Two Is Lonely

by Lynne Reid Banks

  By the time we had rounded off the list with the deafening shriek of the hooter, John was feeling in much better spirits.

  ‘Well, Janie,’ he said, turning his back to the sea and leaning comfortably against the rail, ‘What our plans? How we going to find this little boy who got lost from his daddy?’

  ‘He’s no little boy, he’s nineteen.’

  ‘Never mind his size, how we find him?’

  ‘Don’t ask me.’

  We walked round to the bow. Somewhere ahead of us lay Hydra, an island among other islands, and somewhere upon Hydra was Chris, the water-boy, now presumably in his element, literally, or at least surrounded by it. And I had to find him. That was my mission impossible, to be accomplished before I would feel free to return to Athens and get on a plane for Israel.

  ‘Is it too much to ask of you?’ Andy had said, his arms, twenty-four hours and a thousand miles away, around me. To his everlasting surprise, he’d received a post-card from his son. The picture showed an unbelievably picturesque waterfront scene, with white buildings tumbling down a hill, a little church spire, toy fishing-boats and nets, a foreground of lawn-green sea. ‘If I go, it’ll all go to hell, the whole thing. He’ll naturally see me in the role of a heavy father, come to dry him off and drag him back to Home and Duty. Alas, I’ve played the part so often he’d be perfectly justified. But in this instance, all I want to know is that he’s all right.’

  ‘But the postcard tells you that much.’ I didn’t want to object to going, at least not openly. This was, after all, almost literally the first favour he’d ever asked of me. It was not within the bounds of love or reason that I should refuse. But in point of fact, I quailed from the very idea of it; it did indeed seem too much to ask.

  ‘That’s true,’ Andy had said soberly. ‘So I can’t be being honest. Let’s see, what do I really want?’ He stroked up and down my nose with his thumb several times reflectively. ‘First of all, I want first-hand news of him. That’s not unnatural, surely? I want to know how he’s looking, where he’s sleeping—no, not with whom, I really have learnt to regard that as his own business. I want to know if he’s happy, if he’s he’s—well, if anything is changing.’

  ‘You mean, if he’s growing out of it.’

  ‘Do I mean that? Probably. He once told me not to hope we’d ever reach an understanding, he said we never could. But it’s a hope that dies hard in fathers. However, there’s also something else.’ He held my face where he could look into it. ‘I was too much of a coward even to want to show him to you as he was when I last saw him,’ he said. ‘You and I are close enough, if only in age, to share a feeling of automatic—repugnance—for any young human being whose appearance is so singularly unwholesome. But,’ he went on, leaving me with a heavy sigh to wander round the room, ‘Merrie England is hardly the place where unwashed, underfed, untrimmed young bodies show to their best advantage. If they have any. I suppose I suffer from a typical envious Englishman’s conviction that everything somehow looks more palatable under a hotter sun, starting with human flesh. After all, in Greece he can’t go dirty; he’ll spend most of his time legitimately immersed in the scouring brine of his favourite element. His face can’t look pasty, and his hair, guru-length and tangled though it doubtless still is, must look better for its daily dipping and sun-bleaching. When he was little he used to go quite blond in summer . . .’

  There was a long silence. Then he came back to me again.

  ‘I’m only trying, fumblingly, to say, Jane, that since you will have to come face to face with him sometime, it might as well be in the kindly, mellow light of the Greek Islands, rather than in a cold grey London slum.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I quite see all that,’ I said. ‘What I’m still not clear about is what exactly I’m supposed to do about him if I find him.’

  ‘Would it be too much to ask you to tell him you’re going to be his step-mother?’

  ‘Yes, it bloody well would!’ I answered feelingly. ‘On all counts. In the first place, that is absolutely your job. In the second . . .’

  ‘In the second,’ he interrupted. ‘Yes, don’t go on. I know full well what the second place is.’ He stopped wandering and returned to me, holding me against him with his arms round me as far as they would go. ‘Am I mad?’ he muttered against my neck. ‘To let you go on this fool’s errand? Better to grab you while you’re three-quarters willing. Three-quarters of you is better than the none I may have when you’ve seen this other bastard again . . . What if you never come back?’ He held my face between hard hands and peered into it with desperate intensity, as if it were a crystal ball.

  ‘Oh, surely I will!’

  ‘How can I be sure, when you’re not? And I’d have only my idiot self to blame.’

  It was a fraught evening altogether. He was so tormented and I so nervous, unable to pay attention, even my packing. As it grew later and later I knew I’d be dead-beat in the morning, when I’d have to get up at the crack for Andy to drive me to the airport. But we couldn’t seem to get off to bed, and when we did, the knowledge that we were actually alone in the house (David was already at Jo’s) and that we would not be together again for weeks, plus all sorts of other undercurrent pressures neither of us cared to examine too closely, caused us to make love frenetically most of the rest of the night.

  ‘It’s like the Irishman,’ muttered Andy exhaustedly at one point.

  ‘What Irishman?’ I asked, considerably startled.

  ‘The one in the joke. Confession. Priest asks him if he’s been sleeping with a woman, and he admits he did doze off once or twice . . .’

  What little sleep I had was jumpy with dreams. Jo had promised to ring me in the night, should anything happen with David, but dawn broke and she hadn’t. I could hardly believe it; the first night away from me for months and he hadn’t woken up . . . At six a.m., just as we were leaving, I couldn’t stop myself from ringing to check.

  ‘It’s okay, you didn’t wake me,’ Jo said as soon as she picked up the phone. ‘I knew you’d phone. Ducky, believe it or not—absolutely nowt. Slept like a log the whole night, never even rolled over. It’s going to be fine, I feel sure of it. Now take care of yourself. Two weeks and home, come what may—sooner if there’s trouble. Please, love, don’t give me heart-failure.’

  ‘I’ll try not to. And you’re quite sure you can cope?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve said so. Now go, or you’ll be late. Good luck, happy landings. Have you got the sketches? Sorry, of course you have.’ (Her faith was mis-placed, and so were the sketches for the silversmiths which I’d entirely forgotten, but I found them.) ‘Off you go, then. Sholem Aleichem!’ She’d hung up, and my last link with David was broken.

  Chapter 2

  THE trip to Hydra seemed to last for hours. We had neglected to buy any food for the journey, and by the time we arrived the sea-air had aggravated our appetites to the point of rapaciousness. Hunger is an excellent counter-irritant; the mere prospect of something delicious to eat kicked all other considerations from my mind. All I could think of by the time we jumped ashore was that the Adriatic is full of lobsters, and that the Greeks are reputed to make the best mayonnaise in the world.

  John, however, was made of sterner stuff.

  ‘Where we start looking?’ he asked briskly as soon as we stood on solid ground.

  ‘Over there,’ I said, pointing, after a quick look round.

  ‘That café? What makes you think he’s there?’

  ‘Well, we have to start somewhere,’ I said sententiously.

  ‘He’s not here,’ John announced a few minutes later. ‘Nobody here.’

  This was unarguably true. But the long tables inside the little tavern, and the round ones outside, were laid for lunch; the walls were covered with fishing-nets and other bits of bogus tat, but the smells issuing from the back kitchen were genuine.

  ‘What you sittin’ down for? Don’t you see he ain’t here?’

  ‘He may come in at any moment.’
/>   ‘Janie, what’s the matter with you?’

  ‘I’m famished, that’s what’s the matter with me. Aren’t you?’

  ‘Sure I am, but shouldn’t we—’

  ‘John, you’re altogether too conscientious. How can you walk out on that delectable, peppery, herby smell? Nothing is going to happen to Chris Andrews in the next hour that hasn’t happened to him already.’

  ‘Janie,’ said John sorrowfully, sitting down opposite me, ‘you are nothing but the slave of your stomach.’

  I changed my mind about the lobster when they brought it, still alive and clacking its dark-green claws beseechingly, for me to inspect before they plunged it into its boiling tomb. I had the moussaka instead.

  ‘John, why aren’t we vegetarians?’

  ‘Because we like meat,’ he said promptly, tucking into his own savoury carnivorous mess with relish.

  ‘Is that good enough?’

  ‘It is for me,’ he said. ‘This animal I’m eating don’t know what hit it. After I’m dead, somebody want to eat me, he’s welcome.’

  ‘Chris is a vegetarian,’ I remarked moodily. ‘When he eats at all. Macrobiotic, probably.’

  ‘Never mind his eatin’ habits. You know what he looks like?’ He looked out at the broad cobbled walk, full of tourists of every race and condition. ‘Seems to me there’s enough hippies out there to eat all the green stuff on this island.’

  Right outside the tavern, a whole group of them had come drifting along, some standing around, others sitting on the harbour’s edge with their feet dangling over the water. They all had long hair, of course, wore jeans with elaborate if shabby tops, and loads of ornaments—ceramic pendants on leather thongs, love-beads, and every conceivable symbol from Ban-the-Bomb to Stars of David. One girl had a bit of driftwood hung round her neck, and another a white stone with a hole in it. A lot of them wore buttons, which I later had a chance to study, bearing ribald or ideological or just plain fatuous slogans—‘Down with Oxfam, Feed Twiggy’ being a good example of the latter.

  ‘Maybe he’s one of those?’ John suggested hopefully.

  I took out a small packet of snapshots with which Andy had provided me. Not that he expected them to help much, for they all dated back to Chris’s pre-drop-out days. Although Andy had insisted on my bringing them all (no doubt as an antidote to the poisonous effect of the present-day reality, should I encounter it) only one of them might prove of any practical value.

  It was a frontal close-up of Chris as a schoolboy, forelocked and solemn-eyed, upon which, in a mood of tight-lipped exasperation, his father had done some graffiti work with a fountain-pen. The devout, typically English look had been obliterated by a furiously-scratched moustache, straggly beard, and curls resembling a full-bottomed wig. As a last resentful touch, Andy had been moved to give him a cock-eye and then attempted to rectify it, with ghastly results. The finished effect was of a rather degenerate one-eyed pirate of the late 18th century, upon whom the neat white collar, old school tie and blazer looked distinctly bizarre.

  I studied the face before me and tried to peer into the faces on the dockside, but the sun dazzled me. I passed the ravaged snapshot to John.

  At first he laughed, then he stopped. ‘Who did this other part?’

  ‘His father.’

  John shook his head. ‘He sure is mad at him,’ he said soberly. ‘No daddy should be that mad. You sit. I’ll go look.’

  He stood up and strolled casually outside. I was a little worried for fear he would start peering, gimlet-eyed, into their faces one by one, which would certainly have aroused their irritation. The thought had crossed my mind that the hippies on the island might constitute a colony of some sort, and that this branch of the fraternity might be able to lead me to Chris if I could only win their confidence. I didn’t want them antagonised.

  But I needn’t have worried. John strolled to the water’s edge and stood, his hands slotted into the back pockets of his jeans (only the fingers fitted in), rocking on his sandalled feet and gazing out over the glittering blue water as if entranced. No-one, the hippies least of all, could have guessed he had the slightest interest in them. I suddenly realised that, apart from happening to possess the only black skin among them, and having shorter hair (though it was beginning to develop into a passable Afro), he might have been one of them. The casual, flamboyant style of dress had been his long before it had become the trademark of rebellion among the young, and he wore it, unlike many of the rebels, with an absolute lack of self-consciousness.

  I noticed one girl nudge another, and soon John’s broad back was the focus of interested glances. He rocked and gazed and ignored them. I saw that within the group a movement had developed, which gathered momentum, advocating an approach. Several of the boys were urging several girls to go and speak to him, while the girls, reluctant, were in turn urging the boys.

  The climax of this by-play was somewhat more than even John had bargained for. One boy, losing his temper with a girl who had given him rather too vehement a push, drew back his elbows and delivered a shove to both her shoulders which sent her reeling backwards. She lost her balance completely, fell against John (who appeared to be at forward rock)—and the next moment John and the girl had disappeared. A shriek, a loud splash and a considerable body of seawater which shot up above the harbour’s edge indicated that they had reached their joint destination.

  We all leapt to our feet. One local party leapt so precipitously that they overturned their table. Screams of excitement demolished the tranquillity. By the time I reached the water’s edge, approximately four seconds later, every able-bodied Greek, Frenchman, Italian, not to speak of red-blooded Britons and Americans, had crowded to the brink, there to shove and point and exclaim and shout advice and generally imperil each other for the sake of a few moments’ diversion.

  John’s head was bobbing about among the fishing-smacks and debris like a shiny black balloon with a face painted on it. He was holding the girl up by the scruff of the neck, grinning with triumph, apparently unaware that he was throttling her with her own string of love-beads. She was gargling and threshing and looking as if she might expire at any moment, when a fellow-hippie, who, for the sheer lark of the thing, had jumped in after them, saw her predicament, sliced through the water to her side, and snatched her out of John’s massive grasp.

  ‘Here!’ I heard John bellow protestingly. ‘She’s mine! I saved her!’

  ‘You’re choking her, you silly nit!’ replied the other tersely.

  John lost no time in retaliating. A vast black hand, with arm, emerged like the neck of the Loch Ness monster from the surface, and planted itself squarely on the head of the lifesaver. Down he went in an eruption of agitated bubbles. The crowd shrieked with gleeful horror. The girl, finding herself released, swam calmly to the wall and was hauled out by her friends.

  ‘It’s great, swimming with your clothes on,’ she remarked, wringing out her hair.

  I decided the time had come to intervene. ‘John!’ I yelled above the general hubbub. ‘Let him go! Get off him!’

  He turned his head towards me. ‘What you say, Janie?’ He yelled happily. I realised with dismay that the noise had gone to his head like strong drink. Everyone was screaming at him by now, and he was beaming with enjoyment. I cupped my hands to my mouth and fairly bawled: ‘Let—him—go!’

  John looked around rather vaguely; I could see his glance travel down the length of his arm, clearly visible in the transparent water, to the struggling figure pinioned at the end of it. He seemed to realise the situation and hastily drew it back, whereupon the bedraggled and half-drowned hippie shot to the surface, leaping half out of the water like a dolphin with the force of his desire for air.

  At this moment I became aware of some pushing going on behind me, and suddenly I was roughly shoved aside as two unexpectedly efficient-looking uniformed policemen came upon the scene. They began shouting and gesticulating in Greek, and all the hippies (about three by then) who had opted
for an illicit dip came hurriedly to order and ashore. John came too. The ‘fuzz’ grabbed them, one in each hand, and began marching them off in a very businesslike fashion, but were instantly surrounded by the others who began explaining, mainly in English, what had happened.

  ‘This is the only one you should arrest!’ shouted John’s victim, pointing at him. ‘He bloody nearly drowned me, the big black bastard!’

  A horrified silence fell among the other hippies. The policemen, bewildered by all the racket, had stopped too, and for a moment you could again hear the lapping of the water and the humming of insects.

  The girl who had first fallen in laid her hand on John’s arm.

  ‘He didn’t mean that,’ she said gently, looking up at him with enormous tender eyes out of a wet, fawn-like face. ‘Black is beautiful.’ She said it with such immense sincerity and feeling that she affected the whole crowd, not to mention John, who probably wouldn’t have taken offence anyway.

  ‘That’s okay,’ he said cheerfully. He spread his hands before the furious hippie. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean no harm. I just kind of forgot I was holding you.’

  His apology was so obviously sincere and ingenuous that his opponent was completely disconcerted.

  ‘Then please excuse what I said,’ he mumbled. The others were still staring at him in shocked and silent reproach. He glanced round at them, blushed crimson, and suddenly broke away and began to run.

  His friends turned to watch him. Not one of them called him back. The policemen went into a hasty huddle, and evidently decided the whole incident, which threatened to involve a great deal of tedious translation and statement-taking, was not worth pursuing. They shrugged their shoulders eloquently, and were just about to withdraw when one of them, discovering his uniform was thoroughly damp down the front, uttered a Grecian expletive and, grabbing the first hippie who came to hand, pointed to his hair and made threatening sheering motions, like the dreaded Scissor-man in Strewelpeter. His swarthy colleague seemed to agree, and they went snip-snap, snip-snap several times, very menacingly, at all the hippies before making their way grumblingly to a distant wharfside café to cool their feelings with glasses of retsina.