PART TWO
BEFORE
1
2 August 1980, 5.30 a.m. Athens. Peta Inn roof.
It’s happened again!
Everything has changed AGAIN. Everything is completely, wonderfully, different.
This crazy travelling world just seems to be totally up or totally down. At least it’s not boring, or bland, or beige, I suppose . . .
So, of course, I didn’t jump off the roof. Or I wouldn’t be writing this, would I?
I did seriously think about it. But when it came down to it, I couldn’t do that to my parents. Just thinking of how glad they were to hear from me yesterday morning made me think again. Perhaps if I had a brother or sister I might’ve let myself go over. But I’m the only one they’ve got. The one they’ve chucked all their hopes and dreams into. If nothing else, I owe it to them to keep on living.
Just as well. Because if I had jumped, I wouldn’t have had this evening!
So I can’t sleep because I stupidly took a couple more slimming pills half an hour ago. But the good thing is that I feel I can write and write and write! Which is just as well as I’ve got lots to put down. I’ll start at the beginning and write as much detail as I can remember. I want to record this night for the rest of my life.
I stayed up on the parapet – over there, in fact, just yards from where I am now on my bunk – for another hour after writing my goodbye note to Mum and Dad.
I sat with my hands clenching the rough stone surface, my shoulders hunched up around my ears and my chin slumped on my chest. It got darker and a bit cooler. After a while, the world stopped swirling quite so much, and I looked up. The lights on the roof had been switched on and I was more or less spot lit. There was a group of people on the roof opposite, sitting on a line of chairs, their feet up on their own parapet, swigging from beer bottles and smoking and laughing amongst themselves. I think they were watching me in case I did something interesting. I looked down at the street, which seemed even further away than it had in daylight. A girl glanced up at me, put her hand over her mouth, and pointed me out to her friend.
Feeling a little foolish, like a bad actor in a cheap melodrama, I swung my feet round and slipped off the wall onto the roof. I needed to get away from the edge, just in case I changed my mind again.
Sleepy from the wine and Valium, I looked over to my bed. At some point while I’d been sitting on the parapet, Mick the acid-casualty Australian must have slunk in and climbed onto his mattress right next to mine, where he lay, snoring, out and away on something. I couldn’t face lying next to him up there.
So, with no particular plan, I grabbed my bag and ran for the stairs. I didn’t much like the thought of going out into the night on my own, but what I had nearly done to myself freaked me out. I needed to get away, down onto the ground, quickly, before I changed my mind again.
I bombed as fast as I could down the stone stairs, but on the second floor I stumbled and fell, twisted my ankle and tumbled down five or six steps. Luckily, someone coming in the opposite direction broke my fall.
I’m going to try to remember every single word we said . . .
‘Whoa,’ he says.
I look up and see he’s the tall skinny boy from The Milk Bar. The boy from John’s Hostel roof. He’s startlingly beautiful close up.
Even in the dim stairwell, I can make out the extraordinary blue of his eyes.
‘Ow,’ I say, catching my ankle behind me (which still really hurts now by the way).
He smiles. ‘Where were you off to in such a hurry? You had the hounds of hell at your heels.’
It’s a question I can’t answer, because I have no idea where I was going. That, and something about the kindness in his voice – warm, American, sincere – makes me crumple. I just burst into tears. He wraps his arms around me and holds me.
It might sound a bit Mills and Boon, but that’s what it was like. He held me. My first touch since Marseille. The tender touch I wanted. The tender touch that, even before The French Shit, I’d never known. I don’t come from a family of huggers or kissers. I don’t do all that.
Normally.
‘What is it?’ he says, his lips in my hair.
‘It’s stupid,’ I say, or something like that. ‘It’s nothing.’ My voice is thick with pills and wine.
‘It doesn’t look like nothing to me. Tell me.’ He’s rubbing my back. It feels safe, though, brotherly, lovely. Not threatening in any way.
‘It’s just—’ The tears overtake me again. ‘I don’t know what I am or where I’m going.’
Eventually, when the worst of my tears are over, he takes me by the shoulders and looks at me.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Emma James.’
‘I’m Jake. Jake Mithras.’
‘Hi,’ I say, laughing through the remains of my tears, because it seems odd to be introducing ourselves after such an intimate moment.
‘Do you wanna go get something to eat, Emma James?’ he says, wiping the wet from my cheeks.
I nod.
‘I know just the place. Come on.’
He takes me by the hand and leads me down the stairs and out through the front door onto Nikis.
And there we are: two people, people together, a couple of people, a couple. Part of the throng of pairs and groups of backpackers and travellers winding their way up along the dusty road into the narrower pedestrian twists and turns of the Plaka, looking for food, drink, action.
As we walk, he tells me about himself. He’s twenty-one years old and has recently graduated from UCLA, majoring in philosophy. He grew up in San Diego and is in Greece to discover an ancient way of life lost to ‘dumb Americans’.
‘Look,’ he says, as we pass some patchily spotlit ruins of a temple partially fenced-off behind a bunch of café tables filled with beer-swilling tourists. A couple of mangy street dogs loll on the steps up to the pillars, almost identically mirroring the postures of two crumbling stone hounds next to them. ‘You wouldn’t get something like that in California – the ancient past, casually muddled up with the present. If we did have anything that old, it would be kept preserved, set behind Plexiglas, sanitised. I’ve been here two weeks and my mind is totally blown. Are you staying here long?’
I shake my head. ‘I want to head out to the islands, find a simpler way of life.’
‘Me too!’ he says. ‘There’s places out there where they still live like they did back in the olden times, where they still even speak a sort of Ancient Greek.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure.’ He turns towards me and smiles, giving me no choice whatsoever but to smile back at him. I like him. He’s got this soft mouth, with an exaggerated cupid’s bow that looks almost girlish. But there’s something else there in his face, something edgy that makes me think he might come up with a surprise or two.
Of course, after The French Shit, I’ve got my antennae up. But the size of this boy – he must be at least six four to my five one – makes me feel protected, rather than threatened. I feel OK with him. He is, at the very least, someone to be with.
And anyway, what could have gone wrong tonight? Out there in the bustling, jostling street, all noisy with harsh northern European languages mingling with the fluid, looser shapes of Spanish, Italian, Greek.
I hadn’t noticed it last night with Ena, but the smells of Athens at night are unbelievable – you walk from raw sewage to incense to charcoal-grilled lamb. Then, after passing the rancid patchouli and dandruff stench of a hippy unwashed since setting off overland from Pune, you get the relief of a cascade of jasmine, which in turn is swamped by the reek of death, probably from an unseen, unlucky one of the millions of stray dogs and cats that throng this city.
And, all the way, the pavements are crowded with the rammed tables and chairs of countless bars and tavernas. The gaps between are filled with people selling just about anything you could imagine – second-hand dentures, hand-braided bracelets, cheap plastic toys. And every couple of hundred yards, the way is blocked by a crowd watching a street performer – a guitar-playing German student, perhaps, or a barefoot gypsy girl dancing to her brother’s wild violin.
Eventually, Jake leads me across a little park dotted with old men and even older women, sitting cooling themselves on stone benches under cypress trees exhaling their woody oils after a day roasting in the heat.
Look at me. I’m really writing!
I tense slightly at being taken off the main drag, with its safety net of people, but Jake squeezes my hand and points to a string of coloured fairy lights hanging in trees rising behind a crowd of glossy-leaved shrubs.
‘There. Kostayiannis. Best lamb chops in town.’
He takes me through a gate in the bushes and we’re on a gravel terrace set with old wooden tables and chairs. Waiters bustle around the diners – and there are many straight-looking Greeks in amongst the travellers and hippies – bearing plates piled high with grilled meat and puffy flatbreads.
And suddenly I realise I feel hungry. Not just hungry, emptied out, like I haven’t eaten for a week. Which, thinking about it, apart from the vomited binge on chips from earlier on, is about true.
We sit down and Jake smiles at me.
‘They don’t have a menu, but I know just what to order. You do eat meat?’
I nod.
‘You’re gonna love this.’
‘Why are you being so kind to me?’ I ask.
‘I saw you. I was on the roof of John’s over the road. Man, you looked so down. I couldn’t bear to watch you any longer. I was scared you were going to jump.’
‘I nearly did.’
He orders a jug of village wine and some food. They bring the wine first and he pours me a glass and sits back and puts his hands together on his chest, as if he’s some psychiatrist.
‘So, Emma. Tell me about it. Why are you so sad?’
I look at him and wonder if I should tell him about The French Shit. I can’t, though. I’m never going to tell it to anyone. I’ve got this feeling that if I don’t talk about it, then gradually it will all fade away and not exist any more.
I shouldn’t really write about it here, then, either, I suppose. But maybe shutting it away in this notebook is a good thing. And perhaps one day I might be able to make something out of it. I might be able to incorporate it into my great novel or something. That would be a victory of sorts, wouldn’t it?
So I don’t lie to Jake. I just leave out the bit about being raped and kicked and spat on in an alleyway in Marseille.
I tell him about how I’m not cut out for lone travelling, how I’ve been away for just thirteen days, but how it seems more like a lifetime, how I’m lonely and lost, and how I’m tired of being targeted by men and scared to go out because of it. How my big adventure that I saved for and looked forward to all year has come crashing down around my heels. And then I tell him about Ena and how what I see as her rejection of me was almost the final straw. How I’d thought the world a kinder place and what a shock it’s been to find out the truth.
When I finish, he reaches across, takes my hand and looks me in the eye. ‘Poor Emma James.’
I nod. I feel light. I have all but told him the truth and I feel purged. A tiny, tight kernel of hope forms in my throat, making it almost impossible for me to swallow my wine.
Halfway through my story, Jake orders more wine, but it isn’t until we’ve nearly finished the second jug that the waiter brings our food – perfect, thinly cut, herby lamb chops, pink on the inside, caramelised from the grill on the outside, creamy, cool tzatziki, a plate piled with thin chips, and a Greek salad.
I decide I am going to eat one chop, ten chips, and a handful of salad, without the cheese.
Jake takes the first bite from his lamb, then stops and looks across the restaurant at something behind me.
‘Look,’ he says. I turn to face the object of his attention. ‘Your twin just walked in.’
2
2 August 1980, 7 a.m. Athens. Peta Inn roof.
So: I’m STILL AWAKE. The others’ll be up soon and if I don’t watch out, I’ll be too tired to have fun.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Shouldn’t have done the whizz.
My hand’s aching from all the writing, but I’ve got to keep on. I’m like Hemingway, or Kerouac, or Tom Wolfe and the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and the Merry Pranksters.
So, then. This is what happened next, in my best prose stylee:
Standing at the entrance to the taverna some thirty yards away from us, casting around for a place to sit, is a girl who, indeed, as Jake says, looks almost exactly like me, right down to the calamitous hairdo. Even her clothes are similar – she, too, wears a big black baggy T-shirt dress, although hers is accessorised by a gigantic shoulder bag slung across her body. She catches my eye and her mouth opens a little, her expression almost mirroring mine.
She stops a waiter as he passes her, his hands full of piles of empty plates, and asks him a question. He looks around the terrace, and they exchange a couple of words. While Jake and I have been talking, every table in the place has filled up. The waiter shrugs and bustles off into the kitchen.
The girl hesitates for a moment, then comes over to us.
‘He says I should sit with you guys,’ she says, shrugging. ‘Is that OK?’ She talks like Rhoda off the telly, so I guess she’s from New York.
She’s not so like me close up. Where I have quite unimpressive features – smallish and not very well defined – this girl has a very striking face – dark, dramatic eyebrows, full lips and almond-shaped green eyes. But she
is
around the same height as me and, even though she might be a few pounds heavier than me (it’s hard to tell in these baggy dresses), we’re of a similar build.
Jake looks at me, an eyebrow raised. ‘You OK with that, Emma?’
‘Sure,’ I say, moving over to make space for her, although I’m a little sad at having to share him.
‘Thanks so much,’ the girl says, ‘I’ve just arrived in town and I don’t know anyone. I hate coming out on my own.’
‘Me too,’ I say. ‘I’m Emma, this is Jake.’
‘Hi,’ she says. ‘I’m Beattie. I like your hair, Emma.’
Beattie’s story is this:
She is, indeed, from New York. She’s a drama student at Tisch – an ‘awesome school’ in New York City – and had been due to do ‘The Grand Tour’ with a boyfriend, but ‘the rat-ass’ dumped her at the last minute, citing ‘commitment issues’.
I love how she talks!
She decided to come over anyway, and, at the start, enjoyed travelling – first to London, then Madrid, Florence, Pisa, Rome and Venice. But she’s feeling the strain of continually arriving in places on her own, never spending time with anyone she’s known for longer than two days.
So we’ve got a lot in common, then.
I like her, a lot.
We sat there, telling each other about our lives until the last of our fellow-diners had left – way beyond midnight. So long as we kept buying wine, the waiters didn’t seem to mind us still being there – they had plenty to be clearing up.
Beattie did most of the talking. The way she spoke about Italy – the art she had seen, the food she had eaten, the people she had met – made me cross at myself for missing out on all that.
‘To behold Leonardo da Vinci’s
The
Last Supper
is like standing in front of God,’ she says, her hand to her chest. ‘Right there in the flesh.’
‘You went to Milan too?’ I say, ready to come out with my story of the train station at night, the horrible hotel, the pounding on the door.
‘No, I headed south straight off,’ Beattie says. ‘Milan is just like this big industrial city.’
‘But
The
Last Supper
’s in Milan,’ I say. I know this because it was one of the things I had planned to go and see. One of the things I had denied myself. That The French Shit had denied me.
‘Is it? Oh my God.’ She laughed. ‘My brain’s all fucked, I guess. With all the travel, the moving, the seeing so much stuff. And this wine!’ She gestures at her glass. ‘I meant the Sistine Chapel, the Michelangelos on the ceiling. Jeeze.’ She slaps her forehead and we all laugh, our voices echoing round the empty courtyard.
Then the waiter brings out the bill, along with a carafe of Metaxa and three small glasses. His expression apologetic, he says we can stay sitting at the table, but he needs us to pay so he can get some sleep.
‘I’ll get it,’ Jake says, reaching into his jeans pocket for his wallet.
‘You sure?’ I say, but not too forcefully – my share of the bill would have blown my budget for the day
again
, something I’d done once already with my morning visit to the chemist. I’ve been making too much of a habit of going over my carefully planned daily allowance. I’m going to have to sit down soon and do a re-calculation if I’m going to spin my traveller’s cheques out for my full month away.
That thought hitting me now, so soon after I wanted to go home to my parents, is a mark of what a sea change this evening’s been for me. Something inside me already knows I’ve found some travelling companions, some muckers, some mates.
Jake paid, the waiter said ‘
Kalinichta
’ and limped wearily inside the taverna, shutting and locking the door behind him. A few minutes later, the lights strung in the trees around us went out and we were left in the warm moonlight, with only the sound of crickets, distant, barking dogs and the occasional putter of a passing moped for company.
We sat and smoked and talked and drank our Metaxas and slapped at the mosquitos closing in on us. Beattie leaned back in her chair and stretched her arms up above her head. I noticed then that her black T-shirt dress was of a much finer material than mine, and she clearly had no bra on underneath. My eyes flicked to Jake, who seemed oblivious. In fact, throughout the whole evening, his attention had hardly veered from me. I even picked up a hint of resentment in his attitude to her – as if he felt she was intruding on us. It was only subtle, but I could feel it.
It was quite nice, actually . . .
But it’s better if she is here. I don’t think I could be on my own with a man for any period of time. Jake seems trustworthy enough at the moment. He seems completely lovely, in fact. More than completely lovely . . .
But how do I know at this stage that I can trust him? And there’s that edgy thing about him that I can’t quite put my finger on. Something a little odd. I haven’t got any evidence, but I can just feel it. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from that alleyway in Marseille, it’s that I should trust my instincts more.
So it’s far better that there is another girl here to act as a buffer and support. On top of the fact that I really like her, having Beattie around could also be useful.
‘I love you guys,’ Beattie says, looking at both of us. ‘I don’t want tonight to end!’
I’m with her on that (and look! It still hasn’t ended, even now, not for me, at least. I’m still writing it up!).
‘We could go up this hill I know,’ Jake says. ‘It’s a great place to watch the sunrise.’
‘And I’ve got this.’ Beattie pulls a bottle of ouzo out of her big shoulder bag.
‘And we could mix it with these,’ I say, placing my pills on the table.
Jake picks up one of the blister packs of Valium. ‘Cool,’ he says.
‘Help yourself.’
He pops two out and washes them down with his Metaxa.
Beattie picks up the pack and reads the ingredients, which are printed on the side in both Greek and English. ‘My mom takes this shit. Should we be mixing it with alcohol?’
‘Don’t worry. What was it this Australian girl I once knew said about it?’ I say. I put on a drawling, cod Australian accent, enjoying the mockery. ‘“It really kicks up your buzz.”’
Jake catches my eye and smiles. He knows I’m talking about Ena.
‘Well,’ Beattie says, her Oz miles better than my crap attempt. ‘If it “really kicks up your buzz”, then I’d better get on it.’ She takes two pills out and passes them on to me.
‘Take us to your hill, then,’ I say to Jake, as we get up to leave our table. ‘And tell us everything you know about Athens.’
‘This place just gets under your skin, man,’ he says. ‘There’s so much to see it freaks me out, and then the heat, and the guys you meet every day, it’s just insane.’
We trip across the little park, now deserted except for two backpackers in sleeping bags, looking very uncomfortable using their rucksacks for pillows.
‘They won’t last all night,’ Jake whispers as we pass them. ‘They’ll either be robbed or picked up by the police. And you don’t want to mess with the Athens police force, believe me. Stories I’ve heard from guys who have. It’s like
Midnight Express
.’
‘Jesus, that movie,’ Beattie says, laughing. ‘When Billy pushes the guard back and the hook goes smash right through his skull.’
We carried on, stumbling and talking rubbish, while Jake led us up through the narrow winding streets of the Plaka. I’ve got a terrible sense of direction and had no idea where he was taking us, except that it was very definitely uphill. Most of the houses we passed were shuttered up for the night, although there was the odd Greek voice coming from behind high walls, and the occasional thump-thump of some late nightclub.
Most of the tourists had gone home to their hotel or hostel beds. In their place were the cats. They were everywhere – slinking along walls, peering up in gangs from grassed-over ruins, dozing on the steps of Byzantine churches.
The night was still and airless; the air pressed in on us. Even without the oppressive heat of the sun, the going was hard work. Or perhaps it was the Valium and alcohol cocktail we had swallowed. Or the fact that we were smoking as we walked. We had to break out the slimming pills to keep ourselves going.