‘That’s right. How are you, Annie?’
‘Ooh, I’m just peachy, my darling. Lovely afternoon, isn’t it? Do you mind if I pitch my towel here?’
She was pointing to the empty patch of sand right next to Holly.
‘Of course I don’t mind.’ Holly smiled as Annie stripped off to reveal a rather worn-looking black bikini encasing a rather worn-looking bottom and boobs. Her skin was so dark it looked like she’d treated it with wood stain.
‘So,’ she turned to face Holly, ‘have you bumped into Aidan yet?’
Clearly, it wasn’t just the Greeks who got straight to the point around here.
‘Yes, and he’s very nice.’ Holly contemplated telling her about the bathroom incident, then thought better of it.
‘Nice-looking too, eh?’ Annie cackled. She’d brought a large bottle of water down from the bar, and offered some to Holly.
‘No thanks, I’m good.’
‘So, you didn’t think Aidan was good-looking, then?’
She clearly wasn’t going to let this subject go. Holly allowed herself to picture her scruffy Irish neighbour for a second, her mind lingering on the broad freckled forearms, messy dark hair and slightly mocking half-smile.
‘He’s quite attractive,’ she admitted. ‘Not really my type, but I can see the appeal.’
‘Tall, dark and handsome is everybody’s type, surely?’ giggled Annie, pulling a face as Holly shook her head. ‘Well, each to their own, I suppose. I tell you what, though,’ she added with a wink. ‘If I was living right next door to him, I’d probably have become a Peeping Tom by now.’
‘Annie!’ Holly was laughing now. She’d never met such an unashamed pervert. Well, not a female one, anyway.
Annie merely cackled in response, unscrewing the lid of her water bottle and taking another big swig. ‘Bleedin’ hell, it’s hot today.’
Holly reached for her sun lotion and squirted a fresh coat across her stomach.
‘You’re so lucky,’ Annie told her now. ‘Having olive skin. I bet you never burn.’
Holly glanced down at her rapidly bronzing body and shrugged. ‘I never really thought about it,’ she admitted. ‘I’m not even sure why I have this skin type – my mum was pure English rose.’
‘Sandra was too,’ Annie informed her. ‘She wasn’t a big fan of the sun, either. I always used to say to her, “Sandy, why have you chosen to live in a place like this if it means scuttling from one patch of shade to the next all summer long?” ’
‘What was her answer?’ Holly was genuinely intrigued.
‘She always said the same thing: that this was her home and always would be. Her parents loved it here too, of course – but I suppose you knew that?’
Holly bit her lip. Jenny had talked about her parents – Holly’s grandparents – quite a lot before she’d started to drink on a daily basis. She’d been particularly close to her mother, Jenny had said, her eyes always misting up at the thought of her. They had died in an accident when Jenny was only nineteen and had left her their house, but Holly had never seen it. Apparently Jenny had sold it in the end to start up a new business with a friend, but it had failed and she’d lost everything. Her family was cursed.
Looking up at Annie, she noticed a sadness in her eyes.
‘Do you miss her?’ she asked. ‘Sandra, I mean.’
‘I do, yes,’ Annie sniffed. ‘She was such a lovely woman, as you know.’
‘Well, I …’ Holly stopped as she remembered that she’d lied to Annie on the first night about how well she knew her aunt. ‘I didn’t meet her that many times,’ she finished lamely.
‘She and Aidan were pretty good friends too,’ Annie went on, her tone brightening considerably as she went back to her favourite subject. ‘They used to come down to the bar some nights and have a few whiskies. I don’t mind telling you that I think Sandy had a bit of a crush on him.’
‘Pardon?’ Holly was struggling for a suitable response, what with all the metaphorical pots and kettles banging together.
‘Oh yeah, it was quite sweet, really. She even knitted him a jumper one Christmas. It had a turtle on the front of it and he wore it pretty much every day in the winter.’
Holly couldn’t help but smile at the vivid image this conjured up.
‘He helped her out a lot when she got really sick, you know, found a new home for Caretta—’
‘Caretta?’ interrupted Holly.
‘Her cat. Did you never meet him? He was quite a character – huge bloody thing, almost as big as a sea turtle.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Aidan found him a new home on the other side of the island after Sandy went,’ Annie told her. ‘He wanted to keep him, but Caretta didn’t take kindly to having his back end sniffed by the dog on a daily basis.’
Despite the scorching sun and the lively Greek music floating down from the bar, Holly felt a sudden chill.
‘Was it very bad, in the end?’ she forced herself to ask.
Annie considered this for a moment before answering, planting her eyes firmly on the horizon. ‘She was very brave,’ she said eventually. ‘Cancer is an evil disease, I’ll tell you that – but she seemed positive enough.’
Holly felt an overwhelming pang of sadness for Sandra, who had clearly suffered so much. At least her mum had been completely out of it when she died – the only person in any pain over that particular death was Holly herself.
‘I wish I’d known her better,’ Holly said now, really meaning it.
‘Would you like me to tell you some stories about her?’ Annie turned back and smiled at her. ‘She was very funny after a few cheeky bevvies, your auntie.’
‘I’d like that very much,’ Holly beamed.
Annie clapped her hands together with glee, delighted to have been given permission to natter away uninterrupted.
‘Tell you what, darling – you pop up to the bar and get us a couple of cold beers, and I’ll tell you every story I’ve got.’
She didn’t have to say anything else. Holly was already on her feet.
Three beers and two hours later, Holly had decided that she would have liked her Aunt Sandra very much. Annie had no idea how many gaps she was filling with her anecdotes, but Holly was positively lapping them all up. She discovered that Sandra spent a large part of the year making all the traditional costumes for the annual island carnival, which took place over two weeks in late February and early March. ‘If anyone wanted anything making, they’d always go to Sandy,’ Annie told her, in between hearty swigs of Mythos. ‘She did hundreds of costumes on that tiny machine of hers. She worked until her fingers had blisters, but she never complained.’
‘I like to make clothes too,’ Holly admitted, the beer loosening her tongue.
‘Well, that’s just lovely,’ Annie smiled sideways at her. ‘You must get that from her – after all, your mum was her twin sister.’
Twin sister? Holly almost spat her mouthful of beer out across the sand. She’d had no idea that her mum had been a twin. Just why and how could Jenny have allowed her own twin sister to become a virtual stranger? Why the hell would she have cut Sandra out of their lives for so long?
‘Do you still see your dad?’ Annie’s question crashed through Holly’s racing thoughts like a sledgehammer on a frozen lake.
‘Oh no, he … er,’ she spluttered, caught off guard. She had grown up thinking that her dad was a freedom fighter that her mum had met while she was travelling the world. According to Jenny, he was a bit of a renegade and had ended up in a foreign jail, which was why he couldn’t come and visit them. She’d heard the story so often over the years that she’d never thought to question it, and a father wasn’t anything she’d ever really craved, in any case. Before Jenny started drinking, she had been a wonderful mother, and the two of them together had always felt to Holly like a little team.
‘I still see my stepdad sometimes,’ she said, stumbling slightly on the white lie. ‘He’s called Simon. My mum dumped him when I was abo
ut eight, but he still comes to see me from time to time.’
Annie was looking at her a little oddly now. Holly got the impression that she had been about to say something but had stopped herself.
‘He lives in Canada now,’ she added. ‘We write to each other.’
Simon had flown back to the UK when he heard about Jenny’s death, and he and Holly had been the only two people in the crematorium on the day of her sad, lonely funeral. Holly hadn’t known how to contact any other remaining family, because Jenny had always said she was the only one left, and Simon was none the wiser, either. He’d tried awkwardly to reach across and hold her hand during the short reading, his glasses balanced right on the end of his thin nose and his hair curling around his ears.
Holly had wanted nothing more than to throw herself on to the cheap laminate floor by his feet and wail, but she’d found herself paralysed. Simon had waited a week to see if she would thaw, but eventually he had to fly back and get on with life with his new family. Holly never resented him for that, but she did miss him. She wondered now if he had ever known about Sandra, and if so, why he would have kept it from her.
Holly was distracted from her thoughts as Annie chattered on, oblivious to the effect her words were having. As well as being the seamstress of the island, it seemed that Sandra had also volunteered at the local veterinary clinic – Aidan’s clinic – and had become foster mum to a number of dogs and cats while new owners were found. Caretta had been a stray, Annie told her, but for some reason Sandra fell much harder for the enormous black and white cat than she had for any of the others. ‘He would follow her up and down the hill, like a dog,’ Annie recalled. ‘Sometimes she’d sit at one of my tables, watching the sun set, you know, and he’d perch up on her shoulder.’
No wonder Sandra and Aidan had been such good friends, Holly thought. It sounded like her aunt had been a bona fide Mother Teresa when it came to animals.
After the third empty beer bottle was nestling in the sand by her bare toes, Holly plucked up the courage to ask the question she’d been wanting to ask all afternoon.
‘Did you ever meet my mum?’
Annie looked surprised. ‘Oh no, I didn’t arrive on the island until ’ninety-two.’ She must have seen the shadow of disappointment cross Holly’s face, because she quickly added, ‘But I have heard some tall tales about what her and Sandra used to get up to.’
‘Oh?’ Holly tried her best to remain nonchalant.
‘They were a right pair of tearaways, is how I heard it. Skinny-dipping down at Porto Limnionas and drinking all night in town. There was no mum and dad around to keep them in check, I suppose, so they just had a few wild months.’
Holly was smiling at the thought of her mum being happy and free. By the end of her life she’d turned so grey and immobile – like a caged bird, trapped behind the bars of her own destructive habit. Then again, it was her own fault, Holly told herself sternly. Jenny Wright only really had herself to blame for what happened to her.
‘So, are you a bit of a wild one, like your mum was?’ Annie pressed.
Holly considered the question and thought back into her past. She’d certainly gone off the rails for a while after her mum died, staying out as late as possible on her own in bars and clubs. Anything to avoid going back to the place where it had happened. For a few months, Holly had been on a mission not to think about anything, not her mum, not her future and certainly not herself. She’d told herself that all the drinking and all the men was her right – something she deserved after years of struggling to look after her mother, but of course it had only left her feeling more empty in the end. It wasn’t a time that she was proud of, and she had no intention of telling Annie anything about it.
‘I’ve never been too crazy,’ she gave Annie a half-wink. ‘I’m afraid that I’m very sensible and boring these days.’
They both looked down at the stack of empty bottles by their feet and started to giggle.
‘Okay, okay!’ Holly held up her hands. ‘Maybe I still have the odd moment.’
The two of them sat there chatting until the sun started to slip towards the water and long shadows crept along the sand. Holly was at last starting to feel like she had a better idea of who her aunt had been, but she’d also been left with so many other questions: why had Jenny and Sandra fallen out so badly? Why had her mum left Zakynthos if she had been so happy here? And why did Sandra wait until after it was too late to get in contact?
And if she was honest with herself, Holly realised, as she made her way slowly back up the hill, she was also now seriously questioning the identity of her father for the very first time.
Thursday, 22 September 1987
Sandy!
Are you surprised? I saw this in Kostas’ shop the other day and it made me laugh so much that I had to buy it, but then I remembered that I had no one to send it to! Idiot!! I used to love writing you postcards when I was away travelling, so I thought, why not? Holly has drawn you a turtle as well. Well, she told me it was a turtle, but it looks more like a green scribble to me. I still find it hilarious that ‘turtle’ was her first word, but then she never puts that little glass one down, does she? Oh God, I love her so much. I love you all so much. I’m so glad we made Zakynthos our home. Now put the kettle on, will you?
Love Mummy Bear xxx
11
Holly opened her suitcase and rummaged through the jumble of clothes until she found the straps of her mum’s rucksack. Along with the little ornament of the house and a creased photo of Holly’s grandparents on their wedding day, this rucksack had been the only personal possession Jenny Wright had left when she died. Holly had only thrown it in her case at the last minute and couldn’t quite remember now why she had, but here it was – battered yellow canvas with badges sewn all across the front. One of them, Holly realised with a start, was a Greek flag.
Jenny had travelled the world after losing her parents, she’d said as much, so Holly had always known that this rucksack and its contents meant a lot to her mum. Inside there was a rolled-up map of the world with holes where the younger Jenny had once planted pins. One day she’d sat on the sofa with Holly by her side, retracing her own steps with a finger and teaching Holly the names of all the places she’d visited: China, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, Bali – the list seemed to go on for ever, and Holly, wide-eyed and naive on the cushion next to her, had begged in earnest for the two of them to go back to all these places together. It was in the days before Jenny’s blue eyes had lost their sparkle, and she’d smiled down at her daughter and promised that yes, of course they would go on an adventure together.
It was the morning after her chat on the beach with Annie, and Holly was in the process of rereading the letter from Sandra for at least the twentieth time.
… I’m ashamed to say that a combination of cowardice and hope stopped me from finding out the truth until recently. I hoped that she had simply forgotten me, given up on me, perhaps. It was all I deserved, in the end.
Why? Why was it all she deserved?
… I know you must have so many questions. Questions about me, about your mother, about why I never got to see you grow up – but I fear I have run out of time to answer those questions. I am hoping that if you come to Zakynthos, to the house where it all began, then you will find some truth in the wreckage that I have left behind.
But where? Where was this truth and these answers? Holly had been through every drawer in Sandra’s bedroom and turned out every cupboard in the house, but her search had turned up nothing.
She sat now on the hard tiled floor with her back against the bed, Jenny’s world map unfurled across her bare knees. Running a finger down through Europe, she snaked her way south until the tip of her nail found the hole where Zakynthos was marked. She could probably go to all the places on this map bearing pinholes and not find any answers – it was here, on this island, that she knew the truth was waiting. And she didn’t want to wait another day to find it.
What wa
s the name of that place Annie had mentioned yesterday, where her mum and Sandra had gone skinny-dipping? Porto something? Rolling the map back up and stowing it carefully inside Jenny’s old rucksack, Holly went downstairs and retrieved their hand-drawn map from underneath a heap of discarded scraps of material on the kitchen table. Opening it up, she scoured the scribbled names along the coastline: Porto Koukla, Porto Roxi, Porto Limnionas … That was it! It was the very same place where either her mum or her aunt had taken the trouble to draw a big heart, so it must be important.
Holly opened her guidebook to the map page and compared the two. She was no expert in map reading, but Porto Limnionas didn’t look like it was that far away, perhaps a few miles further than Kalamaki, but on the south-west side of the island rather than the south-east. According to the instructions in the book, all you had to do was follow the signs heading north to a place called Kiliomenos, and Limnionas would be signposted from there. How hard could it really be?
Buoyed by her plan and eager to get out into the sunshine, Holly threw a few essentials into a bag, scribbled the place names on her hand in biro and grabbed her moped helmet from the back of the sofa. If her mum could go gallivanting off on adventures, then Holly could damn well do it too.
Porto Limnionas turned out to be a natural inlet situated at the base of a very long asphalt road. Holly had to trust her instincts as she navigated the twists and turns slowly, because the cove itself wasn’t visible until she was right on top of it. According to the guidebook, the place had been kept secret from visiting tourists for many years and as such had remained largely unspoiled, the raw, rugged beauty of the landscape and the ocean beneath exactly as nature intended.
At the top of the cliff edge, looking out over the sea and the flat, polished rocks below, was a smallish taverna with painted white walls and faded gold tiles on the roof. As Holly pulled up outside rather unsteadily and removed her helmet and sunglasses, she could see that a number of the outside tables were occupied, and waiters were dashing in and out of the main building. The stones beneath her trainers were a clean, bleached white and there was an incessant humming chorus coming from all the crickets that had set up home in the surrounding trees.
My Map of You Page 10
