Better Than Fiction 2 (13 page)

The train steamed rapidly out of the station, its lights soon disappearing, and a minute later even the sound it made was silenced, as if everything were conspiring to bring this sweet oblivion, this madness, to an end as quickly as possible. (‘The Lady with the Dog’)

Being alone made me conspicuous, so I kept talking to the woman.

‘Can I help you with the umbrella?’

‘Thanks, but I think this one’s for the graveyard.’

‘Then we’re doomed,’ I said. ‘Stranded.’

She laughed. ‘No. We’re not bloody stranded.’

She shook the rain from the umbrella and put it on the
window sill, gently, as though it still mattered and somebody else might like to have it.

‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s me and you make a run for the taxi-rank.’

She laughed again.

‘Let’s get ourselves soaked as a pair of socks and never care.’

I
n the summer of 2000 I spent six weeks backpacking around the Greek islands with my at-the-time girlfriend. Like anyone who makes this sort of trip, I have stories – trekking up to the discovery site of the Venus de Milo at dawn, then sitting in a quiet, grassy, old amphitheatre to watch dolphins swimming in the bay below; trying to stay calm as a death-or-glory bus driver threw his ageing vehicle – complete with stickers of fighter jets on the windscreen – around the tight, narrow bends of the road that zigzags up the thousand-foot cliffs of Santorini; the discovery that pelicans are really, really large creatures. All these stories, as important as they are to me, are pretty usual. If you’ve ever been backpacking around Greece, you’ll probably have at least some of them yourself. There’s one story from this trip, however, that is not at all usual. One story that is odd and unsettling. This is the story I’m going to tell here.

We arrived into the port of Heraklion, Crete, at dusk.

We’d picked a hotel in the city and, because we were tired, we decided to blow some of our dwindling funds on the luxury of a taxi to get us there.

We chose a taxi driver carefully from the many trying to get our attention on the dock – he was young-ish, professional-ish, though what can you honestly know about a person in those circumstances; you have to just go with your gut – and followed him to his cab, jumping in the back.

‘Can you take us to the-hotel-whose-name-we’re-not-going-to-mention-in-this-story?’ my girlfriend asked. He nodded and fired up the engine.

We guessed it’d take about ten minutes to get to the hotel in a cab, up from the docks and into the heart of the city. We probably could’ve made it on foot but, as I said, we were tired and didn’t want to think about navigating a strange city in the failing light. We just wanted to get to the-hotel-whose-name-we’re-not-going-to-mention-in-this-story, check in, and fall asleep.

Ten minutes later and the lights of the city were starting to disappear behind us.

Shit.

I leaned forward in my seat. ‘Is this the way to the-hotel-whose-name-we’re-not-going-to-mention-in-this-story?’

‘Yes,’ said the driver. ‘Relax. It’s fine.’

Fifteen minutes and the city was well and truly behind us.

Twenty minutes and we were in the countryside, driving through what looked like an abandoned quarry in the fading light.

Oh
shit
.

We looked at each other, neither of us quite believing that this was happening and yet all too aware of how badly it could play out.

‘This isn’t the way to our hotel,’ my girlfriend said. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Somewhere better,’ the driver said.

‘I think you should take us back now,’ I told him.

‘Relax, please. I’m helping you,’ he said to the road ahead.

We considered our options, which were limited.

After a tense, thirty-minute drive, we found ourselves sitting in the bar of a tiny deserted little hotel in the middle of nowhere, as the driver and the hotel owner whispered in one corner.

‘They don’t look like killers,’ said my girlfriend. ‘We could stay. Get out of here in the morning.’

By this point, night had fallen. Outside was pitch black.

Getting out of here tonight would mean another cab, or the same cab. It would mean the cooperation of at least one of the people currently whispering about us at the other end of the room.

‘I think we should go,’ I said. I was scared, but I’d found the edges of something hard inside myself that I’d never noticed before. ‘I don’t want to be here and neither do you.’

At that point, we forced ourselves into some rational thinking. Nobody was going to be murdered. The driver was probably related to the hotel owner, or picking up a little cash on the side from bringing paying guests here. These weren’t psychopaths. At the very most it was a scam, a little strong-arming, but not much more than that. We just needed to show that we weren’t going to be strong-armed by anybody.

The driver and the owner came over to us.

‘We asked you to take us to the-hotel-whose-name-we’re-not-going-to-mention-in-this-story,’ I said to the driver. ‘Why are we here?’

‘Stay here,’ said the driver. ‘This is a good hotel. It’s better for you.’

The hotel owner didn’t speak any English, or he wasn’t joining in.

‘We don’t want to say here,’ said my girlfriend.

‘Yes,’ said the taxi driver. ‘You do.’

‘No.
We do not.
’

What followed was a fair amount of back and forth until I played what I hoped was our best card and flat-out demanded that he drive us to the offices of the transport police in Heraklion
right now
. I might even have banged on the table. It was impressive stuff.

And it did the trick.

‘Fine, of course, if that’s what you want. I’m just trying to help you,’ said the driver as we followed him out to his car, as if this had been his attitude all along.

Here’s what I did next. Under the advice of the recently discovered hard thing inside me, I sat behind the driver for the return journey. With what seems now to be a disturbingly icy and detached sense of clarity, I positioned myself so that I could quite easily get my arm around his neck to restrain or strangle him if I felt that to be necessary, and from there could go on to kick at the steering wheel and run us off the road if I needed to. I should say that I was completely prepared to do these things, and wasn’t panicked. It felt like there was a current running through me, but I was focused, still, practical. I’d never found myself functioning in this mode before, and have never experienced it since. I remember assessing the situation, not like a chess player but like something with a mouth full of sharp teeth. The driver had to face forwards, operate the car, keep his eyes on the road. I was behind him. I had an overwhelming advantage. I remember thinking that –
I have an overwhelming advantage.
Thinking about it now is still unsettling.

Thankfully, the driver did take us exactly where we wanted to go, all the while explaining that he was only trying to help us out. He pulled up in front of the transport police building in Heraklion and then offered to drive us to the-hotel-whose-name-we’re-not-going-to-mention-in-this-story, as it was just a couple of blocks away.

‘Okay, yes. You should do that. Thanks,’ said my girlfriend, struggling to find the right words for the situation.

A minute or two later, we were standing on the pavement outside the-hotel-whose-name-we’re-not-going-to-mention-in-this-story, catching our breath and being pleased, more or less, with how we’d handled things. It was our first real challenge, and we’d asserted ourselves, come out the other side feeling like seasoned, capable travellers.

We went inside.

My girlfriend began to notice it straightaway, but it took me a little longer. At that point, I was still preoccupied with what had happened, and still thinking over the scary operating mode I’d found myself running in on the return journey. Its existence went against a lot of the things I’d always thought about myself, and I could see there would need to be some time and thought to integrate it into the overall picture.

Preoccupied as I was with these thoughts, it took me a few moments to pick up on the look my girlfriend was giving me.

The look said
what the fuck?

I raised my eyebrows.
What?

She tipped her head towards the receptionist.

At first I didn’t understand what she wanted me to see. The young woman looked normal enough, though she gave us a couple of nervous glances while trying to do something
with the check-in computer. Moments later, it became clear that she couldn’t get it to work. What was that look? Was she embarrassed? Finally, she gave up and began searching around for what eventually turned out to be a cupboard full of room keys.

Why couldn’t she find the room keys?

That’s when I saw what my girlfriend was trying to tell me.

My stomach lurched a little – the realisation was so strange.

This woman was dressed as a receptionist and standing at a hotel reception, but she
wasn’t a receptionist
. She was pretending. She’d been standing here, in uniform, pretending to do a job that she didn’t actually do.

Why?

I looked around the lobby seriously for the first time.

We were standing in a large, grand building. Opulent. Faded.

Dotted around the place in small groups were perhaps a dozen older Greek men in suits. They were all staring at us. Staring a little aggressively, I thought, but much more than that, staring with surprise and incomprehension. The way you might stare if a pair of zebras wandered in off the street.

And another thing, when I turned back to the reception, I saw that it wasn’t just clean and orderly as I’d first supposed; it was sparse, under-dressed – it looked like a set.

This might sound crazy but my now ex-girlfriend and I have talked about this a lot in the fifteen years since it happened and we’re both of the same opinion: the-hotel-whose-name-we’re-not-going-to-mention-in-this-story had put a lot of effort into appearing to be a hotel, but it wasn’t a hotel at all. It was something else entirely. What? We still have no idea.

Various people have suggested all the obvious things – a gangster hang-out or some sort of front for a criminal operation,
a brothel – but none of these feels right; these explanations seem too straightforward, too recognisable, and this wasn’t that at all, this was something
other
.

Imagine wandering into a David Lynch movie, or into the Overlook Hotel during the Jack-Nicholson’s-losing-his-mind part of
The Shining
. That’s the closest I’ve ever been able to come to describing the experience. It felt unsettling; it felt all wrong.

After the not-receptionist had found us a room key, a not-porter – equally confused and horrified – had shown us upstairs, through empty, silent, shabby corridors, to our room.

The room was about as convincing as the reception.

We slid a chest of drawers in front of the door and didn’t sleep very much.

In the night there was a series of loud bangs, but no sounds of movement, no mumbled voices of any other guests. For a hotel, it was very quiet indeed.

Early the next morning, we headed into Heraklion to cash in some travellers cheques.

‘And what hotel are you staying in?’ asked the cashier.

‘The-hotel-whose-name-we’re-not-going-to-mention-in-this-story,’ my girlfriend said.

The cashier stopped writing. I can still see this so clearly – she stopped writing and looked up at us slowly with barely disguised alarm.

‘The-hotel-whose-name-we’re-not-going-to-mention-in-this-story?’

‘Yes,’ said my girlfriend. ‘Why? Is there something wrong?’

‘No, no, no,’ the cashier backtracked with a nervous breeziness. ‘Of course not. It is a very nice hotel.’

We wandered through the streets in silence for a little while after that.

Eventually, my girlfriend said, ‘I’m trying to help you.’

‘What?’

‘I’m trying to help you. That’s what the taxi driver kept saying over and over to us yesterday, wasn’t it?’

It was.

Oh shit. It really was.

‘I think we should get our bags,’ I said.

‘I think so, too.’

And reader, that’s exactly what we did.