Chapter 23 Dark Night
Priya left on the Wednesday ferry with her rolling suitcase and her notebook and four separate voice memos she'd recorded on the harbour steps because the light was "objectively criminal" and she had a feature to file from Chios.
"I'll be back Friday," she said. "Two days. Don't do anything."
"I wasn't going to do anything," I said.
"I know," she said. "That's what I'm worried about."
The ferry pulled away. I stood on the dock and watched it until it was small and then smaller and then just a shape against the Aegean, which was the particular shade of blue it only went in late August, dark and heavy and extraordinarily self-satisfied about it.
I went to work.
* * *
Service was fine. There were German architects at lunch who were very interested in the provenance of the olive oil.
I invented the provenance with confidence and, it transpired, considerable accuracy.
Dinner was mostly regulars. Barba-Nikos came at seven-thirty for the fish special and left without looking at me, which at some point in the last eleven weeks I had stopped reading as an insult and started reading as the particular Barba-Nikos form of acknowledgement.
Lex was in the kitchen. He came out twice to correct a table number I'd missed on the tickets. Operational. Professionally correct.
I thought about the list of things I hadn't said to him. It was getting quite long.
* * *
It was Theria who found me after service, when I was folding napkins at the empty service station because I'd run out of other tasks to perform and needed something to do with my hands.
"I keep meaning to tell you something," she said. She was untying her apron. "The timing has never been right."
"The umbrella," I said.
She looked at me. "Priya told you."
"She told me you told him. She didn't tell me what he said."
Theria folded her apron with the efficiency of someone who had been folding aprons since she was old enough to reach the counter.
She put it on the shelf. She looked at me in the way she had, which was very direct and slightly unnerving, like being assessed by someone who had already reached a conclusion and was waiting for you to catch up.
"I told him," she said. "In the second week of August. I'd been waiting for a moment that wasn't the middle of service."
"And?"
"He started to say something." She paused. "He didn't say it."
I kept folding the napkin. I was, I noticed, folding the same napkin I'd already folded.
"Why?" I said. "Why didn't he say something?"
Theria picked up her bag from the hook by the back door.
"You would have to ask him that," she said.
She left through the courtyard gate, and I stood at the service station with a napkin that had been folded four times and would never be square again, and the kitchen was going quiet behind me, and outside the harbour was doing its late-August thing with the lights.
* * *
I didn't go to the kitchen.
I went home.
* * *
On Friday the harbour music started at nine. I sat on the steps. He didn't come. The musician played the song about the summer with the unhurried confidence of a person who knows the song will still be there when he gets to the end. I went home.
* * *
Derek was at the kitchen table when I got back, reading a mystery novel with a tortoiseshell cat on the cover and a glass of warm milk that said everything about how seriously he took late-night excitement.
He was, I concluded, the right audience for what I was about to do.
"Derek," I said, sitting down across from him.
He didn't respond. His head drooped slightly to one side. His book was still open but his eyes were closed, and had been closed, I suspected, for some time. The warm milk was barely touched.
"Derek," I said again, slightly louder.
Nothing.
I looked at him. I looked at the kitchen.
I looked at the olive oil on the counter that he bought from the Tuesday market and the small cactus in the window that he'd named Gerald and the calendar with the pictures of Cheltenham that he kept for reasons he'd never explained, even though he'd been on Kaliroi for twenty-three years.
"Right," I said, to Derek, who was asleep.
I put my elbows on the table.
"The thing is," I said, "I've made a bit of a mess of it.
Not an irreversible mess. But a mess. And I think — I think the reason I've made a mess of it is that I kept waiting for the right moment, and the right moment kept not being quite right, and at some point I have to acknowledge that the right moment is not going to arrive fully formed with a label on it, because that's not how moments work, and I know that, I've always known that, and I have still been waiting for it because it was less frightening than the alternative. "
Derek breathed. Slowly and peacefully.
"He's — he doesn't say very much," I said.
"You'd think that would make it easier. It doesn't make it easier.
It just means that when he does say something you end up storing it somewhere and referring back to it repeatedly and that's — that's a lot of data to be carrying around about a person you've been insisting is just a colleague. "
I paused.
"The cat," I said. "I named the cat after him.
I named a stray cat who lives near the dock after a man I'd been telling Priya was professionally adequate.
Which is — I'm aware of how that sounds.
Priya pointed it out. I think Theria also knows and is choosing to be kind about it, which is very generous of her given that The Aegean Overlord spends most of his time sitting on the ouzo bottles. "
Derek's book slid slightly. I caught it before it fell.
"I heard a phone call," I said. "I heard my name and problem and not staying and I ran the — I applied the wrong model.
I knew Greenpath had changed the way I process incomplete information but I didn't know it had changed it quite that much.
I heard forty words of Greek and three of them were near me and I built an entire conclusion and then I operated out of that conclusion for sixteen days without asking him anything, and that — that's not actually about him.
That's about me. That's about a thing I need to stop doing. "
I was quiet for a moment.
"He looked like he was going to say something," I said.
"When Theria told him about the umbrella.
That I'd been trying to apologise. He looked like he was going to say something and then didn't." I considered this.
"I don't know what he was going to say. I can't know what he was going to say.
I've been sitting with that for three days and trying to extrapolate from available data and the available data is insufficient and the answer is not more data, the answer is to ask. "
Derek breathed.
"I'm going to ask him," I said.
I said it out loud, to the kitchen, to Derek, to Gerald the cactus in the window.
"Not tonight," I said. "Tonight I — actually no. That's exactly the thing I keep doing." I stopped. "Tomorrow. Before service. That's decided."
I stood up. I tucked Derek's book under his hand so he'd find it when he woke. I put his milk glass in the sink.
"Thank you," I said. "That was very helpful."
Derek slept on, entirely unaware that he had just been the most useful person on the island.
* * *
I got up very early.
The island was still — that particular pre-dawn still of late August, when the air is warm even before the sun arrives and the water is flat and the harbour is empty except for the fishing boats and Michalis's ferry, still moored and dark and going nowhere until seven.
I walked to the headland.
I'd been meaning to walk to the headland for weeks. Everyone said you could see Chios on a clear morning, and every morning I'd been at the taverna or the supply brief or the dock wall or Derek's kitchen table, and the headland kept not being the right moment.
I walked up through the village, past the kafeneion — shut, dark, a single chair upended on a table — and up the path that switched back through the scrub, and at the top the sun was just beginning to come, the sea enormous and pewter-pink, and there, yes, in the distance, the long low shadow of Chios.
The ferry would arrive at half seven. I could see the water where it would come from.
My grandmother had sent a postcard to my mother on holiday. A place to be found when you're ready. I had found the ferry and the wrong bag and the better coffee and the herb names and the carbon copy pads and the cat who lived near the dock.
The sun came up a little more. The sea went from pewter-pink to something that didn't have a name in English.
I took out my phone. I stood at the headland in the early light of late August and I wrote to Priya:
Come back when you can. I think I need to do something.
I pressed send.
I watched the stretch of water where the ferry would come from.