No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories Page 4

A little light came into the kitchen through a high back window. There was a two-ring gas cooker, a sink, and a drainer board with a drawer under the sink. I pulled open the drawer and felt about inside it. My nervous hand struck what was unmistakably a large box of matches, and—yes, the smooth heavy cylinder of a hand torch!

  And all the time I was aware that someone was or might be slumped on a settee just a few swift paces away through the door to the living room. With my hand still inside the drawer, I pressed the stud of the torch and was rewarded when a weak beam probed out to turn my fingers pink. Well, it wasn’t a powerful beam, but any sort of light had to be better than total darkness.

  Armed with the torch, which felt about as good as a weapon in my hand, I forced myself to move back into the living room and directed my beam at the settee. But oh, Jesus—all that sat there was a monstrous grey mushroom! It was a great fibrous mass, growing out of and welded with mycelium strands to the settee, and in its center an obscene yellow fruiting body. But for God’s sake, it had the shape and outline and look of an old woman, and it had Lily-Anne’s deflated chest and slumped shoulder!

  I don’t know how long I held onto the torch, how I kept from screaming out loud, why I simply didn’t fall unconscious. That’s the sort of shock I experienced. But I did none of these things. Instead, on nerveless legs, I backed away, backed right into an old wardrobe or Welsh dresser. At least, I backed into what had once been a piece of furniture. But now it was something else.

  Soft as sponge, the thing collapsed and sent me sprawling. Dust and (I imagined) dark red spores rose up everywhere, and I skidded on my back in shards of crumbling wood and matted webs of fiber. And lolling out of the darkness behind where the dresser had stood—bloating out like some loathsome puppet or dummy—a second fungoid figure leaned toward me. And this time it was a caricature of Ben!

  He lolled there, held up on four fiber legs, muzzle snarling soundlessly, for all the world tensed to spring—and all he was was a harmless fungous thing. And yet this time I did scream. Or I think I did, but the thunder came to drown me out.

  Then I was on my feet, and my feet were through the rotten floorboards, and I didn’t care except I had to get out of there, out of that choking, stinking, collapsing—

  I stumbled, crumbled my way into the tiny cloakroom, tripped and crashed into the clock where it stood in the corner. It was like a nightmare chain reaction that I’d started and couldn’t stop; the old grandfather just crumpled up on itself, its metal parts clanging together as the wood disintegrated around them. And all the furniture following suit, and the very wall paneling smoking into ruin where I fell against it.

  And there where that infected timber had been, there he stood—old Garth himself! He leaned half out of the wall like a great nodding manikin, his entire head a livid yellow blotch, his arm and hand making a noise like a huge puffball bursting underfoot where they separated from his side to point floppingly toward the open door. I needed no more urging.

  “God! Yes! I’m going!” I told him, as I plunged out into the storm…

  After that…nothing, not for some time. I came to in a hospital in Stokesley about noon the next day. Apparently I’d run out of road on the outskirts of some village or other, and they’d dragged me out of my car where it lay upside down in a ditch. I was banged up and so couldn’t do much talking, which is probably as well.

  But in the newspapers I read how what was left of Easingham had gone into the sea in the night. The churchyard, Haitian timber, terrible dry-rot fungus, the whole thing, sliding down into the sea and washed away forever on the tides.

  And yet now I sometimes think:

  Where did all that wood go that Garth had been selling for years? And what of all those spores I’d breathed and touched and rolled around in? And sometimes when I think things like that it makes me feel quite ill.

  I suppose I shall just have to wait and see…

  THE SUN, THE SEA, AND THE SILENT SCREAM

  This time of year, just as you’re recovering from Christmas, they’re wont to appear, all unsolicited, plop on your welcome mat. I had forgotten that fact, but yesterday I was reminded.

  Julie was up first, creating great smells of coffee and frying bacon. And me still in bed, drowsy, thinking how great it was to be nearly back to normal. Three months she’d been out of that place, and fit enough now to be first up, running about after me for a change.

  Her sweet voice called upstairs: “Post, darling!” And her slippers flip-flopping out into the porch. Then those long moments of silence—until it dawned on me what she was doing. I knew it instinctively, the way you do about someone you love. She was screaming—but silently. A scream that came drilling into all my bones to shiver into shards right there in the marrow. Me out of bed like a puppet on some madman’s strings, jerked downstairs so as to break my neck, while the silent scream went on and on.

  And Julie standing there with her head thrown back and her mouth agape, and the unending scream not coming out. Her eyes starting out with their pupils rolled down, staring at the thing in her white, shuddering hand—

  A travel brochure, of course…

  Julie had done Greece fairly extensively with her first husband. That had been five or six years ago, when they’d hoped and tried for kids a lot. No kids had come; she couldn’t have them; he’d gone off and found someone who could. No hard feelings. Maybe a few soft feelings.

  So when we first started going back to Greece, I’d suggested places they’d explored together. Maybe I was looking for far-away expressions on her face in the sunsets, or a stray tear when a familiar bousouki tune drifted out on aromatic taverna exhalations. Somebody had taken a piece of my heart, too, once upon a time; maybe I wanted to know how much of Julie was really mine. As it happened, all of her was.

  After we were married, we left the old trails behind and broke fresh ground. That is, we started to find new places to holiday. Twice yearly we’d pack a few things, head for the sunshine, the sea, and sometimes the sand. Sand wasn’t always a part of the package, not in Greece. Not the golden or pure white varieties, anyway. But pebbles, marble chips, great brown and black slabs of volcanic rock sloping into the sea—what odds? The sun was always the same, and the sea…

  The sea. Anyone who knows the Aegean, the Ionian, the Mediterranean in general, in between and around Turkey and Greece, knows what I mean when I describe those seas as indescribable. Blue, green, mother-of-pearl, turquoise in that narrow band where the sea meets the land: fantastic! Myself, I’ve always liked the colours under the sea the best. That’s the big bonus I get, or got, out of the islands: the swimming, the amazing submarine world just beyond the glass of my face mask, the spearfishing.

  And this time—last time, the very last time—we settled for Makelos. But don’t go looking for it on any maps. You won’t find it; much too small, and I’m assured that the British don’t go there any more. As a holiday venue, it’s been written off. I’d like to think I had something, everything, to do with that, which is why I’m writing this. But a warning: if you’re stuck on Greece anyway, and willing to take your chances come what may, read no further. I’d hate to spoil it all for you.

  So…what am I talking about? Political troubles, unfinished hotel apartments, polluted swimming pools? No, nothing like that. We didn’t take that sort of holiday, anyway. We were strictly ‘off-the-beaten-track’ types. Hence Makelos.

  We couldn’t fly there direct; the island was mainly a flat-topped mountain climbing right out of the water, with a dirt landing strip on the plateau suitable only for Skyvans. So it was a packed jet to Athens, a night on the town, and in the mid-morning a flying Greek matchbox the rest of the way. Less than an hour out of Athens and into the Cyclades, descending through a handful of cotton-wool clouds, that was our first sight of our destination.

  Less than three miles long, a mile wide—that was it. Makelos. There was a ‘town’, also called Makelos, at one end of the island where twin spurs formed something of a harbour;
and the rest of the place around the central plateau was rock and scrub and tiny bays, olive groves galore, almonds and some walnuts, prickly pears and a few lonely lemons. Oh, and lots of wildflowers, so that the air seemed scented.

  The year before, there’d been a few apartments available in Makelos town. But towns weren’t our scene. This time, however, the island had something new to offer: a lone taverna catering for just three detached, cabin-style apartments, or ‘villas’, all nestling in a valley two miles down the coast from Makelos town itself. Only one or two taxis on the entire island (the coastal road was little more than a track), no fast-food stands, and no packed shingle beaches where the tideless sea would be one-third sun oil and two-thirds tourist pee!

  We came down gentle as a feather, taxied up to a wind-blown shack that turned out to be the airport, deplaned and passed in front of the shack and out the back, and boarded our transport. There were other holiday makers; but we were too excited to pay them much attention; also a handful of dour-faced island Greeks—Makelosians, we guessed. Dour, yes. Maybe that should have told us something about their island.

  Our passports had been stamped over the Athens stamp with a local variety as we passed through the airport shack, and the official doing the job turned out to be our driver. A busy man, he also introduced himself as the mayor of Makelos! The traction end of our ‘transport’ was a three-wheeler: literally a converted tractor, hauling a four-wheeled trolley with bucket seats bolted to its sides. On the way down from the plateau, I remember thinking we’d never make it; Julie kept her eyes closed for most of the trip; I gave everyone aboard As for nerve. And the driver-mayor sang a doleful Greek number all the way down.

  The town was very old, with nowhere the whitewashed walls you become accustomed to in the islands. Instead, there was an air of desolation about the place. Throw in a few tumbleweeds, and you could shoot a Western there. But fishing boats bobbed in the harbour, leathery Greeks mended nets along the quayside; old men drank muddy coffee at wooden tables outside the tavernas, and bottles of Metaxa and ouzo were very much in evidence. Crumbling fortified walls of massive thickness proclaimed, however inarticulately, a one-time Crusader occupation.

  Once we‘d trundled to a halt in the town’s square, the rest of the passengers were home and dry; Julie and I still had a mile and a half to go. Our taxi driver (transfer charges both ways, six pounds sterling: I’d wondered why it was so cheap!) collected our luggage from the tractor’s trolley, stowed it away, waited for us while we dusted ourselves down and stretched our legs. Then we got into his ‘taxi’.

  I won’t impugn anyone’s reputation by remarking on the make of that old bus; come to think of it, I could possibly make someone’s name, for anywhere else in the world this beauty would have been off the road in the late sixties! Inside—it was a shrine, of course. The Greek sort, with good-luck charms, pictures of the saints, photos of Mum and Dad, and icon-like miniatures in silver frames, hanging and jangling everywhere. And even enough room for the driver to see through his windscreen.

  “Nichos,” he introduced himself, grave-faced, trying to loosen my arm in its socket with his handshake where he reached back from the driver’s seat. And to Julie, seated beside him up front: “Nick!” and he took her hand and bowed his head to kiss it. Fine, except we were already mobile and leaving the town, and holiday makers and villagers alike scattering like clucking hens in all directions in our heavy blue exhaust smoke.

  Nichos was maybe fifty, hard to tell: bright brown eyes, hair greying, upward-turned moustache, skin brown as old leather. His nicotine-stained teeth and ouzo breath were pretty standard. “A fine old car,” I opined, as he jarred us mercilessly on non-existent suspension down the patchy, pot-holed tarmacadam street.

  “Eh?” He raised an eyebrow.

  “The car,” I answered. “She goes, er, well!”

  “Very well, thank you. The car,” he apparently agreed.

  “Maybe he doesn’t speak it too well, darling.” Julie was straight-faced.

  “Speaks it,” Nichos agreed with a nod. Then, registering understanding: “Ah—speak it! I am speaking it, yes, and slowly. Very slooowly! Then is understanding. Good morning, good evening, welcome to my house—exactly! I am in Athens. Three years. Speaks it much, in Athens.”

  “Great!” I enthused, without malice. After all, I couldn’t speak any Greek.

  “You stay at Villas Dimitrios, yes?” He was just passing the time; of course we were staying there; he’d been paid to take us there, hadn’t he? And yet at the same time, I’d picked up a note of genuine enquiry, even something of concern in his voice, as if our choice surprised or dismayed him.

  “Is it a nice place?” Julie asked.

  “Nice?” he repeated her. “Beautiful!” He blew a kiss. “Beautiful sea—for swim, beautiful!” Then he shrugged, said: “All Makelos same. But Dimitrios water—water for drink—him not so good. You drinking? OK—you drink Coke. You drink beer. Drinking water in bottle. Drinking wine—very cheap! Not drinking water. Is big hole in Dimitrios. Deep, er—well? Yes? Water in well bad. All around Dimitrios bad. Good for olives, lemons, no good for the people.”

  We just about made sense of everything he said, which wasn’t quite as easy as I’ve made it sound here. As for the water situation: that was standard, too. We never drank the local water anyway. “So it’s a beautiful place,” I said. “Good.”

  Again he glanced at me over his shoulder, offered another shrug. “Er, beautiful, yes.” He didn’t seem very sure about it now. The Greeks are notoriously vague.

  We were out of Makelos, heading south round the central plateau, kicking up the dust of a narrow road where it had been cut through steep, seaward-sloping strata of yellow-banded, dazzling white rock to run parallel with the sea on our left. We were maybe thirty or forty feet above sea level, and down there through bights in the shallow sea cliffs, we were allowed tantalizing glimpses of white pebble beaches scalloping an ocean flat as a mill-pond. The fishing would be good. Nothing like the south coast of England (no Dover sole basking on a muddy bottom here), but that made it more of a challenge. You had to be good to shoot fish here!

  I took out a small paper parcel from my pocket and unwrapped it: a pair of gleaming trident spearheads purchased in Athens. With luck these heads should fit my spears. Nichos turned his head. “You like to fish? I catch plenty! Big fisherman!” Then that look was back on his face. “You fish in Dimitrios? No eat. You like the fishing—good! Chase him, the fish—shoot, maybe kill—but no eat. OK?”

  I began to feel worried. Julie, too. She turned to stare at me. I leaned forward, said: “Nichos, what do you mean? Why shouldn’t we eat what I catch?”

  “My house!” he answered as we turned a bend through a stand of stunted trees. He grinned, pointed.

  Above us, the compacted scree slope was green with shrubs and Mediterranean pines. There was a garden set back in ancient, gnarled olives, behind which a row of white-framed windows reflected the late-morning sunlight. The house matched the slope rising around and beyond it, its ochre-tiled roof seeming to melt into the hillside. Higher up there were walled, terraced enclosures; higher still, where the mountain’s spur met the sky, goats made gravity-defying silhouettes against the dazzle.

  “I show you!” said Nichos, turning right onto a track that wound dizzily through a series of hairpins to the house. We hung on as he drove with practised ease almost to the front door, parking his taxi in the shade of an olive tree heavy with fruit. Then he was opening doors for us, calling out to his wife: “Katrin—hey, Katrin!”

  We stayed an hour. We drank cold beer, ate a delicious sandwich of salami, sliced tomatoes, and goat’s milk cheese. We admired the kids, the goats and chickens, the little house. It had been an effective way of changing the subject. And we didn’t give Nichos’s reticence (was that what it had been, or just poor communications?) another thought until he dropped us off at Villas Dimitrios.

  The place was only another mile down the read,
as the crow flies. But that coastal road knew how to wind. Still, we could probably have walked it while Katrin made us our sandwiches. And yet the island’s natural contours kept it hidden from sight until the last moment.

  We’d climbed up from the sea by then, maybe a hundred feet, and the road had petered out to little more than a track as we crested the final rise and Nichos applied his brakes. And there we sat in that oven of a car, looking down through its dusty, fly-specked windows on Villas Dimitrios. It was…idyllic!

  Across the spur where we were parked, the ground dipped fairly steeply to a bay maybe a third of a mile point to point. The bay arms were rocky, formed of the tips of spurs sloping into the sea, but the beach between them was sand. White sand, Julie’s favourite sort. Give her a book, a white beach, and a little shade, and I could swim all day. The taverna stood almost at the water’s edge: a long, low house with a red-tiled roof, fronted by a wooden framework supporting heavy grapevines and masses of bougainvillaea. Hazy blue woodsmoke curled up from its chimney, and there was a garden to its rear. Behind the house, separate from it and each other and made private by screening groves of olives, three blobs of shimmering white stone were almost painful to look at. The chalets or ‘villas’.

  Nichos merely glanced at it; nothing new to him. He pointed across the tiny valley to its far side. Over there, the scree base went up brown and yellow to the foot of sheer cliffs, where beneath a jutting overhang the shadows were so dark as to be black. It had to be a cave. Something of a track had been worn into the scree, leading to the place under the cliff.

  “In there,” said Nichos with one of his customary shrugs, “the well. Water, him no good…” His face was very grave.

  “The water was poisoned?” Julie prompted him.

  “Eh?” he cocked his head, then gave a nod. “Now is poison!”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What is it—” indicated the dark blot under the cliff “—over there?”