Chapter 20
TWENTY
The House of the Rising Sun is full.
He responds to my text with a selfie. He is lying on his perfectly made bed with his ankles crossed and his shoes on. I can only see him from the knees down.
Sorry ’bout that. Sucks.
Is that all you can say?
I’m just typing that he’s an asshole – though it’s starting to feel like old news – when my phone rings.
‘I thought it would be easier just to talk rather than engage in one of our mammoth text sessions.’
He sounds very chilled out. How I intend to be, in my next life. ‘What do you have to say?’ I ask.
‘Is that “Moira” for hi, it’s great to hear from you again?’
I touch my hot, sweaty neck. ‘Frank, I’m sorry, I’m not in the best of moods right now. I’ve got an accommodation problem. For some mysterious reason there are no hotel rooms on Expedia tonight unless I move miles out.’
‘You’ve got a lot of problems, admittedly, but a room for the night isn’t one of them,’ he says, brightly. ‘You can stay here.’ Then he adds, ‘Not here. In my room. There is no way I would condone that. But… in my hotel.’
‘Lovely. But I can’t afford a five-star palace, thank you.’ The downside to taking on an Airbnb for three months, and leaving a well-paid job, is that I’m already practically bankrupting us.
‘Not asking you to pay,’ he says.
I am quick to say, ‘That’s kind, but I can’t be a charity case.’
‘It’s not charity when it’s family.’ There’s a smile in his voice. ‘I mean, when you think about it, we’re practically related, aren’t we? Relatives who actually have sex with one another. The best kind.’
‘Ew! That is so disgusting! I can’t believe you’ve just said that.’
‘It’s one night,’ he says, after a moment or two. ‘And it’ll save a lot of hassle with us getting to the airport tomorrow. Please let me do that for you.’
It’s true that it would save a lot of hassle to be staying in the Plaka. ‘Well… Okay. That’s very kind of you.’ I tell him I will accept.
‘Excellent.’ The smile is back in his voice again.
‘Oh, and one more thing,’ I say, before we hang up. ‘If you’re going to put your feet on a lovely bed that’s not your own, you should at least take your shoes off.’
He just laughs at me.
My room has an amazing view of the Acropolis. All I can do is stand and gawk at how the majestic limestone rock, home to kings and mythical gods, stands serene and proud against the blue dome of the sky.
Does your room have the same view as mine?! I text him, still a bit overcome that he’s done this for me.
Should do, given it’s next door.
I blink. Next door?
I told the young receptionist that you’re a close friend. I guess she took close literally.
I experience an ungodly rush of panic at the thought of a door separating our two rooms. But there are such things as locks. So I simply say: Well, thank you again. I appreciate it.
He responds: Meet you downstairs in 10 so we can go find an early dinner or something?
I type : Sounds like a plan.
He is standing by the main entrance, checking his phone. He has changed into a pair of loose beige trousers, and a white T-shirt, with a light jacket looped over his shoulder. I am assailed by a memory. My nipples against the soft hair of his chest. Him moving slowly in and out of me in breathless strokes. Him saying, God, you’re so hot, saying it so instinctively that he might have just been thinking aloud. Me not remembering the last time anyone called me that. But something about the power of suggestion just let me go with it, let me find that confidence in myself. I perform a slow exhale.
As I approach, he looks up, and I feel myself flush from the crown of my head to the tips of my toes. ‘Nice…’ he says, giving my turquoise dress with the white daisy print, and trench coat, the once-over. ‘Beautiful, in fact.’
Next, he ushers me so that I go first through the revolving door. Then he slides right in behind me, into the same tiny, confined space, so we’re like standing spoons. I give the door a firm push, then we perform an awkward two-step shuffle in time with the moving glass. Despite me trying to ensure that no part of our anatomies ever makes contact again, we bump and graze in a routine that wouldn’t be out of place in Dirty Dancing .
‘You’re wearing that perfume again.’ His breath is like a little draught near my ear.
At the first crack of an opening, I bust out onto the pavement.
‘So, you’re the one who’s been to Athens before, Moira Fitzgerald. What are you burning to revisit?’
The question blows dust off an unpleasant memory. ‘None of it, thanks. Not big on revisiting the past. I prefer new experiences.’ I pluck my sunglasses off my head and put them on, still a bit shaken from that moving door. ‘Let’s just walk and see where we end up.’
‘A fine idea.’ He falls in stride. ‘And something we have in common. I’m not big on revisiting the past either.’
We wander for what feels like a long time through a changing stage of the day, through a maze of narrow lava-rock streets, each one ending with either a café, an ouzeria , a spice shop, or a gyros shop with various fragrant meats twirling on rotisserie spits. We turn corners, slipping from sun to shade. Food smells. People smells. Drain smells. Flowers from a nearby vendor’s stand. Cats hunch on steps, some napping, while others watch the world go by, their skeletal frames perched on the branches of cypress trees. A tired-looking mother feeds her kittens, and we stand and watch.
‘What happened last time you came to Athens?’ he asks. ‘You kind of have to tell me now.’
I try on a smile. ‘How about I ask you one instead. Have you travelled anywhere in Europe?’
‘I never leave my actual house, remember.’
‘Ah yes. Your monument to your vast success on the sand. I forgot that.’ I’m warm, so I take off my trench and loop it over my shoulder like he’s doing.
‘I have been to Europe,’ he says. ‘Once. On a book tour. Well, twice if you count the time my dad took me to Paris while he was conducting his affair.’
‘Affair?’
‘Yup. I was fourteen. It was supposed to be a guys’ trip of the cultural enrichment kind, but he’d parked his mistress in a hotel around the corner from ours and was gone all night and eighty per cent of the day.’
‘He just left you on your own, and went off with a woman?’ I scope out his face to see if he’s being serious.
‘Yup! He flew her in especially for the occasion. I followed him one night. I recognised her from the flight out; a stunning, flamboyantly dressed Jamaican girl. And coincidentally she was on the return flight, too.’
‘You’re kidding!’
‘If only.’
I stare at our footsteps landing in sync on the ancient cobblestones. My white plimsolls and his well-polished tan loafers. ‘I have a story I could tell you about unsettling discoveries on aeroplanes, but it’s best I don’t.’
‘I already like your story better than mine.’
‘I don’t think either of them are very good.’ My brows pull together, that horrible, horrible memory circling and trying to land. ‘So, what did you do with all that time to yourself in Paris?’ I ask.
‘Lay on my big bed in my very expensive hotel room, ordered beer, and watched porn.’ He smiles, ruefully. ‘That’s what I mean about only having been to Europe once. It was hard to count that first trip.’
I tell him that, while I doubt my father ever did anything as extreme as that – mainly because we didn’t have the money for him to be hauling girlfriends to exotic destinations – I was pretty sure he wasn’t faithful. That my mother chose to just crack on with it, maybe in semi-denial; I will never know. I still remember some of her eye-rolling expressions when he’d practically fallen off a restaurant chair while gawking at another woman’s legs. Boys will be boys. A cat can look at a canary… The arguments, the content of which usually consisted of lines I had to read between. Everything muffled, angry ellipses, things that went unsaid because I was there, a young teenager, listening, absorbing, the reluctant witness; the curse of the only child.
I’m telling him all this when a moped suddenly appears out of nowhere. Frank swiftly pulls me into him. It’s jarring at first, because I actually feel the draught of my near-death experience. So maybe that explains why I stay like this for a little longer than is necessary, huddled into the warm space between his arm and his chest, into the soft and firm lines of him.
‘Let’s not talk about bad parents and just try, ourselves, to be better ones,’ he says. He releases me but my body retains a disarming muscle memory. I make a note that I must try to get nearly knocked over by a moped again. Ideally in the near future.
‘What else shall we talk about then?’ I say, buoyantly.
‘I don’t know.’ He frisks me with his gaze. ‘But I don’t want to talk about me any more.’
‘Well, I don’t want to talk about me, so what does that leave?’ I spot a basket of lemons outside of a small grocery shop; ginormous, gnarly, deformed things and I pick one up. ‘Look at these…’
He picks one up too. ‘They look like they could rob graves and feed off corpses.’ He runs his thumb over the pockmarked skin, and I’m reminded of his thumb on my stomach, trailing just north of my panty line until it disappeared inside. Then he holds the lemon out for me to smell, and I realise I almost need something to resuscitate me. I push his hand away with a firm, ‘No thanks.’ Then I try to chirp, ‘But what about the second time you visited France? The book tour?’
He puts the fruit back in the basket, with a little snort of amusement. ‘Done talking about me, remember!’
‘Please. Come on.’
He sighs. ‘Eight countries and seventeen cities in nine days. It was mad. Exhausting. Not to be repeated. And, as it turns out – haha! – it wasn’t!’
‘You didn’t want to stay on anywhere for a day or two? Catch your breath?’ Since he saved me from death by moped, we are walking a little closer, our arms more than occasionally making contact – but it feels tame compared to an invitation to sniff a lemon, so I am okay with it.
‘It wasn’t really an option. I had a wife and fourteen-month-old back home and I’d already been away from them for too long. I could hardly go jack off and travel like I didn’t have a care in the world.’
‘It sounds a bit unromantic. Couldn’t they have come with you?’
‘It wasn’t meant to be romantic. It was work.’
Before I can say, I didn’t mean it that way, he says, ‘People never think writers work. The biggest misconception: they just sit around in their jammies watching daytime TV and waiting for inspiration to strike.’
‘And masturbate a lot.’
He sends me the side-eye. ‘Well, there’s some truth to that one.’
I chuckle. He tries not to. But then a great big smile appears anyway. I like the sight of it so much that I want to keep on making him do that. Until I think what’s wrong with me ? I’m a married woman in the middle of Athens with a strange man I had a one-night stand with – never to be repeated – and I want to make him smile? Am I for real? ‘Okay, so I’m picturing this book tour… You… Young, fit, not entirely horrible to look at…’
‘I was pretty horrible.’
‘I’ve seen worse.’
‘The compliment’s too gracious. I don’t think I can handle it.’
We turn onto a street that seems to have a disproportionate number of closed-down shops with graffiti all over their shutters, and a church whose steps look like they’ve become a dumping ground for the city’s rubbish – all ironically beautified by strings of fairy lights that form a twinkling canopy for us to walk under. An older lady dressed in black drags a rolling shopping bag past two guys strumming bouzoukis on a bench.
‘So there you are on your book tour… not entirely horrible-looking. You’ve written this amazing love story that’s broken hearts the world over. Destroyed my chances of ever meeting a boy who can live up to Ford…’
‘Of course. Let’s make everything all about you.’
‘You’re sitting at a table in a very big room and there’s a huge line-up of horny females, and they’re all clamouring for a flash of eye contact, a touch of the hand from the visiting American author god .’
‘Very few women manage to bring up horny and masturbating within five minutes while they walk the streets of Athens by the way. I salute you.’
‘Thank you! I’m just skilled, what can I say.’
He laughs hard and I feel like a puppy whose owner has just applauded him for taking his first pee outside. A couple of Greek girls are walking towards us. The observe us like we’re infectious and they want to catch some of what we have.
‘So what did you do – this young, not entirely horrible-looking, but married literary sensation – with all that panting, throbbing female sexual energy?’
‘Signed books. Smiled. Masturbated. Went home.’
I squawk a laugh. He is watching me like he’s taking great pleasure in this. ‘It was a serious question,’ I berate him.
‘It was a serious answer.’
We come to a stall that’s practically capsizing with sun hats, sandals and Aegean seaside souvenirs, and I pull a hat on, and pose for his approval. He shakes his head. ‘All I was trying to say, obviously badly,’ I return the hat to the stand, ‘was that it must have been an utterly mind-blowing experience for a young guy, that’s all.’
‘It was. But just so we’re clear, that was all that got blown. Minds.’
When the corners of my mouth slide up again, he says, ‘If we’re being serious, Miss Dirty Mind, it was surreal. Truly. To everyone else I was this famous writer. To me, I was still just this kid who had written a book?—’
‘And a movie.’
‘Yeah. The book always gets eclipsed by the movie, but the book came first, remember that!’ He says it proudly, like a father pushing his kid up the line so he doesn’t miss out on the free ice cream, and there’s a spark, a vivacity about him when he talks about his novel, that I haven’t seen before. ‘I felt like a giant imposter. I’d gotten the dream, but it felt like I was dreaming it.’ I can tell he’s a little in awe of his own story, and I find that surprisingly touching. We stop in sync again and look at one another. ‘I was the teenager who never put his hand up in class. The one who went through life thinking that because I rarely said anything, everyone must assume I had nothing to say. Then there I suddenly was, thrust into the limelight. I was no longer just a writer. I was the person behind a highly commercial piece of intellectual property. I had to step up and give people the Frank Lewis they needed me to be, and I didn’t know who the hell that guy was.’
‘But you don’t sound like you actually wanted what you got, though. You don’t sound like it made you happy.’
By the way he shuts down, I think he might not respond. Then he says, ‘I was grateful. I knew I was lucky. But the thing is…’ His expression darkens. ‘It was the best thing I could ever have imagined happening to me, and it was the worst thing that actually did happen to me.’
Hmm… Interesting. I’m dying to say how so? But something in his demeanour shuts this down, so I decide I’d better not.
We come to another standstill, and I realise this might be the slowest walk around Athens that two people have ever undertaken. But then we hear someone call to us. A young guy is sitting on the ground by an easel. His clothes are torn, and he’s missing part of his right leg. He asks if he can sketch our portrait. I instantly tell him, ‘No, no, no! We are not a couple.’ The guy narrows his eyes and says, ‘ Hmm… ’ as though he doesn’t believe me.
Fortunately, Frank tells him thanks, but sadly neither of us is carrying any euros. The guy very sweetly offers to do it for free. I make sure to haul Frank off by the sleeve, before he gets any ideas about agreeing to it.
‘You were saying,’ I prompt, as we move along. I’m dying to go back to this. ‘Why was it the worst thing that happened to you?’
I think he’s going to answer but then he says a slightly aloof, ‘Story for another day.’
We reach Monastiraki Flea Market, cut a path through the crowds. ‘I suspect all your stories are stories for another day, Frank.’
He doesn’t correct me. Instead, he says, ‘Drink?’