Never Ending

by Martyn Bedford

  “It’s magical,” Shiv said.

  “Actually, it is. Even when there has been no rain on the island for months and everywhere is like dust, the water, the trees, the grass – they are still here.”

  They sat on the grass beside the small pool which fed the waterfall. Nikos removed his sandals and dangled his bare feet in the water, letting out an exaggerated sigh of bliss. Shiv and Dec dangled their feet too. The pool was only shin-deep but shockingly, deliciously cold. Shiv closed her eyes, let a smile spread across her lips.

  “Now,” Nikos said, “we lie back and watch the sky. The sky is the other reason I brought you to this place.”

  Nikos lay on his back, feet still in the pool. Shiv and Declan did the same. In a gap between the branches overhead, a swathe of cloudless sky hung blue and perfect. The three of them became still. All Shiv could hear was the miniature waterfall; all she could feel was the cool grass beneath her and the chill of her feet in the pool.

  “Keep looking,” Nikos told them. “She will come if we are patient.”

  “Who will?” Dec asked. But Nikos shushed him.

  At last, a bird appeared, tracking left to right – not flying but gliding, a long, slow arc, its wings outstretched, head dipped. Dark, greyish-brown with a lighter head, throat and belly. It was close enough to the ground for Shiv to make out black markings around the eyes and a rich cinnamon-red tinge on the breast. The largest bird she’d ever seen.

  “What is it?” she whispered.

  But Nikos shushed her again, as though anxious that her words might scare the bird away. It did disappear momentarily, then wheeled back into view – higher than before, spiralling down from one thermal to the next. For several minutes, the creature circled above, diamond-shaped tail stark against the blue, putting on a majestic display as though just for the three of them. It let out a shrill, wavering cry that resounded off the hillsides.

  Shiv watched, bewitched, almost forgetting to breathe.

  Only once the huge bird had gone did she dare to speak again. “That was…”

  “Too much for words?” Nikos said.

  “Yeah.” Shiv smiled to herself.

  After a moment’s silence, Nikos asked, “You know this bird?”

  “I do,” Declan said. His voice came from a little way off, surprising her. She eased up onto her elbows to locate him – perched up a tree, in the crook of two branches. Shiv hadn’t heard him move from the grass beside her, so engrossed was she by the circling bird. Dec was dropping twigs one after another into the pool and watching them drift over the waterfall. “Vulture,” he said.

  Shiv laughed. “Yeah, right. Like you know anyth—”

  “Quite a rare vulture, actually,” Nikos said. “A lammergeyer.”

  Shiv looked at him, incredulous. “But vultures are…”

  “Are what?” Nikos had sat up and was smiling at her.

  “I don’t know. Horrible. Ugly.”

  “Why horrible?”

  “Because they just are – because they eat dead things.”

  “And you don’t?” His tone was gentle, teasing but not nasty.

  “OK, yeah, but—”

  “And ‘ugly’?” He gestured at the sky, as though the vulture was still there, performing its entrancing aerial display. “You thought she was ugly?”

  Shiv fell quiet. Then, after a moment, “No. No, she was … beautiful.”

  A ballad was playing on the radio as they drove down from the mountain. The female singer’s tone was sweetly melancholic, the voice of a broken heart.

  “What’s she saying?” Shiv asked.

  Nikos raised the volume. “It’s about a girl whose boy has gone for ever.” He listened some more. “She’s saying, The hole alongside me in our bed is the … grave you dug to bury my heart… Tell me, please, do I fall – no, ‘climb’ – should I climb in the grave or live all my days with a hole in my breast where my heart was?”

  Her brother, beside her, failed to stifle a giggle.

  “Shut up,” Shiv said, jabbing him with her elbow.

  Over the next lines of the song, Declan half sang, half said, “My breasts, my poor heartless breasts that once were twin moons orbiting the planet of your love.”

  “Declan.”

  “And these eyes, without your face to gaze upon … I shall pluck them from their sockets and feed them to the dogs of grief who howl for your return.”

  Dec could barely sing for laughing. Nikos was laughing too, running with her brother’s riff. “My hair, shiny as silk with your fingers’ touch will turn to … to…”

  “Rope,” Declan said.

  “For me to hang myself…”

  “From the gibbet of my despair.”

  “Piss off,” Shiv said. “Both of you. This is a lovely song and you’ve totally ruined it.” But she was laughing along with them. “Was that even true?” she asked Nikos. “Those lines you translated before Dec joined in?”

  Nikos shrugged. “I’ve no idea. She’s singing in Albanian.”

  7

  “I sculpted your head in Make today,” she tells Declan. “Started to, anyway. Some kind of modelling clay – dead easy to work with. They gave us these plastic scalpels but you could do most of it with your fingers.” She pulls a face. “Smelly, though – catch a whiff of that.” She raises her hands to the picture on her bedroom wall. “And that’s after I had a shower.”

  Dec just goes on standing there, his expression unchanged, offering an apple to the goat in the olive grove behind the villa.

  “I haven’t started on your face yet,” she goes on. “Well, I did. Spent ages on your nose then gave up and just squished it back in.” She presses her thumb against his nose in the photo. “You have a very difficult nose, Declan Richard Faverdale.”

  Shiv has taken to doing this lately – chatting to the night-time projections of her brother. Telling him all about her day. Letting him know how she’s getting on. With her voice kept low so as not to disturb Caron and Helen in the rooms either side, Shiv’s monologues remind her of the whispery conversations she and Declan had in the dark when they were still small enough to share a bedroom.

  “Hey, it was Day 10 today,” she says. “One-sixth of the way through. That’s somewhere between ten and twenty per cent, I reckon.”

  It was a standing joke between them that Shiv was rubbish at Maths – always asking his help with homework, even though she was three school years above him. One time, when he was going through some geometry revision with her, Declan said, “You know what rhomboid means, right?”

  “Yeah, duh,” Shiv replied. “It’s a creature from the planet Rhomb.”

  Day 10. Nine days of Walk, Make, Talk and Write, and one day off, most of which Shiv spent catching up on sleep or playing table tennis with Caron.

  It’s OK here. Kind of. She has taken Dr Pollard’s advice about losing herself in the activities. And, in a way, she has “found” Declan. Or he has found her. Through the walking meditation, the drawing and sculpting, the night-time conversations, the speaking, the things she writes, Shiv is so immersed in her brother these days that he is more of a presence in her life than an absence.

  “I like spending time with him,” she admitted at her latest one-to-one.

  “But?” Dr Pollard asked.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I felt a ‘but’ coming on. I could see it in your eyes.”

  Shiv went to deny it then stopped herself. “I don’t know … just … it isn’t right.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “For one thing, it isn’t real – me and Dec. And, anyway, I don’t deserve him.”

  “What do you deserve, Siobhan?”

  “I don’t deserve to forget he’s dead. Even for a moment.”

  “I asked what you do deserve, not what you don’t.”

  “I deserve not to be forgiven.”

  Whatever, the clinic must be doing something right because she hasn’t smashed anything – or wanted to – in about a we
ek.

  She has never felt as close to her brother as she does right now.

  “I spoke again at Talk today,” she tells Dec. “I filled four pages at Write.”

  Shiv studies his outstretched arm, the apple resting on the flat of his palm.

  Each night, without fail, her brother appears on the wall. A different picture every time: Dec doing a handstand on the beach, Dec eating a slice of pizza, Dec poised at the end of a springboard, Dec bouncing a yellow tennis ball…

  Caron talks to her pictures as well. In the dead of night, Shiv has heard her through the wall, murmuring to the girl – Melanie – whose life she took with the gift of one tiny pill.

  “What d’you say to her?” Shiv asked one time.

  “I tell her how sorry I am and how much I miss her. Or I just cry.”

  To begin with, the images upset Shiv too. Now, she looks forward to them. She likes this one. Dec looks natural, unposed; so intent on the goat he doesn’t seem to realize he’s being photographed.

  When she’s done taking him through her day, she fills him in on the others.

  “Lucy binged again at dinner tonight,” Shiv says. “Then someone heard her making herself sick in the toilet.” She describes how Caron went to see if her Buddy was OK and brought the girl out, pale and tear-stained.

  If Dec has an opinion about this, he keeps it to himself. Same when she tells him that Helen has started chanting under her breath during Walk.

  He just goes on offering that apple to the goat.

  Shiv tells him about Mikey making a formal request to be discharged.

  “No sign of him at Buddy Time, of course,” Shiv says. She has no idea where he goes between Write and dinner. He doesn’t turn up in the Rec Room either, and her attempts to befriend him at mealtimes and Break are met with monosyllables, if he bothers to speak at all. “Caron reckons I should leave it,” she says. “But I can’t just give up on him, you know? There’s a good kid buried inside him, somewhere.”

  She looks at Declan. “What d’you think?”

  An enigmatic half-smile. The apple fell to the ground when the goat went for it – her brother flinched at the last second for fear of getting bitten. She searches for signs of nervousness in the photo but he appears calm and unafraid.

  “Remember the windsurfing? You acted like you weren’t scared when Nikos had to rescue you, but I knew you were.” Shiv wants to ask if he thought he was going to die at that moment. And the other time too, of course. But she can’t bring herself to put it into words. “You were so happy that day, Dec. We both were.”

  She catches herself tracing a fingertip around her palm in slow circular caresses, just as Nikos did on the beach that day when her hand was grainy with sand. She stops.

  Nikos. She doesn’t let herself think about him any more.

  Shiv rubs her face, sits a little more upright to avoid dozing off. It wouldn’t be the first time she’s fallen asleep in front of Dec’s picture and woken there hours later – cold, stiff-necked – as dawn seeps through the curtains.

  “In the woods this morning,” she begins, whispering, shutting out memories of Nikos and returning her attention to Declan, “was that you?”

  She glimpsed white in the woods at Walk. A shirt? A boyish figure? Closer than the other sightings (that first evening, by the rhododendrons, and a couple of times since) but it was gloomy under the canopy of leaves and it might have been nothing more than a flash of daylight between the trees.

  “Was it you?”

  Shiv rests her fingertips lightly against Declan’s face and strokes his cheek – gently, as though afraid of smudging his features.

  The projector shuts off just then and she is left sitting in the dark.

  Her brother is everywhere.

  Even in the dining room a few hours later, she’s reminded of him at the breakfast buffet. In hotels and all-you-can-eat buffets, Dad and Dec would compete to bring the biggest haul of food to the table, then see who finished first. Dec usually won that one – even if it meant cramming an entire croissant in his mouth or almost choking on a sausage he was trying to gulp down whole, sword-swallower style. As for those egg-cup-sized glasses of fruit juice you get in B&B dining rooms, her brother’s record was twenty-nine at one sitting.

  “Gluttony is not a sin,” he would say. “It is an art form.”

  Shiv takes her tray of food to the seating area – the tables are separated out for breakfast – and is about to join Caron and Lucy when she spots Mikey (by himself, predictably) in the far corner. She heads over there instead, mouthing a “Sorry” to the two girls and earning a don’t-know-why-you-bother look from Caron.

  Mikey is sitting with his back to the room, shoulders hunched, fists clenched on the table as though gripping an invisible knife and fork.

  “Mind if I join you?” Shiv says, sliding into the seat opposite. It’s only now that she sees he’s crying – soundlessly, great tears rivering down his face.

  “Mikey, what’s wrong?”

  Shiv sets her tray down, unloads toast, grapefruit juice; reaches for his hand then thinks better of it. She has seen him angry and agitated and impatient; she’s seen him sullen and silent and withdrawn. But this is the first time she’s seen him upset.

  He raises his eyes to hers. He has no food in front of him, nothing. Just his bunched fists. His injuries from bashing his head against the tree are mostly healed – just a notch in one eyebrow and a reddish patch of skin on his forehead. From the expression on his face you’d think he has never seen Shiv before. Then, as though pulling her into focus, his gaze hardens and she braces herself for another rejection.

  What he says, though, is: “They won’t let me leave.”

  His discharge request; he must have just heard the news. “I thought Dr Pollard said she’d let your mum and stepdad decide?” Shiv says.

  “They said no. They said I have to stick it out till I’m better.”

  Mikey wipes his face on his cuff. Turns towards the window. It’s raining this morning, fat droplets of water patterning the glass. They’ll be having Make inside the Portakabin. Would her parents let her leave, if she really wanted to? She has no idea. Mikey goes on staring out the window. Shiv eats her toast. Waits. Maybe he’ll speak, maybe he won’t.

  Eventually, he says, “This place does my head in. Everyone’s so nice.” He faces her again, back in angry mode. “Everyone wants to be my friend.”

  “Do they?” Shiv can’t help laughing. “I thought it was only me.”

  Kyritos

  The next two days – Good Friday and Easter Saturday – Nikos couldn’t see Shiv. Among Greeks, he explained, these were family days. He hoped she understood.

  “You’re not prepared to abandon your culture, your religious customs, your entire family,” Shiv joked, “to spend time with an English girl you only just met?”

  “I guess I’m just a total bastard.”

  “All guys are,” Shiv sighed, affecting a world-weary air.

  At which point they kissed again. Tricky, because Nikos was driving the pick-up and the nearside wheels scuffed along the verge.

  “Hey!” This was Declan, thumping on the roof.

  Nikos had finally relented and let him ride in the back, with the windsurf rigs, for the last few kilometres of their descent from the mountain. It gave them some privacy, of course – a chance to talk, to hold hands, to swap mobile numbers, to kiss, without her brother knowing. She suffered a tug of guilt over Dec being kept out of their way like that, the unwanted kid brother. Not that he felt excluded – he sounded like he was having the best time ever back there.

  When Nikos dropped them off in the lay-by at the end of the track leading to the villa, the reality of two whole days without him clenched a fist inside Shiv’s chest.

  “Sunday,” he’d whispered, as they said their goodbyes. “Kalo Pascha.”

  “Happy Easter”, according to the phrase book.

  Their plan was for Shiv to fix it so her family went to the E
aster festivities in the largest of the villages on that stretch of coast. Hundreds of people would be there and it ought to be easy for them to slip off by themselves for a while, unnoticed.

  If he thought it odd that a (supposedly) seventeen-year-old girl wasn’t free to go where, or with whom, she pleased, he kept it to himself. Shiv had been sure to let him know just how strict Mum and Dad were – better for him to believe this than to suss the truth about her age. Or have him turn up at the door like a regular boyfriend.

  “My parents are the same with my sister,” he said.

  All Shiv had to do now was persuade an atheist mother, agnostic father and spiritually comatose brother to watch the Greeks celebrate Jesus’s resurrection.

  For the next couple of days, the Faverdales slipped back into holiday routine: balcony, pool, terrace, beach, taverna. Shiv took care not to mention Nikos, except to answer – disinterestedly – any questions Mum or Dad asked about the windsurfing excursion. She didn’t need to say all that much, as Dec said enough for both of them.

  Her brother planned to take up windsurfing in time for the next Olympics.

  “As well as emigrating to Greece to run boat cruises, or instead of?” Dad asked.

  Dec answered sulkily. “As well as.”

  Then Mum chipped in, “Is windsurfing actually an Olympic sport?”

  Shiv kept her excitement buried. The pleasure of their day out coursed through her like a slow-release drug, his kisses lingering on her lips as though they’d been brushed by butterfly wings. And while they couldn’t meet again till Sunday, they could at least send texts – silly, funny messages, or sometimes just an X or a smiley – and, twice, Shiv managed the briefest of whispered conversations.

  Every minute of every hour, Nikos pulsed through her mind or ached inside her or prickled her skin or thudded her heart against her ribs.

  She was sick with him. With longing. With missing.

  Predictably, after forty-eight hours of doing very little, Dad proposed an outing for the next day. Just as predictably, Declan groaned. Shiv made a play of groaning too.

  “Suggestions?” Dad said, ignoring their protests.