The Sleepwalkers, page 20
I don’t imagine you ever thought twice about flying, not even long haul. I’ve always been a nervous flier—well, until I’m actually in the sky, at which point I love the freedom of it, and the sense of people moving around the planet, doing interesting things. I’m usually the only one with the window shade open, agog at the wondrousness of it all, mouth open for the vast pink sunsets and the insane twilight that covers the whole of Europe, with towns and cities twinkling below stars that have never seemed so close. This time the sky seemed bigger and the stars seemed brighter, and it was not just because it had been so hard to save up my fare, but because I was traveling so far to retrieve a part of myself that was so lost.
I spent my layover in Athens in the same airport hotel I’d gone to with Richard after the wedding, trying to remember the person I had been then. I even drank a glass of the same bad rosé. But it was as if I couldn’t yet get that part of my mind to open back up. That place within me just felt numb.
The ferry crossing to Kathos was rougher than I’d thought it would be. I’ve never minded a choppy sea, but all around me people were vomiting. One elderly French lady was demurely throwing up into her handbag—she’d tucked a sick bag inside so it looked almost elegant. I waited in my cabin for the worst of the heaving and falling to subside, and then I went to the shop and bought an American fashion magazine, thinking it was something I could hide behind if I had to. The shop was in chaos: the mini shampoos and sun creams had fallen off the shelves, and other people seemed to care about this a lot more than I did. One man was taking photographs with a professional-looking camera while the woman who’d been vomiting into her handbag shouted at him in French and dabbed at her lips with a white handkerchief.
Memory is such a strange thing. When I’d looked at a map of Kathos when I was making my bookings, I’d initially been convinced Richard and I had honeymooned on the west coast of the island, although we can’t have done, because I wouldn’t have been able to see Turkey from there. In my mind we’d driven from the west coast to the east, on that strange humid night with Bob Dylan playing in the taxi, when we’d gone to the wrong restaurant, but it must have been the other way around. This time, I’d booked an anonymous-looking hotel in a bay on the southeast of the island. I was there for my letters, of course, but for something else too, something I’d never known I needed: the ability to stay perpetually in transit, to never go home, for the honeymoon to never end, even after the marriage itself has irrevocably broken down and the poor husband has been killed.
It was warm when I disembarked from the ferry, my legs unsteady from the crossing, and the anticipation of trauma. I felt more OK than I expected as I got in the cab to be taken to my hotel. But my chest tightened as the cab snaked through the dusty back streets, past the mopeds and whitewashed villas and—it came quicker than I remembered—the dapper little man’s curio shop. My heart flipped. It was still there! But of course there was no reason why it wouldn’t be. I wondered if my letters were tied in a bundle on his shelves or if Isabella now had them. I tried not to look too suspicious as I peered over my shoulder at the shop as we passed, the driver beeping for a couple of kids to get out of the road. The beep made a figure in the shop look around, startled. He moved out of the shadows and into the early evening sunlight. It was a skinny young man in a crop top. Hamza? Had he come back?
My hotel room had everything I needed. A bed, a sofa, and a small tiled balcony with a wooden table and two slightly rickety chairs. I sat on my balcony with a large glass of cold white wine and looked out across the bay toward the south of the island, oddly grateful I couldn’t see Turkey, that the view was new to me and therefore neutral. For a few moments I pretended I was a single, innocent woman on holiday, and I didn’t have anything to be afraid of. What would I do, if I were that woman? I supposed I’d read, and so I took the American magazine I’d bought on the ferry to dinner with me, and I flipped the glossy pages with their wrap dresses and cruise collections and diet advice disguised as “wellness” as I ate a grilled fish with a Greek salad. Afterwards, the tall young waiter brought me a complimentary bowl of Greek yogurt with lemon apparently preserved by his grandmother, and it really was as if I’d never been there before.
The next day was a Saturday. I got up early and went straight to the curio shop. I’d disguised myself as best I could, with bronzer-heavy makeup and my khaki cap. But the shop was closed, it seemed, for the whole weekend. A sign said it would reopen on Monday. I walked back to the hotel. As I did, I caught sight of myself in the window of a taverna and although I’d recently got used to finding myself unrecognizable—I saw that it was in fact me. Evelyn Masters. The woman who’d come here after marrying Richard. It didn’t matter if I lost weight or wore a cap: here I was.
I spent the rest of the weekend daubing lemon in my hair and trying different styles of makeup to see if I could erase myself. I lay restlessly on a sun-lounger and planned and re-planned how I’d get my letters. I swam for miles, my head full of logistics and lies, with all the colorful fish underneath me. There were no tendrilous sea-plants on this part of the island, nothing to lick at my legs or pull me under. For each meal I ate a fish and a salad and shook my head when the preserved lemon arrived. I only wanted fresh lemons for my hair. The hours went past slowly, and sometimes it felt as if I wasn’t even on Kathos and I imagined myself on a different island altogether, on a pleasant holiday or research trip. I tried to picture myself back in Russell but it really wasn’t that similar at all, I realized. Everything on Kathos was so square and stony, and the light reflected off the whitewashed walls in a bluer way.
On Sunday I went for a longer swim than usual, around one bay and then into another. Back in New Zealand I’d been getting a buzz out of swimming as a form of transport, a way of actually getting from A to B. I’d take my sports watch, set it to swim mode, and when I arrived at the next bay or island I’d use its wallet app to pay for a plate of oysters, or an espresso, or if it was evening, a Japanese gin over ice. On that Sunday in Kathos I felt a great surge of energy, so much it almost frightened me, and instead of stopping at the first bay, I swam on to the next one. My tendency to mirror things and turn them upside down had persisted, because although I thought I was swimming southwest, I was actually going northeast. I thought I knew the shape of the coast, and I believed the next bay was closer than it really was. I ended up in a kind of no-man’s-land, where I’d gone too far to turn back, but the nearest shore was still so far away. The last few hundred yards were difficult because choppy waves appeared in the water, and the current seemed to want to pull me back the way I’d come. I thought I was going to drown.
I ended up right by George’s Taverna, where Paul and I had watched the fish devour the bread roll just six months before. There was hardly any beach, to tell you the truth—maybe it was because of the high tide, or perhaps George’s spring storm had not yet brought it back after the winter. But otherwise the place was the same as before. I felt a little faint, but I couldn’t draw attention to myself by passing out, so I slowly and carefully swam on, out of sight of George’s Taverna.
When I’d swum the day before I hadn’t cared about arriving at the next bay in my bikini—I almost relished the lack of shame I felt with my new body. But on this part of the island I needed more of a disguise, so I bought a cheap orange sarong and a pair of dark glasses in the general store by the motorcycle man’s shop, and then found somewhere to sit before I lost consciousness. I’d also bought half a cantaloupe melon, a hunk of feta cheese and some water, and so I sat on the semi-beach and sucked the sweetness and moisture and fat into myself. What had I been thinking? I’d swum way too far and now here I was, in this terrible place where the sleepwalkers had drowned. I was like an animal that had unwittingly circled back to the hunt.
The wreath was still there, just about, storm-battered and withered. I sat next to it as I ate. Once I’d finished, I walked along the thin strip of beach toward George’s Taverna. I couldn’t help myself. And there was Christos, picking up a bowl from a table. In an instant, our eyes met. The effect was startling. I began shaking, and tried to cover it by walking faster. He looked away, but I was sure he knew it was me; he’d seen me as easily as I’d recognized my own reflection the day before. I walked on, feigning confidence, as if I had somewhere to go, but the path beyond George’s Taverna only led up the mountain. I walked uphill and then sat in a grove until the sun went down, leaking orangey colors all over the jagged rocks. I half-wondered if Christos might follow me, perhaps even try to kill me again, but there were no footsteps, and nobody came. I pulled myself together and walked back as if I had just been on some innocent errand, as if that was something a lone tourist was likely to do on a mountain path. By then the evening service had begun and I could see George running back and forth, head down. Christos was gone.
As I walked past the taverna I noticed a table of beautiful young people; not the same ones I’d been so obsessed with the year before, of course. There were two girls and two boys. The girls wore heavy makeup, with false eyelashes and electric-blue eyeliner flicks. One wore a low-cut white camisole and the other wore a loose black halter-neck over a bandeau bikini top. The boys were slim and tanned, both with dyed blond hair. The two men they were with looked very much like the ones who’d been here last year. One of them was tearing the shell off a large prawn while the other one was glowering into his tablet with the bluebottle cover. I carried on walking. When I reached the harbor an hour or so later, I saw that the new beautiful people had got into a small boat with the men, and it was sailing back along the route I’d swum, perhaps heading for the marina. As the boat went past, the girl with the camisole peeled it off and dived into the water, topless. It looked at first as if she were attempting an escape, but she simply did a decorative backstroke alongside the boat until her friends laughed and hauled her back in.
I glanced at the fish restaurant across the harbor. Was Christos in there, I wondered, still doing his evening shifts as if nothing here had really changed? But how could he not have been affected by what had happened? He was the one who’d dragged me out of the storeroom in the Villa Rosa, while I was playing dead. He was the one who’d lain me on the grass next to the generator. I was pretty sure it was he who had killed Richard. I just had no idea why. If you’ve read the enclosed documents carefully enough, you’ll know why Richard died. But I didn’t, because I didn’t yet have them.
The next day was Monday. I arrived at the curio shop at around eleven, before it shut for lunch. I had decided not to arrive like a hungry street cat when it opened at ten. As I approached I could hear the faint sound of a goldfinch singing from within the next-door taverna. The silver bell tinkled when I opened the door of the curio shop. Inside, it was cool, not because of air-con but because the shutters were half closed, and pale curtains fluttered in front of the open windows. You can make rooms cool if you know how, even in hot countries.
He was there, the dapper little man, at the desk at the back of the shop, just as he had been the first time I’d ever seen him. Once again, he was working on a birdcage. He seemed to be securing a yellow wooden perch to the roof of the wire house.
Behind him were the shelves on which he kept the bundles of documents. They were there just as before, looking both real and fake, tied in string and browned and faded in all the right places. I glanced at them and then looked away, back down to the desk, on which there was a soft pack of Gitanes and a bronze Zippo lighter.
“Kalimera,” I said, as if I were just a normal tourist.
The dapper little man glanced at me and then nodded and went back to his pliers and his wire, twisting it through a hole in the yellow piece of wood.
He was wearing a three-piece suit, despite the heat. His small paisley waistcoat was neatly done up, as if the buttons were glued to the fabric. His black hair appeared painted on or molded in plastic. I looked away and pretended to browse. Well, in fact, I really did browse. Acting has to be as close to life as possible to seem authentic. In An Actor Prepares, Stanislavski’s Director asks students to search inside a curtain for an important brooch. When a woman is unable to do it convincingly enough, he tells her she’ll be thrown out of class if she can’t find it. Only then does she act with truth.
Last time I’d been in the curio shop I couldn’t make myself swirl my hands through the drawer of starfish and seahorses as Beth had, but I did it now. I browsed the rails of peasant nightdresses and jodhpurs. I sincerely wondered how I’d look in loose, flowing white cotton, like a ghost that is secretly alive, or an invalid from a Victorian novel. In my mind I became the sort of woman who would wear clothes like that; the sort of woman who runs a hotel and is always looking for interesting interior design ideas and amusing things to pop on dressers. I could see it clearly in my head, my hotel. I could see its tiled entrance hall, and its large terracotta pots.
“Excuse me,” I said, floating over to the front desk, but deliberately standing in shadow. “What are those?”
I pointed at the shelves of documents behind the dapper little man.
They were just out of reach, like prescription medicines.
“Histoires,” he said, in French, and then shrugged.
I’d thought I was standing in shadow, but it must have been only a temporary cloud, as the sun suddenly shone in my eyes. I tried to move sideways out of the glare, but it was impossible. I stepped backwards, finally returning to the cool semi-darkness.
“For decoration?”
“Yes. Or you can read. They have genuine documents from the ages.”
I let my eyes open wide with a sort of shallow excitement.
“They’d look amazing in my hotel. On the chests of drawers in the rooms.”
His head jerked then, ever so slightly.
“Which subject you look for?”
“I’m sorry?”
“They have different subjects. Here.” He stood and climbed onto a small wooden stepladder. “This one is about Italians who occupied the island during the war.” He hooked his finger under the brown twine with which the documents were secured, turned and let the bundle of papers drop onto the counter in front of me. “There are love letters that were not sent; also a very sad journal of an Italian soldier just before the Germans came, and he was killed.”
“Wow,” I said.
“This one,” he continued, dropping a smaller bundle on the desk, “is a collection of notes left for a cleaner from a man in a villa near the airport. They have many details about the tasks he asks her to do. Here in this one is also shopping lists and receipts for pharmaceuticals, and tailoring. I have others, from all around the world.”
I had no idea the dapper little man could say so many words. Last year he’d been so sullen, and almost as mute as Hannah Kayak. I struggled to stay in character as he stared at me.
“How do you get the documents?” I asked innocently.
“People toss them away,” he said, with a wave of his hand. “They send them to be recycled and I find them. Or my boy does. Or they leave them in boxes or the attic when they move, or die.” He shrugged again.
Or you steal them, I wanted to say. You fucking take them.
Of course, I said nothing. Still, perhaps I am not that good an actress after all. Or perhaps he never believed in me. Perhaps at that moment the anger flashed in my eyes and he understood it all. Perhaps he’d understood from the moment I walked in the door. Perhaps he’d seen me as easily as Christos had.
He stared at me, and there was unkindness in his small eyes.
“Maybe they send them to the wrong person, who then loses them. Or perhaps they write in public, for anyone to take, in a hotel guest book.”
I stared back at him. “Or leave them on a pillow, in a locked room.”
He broke my gaze then. He picked up his Zippo lighter, turned it over in his hand, and put it down again.
“So you have come to search for your letters, after all this time?” he said, deadpan.
“They are mine,” I said.
“You should have been more careful with them.”
The way he said this chilled me. I rolled my eyes and shook my head, like I couldn’t believe what he was saying.
He shrugged once again. “You know, if a photographer takes your picture, it belongs to him. Just because it is you in the photo does not means it belongs to you.”
“Right. But these are not photographs, and what I wrote does belong to me. Are my letters here?”
I must have looked as if I was about to vault over his desk and start ransacking his shelves. He held up a hand as if to stop me.
“She have them. Isabella. She will burn them, perhaps, or maybe sell them to Hollywood. I don’t know. But you must ask her. I see her no more.”
“I suppose she’s still at the Villa Rosa, murdering other women’s husbands?”
“This is not true,” he said, grimacing. “You misunderstand.”
He shook his head and a long hissing sound emerged from between his teeth like a balloon deflating.
“Your husband.” The dapper little man sneered. “He took a boat and left.”
“No, that’s not true!”
“Really? There was no dead body.”
“I was there! I was locked in a cupboard and then—”
“Or maybe you put yourself in a cupboard while your husband packed and left you behind, and you had a breakdown and invented a ridiculous story. I know precisely what ridiculous story you invented, because I collected it and put it in order.”
So you see, Annabelle, you’re not the only one who has accused me of making things up. It’s always been the same kind of dirt that sticks to me: slightly crazy actress who doesn’t know what is real and what is fake, who imagines drama where there is no drama, who drives her husband away with her petty jealousy. The girl who kneels in puddles to give blow jobs to men she doesn’t even like, because she simply must be in a story, even if she has to be the femme fatale, or, worse, the victim.
