Bound to You (7 page)

‘Christos, DON’T. I thought it was an
octopodia
!’ Ever since Christos had described how you catch an octopus, plunging your hand into its mouth and turning it inside out, bashing it to tenderising death on a rock, how sometimes if you weren’t quick enough it would wrap its desperate tentacles around your forearms and wrists, I had an almost monomaniacal fear of meeting one in the water. I knew they had to be dragged out of their holes, but still.

Christos laughed and laughed, then started to coo at me, kissing my cheek in comfort when he saw I was actually distressed. ‘Nichi
mou
,’ he pulled me towards him, ‘no octopodia is going to get you while I’m around.’

‘But what if one day I meet one alone? It’s not impossible that it could have got into the swimming pool.’

‘It’s pretty impossible. Why do you love to torture yourself with such thoughts? You’re like Doubting Thomas with your finger in your own wound!’

I shuddered again. ‘Please can we not talk about wounds. They are not a suitable topic of discussion for a romantic swim. Let’s talk about . . .’ I broke off, letting my legs float up and around him.

‘Let’s talk about . . . this,’ he suggested, pulling me tighter around him. He had a burgeoning erection.

‘Do you want to go up to the room?’ Christos gave a half-smile.

Suddenly I felt exhausted, as if the adrenaline that had flooded my body in panic over the imaginary octopus had drained me of all my desire. What was wrong with me, why did I feel so out of sorts? ‘Yes.’ I said. ‘I’m tired. I need a nap.’

When I woke up a couple of hours later I was determined to be in a better mood. Even if the whole issue of Christos moving out was still dragging at my mood, we were here now. I needed to appreciate the treat and put the hurt to bed, so to speak. We couldn’t afford any more discord.

I decided to wear my new white dress for dinner. It had a gathered peasant-style bodice and full skirt and I knew that Christos would appreciate it.

He came out of the bathroom, a white towel wrapped around his waist. ‘Ooh, be careful!’ I warned him. ‘You’re very provocative to me with that tan. That tan against the towel.’

He grinned as he came over to where I stood in front of the mirror, kissed my neck, then murmured, ‘Can I watch you do your make-up?’

I patted his backside. ‘Of course.’

Christos had a thing about watching me paint my face. I wouldn’t have called it a fetish. More a fixation. Mainly, he loved watching me apply mascara. I didn’t wear a lot of make-up in Greece, but tonight I applied a blue mascara Christos had bought me to accentuate my green eyes.

‘Why do you like watching?’ I asked him.

‘I don’t know. It’s just mesmerising.’

‘The French don’t call it
maquillage
for nothing.’

‘Ha,’ said Christos, stroking my neck again. ‘Yes. French for deception. Camouflage.’

‘Did you wear camouflage paint in the army, Christos?’ I was teasing him, but I felt odd. When did this bantering with my boyfriend become so self-conscious?

‘No, Nichi. But I wore camouflage pants. And dog tags. And boots. And no shirt. And a nice, wide, well-polished leather belt.’

‘Speaking of your belt, why didn’t you hurry up and put it on, Sergeant? This almost birthday girl wants dinner.’

That evening we dined on the hotel’s terrace and chatted about our previous trips to Greece. ‘Do you remember the first birthday I spent here, Christos? We had wine that night. You got me drunk, and then the next day we had to have lunch with your grandparents and it was so, so hot, and I was hung-over and trying to show your mum and sister I appreciated the dress they had bought me by wearing it over my jeans . . .’

‘The dress that was meant for an English autumn, not a Greek summer,’ Christos interjected.

‘Yes – exactly – and halfway through, your dad leant across the table, winked at me, and slipped me some paracetamol.’

Even now I buried my head in my hands at the memory, but Christos just laughed, and before long I was giggling, too. This felt better. This was more like the kind of dinner we were used to enjoying before the matter of the PhD had sullied things.

When we got back to our room Christos took his shirt off, then his shoes, then stepped out on to the balcony and lit a cigarette.

I stood at the other side of the glass for a moment, admiring him: his virile physique, the way he blew smoke out artfully across the water between his bounteous lips.

He caught me looking at him and grinned. ‘Are you perving on me, Nichi
mou
? Just because I’m smoking with my shirt off?’

‘Precisely because you’re smoking with your shirt off.’ I grinned back.

I went out to join him. He slung his arm around my waist, loosely at first, then winched me into him until I gasped for breath.

‘Ah, now you can’t get away from me! You can never escape, Nichi
mou
, I’m going to have you bound up in my grip forever!’

I started laughing.

‘Do you remember the first time we kissed, Nichi
mou
?’

‘Of course. It was on one of our midnight walks. It was October. You were wearing gloves. As you came towards me, you slid your hand out of one. Almost sinisterly!’

‘Ha! Well, if it was the left one, the
sinistra
one, that would make sense. See, even then you thought I was a sleazy Greek.’

‘I thought I you were gorgeous. I thought I was in love already.’

‘But I was the one who said it first.’

‘Well, yes, but what you actually said was, “I think I’m in love with you.” Which was somehow more romantic.’

Suddenly, I was agitated again. Talking about how we met, about the first flowering of our love, was upsetting me. Ever since we’d first got together, Christos and I had been inseparable. How could Christos genuinely bear the thought of living apart now?

‘What’s wrong, Nichi
mou
?’

‘I’m too hot,’ I complained. ‘And too full.’

‘Nichi
mou
, that was a very small dinner.’

‘But I’ve barely moved all day. OK, I’m going to have a shower than lie down.’

‘Shall I join you?’

Christos still had his arm around me.

‘If you like.’

He looked at my face thoughtfully. ‘No, you shower alone. I think you need your space.’

When I got out, Christos was undoing his belt. ‘I’m going to have a quick shower too.’

In little more than a minute he was back. ‘Just a quickie! Heh heh.’

His sleazy Greek act seemed almost unbearably poignant tonight because . . . because what, I wondered. Then I swallowed hard and confessed it to myself. Because we weren’t going to make love. Because here we were in this aphrodisiacal treat of a hotel and I was hiding behind an excuse of fatigue, again. And why was I hiding behind an excuse? Because I didn’t want to admit to myself that there was now something heartbreakingly, irrevocably, hope-shatteringly, wrong with Christos and me. And I couldn’t make love to him any more.

Christos climbed on to the bed, wrapped up in a white robe. It was nicer than the ones the private patients at the hospital received for convalescence in their thousand-pound-a-night rooms. Christos sat propped up against the luxurious pillows, right leg gently flopping to the side. For the first time ever, I saw him as vulnerable. As forlorn and lonely. Then he turned to me and smiled.

There was no expectation in his smile. Just love.

I went back into the bathroom, and wept.

I lay awake long into the night. Christos soothed me, hugged me, and I clung to him, desperately trying to convince myself that we could get things back on track but sleep eluded me. My mind turned over and over. I kept switching between determination to do whatever it took to get us through the PhD, even if that meant living apart, and a cold fear that we weren’t going to make it.

The next day we had a room service breakfast and a late check-out, as if going through the motions of romance. I went for a proper swim and Christos got stuck into his textbook. At around four in the afternoon we set off, back to Christos’s parents’ house.

We’d been driving about twenty minutes when Christos’s phone started to ring. ‘
Gia sou
, Mama.’ Christos’s parents were back from the coast.

I was too tired to concentrate on their conversation and started to doze off. I wanted to get home, have a shower, eat out on the terrace, preferably in my nightie, and go to bed. About an hour later I woke abruptly from a fitful nap. Christos had pulled on the brakes hard as we hit the evening traffic. I was in one of those foul, sleep-interrupted moods. And I was getting a migraine.

‘Nichi
mou
, so Mama said Giagia and Papous want us to go round for dinner.’

These were Christos’s grandparents on his father’s side.

‘Go round when?’

‘Now. We’re only half an hour away. Giagia was complaining that you’re nearly due back home already and she hasn’t seen you.’

I was puzzled. ‘But she knows she’ll see me on Sunday. We always have the last lunch before I go home with her and Papous.’

‘Come on, Nichi. They’re old, they want to see their family.’

‘Christos, do we have to have dinner with them? I’m getting a migraine. I’m so tired. I don’t feel well. Look at what I’m wearing.’ I had thrown a cheap, creased sundress over my bikini as we had left, and hadn’t bothered to wash my hair after swimming. ‘I can’t go round like this. It’s disrespectful!’

‘It’s more disrespectful if we don’t go when they are expecting us.’

‘But they didn’t ask! They told us. You told me!’

He was glowering. ‘You’re being unreasonable. It’s no trouble to go round to theirs for dinner, especially not when you’re starving. Think about them for once.’

Christos just didn’t get it. This wasn’t about dinner, it was about decisions being made for me. Again. Last night I had been torn between total commitment to make our relationship work and terror that it might not. But now I felt defiant. What was the point putting the effort in when there was no compromise here?

I couldn’t carry on feeling this stifled. Christos had never treated me as a submissive wife-in-waiting and I wasn’t about to start now. When I got back to London, I decided, I would be fully utilising my newfound freedom. I loved Christos like nothing else but maybe it was time to build a more independent life for myself. Maybe this was all going to turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

I just couldn’t quite feel how yet.

In the passport queue at Heathrow, I started to shiver. It was already autumn in London. I reached around for my denim jacket, which was knotted around the strap of my bag. It was still damp. All the way back from Greece, I had sobbed into it, sat with it wrapped about my face like a widow’s veil. After my emotional parting from Christos, I had wanted to be left alone to cry in peace, and I knew the genial Greek flight attendants would be distressed for me, and only try to offer comfort, comfort that nobody, not even Christos, could bring.

Now, back in Britain, I was feeling fractionally better. Well, perhaps not better, but resolute. I had cried myself into calm and was ready to face the flat again. Originally we had intended to move out at the end of August but there was no way I could move all of our stuff alone, so we had kept it on for a few more weeks. Christos’s friend Markos had, in the meantime, bought an apartment in the Docklands. That would be Christos’s new home. And my new residence? A room in a shared flat south of the river, where I knew neither the neighbourhood, nor the other tenant.

Back at our flat, I flung my jacket, bag and suitcase on the floor, lay down on the bed and started playing out the last few days’ events in my mind.

Dinner with the grandparents had been bearable in the end. Christos’s parents and his cousin had also joined us, which saved me from being the sole target of Giagia Georgia’s inquisition.

The next morning, Christos and I took a trip to the village where his mother was born.

‘There’s a small local festival on today,’ he told me, ‘and the main church will have been decorated by the villagers. It’ll be very pretty. I know how you love to get your Orthodox fix, Egg!’

Mama’s village was a two-and-a-half-hour drive away from the house and not on any map. I hoped Christos knew the way. In the night, the air conditioning had broken down and neither of us got a decent night’s sleep. ‘Are you sure you want to drive when you’re so tired, Christos
mou
?’

‘Yes of course. We need to get out of the house.’

‘But we could just check into a hotel if we wanted to do that! Remember? Like that time in Yorkshire at Christmas when we desperately needed some time alone together?’

I was being flippant but Christos failed to catch it.

‘
Arketa
, Nichi,’ he snapped. ‘You’re always trying to avoid my parents!’

‘Well, you’re the one who said we needed to get out of the house!’ I snapped back.

Christos’s face was thunderous. Then he sighed, and apologised. ‘I’m sorry, you’re right; I’m tired. Let me have a coffee and a cigarette and I’ll be on it. Jesus, this heat!’

On the way to the village we got lost. Four times. ‘Nichi
mou
, I’m sorry, but if these
malakas
would only update their fucking stupid maps.’

‘Christos, why are we in the car on such a hot day, look, why don’t we just call it quits and turn back?’

‘No! We’ve come this far! I refuse to be beaten by these idiots!’

When we finally made it to the village there was little to see. In the church a service was taking place, and as we didn’t want to join it, we couldn’t exactly go in. Everybody in the village seemed to be at the service. There wasn’t even a
periptero
open for us to buy a drink or snack.

‘Come on, I’ll show you the square where my parents had their wedding reception.’

Christos set off round the back of the church. I trundled off after him then ran up alongside him so that we could hold hands. But it was too hot to hold hands. When we got to the square there was nothing to see. It was just an empty square, bereft of decoration. I don’t know what I’d been expecting. ‘Imagine – there were two thousand people here at Mama and Papa’s wedding reception!’