Never Ending (11 page)

Dr Pollard spreads her arms. “Yes, you are all here for the same basic reason. Each one of you believes you killed someone you loved.”

“Believes?”

“Believes.”

“And, what, you’re going to make us believe we didn’t?”

The Director says, “Let me take you back to the question I asked earlier: Why are you here? What do you hope to get from us, from your time at the Korsakoff Clinic?” She wants an
honest
answer this time, her tone says.

“Do you want to ‘get well’?” she prompts, when Shiv doesn’t respond. “Do you want to ‘move on’? Do you want to return to being the girl you were before, the kind of girl everyone else expects you to be? Is that it?”

“No,” Shiv says, after a bit. “That’s not why I’m here.”

The woman nods. “Of course not.”

Shiv places her hands on her thighs to stop them trembling. Her gaze drifts to the biscuit crumbs scattered on Dr Pollard’s plate, to the napkin, flapping again in the strengthening breeze. She gives an involuntary shudder, cold all of a sudden.

“So, why are you with us, Siobhan?” the Director asks. Gently.

It takes Shiv an age to get the words out but, finally, she says, “Because if I can’t find a way to live—” She breathes.

“What?”

Shiv starts over. “I’m here because I don’t know how to live with what I did to Declan.”

Kyritos

After a picnic lunch on the beach they still had almost three hours before Shiv and Dec were due back at the villa. Nikos suggested they’d windsurfed enough for one day and
how about a trip to
the most special place
on the island?
Shiv, who’d windsurfed enough for one
lifetime
, was quick to agree and, for all his bravado after being rescued, her brother raised no objection.

“Thank you,” Shiv whispered to Nikos as they loaded the rigs in the pick-up.

“For what?”

“For giving him an easy get-out.”

“I’m a guy too, remember,” Nikos whispered. “We don’t like to lose face.”

He drove inland, following a zigzag route into the hills. Only a 4x4 vehicle and a driver with a steady nerve could handle those gradients, those hairpin bends on steep drops into the valley below.

“And this is safer than windsurfing?” Shiv said, over the roar of the engine.

“It is so long as I keep my eyes on the road,” Nikos said, turning to grin at her.

“Nikos!”

He looked forwards again, laughing, swinging the pick-up into another sharp curve. As he changed gear, Nikos let his fingers brush against the outside of her bare leg. Fleeting, but it sent a jolt through her. She shot a glance at Declan, beside her, but he was oblivious, hanging his head out of the open window like a dog, his hair whipped by the wind. Yodelling, for some reason.

At the head of the valley the road levelled off. They were following the line of a ridge that ran beneath the craggy cliff of the summit. It was quieter now the engine no longer strained against the incline.

Declan pulled his head back inside the cabin.

“Yodelling?” Shiv asked. “This is Greece, not Switzerland.”

“I wasn’t yodelling. I was shouting hello to the goats.”

“The
ghost
?”

“
Goats
, deafo.” He stuck an arm out the window as though signalling a turn. With his free hand, he punched some buttons on the radio. “Does this work?”

A man speaking in rapid Greek competed against a fuzz of static; it might have been a ranting politician, a sports commentator, or an ad for cereal. Nikos adjusted the dial to pick up a music station. And so, as they bumped along the mountain ridge, they listened to some kind of Greek techno-punk.

From where they left the pick-up it was only a thirty-minute hike into the ravine, mostly downhill, but beneath the furnace blast of a mid-afternoon sun they were soon soaked in sweat. The idea of falling off a windsurfer into the clear, cool sea no longer seemed so unappealing.

Nikos led them along the bed of a dried-up stream, flanked on either side by steep, rock-strewn banks. The ground was parched, fissured, and their feet were coated with dust. Shiv paused to swig from the bottle of water Nikos passed round, shuttering her eyes against the bleached glare of the hillside.

“It’s like the moon up here,” Declan said.

To Shiv the land was biblical, a desert wilderness where a bush might burst into flames at any moment.

“We’re almost there,” Nikos said.

“Where?”

He smiled at her. “The place where we’re going.”

As he took the bottle back and raised it to his mouth, the sun caught the hairs on his forearm, making them glisten. Shiv watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed the water. Watched his moist lips as he lowered the bottle and replaced the cap. She longed to kiss him again. More than she’d ever wanted anything.

But how could she, with her brother right there?

“Lizard!” Dec said, pointing.

The creature was as big as a squirrel, sandy-grey tinged with yellow, basking on a boulder. Studying them with its swivelly eyes. Raised on its forelegs, the lizard looked as though they’d interrupted it in the middle of a set of push-ups.

“Stellion,” Nikos said. “It means ‘star’ – see the patterns down its back.” Then, after a pause, “Very nice in a kebab.”

“You
eat
lizard?” Shiv said.

“Mmm, much tastier than baby turtle.”

At which point Nikos let slip a smile and Shiv whacked him on the shoulder for making fun of her. If Declan noticed the intimacy of the gesture he gave no sign, too preoccupied with the lizard. When the creature tilted its head on one side, Dec did the same; when it raised one foot, as though waving, her brother waved back.

“I think he likes me.” But when Declan turned back the lizard had gone, with not even the parting flick of a tail to suggest it had ever been there.

“Come on.” Nikos gestured up ahead. “Let’s get moving before we burn up.”

Not that it was apparent how they might escape the sun; as far as she could see, the dry terrain shimmered with heat haze. They rounded an outcrop of rock a little further along, where their route left the dried-up stream and forked sharply downhill.

Instantly, the three of them plunged into the coolest, sweetest shade. Not only that, the landscape was transformed into an oasis of green – a long stripe of lush grass and overgrown trees where a cleft split the hillside like a rip in the flesh of a ripe fig.

“Wow!” Shiv said.

Nikos turned to smile. “Beautiful, isn’t it? I call this my Shangri-La.”

They paused, standing on grass as vivid as an English lawn. “How come it’s so
green
?” Shiv asked.

“There’s water underground. In the rock.”

“An aquifer,” Declan said.

“Yes.”
Nikos looked impressed. “Just here, the aquifer is close to the surface.”

Nikos’s Shangri-La was no more than a hundred metres long and ten or so wide, following the course of a V-shaped channel overhung with the trailing branches of the willow-like trees that grew there. He led them further along to a point where the water surfaced, briefly, forming a miniature waterfall over a waist-high shelf of rock.

“It’s magical,” Shiv said.

“Actually, it is. Even when there has been no rain on the island for months and everywhere is like dust, the water, the trees, the grass – they are still here.”

They sat on the grass beside the small pool which fed the waterfall. Nikos removed his sandals and dangled his bare feet in the water, letting out an exaggerated sigh of bliss. Shiv and Dec dangled their feet too. The pool was only shin-deep but shockingly, deliciously cold. Shiv closed her eyes, let a smile spread across her lips.

“Now,” Nikos said, “we lie back and watch the sky. The sky is the other reason I brought you to this place.”

Nikos lay on his back, feet still in the pool. Shiv and Declan did the same. In a gap between the branches overhead, a swathe of cloudless sky hung blue and perfect. The three of them became still. All Shiv could hear was the miniature waterfall; all she could feel was the cool grass beneath her and the chill of her feet in the pool.

“Keep looking,” Nikos told them. “She will come if we are patient.”

“Who will?” Dec asked. But Nikos shushed him.

At last, a bird appeared, tracking left to right – not flying but gliding, a long, slow arc, its wings outstretched, head dipped. Dark, greyish-brown with a lighter head, throat and belly. It was close enough to the ground for Shiv to make out black markings around the eyes and a rich cinnamon-red tinge on the breast. The largest bird she’d ever seen.

“What is it?” she whispered.

But Nikos shushed her again, as though anxious that her words might scare the bird away. It
did
disappear momentarily, then wheeled back into view – higher than before, spiralling down from one thermal to the next. For several minutes, the creature circled above, diamond-shaped tail stark against the blue, putting on a majestic display as though just for the three of them. It let out a shrill, wavering cry that resounded off the hillsides.

Shiv watched, bewitched, almost forgetting to breathe.

Only once the huge bird had gone did she dare to speak again. “That was…”

“Too much for words?” Nikos said.

“Yeah.” Shiv smiled to herself.

After a moment’s silence, Nikos asked, “You know this bird?”

“I do,” Declan said. His voice came from a little way off, surprising her. She eased up onto her elbows to locate him – perched up a tree, in the crook of two branches. Shiv hadn’t heard him move from the grass beside her, so engrossed was she by the circling bird. Dec was dropping twigs one after another into the pool and watching them drift over the waterfall. “Vulture,” he said.

Shiv laughed. “Yeah, right. Like you know anyth—”

“Quite a rare vulture, actually,” Nikos said. “A lammergeyer.”

Shiv looked at him, incredulous. “But vultures are…”

“Are what?” Nikos had sat up and was smiling at her.

“I don’t know. Horrible. Ugly.”

“Why horrible?”

“Because they just
are
– because they eat dead things.”

“And you don’t?” His tone was gentle, teasing but not nasty.

“OK, yeah, but—”

“And ‘ugly’?” He gestured at the sky, as though the vulture was still there, performing its entrancing aerial display. “You thought she was
ugly
?”

Shiv fell quiet. Then, after a moment, “No. No, she was … beautiful.”

A ballad was playing on the radio as they drove down from the mountain. The female singer’s tone was sweetly melancholic, the voice of a broken heart.

“What’s she saying?” Shiv asked.

Nikos raised the volume. “It’s about a girl whose boy has gone for ever.” He listened some more. “She’s saying,
The hole alongside me in our bed is the … grave you dug to bury my heart… Tell me, please, do I fall
– no, ‘climb’ –
should I climb in the grave or live all my days with a hole in my breast where my heart was?
”

Her brother, beside her, failed to stifle a giggle.

“Shut
up
,” Shiv said, jabbing him with her elbow.

Over the next lines of the song, Declan half sang, half said, “My breasts, my poor heartless breasts that once were twin moons orbiting the planet of your love.”

“Declan.”

“And these eyes, without your face to gaze upon … I shall pluck them from their sockets and feed them to the dogs of grief who howl for your return.”

Dec could barely sing for laughing. Nikos was laughing too, running with her brother’s riff. “My hair, shiny as silk with your fingers’ touch will turn to … to…”

“Rope,” Declan said.

“For me to hang myself…”

“From the gibbet of my despair.”

“Piss
off
,” Shiv said. “
Both
of you. This is a lovely song and you’ve totally ruined it.” But she was laughing along with them. “Was that even true?” she asked Nikos. “Those lines you translated before Dec joined in?”

Nikos shrugged. “I’ve no idea. She’s singing in Albanian.”

7

“I sculpted your head in Make today,” she tells Declan. “Started to, anyway. Some kind of modelling clay – dead easy to work with. They gave us these plastic scalpels but you could do most of it with your fingers.” She pulls a face. “Smelly, though – catch a whiff of that.” She raises her hands to the picture on her bedroom wall. “And that’s
after
I had a shower.”

Dec just goes on standing there, his expression unchanged, offering an apple to the goat in the olive grove behind the villa.

“I haven’t started on your face yet,” she goes on. “Well, I
did
. Spent ages on your nose then gave up and just squished it back in.” She presses her thumb against his nose in the photo. “You have a very
difficult
nose, Declan Richard Faverdale.”

Shiv has taken to doing this lately – chatting to the night-time projections of her brother. Telling him all about her day. Letting him know how she’s getting on. With her voice kept low so as not to disturb Caron and Helen in the rooms either side, Shiv’s monologues remind her of the whispery conversations she and Declan had in the dark when they were still small enough to share a bedroom.