Chapter Ten
Her hand came away bright red.
For a moment she thought it was blood, and her heart gave an extra kick, but she soon saw that there was lettering daubed on the door. Reaching for her phone, she switched on the torch and at last made out the words, painted in jagged and ugly capital letters on their front door: SAVE THE TURTLES!!
Nina frowned and peered at the words, as though that would somehow change what she saw.
This must be a mistake. She and Theo were doing nothing to hurt any turtles.
A flash of anger roared through her; who would be so horrid as to graffiti their home?
They were just trying to do it up and peacefully live their lives without causing any harm to anyone.
Or any turtles for that matter. Was this some stupid joke that she didn’t understand?
She didn’t see the funny side, if it was.
As she scrambled to find her key and let herself in, she noticed the red stain on the back of her dress where she’d leaned against the door.
Great. Now her favourite dress was ruined too!
Nina was fuming. This had been a lovely night, she’d finally begun to forget her troubles and feel like herself again; even feel like the version of herself that she so longed to be.
And now someone had mindlessly attacked her home and, unwittingly, her dress.
The house was in darkness when she stumbled through the door, all of her previous good cheer gone, and she could hear Theo’s snoring rattling through the ceiling above. She guessed that he was blissfully unaware of the paint, and there was no point in waking him with such upsetting news.
Nina made herself a calming camomile tea and sat in the courtyard, trying to focus on the soothing view of the beach.
But the whine of a persistent mosquito that refused to be batted away set her on edge, and her mind was churning; who would want to do such a horrible thing?
Surely it was a mistake, there couldn’t be any reason for them to be accused of anything.
Unless Theo had some dark turtle-attacking past that she didn’t know about. Unlikely.
At last she gave up and went to her bed, tossing and turning.
When she eventually slept she dreamed that turtles were crawling all through the house, covering the floors, and she was stranded in her bed for fear of stepping on them.
Vassilis stood in the doorway, beckoning for her to come to him, but the floor teemed with the animals and she couldn’t reach him.
Then the turtles began to speak, opening their mouths in unison and chanting something that she couldn’t make out.
Nina jerked awake, sweating and trapped in the twisted sheets. As she opened her eyes the sea of turtles disappeared and so, sadly, did the smiling image of Vassilis. But the chanting remained.
Leaping from bed she flung open the shutters to find a small group of people standing in front of the house, holding ineptly put together placards and shouting something indecipherable.
Nina was not a morning person. Her mood at this time was never sunny. And this did nothing to improve it.
She dragged on a dressing gown and raced down the stairs, skidding across the newly polished wooden floor and flinging the door open. The chanting didn’t falter, and she could now make out the words:
‘TOURISTS AWAY, TURTLES STAY.’
On an endless, irritating and meaningless loop.
This made no sense at all, she and Theo weren’t even tourists, and they certainly weren’t hunting turtles.
She marched over to the motley group of protesters, an incongruous bunch of about eight people, two of whom were small children, one a babe in arms, and two elderly gentlemen who chatted together and didn’t seem to know why they were there.
The leader, if you could call him that, was a man in his mid-thirties with sandy, sun-bleached hair and glasses, who waved his placard (‘Tourists Away!’) and shouted his lines with gusto.
Even he faltered at the sight of a furious Nina bearing down on him, and the others followed suit, falling into an awkward silence.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ she demanded, grabbing his placard and throwing it to the ground.
‘I, well – hey!’ he said, pushing his glasses up his nose and running a hand through his hair. ‘There’s no need for that.’
‘There’s every need for that.’ Nina wanted to pull those stupid glasses from his face. ‘You’re trespassing. What the hell are you doing?’
‘Well,’ he said, straightening up and standing a little taller, his jaw setting into a stubborn line.
‘What the hell are you doing, more like, causing all that damage to wildlife.’ She caught an angry flash of startling blue from behind the glasses.
‘We – we have a say in that. You can’t just –’ His chest was heaving now, and she could see he felt passionately about his subject.
Well. So did Nina.
‘And did you do this too?’ She gestured to the painting on the door.
‘Destruction of property – I can have you arrested for that.’ She had no understanding of Kefalonian law, and whether either trespassing or destruction of property were a crime here, but that didn’t matter right now. She had the moral high ground.
He scoffed, rocking back on his heels and throwing his head back, which infuriated her even more. ‘Oh please, that’ll wash off with a bit of soapy water, it’s eco-friendly.’
‘Well, you still shouldn’t be putting it there, it’s all nonsense anyway, and you ruined my dress.’ She poked him in the chest, which was surprisingly firm under his Bob Dylan t-shirt. His expression changed from one of irritation to outright fury.
‘Dress? We’re trying to save the local wildlife, that have lived here longer than the village itself, by the way, and all you care about is a bloody dress? My god, now I get it, you’re so concerned about your clothes and bloody trinkets and whatnot, you don’t care about anything that actually –’
Nina felt a rise of actual hatred crest in her; how dare he say these things?
He didn’t know anything about her. ‘How dare you?’ she yelled.
‘You don’t know anything about me. Now bugger off my land, take yourself and your stupid band t-shirt away.
’ She pulled the dressing gown tighter around the oversized Fleetwood Mac t-shirt she wore to sleep in.
‘Hey,’ he cried, even more indignant now. ‘Don’t you start on Bob Dylan, the man’s a poet!’
‘Oh, shut up,’ she said. ‘Bugger off and don’t come back. All of you!’
She glared around at the group, only to find that they were already trickling away, dragging the makeshift placards behind them.
The leader followed her gaze and puffed out a sigh of irritation, running a hand through his hair, leaving it in haphazard spikes that, in other circumstances, Nina might have found endearing.
‘Right, well,’ he said. ‘Yes, we’ll – we’re going now. But you, you . . .’ He pointed a finger at her as though she was a naughty kid. Enraging. ‘You be warned. We – this isn’t over.’
‘Oh yes it is,’ she muttered as they both turned their back and stalked off in their opposite directions.
Nina was shocked to find Theo standing on the doorstep, watching everything as he sipped on a cup of steaming coffee. He raised a hand. ‘Bye, George.’
The protest leader turned and waved as he walked. ‘Bye, Mr Pappas.’
Nina was flabbergasted. ‘I – what? You know him? Well don’t wave to him, he – he graffitied our door and he woke me up with all that nonsense about tourists and he ruined my dress and he was very rude to me actually!
’ She could feel a hot flush of rage storm over her cheeks.
Theo’s chuckle in response did nothing to lighten her mood.
‘Well. He has been up to the mischief,’ he said, raising an eyebrow and attempting to hide his grin behind his coffee cup.
‘Just made one for yourself, did you?’ she asked crossly, barging past him into the house.
‘More in the pot.’ He followed her in.
Nina turned on him, hands on hips. ‘Why aren’t you more annoyed about this? They – they’re accusing us of all sorts of nonsense and they’re vandalising our house!’
He shrugged. ‘George is this kind of boy, gets worked up like this, but it all blows away again. Gale in a teapot.’
‘Storm in a teacup,’ she muttered as she stomped up the stairs to her bedroom.
It was only then that she caught sight of her reflection and realised she was sporting a massive birds’ nest of a bedhead.
Well. It didn’t matter what that bonehead of a protester thought of her anyway, did it, she thought as she dragged a brush through the tangles, an image of those eyes flashing through her mind.
She needed more than coffee to calm her, and she wanted to be away from the house.
Without telling Theo where she was going – she was still irritated by his lack of outrage about the protesters – she went to the café, almost tripping over Milo as she stood in a corner, quietly chewing the edge of a tablecloth.
A second cup of coffee, with the milk heated, just how she liked it, soon had her properly woken up as the caffeine zinged through her veins. Yiannis smiled as he refilled her cup. ‘Breakfast?’
‘Kagiana, please,’ she said.
He nodded, slipping her a small look. ‘No Theo this morning?’
‘No.’
Nina didn’t feel like elaborating and, not one to pry, Yiannis just nodded and went into the kitchen.
Unlike Theo himself, Nina thought, whose eyes would have lit up at the opportunity to find out some gossip.
He would probably have asked as many nosy questions as he could get away with and then come charging up the hill to the house, bursting to tell her all the juicy details he’d discovered.
He wasn’t malicious, but he was incorrigibly nosy.
She couldn’t help but smile as she pictured his round cheeks flushed and his eyes bright with excitement at whatever silly news he’d found out.