these obstacles aside.
We passed a taverna, shut up, the wooden tables overturned to form a barricade against the front door. I thought I couldn’t feel any more scared, but the tables, in a haphazard, frantic pile, terrified me. It spoke of a future where everything is overturned, abandoned.
When we arrived at our destination, I found myself climbing from the car and into David’s arms. I’ve not been able to let go of him since. I hold his hand, so tight, as we approach the mouth, and stare into the darkness. There’s a set of steps, gouged out of the stone, worn by so many tourists’ feet, and an orange rope set into the wall by metal rings, making handholds. It looks so normal. I must be wrong. Moira must be somewhere else, far away, in a place I would never think of looking.