KATE
2013
Kate and Mark lay on their enormous white bed, the full moon silvering their bodies through the glass atrium some thirty feet above them. He was asleep, she wasn’t.
For the first time in over two months, he had wanted her. Perhaps it had been the stress at work that had kept him at bay.
He undressed her and laid her back on the pillows and performed what she had led him to believe were all the right moves, until she went through the motions of the orgasm she had not once ever experienced from another person.
He was a considerate lover, though. Only after she had duped him did he allow himself his own release. And then, as usual, he fell instantly asleep. Coming was better than Temazepam, he once said.
She wouldn’t know. Her post-coital mood was more one of lying on her back, touching her bones, turning some thoughts over, stopping others from penetrating her consciousness, until she relented and took a pill.
‘I’m not happy about Tilly going travelling,’ she found herself saying out loud.
‘Hmmm?’ Mark stirred.
‘I’m not happy about Tilly going away.’
Mark lifted his head, a slight frown crossing his face. ‘I thought we’d covered all that in the restaurant?’ He tried to conceal it, but she could hear a tetchiness in his voice.
Kate sighed, swung her legs out of bed and fetched a fresh cotton nightdress from her dressing room. Unlike Mark, who never wore pyjamas, she preferred not to sleep naked.
‘I know what your problem is,’ he said as she rejoined him.
For a second she wobbled. She lay next to him and drew the duvet over herself.
Did he?
Did he really?
She turned her head to look at him. He was such a beautiful man. Beautiful, but inscrutable.
‘I know it’s hard for you,’ he said, turning his face to her, catching her eye. ‘Your only child fleeing the nest.’
She’s not my only child
, Kate screamed in her head.
Mark had a policy of not referring to Martha any more. It was as if to him the name was nothing more than part of the title of the charity.
‘But Tilly’s a sensible girl,’ he went on. ‘And you’ve got to allow her to spread her wings.’
‘I know all that.’ Kate sighed. She couldn’t possibly explain what really lay behind her reluctance. Not to Mark, not any more. The time for that – if there ever had been one – had passed long ago. And anyway, the kernel of her objection to the travelling plan – especially the Greek bit – was so illogical that, even if he knew all the shocking facts of it, he would still be hard-pressed to understand it.
She didn’t have a leg to stand on.
‘Look. We’ll tell her that it’s not going to be all about lying on beaches and drinking retsina. She’s got to get to know the country as well, visit some ancient sites, get a sense of the history and culture.’
‘Oh, she’s already set on that. Didn’t you hear her in the restaurant?’
‘So what’s the problem? You could even nip out and visit her at some point, perhaps on an island. Get an authentic Greek experience. Bit of sun, sand and blue sea. Kick back your heels a little.’ He propped himself up on his elbow and looked at her. ‘Kate?’
Without realising it, she had curled up into a small ball.
‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Is it the thought of flying? You could have more hypnotism like you did for Africa.’
‘It’s not that. It’s nothing.’ She forced herself to breathe, her eyes tight shut against him.
‘For God’s sake, Kate. You’ve got to let her grow up some time.’
‘Yes.’ Her voice was tinier even than she felt.
‘And you’ve got to sort yourself out, too.’
Not this again. Kate wished she could stick her fingers in her ears.
‘Get out, get in touch with some friends,’ Mark went on. ‘Or you’re going to be awfully sad and alone when she’s gone. And that’s too much of a burden to place on Tilly’s shoulders.’
‘I know.’
‘And mine.’
‘Yes.’
He lay down, facing away from her.
‘Mark?’ she said, reaching out to touch him.
‘Look, love. I need to sleep. I’ve got to be in for a six a.m. conference call with Tokyo.’
‘Sorry.’
Eventually, his breathing became slow and even, and the tell-tale gentle snore started at the back of his throat. Kate watched the moon-etched shadows of the atrium edge across the sweep of white-carpeted bedroom floor, marking the passage of her sleepless night, and the thoughts she tried to keep at bay seeped in, until she was inundated.
EMMA
31 July 1980, 3 p.m. Athens. OTE office, Patission St.
I’ve been here for ages, waiting for the phone-office people to place a reverse charge call to my parents. The room is cavernous, brown with dust and stinky with stale sweat. It’s hot, hot, hot and I feel so weak I can hardly hold my pen.
My body still aches and I’m sweating into the cuts and grazes from when The French Shit pushed me up against that wall. Also, I now have about a million mosquito bites and a good few of them are sore and infected.
I’ve been here for half an hour already, holding a ticket with 347 on it. Every now and then, a board clicks to a new set of numbers, but they don’t seem to be in any sort of order. Mine hasn’t come up yet – unless I’ve missed it. Like everything else here, the system is chaotic. The fact that, even with English, French and a little German, I don’t even understand the basic roots of the language doesn’t help, nor that the alphabet is all over the place. Ps for Rs, indeed.
It was a LONG train ride to get here. Two days and two-and-a-bit nights in the corner of a crowded eight-seater compartment on the slowest train in the universe, which seemed to stop at every village on the way. Yugoslavia is one endless, big, dusty, hot country and, from the look of the people getting on and off the train, it’s extremely poor. With my bruises, bites and blisters and the way I’m feeling increasingly spaced-out, subtracted from the world around me, it was a surreal and uncomfortable ride.
At least I could read again. I’ve given up on Henry James, though. I don’t think I’ll ever return to
The Bostonians
– not just because it is a bit of a slog, but also because I’ll always associate it with The French Shit. So I read
The Tin Drum
(weird book) and then Thomas Mann. I’d rather read about death in Venice than tempt fate and run the risk of experiencing it with a visit. But it was disappointing. I know it’s supposed to be beautiful and about Dionysus and Apollo and all that, but I can’t view it as anything but the story of an old creep now.
That’s how I view the world now. A place full of old creeps.
Ugh.
I suppose one good thing is that, as I haven’t had periods now for two years, there’s no danger of me being pregnant. Can you imagine the horror?
Yesterday I stood in the corridor outside my compartment and hung my head out of the train window to watch Athens approach like a slate-grey cloud shimmering in the hazy plain. There’s a heatwave at the moment – it’s been the hottest July ever recorded, according to the guy at the desk in the Peta Inn, where I’m staying on the roof for about twenty-five pence a night.
The pollution here is frightening – you can literally see the yellowy haze as you walk along the pavement, and every street seems to be choked with cars, engines revving, horns blasting. I’ve been here just one night, and already my skin’s coated with a grimy layer of dust.
The upside of looking like a filthy old tramp is that with the dirt, the black shroud dress thing (which I’ve worn for days now) and my Sid Vicious hair, I’ve only had a few ‘tsk tsks’ from a couple of men. Most seem happy to ignore me and carry on drinking beer, flinging their worry beads around and staring at passers-by.
But, horrors, I thought I saw The French Shit today. A man walking ahead of me could have been him. He, too, suddenly stopped, turned and walked back towards me. I felt a sharp shock, prickling pins and needles all over my face. My feet wanted to run away, my hands wanted to attack him, to claw the flesh from his face.
The violence I feel towards him shocks me.
But I was on a crowded street and nothing happened. And anyway, of course, it wasn’t him. I’m thousands of miles away from him. All this man wanted was to go into the
kafeneion
I had just passed.
I’ve got to pull myself together. I can’t let him get the better of me like this.
It doesn’t feel like Europe here. It’s more like how I imagine Asia might be. The men seem to be more polite, less like they think they can do whatever they like with you. And today I saw a ferocious old woman telling off a group of noisy young men. Looks like they’re kept in order here.
My bed is a grey-stained mattress on the top of a metal bunk bed crammed with ten others out on the roof of the hostel. If I wanted, I could reach out and hold the hand of the boy sleeping in the bunk next to mine (I don’t want, though). He’s called Mick, and he’s an acid-casualty Australian of about twenty-five, whose beard and hair cover his entire face. But he’s quite nice. I don’t think he’s a threat. Even so, because it’s a mixed dorm, I keep my Swiss Army knife open and ready under my day bag, which I use as a pillow.
I was tempted to up the nightly fee to fifty pence and take a bed in a room downstairs (which would still be mixed), but the guy at the desk – Dimitri – said it was better on the roof – cooler and more airy. And it never rains, he says. I can believe that. Everything is parched here, and filthy. Piss just dries to stinky stains on the pavement. Dog turds look like they might crumble.
And it
is
cooler up here at night. But as soon as the sun is up – which is about six in the morning – you start sweating; by seven it’s impossible to stay in your sleeping bag any more. And there’s nowhere to go to cool down, or even to get any air.
Shit. So, after two hours, my call got placed. But there was no bloody answer. My parents were out. Where the fuck did they go? They never go out.
I need to talk to them. Not to tell them – just to hear their voices.
Don’t they know that?
Emma James: all alone in a big, scary world.
KATE
2013
‘Hiya,’ Tilly said, coming up behind Kate, who was hovering on the threshold of Martha’s bedroom, deciding what she was going to say.
With her own space too full of her own mess – jumbled piles of clean and dirty clothes, used cotton-wool balls, bathwater-crinkled magazines – Tilly had been using her sister’s bed to sort out her packing for her fast-encroaching trip. Despite her more sensible conscious mind telling her not to be so stupid, Kate couldn’t bat away the gut reaction that this was a desecration of her dead daughter’s room.
But it was something of a consolation to see that Tilly had adopted her own method of packing: laying all one might need neatly on a bed, then gradually editing. Although Kate rarely went abroad – a fear of flying meant that the African field trip for Martha’s Wish was the only time she had done so in decades – she always used the technique to pack for Mark’s business trips. Had she any women friends, she would have hesitated to admit it in front of them, but she took enormous pleasure in getting his beautiful shirts pressed into tissue for travel, making sure his Italian leather washbag was well-stocked, ensuring he had the right number of clean socks and underwear, with an extra pair of each just for luck.
That, and looking after the house and the family were the least she could do, given the second stab at life he had unwittingly granted her.
Even so, irritation at Tilly thrummed inside her, curdling the non-fat yoghurt that had been her lunch. Seeing her dead daughter’s space taken over like that – even by her living offspring – hit her in the stomach like a woodcutter’s axe. Particularly because, laid out on the bed like some photograph of a soldier’s kit in an army recruitment booklet, were the tools Tilly was amassing for what – again, despite her rational self – Kate couldn’t help seeing as her defection.
Tilly would know all this, of course, so when she came up behind her mother in the doorway, she tried to win her round with a remorselessly bouncing enthusiasm.
‘Look,’ she said, steering Kate into the room that recently, on separate occasions, both she and Mark had respectively accused her of preserving in aspic and amber.
Kate’s shoulders stiffened. There had always been an unspoken rule that nothing must be touched here, that the books that Martha had alphabetised in their shelves would remain untouched except for their quarterly dusting, that the drawers would retain their neatly folded and arranged contents, that the pink sheepskin throw would remain smoothed down on the bed where she died under home hospice care.
It had been eight years now, and of course Kate had found a place for her loss, had housed it so that she could carry on living. But still sometimes, like a deeply lodged piece of shrapnel shifting and tearing flesh, the unbearable fact of it would come back to visit her.
Kate saw the preservation of this room as a sticking plaster for those moments. It proved to her that her youngest daughter had existed, that she had been a force in this world.
Little Martha had been the tidy one; the one who took after Kate in that respect – although Kate had never been entirely sure which of her own personality traits were inherent and which she had adopted as a means of survival.
‘It’s not as if we need the space,’ she had once argued to Mark when he broached the subject of, as he put it, ‘repurposing’ Martha’s bedroom.
‘It could be a yoga room for you,’ he said.
‘But I’ve got the mezzanine. And it’s on the girls’ floor.’
‘Well, a living room, then, for Tills.’
‘I don’t want her living in a different room to us.’
He had looked exasperated. But he would never win.
So, as Kate surveyed the piles of going-away gear on the bed, she wondered if Tilly’s rule-flouting might even be a tactic, agreed between father and daughter. Some sort of cod-therapeutic strategy to force her past what they saw as her tardy inability to surrender the room to the present.
But Kate thought she had done very well, considering, what with the charity and everything. Wasn’t she entitled to this one indulgence, this shrine to her daughter?
Tilly brushed brightly past her and threw her a slim, olive-green package from the bed. ‘One point five kilos,’ she said. ‘Fast and easy to pitch, with exceptional wind-resistance should I get caught up in the Meltemi or the Mistral.’
Meltemi
.
Mistral
.
Kate turned the tiny tent over in her hand, marvelling despite herself at its lightness. ‘You’ve thought of everything.’
‘And look at this.’ Tilly tossed over what Kate took to be a pouched-up cagoule. ‘Ultra-compact sleeping bag.’
Kate gave it a squeeze. ‘Very nice. Tents and sleeping bags used to take up half a rucksack.’
‘Like you’d know,’ Tilly snorted, rolling her eyes.
‘What does that mean?’
‘You “didn’t have the luxury” of going off backpacking, did you?’
Kate looked at her daughter, who had just – knowingly, perhaps – tested the limit of her sense of humour. She didn’t know how to react. Should she upbraid her privileged daughter for mocking her unlucky upbringing story where her parents were taken in a car crash when she was seventeen, leaving her to fend for herself?
But, seeing Tilly stand there, looking as if she wished she could unsay what she had just let out, Kate didn’t have the heart.
And could she
really
tell her daughter off for poking fun at something she thought was true but which, in fact, was a dog-old lie?
No.
‘What’s this?’ Kate said instead, picking up a packet of pills from the bed. The writing was too small for her to read without her glasses.
Pills and Greece. The idea – or memory, rather – gave her a dun feeling in the pit of her stomach. This whole bloody business was stirring up sediment she thought she had packed down many years ago.
‘Water purifier tablets,’ Tilly said.
‘Will you need them in Greece?’ Kate asked. ‘Surely they have mains water everywhere now?’
‘I’m planning on straying off the beaten track, though.’
Kate tried to stem the image this added to those already swirling inside her. ‘Not too far, though, I hope,’ she said, smiling thinly. She put the tablets down and picked up a Swiss Army penknife, feeling its familiar weight in her hand.
‘I had one of these, once.’
‘That’s for the corkscrew, only, of course,’ Tilly said. ‘But there’s also a screwdriver, and the blade will be useful for cutting up tomatoes and stuff.’
‘While you stroll along some deserted mountain path, off the beaten track.’
‘That’ll be me.’ Tilly smiled and took Kate’s hand. ‘I’m going to find the real Greece that most travellers don’t ever get to see. An authentic way of life that’s disappearing in Europe.’
Kate put the penknife back with the other gear on Martha’s bed. She looked at her daughter – so clear, so determined, so sensible compared to how she herself had been.
She shook her head and smiled. ‘Just take care, Tills, won’t you?’
Tilly leaped forward and hugged her so forcefully that she nearly knocked her over.
‘I knew you’d come round, Mum!’
Kate rested her head on her daughter’s shoulder and closed her eyes, breathing in her scent of clean washing, and apple shampoo, and all things good.
Of course Tilly would be fine. It was absurd to think otherwise.