Chapter 42
CARRIE
Carrie didn’t know for how long, but she sobbed in Drago’s arms, sobbed like the little girl she was inside who missed her mummy, and who’d secretly wanted grandparents like those of her friends, who’d take her to funfairs and buy her chocolate.
Finally she drew away and sat down on the sand, took off her shoes and let the tide lap her toes.
‘Sorry about that.’ She gulped, a welcome sea breeze drying her face and bringing her back to the present moment – she was here with the man who’d stolen Poseidon. Yet a man she’d got to know a little more in the restaurant, who didn’t seem blind to his own flaws.
Drago sat down quietly next to her and simply threw pebbles into the water. Perhaps he’d also had a mum who’d taught him the importance of listening.
‘I met my grandmother tonight. For the first time.’
His eyes widened but he still said nothing, nodding encouragingly.
‘She and my grandfather threw my mum out when she got pregnant as a teenager.’
A pebble slipped out of his fingers. ‘What? Oh, Carrie.’
She told him about putting her life up for sale, about Eliza. She didn’t know Drago that well, but somehow that made talking about it easier. It spilled out, everything Eliza had said about what it had been like, married to Howard.
‘But whatever he was like, that’s no excuse,’ she spat out.
Drago picked up a piece of driftwood and drew circles in the sand. ‘No. It’s not. But… I understand her predicament – to a degree.’
Carrie turned her head. ‘You aren’t serious? I’d never let go of a child of mine. It was hard enough giving up my cat, Boo, to come here.’
Drago threw the stick aside. ‘I never thought Dimitrios and I would fall out. We were like brothers until we started high school. He knew about my first crush and which were my favourite play-acting games. Once we snuck into the kitchen and ate the bottoms off all Mum’s freshly home-baked muffins.
We almost got away with it until we were sick. ’
‘How did the fallout happen, then?’
He went to speak but then stopped. ‘Not making it about me, by the way, only sharing because it might help.’ He batted his arm against hers.
The more she got to know Drago, the less he appeared to be a villain.
‘I joined a gang led by a boy called Helios.’
Carrie recalled that Dimitrios had mentioned him, and had said he was a real jerk.
‘I felt… how do you say… rudderless without Dimitrios, as if I had no direction.’
‘I felt like that after Mum died.’
Drago flushed. ‘I’m not comparing falling out with a friend to losing a parent.’
‘I know,’ she said quietly. ‘But he was your everything back then, right? Like Mum was mine.’
He nodded. ‘Helios pressurised me. Told me the gang would give me protection against the bully boys in the higher years. I’d already had a few comments about my surname.
Helios said I’d get picked on for being “too Bulgarian”.
It was scary, that first year of high school with no friends, and I didn’t want to stand out as different.
Helios had moved up from his primary school with the same group.
So I joined them. Things were okay for the first year.
The second even. We had fun. Dimitrios made his own friends, like I had.
But then things changed when the gang started drinking and smoking.
Shoplifting too. I didn’t like any of it.
But Helios said I owed him. He said I’d be nothing without him and the others.
He said I’d been pathetic before he’d taken me under his wing. ’
As Carrie listened, Helios reminded her of the way Eliza said Carrie’s gaslighting grandfather had been.
‘He… he beat me up once, when I refused to shoplift cigarettes.’ Drago threw a stone into the tide.
‘I’ve never told anyone this before but when that happened…
I wet myself. He and the others couldn’t stop laughing, never let me forget it – threatened to tell everyone if I didn’t do what they said; called me a baby.
That’s when I hardened up and put on an act – fooled them and everyone else into believing I was one of the tough guys. ’
‘That must have been awful.’
‘It was but… I didn’t feel I had a choice – not about any of it. There seemed to be no way out.’
Carrie stared at the sea. Sentiments that, again, had come out of Eliza’s mouth.
‘I was so glad when his dad got a job elsewhere and Helios moved away when he was sixteen. Turned out, the other boys were glad to see him go too. I managed to catch up with my upper secondary studies. Helios had always told me wanting to work with animals was for girls. I regret letting my Biology studies suffer. Dimitrios and I weren’t on talking terms by the time Helios left, hadn’t been for ages.
To belong to the gang, I used to trash-talk the studious, successful people we called nerds.
’ He shook his head. ‘Looking back, like your gran says, I can’t blame anyone, it was down to me how I reacted to Helios… but…’
‘Hindsight is a great thing?’ said Carrie.
‘Sure is.’
Carrie hugged her knees. Drago had put on an act in public. Eliza had back in the day, too, with an abusive husband. Both of them reminded her of ‘Carry Away’, the fake persona she’d created.
They sat in silence and an uncomfortable feeling washed over Carrie, but unlike the tide, it didn’t recede; it stayed with her, soaking into every pore.
‘I wish I could make it good, with Dimitrios,’ muttered Drago.
She picked up his stick and doodled in the sand. ‘There is something you can do. You know that.’
He raised his eyebrows.
‘Your screen saver. The furry tail. I know which cat it belongs to.’
He bit his lip.
‘We’ve all made mistakes, and it’s obvious you care about animals, but perhaps now’s the time to hand back Poseidon.’
‘The way I took Poseidon, and kept her – it shocked me that my behaviour had become so underhand. It made me take a long, hard look at myself but as time went on it felt too late to hand her back. I can’t blame Dimitrios for doing well at school.
Choices. We all have them. It’s about whether we are brave enough to make the right ones, and to admit when others we’ve made have been wrong. ’
Carrie digested every word.
Mum had said something similar once. She’d never let go of her resentment of Queenie, but she’d also taken personal responsibility for the pregnancy and the chaos that followed – even if Carrie’s father wasn’t going to.
She said that the facing up to consequences was important; that pity parties were usually solitary affairs and solved nothing – whereas ownership of the part you’d played, in a difficult situation, was empowering.
The two of them stood up and brushed sand off their clothes.
At the edge of the beach, she thanked Drago for listening and after a very British, awkward moment of indecision, hugged him, unaware that Dimitrios had been working late at The Bar; that he was looking out of its windows, in the direction of the sea at a young couple he recognised, embracing tightly.