Thirteen Days By Sunset Beach (2 page)

By the time they reached the port he'd sorted out cash for the taxi and the voucher for the ferry. The driver had to slow down for a crowd on the dock, beside which the vessels looked massively weightless as clouds. Beyond several of these was a boat less than a quarter of their size. The driver honked the horn at it as he came alongside, though passengers were still boarding. Indeed, others hadn't finished disembarking—dull-eyed young couples so encumbered by their backpacks that just one girl raised a hand to greet the incomers, a feeble gesture that might almost have been trying to convey a different message. Ray would have said they needed a holiday to get over the one they'd just had. "Too much night life," he remarked instead as the driver parked in the middle of the road.

Sandra was out of the taxi before Ray succeeded in releasing his seat-belt. "I'll make sure they don't go without us," she said and made for the ferry, tugging her suitcase.

The man heaved the second case out of the boot and gazed at it while Ray paid him. "You use cross."

"It's a way of distinguishing our luggage." Ray felt oddly abashed by explaining "It isn't religious."

"No good."

"Well, they're some use. You've seen other people with the same idea, you mean," Ray said as Sandra joined the queue at the gangplank. "Forgive my hurrying you, but could you—"

The driver wrote the date and time and payment on a notepad with a stubby pencil whose thick lead was worn down almost to the wood, and eventually handed Ray the slip, which at least bore the details of the taxi firm. Ray was pulling up the handle of his case when the driver said "Look after lady too."

Ray felt as if the man had somehow gleaned too much. "What do you mean?"

"Bring her back."

As Ray opened his mouth Sandra called "They need the voucher."

"I'm coming now," he shouted, and the driver turned away as though he'd been rebuffed. Ray made for the ferry as fast as the suitcase allowed, dragging at his arm like a reluctant child. He was halfway to the gangplank when a sailor came to snatch the voucher. "Go on," the sailor said, not much like a welcome at all.

Sandra had dragged her case on board. When Ray followed her he found the deck was trembling with the impatience of the engines. Beyond a muster of luggage several dozen passengers sat on plastic bucket seats in a lounge overlooked by a small rudimentary bar bereft of staff. Sandra trundled her case to the nearest trio of seats and waited for Ray to bring his. "What was he saying to you?" she said.

"Just how he didn't think these crosses would be much use."

The engines began throbbing like Ray's insistent pulse, and the ferry edged away from the dock. As the vessels moored alongside shrank to fit the windows of the lounge Sandra clasped his arm in both hands. "Nearly there," she said with a surge of the excitement holidays had always prompted, "and soon everyone will be."

All summer he'd had the unhappy impression that her eyes had faded like her close-cropped hair, no longer glossy black, and her small face that oughtn't to have room for so many lines, but now her eyes seemed to have regained a brighter blue. While her lips were still pale, she could still smile, and she even wrinkled her long slim nose in the old amused way he'd been in danger of forgetting. She didn't relinquish his arm until he managed to smile, and then he turned quickly to the window. The sun was hovering above the horizon, from which it laid a path of amber light for the boat to follow. Otherwise there was only water as still as the cloudless sky except around the vessel, and Ray didn't know he'd abandoned the view until his head jerked up. "Sorry," he mumbled.

"Why, Ray? You've earned a rest. You drove us to the airport when you should have been asleep."

"I don't want to leave you alone."

"You won't, will you? I'll know you're here."

For years he hadn't slept much in the weeks before a holiday—every night his mind would run through all the tasks and items he had to remember, not to mention all the apparently innumerable things that could go wrong—but by now he'd forgotten how it felt to sleep all night or even for a few unbroken hours. "Say you'll wake me if you need me," he said.

"I always need you, but if I need to wake you I will."

Instead a dull impact wakened him. How badly had she hurt herself by slipping off the plastic chair? At least people were hurrying to help, except that when Ray widened his shamefully reluctant eyes he saw all the young holidaymakers heading for their luggage. He'd felt the ferry bump against a jetty, and Sandra was upright on the seat beside him.

At first he thought Vasilema Town had been illuminated to welcome the newcomers. A multitude of white buildings tinged with red clung to a hill as haphazardly as shells on a rock, and window after window shone crimson. As he and Sandra hauled their cases onto the dockside the lowest; windows darkened, and before Ray could take much of a breath the next highest row of lights went out. He saw the light retreating from him and Sandra, and glanced behind him to confirm that it was just the sunset, the horizon having sliced the red orb in half.

The darkness crept uphill as they followed their fellow passengers along the wharf to a coach attended by a girl in a Frugogo uniform. "Take your time," she called. "You're important to us."

The driver seized each case and swung it into the compartment full of luggage while the cigarette between his lips kept hold of at least an inch of ash. Ray cupped Sandra's elbow to help her up the steps and felt how thin her arm had grown. She scrambled onto the seat immediately behind the driver's not unlike an excited youngster. As soon as he joined her Ray tugged the belt across himself to encourage her to be equally safe. He was trying to riddle the mechanism that would lock the arm of the seat in position when a young man leaned across the aisle to fix it by raising it above the horizontal and easing it down. "No probs," he said, and Ray felt mean for reflecting that the generation to which all the passengers except him and Sandra belonged seemed increasingly to speak in the language of their text messages. He'd often said so to his pupils at school, but the thought left him feeling even more out of date.

The driver took a last drag at his cigarette and squashed it out between a finger and thumb varnished with nicotine as he climbed aboard. While he eased the coach forward the Frugogo girl picked up a microphone and stood with her back to the windscreen, beneath an icon of a Greek saint with a spear in his hand. "Kali mera," she said and, having explained that it meant good evening, repeated it until the passengers echoed it loud enough to suit her. "I'm Sam, and welcome to our island. Who hasn't been before?"

"We haven't," Sandra murmured.

"I'm promising some of you will be back. Lots of our guests say they've had the best nights of their lives." The travel representative blinked at Ray and Sandra as though she'd almost overlooked them, but her broad roundish suntanned face stayed placid. "If you've come for a rest," she said, "you'll get that too."

She handed out envelopes that contained invitations to tomorrow's welcome meeting, together with an island map that Ray thought could have been more detailed. By now the coach was speeding along the coast road, beside which a ruddy afterglow was sinking into the ocean. Sam returned to the microphone to mention local drawbacks—mosquitoes, bathroom plumbing—which were so familiar from previous Greek holidays that Ray stopped hearing them. She'd said he could rest, and Sandra had as well.

This time light and uproar wakened him. The coach was at a standstill and almost empty too. Both sides of the teeming street blazed with colours he might have expected to find in a nursery or else a cocktail. A neon jester pranced above a bar while a neon cat leapt back and forth across the entrance to another, as though it kept losing if not playing with some invisible prey. All the bars and clubs seemed determined to blot out whatever music their neighbours were emitting. Ray could see nobody older than the passengers Sam was ushering to an apartment block beside the coach. The driver had one foot on the lowest step while he sucked at another cigarette. "Soon be quiet," he said.

"It's Sunset Beach," Sandra told Ray. "I wouldn't like to try to sleep here."

"They don't," the driver said mostly to himself, "when it's dark."

Ray wondered if the resort ever was, except out of season. He'd resumed nodding before Sam reappeared. The turmoil of light and noise took some time to fall behind, giving way to a deserted road where moths fluttered into the headlamp beams. In a few minutes the beams found a sign for Teleftaiafos, and then the village itself. Beyond a handful of tavernas the coach halted outside a stone arch overgrown with flowering vines. "Sunny View," Sam announced.

As Ray stepped down into the hot night he heard the distant pulse of Sunset Beach, reduced to a single insistent repetitive beat. He was taking Sandra's arm to help her down the steps when a woman bustled out of a house across the marble courtyard beyond the arch and practically ran to the coach. "Here you are at last," she cried. "Mr and Mrs Thornton."

"This is Evadne." Although Sam was presumably used to the spectacle, she seemed a little overwhelmed. "She'll look after you," she said.

The large woman embraced Sandra like an old friend and gave Ray an equally vigorous hug, not so much patting as thumping his back. A wide smile dug creases into her loosely lined brown face. "What shall I call you?" she was eager to establish.

"Ray," he said or at any rate gasped.

"Sandra," Sandra said, having regained her breath.

"You must call Evadne if you need anything at all. If ever I am not here, call Stavros."

As if she'd given him his cue a man even brawnier than Evadne crossed the courtyard to engulf the handles of the cases in his extravagantly hairy hands. A cat fled not much more loudly than its shadow across the marble flagstones and hid behind a pot of purple blossom while Evadne led the Thorntons into the house. Except for a counter and the pigeon-holes behind it, the office just within the doorway might have been a parlour. As Evadne lifted a key off a hook Ray said "Do you want our passports?"

"Give them tomorrow. You can't go anywhere, can you? Now we take you to your room."

Behind the house four white two-storey apartment blocks boxed in a swimming pool. A gap through the middle of the left-hand block led to three further sets of apartments surrounding a play area, where rotund faces painted on the swings and slides and roundabouts displayed toothy grins to welcome children. "Your young ones come tomorrow," Evadne said.

"Only one of them is this young," Sandra said as a shadow leapt off a swing—another cat, Ray saw.

"We could not put you all together. You all have the view, but you are at the top and the rest are down below," Evadne said and gave her a concerned look. "Both of you are good for climbing up, yes?"

"I've a bit of life in me yet."

Ray had to swallow as an aid to saying "And I'm fine."

Stavros was waiting with the luggage by a flight of marble steps, and the Greek couple tramped up to the balcony alongside the top floor with a suitcase each. By the time Ray and Sandra caught up with them Evadne had unlocked an apartment and inserted the key fob in a socket to rouse the lights in a large white room. It contained a double bed, a wardrobe and a dressing-table attended by a sketchy chair, a hob and a microwave beside a sink at the far end of the room, where a refrigerator burbled to itself. Whoever made the beds had left a flower on each pillow. "They're lovely," Sandra said as Ray was put in mind of laying down a flower.

While Stavros wheeled the cases in Evadne crossed the room and slid the floor-length window open. Beyond a balcony on which a pair of chairs matched a round white plastic table, the hem of the dark sea drifted back and forth across a dim beach planted with drooping umbrellas. The distant lights of Sunset Beach seemed to be keeping time with a disco beat. The blurred sound was no louder than the sea, but Sandra said "Does that go on all night?"

"They sleep in the day. It is such a place." Evadne sounded apologetic, and Ray had the odd idea that her animation was designed to compensate. "You should not let them trouble you," she said.

"I was only wondering if we could have kept it up, even at their age."

"They take life from the night."

"That's one way to put it," Sandra said, switching on the bathroom light. "Oh, isn't there a mirror?"

Above the sink opposite the toilet and beside a shower was a human frieze—a photograph of dancers with their arms on one another's shoulders. "Nobody will mind how you look on holiday," Evadne said.

"I'd still like a mirror, and I'm sure Ray would for shaving."

"I can bring one," Evadne said, though not before she'd gazed at both of them. "Will you want air conditioning? It is five euros every day, but your safe, that is free."

She seemed more apologetic than ever. "At that price we'll have air conditioning," Ray said.

"I will bring you control." Evadne paused in the doorway to add "Any of us who want to come in, we knock twice and wait for you to answer."

Sandra unzipped her case, and Ray set about unpacking his. "I'm already glad we came, aren't you?" she said.

"In that case I couldn't be gladder."

He didn't know how much he was playing with words. Sandra opened the wardrobe, revealing the safe and a hidden chest of drawers. She was transferring dresses onto hangers when somebody knocked at the door. "Come in," Ray called.

"No."

Evadne sounded more admonitory than he understood. She knocked again, and Sandra called "Come in."

"That is right," Evadne said and opened the door. "We knock twice and then you say."

She switched on the box on the ceiling opposite the beds, and metal slats rattled apart to fan out a chill. She showed the Thorntons how to operate the remote control and then substituted the mirror she'd laid on a bed for the photograph in the bathroom. "May the night bless you," she said.

Once she'd gone Sandra gave Ray her wide-eyed bemused look. "Do we think that's a local tradition?"

"Blessing your guests, you mean."