Page 68 of Things We Never Said
Snapshot #21
35mm format, colour. A cluster of white buildings with curved roofs clings to a barren, rocky outcrop, rising from a ripple-free sea of blue. Tourists are massed in the narrow streets and many are holding cameras. A blue-and-white Greek flag flutters in the breeze and the entire scene is bathed in orangey evening light.
Sean smiles at the photo. He remembers the iodine odour of the salty evening air.Could Catherine have had an affair in Greece?he wonders. No, of course not. They had been together twenty-four hours a day. And they had been happy, too, hadn’t they?
It had been their second holiday in two years, with Maggie and Ian this time, and they had felt sun-soaked and relaxed, and blessed.
April had been dropped off in Margate with Catherine’s mother. Catherine had been terrified that two weeks in Margate would turn her into a hooligan, but the only noticeable change on her return had been a sudden, determined predilection for oven chips and Coke. Some things, it seemed, never changed.
Santorini had been amazing, though. The light of the place – that was the thing. The light and the stunning blue of the sea and the sky everywhere you looked. The beauty of the island had literally taken Sean’s breath away on a number of occasions.
After Santorini they had gone on to Mykonos, and that had been a mistake. For whereas Santorini, in the early nineties, still felt uniquely Greek – even Middle Eastern and undeveloped in places (donkeys were still considered a means of transport back then) – Mykonos felt more like Cannes. The streets were lined with luxury shops selling ridiculous fashions from Jean-Paul Gaultier and Dolce & Gabbana, and the bars had been serving not retsina to traditional bouzouki music, but expensive cocktails to a background of techno. And then Maggie and Ian had unexpectedly split up, and the whole thing had gone tits up.
Still, the sex had been good. That’s one thing Sean will never forget. For once Maggie and Ian had gone their tearful separate ways, and Sean and Catherine had the whole place to themselves, Catherine had become quite rampant. Sean had never known anything like it. Perhaps Catherine had been worried that Sean would run off with someone else, too?
Cassette #21
Hello darling.
I’m not sure how well I’m going to manage this today. I’ve been throwing up all morning, and even though they’ve now given me an anti-emetic, I still feel pretty dodgy. We’ll see.
Today, we’re off to the Greek islands.
It had been your idea to go, and I’ll admit it, I wasn’t keen. I don’t know why that’s the case, really, except to say that I had always thought that Greece was a bit third-worldy and, though in ways it was – do you remember all those poor donkeys there were everywhere?– I loved it. It blew my mind, really.
Paris had been amazing and I believed that it would be a tough act to follow. In fact, I even campaigned for a return trip to Paris instead of Greece. But Maggie wanted to go somewhere hot and Ian wanted to practise his Greek and you wanted to swim, so I caved in.
Where Paris was like a prettier, chicer version of London, stunning but somehow familiar, Santorini was a completely different experience, a sharp, gorgeous shock to the senses, like landing on a different planet, really.
It smelt different – that was the first thing I noticed when we stepped off the ferry. It smelt hot and dusty, like one imagines the desert might smell. And the sea, just everywhere, that blue ... God, I fell in love instantly.
On the third day you rented a moped so that we could explore, and we whizzed off around the island. There was hardly any traffic back then, just other tourists on mopeds and the occasional truck or donkey. A girl from work went there a couple of summers ago and what she described sounds very different. It sounds like it’s become like Mykonos, really, so God only knows what Mykonos is like these days.
Anyway, the moped thing was amazing, definitely the best bit. I felt so carefree and young bombing around those dusty roads with my arms around your waist. I’m pretty sure we wore shorts, didn’t we? How irresponsible were we?
Maggie and Ian stayed behind because Ian insisted that mopeds were too dangerous. I thought, at the time, that they’d stayed behind in order to have the place to themselves, that they wanted to have their holiday fun-time, but, knowing what we know now, I suppose that’s unlikely.
At lunchtime we followed a sign that said ‘Restaurant’ and rode miles and miles down this terrifying gravelly track that I thought we’d never get back up again, and came, in the end, to a tiny restaurant on a deserted, scrappy beach. We were the only people there.
An old woman dressed in black – they were all dressed in black – came out to serve us. She had fish or feta, she said. That was it. So we ordered feta for our starter and fish for our main course, and I can still remember the exact taste of that feta. It was rich and creamy and tangy and it came drenched in olive oil from the woman’s own olive trees, and with bread that she had baked herself.
And then, just as we were finishing our feta first course, a little fishing boat came buzzing up to the beach. It was her husband with the day’s catch: the fish for our main course. It was the scariest, ugliest-looking fish I had ever seen, but she drowned it in more olive oil and threw it on the barbecue, and it was the best fish either of us had ever tasted.
After that, we got the Flying Dolphin to Mykonos and everything went pear-shaped. If we had gone there first, I think we would have thought that it was lovely, but after Santorini it felt like civilisation – it felt like the holiday was over.
Ian started vanishing almost immediately, and I kept on and on asking Maggie if they had fallen out, and she kept on and on insisting that, no, everything was fine, and Ian was just practising his Greek on the locals. Which, in a way, he was.
But even before the big secret was revealed, it put a bit of a downer on the holiday, because we all loved pretty, clever, Greek-speaking Ian and we all thought that he was finally ‘the one’ for Mags. Mags even mentioned marriage one night in Santorini when we were all alone and drunk.
Poor Mags. She fell to her knees when he told her what was going on. We’d gone out to eat, I think, so neither of us was there to witness any of it. She told me afterwards, when we got back; which is strange, because it’s as if I have the image of it in my mind’s eye. It’s as if I was there. It must just be because I’ve imagined the scene a hundred times: Ian telling her that he needed to explain something. And then telling her that he had met someone. And finally that this person he had met was called Dimitri.
‘I should have known,’ I remember Mags saying. ‘The sex was awful. Everything else was wonderful, but the sex was bloody awful.’
We let her stay in bed the next day, and then the day after that we rented a car and dragged her across the island with us to some beautiful beach you’d read about in theRough Guide.
They had sun loungers, and big suspended parasols, which looked like ships’ sails fluttering in the breeze. The waiters all wore matching white pareos.
Poor Mags, she walked off to the far side of the beach and sat on a rock staring out to sea all day, while you and I studied all the gay couples around us, scared and a little intrigued by the idea that we might spot Ian and Dimitri together.
