Send Me A Lover (28 page)

My eyes fasten onto a woman who looks vaguely familiar. Something about the jet-black lustrous hair, and her strikingly lovely body. Yes. The girl in the swimming pool who was floating on the red air mattress the day mam and I sat here. Her tan is bronze, and now she’s wearing a white Marilyn Monroe dress with a halter neck and glittery flip-flops. She’s laughing and talking, and smoking, clearly wasted, and just as she reaches out to accept a drink from one of the men, somebody, who I can’t see, pulls her into an embrace. For seconds she disappears from sight. But then she emerges again and I freeze. Her hands are knotted around Sean’s neck. While I take stock, my mind tries to work out what else this could possibly mean. But it seems to mean only one thing. They’re not dancing in time to the music, but rather, to their own music, slow and sensual, bodies fitted together, not even room for air. She rests her chin on his chest and gazes up into his face.

~ * * * ~

Georgios drives us to the airport.

I sit quietly in the back seat, staring across vast, parched hills, saying goodbye to Greece.

I don’t know if I’m ever going to see Georgios again. I listen to my mother and him talking, look at the back of his neck, the way the black hair burrows into it, his hand on the wheel that looks a little more healed now. There, in the gut, I know that Georgios is not the man for me. And it’s got nothing to do with the fact that he’s crazy about my ma.

I don’t know if they have made love. I suppose I don’t have the right to ask her, any more than she would, if it were I. And she’s certainly not letting on. My guess, though, from the way she languidly moves her gaze from his eyes to his mouth as he talks, and she no longer looks like something’s being held back, that it would be a thumbs-up.

When we reach the airport I recognize the Scottish rep who greeted us at the start of the holiday, and a couple who arrived with us, standing in a long line outside. The other rep told us this morning that Zante airport is too small to accommodate the packaged mob, therefore we have to get there about four hours early. It seemed to make sense to everybody else, but not to me. Nonetheless, I feel impervious to the strains of Zante airport as though somebody’s just slathered me in a special not-give-a-damn cream. Estee Lauder could package it and make a small fortune. I’m just too busy thinking Thank God I’m going home. Home to Vancouver.

Despite the reps trying to be organised, the line-up outside the airport has got total chaos written all over it. Georgios stops the car a good distance away, so we can say out good-byes in peace. He turns to look at me in the back seat.

‘I have a small problem Angelina that I would like to take your advice on,’ he says. His eyes have a twinkle in them.

‘I think I’ve heard this song before.’ I wag a finger at him, instantly cheered by something in our exchange, experiencing a fresh flush of fondness for him. I think of our night out in that restaurant, and can honestly say that it could have been one of the nicest evenings of my life.

‘The thing is, I’ve been asking Vivien to extend her holiday, to stay one more week with me—but she doesn’t think she can do that. She wants to go back with you, to spend time with you before you go back to Canada.’

I can’t read my mother’s face, or guess what it is I’m supposed to say. So I just say the truth. ‘Mam, I fly back to Vancouver the day after tomorrow. I don’t need you to be with me for one day.’

She looks stressed because she’s being called upon to make a decision.

‘Stay,’ I tell her.

‘Stay,’ Georgios says.

She looks even more flustered now. ‘But I have my ticket… I have my luggage all packed! Angela, I should go back like I’m supposed to go back.’ She turns to Georgios now. ‘We’re only going to find ourselves in this position in a week’s time and it won’t be easier, only harder.’

I can’t read her. Doesn’t she want to be with him?

‘But, Vivien, we’ll have had a week together. That has to be better than just a day, no?’

Vivien looks caught between a rock and a hard place. Then he turns to her and takes both her hands in his. ‘Stay, Vivien. I ask you one more time.’

She stands on her tiptoes and sensually reaches her arms behind his neck. When she looks over her shoulder to smile at me, I feel like I shouldn’t be watching.

‘One more week,’ she says. ‘I’ll stay.’ And Georgios lifts her ever so slightly off her feet, and she gives a giddy chuckle.

I start backing away.

‘Wait, Angelina,’ he says, and lets my mother go. I see him just as I did that day in the grocery store. There’s something interesting about his face. You wouldn’t call him handsome. Not in the classical sense. The face is a bit too long, the eyebrows too heavy and dark, the C-brackets at either side of his mouth too deep, like the furrows in his brow. And he looks like he needs a good shave. Yet there’s something in that face. There is something about him that holds me.

‘I almost forgot that I have something for you.’

He ducks into the trunk of the car and then he pulls out a small brown paper bag and hands it to me.

I take it off him, puzzled.

Inside the bag is the little book I bought.

I bring a hand to my mouth, holding his eyes though a softening focus of disbelief, a pain welling in my head.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I have a friend who works for the ferry. I ask her to go look on the seat near ferry and she find it…’ He smiles at me. ‘I had her bring it to me.’

Georgios has saved me again. I’m too welled up to speak. So I just nod my head, a nod that, hopefully, says everything.

Vancouver is like a vibrant colour wheel exploding before my eyes. As the airport bus rolls down Granville Street, past the boulevards of expensive residential Shaughnessy with their canopies of trees, the inky blue-green of the North Shore mountains punches out against a cloudless, duck egg sky. The ocean twinkles a light steel blue, fringed, in part, by the dense, healthy green valance of Stanley Park. Late-blooming firey pink rhododendrons show off behind the walls of stately gardens. I live in probably the most beautiful city in the world.

My mobile rings just as we pull up to a red light.

‘Hey! Where are you?’

Hearing Sherrie’s voice, I instantly drop anchor again, and smile. ‘What d’you mean where am I? I’m here, aren’t I? I’m home.’

‘Where’s here?’

‘Vancouver of course! I’m on the airport bus at Granville and twentieth street. Why, where are you?’

‘At the airport! I came to get you. You’re on a bus on Granville Street? I’ve stood watching three flights come through the doors, and I asked all these Chinese people if they’d got off the flight from England, and then a stewardess told me the UK flight went through an age ago…’

‘Oh God! You’re at the airport?’ I swell with affection for my good friend. ‘You came to meet me? I don’t even remember telling you which day I was flying back.’

‘You didn’t. I rang Richard. When I got here the board said your flight had landed so I went to get a latte figuring you’d be at least half an hour.’

‘My bag was the first one out. I zipped through in minutes.’

‘Shit! Damn that latte… Richard was going to come meet you anyway, but I told him I wanted to.’

‘You were fighting over me? Argh. I’m really touched!’ Joking aside, I genuinely am. Now it doesn’t seem to matter so much that there was nobody there to meet me when I walked out of those double doors, pushing my luggage trolley, searching, stupidly for Jonathan’s face; force of habit. Sherrie was there. She was just buying a latte. And if she hadn’t been there, Richard would have.

‘Did you buy me one too?’

‘What?’

‘A latte.’

‘Kiss my ass.’

‘But you brought me flowers, right?’

‘Kiss it twice.’

I smile. The bus is jerking along South Granville, stopping and starting with the familiar clog of traffic. The sharp, black façade of a high-end deli has its flower stall spilling summer colours all over the pavement.

‘So what are you doing now?’ I ask her.

‘Paying my parking ticket and getting my car. Without my damned passenger.’

I titter. ‘Sorry!’

‘Yeah well. That’s the last time I’m gonna try surprising you.’

‘Well come over for a drink if you’d like. I’ve nothing in but we could always order something.’

I hear her grunting and then she screams at a driver. ‘Old people,’ she says. ‘They should only be let out after dark… What? Oh, I think I’ll pass. I have a date tonight, girl.’ I hear her blare on her horn. ‘Stop straddling the line, you octogenarian! …A second date as it happens. Look, can I just catch you later? I’m getting frustrated talking and driving. Do you mind?’

‘I’m heartbroken you’d pick a date over me.’

‘No you’re not,’ she chuckles. ‘Cow.’

‘Moo.’

I’m ready to hang up and she says, ‘Oh, by the way Ange, I’m glad to have my friend back.’

‘Which friend?’ I tease. ‘Oh, you mean me?’

~ * * * ~

Back.

I really am.

The same Vancouver streets I’ve walked many times before. Fashionable Robson Street, with its laid-back, West Coast, California-Rodeo-Drive feel, picturesquely hemmed in by mountains and ocean; where everybody, especially the young and cute, goes to shop. I drag my suitcase on its little wheels, cutting a path through people, as though I’m the only one walking against the flow, soaking Vancouver back into my system. How quickly you forget a holiday. If it weren’t for my tanned feet I’m not sure I’d know I’d been away.

Coming into my apartment, I’m hit with the reek of bad recycled air. Sunlight bleaches in the wall-to-wall windows, paling-out my rather dismal navy blue Ikea loveseat. There’s a layer of dust on my parquet floors that I could write my name in. The kitchen is barren except for a somewhat stinky tea-towel, a tea plate with crumbs on it—evidence of my last Melba toast supper—and a knife with some rancid butter on it.

I push open a window (one of those boot-box-sized ones that you can’t possibly top yourself from; your cat could barely top itself if it got a strong case of apartment-cat blues). A warm breeze wafts in, bringing with it rising street sounds—cars, screaming kids, the chilling crash of glass as the restaurant
on the corner dumps its waste into a commercial recycle bin.

I open my fridge for some milk to make tea and find a bag of purplish pulp that may have once been an aubergine, cohabiting with half a can of green fuzz-covered tomatoes. Of course, no milk.

I pick up my phone but don’t have any messages. I don’t bother checking Email because I will have a lot of those, but ninety-percent will be junk. My pay cheque from work is in the handful of mail I’ve brought upstairs, reminding me that I have a job. But the good thing is I’m not due back for another two weeks.

Normally, the first thing I’d do after getting back from a trip home would be to call Mam and tell her I got back safely. But she’s not there, where she always is, at the end of the phone, waiting for my call; she’s in Greece, with a man, having a romance.

‘I hope you’re having fun, Mam.’ I say the words out loud, thinking the old post-visit-to-England thoughts: what if that’s the last time I ever see her? What if I heard she was ill, and there was a ten-hour flight between my getting to her? Now on top of this, I’m wondering if she thinks we had a good holiday. I’m regretting that we had to fight so much. It still all feels screwed up: us living at opposite ends of the earth. There’s this damned eight-hour time change. I am never the first person to wish my mother Happy New Year. When I ring her on her birthday, the day is almost over for her.

Fight it, Angela. Fight it. Don’t let homesickness get to you. Your mother is happy.

~ * * * ~

I spend the next couple of days just getting organised. Filling the fridge. Doing laundry. Answering emails, returning phone calls. Getting rid of dust.

‘You didn’t returned my call,’ Richard says to me, when I return his call.