Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
We are leaving a bar that I finally settled on after deciding that half a dozen others were either too loud, too quiet, too young, too touristy, too restaurant-y… and him asking me if I’m always this hard to please. We have watched the sun set on the Acropolis – just because it happened to be there, not because we went looking for a romantic moment – the cool white of the city dissolving to indigo with flecks of gold. We are passing the ruins of Hadrian’s Library. A family of four pose for photos on its gently floodlit portico, which blasts me back to holidays past.
The three of us on outings to the seaside where Rupert and I would sit and quietly watch Harriet building sandcastles by the shore. Eating ice cream from glass bowls in the orangeries of stately homes. My life being measured in summers. Where will we go this year? What will we do? Then Christmas. Easter-egg hunts that Rupert was so great at putting together. Birthdays – we mostly celebrated Harriet’s, ours didn’t feel that important. Guideposts on the annual calendar manoeuvring me through life. An awareness of myself going with the flow of it all, but a dullness I was barely conscious of accompanying me at every step. Each passing year taking us closer to the time when Harriet would be grown up, married, and we wouldn’t be the three of us any more. I try to picture me and Rupert finding our way as a couple, rather than as a family. Us listening to the empty-nester plans of friends and having some cool ones of our own. The one we haven’t yet talked about. Because our world has always evolved around her. We made her so much a part of us that there really wasn’t an ‘us’ any more.
Two spindly silhouettes of cats walk single file on a wall. They are almost invisible except for the white flash of their synchronised paws. Athens has come alive now, but a different, more soulful life to the one before dark. Someone is playing the bouzouki off in the distance, a haunting melody I remotely recognise that makes me melancholic. Everything is loose and evolving. Frank picks a random direction, on the hunt for a nightcap. I don’t need another drink, but I’m good with walking for a bit. We end up following a moonlit alleyway, sparsely commercialised by day, but at night populated only by the occasional cat; like the street that Athens forgot.
‘Can I ask you a question about your book?’ I say. I don’t know why his beautiful love story comes to me now. When he doesn’t reply I say, ‘Yes, Moira, I think you can ask him a question about his book. Go right ahead, why don’t you.’
He slides his hands into his pockets. ‘How about we just forget I ever wrote that damned book?’
‘Why have you got a problem with talking about yourself and your talent?’ I am swaying a little, the world going a little skew-whiff, the jet lag and drinks catching up to me. ‘You’re quite a different sort of fellow, you know. Because you don’t seem to welcome the attention that most people thrive on. It’s almost intriguing in a way.’
‘Is this “Moira” for shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate?’
I laugh out loud – mainly just glad that I can. ‘Okay, that was funny.’
‘How about this place?’ He nods to a cute little taverna that has two tables outside, both occupied, but one couple looks like they’re about to leave.
‘Do we really need another drink? I partly think we don’t.’
‘I prefer the other part of you.’
There is something rascally in the way he says it, and I feel myself blush. ‘Let’s just walk a bit first. I’m not sure another drink is in my future.’
‘We can do that,’ he says. ‘If you’re set on being boring.’
‘Okay, so here’s the thing that bothers me about your book.’ I stop walking and hold up my hands like I’m clutching an imaginary crystal ball.
‘Which book, by the way? I have written four of them.’
I tut. ‘ Love for Lara . Obviously. Nobody’s heard of the others.’ I go back to clutching my crystal ball.
‘Because you know all these other people in the world, therefore you’d know what they all have – and haven’t – heard of. Right?’
‘Can we just go back to my question please?’ Off in the distance there’s a riff of what sounds like church music. Like a midnight mass.
‘Why are you doing that strange thing with your hands?’ he asks.
The moment he says it, I realise I’m doing a strange thing with my hands. ‘Look, when I’m leading up to saying something big, I just need to pontificate properly. Clearly, this is how I do it.’
He shakes his head at me. ‘Has anyone ever told you you’re the oddest person they know?’
‘Just you.’ I pat my heart. ‘But that’s what makes it’s so meaningful.’
We start walking again and I try not to do the thing with my hands. Or focus on the suddenly strange and unsettling realisation that I’m walking after dark – and a lot of alcohol – with an American in Athens with whom I’ve had sex, and a part of me has just imagined what it would be like to have sex with him again.
We have reached the end of the alleyway and now we’re back to Monastiraki Square; I recognise the Byzantine Church. There’s a lot going on all at once. Young people drinking, shouting, caterwauling, laughing. ‘The thing that bothers me about your book is that from the minute they meet, they seem to not really like one another. They’re always bickering. She’s always insulting him. I mean, frankly, she’s a bitch.’
He tilts his head back and stares at the sky. ‘The LA Lakers are playing the Memphis Grizzlies on Friday. I’m gonna miss it.’
‘The opening scene when she mocks his wardrobe by calling him Mr Tweedy? It’s like she’s decided he’s rich and privileged and she’s out to prick his little smug bubble, only this snarking goes on for the entire book. If you watch the movie – which you probably have, given you wrote it – you’ll find they hardly stop sparring until she’s hit by the car and then she’s dead.’
‘It’s the third game of the season and I missed the other two, as well. Oh well…’ He stops walking. The convoy of young people behind us part and pass around us, their laughter a buoyant wave that quickly recedes. He sends me the side-eye. ‘Did you really just say he had a smug bubble?’
The alcohol is making me feel unduly self-important. ‘Look, I’m only being this frank with you – Frank – because I know you don’t really give a damn what I think. If I thought I genuinely had the capacity to hurt you, you would see a much more reticent side of me right now, I promise.’
This makes him laugh – properly laugh. ‘Oh my God, that’s priceless.’
We face one another. And perhaps it’s the darkness, or the fact that there are no people around us suddenly. Or maybe it’s because the floodlit Acropolis has just made another God-like appearance, reminding me of the permanence of everything, and how we, and our imperfect pasts, and our even more imperfect presents, are almost insignificant up against all this history. But the moment, and the way he is looking at me, feels over-the-top intense.
‘He likes that about her,’ he says. ‘She doesn’t pander to him like other girls. It makes her interesting. Her insults remind him that he’s alive.’
‘But he’s just a kid. How can he have forgotten he’s alive?’ Before he can react, I say, ‘It was cute in the beginning. But at some point, she has to let her guard drop. She has to expose her vulnerability if they’re going to fall in love and be together in the end.’
He puts his hands in his trouser pockets, saunters off.
I trot after him. ‘I’m not trying to be insulting. I just wanted to say to them, look, this thing you have… You might think this happens to everyone but it’s rarer than you know. Cherish it, because one day it’ll probably fade, and you won’t get the feeling back once it’s gone. And you’ll spend years wondering why it had to change, and which one of you was the most responsible for giving up, and then eventually you’ll doubt it ever existed in the first place.’
My words almost blow me over. I take a wobbly breath.
‘Anyway, that’s… er… all I wanted to say.’
‘Wow,’ he says. ‘Some might argue it’s enough.’
‘What I mean is…’ I try to get a hold of myself. Stick to talking about his book. ‘If they bicker constantly until she’s dead, then how can we say it’s a love story?’
He turns his face away.
‘You’re about to tell me to F off,’ I say.
‘If I did, would you go?’
I find myself smiling. Don’t know why.
‘Let me ask you a question,’ he says. ‘Did you cry at the end?’
‘Are you serious? Of course! Horse tears for days! In fact…’ I press my fingertips to my lips. ‘I could cry right now just thinking about it.’
His gaze combs my face. ‘Then that, Moira Fitzgerald, is a love story.’
I frown. ‘But why does one human being have to be left with their heart irrevocably shattered before we can decide if what they had was the real deal?’
‘It doesn’t have to be, it just is. We have to be confronted with the magnitude of what has been lost.’
‘I don’t like that,’ I finally say. ‘If we’re not sat there feeling like we’ve lost something monumental what does that say about the choices we’ve made?’
He doesn’t answer. Every organ is on fire and pumping out of my sweat glands. ‘I like happy endings,’ I say. ‘This messed-up world needs happy endings. If we don’t have real life to hold us afloat, we should at least have fiction. People want to escape in a novel, otherwise why read it?’
‘Not always. Sometimes people read to feel understood.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I say. All I do know is that this conversation has hit a nerve I wasn’t aware existed.
We walk the next stretch without speaking. We pass through a maze of similar-looking alleys; closed store fronts, rubbish bins, cats, a moody streetlamp that brings alive some ancient edifice in the hilly distance. ‘I think my hotel is down here.’ I suddenly spot the tacky yellow awning, the resplendent tree, the ATM. The restaurant that was opening up earlier is now packed with high-spirited Greeks.
‘I thought we were going for a drink,’ he says.
‘I don’t feel like it any more.’
I sense him analysing the sudden but seismic shift in my mood. ‘Was it something I said?’
‘Nope. Just tired.’
He stands there like he’s giving me the opportunity to add something, but I keep walking, conscious that he’s not following.
I just have to put distance between me and that conversation.
‘Not very nice to just wander off and leave me all alone in the middle of Athens.’ He hollers after me. ‘Not very considerate of my safety.’
If I try to smile, my face will crack like cement, and I don’t want to have a permanently cracked face. ‘I think you’ll survive,’ I say. I remember my dad’s words. Smile, lass. It might never happen. But it already has.
‘If I don’t,’ he says, ‘it’s on you. Your conscience, for the rest of your life.’
I don’t turn around. I just keep my stiff upper lip and wiggle my fingers in a wave.