Never Ending

by Martyn Bedford

  After the medical, Shiv is escorted to the main building, to her room on the second floor. She has an en suite bathroom to herself. She’s one of six residents, she’s told: four female, two male, aged from thirteen to seventeen.

  That word again. Residents. Not patients.

  Shiv will get to meet them all at dinner, her escort says.

  Alone in her room, she heaves the suitcase onto the bed, opens it and begins stowing her clothes in the wardrobe and the drawers underneath. She’s always done this whenever she goes anywhere. First job: unpack.

  Her brother never unpacked, content to pull clothes from his case as and when he needed them.

  The suitcase is the one she took to Kyritos. Of course; it’s her only one. She must have known it while she was packing to come here, but the realisation has only just struck her. The flight labels have long been removed but the red ribbon she fastened to the handle for easy identification on the luggage carousel is still attached.

  Shiv considers untying it, throwing it away. In the end, she decides to leave it.

  The room is OK in a functional kind of way. As well as the wardrobe and narrow bed, there’s a not-quite-comfy-looking brown armchair – IKEA, at a guess – and a small chest of drawers. The furniture is pine-effect, the walls and ceiling plain white, while the curtains and carpet are patterned in yellow and brown swirls, to match the duvet and pillowcase. It puts her in mind of chocolate sponge and custard. A print of lollipop-shaped trees hangs on one wall.

  It’s like a room in a cheap hotel.

  Her determination to be optimistic, to go into this with the right attitude, shudders as the “other” Siobhan, the girl who wants to smash things, rears her head again. It’s an effort to ignore her, but Shiv manages. Centres herself. Focuses on the bedroom, on the window, which is ajar, a breeze pushing half-heartedly at the curtains. From some way off comes the plaintive, lonely cry of a pheasant.

  She wants to speak to Dad.

  The loss of her phone, the lack of a signal even if she still had it, only sharpen the urge to call him. Not that she knows what she’d say.

  The phone was switched off the whole way here and she hasn’t checked for messages since breakfast. As usual, there weren’t any. She’s had it a week, since that journalist somehow got hold of the number for the old one, and she has only let a few people have the new number. Dad, Mum, the counsellor, Laura and Katy. Neither of her friends has made contact. OK, so they’re out of the country – Laura, kayaking in Colorado; Katy, touring Italy with her folks in that huge camper van. Too busy having the time of their lives to type: hey shiv how u doin? Those end-of-term hugs and tears and miss-yous; the promises to keep in touch. Yet, when school broke up, Shiv got the impression Laura and Katy were secretly relieved not to have to see her for the summer. Or speak to her.

  But, then, she hasn’t contacted them either. They don’t even know she’s here. Her “best” friends have no idea how she’s doing. All the talking they’ve done, or not done, since she returned from Greece has only made Shiv see how far apart they’ve been driven by what happened.

  Shiv goes to the window. It’s after six and the day is still full of light. Her room overlooks a vegetable plot to the rear of Eden Hall and, beyond that, an apple orchard, then rough pasture that rises to meet the wooded hill she saw from the drive.

  No view of the lake, then. That’s something to be glad about.

  A droning noise snags her attention. She spots the plane, high overhead, the sound seeming to come from somewhere else altogether. Shiv wonders where it’s headed. Not Kyritos, she supposes. She pictures the passengers, watching a movie, eating a meal, peering down at a miniaturized landscape – oblivious to her, thousands of metres below.

  It seems a lifetime ago, that flight. Or something that happened in another life, to someone else. A pretty stewardess, handing out boiled sweets to people to ease the discomfort in their ears during take-off; her brother asking for two, one for each ear. The stewardess laughing, like it was the first time she’d heard that joke.

  The tears come. So often they come, these days. Great gulping sobs that escape from her throat faster than she can breathe.

  At last, the tears stop. She stands there, braced against the windowsill.

  “Jee-zuss, what is this carpet all about?”

  Startled, Shiv twists round to see an older girl in the doorway, her scarlet mini-dress a shocking gash of colour.

  “Yellow and brown? Really?” the girl continues. “Is the decor sponsored by the Brownies or something?” She gestures at the window. “No wonder you were going to jump. Although, hmm, second floor – is that gonna be high enough, d’you think?”

  Shiv laughs, despite herself. Wipes her cheeks with the cuff of her hoodie. She’s cried in front of too many strangers to care about adding another to the list.

  “I’m Caron. With a C.” The girl points at the wall with the lollipop-trees picture. “I’m next door. We can tap messages in code to each other in the night.” She smiles in the pause that follows. “OK, this is where you say your name.”

  “Oh … Shiv.”

  The older girl frowns. “That’s not a name, that’s a syllable.”

  Another laugh escapes Shiv. “It’s short for Siobhan.” She does the it’s-Irish-but-I’m-not explanation.

  “Well, hi, Shiv-short-for-Siobhan.”

  Caron steps further into the room and performs a pirouette in the centre of the swirly carpet. She has jet-black hair down to her bare shoulders and a fringe cut on the diagonal. Shiv watches her slip off her shoes – high-heeled, scarlet, to match the dress. Her lipstick is the same vibrant colour and so are her earrings.

  “These are killing me.” She flicks the shoes away with her toes. “But if I pack them in the case they crush.” Then, indicating the bed, “D’you mind?” She flops down.

  Shiv ought to feel invaded. She’s not usually keen on people with what Mum calls “big personalities”, but she can’t help liking this girl. After a few minutes with Caron, she feels a hundred times better than when she was sobbing at the window.

  “Seven bloody hours,” Caron groans. She’s lying on her back, legs dangling off the end of the bed, arms raised, performing tai chi-type movements, as though painting the ceiling with an invisible brush. “Where’ve you travelled from, Shiv?”

  Shiv sits in the armchair. Names the town where she lives.

  Caron stops mid-brushstroke and eases up onto her elbows. “Siobhan who?” She stares at Shiv. Serious all of a sudden.

  Shiv could make something up but decides not to. “Siobhan Faverdale.”

  Caron sits up properly, eyes still fixed on Shiv’s face. Almost in a whisper, she says, “My God, you’re the sister of that boy.”

  It’s Caron’s idea to take a stroll in the grounds before dinner. After a day on the road, a walk and some fresh air will do them both good. Shiv suspects the real reason is to jolt them out of the sombre mood that’s taken hold.

  Caron heads back to her own room and reappears in a pair of crimson sandals.

  “D’you only wear red?” Shiv asks.

  “Nooo, because that would be weird, don’t you think?”

  Outside, they wander aimlessly along the gravel paths of a rose garden. It’s a mild evening, the day’s warmth leaching from the ground, the air fragrant with roses and wood smoke and cut grass. The distress that overwhelmed her at the window is spent; in its place, calm has settled on Shiv, so total she can’t quite believe how upset she’d been. It’s always like this afterwards. After her violent outbursts too.

  “You nervous about all this?” Caron asks.

  “Yeah,” Shiv says. “Me and therapy don’t really get on.”

  “Jee-zuss, tell me about it.”

  Shiv wants to ask why Caron’s here but isn’t sure how she’d take it. She doesn’t know what to make of her. The clothes, the brash self-confidence, it’s not how she’d expect someone to be, checking into any psychiatric clinic, let alone this one.<
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  As soon as they’re out of sight of the main building, Caron hoiks up her dress and shoves a hand in her knickers. “’Scuse me,” she says, producing a lighter and two cigarettes. “Some things they can confiscate, some they can’t.”

  She lights one of the cigarettes and offers the second to Shiv.

  Shiv gapes at her. “OK, one, I don’t smoke; and, two…” She gestures at where the cigarette had come from.

  “Oh, right. Fair point.”

  They continue out of the rose garden, passing through an arch in a hedge and up some stone steps, to find themselves in a kind of grotto around an ornamental pond.

  “This place is meant to be different though,” Shiv says, picking up the thread of their earlier conversation. “It’s supposed to work.”

  “So they say.” Caron draws on the cigarette; exhales, directing the smoke away from Shiv. She nods at a weathered wooden bench. “You want to sit down for a bit?”

  “I thought you wanted to walk?” Shiv says.

  “We have walked.”

  “We’ve only come about two hundred metres.”

  “Shiv, ’Zuss, what are you – some kind of fitness freak?”

  “No, I just—”

  “A triathlete or something. I mean, how old are you anyway?”

  “Fifteen,” Shiv says. “You?”

  “Seventeen. So that puts me in charge and I say we do the sit-down thing.”

  “Walking, sitting – what’s the third part of the triathlon? Smoking?”

  Caron lets out a snort of laughter and smoke. “That’s actually quite funny.”

  They sit down. They fall quiet, the tranquillity of the surroundings seeming to cast a trance over them. It’s a companionable silence, as though they are old friends rather than two people who’ve only just met.

  “Why were you crying?” Caron asks, breaking the spell at last. Then, “Actually, scrub that. Why wouldn’t you be crying? Why wouldn’t any of us?” She draws on her cigarette, her lips making a kissing sound. “So, what else did you do to get sent here? Apart from the obvious.”

  “I smash stuff,” Shiv says. “Windows, doors. A load of wine bottles in Tesco. Car windscreen wipers – I went right along our street one night, ripping them off. Some of the wing mirrors too. Anything, really.”

  “Yeah?”

  Shiv tells her about setting fire to her school books.

  “Actually in one of the classrooms?”

  “No, at home – in the garden.”

  Caron seems disappointed.

  “One time,” Shiv goes on, “I lost it so badly with the educational psychologist, she had to buzz for back-up.” She shrugs. “It’s funny, at first, when I went back to school – you know, after Greece – I worked harder than I’d ever done in my life. Class nerd.” She shudders with the chill as the evening starts to close in. “Outside school I was doing all sorts of shit but … I guess it was the one thing I hung on to.”

  “A life raft,” Caron suggests.

  “Exactly. Then, one day, I thought, Why bother? Why not just let rip?” Another shrug. “If it wasn’t for my extenuating circumstances I’d have been kicked out long before the summer holidays saved them the trouble.”

  “And, what, you’re the coolest kid in school now?” Caron says, teasing.

  “No, I’m the weirdo. The one nobody looks at or talks to.”

  “Yeah, well, better that than sympathy.” The older girl makes a gagging sound.

  Shiv gives her a sidelong look. Caron’s face is pale in the gloom of the grotto. It’s good to meet someone as sick of sympathy as she is. Who understands.

  “What about your friends?”

  Shiv thinks of Laura and Katy. “They hug me a lot,” she says. “But it’s like I’ve been diagnosed with something – so, even while they’re hugging me, I get the feeling they’d rather not touch me in case they catch it too.”

  Caron nods. “What they want is for you to be the way you were before. But you can’t, can you? None of us can ever be that.”

  Just as the dinner gong sounds and they get up from the bench to head back inside, Shiv spots him.

  A glimpse of white among the rhododendrons down by the drive. He stops, as though aware of being observed, and half turns their way. Then the figure continues, disappearing, swallowed up by the bushes. The briefest of sightings … but she could swear it was Declan.

  Shiv realizes she has been holding her breath. She releases it.

  Usually, she sees him in the street, or a busy supermarket, or on the school field – crowded places where some boy has Dec’s haircut, or build, or his way of walking, or a top the same colour and style as one he used to wear. This is the first time she’s seen him on his own.

  “You OK?” Caron looks where Shiv was looking.

  “I’m fine. It’s nothing.”

  Kyritos

  As the hire car crunched to a halt on the dazzlingly white stone chippings of the villa’s parking bay, Shiv released her grip on the door handle and sank back into her seat. She gave an exaggerated sigh. Beside her in the back, Declan – who had both hands over his face – tentatively parted his fingers.

  “Are we … are – are – are we … still alive?” he said, through fake sobs.

  “Blimey,” Dad said, laughing with relief. “I thought the drivers in Italy were crazy.”

  “Is that you, Daddy,” Declan said, with childlike wonder, “or am I in heaven?”

  Shiv turned her face to the window, her shoulders shaking. There was a stone wall overflowing with a brightly flowered climbing-plant of some kind; if she focused on those flowers, on the bees gathering pollen, she might not wet herself laughing.

  “You handled it very well, love.” This was Mum, her teasing voice. “Foreign roads, an unfamiliar car, several hundred kamikaze Greek drivers – and you only swore seventeen times.”

  “One of those was the C-word,” Shiv said. “Doesn’t that count treble?”

  “Look –” Dad let go of the wheel and splayed his fingers – “I’m shaking.”

  “Mum,” Dec said, “I think you’ll find kamikaze is Japanese, not Greek.”

  Dad exhaled, tipping his head back against the headrest. As he did so, his foot must have slipped off the clutch and the car, its engine still running, stalled with one last lurch.

  Declan covered his eyes. “No, nooo, we’re moving again!”

  They burst out laughing.

  Dad lowered the windows, letting in flowery, resinous smells so familiar to Shiv from previous holidays. The blast of heat was delicious. Ahead, a small olive grove separated their villa from the next, each grizzled tree standing in the scrawl of its own shadow.

  They were here! The early start, the long trip … all of it fell away like a shrugged-off coat.

  “D’you think we can go the whole two weeks without using the car?” Dad said.

  While Dad unloaded the cases, Shiv followed her mum and brother round the side of the villa, spring sunshine soaking into her skin. It’d been sleeting when they left home, the weather’s parting gift for their holiday. They’d viewed the property from every conceivable angle in the photo gallery on the website – even so, as they entered the garden, the sight of the real thing stopped them in their tracks.

  “Oh, my goodness!” Mum said.

  They were on a stone-flagged terrace, patterned in marshmallow pink and white, overlooking a glittering swimming pool and, beyond that, the land descended to a bay – a swathe of blue-green sea so still it might have been painted there. Just the other side of the garden’s low stone wall, a solitary goat grazed in the shade of an olive tree. Their appearance on the terrace caused the goat to lift its head with a jerk and cast an inscrutable stare in their direction.

  “Hey, look – springboard,” her brother said, nodding at the pool.

  Dec had found a tennis ball and was bouncing it on the flagstones. Bounce–catch, bounce–catch. With his dark hair and olive skin, he could almost pass for Greek.

&nbs
p; “This is so—”

  “Beautiful,” Shiv said, finishing Mum’s sentence.

  “It’s very foreign, isn’t it?” Declan said.

  “Funny that.” Shiv gave him a friendly shove and the tennis ball popped out of his hand, bounced down the steps and into the pool with barely a splash.

  “You know,” Mum said, “I think this is even better than Sardinia.”

  Shiv gave a mock gasp. “But that was ‘the villa to end all villas’.”

  “The goat isn’t happy,” Declan said. “Look, he’s at the end of his tether.”

  Mum and Shiv groaned. Shiv felt a bubble of joy well up; the first day of a holiday could sometimes be fraught – the travelling, the tiredness – but not this one.

  She went down the steps, skirted the pool and stood on the wall at the bottom of the garden to take a look at the bay. From there, she could see the zigzag path through the dunes that led to the beach they’d read about on the website – a gentle stroll brings you to a quaint fishing village with its welcoming tavernas, and just beyond the harbour, an unspoilt sandy beach ideal for swimming. She spread her arms, closed her eyes and tilted her face into the sun.

  Which was when the wet tennis ball smacked her in the back of the head.

  “First strike of the holiday to the Boy Declan. Oh, yesssss.”

  By the time she’d caught Dec and brought him sprawling onto the grass, they were weak with laughter. They untangled and flopped onto their backs, side by side, gasping for breath.

  “You fight like a girl,” she said.

  “So do you, as it happens.”

  Sisters weren’t meant to like their kid brothers, especially when the brother was too smart for his own good. Her friends hated theirs. Declan, though, had always made Shiv laugh, right from when he started to talk. He was her mate. Often, they didn’t need to speak to know what the other one was thinking, or to set themselves off laughing over some private, unfathomable joke.

  In cahoots, Mum called it. You two are always in cahoots over something. Dad reckoned they were twins who happened to have been born two and a half years apart.

  She even liked his clothes. Borrowed them, sometimes. Like he was an older sister rather than a younger brother. That baggy T-shirt he was wearing now, for instance – a birthday present he’d barely taken off since he got it – that was pretty cool, with its line from The Catcher in the Rye: