by Carol Mason
He watches me walk inside. When I turn around to see if he’s gone, he’s still standing there, smiling at me as though I’ve just pleased him more than he ever thought he could be pleased right now.
Fourteen
Mam’s bed is empty when I get back to the room, and empty when I get up to pee at two in the morning. I go back to bed and try to sleep but I can’t. My head’s a mix of my mam, Sean, Jonathan… Would Jonathan have left me if he found out I’d got it on with a stripper? Interesting question. I think he’d probably have been disgusted at me. He’d have made me feel really, really small and pathetic, but ultimately, he’d have got over it.
Around three, I hear the door. She creeps in, picks her way around the room so as not to disturb me. I smell a gentle waft of her perfume. I pretend I’m asleep.
~ * * * ~
He’s sitting on the wall when I come out. The sight of him makes my stomach flip.
‘You’ve got good legs,’ he says, looking objectively at them in my short denim skirt. ‘Runner’s legs.’
‘That’s what my husband used to call them.’
He looks sad for me, for a moment. ‘Do you run then?’
‘Only if I’m being chased.’
He gets off the wall. ‘By who?’
‘Oh… wives of Englishmen I meet on holiday in Greece.’
A proper smile now. ‘Well that counts me out. I’m Irish, remember.’
We stand there looking at one another, a bit like we did yesterday, only not half as uncomfortably. ‘I’ve been thinking about everything you told me,’ I tell him.
‘You and me both.’ He holds my look for a while. ‘Come on,’ he says, leading me out onto the street. ‘This is my rental. Well, it’s Boz’s really.’ He indicates to the silver Nissan Micra.
‘Where’re we going?’
‘Away from this pit.’
‘Did you tell your friend Boz—is that really his name—that you’re taking me out?’
He pauses with his handle on the passenger-side door. ‘It’s short for Barry, only we’ve called him Boz since he was, like, two. And yeah, I did tell him.’
‘Oh.’ I can just imagine the tone of that conversation, what they’re all going to think.
‘Why? Do you care?’ He scrutinizes me.
I shrug. ‘I suppose not. If you don’t.’
‘He’s a good guy, anyway, Boz. No worries there.’
‘So what does he make of this?’
‘Oh, just that I’m giving myself more problems.’
‘And you?’
He gets in, slams the door heavy-handedly. ‘In a way it’s not that simple. In a way he’s probably right. But I’m a big boy—I can decide for myself.’ He looks at me again. ‘Besides, who knows, maybe we were fated to meet.’ He starts up the engine. ‘Now I’m not going to let Boz and a few more little problems get in the way of that. Am I?’
~ * * * ~
We drive up to Bohali. The place we came on the trip, that left such an impression with me. Where Georgios brought me for dinner. The restaurant where we ate is closed, as it’s still only early morning.
‘Did your mam come home last night?’ he asks.
‘She did. Around three.’
He whistles. ‘So what happened with her and the Greek lover? Did she give you the gory details this morning?’
I shake my head. ‘She was sleeping when I got up. I didn’t want to wake her.’ We sit and watch the view. ‘How did you meet her? Your wife?’ I ask him, after a while.
He takes a moment or two to reply, as though he’s partially reliving it. ‘In a bar, in Liverpool. I’d just broken up with a girl I’d been seeing for six years. She was a nice girl. Looking back now, I probably should have stayed with her. Only at the time, it felt like too much too early… We met in uni, but then we graduated, got jobs in different cities. When we did get together on weekends, there was too much pressure to have a good time, but somehow all we did was fight. I could tell we were both getting restless to just be rid of each other.’ He looks at me now, laughs a bit. ‘Anyway, I met Jen, and Jen didn’t seem to have a care in the world, or a serious side. It made her very fanciable. She was great to be around. She never really took responsibility for anything… And she still doesn’t.’ He shakes his head. ‘I thought I’d change her, once we got, you know, married, got the house, a life together... I thought she’d settle down. Yet it’s daft really because you can’t marry somebody expecting them to change, and I was attracted to her because she was who she was… Maybe I’m the one that’s grown up in these last two years—more so than she has. I look at her now and I’m not so sure I see her as the mother of my children.’ He knits his brows, looks at me, shakes his head. ‘Anyway, let’s not talk about all my crap mistakes.’
‘Why, are there more?’
He pretends to think. ‘Hang on… No. Definitely not more, you’ll be glad to hear.’
‘You’re right. I am.’
~ * * * ~
The restaurant where we eat lunch is the exact one I wanted to come to with Georgios. The one that he said had bad food.
‘Not a gyros in sight,’ I tell him, scouring the menu. ‘Do you think you can handle it? I wouldn’t want you to go into a gyros deprivation coma or something.’
He rests his chin on his upturned wrist. ‘It’s all right. I’ve got my gyros-deprivation adrenalin kit at hand. Feel free to give me a jab in the backside if I look like I need it.’ He beams at me, ‘I have to confess, I brought you here deliberately, because it seems like the sort of posh place you’d bring a girl. The first time we ever talked, as I remember it, I was trotting down the street with bare feet and a pint of beer in my hand. So I don’t want you, with all your wordly sophistication—to get the impression that I’m some beer-drinking, gyros-eating thug.’
‘The thought never once crossed my mind.’ I peel off a piece of heavy, golden bread and dip it in some olive oil, after having just decided on a simple Greek salad, which doesn’t sound like something they could screw up. ‘Ok. Maybe once.’
He orders a fizzy water. ‘You can have a beer, you know,’ I tease him.
‘I’d better not. Too much booze makes me want to tell everybody I love them.’ He grins at me.
‘It generally happens to me about ten times a day.’
He grins again. ‘See, I told you you had an ego.’
My turn to smile now.
He looks around at the view, which feels a lot like being perched on the rim of a ginormous bowl with all sorts of wondrous goodies in it that you might just get to fall into and not be able to climb your way out of. ‘It’s beautiful here, eh? Look at this. Ocean. Mountains. Trees. Crumbling little villages all over the place… If I move to Seattle, there’ll be none of this will there?’
‘No but Hawaii’s close. And Mexico. And Cuba.’
‘And Vancouver. You forgot about Vancouver.’ He cocks me a glance.
‘Yep, that too.’ Could I hurtle headlong into a relationship with a man who has just left his wife? It would be very strange finding out.
‘You hate it there,’ he tells me.
‘Actually, no. I love Vancouver. It’s just that I moved there with Jonathan; I’ve only ever lived there as a married person, and well, obviously for a little while as a widow… I’m not sure I know how to be single in Vancouver.’
‘Have you been on many dates, since..?’
I shake my head. ‘I went on one really weird one about eight or nine months ago, with a strange fellow. Then I went on a really weird one shortly after that with a really nice fellow.’ I think of him briefly and wonder what he’s doing now. ‘Then I went on a rather better one with the same guy, but then I scared him off.’
‘How?’
‘Oh… By being me. The widowed me. Something about him made me unable to put the act on. He sort of got to me with his niceness, and his concern…’ I smile at Sean now. ‘He was a little older and an intelligent, accomplished man who was the one person who was ready to wal
k barefoot over the shards of a widow’s broken heart. But I wasn’t ready to have another man do that.’ Except Richard, I think. Richard was the one man I could let see my vulnerable side. ‘If he’d been a selfish, disinterested asshole who just wanted to get me in the sack, he’d have been just the ticket.’
‘Women love a bastard.’
‘Actually, I don’t. And I’m sure he couldn’t have been a bastard if he’d tried.’
‘So moving back to England, like you were talking about earlier, would be a whole new start, so it’d be easier, is that what you mean?’
I think about this. ‘Maybe. I don’t know. I spent years thinking I wanted to move back, when I knew I couldn’t. But now that I can, I’m not sure I want to. Maybe I’m more Canadian than I’ve always thought.’
‘So we have at least two things in common then.’
‘What’s that?’
‘We’re both thinking of moving across the world, and we’re both facing being single again.’
‘Well, I think I’m actually living being single, rather than facing it.’
He raises his glass in a toast. ‘To getting our bearings,’ he says.
‘Do you mind if I take your photo?’ I ask him.
Before he can answer, I snap one.
‘Go on then,’ he says. ‘If you insist.’
~ * * * ~
‘She gets back early evening. Probably around six,’ he tells me, as we walk down a crooked, narrow road past some street vendors selling lace, olive oil, wine, and dried herbs.
I sense he’s restless because he keeps looking at his watch. ‘We can go back now, if you like,’ I tell him. ‘If you’d prefer.’ It’s quarter past two. The day has whizzed by. I want to grab on to it and keep it here, and stop time.
He looks at his watch again. ‘God, is that what the time is? Never mind. Come try this wine,’ he nods over to a man giving out samples from a table under an awning. ‘You’re a red girl right?’ He taps his nose. ‘I have an instinct for these things.’
‘White, actually.’
‘See, I knew you’d say that.’ He picks a tiny sample of red and white off a trolley. ‘Here, take both. It’ll hardly put you over the limit.’
I look at the two splashes in the glasses. ‘I don’t know…. too much booze makes me want to tell people things I shouldn’t say.’
He grins at me. The white’s vinegary and warm. The red, watery and tasteless. ‘I must remember both of these lovelies if I ever come back.’
‘You’re planning on coming back?’
‘Probably not. Unless my mother marries Georgios.’
‘How likely is that?’
‘Unlikely. I hope. Or maybe I don’t hope; I’m not sure. I try to picture them as a couple and I can’t. But then again, I couldn’t really picture Mam with any man who wasn’t my dad, even though if you’d seen them together you wouldn’t exactly have pictured them as a couple. It’s very odd.’
‘I can’t say I’ll hurry back here either.’ He shrugs. ‘This holiday has felt a bit like the end of an era for me. I don’t know if that makes any sense… No going back for me.’
When I look at him, there’s a sad, wistful expression in those crystal clear green eyes.
‘I think I know what you mean,’ I tell him, and I get the urge to link him as he stands there with his hands in his pockets, to slide my hand down to his and lace our fingers. But we won’t touch. I’d lay all my bets on that. He’s a decent lad. He’s got some sense of what’s right, and what’s probably not right, under the circumstances.
‘I don’t know what this is!’ I suddenly tell him. ‘I don’t know what we’re doing. Lately I feel I’m meeting people that I like, that I can’t have. And I don’t know why.’
He looks uncomfortable for the first time. Just as I’m thinking of something less dramatic to say, to smooth it over, a withered Greek woman appears from behind a curtain of lace. ‘Beautiful couple!’ she says, indicating with a lavish gesture from me to him. ‘You were made for each other!’
Sean sniggers. ‘Oh God! Did somebody pay her to come out here and say that? I think they must have.’
Despite my frustration, I smile too.
His eyes hold mine. ‘For the record, I don’t know why this is happening either.’
~ * * * ~
It takes us over an hour to drive down the mountain, mainly because we keep stopping to stare at things: church domes, little homes, dilapidated cafés with elderly Greek men sitting outside; an old Greek lady selling honey from a small table, in the dappled shade of a tree, in the middle of nowhere, not a customer in sight; a scrawny cat peeking out from under a stone wall; an unusual plant. When we start getting out of the car to look at plants we know we’re getting desperate. We’re talking less and less.
It’s not fair.
The thought just sails through my head. You can’t meet a really great guy—who you get on spectacularly with—spend a couple of days with him, and then never see him again, because, maybe he decides not to leave his wife and move to Seattle after all.
Why couldn’t I have just met him, got on decently with him, and quite liked him? Then I’d not be sitting here feeling like I’m about to lose him. How do you lose somebody you’ve never had? I’m as bad as my mother, who’s spent her life in love with somebody who has never existed.
I wonder if we are thinking similar thoughts, because he looks at me now and says,
‘I was just thinking how can it be that I should be looking forward to seeing my wife in a few hours and hearing all about her trip to Athens with the girls, yet all I can think is, Why does she have to be coming back? Because that means I can’t spend any more time with you.’
‘I know what it is,’ I say. ‘I think I’ve got replacement angst. I’m afraid I’ll never find another Jonathan, and yet I have to, and clearly, the faster the better, and pretty much anyone will do—whether they’re Greek and fancy my mother, or they’re English and married.’
‘That’s not true,’ he says. ‘I don’t really know you well enough to conclude that, but I do believe that. And I’m sure you will find another Jonathan.’
No comment to that.
I recognise the road that takes us to the resort. It seems neither of us is speaking now because we don’t know what to say. We pull up in front of the hotel, a thrum of anticipation beating in my neck. I want him to kiss me. I know he won’t. He leaves the engine running but takes his hands off the wheel, crosses his arms, lays his head back on the rest, sighs. I’ve noticed he sighs a lot. I run my gaze up his arms, to his throat, to his eyes that are closed. Am I being tested to see if I’m ready to care about somebody else? Or is this punishment to remind me that the nice guys are taken?
‘Angela,’ he pauses for a long and complicated while. ‘Saying it’s been really great meeting you feels a bit like saying the obvious—not to mention the fact that it’s ridiculously inadequate—but it has been, and I don’t know how else to say it. It’s given me a hell of a lot to think about. And I wasn’t expecting that.’
A pain builds in the front of my head. My head feels like it might explode. I reach for the door handle and am out of the car in a split second. He clamps both his hands on the wheel, and I hear him say ‘God,’ through gritted teeth. I let the door close, but don’t want to flee like this. I bend over and look in the window. He turns and meets my eyes, winds the window down. As he exhales, the sad, earnest expression is replaced with something brighter and a touch more optimistic. I think he’s going to say something, but I get in there first.
There really is only one thing to say. ‘Goodbye Sean.’
Fifteen
The doctor is just leaving the room when I arrive.
When I go in, my Mam is lying on top of her bed. Her face is drained of all its usual colour.
‘I fainted,’ she says. ‘That’s all.’
‘Fainted?’ I sit down on the bed by her feet, shocked. My first thought is what the hell has Georgios done to her?
‘—No!’ I squeal. I’m going to kill him.
‘No!’ she says. ‘Of course not! But I knew that’s what you were thinking. It was written all over your face.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I tell her.
‘If you must know, I was out all day with Georgios, and I was feeling unusually exhausted. I asked him to drop me off here so I could freshen up, change… I came in the lobby, remember staring at the receptionist and feeling everything go slow, and then I was going down... sinking to my knees.’
‘Good God, Mam!’
‘The next thing, I was being helped into a chair.’
‘Mam…’ I shake my head, put a hand over my mouth.
‘I’m fine! It was the hotel manager’s idea to call the doctor, not mine.’
‘You fainted! You can’t be fine!’ Why hadn’t I taken more notice when she kept telling me she hasn’t been feeling herself lately?
‘My blood pressure’s high, but we knew that already. He said some twaddle about how I should probably get some blood tests done when I get home.’
‘Blood tests? This is the first time anything like this has happened, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Unless you count that one other time.’
‘What d’you mean that one other time?’
‘I had a little episode a few weeks ago. I came around and I was on the kitchen floor. All I remember is that I’d been about to put the kettle on…’
‘You never told me!’
‘I didn’t want you to come home! You’d have been on the next plane.’
‘Of course I would have!’
‘You’ve got your own problems to deal with.’
‘So you dying wouldn’t add to them?’
‘Nobody’s talking about dying. I only fainted… It’s probably the heat. Don’t look so damned panicked!’
