by C. A. Larmer
Tom sighed and turned away from the happy household. Sat down at the dark kitchen table and reached for his beer. His fourth for the night. Or was it his fifth? He remembered his mother’s last evening, although he hadn’t known it at the time. It was like any other night. They ate dinner in silence, at this very table in fact, his dad shooting off soon after for “a quick one with the lads,” Harry and Tom disappearing to their respective bedrooms where they spent most evenings now. Hiding from the unhappiness.
She came to tuck him in, his mother, but later than she normally did. He was ten, too old for hugs, but she hugged him anyway, tighter than she normally hugged him, and she was a tight hugger as it was. She said stuff he didn’t understand then, words like destiny and fate, words that meant nothing until he met Amy.
Millie Malone. The woman on the Spanish Steps. The one who reminded him so much of his mother. It wasn’t just her luscious brown hair and sparkling green eyes. It was the way she spoke, the things she believed in. The words she used. So like Linda.
The two sets of friends had followed each other to a small bar in the Piazza Navona, and with each glass of vino, Millie began to open up.
“We were meant to meet here!” she philosophised to the boys. “You might think it’s all chance, but it’s not!”
“Millie doesn’t believe in coincidences anymore,” said Monty, the plainer one, the one with the wispy hair and the crazy dress sense. “Not since she read that stupid Celestine Prophecy.”
“Shut up! It is true! Just look at us. Thousands of miles from Sydney and here we are, together. How did that happen?”
“We’re all tourists and we met at Rome’s most popular tourist spot?” Angus suggested with a smile, but she was shaking her head.
“Nope. Millions of people go to the Spanish Steps every year. How come we met, us four, this evening? Huh? I’m telling you, everything happens for a reason! It’s destiny!”
And while Angus muted his mockery and pretended to agree—he’d agree to anything to get a girl in the sack—Tom nodded fervently. She sounded just like his mother! And suddenly, in the middle of a foreign land, his whole life made sense.
He lapped her words up back then, had lived by them ever since. And even when she chose Angus that first night instead of him, he was fine with it.
It was destiny.
When she nearly got off that ferry that day en route to Santorini, those agonising few minutes when he thought she was lost forever, he was willing to accept that too. It was fate, wasn’t it?
But then she didn’t get off! It was like a miracle!
She simply laughed at her own folly, dropped her backpack down, and fell back into Angus’s lap. And Tom was fine with that too.
Fine, fine, fine.
Because he knew then exactly what would happen and it turns out he was right. Millie fell pregnant to an egomaniac who left her to fend for herself, and Thomas stepped up as he knew he would because that was his true destiny.
She was his fate. Amy. It had only ever been Amy. And finally, one balmy Greek night, everything made perfect sense. This was why his mother left, to give him the gift of Amy.
Without Linda’s departure he would never have left for Sydney and then for Europe, searching the world for his mother and finding, instead, a young backpacker.
God, she really was like his mother! So bright, so confident, so full of love and laughter and hugs so tight.
That first night she finally slept with him, the night Angus had laughed and left, he held her in his arms and watched her quietly snore. They were en route to London, back in Corfu by then, at a lurid-pink hostel with warm shots of ouzo, and she had just missed her period and had a screaming fight with Angus.
He’d taken off for the hostel bar—looking for Monty as it turns out—and Thomas had stayed behind to soothe and assure her it would all be okay. He would look after her; she was the only girl for him.
Then he hugged her as tight as he could without waking her, and he whispered thank you to his mother.
SARISI
The witness was an elderly, windswept man named Artemis. He ran a beachside pension on the other side of the castle, called Sofi’s. Sofi had fled years ago, not long after he first found Millie lying battered on the beach nearby. Sofi didn’t like how fixated it made him, how crazed and haunted, and had soon found a younger man with no dark thoughts and very little else going on upstairs, or at least that’s how Artemis put it. They were now happily living on Mykonos.
He told all this to Millie as she sat on a plastic chair beside him, hands wedged in her lap, teary eyes looking out at the beach she never thought she’d be brave enough to set foot on again.
“Everybody think I mad,” he said. “Everybody say, ‘Artemis, he crazy!’ but I know what I see. I tell them about this man but nobody believe me. I tell Effie, yesterday, but she no believe.”
“Tell me,” she said quietly. “I’ll believe.”
He nodded. “But first we have breakfast.” Like they both needed the strength, and he was probably right.
It was 6:30 a.m., and Millie had not yet eaten, hadn’t meant to come so early, but she hadn’t slept a wink since Nicholas dropped his bombshell and couldn’t wait a moment longer, grateful to find Kostas up and smoking his first cigarette when she appeared in the lobby at sunrise.
The hostel manager had been happy to hear she wasn’t leaving and given her directions to Sofi’s, which was located on the quieter side of Coso Point, the one with blacker sand and budget tourists. He didn’t know why she was asking, but he had a pretty good idea. Unlike Nico, he had his ear to the ground and already knew the story, or at least scraps of it because it wasn’t exactly a favourite topic around these parts.
Millie’s attack had left a dark smudge on the island’s soul and pitted police against locals, and neighbours against neighbours. Because of this, some of them were anxious that Millie was back while others hoped things would be different this time, that they could somehow redeem themselves and their beloved island.
Of course Kostas told Millie none of that, but she had already worked it out from the wary expressions she received from old-timers and the way they scuttled in a different direction, as though just crossing paths with her would bring another decade of bad luck.
Not Nicholas though. He ran towards Millie, embraced her, and it was clear even before last night that he had no idea about the past. And that’s what she liked about him. He was a clean slate. She had enjoyed their time together, if only because it made her feel like none of it had happened.
He made her feel clean and sparkly.
But of course it had happened, and this elderly witness was about to make it very real, so she appreciated the murky Greek coffee he produced and the breakfast platter of cheese and yogurt with honey and a sesame bagel he called koulouri, trying to swallow as much of it as she could before her appetite was chipped away with every passing sentence.
“I tell police,” he said now, rolling a cigarette. “I tell everybody but nobody listen. I know who do this to you. I know this man.”
She felt her heart charge and said, “You saw him attack me?”
“No, no! I no see!” He was offended by the suggestion. “If I see, I stop, yes? But I see him go to beach where I find you. I see him that night. Next morning, he take early ferry. He leave quick. Quick mean guilty. He only here one night, then he go. Why he go? I know guilty man when I see guilty man. This man guilty.”
She nodded. It wasn’t exactly a smoking gun.
“This guilty man…” He hesitated. “This man he Australian.”
Artemis waited for that to settle in, for the shock of it to subside, but she didn’t seem shocked at all, was still nodding at him, staring out at the sea.
“He come on evening ferry from Santorini, yes? He book room, here! He stay one night, he go. I tell police, I tell Sister Agnetha, but next day he gone! Nobody believe me. They all think Greek boy do it. Like they want Greek boy do it. But I know. I see this
man. I see evil in his eye.”
Millie shivered now and wrapped her cardigan tighter. She hadn’t seen the evil, but she had felt it and would feel it for the rest of her life.
“What did he look like?” She needed confirmation.
There was hesitation, an embarrassed glance. “Is like Aussie tourist. You all look same to me.”
“So how do you know…?” She stopped. “I’m not saying he wasn’t Australian, but how do you know for sure? Was it his accent?”
“This man, he wear Aussie hat. You know, from Crocodile Dundee.”
She sighed. Every second Aussie tourist wore those hats back then. “Did you see the colour of his hair? His eyes?”
“Hair under hat, he wear hat all the time, even inside! This strange, yes? This make me think he bad man.”
She almost laughed then with the idiocy of it. He was certainly guilty of having bad manners, but was this man her attacker?
“But his eyes different to crocodile man,” Artemis continued. “Crocodile man kind, this man, he evil. He has evil eyes.”
She nodded yet again, but it wasn’t really why she was here. She had a question to ask, a difficult, terrifying question. She swallowed and said, “What happened to Aki?”
Akakios. The Greek stranger on the ferry; the innocent man as it turns out.
Artemis’s eyes looked hooded, and he dragged on his rollie for a long time, then blew the smoke out and shrugged. “He go away. He no come back.”
“He didn’t get in trouble?”
He half shrugged. He didn’t have the words, didn’t have the heart, but later she would learn that Aki left under a dark cloud. He’d been seen with Millie that evening and was hauled in for questioning when the police arrived. He insisted he was innocent, insisted she was British, too, which set police on the wrong path entirely. Some locals thought he’d done that deliberately, but he’d misunderstood her accent, and while he was eventually cleared, his reputation never recovered.
Mud sticks, after all.
“He never come back,” Artemis repeated.
She nodded sadly and drained her cup. If only she could see Aki again and tell him how deeply sorry she was. How she, too, had blamed him all those years. How she could never equate the sweet man on the ferry with the monster that attacked her that night.
If only she could turn back that boat, not flirt with him over cheap coffee or take his hand and try to win his heart like a stupid little schoolgirl. But of course she couldn’t do any of that, and she wondered now as she had wondered all week, why she was putting herself through this.
What was the point?
She pushed her plate aside and stood up. “Thank you, Artemis,” she said. “I’m sorry nobody believed him, and I’m so sorry nobody believed you. I certainly do, but I’m not sure there’s enough proof. I think it might be too late.”
He looked sad but not surprised and dragged on his rollie again, then, as she reached for her purse, he held that hand out.
“No, no, no!” he began, but she shook him off.
“I will pay for this meal, Artemis. It’s important to me that I pay, okay? You don’t owe me anything.” You’ve paid enough.
As Millie rifled through her purse, she began to frown. “Damn it, I gave Kostas all my Euro last night.” She plucked a credit card out. “Do you take Visa? Is that okay?”
Artemis waved her indoors towards the cash register. “You Aussies,” he said as he took the card from her and swiped it across his machine. “You like your credit cards. You know your number too?”
“Sorry?”
“This man, this evil man I see, he know his number, he say it to me. He think he so clever.”
Millie felt suddenly faint. She already knew that, didn’t she? Yet it was the last compelling piece of the puzzle. Her worst fears had been realised, and now it made everything real.
Worse than that, it made everything she did afterwards utterly unforgivable.
EVE
It was early evening when Monty reached Darlinghurst and already getting dark down that stinking, narrow laneway, and she breathed in through her mouth and wrapped her jacket tighter as she headed to number 263A.
“Monty Brennan!” Thomas said, his eyes lighting up as he opened the door. “My, my, two visits in a week. Somebody got a little crush?”
“Hey Tom, can I come in?”
He smiled. “Sure.” He held the door wide but didn’t move so she was forced to step in and under his armpit. Again she tried not to inhale as she made her way up.
When she got to the living room, she stopped and said, “I’ll have that beer now, if it’s still on offer.”
“Really?” He looked surprised. “That’s more like my old Monty. Great, just give me a sec.”
He vanished into the kitchen and she watched him go, then turned and dashed to the bookshelf, running her fingers along the dusty covers.
Where is it, where is it, where is it…
“You looking for this?”
She swung around to find Tom holding a battered copy of The Celestine Prophecy. Her stomach clenched.
“It’s hers, isn’t it?” she said, knowing she was steering into dangerous territory. When he just blinked at her, she clarified. “The book, it’s Amelia’s, right?”
“Millie. Her name is Millie. Why do you keep calling her Amelia? It doesn’t suit that stupid slut.”
He said the words so casually, but she felt like she’d been punched.
“Yeah, you’re right,” she managed. “Sorry… So… how about that beer?”
His eyes narrowed and for a moment she thought he was going to refuse, but then he slapped the book on the coffee table and returned to the kitchen. This time she heard him open the fridge door. She heard the clink of glass bottles and she slipped onto the sofa and grabbed the book, flicking open the front page to see what she already knew had been scribbled there in smudged blue ink many years earlier:
Millie Jane Malone 1998 xo
When he stepped behind her, she tried not to jump. She steadied her breathing as she flung the book back.
“What a load of nonsense, hey?”
There was deathly silence, then Tom handed her the open beer, dropping it over her shoulder so it hovered, dripping near her breast, and she grabbed it quickly, thanked him and took a long, steadying gulp.
He sat down on the stained armchair opposite her now and drank from his own bottle, watching her.
“Why are you here, Monty?”
She leant back, trying to look relaxed. “I don’t know, maybe I just wanted to be around an old friend. Forget about life for a while.”
His eyes narrowed further. “Sillie Millie still missing then?”
She told him yes but had a terrifying feeling he already knew that. She said, “I’m sick of the whole subject to be honest. I’m sick of it always being about Millie. Maybe I want to be around someone who saw through it all, just like I did.”
He kept staring at her, so she ploughed on.
“I gave her the best years of my life, you know, and for what? She was the boss, not me. She got the big pay cheque, all the glory, I did all the work. You’re right about that. I was a fool.”
He smiled. “You wouldn’t be the first.”
“I know! She didn’t deserve me. Didn’t deserve either of us.”
“Us? There was no us. She never even looked sideways at me.”
“I know, right? What a bitch. You’re such a catch.” She wondered if she was overdoing it. Sank her mouth around her bottle.
But he was warming to the topic now. “She ruined my life too, you know.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, we did do it, just the once. Did you know that?”
So that’s what he was calling it. She felt her stomach turn.
“She was a cold bitch. Don’t know why I bothered.” His eyes began to flutter down Monty’s neck and towards her décolletage. “Pity you and I never stuck.”
She tried to smile, was sure she hadn
’t quite delivered.
“You got a boyfriend? A husband? Somebody?”
“Yes,” she lied. “Going out with a guy from work. Hank.”
He swept his eyes back up. “Then why are you here with me?”
She laughed nervously and dropped her beer on the table, struggled to her feet. “You’re right. I should get back.”
He sat forward. “That’s a pity. I thought we were just getting warmed up.”
“Oh, ha, ha, I wish! No, I… um, I have to return. Deadline.”
“Thought you didn’t give a shit about that anymore.”
“No, I don’t but, well, it’s the last issue. I’m putting the magazine to bed and then I’m out.”
“How about I put you to bed?”
She laughed again, but this time it definitely came out strangled and she had to do everything in her power not to run for the front door, expecting him to grab her at any point, but he didn’t. He simply followed her across the room and stood at the top of the staircase, watching her go.
When she reached the bottom, she swung the door open and then called back, “I’ll be in touch, yeah?”
He did not reply.
TOM
Montana shook her cherry-red curls and gasped at the classic Queenslander in front of her. For a cop station it would make a really lovely family home. Of course you’d have to replace the parochial white timber with a more in-trend shade of grey and open up that wondrous wraparound veranda, which some short-sighted delinquent had thought to enclose. Built on stilts with steps sweeping up to it, the timber structure looked almost cheerful with its clump of rosebushes out the front, and if it wasn’t for the signage, you’d swear you were given a bum steer.
“It’s not so charming inside,” came a gravelly voice beside her.
Montana looked around to find Angus Tower standing there, hands deep in his pockets, giving her a flirtatious grin. She hadn’t seen him in years and was momentarily spellbound—he was still so handsome, more so now that he’d swapped his casual jeans and Polo shirts for a slick Hugo Boss suit—but soon found herself in his embrace, soaking up the heady aftershave and the past memories. They held each other for a few seconds before turning to stare at the station again.
