Send Me A Lover

by Carol Mason

  I was both relieved, and strangely disappointed.

  The other episode was a little more puzzling.

  Shortly before I got fired, I was working on a Sunday night on a complex billing matter that was due to the client on Monday and I’d asked Jonathan to make our bed up with the sheets and duvet cover I’d just washed. ‘These Goddamn buttons!’ I heard him say, after he’d had a grumpy wrestling match with the king-size duvet, getting it back into the cover. ‘Why does it have to have a million buttons, Ange? What’s wrong with a zip?’ Jonathan’s impatience was legendary. But his constant huffing kept distracting me. ‘Just bloody do it and stop whining!’ I told him, as I jabbed away at computer keys, resenting my job, resenting his complaining about some tiny domestic no-brainer.

  ‘Excuse me but isn’t this why we pay a cleaner?’ he hurled at me. I was shocked to see that he was genuinely pissed off.

  ‘Cleaners don’t do everything!’ I could not believe he was seriously annoyed. I’d just asked him to make up the bed, not build a one!

  ‘Try finding one that does,’ he said. Jonathan could be very high-and-mighty at times. When he did it with other people, it could be embarrassing, but sometimes effective. But I hated it when he did it with me. Or when he’d play the lawyer and try to outsmart me in an argument, or cross-exam me.

  ‘Oh piss off you self-righteous prick,’ was my last, and not particularly clever, reply. I got up and watched him fiddling on with the buttons. It was the first time in our years together that I’d wondered what I was doing with him. The doubt—and its easy, irrational trigger—saddened and disturbed me.

  Weeks after his death, after this incident was long forgotten, I had finally got around to stripping the bed and laundering the sheets. Just as I was about to put the cover back on, I noticed something very peculiar. All the buttons were done up. Obviously I’d had to undo them to take the thing off. And they couldn’t have just done themselves up in the wash. All I could think was that, in my semi-out-of-it state, I must have buttoned them up myself before I threw the thing in the washing machine, without realising what I was doing. There could be no other explanation. However, the next time I washed it I did wonder if something weird like that was going to happen again.

  It didn’t, of course.

  Ten

  Mam has gone turtle-saving.

  Georgios invited us to join his friend down at the beach at 4am. Now while I’m all for preserving nature, to me, 4am is the middle of the night, and I only do one thing in the middle of the night, and that’s sleep. Although with Do the Locomotion and Wham! belting out from the hotel opposite, until 2am, and the lads next door—Jimmy Gonads and crew—ribbing each other and having farting competitions, there hasn’t been too much of that.

  ‘Adios Amigos,’ I said to her, when she stood at the door and asked me one more time if I wouldn’t change my mind and come. I pulled the blanket over my head.

  After breakfast, she still isn’t back. I decide to go down to the beach to try and find them.

  It’s hot already—must be low eighties—the sand burns the soles of my feet. They’re not here. Not a turtle-saver in sight. I wonder where they’ve gone. I claim one of the few available lounge chairs, strip off to my bikini, and then quickly decide to go the whole hog and get the top off too. Two Italian-looking men and a heavily-pregnant woman claim the lounger next to me. The woman and the shorter fellow walk into the water. I watch how slim she is from behind and feel a big thump of sadness. Will I ever be pregnant? It’s one of those things I am now resigned to just not knowing about myself. Like how long I’ll live.

  The tall, really handsome one doesn’t go into the water. He gets out a book and starts to read, but not before looking me over and giving me a suggestive smile. On that note, quite pleased with myself, I stand up and walk into the water, aware of his gaze on my bum.

  The seabed is smooth and pebble-free. The sea is a gentle shelf of warmth, which climbs higher up my body, to lap around my ribcage. The sun beats down on my forehead and shoulders. Right this minute, Vancouver, and my non-life-at-the-moment, feel a million worries away. The job. The flat. Right now it all feels remediable. When I dunk myself in and pop up again, the air suddenly feels cool on my skin and I see my nipples are rock hard, which is like looking at a sexy body that’s not mine. I roll from my front to my back, enjoying the freedom of being almost nude, realising that since being in the sea in Kefalonia, I’m not frightened of swimming, or what might lurk in the seabed any more.

  I am free. The thought just hits me. I don’t have to go back to Canada if I don’t want. I could work in London in an ad agency there. I could come here every year for a holiday. Hell, maybe I wouldn’t even work in advertising. Maybe I’d do travel writing—push myself to write more creatively. Just because I was having trouble writing a speech doesn’t signify the end of my career, and the world, anymore. Yes, I could go back to Vancouver, ditch the job, ditch the flat…There’s a thrum of excitement inside of me at the thought.

  I wade out quite far but then the water becomes deep, which is a bit scary, but I can’t expect to be totally cured. I float on my back, closing my eyes to the sun, latently thinking of Georgios. What if he said Don’t go back to Canada. Stay here. Work with me..? I could learn all about the olive oil industry, employ my marketing skills. I could buy a rundown villa. A really small one, made for one, with a double bed, and pots of oregano on the step, and maybe I could do travel writing on the side. I push the velvety water away from me, feeling it lap and swash, and imagine this being my life. I could live here. Forget Sunderland, Vancouver, London. This is better.

  ‘Hello beautiful.’ Before I realise it, I’ve floated far out of my comfort zone. There are two teenage boys swimming behind me, and the good-looking one has his eyes glued on my nipples. I dunk myself under the water so all he can see is my head. He’s a real show off, dipping and diving and disappearing, then coming up like a dolphin. They talk in Greek, their eyes fastened, mischievously, on me like I’m their free peep show.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ I snap.

  ‘You no like me?’ he says, brazenly, clearly quite practiced at hitting on female tourists.

  ‘You’re too young.’ I try swimming away, casually.

  ‘Really, it is no problem.’ He swims faster, narrowing the distance between us.

  ‘It is for me!’ I do a hurried flap of my arms and attempt a fast stroke, thinking Oh God, please don’t let me get felt up by two Greek teenagers! That’s all I need. But fortunately after they pursue me for a moment or two, they give up. Wading out of the water, my bikini bottom clings to my bum. The two men and the pregnant woman watch me walk up the beach. When I sit down and try to nonchalantly put my bikini top back on again, my heart is thrumming. Not from nerves, I realise, but because I’m actually a little turned on.

  It’s only when I’m on the lonely dirt path, heading back to the hotel that I hear them. ‘Why you not have fun with me?’

  Oh no. Have they lain in wait? I turn around and they’re on dirty-looking mopeds. There is something hungry and vaguely threatening about them.

  ‘Get lost,’ I tell them, like I mean business.

  The cocky one smirks. ‘Beautiful tits.’ He stares at my breasts, where my T-shirt clings to them.

  ‘Seriously,’ I say. ‘Piss off. Go find yourself a teenager.’

  ‘Beautiful tits,’ he says again, but a little less confidently, as though I’ve found some chink in his teenage armour.

  ‘Can’t you think of something more original to say?’ I fire back, not quite as laid-back as I’m sounding.

  I’m just thinking, why aren’t you here Jonathan, then this stuff wouldn’t happen? when I hear a voice: a faintly Irish accent.

  ‘What did you just say to my wife?’ the voice says, and the fact that he called me his wife right as I was mentally addressing Jonathan turns me strangely nauseous.

  When I look around, I’m stunned to see the Englishman standing there, barefoot, wit
h a glass of beer in his hand. The lads rev their engines and vanish noisily leaving a cloud of dirt and sand.

  For moments I can’t speak. ‘Thank you,’ I eventually manage to say, when my heart rate comes down. ‘Although I was handling it fine on my own…’

  He looks, today, a bit more like he belongs on a package tour, with the beer, the sandals, the sleeveless white muscle shirt with his nicely worked-out, golden arms showing.

  There’s a few awkward seconds where his eyes very un-deliberately go down the front of my T-shirt. Then he says, ‘Sorry about calling you my wife.’

  I smile, recognising how badly I want to correct his earlier impression of me. ‘It seemed to do the trick.’ His eyes are a greenish-blue in this light. I’ve never seen such clear whites.

  ‘One of the joys of being a single woman travelling on her own, eh?’

  I smile. ‘I’m actually not exactly on my own, although I know it would seem that way.’

  He gives me a sceptical look. ‘It would, yeah. Seem that way, for sure… The ferry, yesterday…’

  ‘So that was you!’

  He looks at me, oddly, again. Of course it was him. ‘It was weird,’ I try to explain away my surprise. ‘You were there one minute, in the line, and then two seconds later when I looked, you were gone.’

  ‘Coz I realised I’d left my sunglasses at the place where I bought the ticket, so I had to go back to the booth.’ He says it like there really is no mystery.

  I look at my feet. His feet. The dirt path between us. ‘I didn’t think you were staying in this resort… Coming back from Olympia you didn’t get off the bus… It seemed like you were going on somewhere else.’ I sound like I’ve given it too much thought. The memory of us holding eyes like that seems to hang there, palpably between us.

  ‘Argh, yeah, we transferred hotels. We were supposed to be staying in the Pedallo Sands, in Tsilvi, but then they moved us somewhere else nearby and, God, it was a right pit, so we decided up upgrade to here—that one, actually.’ He points to the hotel where mam and I ate yesterday, where the glamorous dark-haired girl floated on the red air mattress.

  ‘We were supposed to be at the Pedallo too!’ I tell him. How weird. ‘They changed it last minute for us as well. For some reason they put us here, in Kalamaki.’

  ‘What’s your hotel like?’

  ‘Nothing to write home about.’

  ‘So we could have been in the same hotel,’ he says. ‘Funny, eh?’

  When I don’t reply he says, ‘How long have you got left? Before you go home?’

  I have to think backwards over each day’s events to remember it’s Friday. ‘Oh… Three more full days, I think… Yes. We leave late Tuesday.’

  ‘Are you American? You’ve got a bit of an accent.’

  I push my wet hair off my face, feeling over-sunned and a mess. ‘I’m a Brit actually. From Sunderland. But I live in Canada. I guess I’ve picked up a bit of the twang.’

  He holds his beer glass out and looks at it, self-consciously, as though he can’t imagine how he’s come to be carrying it. ‘Where in Canada, then?’

  ‘Vancouver, on the West –’

  ‘Yeah! I know Vancouver. I mean, I know where it is. Seattle’s not far from there is it?’

  ‘Two hours.’

  ‘Right. Yeah. That’s what I thought. Actually… I’ve got a job offer to go there.’

  ‘Where? Seattle?’ I feel the fast tick of my pulse in my neck. That’s what I overheard them talking about on the bus—when his friend said something about him moving.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Wow. We’ll be neighbours.’ There’s a silence where we both seem to process the chances of this. ‘What do you do?’

  He rubs the back of his head, almost as though it’s itchy; something Jonathan used to do a lot when he was thinking. ‘I design computer software.’

  ‘You’re going to be working for Bill Gates?’ I ask, half seriously.

  ‘Yeah. Actually, I am.’

  ‘Really? Are you? I was just joking… I didn’t really think… That sounds impressive.’

  ‘Well, it’s not like we’re going to be on first name terms or anything. Not that I’d think, anyway. I mean, I might say All right there Billy Boy to him when I see him at the coffee machine, but I doubt he’ll know me.’

  His humour—everything—he feels so familiar to me. He’s the rare kind of lad I might have met in a bar in Sunderland when I was eighteen, and there’d have been something about his reserve, combined with his good looks, that would have put him at a distance from his environment and his buddies, and made him intriguing and a little bit untouchable, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn later that he’d amounted to something. ‘You’re Irish aren’t you?’

  He smiles again. How did I ever think he was hung up on himself? ‘I was born in Ireland. Lived there till I was nine. Then we moved to England. We live outside of Liverpool.’

  ‘You don’t have a Liverpool accent.’

  ‘No. My brother does though. He was four years younger when we moved. My dad, now he’s another story. You can’t make head nor tail of him. Broad County Antrim.’

  He lights up talking about his family. ‘So when are you moving to Seattle?’ I’m aware our conversation’s going on too long now.

  He shrugs. ‘That’s the thing, like. I don’t know if I am.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘My wife’s not so keen to go.’

  I knew he wore a ring, so it shouldn’t surprise me to hear the word wife. But when he says it, it floors my heart. I miss being called that. I miss saying, ‘my husband’. Now when I say those words I get frowns and pity. I don’t want to be free, like I was just thinking. I want those tiny invisible threads that connect me to somebody, that complicate, yet simplify, everything, that hold me there, even when I think I want to go, when I think I don’t want them.

  ‘Where’s he hiding then?’ he asks, looking like he’s ready to get going now. ‘You said you weren’t exactly here on your own. You said ‘we’ go back Tuesday.’

  I try to hide my bleakness with a smile. ‘It’s not a he. It’s a woman as it happens.’

  ‘Well now, I wouldn’t have said you’re that sort of girl.’

  I smile. ‘It’s ok. She’s my mother.’

  Those magnificent greenish-blue eyes twinkle. ‘Your mother, eh?’ He seems to process this, and slowly nods, still standing there looking awkward with his glass of beer. ‘Well… look after yourself,’ he says. ‘Watch out for randy teenager Greek boys. I’m sure I’ll bump into you before you leave. Seems I keep seeing you everywhere I go…’

  ~ * * * ~

  ‘Where did you go?’ Mam is a bundle of exuberance. ‘We came back here to find you, thinking we’d all have breakfast, but you weren’t here!’

  ‘I went to the beach looking for you.’

  She hovers over my bed, as I lie there with a book on my chest, pretending I’ve been reading.

  ‘Are you cross?’ she asks. ‘You are! You’re cross with me! I don’t believe it.’

  ‘I’m not! Just, well… it’s four in the afternoon for God’s sake, and you’re only just coming back now! Didn’t you think I’d worry?’

  She does an aghast laugh. ‘No! I didn’t realise there was a curfew on me.’ She bends over, sticking her bum at me. ‘Here. Give me the strap.’

  ‘Don’t be a child. Where were you anyway?’

  She looks tanned. Her eyes are the bluest of blue: true Tiffany gems, set off by the cornflower colour of her form-fitting, zip-up hooded top that strains slightly over the eye-catching shelf of her big boobs. Her fitted, white linen pants sit low on her hips, showing just the teeniest band of tanned midriff—I don’t know why she doesn’t just get a belly ring and be done with it. Even in this thrown-on-at-four-o’clock-this-morning little ensemble, she looks fantastic, and brimming with sex appeal. I feel a relic by comparison.

  ‘He rowed us out to Marathonisi Island to see the turtles.’ She claps her
hands together. ‘Oh! It was fascinating. Their big heavy bodies… these gigantic, lumbering shadows in the water… I’ve never seen anything like it. It was magic.’ She sits down on the end of my bed, pats my leg. ‘Georgios is magic… We wanted you to come. That’s why we came back for you.’ She slips off her white thong flats that leave tan lines, making even her feet look glamorous. ‘Georgios wanted you to come. I could tell that he was entertaining me but it was you he really wanted to be with.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s believable.’ I realise I’m jealous, which is odd, given I’ve spent the last few hours lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking of the Englishman. Whose name I didn’t even ask. Who knows I’m leaving in three days. Who is married.

  ‘You’re jealous!’

  ‘Get real.’

  ‘Is that another one of your eloquent American turns of phrase? Get real? Very nice.’

  ‘How about get knotted? Or get stuffed?’

  ‘That’s not a very nice thing to say to your mother. Get knotted, and get stuffed back. There.’ She blows a raspberry at me then goes over to her bed, unzips her hooded top, peels off her trousers to reveal her Bridget Jones’s knickers, which makes me hide my smile. Her bum looks lily white, like a baby’s. But young! Even her backside looks young. I want to give her a cuddle.

  I get up and dig in my make-up bag to get the remover to take off my chipped toenail polish.

  ‘He only took me because when you weren’t there it would have looked very ungracious of him to back out. All he talked about was you.’

  ‘I’m not bothered, honest.’

  ‘We only went to see the turtles!’

  ‘To see my backside!’

  ‘I don’t want to see your backside. Certainly not if it’s half as sour as your face.’

  I tut. ‘Anyway, what’s his girlfriend like?’

  ‘You mean, Eleni? She’s not his girlfriend. They’re just friends. She’s very nice. She’s dying to meet you.’