An Inch of Time

by Peter Helton

  ‘She sent this postcard.’ I held it up for him to inspect.

  He beamed again. ‘Yes, our postcard.’ He pointed out a stack of them on top of the bar. ‘You get free with meals. Is what is called gimmick. And works, no? You got postcard, you come here.’

  ‘She only sent it a few weeks ago. There can’t have been that many tourists around then.’

  Niko put on a conspiratorial air and leant across the bar. ‘Is too many faces every week,’ he said in a tragic voice. ‘We like tourists, but every day is same job, different people. Sometimes people come many years, then you remember, but if come for one or two weeks only, then you smile, you say how nice, how wonderful, and when they go away, you forget same day. Because is already more people. To you is holiday, important event, OK. But to us is just people come and go, come and go, always.’ His fingers drummed a tattoo on a laminated menu. ‘You want to eat now?’

  I have been rightly called a glutton, but another meal so soon was beyond even me. Besides, I have a rule about eating in places with laminated menus. You guessed. I climbed on to a bar stool. ‘No, not tonight. I’ll just have a drink, please.’

  Niko set an ice-cold bottle of beer in front of me. ‘Enjoy your drink. Sorry, I must go kitchen now.’ He ducked away through a narrow door, leaving me to contemplate my various ineptitudes as a private eye over a glass of Henninger. My only clue as to where Kyla Biggs went on her holiday hadn’t got me very far. They didn’t remember her – or else Niko was a good actor. And he did have a point, after all; I didn’t for one minute imagine that I myself would remember foreign names and faces over a hectic twenty-eight-week season of moussaka and chips. Sipping my drink, I sat gloomily unfocused, not knowing what my next move should be. Sometimes, I tried to tell myself, the answer was right there in front of your nose, if only you could see it. ‘Focus!’ I admonished myself. I drank more beer and sat up straight. My eyes focused on the dense patchwork of tourist snaps blu-tacked to the wall behind the bar. It was an excellent showcase of how even the worst photographer somehow managed to capture at least some of the atmosphere; happy, pink, possibly drunk examples of tourist-hood smiled from every picture, now fading in the strong Greek light almost as quickly as they did from Greek memory.

  And there she was, right in front of my nose, looking back at me from a square Polaroid: Kyla, sitting outside this very taverna, smiling, tanned from the sun, red-eyed from the flash and flushed from drink, raising a glass towards the photographer. To her right sat Niko, smiling at her. Next to him, badly lit and half cut-off at the edge but easily recognizable, sat the chap I had seen only this lunchtime, sitting in the leading car emerging from the Thalassa Organic Olive Oil Co-op, checking his watch. And to Kyla’s left, with bleached hair and sparkling nose stud, holding a bottle of beer by the neck, unsmiling and watching the others, sat Gloves.

  THIRTEEN

  I slid off the barstool and peered into the doorway Niko had disappeared through – a cluttered gangway leading to the kitchen. There was no sign of him or any staff. Good. I had just changed my mind about Niko’s acting skills. Or perhaps the state of his memory. I walked behind the bar, snatched the picture off the wall and rearranged its neighbours a bit. There, no one was going to notice that. My first impulse had been to point the photo out to Niko to refresh his memory; only then I remembered how the police seemed quite keen for me not to find this place. Or perhaps any place Kyla had visited. I heard a noise from the doorway. The Polaroid disappeared into my pocket and I swiftly resumed my place at the right side of the bar. Not a moment too soon. Niko reappeared. Too smiley now somehow, and tidying things that didn’t need tidying, while keeping a nervous eye on the open entrance door. I felt a little tingle at the back of my head that made me think I shouldn’t be sitting here with my back to that door. Peeling euros on to the table, I thanked Niko, who suddenly came to life.

  ‘You go so soon? Is early. Have another drink.’ He pushed the money back towards me as though refusing all payment.

  ‘No thanks, I ought to be going.’

  With lightning speed, he set two glasses up on the bar and splashed a generous amount of ouzo into both from a large bottle. He pushed one across and set a carafe of water next to it. ‘You must take one drink with me. Is ouzo – you mix with water if you like. On the house, of course. Is traditional, for welcome people. I forgot before, very sorry.’

  If one large shot of this ubiquitous aniseed horror was going to be enough delay, then I really had to get a move on. ‘Very kind, but I’m allergic,’ I said on the way to the door. ‘Iássu, Niko.’

  He followed me outside and put a heavy arm around my shoulder. ‘You have allergy with ouzo? Come drink whisky. One whisky. Is on the house.’

  ‘Scotch whisky?’

  ‘Greek whisky.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I promised. ‘I’ll have a drink tomorrow.’ But most likely not in this place. And definitely not Greek whisky.

  I had reached the edge of the taverna area by the canal and he had to let go of me now. Guests from the two tables began to notice this excessive display of hospitality and two more couples, talking in loud, happy voices, were just arriving, greeting Niko like a long-lost friend.

  I shrugged past them and hurried. It was getting darker now and the retro street lamps along the canal were glimmering against the remnants of the sunset. I had nearly reached the bridge when a police car came flying across from the opposite side. Hastily joining a family reading a billboard menu outside a cafe, I watched as the car stopped abruptly by the little supermarket at the corner. Two men jumped out, one in uniform, the other in a dark suit. They walked fast towards Niko’s Taverna.

  Not as fast as I legged it across the bridge to the bike. I had little doubt that the police had arrived in response to me having quizzed Niko and I had no intention of hanging around to find out what they thought about it. The wretched little bike responded to my working the kick-starter with a tired snuffling sound. Four, five, six times – I was just going to flood the tiny engine if I carried on. I pushed the bike along the road, faster, fell into a trot, then jumped on the thing, slid it into second gear and dropped the clutch. It coughed, the engine fired and I opened the throttle wide, listening to its agonized whine, urging it to gain speed as it crawled uphill through the town. There was no point trying to hare down the side streets in an attempt to hide; the police were bound to know every short cut and would simply scoop me up round the next corner. I joined the thin traffic through the centre, checking behind every few seconds, my paranoia at a fresh peak, then left the town northbound. Soon I was just a tiny light on a rural unlit road, being frequently overtaken by faster vehicles, though none of them turned out to be the dreaded police car. Perhaps I had got it all wrong and the arriving police had nothing to do with me. Or perhaps they had decided to believe my promise to come and have a drink there tomorrow and would be waiting for me. Or perhaps they were confident of getting me later. We’d see about that. For the first time since arriving here I had taken the advice given to me; Morva had said, ‘If you see police, scram’, and I was scramming north as fast as the little Honda would go.

  The roads around Neo and Ano Makriá felt familiar now, which is how I managed to find my way home in the dark with only the feeble glimmer from the bike’s headlamp and the stars for company on the narrow unlit roads. A few potholes and a couple of prowling dogs took me by surprise, but I skilfully panicked the bike around those without riding it into a ditch. I was relieved when I reached the prosperous lights of Neo Makriá. Dimitris’s cafe, though, stood dark and deserted as I passed it. The treacherous dirt road up to Ano Makriá seemed to go on for ever tonight and Morva’s crumpled Fiesta by the tree was a sharp reminder of just how close to the edge it ran.

  Once I had parked the bike by the van I waited for a while, allowing my eyes to adjust to the sudden darkness and my ears to the absence of engine noise before taking the path towards the house. The display of stars in the Greek sky was spectacular tonight, th
e starlight strong enough to make out the shapes of the church and churchyard to my right and the rest of the ruined village squatting in the hollow darkness to my left.

  Only in a setting like this one could the oil lamps and candles that were lighting Morva’s sitting room appear so bright. The three students were keeping the invalid company, cheering her – and themselves – with the help of quite a few bottles of wine. I fended off the repeated invitations to join them. In the kitchen I pulled the cork on a private litre bottle of red Corfu plonk and let myself out of the back door into the ghostly starlit village. Not too far from the house I found a comfortable place between the roots of a giant olive tree where I intended to drink every drop of this stuff. Tomorrow Annis would touch down and I would talk sense to her about this whole Corfu lark, but tonight I would indulge in the solitary romantic pleasures of starlit inebriation.

  After a third of a bottle, my taste buds were sufficiently numb and I no longer shuddered after each gulp. Lying back against the tree trunk, I looked up at the patch of sky above the silhouetted church and fell into schoolboy musings about whether up there on a distant planet some other idiot was drowning his brain cells and thinking the same. In which case, it was hardly worth us going there; it was bound to be painfully similar at the other end of the galaxy.

  Even quiet footfall travelled far in the stillness of the night. A dark shape appeared near the house, then stopped. There was no way of telling who it was. No noise came from the house and the figure stood motionless now. I kept equally still, hoping to pass for a gnarled root shape under my tree. Then the shadow moved off towards the groves near the church and I lost sight of it. All was quiet again. Should I care? I had never felt less inclined to investigate anything than in that warm, hidden, starlit moment, slightly soured by cheap red wine and serenaded by just one insomniac cricket, still sending its simple message to the stars.

  I took a long draught from the heavy bottle. When I set it down again between my knees, the shadow was back, much closer and in front of me, standing motionless.

  Perhaps aliens used this last quiet corner of Corfu to beam down on to our planet. Yes, that was it. Bound to be the most likely explanation. I lifted my wine bottle in salute. ‘Hail, alien shadow. Welcome to our planet; population: five. We are a peaceful race and taste horrible.’

  The figure moved straight towards me. I smelled her perfume long before the amorphous shadow sharpened into a recognizable shape.

  ‘How did you find me?’ I asked. ‘Thought I’d be invisible under here.’

  Helen let herself slide down the trunk next to me. Close. ‘You were, more or less. But I could smell the wine.’

  ‘You must have a sensitive nose.’

  ‘Let me ruin it by drinking some more of that paint stripper.’

  I transferred custody of the bottle to her, remembering what Sophie had said in a similar situation: ‘There’s never enough to go around. Of most things.’ Sophie had a point there – a sad little point – yet there was, just possibly, enough sour wine on the isle of Corfu.

  She took a swig from the bottle. ‘Why the lonely vigil?’

  ‘I just fancied a quiet drink under the stars.’

  ‘Sorry if I’m ruining it for you.’

  ‘Don’t be. I think it already yielded all the metaphysics it was going to.’ I lit a cigarette. The flame from the lighter briefly illuminated Helen’s face, her eyes bright from the evening’s drinking. ‘I wonder what it was like up here when people were still living in the village. Life must have been quite simple.’

  ‘Nonsense, Chris; village life is never simple.’

  ‘Basic, then,’ I amended.

  She ignored it. ‘City life is simple. You don’t know anyone and nobody knows or cares about you. The freedom of the ant heap. But in a small community you have to think carefully about what you say and do. Everyone knows your business, too; watches every step.’

  ‘You make it sound less than idyllic. You’re speaking from experience?’

  ‘Mm? Yes, I . . .’ She sighed impatiently. ‘I lived in quite a small community; didn’t care for it at all.’

  ‘And what about here? You couldn’t live like Morva, then?’

  ‘No. And neither can Morva. But she’s stubborn.’

  She felt for my cigarette and took it from between my fingers, then took a puff.

  ‘I didn’t think you smoked.’

  ‘I don’t. I just wanted an excuse to touch you.’ She felt for my hand again, found it and held it in that suddenly awkward six-inch canyon between our bodies. My body remembered hers, naked, among the sun-baked ruins. For a while we just sat quietly. She handed the cigarette back, which I finished all too soon, but she kept my hand, caressing it with her thumb; a tiny, delicate gesture, yet electrifying, magnified by the wine, by the night. She stretched out her other arm towards me.

  I cut across the gesture, reaching for the bottle, and rearranged my body, freed my hand. ‘I do have a girlfriend . . .’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘She’s arriving here tomorrow.’

  ‘I know. Morva mentioned it.’ There was a pause in which I took a swig, then lit another cigarette. Helen took the lighter from me and held a flickering flame between our faces. ‘That’s tomorrow. How about tonight? Why waste the night? Go to bed with me. Make love to me under the stars.’

  ‘Look, it’s . . .’

  ‘If you say “Look, it’s not that I don’t fancy you, but”, then I may just do something . . . unexpected.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘How should I know? That’s the thing with unexpected things, I find; you never know what to expect.’

  ‘I don’t want a one-night stand, but I don’t want to complicate my love life, either.’

  ‘This lighter is getting bloody hot.’

  ‘Then let it go; I can’t see the stars.’

  The flame went out and I heard the lighter drop in the sudden darkness. ‘I’ll not try to compete with your stars.’ She stood up with a little groan, brushed her skirts with her hands and walked off, sure-footed. ‘I can see like a cat in the dark,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘It’s just during the day that I don’t see so clearly.’

  Matilda wouldn’t start. Annis’s plane was touching down in two hours and the damn van sulked in the heat. Since the Fiesta still sat crumpled against a tree, the van was my only hope of bringing Annis up here without paying a fortune in taxi fare, always presuming I could persuade a taxi driver to make the journey up here. With the amount of luggage Annis normally lugged about, I knew the little bike certainly wouldn’t do.

  Being under-endowed with mechanical genius, I kept on worrying the starter and senselessly drained the battery. I shrugged at Dr Kalogeropoulos who just then arrived in his own battered car to check on Morva.

  ‘Engine trouble?’ he enquired.

  ‘It may just be a flat battery.’ The starter motor stopped turning over altogether. ‘Quite flat now, I expect. You wouldn’t have jump leads by any chance?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not. Someone in the village, perhaps. Or a battery charger?’

  I checked my watch. ‘No time for that, I’m afraid. I’m supposed to pick someone up from the airport soon.’

  ‘I’ll drive you,’ he offered instantly. ‘It’s no problem.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I said, it’s no problem.’

  ‘No patients to see?’

  ‘Not until tonight. But now I must go and see how Miss Morva is getting on.’

  Today Morva was getting about again for the first time, albeit only on the ground floor of the house, on the crutches the doctor had provided, taking as much weight off her ankles as possible and moving extremely slowly.

  ‘The less you move about, the sooner you’ll recover,’ the doctor warned.

  ‘The less I move about, the sooner I’ll go mad,’ Morva countered. ‘And you’ll never get a shrink to hike all the way up here.’

  The doc shrugged. ‘I have a p
sychiatrist colleague who would be interested in your case, I am sure.’

  ‘Ha. Now get out, both of you; Margarita is about to run me a bath.’ She nodded at the zinc tub waiting by the stove.

  ‘Run?’

  ‘Well, pour, anyway. Out, both of you.’

  A photograph of Dr K behind the wheel of his car would have shown a cautious-looking man grasping the steering wheel at the recommended ten and two o’clock positions while squinting through his gold-rimmed glasses through the windscreen. Yet the sun-drenched landscape beyond the car windows would have been a blur; Dr K drove as though the pothole had never been invented and he cornered at ambitious speeds.

  I braced myself against the door and worked an imaginary break pedal, usually seconds before the good doctor felt any need to. He noticed it. ‘Relax. Trust me, I’m a doctor.’

  ‘They teach rally driving at medical school?’

  ‘They do in Finland, I think. Good rally drivers, the Finns. Lousy doctors, I heard. Everything quiet at the old village now? No more strange things happening?’

  ‘Not for a few hours.’

  ‘Good, good. And what about your own . . . mission? The missing woman. You have not found her.’ This was not a question; he was stating a fact. ‘But you must find her before you can leave, yes?’

  ‘I can’t stay for ever. If I can’t find her soon, then I’ll have to pack it in and go home.’

  ‘But you believe this woman, Kyla, she is still here. Not . . . gone somewhere else.’

  ‘No. She could be dead, of course.’

  ‘Oh no, she is not dead. I mean, let us hope not,’ he quickly corrected himself. ‘So . . . how much longer do you think you will look for her?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Another week or so.’

  ‘Well, that is good. But you have somebody coming to help you?’ He frowned, first at me, then at a pickup truck backing from a side track on to the narrow road we were barrelling along. Our car hurtled towards an inevitable collision until, at the last moment, Kalogeropoulos swerved madly and we flew past the truck in less time than it took to scream his name.