Can We Still Be Friends
Can We Still Be Friends
FIG TREE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
For my mother Drusilla
1
The terrace – if you could call the concrete slab with its two white plastic chairs a terrace – looked down on the small Kanariki beach. Kendra leant over the black iron rails and rubbed her leg, vaguely exploring whether her newly acquired suntan might flake off into dried skin, as she watched the families below, laden with the cumbersome paraphernalia of small children, pick their way slowly down the path on to the rocks and stones. The sun was already high, sparking light off the calm Ionian sea that lapped gently where the stones met the water.
‘What happened to the long university holidays?’ she asked herself, entering the room she was sharing with Sal. The floor was strewn with clothes and, with the shutters closed, the room was dark, pierced only by one bright shaft of sun from the terrace door. She heard the rustle of Sal’s sleeping form turning under her thin sheet. Rummaging around for a dry bikini, Kendra was torn between making an exaggerated amount of noise to wake her friend to share the precious hours of this last day and the alternative of acknowledging that it was Sal’s last opportunity to lie in.
‘What time is it?’ Sal’s slow voice emerged, and Kendra heard the near-simultaneous click of a lighter and an inhalation. Sal’s smoking had been driving her crazy all holiday so there was no point in making a fuss about it at this late stage; nonetheless, irritation infused her voice, clipping her words.
‘About 10.30, I guess. I’m going down to the beach.’
‘See you there,’ answered Sal, now propped up against the whitewashed wall, her small bare breasts white against the tan of her arms and torso. ‘Last day and all. Musn’t waste it, must we?’ She smiled, her eyes still closed against the light as she blew a thin stream of smoke into the air above the bed.
The holiday had been Sal’s idea. Her eye had been drawn to a small ad in the newspaper: ‘Big Discount. Traditional Greek village studio on beautiful beach – two weeks only.’ ‘Come on, Kendra,’ she had urged, telephoning immediately. ‘It’s a bargain, and you haven’t moved from London since we left university. Girls only. Catch the rays. I’ve found the flights. Annie can do one week, but she can’t get any more time off work.’
Annie and Sal were Kendra’s closest friends, yet her reaction to Sal’s enthusiastic proposal, as ever, was a certainty that she didn’t really want to participate in whatever activity was being suggested, rivalled by a niggling suspicion that this reaction showed her in a negative light. Sal would, of course, be suggesting something that would make life more interesting, more vivid. Over the four years since they had first met on their shared university corridor Kendra had become well acquainted with this feeling of inadequacy rippled with apprehension. Crashing a party hundreds of miles away, hitching to the sea at midnight, experimenting with a new drug – for Sal, it was all in her sights, up for grabs; for Kendra, it was all a potential source of anxiety and trepidation. Annie was often able to straddle the extremes of the two friends with her gentle determination, but experience had taught them both that, although it was, in Sal’s words, ‘narrow-minded’, ‘so unadventurous’, to say no to some of Sal’s wild plans, to say yes would often end in a medley of chaos, and the ramifications would stretch far and take a lot of undoing.
Corfu, though. Only a short charter flight away. And Sal was right, Kendra had been precisely nowhere in the last year.
Having been deposited at Corfu airport at three o’clock in the morning, the girls lay on the hard floor of Arrivals until daybreak, when a taxi took them out along the winding roads towards the north-eastern end of the island. Tiredness had reduced them to companionable silence for most of the journey.
‘Hey! Look, down there. Fantastic!’ Sal spotted the beach at the bottom of the slope as the taxi bumped towards the water.
A woman in a pair of unbecoming white shorts stood outside the
small taverna on the beach. The black folder she held and her bored demeanour gave her away as the holiday rep.
‘Sal Turner?’ she queried as the three disembarked with their bags.
Sal stepped forward, smiling.
‘You’re in Villa Ariadne. Follow me.’ The rep led the way back up the road; the girls stared after the dingy white bra straps sliding down her shoulders, and followed her stolid figure, lugging their suitcases like mules. Soon they turned on to a narrow path, on which stood a square whitewashed building, its dark-green shutters closed. Outside climbed a staircase, to a room with four narrow beds, and a kitchenette in one corner.
‘The plumbing’s a bit temperamental in this one, so go easy on the toilet paper and, on no account, put
anything else
down there, or I can’t be held responsible,’ the rep recited.
Annie opened the shutters to the balcony, taking in the bright sun and the crystalline sea. Why were the first moments of her holiday being tarnished with a conversation about lavatories? She only had a week.
‘Of course. Thanks.’ She took the room key from the rep as Sal signed for it.
‘I’m Amanda. You can find me at Villa Serafina, outside Kassiopi, if you need me in an emergency. All breakages will come off the deposit.’ And, with that, she left.
Annie opened the low cupboards under the sink at the dark end of the room.
‘I don’t think we’ll be doing much cooking here,’ she muttered. Sal and Kendra glanced at each other. ‘I know you two can’t cook, or won’t, but Mum lent me her Elizabeth David and I thought I might do something. Like mayonnaise. Real mayonnaise is so delicious. You know, with local olive oil –’
Sal was already flinging the contents of her case around in a hunt for her bikini. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s leave the mayo for a bit. I’m on for a beer. What’s the Greek for beer? I’m baking already.’
From then, their days followed the same pattern: hours lying on
the large stone slabs that rose from the pebbles of the beach, interspersed with forays to the taverna. Occasionally they would trek up the hill and over to another hamlet, but an unspoken agreement had determined that this was a no-action holiday, a time when they could indulge in each other’s company day and night. ‘No pulling, I guess’ was how Sal had wrapped it up.
They had never shared a house while at university, although they had become the best of friends, plaited in an intricate weave of shared experiences. After the first year on campus they had found separate lodgings. Annie rented a room in a mouse-infested house in the local town with a couple of her fellow history of art students, Kendra shared with an itinerant population of students and Australians on working visas, and Sal – well, Sal floated from place to place, finding a bed with friends and a constant stream of extremely short-term lovers. She liked to say that she ‘surfed the wave of spontaneity’ and, on the occasions when the wave crashed and she was left stranded, she had always been able to find space with one of the others.
Each of the girls realized that their friendship was preserved by this distance. The intensity of their engagement with every aspect of each other’s lives was given some respite by their not living together. Of course when they did discuss the prospect of sharing a home they all vowed that it would be a wonderful thing to do.
There had been an afternoon just after finals when a large pack of that year’s students had headed up on to the downs to party into the night. In the clear, brilliant light that came straight off the south coast some distance away, they set up an encampment, lying on blankets, listening to a medley of music on a bulky cassette player. Sal, wearing denim cut-off shorts and a vest, sat on the long grass rolling a joint on her lap while Kendra paced, a bulky Nikon camera slung across her neck, taking photographs of the group. Annie unpacked French loaves, bags of cherries and crisps, packets of tomatoes and triangles of Dairylea.
As the sun faded slowly into the rose-tinged light of the evening,
the group lay in a tangle of denim and bare legs. The three girls wove daisy chains around each other’s wrists, slicing the thin stalks with their fingernails and pledging that, one day, they would all live together.
‘As soon as I’ve got some cash, I’m going to look out for somewhere for us. It’ll be brilliant,’ enthused Sal, drawing on the heady smoke and passing the joint to Annie.
‘We’ll be the Three Graces,’ Annie offered, and lay back looking at a vapour trail in the clear sky. Kendra handed over her precious Nikon to a bespectacled boy in a Sandinista-sloganed T-shirt.
‘Tony – take a picture of us. Here. The aperture needs to be open in this light. Are you sober enough to focus? We should capture this moment. Remember it when we’re old and grey.’
Kendra and Annie sat on the grass, smiling gently, blearily, into the lens, Sal leaning behind and into them, her arms around their shoulders. From the cassette player the sound of John Lennon’s ‘Woman’ wafted into the air. They heard the click of the pictures being taken, one after another. Sal stood up, swaying a little. ‘We should make a toast – to us. Together for ever. Sisters under the skin. All that stuff. Shall we make a blood bond?’ She picked up the large knife that had been used to cut the bread.
‘Don’t be crazy, Sal,’ said Annie. ‘The daisy chains will do. We don’t need to carve ourselves up to know we love each other.’
Pulling her sarong tightly around the lower half of her body, Sal walked over the stones to where Kendra was lying in sphinx pose on a scarlet towel reading a thick paperback.
‘Watch the back of your legs – just this bit here, you’re starting to burn,’ said Sal, gently touching the skin on the top of Kendra’s thighs. ‘Do you want a coffee? I’m going to order one.’
Kendra jumped up awkwardly, pulling her untied bikini top over her full breasts and narrow back. With her tangle of tawny hair, her height and her generous figure, she was a golden Amazon, in contrast to the small, lean proportions of Sal.
‘I think we should go into town for our last night. We’ve been loyal to Vassily and his kalamari and moussaka, but we’ve got to hit the big city lights tonight – or at least go to Kassiopi,’ mooted Sal as they strolled over to the taverna.
Kendra realized that, although she had no desire to leave the hamlet, where the fishing boats came in at night to deliver their haul of mullet, squid and octopus to Vassily and his son, especially the night before the inevitably tiresome experience of a charter flight home, there was absolutely no point voicing this.
‘Let’s go in early, watch the sun go down from there and get something to eat. That way we won’t be back too late,’ she offered, hoping that this would satisfy Sal’s appetite for action.
They sat at the table they had now come to regard as
their
table, and ordered gritty coffees, spooning thick honey into bowls of creamy yoghurt.
‘You know, when we get back I really need to get a real job,’ mused Sal. ‘I’m getting cash for shifts working on that diary page in the newspaper, but I can’t even guarantee the rent for a room somewhere. Funny, isn’t it, how it’s Annie who’s got the good job?’ replied Kendra, narrowing her eyes and looking out over the bay to the cypress- and gorse-clad hills opposite, which were veiled in a blue, gauzy light from the heat of the sun. ‘Well, she’s always been the practical one. I couldn’t face Terrible Tania and her tribe, but Annie doesn’t really care, does she? She’s not looking for a career. She’s just passing time, waiting for her dream man.’ She rolled the paper packets of sugar in a bowl on the table around in her fingers, enjoying the crunching sound of the grains. The thought of Annie’s last boyfriend, a rugby player with thighs instead of brains, asserted itself: ‘And we’ve certainly been through enough Mr Wrongs on the way … Anyway, I might investigate this Chapel place I’ve heard about,’ Kendra continued. ‘It sounds like it could be interesting, it’s a kind of community centre. I just … I don’t know … I feel I want to do something useful. Sounds wanky, I know.’