Bound to You (2 page)

‘So you haven’t forgotten about the wedding this weekend, have you?’ I asked him as we ate.

Mouth full, he shook his head.

‘Rachel texted me again today. She wanted to know what I was going to wear. I haven’t even thought about it.’

‘I’ll tell you what you’re going to wear!’ Christos affected his ‘Master’ voice. ‘That dress you wore to my graduation dinner. The cream netted one with the red flowers, the prom dress, silk, shows off your . . . assets.’ He said assets in a filthy whisper and added a dirty ‘Hehheh.’ Christos loved to play at being what he called ‘a sleazy Greek’.

I laughed again. ‘And what about you? Will you wear that very expensive, impulse-purchased designer shirt that you only wore ONCE to the charity ball, Christos?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’ll ask my sister to send me a new one.’

‘But you look like a Jean Paul Gaultier model in that shirt! Please wear it,’ I pleaded.

‘Ha! You mean I look like a gay underwear model and I’ll get hit on by loads of men and you will find it hilarious again!’

‘Well, it’s not your fault you’re so good-looking gay guys fancy you. If society only valued heterosexual male beauty as much as it did female, it wouldn’t be a problem. Anyway,’ I smirked, ‘you mean I’ll get off on it again.’

‘Nichi!’ he growled, pretending to chastise me for being what he would call crude. ‘Look, I don’t worry about gay men hitting on me; it’s a compliment! Besides, I’m getting so old. Soon we are going to be withered and toothless and saggy and hairy and no one will fancy us, Nichi
mou
.’

‘I will always fancy you,’ I said softly. ‘Unless you carry on doing that weird scrunchy thing you do with your feet when you think the floor is dirty.’

‘But Nichi
mou
,’ he replied in a grave voice, ‘if I stop doing that then I will probably die of a terrible disease long before I become withered.’

‘Yeah, or hypochondria!’

‘It’s a Greek word, you know, hypochondria!’ he said, triumphantly.

‘Yes, Christos, I know,’ I said, rolling my eyes.

‘And if I stop doing that thing with my feet, my penis will rot off, just to spite you, because you didn’t believe me!’

I shook my head and laughed in spite of myself. These ridiculous conversations. Christos had an almost pathological obsession with his own decay.

‘Ah!! You don’t have an answer to that one, do you! Do you, Nichi
mou
, you want me to KEEP my penis!’

‘I want you to shut up talking about your penis and plan this wedding trip with me, please!’

‘Feisty. I like you feisty.’

Still laughing, I pressed on. ‘So I don’t think we need to stay over. Rachel says we can drive back to London that evening. Only that means you can’t drink.’

‘Oh, I don’t care about that.’

‘Well, it should be the other way round really, since I don’t even like drinking that much.’

‘Ha! No, Nichi
mou
, I’m going to get you drunk so I can take advantage of you.’

‘Like at your graduation dinner, you mean?’

Christos and I had a habit of slipping off to have sex in the toilets on formal occasions. Usually just before dessert was served. When I mentioned one of these episodes to my friend Gina, she asked me how I managed not to ruin my dress. ‘By taking it off. There’s usually a peg you can hang it on, somewhere.’ I was never sure who instigated this cocktail cottaging, as I called it. We just always seemed to know instinctively when the other was up for it.

‘You exploited me that time. You told me I reminded you of the Turkish Delight Man.’

The Turkish Delight Man was a tanned, turbaned nomad who featured in a TV advert I had been utterly obsessed with as a child. He trekked through the desert to bring a tearful princess Turkish Delight to mend her broken heart, before slicing it in front of her with his scimitar. Even at the age of four I suspected the scimitar was meant to represent something else.

‘Well, you do remind me of the Turkish Delight Man, Christos
mou
! And any other number of delicious exotic poster boys!’

I’d always been a shameful exoticist. In contrast to my own light-skinned, light-eyed, blonde colouring, I loved dark-haired, olive-skinned men. And when I met Christos it was impossible to admire anyone else.

‘Nichi, it’s ridiculous that you remember that advert, nearly as ridiculous as you being mesmerised by David Bowie’s crotch in
Labyrinth
.’

‘But EVERY girl of my generation was obsessed with That Crotch, Christos, you have to understand. And at the end when King Jareth offers himself up as Sarah’s slave. Why does she refuse him?’

‘Because she knows what’s sexy. And it’s not that! I’ll never understand David Bowie. It’s where our cultures clash.’

I laughed. It had always been a source of amazement for both of us that, in fact, we hadn’t experienced any real culture clash. We had grown up in such different worlds, and yet it never caused a problem.

I was born and brought up in Wakefield, a former mining town in West Yorkshire that before its brief coal-driven heyday, had last been truly significant during the Wars of the Roses. Still, I was happy growing up there with my younger brother and our various pets, running my parents ragged as they ferried me to my endless dancing and gymnastics classes, Brownies then Guides, and brass band practice, constantly in need of stimulation and a stage on which to perform.

My parents divorced when I was nine and after the usual bout of awkwardness, they were genial enough to attend all our various birthdays or school plays or parents’ evenings together. With my dad only ten minutes up the road, life soon settled down into cheerful suburban normality again.

At eleven, I went to a prim, studious girls’ school where, when not concerned with getting into dinner on the first sitting or endlessly redecorating my hymn book, I was mostly obsessed with becoming a Shakespearean actress, and ploughed all my extracurricular energies into school plays and musical ensembles. Later, I was ferociously independent and hadn’t lived at home since I was eighteen years old and went off to university. I felt close to both my parents and Alistair, my brother, but now that my mum lived in Australia, although we spoke often on the phone, meeting up was a once-a-year event.

Despite being based for the most part in Athens, Christos’s family were more present in his daily life than mine were. They knew what friends he saw, where we went at weekends, and always what we had for dinner. But I appreciated their involvement for what it was – absolute care. They had welcomed me into their fold, more formally than warmly at first, but they always asked after me. I knew they were touched that I had made the attempt to learn Greek. I would be visiting them for the third time at the end of the summer, just before Christos began his PhD. I was already looking forward to it.

As if on cue, Christos’s mother called.

‘
Giasou
, Mama!’

I cleared the plates away and went into our shabby kitchen as they chatted about Christos’s day. The more Greek I knew, the more invasive it seemed to listen to their conversations. But I couldn’t fail to hear ‘
Melitzanes
, Mama!’, which made me smile.

I noticed that Christos had tried to prettify the windowsill with a pot plant he knew would die at my hands within the next few weeks. He had also bought me a pink elephant watering can as an encouragement to care for it.

Suddenly Christos’s voice broke into my thoughts. Was he arguing with his mother? I paused, holding the knife I had been drying, and tried to decode the frantic Greek. I could pick out the odd thing. References to the garage. Work. Helping your father. Christos had spent most of his childhood and teenage years helping with his father’s garage. All that tinkering with filthy engines was part of the reason he’d decided to study engineering. I carried on filling up the cutlery drawer. Soon, he said goodbye to her and I wandered back into the room.

‘What was all that about?’

‘Just Mama being Mama,’ he shrugged, smiling and cracked his shoulders. ‘OK, I’m going to take a shower. How am I still wearing these clothes?’

Christos was interning at a shipping company before he went back to studying, and was dressed in office smarts, white shirt, charcoal trousers. There was little he looked better in. He started to unbutton the shirt. Underneath was a white T-shirt. I’d never figured out why he needed that too.

‘It would be shameful not to wear a T-shirt underneath!’

‘What, because we could see your nipples?’

‘Nichi!’ That chastising growl again. ‘No, because it would bring shame on my family. Are you going to have a shower with me too, Nichi
mou
?’ he asked, advancing to where I stood watching him undress, and sliding his hands over my hips. He pretended to be sleazy again.

‘No, I already had one before you came home.’ I replied. ‘But I might take all my clothes off and get into bed and wait for you.’

Quickly, coyly, I pulled off my jersey dress.

‘Yes. That is how I like my woman!’

I rolled my eyes at him once again, and kneeling on the bed in my diaphanous blue underwear, underwear that Christos had bought me, I reached up to plump the pillows. Suddenly, something struck me across my backside.

‘Hey! What’s going on?’ I cried, startled, clutching my stinging right cheek.

Christos stood there in his candy-striped boxers, brandishing the black leather belt. He was laughing uncontrollably. ‘Sorry Nichi
mou
, sorry, I guess I just whipped it off too quickly.’ He had accidentally caught me with the tail end of it as pulled it out of the loop on his trousers.

‘Well, do you want to watch what you’re whipping next time, please!’

‘Ha ha. I WHIPPED you. Hilarious!’

When Christos came back he had a question for me. ‘So, Nichi, what do you think about people that like being whipped?’

‘Doesn’t do it for me,’ I replied. ‘And I suppose you have to wonder why people enjoy it in the first place. Especially women.’

‘I don’t trust it either,’ Christos agreed. ‘But what do you think, is it a kind of self-harm for women, Nichi
mou
?’

‘Probably,’ I said. ‘There’s just something about that makes me feel uncomfortable. And anyway, why would you need it if you were having perfectly hot sex in the first place?’

‘Exactly!’ Christos grinned and pulled me into him.

Early the next morning Christos’s phone rang. ‘Mama!’ he murmured, barely forming the word with his lips. As she spoke and he listened, I watched his forehead solidify into creases, until he looked like a pained classical statue.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I’ve really got to go help at the garage this weekend. I’ll just fly over on Friday evening after work and come back Monday morning.’

I felt a prickle of annoyance. It was already Wednesday. ‘Isn’t it a bit of a long way to go just for the weekend? Are they that desperate?’ Christos’s parents worked so hard and I knew that they struggled without him but something about this summoning of him and his readiness to go, set a faint alarm bell ringing.

‘They need me, Nichi
mou
. it’s not like it happens all the time.’ He pulled me to him and stroked my cheek. ‘I’ll miss you, Golden Egg, but you’ll be all right. It’ll only be a couple of nights.’

“OK, well, if they need you,” I sighed.

“But it means I can’t go to the wedding, Nichi
mou
.”

Oh. The wedding.

Later that day, following Christos’s announcement, I decided that I had to try and find a way to attend the wedding alone. I wasn’t looking forward to the inevitable ‘where’s your perfect Christos?’ remarks when I turned up without the Greek hero, but it mattered far more that I was there for Laura.

Since I didn’t have a driving licence, I had been depending on Christos driving us up from London to rural Oxfordshire and back on the day to attend the wedding. I made a new travel plan which involved taking a train, a bus and then a cab to reach the venue. But it would also require me to stay over at a local hotel. I rang around some of them that afternoon, but with just two days’ notice, they were all fully booked.

On Thursday, I had no choice but to call Laura and tell her I couldn’t make it. It was a slap in the face of our friendship to let Laura down at this stage, and it had sickened me to explain why I could no longer be there. But the fact of the matter was that without Christos, there was just no way that I could get to the wedding.

That evening when I met Christos at our local pub for a drink, I told him that I’d phoned Laura to officially excuse us. Christos didn’t seem to understand the significance of what I’d just had to do and instead made blithe chat about Laura and her fiancé Craig.

‘So the happy couple have been together since they were sixteen, eh? Aww, that’s lovely!’

Christos had a sentimental streak to rival a Latin soap opera. From time to time we listened to a late-night Greek radio show over the internet, which mainly consisted of septagenarian men and women ringing in to read poetry about their lost loves. The presenter, with her smoke-and-silk voice, would lament with them and Christos would wistfully imagine the day he too would join their ranks.

‘Yep, since sixteen. I remember when they first got it on. And where. It was in our friend’s nightclub in Leeds.’

‘Sixteen and you were clubbing, Nichi
mou
!’

‘Thirteen and I was clubbing, actually!’ I laughed, correcting him.

‘So – Nichi . . .’ Christos affected the sleazy Greek. ‘Does that mean they’ve only ever had sex with each other? Imagine! One person! How would you even know if you were doing it right?’

‘Erm, I think you’d know, Christos!’

‘Like the first time we tried to have sex and we failed, you mean?’

This memory still made me wince. Apparently, the first time we ended up in bed together I was too anxious to make love and Christos had had to stop. I say ‘apparently’ because I have absolutely no recollection of this, and Christos had to tell me. I presume my amnesia related to my guilt, because the fact of the matter was that Christos and I had started out as an affair. Technically, when I met Christos, I was already boyfriended, to a beautiful serious man who had very admirably gone off to do aid work in South America while I completed my final year.