Thirteen Days By Sunset Beach (25 page)

Irene looked away from him and indicated all the tourists. "We wait for you to come."

"That's hardly an activity, is it?" Julian said. "I believe Douglas was asking how you occupy yourselves."

"We are occupied," Irene said, turning back to Doug and Pris. "You would not want to be here. There is much dark."

"I should think Christmas is special," Pris insisted.

"The child is born to die and rise again."

"That's what it's all about," Doug said, if a little uncertainly. "My wife was asking how you celebrate."

"All we can for the dark."

Ray thought Doug was growing as frustrated as Julian visibly was. "It's related to that, isn't it?" Doug was determined to establish. "Christmas is, I mean. A way to remind us the light always comes back even when it's darkest."

"We have the darkest day."

To Ray this sounded like a grotesque boast, but perhaps Pris understood. "You mean you have another tradition."

"We light the fires. Fires to St Titus."

"Like the one we saw the other night, you mean."

"Not so much like. Fires, nothing else. They bring light but they don't bring sun." With a partial smile that looked not merely wry but half-hearted Irene said "Just more legends people can't let go. Fairy tales so children aren't afraid."

Ray assumed she meant superstitious folk. "St Titus again," he said. "His monastery, that must be the darkest place."

"What makes you say?"

"We've been there."

"But there is nothing to see." Irene might have been resolved if not anxious to persuade them. "Just dark," she said.

"There's plenty of that." As he saw her start to turn away he blurted "Don't people still live there, though?"

Julian scowled at him and jerked his head at William. By the time Natalie distracted the boy with chatter Irene had yet to respond. In case she was using William as an excuse for silence Ray murmured "I saw one."

"First we've heard," Doug objected.

"Are you sure, Ray?" Pris said too gently for his taste.

"Yes," Ray said and held Irene's gaze. "I am."

"Some of our oldest went there. It is a refuge always. Nowhere else for them." As Pris and Doug and Ray hindered one another with attempted questions she said "Now I must talk to my other guests." All the same, she lingered to add "We are happy when you come to our island."

Was this some form of apology for attempting to put Doug and Pris off? Ray gathered that was how they took it, and couldn't think what other interpretation there might be. "So what are you saying you saw, dad?" Doug said.

"Better not discuss it while William's around." Ray found he had too many incomplete thoughts to put in order if he could, but he was disconcerted to be using his grandson as a pretext. "We'll talk about it later," he said and felt as if he weren't admitting why he wanted to delay that, even to himself.

***

When they all heard a second splintering crash from a house opposite Chloe's Garden, Natalie gave William a worried look. "What's happening over there?"

"Nothing bad. It is his birthday," Chloe's daughter Daphne said.

"Happy birthday to him, then," Natalie said as if she were reassuring William. "How old is the birthday boy?"

"He is forty."

"I didn't think you did that any more," Doug said as they heard another item shatter.

"We break plates sometimes. We are Greek."

"No, I mean I thought you only celebrated children's birthdays. And your name day when you're his sort of age."

"We have the fun we can," Daphne said with an odd hint of defiance. "It is natural."

"I suppose nothing's more natural than growing old," Sandra said.

Natalie reached for her mother's hand as if she didn't trust herself to speak, and Ray saw Tim and Jonquil wonder why. Perhaps Pris intended to distract them by raising her glass towards the house across the road and calling "Hronia polla."

"Polyhronos," Doug shouted.

Daphne's eyes winced shut, and she shook her head. "We do not say that here."

"What aren't they meant to say?" Julian enquired.

"Live many years, apparently," Pris told him.

"Or live a thousand years," Doug said.

"Didn't somebody say something like that to us, Ray?" Sandra said. As Natalie clasped her mother's hand with both of hers Daphne said "It is not the same. You are not from our island."

"I've no idea what difference that's supposed to make," Julian said.

"For you it is just a wish."

Jonquil was watching her mother and grandmother. Before anyone could answer Daphne the girl said "What's wrong?"

"Not a thing, Jonquil," Sandra said. "Really nothing at all, honestly."

Ray thought these were several words too many. 
"We've both been thinking something was," Tim said.

Natalie seemed unsure where to look, except not at William. "We weren't aware there had been any discussion," Julian objected, "and there's no need for any more."

"Gran ought to say," Tim said.

"Thank you both for caring. Nobody should tell you off for that. If anything was wrong," Sandra said, "it isn't worth bothering about any more, truly. Now I think Julian's right and we can put it to bed."

Ray saw that Jonquil wasn't entirely won over, and he thought Pris was trying to create another diversion. "If it's not a wish for you," she said to Daphne, "what is it, then?"

"More like a curse," Daphne said and glanced at the dim road, where nothing moved except the scrawny elongated limbs of the shadow of the spider in its web. "I will bring your drinks."

As she retreated, having scribbled down their food orders as well, Sandra said "I think I could live with that kind of curse."

Ray was hoping Tim and Jonquil couldn't sense how the adults were suppressing their reactions when Doug said "Here comes somebody we know."

Neither of the cousins followed his gaze. Ray did, and saw the mute seller of trinkets approaching from the direction of the bridge. Might she have another copy of the book she'd given him? He pulled out a twenty-euro note and flourished it at her. Although she must have seen, she swung around as if she hadn't and tramped back the way she'd come. "Just a tick," Ray called. "Hang on."

"Ray," Sandra murmured. "She can't hear, can she?"

"She can see well enough," he said, pushing back his chair.

"Ray," Sandra protested more vehemently, but he hadn't time to make her understand. He ran out of the taverna and after the woman. If she couldn't hear his flapping sandaled footsteps he ought not to startle her, and so he was keeping to the opposite side of the road as he made to overtake her when his shadow did. She twisted around so fast that her bag thumped her hip. "It's all right," Ray said, though he felt absurd for speaking in a language she might not even know. "It's only me."

Presumably she saw that, even if it didn't seem to reassure her much. She held her cupped hands out to him, though only just, which he assumed was meant for a question. "The book you gave me," Ray said and saw from her eyes that she didn't understand, or could their blankness mean she was determined not to admit she did? He wasn't here to investigate how genuine her deafness was. He pointed at her bag and used both hands to mime pulling if not wrenching it wide.

How much like a bully did he look, if not a robber? She opened the capacious bag readily enough, but Ray had to crane over it to be certain in the dim light from the nearest streetlamp that none of the many items it contained was a book. He stuffed the note he was clutching back into his pocket and saw her face stay blank. No doubt she was used to that kind of rebuff, and Ray had to make her understand. "Book," he said. "Book."

He'd no business condemning Julian's impatience over language when he was behaving worse. He patted the air in front of the woman as if he were playing charades, and then indicated her with both hands before turning them upwards and cupping them towards himself vigorously enough to make his fingers twinge. He wished he'd learned signing, though would it be the same in Greece? He shook his head several times in the hope of conveying that he didn't want any items from her bag, and then held his folded hands in front of his face. He meant them to signify a book as he opened them while pressing their sides together, but might they look as though he had been praying or was now releasing some creature they'd trapped? He held out the left one and traced lines on the palm with his forefinger while he pored over the pretence of sentences. "Book," he said and stared at her in some desperation. "Book."

She nodded once, which surely meant she understood. Ray raised his fists and shook them, intending to communicate triumph, and then he showed her the backs of his hands as a kind of punctuation, a sign that he hadn't finished. How could he ask the question? He held out his hands with the fingers splayed and lifted his shoulders in an extravagant shrug and cocked his head on one side while widening his eyes and distorting the rest of his features into an interrogative grimace so fierce that his brows ached. "Why?" he didn't say but only mouthed, "why me?" and jerked all his fingers at himself.

He saw her grasp his meaning before her face reverted to illegibility. At first he thought she had no answer or refused to have one, and then she held up her right hand, bending the little finger against the palm to pin it with the thumb. Ray couldn't see what she was trying to communicate until she brandished the remaining fingers and then pointed them at the taverna, by which time he didn't know how much he cared to understand. "Three of what?" he demanded, feeling not just stupid but wilfully so. "Which three?"

He was dismayed to realise that he might have liked her not to comprehend, but she did. She nodded at the taverna, and was waiting for him to look when her gaze strayed past Chloe's Garden, along the road. Her hand sprang open and quivered while her mouth gaped as though straining to utter a cry. Ray turned so hastily to see what she was seeing that he almost fell.

Three figures stood beyond Chloe's Garden and the Sunny View, at the mouth of the alley under the streetlamp. Had she been pointing at them all the time? They were too distant for Ray to make out their faces or anything else of significance about them, and he might almost have been able to believe that nothing was wrong with the sight of them. Then a cat dashed out of the alley and fled together with its shadow across the road, and Ray saw what he ought to have noticed. The shadows of the figures were at least twice the length they should be, extending up the road as though in search of prey. As his pulse swelled in his ears his vision blurred, so that he couldn't be certain whether, even if the figures were staying utterly still, their shadows had begun to merge into a single mass of blackness.

He heard a clatter of footsteps behind him, and blinked his eyes clear barely in time to watch the mute woman disappear past the bend in the road. He swung around again to find that the road beyond the Sunny View was deserted apart from the dancing shadow of the spider. As he trudged back to Chloe's Garden he saw all the diners watching him, though quite a few turned away to pretend they hadn't been. Several of the family seemed to want to speak, and Doug was first "Dad, what did you do to her?"

"I didn't do anything. I was just trying to make myself understood."

"Is that why she ran away?" Pris said with a tentative laugh.

"That wasn't my doing. Didn't you see?"

"See what?" Natalie said at if she mightn't want to know.

He mustn't unnerve William, especially since he was growing less sure what he'd seen. "That I didn't make her run," he said.

"If you say so," Doug said, "but what did you want from her?"

"Just to find out if she had another copy of that book."

"Maybe you can find it online. Shall I look?"

"I think I'm still capable, son," Ray said, not least because he felt slow for having failed to think of searching. He took out his phone and found nothing at all—no copies of
History of Greece Islands
for sale, and not a single reference to the book or its author. Though Ray had seen it was self-published, he wouldn't have expected it to be quite so unremarked. He could have fancied that every trace of it had been erased from the web.

"Let me try," Doug said, and Ray did his best not to feel patronised. As he watched Doug search he was aware of the darkness beyond the dim road, and felt as if the light of the phone were a feeble bid to hold it back. Before long Doug admitted defeat too. "Never mind," Ray said but did, which made him anxious to examine whatever was left of the book. Perhaps that was why he was on edge, though whenever he glanced along the road the scrawny restlessness turned out to belong to the shadow of the spider.

Once everyone had said goodnight while the faces watching from the playground grinned at them, he laboured upstairs after Sandra. She was inside the apartment by the time he reached it, and he might have thought she was eager for bed if not for making love. Just the same, he pulled out the drawer of the bedside table. "Do you mind if I finish sorting through all this?"

"Why is it so important to you, Ray?"

"I just want to see what I've managed to save. I'll do it outside if you like."

"I'll be in bed if you need me."

This sounded like an unmistakable hint, and he felt guilty for postponing his response. He gave her a smile that he hoped wasn't too abjectly apologetic as he carried the drawer onto the balcony. He switched on the outside light, which seemed to rouse a crouching shape on the beach—just a wave—before he slid the window shut behind him.

The fragments of the book were dry now, but this meant some of them were more thoroughly stuck together. However carefully he tried to part them, sections of one fragment clung to the other. He peeled them all apart as best he could and set about leafing through them. He was hoping to deduce why the woman had given him the book, and found that was as far as he could think.

There was nothing he could recognise as referring to Vasilema that he hadn't previously read, and nothing else that might explain the gift. The most substantial portion of the chapter was the first page, and even there the sentences were incomplete. As for the photograph of the monastery on the reverse, it had lost the section showing how unblackened the trees were. When he tried to recall the words missing from the sentences he felt as if he were drawing the darkness closer. Perhaps this was caused by the persistent sense he had of supine shapes creeping out of the night towards the Sunny View—still just waves on the beach.