Conor downed the remains of his beer in a single gulp and lurched into action, grabbing the handle of his wheeled suitcase with one hand and roughly taking my wrist with the other.
‘It’s a bit early for beer, isn’t it?’ I commented as I trotted along beside him.
‘Well, if you hadn’t taken such a bleeding long time getting here, I wouldn’t have had to drink anything, now would I?’ Conor said as he strode towards the check-in counter.
The girl on the British Airways desk checked Conor in first, and it crossed my mind, even at that late stage, that I could walk away. There were officials and policemen all over the place. Conor wouldn’t be able to force me to go with him. And he wouldn’t be able to prevent me from leaving either.
‘Can I have your passport, please?’ the girl asked, and as I opened my mouth to speak, I honestly didn’t know whether I was going to say, ‘Yes, here it is,’ or, ‘Sorry, but I’ve changed my mind.’
But Conor noticed something was up. He looked at me and frowned briefly before slipping into the broadest of grins. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘She’s talking to you, pretty lady. It’s passport time. We’re gonna have such a good time, you and me.’
He winked at me and, as if I had momentarily stepped out of my body, I watched him pluck my passport from my hand and hand it over.
‘Thank you,’ the BA lady said.
‘You’re welcome,’ Conor replied, apparently on my behalf.
THREE
BECKY
I sat my finals in May, did a wicked round of goodbye partying, split up with Tom (we’d only been dating for a few weeks, but that was enough to know it wasn’t going anywhere) and loaded my stuff into my hired Corsa.
Mum, as I said, had been having a horrid few years, what with Brian leaving her, Gran dying, and then losing her job. She had lost a fair bit of weight, which at first seemed an improvement but then, as the process continued, started to worry me more and more. She was looking a bit ghostly, a bit transparent, and far older than her forty-nine years. Yet, incongruously, she reminded me of when she was younger, too. Her sadness, her sense of resignation . . . it all felt familiar.
It was hard to leave my life in Bristol behind, though. I’d loved that city, and I’d had a great group of friends there. I felt transformed by my four years at college. But everyone else was moving on to fresh pastures – not one of my close friends was staying on. So Margate seemed as good a place as any from which to plan my next move.
There was more than a hint of selfishness in the decision as well, I suppose. I was two grand overdrawn at the bank (pretty modest compared with most of my peers, thanks to the various McJobs I had done to pay my way), and I had twenty-four thousand pounds of student loans to reimburse at some point in the future as well. Chez Mum, there would at least be no rent to pay.
Mum really perked up when I arrived, and I wondered if she hadn’t simply been achingly lonely since Brian left. But even if it seemed to do her good, it was incredibly difficult for me to revert to childhood after my four-year foray into independence.
Suddenly, there I was, waking up in my old bedroom, Mr D, the stuffed donkey, sitting at the end of the bed staring at me with his one eye. I had to eat at six thirty, because that was the way Mum liked it, and she’d hassle me about eating more, or less, depending on the day of the week. She would nag me to tidy my room and tell me my skirt was too short. I felt real fear, as if she were nibbling away at my sense of self, slowly dissolving the bubble of adulthood I had so carefully constructed to protect myself.
If no one was there to perceive this new, witty, self-assured me – because Mum really did seem to look at me and still see the baby she had breastfed – did that person really exist at all?
You forget, when you leave, how many tiny decisions your parents took out of your hands as a child. What to wear. What to eat. How much to drink . . .
I’d slipped into a surprisingly hard-to-break habit of having a couple of large glasses of cheap wine with my evening meal. Mum, though, served wine by the thimbleful and then put the bottle back in the fridge immediately after she’d done so. She didn’t actually put a padlock on the cork, but I just knew from her aura that a refill was out of the question. I’m twenty-three! I wanted to scream. I can drink as much as I want! But I didn’t. I sipped and smiled and tried to convince myself I was still a grown woman.
As far as my ten-a-day smoking habit was concerned, I daren’t even leave the packet in sight. Instead, I hid them at the back of the wardrobe. I smoked out of my bedroom window, exactly as I had done aged fifteen, and I ripped the cigarette butts to pieces and flushed them down the loo.
One Friday in late June, a Friday of the grey, drizzling variety, I began hunting for a box of matches. My degree results were to be published at twelve o’clock precisely, and my lighter had run out of gas. I’d tried lighting a sheet of paper from the glowing element of the toaster but had merely burned my fingers and set off the deafening smoke alarm.
Mum was at the supermarket and would be away for at least an hour, so my initially frantic search took on a leisurely, if not nosey, aspect.
I found old photos, which I studied, and prescription drugs, which I googled, and cheap jewellery I’d never seen before: necklaces and earrings that I tried on in front of Mum’s mirror.
I was looking through her nightstand (Valium, cough pastels, some condoms with a 2012 expiry date . . .) when I found the envelope. Inside were return plane tickets for the end of August, destination Athens.
Now, without you knowing my mother, it’s hard for me to explain quite how surprising plane tickets might be. But Mum, with the exception of our bizarre and entirely out-of-character holiday when I was seven, had never been anywhere. And I mean that quite literally. She’d never travelled, or been drunk, or smoked, or even gone to bed after midnight. She was the most predictable, sensible mum anyone could ever have had. In fact, I was so shocked, I read the name on the tickets over and over again.
Once I’d convinced myself that my eyes were not deceiving me, I put everything back exactly as it had been and, wondering how I could get her to tell me about the tickets without revealing that I’d been going through her bedside cabinet, I returned to the lounge to wait.
It will give you some idea how intrigued I was, perhaps, if I tell you that I’d momentarily forgotten not only my need for a ciggy, but also the imminent arrival of my degree results. I stared at the clock on the Virgin box for a few minutes, watching the digits change, and I wondered why Mum was going to Athens, and how on earth she could afford it, and why she hadn’t told me.
It was only when the figures changed to 12:00 that I remembered, with a jolt, about my exam results. I grabbed my laptop and clicked manically, and yelped when I saw the outcome. I’d got a first-class degree!
This left me overjoyed, obviously. But it also gave me an idea.
I shouted out my news before Mum had fully opened the front door.
She dumped her Aldi bags on the sofa and hugged me. ‘I knew you would,’ she said. ‘You always were a clever clogs. That’s why I bought this.’
She reached into one of the bags and produced a bottle of dodgy fake champagne.
My attempt at wheedling the information from her did not go well. In fact, it proved to be another whiplash straight back to childhood.
We were sipping our glasses of Aldi’s finest sparkling wine and nibbling at the anchovy olives Mum had bought to go with it, when I said, very casually I hoped, ‘I was thinking, I mean, seeing as we’ve got something to celebrate and seeing as we’re both free for the first time in ages . . . well . . . what would you say to planning a little getaway somewhere, Mum?’
‘What, like a weekend break or something?’ Mum asked.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Or even . . . maybe . . . a proper holiday. A bit of sunshine. Mother and daughter. It could be nice.’
‘Right . . .’ Mum said, sounding doubtful.
‘Spain, I was thinking. Or Italy. Or even Greece.�
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Mum put her glass down and stared at me piercingly. It was the same look she’d had when I was a child, the look she’d given me at the precise moment she’d spotted the broken vase hidden at the bottom of the dustbin. She ran her tongue around the inside of her cheek.
‘What?’ I asked. I laughed and could feel myself blushing.
‘You tell me,’ she said, raising one eyebrow.
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know what you’re on about,’ I said. ‘I was just . . .’ But my voice faded out. I could hear how unconvincing I sounded. Trying to pull one over on Mum was like trying to cheat the Gestapo.
‘So?’ Mum said.
I shrugged again. ‘Maybe I stumbled upon some tickets?’ I said as cutely as I could manage.
‘You stumbled upon them?’ Mum repeated, mocking laughter in her voice.
‘I was looking for something,’ I said.
‘You were looking for something.’
‘A lighter.’
‘Oh, a lighter, was it?’
‘Yes, I wanted to light that candle,’ I said, nodding at the huge red candle on the windowsill. ‘But I couldn’t find matches or a lighter anywhere.’
‘You wanted to light that candle,’ Mum said.
‘Can you stop repeating everything I say?’
‘Do you actually think I don’t know about your Camels hidden at the back of the wardrobe?’ Mum asked. ‘Do you think I can’t smell it when you smoke out of your window?’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘Yes. Oh.’
‘So you’ve been rummaging through my wardrobe?’ I asked, unsure if I was feigning or actually feeling the beginnings of outrage.
‘I don’t think you want to go there, do you?’ Mum said. ‘Not after rummaging through my bedside cabinet while I was out buying you champagne.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Maybe not.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘So, Athens?’ I said. ‘How come?’
Mum shrugged. ‘Your granny left me some money. She had quite a stash, as it turns out. Actually, that’s something we need to talk about at some point. I’ve reserved a chunk of it for you. But anyway, I thought, why the hell not? I haven’t had a holiday for years. And I have the time at the moment, too.’
‘But you didn’t want to tell me?’
‘Oh, don’t be like that, sweetheart,’ Mum said. ‘I knew you wouldn’t want to go away with an old fogey like me.’
‘But what if I would?’ I asked.
‘You could at least have denied that I’m an old fogey,’ Mum said, laughing. ‘But you didn’t, did you?’
‘You’re not even fifty, Mum.’
‘Not until September,’ she replied.
‘Ahh, that’s it. Your fiftieth!’ I exclaimed. ‘Of course. But you don’t want to spend your birthday on your own, do you? Unless you’re planning on doing a Shirley Valentine and hitching up with some big, hairy Greek bloke?’
Mum ignored this comment. ‘Would you really want to come?’
‘I might.’
‘In August, September?’ Mum asked. ‘Don’t you think you’ll be sick of me by then?’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But, no, I don’t think so. I think I’d love to go to Athens with you for your birthday. We’ve never been anywhere together, really, have we?’
‘We went to Bergen.’
‘I was six,’ I said. ‘Other than the fact that you kept trying to get me to eat seafood, I don’t even remember it.’
‘You were seven,’ Mum corrected. ‘But yes, I suppose it might be nice. It’s not Athens, though, sweetheart. That’s just where the boat goes from.’
‘The boat?’
‘Yes. The boat to Santorini.’
FOUR
LAURA
Though these days you can fly direct from London to Santorini if you so wish, back in 1994, before the whole low-cost thing had really got going, the options were much more limited.
The best route the travel agent had been able to find for us was from London to Athens with BA, then from Athens to Mykonos with the Greek national airline, Aegean, and finally a short boat trip to Santorini.
Conor, who it unexpectedly transpired was a nervous flyer, drank continuously during the trip, and as he drank he became both more talkative and noisier. In doing so, he seemed to match less and less the polite, well-dressed man I had met back in England, and more and more the tattooed roofer I seemed to have sitting beside me.
By the time we reached Athens, I had learned not only far more than I’d ever wanted to know about roofing, but also that his parents had died when he was young and he had grown up, along with his only brother, in care. This last bit of information produced an inevitable wave of sympathy for both his drinking and the vulgarity it seemed to let loose. For what woman can resist an abandoned child doing his best to shake off the trauma of a dodgy upbringing? Certainly not someone with a childhood as traumatic as my own.
We negotiated Athens airport, essentially thanks to me – Conor was quite drunk by the time we landed – and boarded a much smaller propeller plane for the final flight.
If Conor had complained about the turbulence of the first flight – and he had – it was as nothing to the ups and downs and sudden sideways lurches of our little propeller plane, and though I discovered, to my surprise, that I actually enjoyed the craziness of the flight, just as I might enjoy a roller coaster, that the excitement and sense of danger made me feel light-hearted and alive, poor Conor was terrified. He actually reached for a sick bag at one point, but thankfully, unlike the elderly chap across the way, resisted.
As we stepped into the balmy heat of tiny Mykonos Airport, Conor announced, entirely devoid of any context, that in addition to being a roofer, he was a middleweight champion boxer.
He was clearly trying to compensate for having been such a wuss during the flight, but not only did I not believe him, I also thought the claim made his trembling and praying of a few minutes earlier seem just that little bit more ridiculous.
As arranged, a driver was there to meet us, holding up a placard with the name of our hotel. As the minibus lurched along the poorly lit, bumpy roads of Mykonos, it was my turn to feel scared.
‘Don’t worry,’ Conor said, suddenly brave. ‘It’ll be fine. This guy drives these roads every day.’ He put one heavy arm across my shoulders and looked out of the window before adding, ‘Looks like a right shithole though, doesn’t it?’
When we got to the hotel, an imposing blue-and-white building on the seafront, he cheered up. ‘Now this is more like it,’ he said.
Even though we didn’t have a sea view, our room was lovely. It had a huge double bed (which scared me somewhat – I hadn’t, after all, slept with Conor yet) and a dressing table and built-in cupboards with blue doors that looked like Parisian shutters.
‘A shower, then food?’ Conor suggested, dumping his suitcase on the bed.
I told him that sounded fine.
To avoid being in the tiny en-suite with him while he showered, I faffed around hanging up clothes that would only have to be repacked the next morning. Because of the prices, which were double those on Santorini, Conor had booked only a single night in Mykonos.
As soon as he came out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist, I ducked in and locked the door.
Because I was both terrified and excited by the idea that Conor might be lying naked, waiting for me on the bed, I took the longest shower I thought I could reasonably get away with. And my plan worked perfectly because, by the time I came out, the room was empty. I sat for a moment in the cool of the air conditioning and watched the steam drifting from the bathroom, and I wondered if I was relieved or disappointed.
I put on a brand-new pair of snow wash jeans I had bought for the trip and a pinkish Calvin Klein T-shirt, before – after a long hunt for the room key, which I finally found in a slot in the light switch – heading downstairs.
The hotel restaurant was on the ground floor at the front of t
he building, overlooking the beach. The huge glass windows along the front wall had been completely folded back, effectively turning the whole place into one vast, beachfront balcony. The tables had candles and starched, white tablecloths, and beyond the opening, the sea twinkled with the lights of the fishing boats that were moored there. Ceiling fans spun slowly above the diners’ heads and plinky-plonky, minimalist Greek music was playing, the kind of thing they use to fill up those Buddha Bar compilation CDs. I think I’d been too tired and sweaty and scared when we had arrived to truly appreciate the beauty of the setting, but now, after a shower and a change of clothes, I saw it all and gasped.
Conor had secured a table right at the front. He was wearing jeans and a white shirt and looked really rather beautiful. He waved at me and smiled and I remember thinking, as I wove my way through the tables towards him, This is going to be all right after all. I kept changing my mind about everything, back and forth, back and forth, over and over again.
‘Jaysus!’ Conor said when I reached the table. ‘I was about to give up on you and order. I could eat the bleedin’ twelve Apostles, I’m that hungry.’
I fluttered my eyelids and slipped into my seat. ‘It’s beautiful here,’ I said.
‘Aye, it’s a bit of all right, eh?’ Conor said. ‘You’re looking pretty.’
‘Thanks,’ I replied, blushing. ‘You don’t look so bad yourself.’
‘But I hope you have some skirts with you,’ Conor continued. ‘We can’t be having you in jeans the whole time, now, can we?’
I frowned. I was used to my mother telling me my skirts were too short, but having a man tell me what to wear was a whole different thing. ‘I do, but . . . I’m fine in jeans, thanks,’ I said.
‘Well, it’ll do for now, I suppose,’ Conor said. ‘But tomorrow wear a dress, OK?’
I nodded vaguely. ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘We’ll see.’
Conor sipped his beer. ‘Yes, we will see,’ he said, sounding a little menacing, but as ever I couldn’t tell if he mightn’t be joking. He smiled at me then, and because I didn’t smile back, he added, ‘You’ve got lovely legs, you have. We can’t have you hiding them the whole time, now, can we? If you’ve got it, flaunt it, babe.’
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