Signs of a Struggle Read online

  “Of course I am worried too,” I said. I wasn’t really. Disappointed maybe. But worried? Not really. Not yet. What she’d told me hadn’t contradicted my notions of what Lucy-being-Lucy was like. What I did feel, in spite of my caution, was a half-suspended excitement for the romantic possibilities of time with Lucy. Also I was genuinely curious about the “great” story Lucy was onto, virtuously and professionally curious. Segue into pleasant day-dreams of Lucy and I, side by side, deep undercover, developing startling headlining copy, our heroic quest rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize and us in bed, with me on top of her, my nose in the fold of her neck, smelling her delicious warmth…

  Fuck, you need to get a grip! I told myself censoriously – hold back. Slow down. Lucy was beautiful, but she was complicated. I’d been so into her. I’d thought that weekend, maybe, we had a future together. And the outcome? - Like throwing my body onto a grenade. Get perspective - think two steps ahead.

  Irini, I decided, was just being her usual melodramatic self – wanting to be at the centre of someone else's drama. Making herself indispensable to others. Especially to Lucy. There was a pattern there. I had wondered on occasion whether my sister was actually in love with Lucy.

  But what if Lucy was really in trouble? With Lucy that was not improbable. I could see her locked up in a jail somewhere. Wouldn’t be the first time that had happened. She’d been locked up in Lagos for two weeks for covering the oil drilling in the delta and then bad-mouthing a Minister. She’d handled that. So, Lucy could handle this, whatever ‘this’ was. She didn’t need me to rescue her. She’d get out, get in touch with the Australian Ambassador, or at least get a lawyer.

  Maybe she’s just lost her Blackberry. She could be on a remote island without internet access.

  “You still there?” Irini’s voice brought me back.

  “Maybe she's lost her phone and can’t get online,” I offered.

  “This is 2005. There must be an internet cafe where she is surely,” my sister said.

  “Maybe not.”

  “Really?!”

  “Maybe she’s not bothered.”

  “Oh, come on, she’d know we would worry.”

  “You think so? She’s that considerate?” I said, remembering the way she’d ditched me. No note. No explanation.

  “Oh, Tom, don’t be so sorry for yourself!” Irini snapped.

  I sighed. She was probably right. “Have you tried to contact her family? Does she have family?” I said, in my problem-solving voice, almost surprised to find I didn’t know this, feeling I should have, considering I’d asked her to move in with me.

  “Lucy’s mother has Alzheimer’s and is in a home in Melbourne. She doesn’t have contact with her father. Her brother is a hippy somewhere in South America.”

  “Other relatives…? Friends…? Colleagues…?” I offered.

  “I don’t think so, Tom.” A hesitation. “And you know, Tom, she is very fond of you.”

  “Is she?” I said, hoping I sounded more hurt than hopeful.

  “You know she is. She’s just scared of getting in too deep. She’s been hurt before.”

  And me? I almost said, but I didn’t. Instead I said, “Is she working for anyone at the moment? Maybe they’ve had contact.” If she was, Irini didn’t know who they were. More likely to be freelancing. She’d told Irini that she was on a Greek island called Mythos. She’d texted Irini the address of the cottage she was renting. Sounded like she was working on the usual sort of stuff – environmentalist intrigue.

  I could feel the weight of self-doubt and inertia dragging me down. “Let’s wait,” I said. I got Irini to agree to us both trying to call Lucy the next day.

  But nothing. Neither of us could get hold of Lucy. Increasingly I was hearing that “I missed you” on a loop in my head. The sultriness of Lucy’s voice, the depth of that phrase, almost whispered. Took me straight back to that last weekend we’d had together, when I imagined being married to her… Christ, I’m not old enough to imagine being married to anybody – and haven’t since. Then she’d left on the Monday morning, without even saying goodbye… and I’d... fragmented, like a tearing out from inside. I don’t trust easily - the legacy of a child who has lost a parent at too young an age for it to be remotely normal. I am naturally circumspect. I hedge my bets. How did I lose that with her? Fuck, I was so… disappointed - in her... in myself! I felt so foolish, like I’d seriously over-reached myself and had been slapped down. It had taken me time to surface.

  Now Irini’s ‘damsel in distress’ scenario and Lucy's voice-over: “I miss you”.

  “Can’t you go out there?” Irini asked me finally. “See if she’s in trouble? I’d go, but it’s term time.” (My sister, for her sins, is a teacher at a Comp.)

  Maybe Lucy did need help. Maybe Irini wasn’t just placating me – maybe Lucy did care for me after all. Maybe she was just as cautious as me. Was this a second chance? Could this be destiny? Or was this just me wanting my life to turn out like True Romance?

  But what the fuck, I was between stories and I deserved a break after covering the Uzbekistani petro-chemical scandal, two weeks on a Greek island in late September was, I told Marsha, my boss, small reward for my relentless and ultimately productive enterprise. I don’t think it’s too much to claim that it was mainly down to the report I put out that the Uzbeki Minister of Energy had been arrested and was going down for a long time – so long, fuckhead! What I didn’t tell Marsha was that Lucy was in Greece and there may even be a story in it for us – probably because by then I was stuck on imagining surprising Lucy, swimming in warm turquoise water, eating grilled fish, drinking the local wine, and then, when the heat of the day cooled down, leading Lucy back home, peeling off her clothes and making gentle love to her. That didn’t sound like work.

  ****

  So, a big disappointment now, not finding Lucy at home. And now that I’m here and she’s evidently not been around for a while, I’m starting to worry that her not answering e-mails and phone messages is more than her being flighty and frightened of commitment. There is something unnerving about the stillness in her cottage and all her things left untidy, the foetid smell, as if she’d left in a hurry, or had intended to come back by now. Maybe something bad has happened to her, not just that she’s in a prison somewhere (although that is still the most likely).

  In spite of myself, I suddenly imagine her unconscious in a hospital bed – could she have had a motor-bike accident? – you hear of that all the time – fucking Greek truck drivers are infamously dangerous…! Oh, God, what if she is seriously injured, bones broken, her face cut and bruised? What... what... if she’s dead? What if she’s lying unclaimed in a morgue somewhere? Oh, God, no! Not that! No, it can’t be, I reassure myself by magical thinking- Lucy isn’t the type. She’s too young and robust and lively. It’s just Irini’s neurosis talking. Fuck you, Irini. It’s way too early to be thinking of all the possible calamities. I don’t want to be melodramatic like my sister. I am not melodramatic like my sister. I am the rational one. Lucy will probably be home later. But if she doesn’t turn up, should I at least contact the hospital, and the police, tomorrow? Or leave it another day? “Let’s not worry about what hasn’t happened yet,” I tell myself.

  The yellowing fronds of the tamarisk are moving gently in a faint breeze. Then the breeze dies and the fine-fibred fronds settle. The sea beyond is an impossible blue - a cerulean blue, shading to indigo where it gets deep. The smell of oregano from the aromatic grilled pork gets to me. A souvlaki, a chilled beer, and then my first slow luxurious swim in that beckoning water.

  I order a beer from Yianni, who barks the order at a young man, sitting, smoking on a bar stool. The young man – he’s about twenty, I guess - gets up slowly – he makes a show of not jumping to it – and pours my beer and brings it over. The beer is in a glass which has been frosted in a cabinet. I like that. He looks at me with enquiring amber eyes. He says nothing. He is very good looking, his strong features classically
Greek, Adonis-like, but shy. (I wonder if people here can tell that I have Greek blood - that I am part-Greek. I will find out in time.)

  Yiannis tells me, with a tone of quiet exasperation, that the waiter is his son, Dimitri, whom they call Bobby, for reasons he doesn’t explain. Their daughter, two years younger, is Katerina, or Kat, she demurs from working in the restaurant – she prefers to sit upstairs – he points at the overhanging balcony - painting her toe-nails and watching married people fight on television.

  “Know anything about the body in the bridge?” I ask Yianni. He bats his eyes modestly, like of course he knows. In his tortured tenses, he tells me that the body was found by construction workers demolishing the old bridge. The cops have had a look at it and called in archaeologists (“archaiologoi”) to advise on getting the body out. They will want it as intact as possible to try to identify it. It must have been there from when the bridge was built thirty-five years ago. “What they can find now?” he asks, shrugging, not once, but twice.

  Suddenly Yiannis is distracted by a young man who is cleaning the floor of the next-door restaurant and swilling dirty water onto Yianni's side. Yiannis cusses explosively and abruptly cuts short our conversation and strides angrily over to the young man, his arms hacking his disapprobation in the air. The young man puts up no argument. He picks up his bucket and mop and goes inside. “What’s the story with the restaurant next door?” I asked when the old man comes back to me, shaking his head and sighing loudly. “Why so close? Why right on top of you when he had the rest of the beach?”

  “You speak very good English,” Yiannis says without irony, “But me, I speak Greek. Ellinika. Se parakalo, you please speak more zlow. Z-low. Pio arga.” And then an indulgent smile. “Sigga-sigga. Later. Come tonight. Soulla she is make stuff-ed to-may-toes and peppers. Special. Very good. You and me, we drink Metaxa. I tell you what’s happen.”

  2

  I’ve not been to Greece before. Even though I’m half-Greek by blood. My father was Greek. Petros Xanakis (although he always called himself Peter). He was a lovely guy – a lover of jazz and lost causes, warm, funny, although, it seemed to me, somewhat disabled by his baldness - he had, I imagine, in his youth cherished an image of himself as an older man with a full head of hair. In photos from his student days in Athens, his sumptuous black mane is tied back in a ponytail. By his middle-age, which is how I remember him, my father was handsome but no longer beautiful. His baldness introduced a diffidence, a shyness in a garrulous man, a man with a full heart, a man prone to moods – I now recognise these as episodes of depression. His baldness was just a symptom of all he had lost.

  He left Greece in 1971 and came to London where he had friends, met my mother, who was Home Counties English, and cut his ties with the land of his birth. He never said why. Never spoke of it. Had me and Irini – and worked in some capacity at the TUC, the Trades Union Council, in Central London until he died when I was ten. A cerebral aneurysm, bursting in his brain. Other than our surname (and my middle name – Alexandros), I wouldn’t have known I was part Greek. We never went to Greek school, we didn’t have Greek friends or Greek family to visit and I’d never heard my father speak Greek. But I have some things in me which I know are not from my mother's family, ways of being and physical resemblances which are not exact copies. He never showed us any photographs of our Greek family. I sometimes caught him looking at me like he was seeing a familiarity. I think it must have saddened him, my phantom inheritance. Once he barbecued lamb, marinated in vinegar overnight and crusted in oregano, which he told us was a Greek delicacy. I remember the strange faraway look of pride and sadness he had as he ate the soft meat in silence.

  When he died, his family claimed his body and took him back to Athens to be buried. My mother had no say – it turned out they’d never legally married, even though his name was on my birth certificate and my mother had gone by the name Xanakis. His family made no attempt to contact us. My mother was bereft - she changed our names to Pickering – her name – as soon as she could. Then she went to pieces. I was left to look after her and my sister. I wasn’t very good at it. I was only ten.

  I loved my father. But I was so angry with him. For years. For dying, for leaving me to look after my mother and my sister - his wife and his daughter – that was his job! Angry for leaving me without a father. For never introducing me to his parents, my grandparents in Athens, to his family – my family. Like I was something to be ashamed of. For leaving me with no story to account for the absence from my life of anything Greek. I missed him like a phantom limb.

  I mused on this on the plane coming over, as I shuffled through the Greek phrasebook and scan-read the Brief History of Modern Greece I bought at the airport. What would I make of Greece? What would Greece make of me? Would I find an affinity, a familiarity, a recognition from dormant programmes hidden in my genes? Would I find my way back to loving my father?

  ****

  Lucy’s house is, I find, just one room with a bed, a set of drawers, a cupboard with doors that don’t meet, a table and two chairs, and against one wall, a single-plate cooker and sink. A shower-cum-toilet is tucked into an airless room without any space to turn. An afterthought. I suppose there used to be an out-house. Out the back, there is a table and two chairs under a pergola, which supports an old vine and tangled jasmine. The chairs look out over wild grass to a grove of ancient olives, and beyond that, the bruised mountains, their tops shrouded in bulbous clouds.

  I go back inside. I’m back from lunch. The place is a mess. Lucy’s stuff is everywhere. I’m looking for somewhere to put some of my things (is it presumptuous of me to unpack?), when I find Lucy’s laptop in the cupboard. A MacBook Pro. With a Greenpeace logo stuck on the lid. Nice bit of gear. Perhaps I could quickly find out where she is by discreetly checking her mail. Shit, I’d come all the way from London. I did have cause for concern. I wouldn’t normally snoop. Okay, sometimes. But it's legit - I’m an investigative journalist - it’s what I do! At least I can check if she’d received the e-mails I sent her. I want to know how worried to be. Maybe, if it's right there, I could also sneak a look at what she’s been working on. Just a quick peak.

  I find her charger under the sink, set it up and press POWER. The screen wakes up slowly, reluctantly it seems, offers me two spheres: Lucy and Guest. I click on Lucy. With a grumble, up pops a box for a password I don’t have. Okay, okay. What would it be? LD (Lucy’s initials) I try. Stutter, blink… no. ‘LD 2005’ I try. No. Shit, I don’t even know her date of birth. But she wouldn’t have used her date of birth. I consider which of my friends would know how to crack a password. Mmm. Fortunately, I don’t have any friends like that. Maybe someone in the office has a contact. We’ve used geeks before. Or I’ll have to message Irini – she may know, or at least have some ideas. I guess she’d be okay with me trying to open Lucy’s computer.

  Or maybe… maybe I should just be patient and wait for Lucy to show up. Patience is indubitably a virtue. Unfortunately, not one of mine. I want Lucy to be here now. I don’t want this feeling of foreboding lurking in my abdomen to swell and form into alarm. I want this to be a momentous coming together of two souls destined to be together. Blah blah blah… Fuck, so prosaic! Basically, I don’t want to be let down.

  I suppose I could google her on my laptop and see if it showed up who she was last working for. I should have done that already. I don’t know why I haven’t. Maybe the colleagues she used to work with have heard from her or know what she is up to. I need to get online. Who in this fishing village on a small island in Greece would have internet connection? Anyone? I’ll ask Yianni.

  I put her computer back in the cupboard. On a lower shelf, next to a jumble of tee-shirts, there is an unruly stack of cards and photos. I don’t expect Lucy would mind me having a gander. Not like they are very private - I mean, they are not locked away or anything. I take them over to the table. The postcard on top is from Agia Sofia, an elevated view of the harbour, with its pretty whitewashed ho
uses rising on a hill, open restaurants under bright blue awnings along the quayside. She hasn’t written on it yet. Who is it for, I wonder?

  The second is a photo of a younger looking Lucy, bundled up in fleece, a snowy setting and in the background, penguins. That must be Antarctica. I remember her telling me how, in her gap year, she’d paid her way to Cape Town (“the scenic route”, a thirty-seven-hour super-cheapo flight via Doha, Addis Ababa and Lusaka, or some such), and then, in Cape Town, she’d blagged a berth on a research ship to South Georgia as a galley-hand and companion to the First Mate, a fellow Aussie. “The skies were fantastic, and the penguins were so serious,” she’d said. “At our infant’s school in Canberra, the nuns had been given lessons in deportment by actual penguins, I swear to God. Our teacher, Sister Beatrice, would waddle down the corridor, stop, have a little poo, then waddle off again!” My credulity and horror had produced an explosion of glee. “Only jesting, you buttock!” she’d roared, “Come here! You’re so adorable!” she'd laughed and hugged me to her like I was a little kid. I didn’t mind being the sap when the reward was her affection. In the photo with the penguins, she is grinning madly, no doubt thinking of her portly teacher. “Just jesting!” I hear her chortle.

  The next photo in the pile is an abrupt contrast - an artfully framed photo of a bombed out building in front of which stands a war-ravaged Somalian or Eritrean child, its hollow eyes begging the photographer to stop. On the back is scrawled, “Happy birthday. Be grateful for what you've got. Wim. 2004.” That must be from the war photo-journalist she was with for a time. The photo must be one of his, the self-indulgent creep, I think, resenting that the prick actually knows when her birthday is! I put the photo to the bottom of the pile.