My Map of You (8 page)

She knew now that her mum had most probably been here, in Zakynthos – maybe even stood where Holly was standing right now. Was that why she'd had such an affinity with the sea? Had she stood on this beach, looking out at that endless expanse of blueness, and let herself believe that anything was possible? Had her Aunt Sandra done the same thing?

Holly forced herself to turn away from the view and continue down the beach. These dark thoughts weren't going to do her any favours, and neither would sending questions out into the universe that would never be answered. Her mum was dead, her aunt was dead, and she was alone. That was all there was to it.

Monday, 14 May 1984

My darling sister,

Thanks for writing back to me so fast. Your letter made me laugh A LOT! So, you've gone and fallen in love with a bloody local,
have you? Well, that's sealed the deal – I'm going to have to come over there immediately and make sure he's good enough for you, which of course he won't be, because you're the best person on the planet … after me! Anyway, I'm only writing this to tell you that my flight is booked to Athens, so I'll get the boat from there and see you very soon. Be safe over there in the meantime – don't get pregnant or anything stupid like that. Ha ha!

Miss you SO MUCH. Heaps of love,

Jenny xxx

Kalamaki
beach turned out to be a further twenty minutes' walk, but Holly was glad she'd made the journey. She'd read something in her book about this area being the main nesting ground for rare sea turtles, and as such it was protected, almost like a nature reserve. Despite having only one restaurant and just a handful of sunbeds scattered haphazardly across the sand, this beach had the benefit of being cleaner, wider and far more beautiful than the one in Laganas. Instead of hotels, the beach here backed straight into the rough edges of a cliff, the highest point of which looked to have some sort of viewing platform jutting out. Holly promised herself she would find a way up there to check out the view, but first she needed a drink. Her water had long since run out, and there hadn't been a single shop or bar for the last few hundred metres of her trek along the sand.

The beachside taverna was large and square, with tables stretching all the way to the back, where Holly could see a bank of fridges and a till sitting on a table. An extremely old woman was sitting there, a black shawl pulled across her hunched shoulders. There were a number of waiters zipping around between occupied tables, and Holly caught the eye of one who motioned for her to sit wherever she liked. Glancing around, she spied an empty table in the corner that offered an impressive view of the beach
and sea beyond. There was a large wood and wicker umbrella above it, sheltering the chairs from the sun, and Holly slid thankfully into one of the light-dappled seats.

‘Yassou!'
came a voice at her ear, and she jumped as a menu was unceremoniously tossed down on to the table in front of her. She looked up to where a waiter was standing, his pen hovering over a tatty-looking notepad. Catching her eye, he smiled broadly, displaying a number of missing teeth and what looked like a large chunk of spinach jammed in between two of the remaining ones. Holly swallowed her giggle.

‘Yassou,'
she replied, smiling back. ‘Can I have a water, please, and some coffee?'

The gap-toothed waiter pulled a face. ‘It is too hot for coffee,' he informed her, swinging a random arm round at the beach. ‘You like frappé? Coffee with ice?'

‘Um,' Holly hesitated. The waiter grinned at her again, nodding his head. ‘Okay,' she said, smiling up at him before turning to examine the menu. She wondered what Rupert would have made of that little exchange, of being told what to order. After a frugal breakfast of yoghurt and a few lumps of cheese, she was starving, and her mouth watered as she read the list of ingredients in a Greek salad.

‘Frappé!' The waiter was back, and placed her drink on the table top with an exaggerated flourish. Holly ordered her salad and even managed an
‘efharisto'
at the end, which made the waiter show off even more gaps in his lower set of teeth. He might have a mouth like a graveyard, decided Holly, but he was still totally adorable. The more Greek people she met, the more she liked them. They all seemed to have such a relaxed outlook and a cheeky sense of
humour. Holly couldn't remember the last time she'd been anywhere close to crying with laughter, but she could sense that the Greeks made that a daily priority. Perhaps when you lived in such a beautiful place, with such gorgeous weather, it was much easier to feel happy.

Even on its sunniest days, London felt oppressive, crowded and restless. Relaxing was more of a carefully selected activity than an everyday part of life, something people seemed to schedule in between their hair appointment and the weekly shop. As she slipped off her flip-flops, stretched her bare toes into a patch of sunlight and took a sip of her delicious frappé, Holly realised that she was feeling more relaxed than she had in months – perhaps even years. For the next half an hour, she decided to just let herself enjoy that feeling and shut out everything that threatened it.

Banishing thoughts of her mum, Sandra, Rupert and especially Aidan to a small compartment in the back of her brain, Holly tucked into her salad, relishing the sweetness of the tomatoes, the saltiness of the olives and the tangy flavour of the feta cheese as it crumbled over her tongue. As she ate, she took in her surroundings, watching as holidaymakers applied more sun cream to leathery brown limbs and children took their buckets and spades to the shoreline, immersed in their own made-up games. A middle-aged German couple were laughing together over something the wife had just read in her magazine, and further down the beach a boy in his late teens had the back of his shorts pulled down by his girlfriend, who seconds before he'd been attempting to drag into the sea by her feet.

It was a few moments before she realised that the waiter had returned to take away her empty plate. Rather than heading back into the kitchen, however, he stood for a moment at her elbow, taking in the scene spread out below them.

‘It's so beautiful here,' Holly blurted.

This seemed to please him, and he smiled without looking at her, nodding his head in agreement.

‘I am very tired,' he said.

‘Oh?' Holly wasn't sure how to respond, and looked up at him with what she hoped was concern.

‘I work here, very early, then I work at the hotel, very late.' As he said the last part, he waved a hand in the direction of Laganas.

‘You work in a hotel in Laganas?' guessed Holly, earning herself another nod of the head.

‘Yes. It's very good, but I finish at two thirty in the morning. Then here at six thirty in the morning.' He was still smiling, so Holly assumed he must be content with the arrangements, even if they did mean that he got about three hours' sleep a night.

‘You're a very good waiter,' she told him now. ‘Are you a waiter at the hotel, as well?'

‘I work on the bar. I am barman,' came the reply. He told her this with a certain amount of pride. ‘I am Nikos,' he added, putting down her empty plate and shaking her hand as she told him her name in return. He repeated it back to her several times, before telling her it was ‘very nice'.

Then came the inevitable, ‘This your first time Zakynthos?'

‘First time in Greece,' she said, waiting for the eruption of excitement she'd come to expect from all Greeks.

Nikos looked at her. ‘You like? How many days come?'

‘Yes, very much. And just two da—'

‘You stay in Kalamaki?' he interrupted. For some reason, Holly found being interrupted by a Greek was more endearing than irritating, and she laughed.

‘No, Lithakia,' she told him, smiling as he crinkled his forehead in surprise.

‘Lithakia is very good,' he went on, nodding to himself and reaching across to pick up her plate again. ‘Close to Porto Koukla. Very good.
Poli kala
. You should make a visit to there.'

‘Porto Koukla?' Holly repeated.

‘Yes. It is very nice beach. Not like Laganas.' As he said the word, he threw his arm up again, and Holly ducked to avoid being hit with the empty frappé glass.

She was starting to like Nikos more and more. It was such a long time since she'd spoken to anyone she didn't already know. Chatting to Nikos was so easy, and so much fun. If she started jabbering away to a waiter like this back home, they'd probably call the men in white coats to come and cart her off.

She ordered a second frappé and opened her guidebook at the map page. Sure enough, just down the hill from Lithakia there was a beach area marked as Porto Koukla. If the map was correct, the beach there would be nestled in the bay directly opposite the famous Turtle Island, which Holly now discovered was actually called Marathonissi. Running her finger around the coastline on the map, she mouthed the unfamiliar Greek names one
by one. They all sounded so magical: Agios Sostis, Marathia, Vassilikos, Argassi. If only she'd taken the time to learn to drive, she could have rented a car and gone exploring. It had never seemed necessary, though, not when she lived in London. Plus, driving lessons weren't cheap. On the rare occasions that she and Rupert ever left the city, he would do the driving or, more often than not, book them both a first-class train ticket.

Holly gazed longingly at the map and wondered vaguely if she could see the island by bus. No, that was silly. She was here to pack up her aunt's house and move on, simple as that. Maybe she would come back one day and see much more, but for now she had to focus on her real reason for being here.

Despite her resolve to exercise self-restraint, Holly continued to read her guidebook as the sun slipped lazily across the sky. After settling her bill and leaving a very generous tip for Nikos, she relocated to her towel down on the beach and sat watching the gently shifting ocean, her toes scrunching through the sand. One hour soon turned into two and she lay back and closed her eyes, letting the sound of the sea and the tickling fingers of warm breeze lull her into a doze.

Something was wrong. Holly closed the front door behind her and dropped her bag on the floor.

There was a cloying smell in the air, and she instinctively brought her hand up to shield her nose, noticing as she did so that the red nail varnish she'd applied during that afternoon's English lesson had already begun to chip.

‘Mum?'

The voice that came out of her mouth sounded strangled – muffled by a fear that until now Holly hadn't realised she was feeling. Taking a timid step towards the front room, she peered through the crack where the door hinges met the wooden frame. The TV was on, as it always was, but the volume had been muted. On the screen, a blonde woman with impeccably neat hair was holding up an ugly ornament of a bird sitting on a branch. The price underneath read £34.99, and Holly let out a startled laugh. In the suffocating silence of the hallway, it sounded like a gun had been fired.

‘Mum?' she tried again, knowing even as she spoke that it was hopeless. She knew what she'd find when she walked into that room, and over to that chair. The large, squashy armchair, upholstered in tatty brown corduroy; the place her mum always retreated to after she'd got far enough through that day's bottle of vodka to render her legs unreliable.

Holly stood balanced on the tips of her toes, staring down at the carpet, which was littered with leaflets about local cleaning services, takeaways and taxi companies. As she gazed, the colours began to run into one another, until all that swam before her was blackness …

‘What are you doing? Geddoff!'

Holly sat bolt upright and slapped away the hand that had shaken her awake. After the darkness of her dream, the sunlight on the beach felt blinding.

Nikos crouched down beside her, his bare feet half-obscured by the sand. ‘You were … moving,' he told her, not unkindly. ‘I … I think you would want to wake up.'

Holly failed to hold in the groan as she remembered what she'd just been dreaming about. It was haunting her,
even here, in this beautiful place. She must have been asleep for a while, because the beach around her was practically empty. A small, elderly man wearing a shocking pink visor was busy stacking up sun loungers, while a much younger boy raked the sand flat behind him. The Insomnia Troll had picked a bloody inconvenient time to stage a disappearing act.

‘It is seven o'clock,' Nikos informed her.

Holly rubbed her eyes, then swore as she transferred sand straight into one of them. Before she could do anything, Nikos had unscrewed the lid of his water bottle and unceremoniously lobbed the contents into her face.

Now she was awake. Grabbing her discarded vest top from her open bag, Holly swung it round to wallop him, causing Nikos to leap back on his haunches with a bellow of laughter.

‘You … You …' Holly grinned at him as she attempted to dry her straggly wet hair. Her towel had been on the sand, though, so all she managed to get was a headful of grit.

‘You go to Lithakia?'

Nikos really was the master of coming straight to the point.

‘Yes,' she nodded, pointing a vague arm down the beach.

‘You get a bike.' It wasn't a question.

‘No, no,' she tried, but he shook his head.

‘I am not madman,' he assured her. ‘We go on my bike.'

He probably wasn't going to kill her, Holly reasoned. She was just shaken up because of the dream. He didn't look like the murdering sort. If he tried anything funny, she'd just knock the rest of his teeth out.

Gathering up her bag and giving her towel a firm shake, Holly waited by the path and watched Nikos disappear behind the back of the restaurant. Shortly afterwards, there was a loud spluttering noise and he re-emerged in a cloud of dust and black smoke, his gangly legs sticking out from either side of his moped in the manner of a drunk daddy-long-legs.

Dumping her bag in between his bare feet on the footwell, Nikos shuffled forward on the seat and nodded for her to climb on. It was hard to tell what colour the saddle was, because it was covered with a criss-crossing array of thick parcel tape in various states of disintegration. Foam was escaping from cracks where the seat joined the metal frame and there was a large hole in the framework of the bike, just behind where Holly was about to put her bottom.