‘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.