The Sleepwalkers, page 19
After Richard and Paul raped me, I signed up for an optional module in “Self as Performance.” I got a distinction for my work that term. I constructed a new persona for myself—Hannah Kayak, a mute mime artist inspired by Harpo Marx—but I went further than the other students and got my persona a bank account. It’s not that hard. Perhaps that’s why your lawyer had trouble finding me at first—I haven’t spent any traceable money since I left Kathos last September, not that I officially have any money now anyway. I’m not exactly sure why I did it, but at the height of the success of The Chambermaid I put £10,000 in Hannah’s account and never told anyone. I suppose even back then I felt I might need to escape one day. It was Hannah’s card I’d used to buy my plane ticket in Athens, and again at Auckland. I’d had to travel under my own name, of course, and I guess that was how you eventually found me.
Back in the days of Hannah Kayak, Peter liked to fuck me as soon as you left for London on a Sunday evening. He’d do it desperately sometimes, like a slavering hound, bending me over your white porcelain sink, or pushing me down onto my hands and knees in front of the cream enamel Aga.
“Why do you make me do this?” he panted one cold Sunday evening.
“Because I’m a disgusting whore,” I said back obediently.
“You fucking bitch,” he breathed raggedly into my ear.
Afterwards he was usually more gentle, but later, in the lead-up to the wedding, he became colder and rougher. He’d barely speak to me once he’d cleaned his jizz off my lower back with a Kleenex. But I think he loved me, in his own way, and I know he feared losing me. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Luciana, and your poorly chosen honeymoon gift, things would likely have carried on as usual, with Peter being serviced by his daughter-in-law. There are much worse forms of incest, I expect.
I always thought you knew and never said anything. It can’t have been such a bad deal. I soaked up Peter’s rage and his spunk (it only went on my back if my app said I was fertile) and handed him back showered and in a pressed shirt ready for your dinner parties and family events. I was like a dog-grooming service. Not that you ever had a real dog. You didn’t really need one.
But how much else did you know? I wondered if you were aware when you booked the Villa Rosa that terrible things had happened there, but I don’t believe you were. I think you simply saw the reviews and didn’t look into it any further. For a while I wondered if one of your well-connected friends had told you of the horrors of the island, and that was what inspired your choice, but it makes no sense. You wouldn’t want to harm your precious son, would you? But then how precious was he really? When I finally read the letter he wrote me, I couldn’t help wondering where you’d been when he’d needed you. But you know I don’t like blame-the-mother narratives, so we won’t dwell there.
It dwindled fast, Hannah’s money. New Zealand isn’t a cheap country. Still, I lived in the motel easily enough for almost a month. You’d be horrified by what I ate. Grimy, gritty strawberries from plastic punnets, thin processed ham, packet pastrami with a rainbow sheen, the most basic South Island brie and nothing organic. For the first week I lived on pure white Greek yogurt, because my stomach was recovering from all the vomiting. It had started on the propeller plane, but continued through my next flight, and then the one after that, until my bile turned pale green and then became a kind of foresty color, before drying up completely.
I don’t eat carbs anymore. I’ve become a carnivore (well, almost—I also eat berries and yogurt) and I highly recommend it. Debbie explained it all to me at Athens airport, while I was trembling in the lounge. Humans should function as machines for turning earth into beauty, not sugar into fat, she’d said, stroking my arm softly with her manicured fingers. Cows and other beasts eat the inedible things of the world, things that sprout out of the mulch of the dead, and then we eat the animals and then we produce art and culture. Then we die and it all begins again. The miserable starvation diet you had me on for the wedding, all that oatmeal and dry Ryvita, that just creates disease and waste, according to Debbie. And it doesn’t even stick, as you well know.
It certainly helped me go undetected, having little bird shoulders like Debbie’s, and a skinny waist like on fitness magazines. In Russell I started wearing a khaki baseball cap all the time, and I got a few small tattoos. I bought cheap bracelets for my wrists and let the sun bleach my hair and grew out my fringe. You probably didn’t notice me walking by your house last spring? Don’t worry, I’m harmless. I was hardly going to knock on your door after our terrible phone call. But I did wonder for a while if you were harboring Richard, if by some miracle he was still alive. Anyway, I’m back on the other side of the world again now, where I belong, in the ghost version of Europe, all upside down like Erewhon.
One day, probably in the second or third week after I first arrived here, I was running up the hill from the sailing club, on my way to Long Beach. Beating Kostas had made me think maybe I should carry on running, and I’d picked up a second-hand sports watch of the type Richard always favored. I was looking out for the kingfisher I sometimes saw on the power lines, but instead I glimpsed a bright parrot lunging out of the bushes by the road. It was every color all at once: a red beak, a blue-and-yellow head and a green back, as if someone had given a primary school child too many crayons. I was moved by its ridiculously extravagant palette, its brash beauty. When I got back to the motel I used the Wi-Fi to look it up and I found it was a rainbow lorikeet—an “unwanted organism” in this country. You were supposed to call a number to report it, but of course I didn’t. I realized how scared I was of being reported myself.
Another day I was on my way to Four Square to buy more yogurt and a plastic carton of blueberries when a police car cruised the main road. I ducked into a side street and in a slight panic ended up in the Russell museum—$12 entry, seriously. Inside, there was a shark’s jaw, and a replica of Cook’s boat, some military buttons and the tooth of a sea elephant. There were also samplers and tapestries done by the nineteenth-century women who lived the kind of life I think you always aspired to. One of the samplers had the phrase “A little pot is soon hot” stitched again and again. Just beyond that was a sad-looking taxidermized kiwi with an egg far too big for its body.
Until I finally read Richard’s story, I thought he was so unworldly, that he didn’t see the grime of life because he didn’t know it was there. I recall a previous holiday in India, which I think you may even have booked as a birthday gift. We’d had a pleasant-enough time following all the other tourists from the city to the lake to the mountains to the tea plantation, before ending up back at sea level at a beach resort frequented by politicians from the UK and a celebrity chef I wouldn’t have recognized if I hadn’t overheard two other women talking about him in the pool.
Richard was such a good tourist, so compliant and cheerful. Like other good tourists, he wanted “authentic” experiences. The Indian beach hotel was contrived and fake, with its thatched huts and outdoor dining areas fringed with palm trees, and the brightly lit shop selling factor-50 sun cream and T-shirts with the name of the resort on them. One morning Richard suggested going for a walk down the beach, even though the hotel and guidebook advised against leaving the official complex. As we walked, we noticed men squatting on the sand near some fishing lines, and we assumed that they were fishermen working. I felt uncomfortable watching them, and suggested to Richard that we turn back. I’ve never liked to think of other people’s labor as a sideshow. But Richard wanted to carry on, and so we did. One man seemed to have caught something between his legs, some sort of seafood, and he was grappling with it, so Richard stopped to watch, full of enthusiasm. I realized before Richard did that the seafood was actually the man’s penis, and that he and all the other men were squatting on the seashore because they were taking their morning shit.
Now I’m a good tourist too, now that I basically live on holiday.
But do you think I was happy when I arrived in Russell, so far from home and everything I’d ever known? It is a perfect, tranquil place, but I couldn’t enjoy it then. Those first few nights I dreamed I was still in Kathos, locked in the store cupboard, or lying there by the generator, and then I’d wake too early in the shimmering waterfront town that looked so familiar, and wonder if I was quite mad. Eventually, I tried to write it all down; not for a film adaptation, but for myself—at least at first. My contacts in the film and TV world in the UK had long since dried up, and I wasn’t there to take any meetings anyway. I wasn’t even in the right time zone for a call. So when I realized my money was running out I did the only thing I could think of. I called Debbie on the number on the card she’d given me at Athens airport.
It took a few rings for her to pick up.
“It’s Evelyn Masters,” I said. “Evie. We met on Kathos, in that storm?”
“Um…?”
“Last September,” I said. “In Greece.”
“Sorry, doll, not totally sure I can place you.”
“You flew me out of Kathos on your private plane? I was running away from my husband? You were there because of the sleepwalkers, and—”
“Oh, hi, sweetie! How are you?”
“I’m good, how are you?”
“Honestly? About to go out for a mani-pedi, so…”
“Right, well, I’ll be quick. Um, what you said about optioning my story.”
“Yeah, what story was that?”
“About breaking up with my husband, and, you know, that weird hotel owner Isabella, and how controlling she was, and—” My pitch wasn’t coming out the way I’d hoped. I remembered how mad I must have seemed that morning at the Athens airport, when Debbie had taken me to buy new clothes. But it had been Marcus’s idea to option my story. He was the one who’d brought it up.
“I just wondered if I could send some material?”
“Oh, doll, I’m sorry but you’re too late.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Greek story? The Sleepwalkers? Well, we already have that.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We’re buying some documents? There’s like a package that tells the whole story. We’re flying back out there next month to collect it.”
My mind hurried to catch up.
“Who has the documents? Isabella?”
“Well, no, but—”
“The French man? From the curio shop?”
“Yeah, exactly. But that lady from the hotel? She has a pitch for the screenplay.”
“Do the documents…?” I wasn’t sure how to ask it. “Is there a letter of mine in there?”
“Uh—”
“Because that belongs to me,” I said. “I wrote that. And I lost a notebook as well.”
“There are quite a few documents, doll. A letter from a wife, a letter from her husband, some—”
“Wait, a letter from a husband? Richard’s letter to me?”
I wasn’t sure I’d believed Richard when he’d said he’d been writing to me. I didn’t think he’d actually done it, and that there was a letter for me that had been left behind.
“Please,” I said. “I have to see that letter.”
“I don’t have it, sweetie. Not until next month.”
“But—”
“You know,” she said, “it does sound like maybe this is more your story.”
“Yes!” I said. “I agree.”
“I mean, I said that to Marcus originally.”
“Well, then—”
“Yeah, Marcus believes movies nowadays are much more about synecdoche and metonymy, you know, like the adjacent stories? How you can open up one story using a totally different one? To be honest, I don’t really get it myself.”
“OK.” I had no idea what she was talking about.
“So, I mean, if you wanna maybe go and locate the material we’d be just as happy to buy it from you. And you could probably pitch for the screenplay too. I’d need to check with Marcus, of course, and the lawyer.”
An hour later I got an email from her saying that yes, they’d be glad to buy the documents from me, if they happened to be in my possession. And they’d be willing to hear my pitch for how I’d adapt it for their movie.
So I decided to go back.
I’d already begun waitressing at the classy hotel overlooking the waterfront. It was the one place I’d never frequented as a punter, in my early days here in Russell, when I still had money. I’d always preferred the lowly charm of the Swordfish Club, which I’d even joined, with its walls covered in pictures of Zane Grey and all the enormous fish he caught. On the few evenings I wasn’t working I’d sit on the Swordfish Club balcony and watch huge sunsets bleed out over the harbor and the jetty, and check airfares and do calculations. It wasn’t at all clear I’d be able to get to Greece before Marcus and Debbie did.
On the nicer evenings there’d be kids chucking each other in the water from a scruffy diving island. One time there was a girl, thin and lithe, in amongst several boys. The game seemed to be a version of King of the Castle. The tallest boy with the longest shorts was standing there, his chest aloft and proud, and whenever one of the other children got on the island he’d throw them in. After a while, one group of children were called out of the sea to eat chips with their parents on the beach, and only two boys and the girl remained. The boys picked the girl up by her arms and legs, her slight body like a skipping rope, and they swung her to and fro and then threw her in the bright blue water. They’d tossed her so high, she went in deep. It was a few moments before she came up, and I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying.
The classy hotel was patronized mostly by European men with their long-suffering wives. They came from France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria. They reminded me of you, the wives, with their sensible haircuts and modest diamond jewelry. Their skin, like yours, was pale from years of sun-block and good cosmetics. They would drink one glass of wine out of the bottle their husband ordered, and never, ever eat dessert.
The men’s tongues tasted like espresso and Gitanes. Their dicks were salty and wrinkled, but usually firmed up with a bit of encouragement.
The conversation would start when I brought the bill, carefully timed for when the wife had gone to freshen up in the toilets.
“And you keep all the tips?” he would say, or something like that, pressing a couple of fifties into my hand, or simply tossing them onto the saucer with the bill, if he was the kind of man who liked people to see him disgracing himself. I’d touch the money and then he’d ask where I lived, and was it nearby.
The wives would take a sleeping pill and not notice their husbands slipping out. Or maybe they just didn’t care. By then it was late summer in the southern hemisphere and I’d left the motel and rented a cheaper room above the pizza place, all patchwork throws and complicated plants. I’d pour Cointreau into a shot glass and say it was a British delicacy, or sometimes I’d serve Japanese gin with just a squeeze of lime and one tiny ice cube. The drink usually remained untouched, though, not because the men thought it was poisoned, but because they wanted to fuck me as soon as possible. Or Hannah. I always let Hannah do the actual fucking.
Is it wrong that I earned my airfare back this way? You’d already managed to get Richard’s assets frozen, including our joint account, and so I really had no option. I had to get back to Greece, and even economy tickets cost a lot then, in those early years after the worst of the pandemic, with everyone flying everywhere all of a sudden, and it always being summer somewhere, more or less.
It had actually begun with the private investigator you sent after me. He did a great job, by the way, picking up my trail at Athens and following it to Kerikeri, so long after I’d left. It only took him a few more weeks of all-expenses-paid travel in Northland to finally locate me. I can’t believe I didn’t suss him out immediately, but I’d become a little soft by then. He’d sat on the veranda of the hotel in a white polo shirt on Christmas Eve, nursing a single glass of Man O’ War Syrah from Waiheke Island and staring out to sea. Sleigh-bell music and carols were playing on the sound system that night, reindeer and snow at the height of the summer. He’s the only customer I regret fucking, and not only because he didn’t leave a large tip. He was hard and brutal, although I still thought I deserved that then, after being so ruined by your son. Your detective—I never knew his real name—fucked me like it was a punishment, holding my shoulders and ramming me so hard it was like something you might see done to an animal at a country fair. He said if he could film himself deep-throating me with his hand around my neck he’d consider not telling you he’d found me, and that was when I realized you’d hired him. When I visibly considered his offer he laughed and said he was joking, that of course he was going to report back. But in his own way he was warning me, giving me notice to move on if I didn’t want to be found.
I told him I had nothing to hide, and I didn’t. I still don’t.
I went so far away because I was traumatized, Annabelle; nothing more. Why can’t you believe that? There would have been more convenient places for me to have hidden out, I promise you. Places it would have been so much easier to come back from.
Not that it isn’t glorious here. Lemons grow on trees and although their outsides are knobbly and wretched, their soft flesh is the color of early sunrise. There are so many stars in the night sky. I’ve seen the Pleiades for the first time. They call them the “Matariki” here, and celebrate when they first appear in June or July, deep in their winter. Māori navigators once used them to travel in the Pacific and the Tasman, and the Greeks used them as a signal that it was time to begin sailing. Even though there are now only six visible stars, most cultures over history have mythologized them as seven sisters, or a mother and six daughters. Often, they are seven maidens being pursued by a man, and so there is always the fallen one, the one who disappeared, or was caught. Once she glowed bright in the heavens, but she’s not there now. Maybe she’s gone so far into the darkness we just don’t see her; or perhaps she went into supernova and died a long time ago.
