Lie With Me (9 page)

Things go missing all the time here. I pulled my bed apart looking for the cream, upended the thin, solitary drawer on to the mattress. As I fruitlessly sifted through its meagre contents, I was remembering packing for the holiday, how carefully I had chosen each item – a white shirt, chinos, a pair of Vans I found on sale. I had planned to take the purple T-shirt with me, the one from Zeus nightclub. Worn at the right time, it would have, I thought, an amusing, ironic effect on the company. But I couldn’t find it.

I’ve been thinking – not about the bachelor flat in Bloomsbury, nor the family house in Clapham. It’s my mother’s house in East Sheen that keeps coming into my head: the little single room with the window onto the garden, the gloss fireplace, the spider plant in its small caged grate.

I think about that room empty.

THEN

Chapter Seven

The heat woke me, the sun burning my eyelids, probing through my clothes, down to the skin. Sweat had collected in the small of my back. My holdall was propped under my head and I could feel the jag of the zip, stabbing into my scalp, and a rigid object – my washbag – against my neck.

Unbending my legs, I swivelled round stiffly and sat up, adjusting my eyes. It was early but the light, glaring through the plane trees, was already intense, the sky an indigo blue. The air was sultry with the smell of fresh bread, and eucalyptus, aniseed, and something less pleasant – urine. In the distance, the rattle of shop shutters being lifted, the snarl of a motorbike. An elderly woman on the other side of the street was staring at me.

The bus was still parked up in the lay-by. Last night it had appeared dashing, with its blue and white paintwork, triumphant like a flag. Now, sober and in the brightness, I could see the rust above its wheel arches, the filth splattered across the windows. All the seats, including the driver’s, were still empty.

I rubbed my face, trying to loosen the ridges caused by the imprint of the bag across my cheeks.

My head throbbed. My mouth, scratchy with nicotine and aniseed, tasted bitter. Was it too early, I wondered, for another drink?

It had been a ludicrous journey, an act of thrilling absurdity. Alice had told me to ‘look on FlyBest’, and to book on to the Thomas Cook flight that left early Sunday morning. There was a BA leaving at a more sensible hour but it was much more expensive and the red-eye meant that, even with a two hour time difference, ‘we’ll be in the pool by teatime’.

‘You should be able to get a ticket for about five hundred quid,’ she said. ‘They’ll have gone up a bit since I booked mine. But at least we’ll arrive together. Andrew’s booked a mini-van to get us up to the house. I’m sure we can squeeze you in.’

We were in bed, after the theatre, and she was lying under my arm, her mouth soft against my shoulder, her fingers stroking my chest. I murmured, ‘That’s what I’ll do,’ glad she couldn’t see the shock in my face. It hadn’t occurred to me the flight would be so expensive. I had planned to ask Michael to tide me over, but even I would be embarrassed to touch him for that much.

The next day I looked on FlyBest. The Thomas Cook flight was running at £682 – the BA £1,200. By scrolling down a few pages, I found a cheaper alternative. Under ‘Duration’, in place of ‘Non-stop 05hrs10’, it read, ‘2 stop(s) 17hrs40’. The flight left Heathrow seven hours
before
the Thomas Cook, at 10 p.m. on Saturday, and arrived five hours
after
it, at 5.40 p.m. on the Sunday – and ten minutes after the BA landed from London. I booked it.

‘The BA?’ Alice said, when I told her, slightly put out.

‘I’ve got a meeting in the morning with an American publisher. It’s the only time she can see me. I could say no but . . .’

‘No of course you shouldn’t.’ She paused to think. ‘There’s not much point you hiring your own car. If you don’t come with us, you’ll have to get a taxi up to Pyros. It’s a good two hours and it’ll set you back at least 200 euros.’

I’d already Googled. I’d be in time to catch the last public bus from the airport. ‘To hell with the expense,’ I said. ‘I’ll be in the pool by teatime.’

At first it had gone according to plan. I left London on a cold wet August evening and caught the 10 p.m. flight to Munich, arriving at 12.50 a.m. local time. I spent the night on a bucket chair in Departures, and took the red-eye to Athens, where I was due to make a connection in the early afternoon. Here was where it began to go wrong. The Aegean Airlines plane, scheduled to take only fifty-five minutes, was grounded due to a technical fault and I finally arrived at Ionnasis Vikelas International Airport, Pyros at 10.15 p.m., almost five hours later than I’d intended, having missed the last bus.

I leant against the wall by the shuttered Avis desk to ring Alice. I felt a small thrill as I did so; the rush of the lie. I apologised profusely for not having spoken to her sooner – I’d been trying and trying: did she not have a signal? ‘Most of the time,’ she said coldly. I battled on. Basically, there was a slight change of plan. I was ringing from my publishers’ office. The American editor I’d stayed behind in London to see had kept me waiting until the afternoon. I’d had no choice but to tear up my BA ticket and instead would ‘catch the early flight out’ the following day. ‘It was worth it; I’ll tell you all when I see you.’

Alice’s voice softened when she realised I wasn’t bailing. She was sad, but she understood. ‘Everyone sends their love,’ she said.

I hung up, and with an electric charge in my legs, a euphoric surge of unexpected freedom, walked jauntily along the airport access road towards the outskirts of Pyros town. The sky was a dark neon blue, the trees and buildings clear against it. The air, even this close to the runway, was warm with oregano and mint. Lights and noise, the spit and smell of roasting meat led me down a web of roads to what appeared to be Pyros central. I walked past a strip of tourist tavernas, in which shrieking women with sunburnt shoulders applauded a troupe of finger-clicking ‘traditional dancers’, and found a small, dark, nameless bar, populated by what I imagined to be genuine Greeks. I remember very little after that except that I drank a lot of ouzo and charmed some rather lovely young girls and that, at some point in the early hours, one of the genuine Greeks, imaginary or otherwise, escorted me to the stationary blue and white bus and the urine-streaked neighbouring bench on which I now perched.

I got on early, as soon as the bus driver appeared, and secured a seat near the front. The heat rose as the bus filled – an elderly woman with bow legs and bad teeth; a loved-up Australian couple; an intense-looking youth in decoratively zipped jeans. A greasy-haired man across the aisle was wearing a black suit and open leather sandals; his toenails were thick and dirty, curled like the end of traditional Greek shoes. I’d repeat that observation to Alice, I decided: she’d enjoy it. I was looking forward to seeing her, all the more after my secret escapade. Surprisingly, I was missing her.

The bus left at 10 a.m. with a great deal of clamour and rattling. It took a while to leave the town. We groaned and swayed, obstructed by traffic and tourists; the driver accelerated and braked, gesticulated and hooted. More people climbed on; at one point the driver disembarked to shout at another driver. But eventually the straggle of American-style fast food outlets (‘McChicken’; ‘Kojax Burger’) and supermarkets (‘OK’; ‘Super Buy’) gave way to marble emporiums and DIY warehouses, the engine eased, and we began to make some headway.

I wasn’t entirely sure how long the journey would take – two hours in a taxi might be double that in a bus. I was bored of the Dickens I had brought for the journey (
Barnaby Rudge
), and didn’t feel up to
In Cold Blood
, the Truman Capote I planned to read by the pool. In my bag was a guidebook to Pyros, which Michael had given me as a leaving present, and I reached up and fetched it from the overhead shelf.

The last time I came to Pyros I knew so little about the island it might just as well have been somewhere in the Atlantic. Opening the book, I was surprised to learn it was not to the south of the mainland, where I thought all the islands huddled, but to the west. A map on the inside cover showed a long mass of land, shaped like an elongated gourd, and a list of ‘Quick Facts’ informed me it was, at 800 km2, the largest of the Ionian islands, more heavily populated than Kefalonia, or Corfu, its near neighbour. Tourism was heavily concentrated in the south, while the mountainous north, with its ‘steep coves, goat-peppered hillsides and small fishing villages’, still provided glimpses of ‘a more traditional Pyros life’. It was famous for its endangered species: the European pine marten, and the Mediterranean monk seal,
Monachus monachus
, ‘who lives in caves around the island’s coast, especially on the parts that are inaccessible to humans’.

I looked out of the window. I had begun to feel nauseous. We were reaching Elconda – which I knew to my cost was all too accessible to humans. We lurched along the main street, with its run of ‘cash bingo’ joints and Irish pubs. I put down the guidebook and pressed my face to the window: none of it looked familiar. The bus turned a corner into a car park and shuddered to a halt. The Australian couple and the zipped-up youth got out, and a man with a shaved head carrying a roll-up bag swung on.

‘You going to sunrise beach, mate?’ he asked the driver. The accent was Geordie, Newcastle or thereabouts.

The driver nodded.

‘Sweet. More action up there than down in Pyros town? We went last night. It was well quiet. We’re looking for a bit of a party.’

The bus driver shrugged. ‘Very nice beach,’ he said.

‘OK to camp?’

The bus driver made a balancing motion with his hands, which the shaved-head Geordie opted to take as consent. ‘Sweet,’ he said again, and gestured to his friends behind.

They clambered on, six or seven of them, and pushed on down the bus. Plastic bags clunked with bottles of Mythos. Rap music fizzed from one of their phones. A girl who looked like Rita Ora with red lips and white-blonde hair rolled tightly against her scalp in intricate plaits like ram horns stood in the gangway, complaining loudly about a broken flip-flop: ‘You did it, you knob, you trod on it; you’re going to have to buy me some new ones.’

‘Sit down, Laura.’ The boy with the shaved head pulled her on to his knee and she squealed. She stood up again. ‘Fuck you,’ she said.

I had craned my head to watch and she saw me. ‘Hello,’ she said, her tone overly familiar. ‘You all right?’

I tried to close one eye in a cheery wink and slightly failed.

The man with the dirty toenails was muttering. He had taken against the music and the noise. I turned back to the window. On a lamp-post just by me was a large piece of laminated paper, with two photographs – the smiling thirteen-year-old Jasmine, and the twenty-three-year-old photofit. ‘HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN?’ The poster looked fresh. In smaller print was written: ‘English girl missing since 2004. Light brown hair, blue eyes. Distinguishing mark: scar on right shoulder.’ The mild nausea that had been toying with my insides soured. I had forgotten Jasmine. Now I recalled Alice’s warnings. The anniversary. The parents. God – they weren’t exactly going to be in a holiday mood. Poor them and all that, but after all the effort I’d put in to get here, I hoped they weren’t going to spoil everything.

We stopped several more times on the way north. The scenery became greener and more wooded. People got off. I was aware of these details, though I drifted in and out of sleep – lulled by the undulations in the landscape and the glare of the sun. When I finally opened my eyes, the bus was empty but for me. We were driving downhill. Gnarled olive trees stood on either side, the ground covered in rolls of black netting. They looked like mummified bodies.

The bus stopped. The driver got to his feet, with a stretch of his shoulders. He pressed a button and as the door levered open, jerked his chin at me. ‘Agios Stefanos,’ he said.

I must have looked surprised. The bus seemed to have parked on a verge in the middle of nowhere. We were on a section of road edged by more olive trees, dappled shadows and a hot midday sun. No harbour. No boats. No cluster of tavernas. No obvious ‘Agios’.

I grappled my bag and coat down from the rack and stepped out. The driver was leaning against the bus, talking on his mobile. On one side of the road was a small shrine: a collection of candles and icons. The photograph of a young man rested against a jar of dead flowers. On the other side of the road was a turning and a large sign, ‘Delfinos Beach Club’ – the place owned by the developers who had bought the freehold of Alice’s land.

The directions to the house that Alice had texted me started from here, but there was no hurry. I lit a cigarette, waved farewell to the driver and set off down the hill in the opposite direction. I wanted to gather some independent knowledge, learn the lie of the land, find out where cigarettes could be bought, maybe locate the ideal spot for a sneaky nightcap.

I stayed in the shade as far as possible, which meant walking in a gully next to a low brick wall. The road was deserted and I enjoyed the solitude. The sleep had done me good. I was on holiday; nothing, no missing girl, was going to interfere with that. The air rang with the constant ratchet-noise of cicadas. On the road were coils of desiccated black snakes. And then the olives and the black netting gave way to more general trees and scrub, a patch of knotty grass containing four tethered goats, and then buildings: a couple of holiday villas, followed by several village houses, a brick and whitewash mish-mash of buildings, a run of vegetable plots, plants in pots, skinny black and white cats, a dog, tied to a post by a piece of rope, furiously barking.

I passed a dead kitten, splayed out at the side of the road, and, a little further on, an old woman sitting by an open door on a plastic folding chair. Chickens scuttled in a yard next to her. I smiled and said hello, imagining myself a cheerfully jaunty figure. She stared back. Shortly after, I left the main road and took a narrow pedestrian lane off to the right. My feet tripped down a flurry of uneven steps, between close whitewashed walls, heat bouncing, sun flickering in the cracks between buildings, flashes of blue sea. Smells of warm bread and sour milk, freshly fried garlic, roasting lamb. More cats, stretched out in corners of the steps, like basking fish. The passage widened, turned a corner and twenty or so steep steps led down to a narrow access road. A drainage ditch led me between two buildings and then an explosion of light, an expansion of sound – I had reached the water.