TWNS-2-6-Kindle Master

by Alexander, Nick

  When Sean tells her that he’s not been sleeping well, she suggests exercise. “It always fixes it for me,” she explains. “Go for a really long walk after dinner. You’ll see.” And as it’s a beautiful evening, that’s exactly what Sean does.

  He heads, quite automatically, down to the river, where he hesitates momentarily about which way to walk. Right will take him to Riverside, which feels a bit too much like work. Left will take him towards The Backs, and then on towards Grantchester. He thinks of “his building” and decides, for want of a better destination, to make his way there. It should be lovely in the evening light.

  By the time he has zigzagged back and forth to the river bank (there is no continuous footpath along the Cam) it takes him almost an hour of quite sporty walking, to reach the building.

  He scrambles though the scrubby undergrowth beyond the furthest side wall, then down the bank to the river’s edge from where he can look proudly back up at the building he created. The evening sun is low in the sky and illuminates all sixteen windows quite magnificently. For once, the reality looks better than the artist’s impression he once drew.

  Sean remembers quite clearly the late nights he put in designing windows that would fold back entirely, effectively transforming the lounges into balconies. He studies and congratulates himself upon the perfect way the building is staggered to make the most of the evening light. He remembers, again, the funky kitchen units he designed, complete with integrated, rotating, vanishing dinner tables. He wishes he could step inside and sense the smooth sliding movement once again. They had been so beautifully crafted by a local carpenter. He wonders how well they have aged.

  A man, fifties, shirtsleeves, appears at one of the third floor windows. He pulls the handle of the vast sliding window, effectively sealing the interior against the cooling night air, and Sean remembers thinking, when he designed the building, that one day he would live there, that one day he would be that guy. He remembers, too, how on seeing the prices, he had understood that he would never be able to afford it.

  The man returns to the window with a tumbler of golden liquid in his hand, perhaps whisky, perhaps just apple juice. He stares down at Sean suspiciously and then turns and says something to someone behind him. A woman, young, pretty, well dressed, comes into view. She follows the man’s gaze and takes in Sean’s presence before simply shrugging and vanishing again.

  Sean turns his back to the building and takes in the splendid view one last time. The sun is just starting to dip behind the trees on the opposite bank and a couple are cycling along the footpath, their young daughter strapped into a child seat on the back. She looks like April.

  He clambers back up to the road where he takes a photo of the For Sale sign before turning and heading for home.

  Snapshot #21

  35mm format, colour. A cluster of white buildings with curved roofs clings to a barren, rocky outcrop, rising from a ripple-free sea of blue. Tourists are massed in the narrow streets and many are holding cameras. A blue and white Greek flag flutters in the breeze and the entire scene is bathed in orangey evening light.

  Sean smiles at the photo. He remembers the iodine odour of the salty evening air. Could Catherine have had an affair in Greece? he wonders. No, of course not. They had been together twenty-four hours a day. And they had been happy, too, hadn’t they?

  It had been their second holiday in two years, with Maggie and Ian this time, and they had felt sun-soaked and relaxed, and blessed.

  April had been dropped off in Margate with Catherine’s mother. Catherine had been terrified that two weeks in Margate would turn her into a hooligan but the only noticeable change on her return had been a sudden, determined predilection for oven chips and Coke. Some things, it seemed, never changed.

  Santorini had been amazing, though. The light of the place, that was the thing. The light and the stunning blue of the sea and the sky everywhere you looked. The beauty of the island had literally taken Sean’s breath away on a number of occasions.

  After Santorini they had gone on to Mykonos, and that had been a mistake. For whereas Santorini, in the early nineties, still felt uniquely Greek, even Middle Eastern and undeveloped in places (donkeys were still considered a means of transport back then), Mykonos had felt more like Cannes. The streets had been lined with luxury shops selling ridiculous fashions from Jean-Paul Gaultier or Dolce and Gabbana and the bars had been serving not Retsina to traditional bouzouki music, but expensive cocktails to a background of techno. And then Maggie and Ian had unexpectedly split up, and the whole thing had gone tits up.

  Still, the sex had been good. That’s one thing Sean will never forget. For once Maggie and Ian had gone their tearful separate ways and Sean and Catherine had the whole place to themselves, Catherine had become quite rampant. Sean had never known anything like it. Perhaps Catherine, too, had been worried that Sean would run off with someone else?

  Cassette #21

  Hello Darling.

  I’m not sure how well I’m going to manage this, today. I’ve been throwing up all morning, and even though they’ve now given me an antiemetic, I still feel pretty dodgy. We’ll see.

  Today, we’re off to the Greek islands.

  It had been your idea to go, and I’ll admit it, I wasn’t keen. I don’t know why that’s the case, really, except to say that I had always thought that Greece was a bit third-worldy and, though in ways it was – do you remember all those poor donkeys there were everywhere? – I loved it. It blew my mind, really.

  Paris had been amazing and I believed that it would be a tough act to follow. In fact, I even campaigned for a return trip to Paris instead of Greece. But Maggie wanted to go somewhere hot and Ian wanted to practise his Greek and you wanted to swim, so I caved in.

  Where Paris was like a prettier, chic-er version of London, stunning but somehow familiar, Santorini was a completely different experience, a sharp, gorgeous shock to the senses, like landing on a different planet, really.

  It smelt different – that was the first thing I noticed when we stepped off the ferry. It smelt hot and dusty like one imagines the desert might smell. And the sea, just everywhere, that blue… God, I fell in love instantly.

  On the third day you rented a moped so that we could explore, and we whizzed off around the island. There was hardly any traffic back then, just other tourists on mopeds and the occasional truck or donkey. A girl from work went there a couple of summers ago and what she described sounds very different. It sounds like it’s become like Mykonos, really, so God only knows what Mykonos is like these days.

  Anyway, the moped thing was amazing, definitely the best bit. I felt so carefree and young bombing around those dusty roads with my arms around your waist. I’m pretty sure we wore shorts, didn’t we? How irresponsible were we?

  Maggie and Ian stayed behind because Ian insisted that mopeds were too dangerous. I thought, at the time, that they’d stayed behind in order to have the place to themselves, that they wanted to have their holiday fun-time, but knowing what we know now, I suppose that’s unlikely.

  At lunchtime we followed a sign that said “restaurant”, and rode miles and miles down this terrifying gravelly track that I thought we’d never get back up again, and came, in the end, to a tiny restaurant on a deserted, scrappy beach. We were the only people there.

  An old woman dressed in black – they were all dressed in black – came out to serve us. She had fish or feta, she said. That was it. So we ordered feta for our starter and fish for our main course, and I can still remember the exact taste of that feta. It was rich and creamy and tangy and it came drenched in olive oil from the woman’s own olive trees, and with bread that she had baked herself.

  And then, just as we were finishing our feta first course, a little fishing boat came buzzing up to the beach. It was her husband with the day’s catch: the fish for our main course. It was the scariest, ugliest looking fish I had ever seen, but she drowned it in more olive oil and threw it on the barbecue, and it was the be
st fish either of us had ever tasted.

  After that, we got the Flying Dolphin to Mykonos, and everything went pear shaped. If we had gone there first, I think we would have thought that it was lovely but after Santorini it felt like civilisation – it felt like the holiday was over.

  Ian started vanishing almost immediately, and I kept on and on asking Maggie if they had fallen out, and she kept on and on insisting that, no, everything was fine, and Ian was just practising his Greek on the locals. Which, in a way, he was.

  But even before the big secret was revealed, it put a bit of a downer on the holiday, because we all loved pretty, clever, Greek-speaking Ian and we all thought that he was finally “the one” for Mags. Mags even mentioned marriage one night in Santorini when we were all alone and drunk.

  Poor Mags. She fell to her knees when he told her what was going on. We’d gone out to eat, I think, so neither of us was there to witness any of it. She told me afterwards, when we got back; which is strange, because it’s as if I have the image of it in my mind’s eye. It’s as if I was there. It must just be because I’ve imagined the scene a hundred times: Ian telling her that he needed to explain something. And then telling her that he had met someone. And finally that this person he had met was called Dimitri.

  “I should have known,” I remember Mags saying. “The sex was awful. Everything else was wonderful, but the sex was bloody awful.”

  We let her stay in bed the next day and then the day after that we rented a car and dragged her across the island with us to some beautiful beach you’d read about in the Rough Guide.

  They had sun loungers and big suspended parasols which looked like ship’s sails, fluttering in the breeze. The waiters all wore matching white pareos.

  Poor Mags, she walked off to the far side of the beach and sat on a rock staring out to sea all day, while you and I studied all the gay couples around us, scared and a little intrigued by the idea that we might spot Ian and Dimitri together.

  Mid afternoon, Mags came back – she was burnt to a crisp – and said that she wanted to go home, which we both took to mean that she wanted to return to the holiday apartment. But no, she really meant home.

  Ian stayed on, though not, of course, in the flat that we’d rented. We bumped into him coming out of a bar one evening. He was with a Greek guy who was even more beautiful than Ian was. He turned out, of course, to be the famous Dimitri. It’s a funny thing to say, but in that moment, Ian made sense to me in a way he never really had before. I had that sort of of course feeling you sometimes get when Barry Manilow finally admits that he’s gay, or someone tells you that Michael Jackson has died. Of course, he is. Of course he has.

  You couldn’t fault Ian’s taste, though. Dimitri was incredibly good looking. He had olive skin and jet black hair and blue eyes that perfectly matched his open-necked denim shirt. I think he could have turned a few men’s heads even if they hadn’t been gay, to be honest. And he smelt incredible, a mixture of aftershave – something subtle – and a sort of salty, spicy Mediterranean animal smell. He smelt a bit like barbecue smoke and sea and sex, if that makes any sense.

  Ian asked us if Mags was OK, and I had to be the one to tell him that she’d gone home.

  “If hell exists, I’ll go to hell for what I’ve done to her,” he said, looking like he was about to cry.

  And you replied, “Luckily for you, it doesn’t, then.”

  I loved you for saying that, because it summed up the whole thing for me. It somehow nailed it shut.

  We were there three more nights, I think, but I don’t remember any of it really. The whole thing seemed spoilt by the fact that we knew Mags was back in Cambridge crying her poor eyes out. I still wonder if we shouldn’t have changed our own flights and travelled back with her. I almost suggested it – in fact was about to suggest it, even – when Mags said something which upset me, causing me to keep schtum.

  She told me that she had only ever been in love with Ian and, because I wanted her to realise that she’d been in love on more than one occasion and by consequence would be again, I challenged her on this until finally she admitted that it was true.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I was in love one other time. But he was married, so that doesn’t count.”

  Well, it seemed obvious to me that she was talking about you. In fact, I was terrified that she was about to admit to the whole affair thing bang in the middle of my summer holiday. It crossed my mind that she might have a vindictive streak – that she might think she’d feel better if she torpedoed our holiday by chucking everything out there in the open, so that we could all be miserable together. I thought, too, about the fact that she was now single again and, as such, was now dangerous again, as well.

  So I selfishly decided to keep you safe from her for a couple more days while I did my best to prove to you how much better you were off with me. Plus, to be totally honest, which is supposed to be the whole point here, thinking about Ian and Dimitri together had made me feel strangely horny. They were both so very, very pretty…

  When we got back, I went down on the train to pick up April from Mum’s.

  She was so happy there, Sean – it was as much as I could do to drag her home. It had been a hot fortnight and Mum said that they, too, had spent every day on the beach. When I asked April what she’d been eating, she said, “Chips and Coke and chocolate ice cream,” which I knew, instantly, was the entire truth.

  When I got back to Cambridge, I found you and Mags together, staring at the TV screen. Something strange was going on and you both looked concerned, and I worried, for a moment, that you were going to make some devastating announcement to me.

  When I looked at the TV screen, it was covered with red percentage numbers that I didn’t understand. “We’ve crashed out of the ERM,” you said. I had no idea what that meant but you looked pretty worried. It was the day after Black Wednesday.

  • • •

  Sean rolls onto his side and sunlight warms his face. He writhes and stretches and luxuriates in the sensation of the crisp, white sheets against his skin. The odour of fresh coffee reaches his nostrils, mixed with something different, something spicy and tangy.

  He rolls onto his back, stretches again, his arms above his head, and then opens his eyes. The sunlight flickers and strobes as the leaves of the tree outside bristle in the breeze.

  He throws back the covers, and stands. He yawns and then begins to walk towards the lounge, conscious as he leaves the bedroom of his nakedness yet aware by the time he reaches the lounge of the soft plush dressing-gown he’s wearing.

  A woman is in the kitchen area, a woman he loves. She’s in the process of squeezing oranges, and this, he realises, is the origin of the second, tangy odour he detected from the bedroom. The woman is wearing one of his white work shirts and the sunlight is revealing the shadow of her enveloped body through the material.

  “Coffee and juice?” she asks, and as she turns to face him, he realises that this is not Catherine. She is somehow of the same essence as Catherine, but she is not Catherine.

  He turns to look at the picture window at the far end of the room and sees that the woman is now seated outside, waiting for him, so he crosses the room and pushes at the window which glides effortlessly before vanishing into the wall. He steps onto the balcony and then grips the cold railings and looks down at the scene below.

  Beneath him is the Cam, complete with rowers and punts and wind-surfers, and beyond that, a daffodil spotted river bank, and beyond that, a vast sea of blue, dotted with tiny islands in a pink sunrise.

  “The sea!” Sean gasps.

  “Yes, they moved it,” the woman replies. “Isn’t that the funniest thing ever?”

  “They moved it,” Sean repeats, and he begins to laugh, and once he has started, he can’t stop. He laughs and laughs and laughs. And when he opens his eyes to find himself in his usual, darkened bedroom, he realises that he is still laughing. He wipes the tears from his eyes and glances over at the alarm clock
. It’s six-forty-eight.

  It is now ten o’clock on Saturday morning and Sean is out of bed, out of coffee and out of orange juice. So he makes Marmite on toast and a mug of tea instead and looks out at the rain-soaked garden and thinks about the dream.

  It’s the first happy, sexy dream he has had since Catherine fell ill, two years ago, and he wishes, in a way, that he could close his eyes and go back to that sunny apartment.

  He tries to remember the woman’s face, but it’s a blur, like one of those frosted-window faces you see in crime documentaries.

  But the flat, he remembers and recognises. It was one of the Cantabrigian Rise units, albeit stretched to dream proportions and re-situated on the Aegean. That sensation, of simply being happy, remains so sharp, so well remembered, and so lost to him now he’s awake, that it makes him want to cry. He reaches for his phone and flicks through the recent photo list until he comes to the picture of the For Sale sign. And then he fetches the landline handset and dials the number.

  By the time he hangs up, he knows the price of the apartment. Six hundred and thirty thousand for a one bedroom flat! And by the time he folds his laptop away and heads to the bathroom for his shower, he knows the estimated price of three bedroom houses in his street: Five hundred and fifty thousand. Which leaves a gap of eighty, at least.

  Snapshot #22

  120 format, colour. A teenage girl poses reluctantly for a school photo against a painted backdrop depicting clouds. She is rolling her eyes and wearing school uniform. Her school tie is knotted in such a way that it hangs halfway down her chest and has a total length of about three inches.

  April’s moods had come and gone. For certain periods, sometimes for an entire year or so, she would become angelic. And then something inexplicable would change somewhere in the cosmos and she could shift from angel to devil in about half an hour, a state which, once again, could last for an hour or a year.