The Sleepwalkers, page 5
At six, I put on my black dress, the one I know you like. You wore your white linen shirt with your dark blue chinos and your Ralph Lauren boat shoes. I hadn’t worn much makeup this whole holiday, but that night I did it all: foundation, which felt like thick butter on my face, full heavy eyes with mink eyelashes, and red lips.
I told myself I was doing it for you, but really I was doing it for the mirror. In any case, it didn’t work and I still looked like a pile of guts and marrow but this time with red lipstick. You’re not supposed to have heavy eyes and red lips together, by the way, because all the women’s magazines say it’s sluttish, like offering yourself up as a piece of meat, a craven dog. But men don’t know that, and you always liked me in a lot of makeup. You actually once described this look as “natural,” but men don’t know what is natural and what is fake most of the time.
“You look beautiful,” you said.
Even though everything has gone so horribly wrong, I’ll always remember that. Thank you.
While we waited for the cab, the gardener sat on a low wall with his machete next to him, smoking and watching us. Isabella was beyond him in the still sunlit garden, picking pomegranates and putting them into a wicker basket. She must have picked a lot of pomegranates in her life, but she was picking these ones as if the process was new to her, yanking them off their branches with unnecessary violence. It wasn’t efficient. Her basket was full of stalks and leaves. As she ripped the fruits off their stems, her small breasts bounced in her white shirt. She quite clearly was not wearing a bra.
“Oh,” she said, turning and seeing us. “You are here.”
“Just waiting for our cab,” you said.
“This is Kostas,” she said, indicating the gardener. “He helps me in the garden.”
Which is exactly how your mother always described workers as well: “helpers.”
I helped your mother quite a bit. And your father, too.
Kostas nodded at us. You walked over and shook him manfully by the hand. While he shook your hand, his eyes crept over my body. You didn’t notice.
The cab driver was unfriendly and spoke no English, although he did at least respond to my Kalispera with a gruff mumble. His crackly car radio was playing Bob Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee for the Road.” It was oddly proleptic, hearing that song then, because in fact it’s all I can hear in my head as I write this letter.
We sat together in the back of the cab and you held my hand. The driver didn’t turn toward the beach but instead went up into the hills behind the Villa Rosa. The sun was going down and pink clouds were thickening overhead, like sauce that might easily curdle. After about fifteen minutes we reached a small bay with a wooden pier and some fishing boats. We hadn’t been to that side of the island yet. In high season perhaps there were a lot of people there, but that night it was just us. The wind was too strong for us to sit outside by the water, so we went into the taverna. The television blared with a Greek game show.
“This is so authentic,” you said.
“Right,” I said. The tables were laminated with sticky plastic. The chef was smoking. The waitress, who was also clearly his wife, had her left arm in a sling.
“It’s great to be able to come somewhere real for once.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “George’s Taverna was real.”
“It was for tourists,” you said.
“OK,” I said. “But we are tourists.”
The waitress brought us the menus. I felt sorry for you then. It was the worst we’d seen on the island. All your least favorite things: deep-fried cheese balls; deep-fried halloumi; deep-fried baby shrimp. There were no salads. When you asked about fish of the day you were told that the fisherman had not been out today. In fact, the waitress said, there was no fish at all except for something that was supposed to be a bit like “cod-fish,” which was prepared in a way similar to fish and chips. We both ordered that, and a carafe of white wine.
The waitress then brought us a bowl of taramasalata, and small white rolls that had obviously been defrosted and then heated in the microwave. An amuse-bouche.
“Mmm,” you said. “Fresh bread.”
I couldn’t tell you it wasn’t really fresh, just as I couldn’t tell you that the taramasalata was mainly breadcrumbs and ketchup. You wanted to like everything so much, and I loved you for that. But you wanted to like this place more than usual.
“I bet you can’t find this in the Lonely Planet,” you said happily.
“No,” I agreed.
Had you ever even read a Lonely Planet guide? I can’t imagine you doing so, except maybe on your gap year. You traveled mostly for work, rather than pleasure, and the whole thing was always a complex game for you, an augmented reality of platinum cards and hotel memberships and collecting as many loyalty points as you could, for things you could afford to pay full price for anyway. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you were never the world’s most authentic, earthy traveler. But I never thought you wanted to be.
“We are close tomorrow,” the waitress said. “Go to Athens before storm.”
Just like everyone else.
“Why are they all so sure a storm is coming?” you asked in the cab home. We were drunk. We’d ordered three more carafes of wine to make up for the terrible food, which you kept saying was great, right until the very end when they brought an ice-cream sandwich of the sort my mother used to give my father and me for dessert—which, yes, we did used to call it. I don’t think you’d ever seen one before, but even you couldn’t pretend this was an authentic Greek experience. But you still didn’t say anything: you just ate it and smiled. Your class is always so positive, don’t you find? Doesn’t it ever annoy you?
When we got back, Kostas was smoking at one of the breakfast tables. He didn’t say anything to us. His smoke curled above his head in thick petals. The moon was high and full, with clouds rushing in front of it like dark chariots on their way to a big event.
There was a new mirror in our room. A full-length antique mirror on a stand. It was an oval shape, with brass hinges that looked like wings. Odd. But I didn’t think about that then as you pulled me onto the bed.
“Shhh,” I said. “Kostas is still out there.”
Our window was open, even though I was sure I’d left it closed. The thin curtain lifted in the breeze.
“He can’t hear anything.”
Another thing about you: you have never believed anyone can hear anything through open windows. But as we made love I imagined Kostas listening. I thought about him appraising my body the way he had before. I imagined him coming up the stone steps and pausing there on the hard tiles, watching us through the window. I imagined him unzipping his work trousers.
When I orgasmed, you believed you’d done it.
Before I fell asleep I wondered where the mirror had come from.
The next morning, I had a hangover. We’d drunk more than I’d realized, and the wine must have been cheap and full of sulphites. I looked bad enough in the old mirrors, but in the new one I was jowly and pale, like a bleached-out St. Bernard that had drunk its little barrel of whisky a long time before, and whose only hope in life was to find another one.
“Where do you think this mirror came from?” I asked you, before we went down to breakfast.
“What mirror?”
“This one.”
You peered at it, and then at yourself in it. I don’t know what you saw.
You looked away, as if disgusted with yourself.
“You don’t look like that, by the way,” I said, before I’d even thought about it. But you didn’t. And it made me feel better because I realized the mirror had distorted me too. In fact, as I looked at it properly I realized how horrible it was. The glass was cheap and smeared in places. The varnish on the wooden frame was thick and ugly.
You sighed. “Wasn’t it here before?”
“No,” I said. “Do you think…?”
“What?”
“Isabella,” I whispered. “Did she listen to us yesterday?”
“Don’t be silly,” you said, and kissed me on the top of my head. “Let’s go and have breakfast.”
As we left the room, Isabella was on the patio, sweeping up leaves and dead insects and presumably not listening to us. She was wearing army-green shorts and a white T-shirt. Again, with no bra. I could clearly see the bloom of her dark nipples through the thin cotton, and I was sure you could too.
“Please,” she said. “You must leave this door unlocked overnight.”
“We did,” you said. “I’m sure we did.”
Actually, I locked it when you weren’t looking. Because, well, just because. We were drunk, and about to make love, and Kostas with his strange eyes was down below and… I don’t know. I’m provincial. Petit bourgeois. Uptight. Afraid. Like most women, I don’t want my dark sexual fantasies to actually manifest in real life.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m just used to locking doors at home. I must have done it without thinking.”
“It is safe here,” Isabella said urgently, with that fear back in her eyes.
“OK,” I said. “But we’re the only guests. Does it matter?”
“We are safe here,” she said again. “No need to lock.”
We sat at the same table again for breakfast. The pomegranate trees looked dull in the odd morning light. It was cloudy and the air was dense, even more so than yesterday. The day had the feeling of a large balloon that was too heavy to take off, because its skin was too thick and its basket too full of people.
The dapper little man from the curio shop was there again, in the tiled hallway, putting documents into a soft and battered brown leather briefcase.
Paul and I had begun calling him the “dapper little man” after we’d first seen him in his curio shop. I’m not sure you’d ever really noticed the dapper little man, but Paul and I had developed all kinds of theories about him. There was something waxy and doll-like about his skin, and he was slight and short. We imagined him dressed in all kinds of miniature outfits, like an aged, Gothic Ken, or a decommissioned Action Man. We’d invented racks of little felt paisley waistcoats and bow ties, a moustache-grooming set and a cupboard full of monocles.
Paul and I had so many little in-jokes and references, and you shared none of them. Sometimes we could communicate with only our eyes. A little flick here or there, or just a tiny flash, and we always knew what we meant, what we were finding ridiculous, or suspect. Why was it never like that with me and you? The one time I tried to communicate with you using only my eyes you asked if I might need to go to the optician.
We’d discovered the curio shop the day Paul and Beth had arrived on the island, two days after us. It had taken us only an afternoon to exhaust the main village by the harbor, and it seemed that the few tourist shops all sold the same things anyway: brightly painted ceramics, cheap jewelry, lavender sachets, lemon balm tea in decorative tins, and dried seahorses and starfish.
The curio shop was just beyond the village. It also had the seahorses and the starfish, but they were different, somehow. Maybe they just seemed fresher, and less dead? Almost everything in the curio shop had been part of a living creature once—antlers, leather packing cases, feather boas, riding crops—and I fancied I could sense a faint pulse in every one of the objects, as if the creatures were simply asleep, or under some kind of spell. Beth put her hand mindlessly into a drawer full of dried seahorses and sort of swirled them around, but I was too squeamish. I couldn’t touch anything in case it woke up.
The dapper little man had been sitting on a high stool in a dark corner at the back of the shop, twisting a piece of wire with a pair of sharp-looking pliers. On the counter in front of him was a half-completed birdcage of the sort we’d seen in other shops and restaurants—the ones the goldfinches were kept in. Behind him were shelves holding bundles of documents tied with string, seeming to be little antique archives, or collections of old love letters—just like the ones Isabella had at the Villa Rosa, on the chiffonier and in the four-poster rooms.
Now, I noticed the dapper little man flinch only slightly as Isabella brushed past him, a bit closely, I thought. He snapped the bronze clasp on his antique briefcase and hurried away across the courtyard to his scooter. Isabella paused for a moment by the chiffonier, but I couldn’t see what she was doing. The scooter sped away.
Isabella came out.
“Good morning,” she said, with a smile directed at you. It was as if we hadn’t just spoken to her upstairs, as if we hadn’t yet seen her today.
“Morning,” you said back.
“Kalimera,” I said. But she ignored my attempt at Greek, just as she had the day before.
“So,” she said, biting her lip. “You went to a different restaurant in the end. It was good?”
“What do you mean?” you said.
“The restaurant call and say you did not come.”
A few beats then while we all realized what must have happened.
Then you laughed. “Oh dear. Did we go to the wrong one?”
“It seems so,” said Isabella.
“We went to the one the cab driver took us to,” I said. “He pointed at the door.”
You and Isabella locked eyes and laughed, as if this were the funniest thing ever. So we’d eaten terrible frozen food for no reason? I did not find this funny. If only you’d been more honest about how bad it was we might have realized our mistake. Authentic, indeed. You laughed and laughed. In fact, Isabella laughed so much she had to grab your arm, perhaps to stop her from falling to the ground with the sheer hilarity of it all.
“I bring you eggs on toast again?” Isabella said to you once you’d both stopped laughing and she had finally let go of your arm.
“Thank you,” you said back, touching her arm now. All this arm-touching all of a sudden, but I was not part of it, not at all.
“And ‘just fruit,’ ” Isabella said to me, I thought a little mockingly.
“Thanks,” I said.
Breakfast arrived. Yours was the same as yesterday. Mine was a bowl of melon. Just melon with—and I pointed this out to you, and you know it is true—one pomegranate seed on the top. One. I tasted a bit of the melon. It was hard and unripe.
“Wow,” I said.
“What’s wrong this time?” you said.
“It’s a bowl of melon,” I said. “Just melon. Loads and loads of melon.”
“Well, you did ask for it.”
“OK, but I usually eat all different fruits for breakfast. Why just melon? Don’t you think it’s weird?”
“You’ve got a pomegranate seed as well,” you said, with a half-smile.
“You must agree that that’s odd,” I said. “Who puts one pomegranate seed on a bowl of melon?”
“It does look quite pretty,” you said.
“It looks like a tit,” I said. “A cubist tit.”
“A cubist tit could still be pretty?” Your face was still flushed with the aftermath of all the laughter. You raised an eyebrow. You were being playful. Light.
“I’m not eating it,” I said.
“Evelyn,” you said, groaning. “Don’t.”
“If she wants a passive-aggressive war then she can have one,” I said. “I lived with my mother for twenty years and yours for almost five. I can win against this pathetic attempt if I have to.”
“Look, she made you a bowl of melon because you asked for it yesterday. Why don’t you just eat it?”
“One pomegranate seed,” I said, shaking my head. “Please.” And then for a moment it did seem almost funny, and I smiled, and you smiled back, and I remembered you stroking my hair last night and telling me you loved me, and the storm didn’t come, and the clouds moved away.
I popped the single pomegranate seed in my mouth.
After breakfast you got ready for a long run. Once you’d left, I found it hard to get into my writing. I tried to compose something about the wedding, but it was too hard, and then I started tinkering with the plans I’d already made for my new one-woman show about a girl who is raped in Freshers’ Week at university. I tried different forms for this—even using an epistolary structure at one point. But nothing was working.
Instead, I tried to look up the beautiful people on Tripadvisor. Would one of them have left a review by now? I wanted to know if they were Turkish, how old they were, whether any of them had an Instagram. I couldn’t imagine not being able to follow them digitally now that I couldn’t follow them in real life.
I told myself that’s all I was doing on Tripadvisor, but then I found myself reading all the reviews of the Villa Rosa. I know this is awful, but I wanted them to be bad. They weren’t. I wanted them to say how peculiar Isabella was, but they didn’t. One said, The charming owner is such a free spirit and so inspirational. In an area surrounded by high fences and guard dogs, she chooses to have an open house. Another said, The breakfast is magnificent. All that wonderful fresh fruit picked from Isabella’s delightful garden. Another said, Isabella was so kind to us after the loss of our parents in such tragic circumstances. We arrived on the island in… The entry was long and I skipped over it. Unlike me, I know.
The beautiful people were not on there. But why would they be? They were not the kind of people who left reviews. They were, I thought then, more the kind of people who received reviews. Were they some sort of band? That would explain their beauty, the glitter and the presence of the older men, who could have been managers or agents. The guitars and the singing, too. I googled Turkish band four members two boys two girls, but before the results could come up the lights flickered and the Wi-Fi went off. The universe telling me to go back to my play, I thought. Not that the universe had given me any other indications that it wanted me to carry on writing, or performing. There was a low rumble of thunder outside, and I expected it to start raining, but it didn’t.
I wanted to walk to the beach but in truth I was a bit afraid of the dogs, and I knew you’d be annoyed if you got back and found me gone. You’d made it clear, after all, that the days of lying on the beach were over. I was supposed to be writing. But I knew you wouldn’t object to a wholesome walk, for inspiration, as long as it was not to the beach. I wrote you a note, and then started the long process of applying sun cream and insect repellent. I changed from my playsuit into my long khaki shorts and a white shirt. Then I closed the bedroom door, went down to the garden and started walking up the steep hill behind the Villa Rosa. I didn’t lock the door, because, well, I’m such a free spirit. And you didn’t have a key.
