Never Ending Page 15

  Actually, he could sulk in bed the whole day for all Shiv cared, but mixed in with the anger was dread. Of what he might say to their parents.

  “Fifty minutes, I reckon,” Dad called out, tapping the map. “An hour max.”

  “Good-oh,” Mum said, buttering bread.

  She had picked up on the atmosphere, even if their father hadn’t. “What was all that about last night?” she’d asked earlier, while Dad was in the shower.

  “All what?”

  “Dec stomping off to bed early; you moping around like a ten-year-old.”

  “I wasn’t moping,” Shiv had said.

  She opened three cabinets before she found the sandwich bags. Greek music played on a radio outside, where the maintenance guy was servicing the pool. For no other reason than he was old and Greek, he put Shiv in mind of Nikos’s grandad and the tale Nikos told of fried fish and boyhood picnics down at the rocks.

  Nikos. The look he had given her last night as he climbed onto his moped.

  So what if you’re only fifteen? That was what she sought in his expression in the wake of Declan’s revelation. It’s OK, Shiv, we’re still good. In the countless replays of that scene in her mind over the past twelve hours, she almost convinced herself she’d seen exactly that look in his eyes in the moment before he rode off.

  But she no longer trusted herself to distinguish between what she saw and what she’d hoped to see.

  In another version, she saw him dismiss her as a kid, a stupid, lying, jailbait bitch. Saw his relief that he’d learnt the truth before things had gone any further. Saw that he couldn’t mount his bike and get away fast enough.

  If only Nikos had said something. If only he hadn’t just flicked her a look – the briefest, unreadable glance – before veering off with a spurt of grit and dust that left Shiv alone with her brother in the twilight. Then alone altogether as Dec, without a word, returned to the villa. Shiv had stared for ages at the point where the gloom swallowed the moped’s tail light, before she turned to follow her brother.

  Shiv had texted Nikos that evening. Three, four times. She’d left a whispered message on his voicemail. She’d texted again, twice, in the morning.

  Nothing.

  If his look as he’d left was open to interpretation, his silence was clear enough. Nikos was gone and Shiv would never see or hear from him again.

  Afterwards, she’d found Dec at the pool, cross-legged at the end of the diving board and gazing blankly at the water. He’d removed the basketball vest Nikos had given him and was shivering in the night air.

  “Why did you tell him?” Shiv said, furious, but keeping her voice low in case Mum and Dad overheard through the open patio doors. From inside, came the sounds of food being served, a wine bottle being opened. “Why, Declan?”

  Her brother just sat there, the board bowing beneath his weight. The pool lights on the rippling water illuminated him from below like the reflection of so many silver coins. He ignored her so totally you’d think he hadn’t even registered her at the side of the pool. Her arms hung straight down at her sides, as Dec’s had done earlier, in the lay-by; her hands, as his had been, were bunched into fists.

  He was crying but Shiv said it anyway. “I’ll never forgive you for this.”

  “Does His Lordship intend to grace us with his presence today?” Dad said. He had folded away the map and come to stand the other side of the kitchen counter, picking an olive out of the tub of salad and popping it into his mouth.

  “Who knows?” Mum said, shooting a sidelong glance at Shiv.

  Dad looked at his watch. “Only, we could do with—”

  The slap of bare feet on the stairs and there was Declan, with slept-in hair, crumpled boxers and a very creased and grubby Salinger T-shirt. So, he was wearing that again.

  “What?” he said, crossly, as three pairs of eyes tracked his arrival.

  “We’re meant to be going to the fort,” Dad said.

  “And your point is?”

  “We’ve wasted half the morning already.”

  Declan crossed the room, barging past Shiv, and raided the fridge for orange juice. He drank straight from the carton. “This fort is, like, a thousand years old,” he said, wiping his mouth. “I don’t reckon it’ll fall down before we get there, do you?”

  Before the bickering escalated, Mum intervened. “Eat something,” she said, handing Declan a bowl, “then get showered and changed, please.”

  Dad muttered something and left them to it. Shiv watched her brother tip cereal and milk into the bowl and eat standing up at the counter. She thought he might continue to blank her, as he’d done last night, but he looked directly at her, his expression indecipherable.

  Mum busied herself loading the cool box. “Do something with that, can you, Shiv?” she said, nodding at the chopping board, strewn with salad trimmings.

  Shiv went to scrape it into the bin, but her brother was in the way.

  “’Scuse me,” she said.

  “I’m eating,” he said, mouth full of half-chewed cornflakes.

  “Go and eat somewhere else then.”

  “For crying out loud!” That was Mum, banging the cool-box lid down so hard the bottle of washing-up liquid toppled into the sink. “I don’t know what’s going on between you two, but we only have two days left of this holiday and you’re not going to ruin them.” She glared at them in turn. “Understood?”

  Neither of them responded.

  “I mean it,” Mum said. “The pair of you, just grow up.”

  “Oh, Shiv’s all grown up. Aren’t you?”

  “Shut up, Declan.”

  “What’s the problem?” Dad said, reappearing in the lounge.

  “Nothing,” Shiv said, widening her eyes at Declan, daring him to contradict her. He set the bowl down on the counter, slopping milk, and headed out of the kitchen.

  “And don’t take all day in the shower,” Dad called after him.

  “No, I won’t.”

  “And what’s with the T-shirt – I thought the basketball top was glued on?”

  Declan paused, hung his head a moment – as Nikos had done last night – then carried on out of the room without a word.

  In the car, she expected Dec to slide back into a silent sulk. But he was something like his usual self, making up silly “facts” about the fort as he pretended to read aloud from the guidebook, or singing along (intentionally badly) to the CD. Too normal. Like this was a reality TV show and he was playing an exaggerated version of himself for the cameras.

  Shiv wasn’t sure if she preferred this Declan to the one who had frozen her out or the one who’d sniped at breakfast. She wasn’t sure what to expect.

  She sat, half turned away from him, staring out the window as they snaked through the interior of the island. The sunlit hillsides, littered with huge boulders and twisted old olive trees, were almost stunning enough to lift Shiv out of her black cloud. Almost, but not quite.

  They couldn’t have been too far from the place where Nikos had taken them to see the vulture.

  She checked her phone for messages. No signal.

  Whether it was this that caught Declan’s eye, or whether he’d planned to say something all along, she would never know. Maybe he’d just noticed where they were and remembered the vulture trip too. Whatever, he quietened again. She slipped the phone back in her bag.

  Five minutes, ten – the silence in the rear seat was so profound Shiv couldn’t believe their parents were chatting away about the passing scenery. Then, as they rounded a bend and the island’s eastern coastline swung spectacularly into view far below, her brother said, “Don’t worry, Shivoloppoulos,” plenty loud enough for Mum and Dad to hear, “I won’t tell them.”

  “Tell us what?” Dad frowned into the rear-view mirror.

  Mum sat dead still, eyes fixed on the road as though she was the driver rather than the passenger. Like she dreaded where this was leading as much as Shiv did.

  Shiv turned to her brother. “Dec, pl
ease—”

  Dad repeated his question. “Won’t tell us what?”

  “I won’t tell you,” Declan said, “that your lovely daughter is shagging Nikos.”

  12

  Shiv realizes immediately that the re-creation of the villa’s interior is virtual rather than actual. That what she is seeing isn’t a room furnished and decorated to resemble the lounge in Kyritos but photos of the original, enlarged to life-size and projected onto the floor and walls of an otherwise bare room. The clinic must have downloaded the images from the holiday company’s website.

  What doesn’t happen so fast, or for several minutes, is the steadying of her breathing, or the return to a regular beat of her thump-thump-thumping heart.

  Or the lessening of the urge to hammer on the door and scream to be let out.

  They won’t let her out though. For four hours, Shiv is stuck here with … whatever this is. A psychological experiment. Her very own Room 101. Trapped inside – enveloped by, taken back to – the place where her brother lived his last days.

  Well, they can lock her in but they can’t make her look.

  With nowhere to sit but the floor, she settles down in a corner, cross-legged, tips her head back against the wall and closes her eyes. She’ll keep them closed the whole four hours, if necessary.

  But her eyes have been shut for just seconds when an unbearably loud buzz breaks the silence, insistent, drilling into her ears – right into her brain, or that’s how it feels. The moment she opens her eyes again the noise stops. She closes her eyes once more. The noise kicks back in. Opens them. The noise stops.

  So, they can make her look. And if they know when she opens and closes her eyes, they must be observing her.

  There are several bug-eye lenses set into the ceiling – projecting the images that fill the room. Any one of them could house a camera to spy on her – not just to ensure she keeps her eyes open but to monitor her behaviour, her reactions. She feels like a laboratory rat.

  When she has calmed a little Shiv studies the photomontage more closely, picking out details she missed at the first, shocking sight. The flat-screen TV in one corner, the books – some Greek, some English – lining the shelves, the framed print of an old woman in traditional costume hanging on the wall. She can almost picture her father at the wood-and-glass coffee table, a map spread clumsily across it as he plotted their route to the fort. Can almost see Mum’s postcards propped on the mantelpiece. Dad’s Stieg Larsson novel wedged down the side of a cushion. Dec’s stinky flip-flops and sodden swimming shorts strewn about the place and the regular trails of biscuit crumbs he left across the floor.

  Can almost feel the ceiling fan losing its battle against the heat of a new day.

  Can almost smell the suntan lotion she’s massaging into her skin.

  Can almost hear the thud-thud of the tennis ball against the wall outside.

  How long it is before the pictures change, she isn’t sure. But after she’s been adjusting to them, making them less upsetting, the room plunges into darkness and, an instant later, the walls and floor light up again. She’s outside, on the patio, gazing through the dangling vines at the pool, shimmering beneath a perfect Mediterranean sky. And at the olive grove and the bay and the pinkish hills, blurred by heat haze.

  The pool is hard to take, with its springboard and the unbidden image that fills her head: Declan, in his red swimming shorts, performing a clownish, acrobatic leap, soaking the patio’s pink-and-white flagstones with a great plume of water. Another one: Dec, sitting cross-legged at the end of the board, shirtless, head bowed, mottled in the pool lights, the night he caught her with Nikos.

  Instinctively, she shuts her eyes. The appalling buzzer snaps them back open.

  For the rest of the morning – apart from a five-minute “loo break”, which Assistant Hensher escorts her to and from – Shiv is confined to her Personal Therapy Unit. Throughout this time, the projections cut back and forth between the inside and outside of the villa. Boredom should have set in; the images should have lost their power to upset her. Both of these things do happen, somewhere around the middle of the session. But the picture show regains its intensity – its hold over her – as the sheer monotony of sitting for so long staring at the same scenes acts like a kind of water torture.

  Or it may be that, however hard she tries to resist it, Shiv’s imagination takes over – filling in the gaps, scripting the story that the pictures leave untold. Resuming the countdown of the days, hours, minutes to Declan’s death.

  For the next few days, the projections remain the same.

  Shiv starts to believe she can handle it. The mornings become an exercise in forcing her mind to look away, even if her eyes can’t.

  Then a whole new set of images appear.

  At first, Shiv can’t understand how the clinic obtained them. She has never seen them before, or even known they existed. But it dawns on her that, of course, the photos must have come from the files of the police investigation. From Dad’s lawyer out in Kyritos. Which means that Dad arranged for them to be copied to Dr Pollard.

  That he has agreed to let the clinic use them.

  The first is a shot of the place where Declan died. Several shots. A sequence of digitally sharp photographs from every angle, super-enlarged – a relentless slideshow that lasts the full four hours.

  The next day, a different slideshow: the place where Dec’s body was found. She knows it’s the place because his body is right there in the pictures, covered in a blue tarpaulin sheet. The sequence of images stops at the one where a Greek police officer is about to pull the sheet away.

  She finds Caron next door, in her bedroom. It’s lunchtime, but neither one can face eating. Shiv came up here to be by herself for a bit, before Talk, but heard sobbing as she passed Caron’s door and couldn’t just walk on by. She knocked and, after a moment, the older girl let her in.

  They’re sitting at opposite ends of the bed, struggling for words. Caron looks as though she might start crying again.

  “It was Mel,” she manages to say. “Just after she collapsed.”

  Thinking she was fooling around, a guy at the party had carried on filming Melanie on his phone, Caron explains. The clinic must have got hold of the footage and produced stills from it. In the first few days of Phase 2, the images of Mel at the party before she took the pill – laughing, dancing, singing along to a song – have hit Caron hard enough. Today, she’s pale and shaky, eyes underscored by dark shadows, hair hanging limp and greasy. “How about yours?”

  Shiv tells her about the latest pictures and Caron puts a hand to her mouth as though she’s about to vomit.

  “How can you bear to…” But she can’t finish the sentence.

  “I guess it was always going to come to this,” Shiv says.

  “Come to what?”

  “Just – death.”

  Melanie and Declan, dying. For thirty days they were brought back to life; now they’re being brought back to death. But she can’t find a way to say this that wouldn’t sound brutal. She studies Caron. Where’s the sassy girl in the scarlet dress? The girl who stashed cigarettes in her knickers?

  “I don’t know if I can face Talk and Write this afternoon,” Shiv says.

  “No,” Caron says, after a moment. “Me neither.”

  The afternoon sessions have continued as before, with the difference that each resident is required to speak – no exceptions – and to read out what they have written. They must speak and write about the death, nothing else. As Assistant Sumner puts it, they have to “sift the psychological rubble” created by the morning picture shows. Talk and Write strayed into this terrain in Phase 1, but never with such intensity.

  Sumner probes, digs. Insists on details, however gory. Where did they die, exactly? What happened, exactly? Tell me how, exactly, it was your fault.

  “Will you write me a note to say I’m sick?” Shiv asks, hoping to tease a smile from her friend. To conjure up a flash of the old Caron.

/>   Caron lets the remark go. Talks about something else but stops at the sound of feet scuffing along the corridor. The footsteps pass Caron’s door and halt outside Shiv’s. Silence. As though the person is listening, trying to figure out if Shiv is in her room. Then, the familiar rat-a-tat-tat of knuckles on wood.

  “Mikey,” Caron says, her voice flat.

  “He’ll be wondering why I’m not at lunch.” Shiv wants to find out how he is after this morning’s PTU, but not if it means making Caron feel abandoned.

  “That’s nice of him.” Toneless, again.

  Shiv can all too easily imagine the shots of the river where Mikey’s sister drowned, the muddy bank where her body was dragged ashore. He has taken surprisingly well to Phase 2; the tougher line. Like, finally, the clinic gets the point. Call it treatment but, to Mikey, the pictures are a form of punishment. She wonders if today’s images will be enough, or how much further he needs to go before he finds the right kind of tree, the right way to bash his head against it.

  She turns to Caron. “Don’t be like that.”

  “I’m not being like anything.”

  Rat-a-tat-tat next door. “Shiv?” Mikey calls.

  Her eyes flick towards the sound, then back to Caron. “I should—”

  “Yeah,” her friend says, “you don’t want your little brother to worry.”

  Shiv glares at her. “He’s not my brother.”

  “Whatever you say, Shiv.”

  The images undergo another change. Still, the slideshow of death, but gradually some living versions of Declan appear in the mix. More holiday photos, overlaying the ones of him beneath that tarpaulin, so that she can see the living brother through the outline of the dead one, or the dead brother through the living.

  It doesn’t stop at photographs.

  On Day 40 or 41 (she’s losing track), the moving images start to appear. She’d forgotten about the clips Mum filmed with her phone in Kyritos.

  Declan, dancing in manly Greek-style with a waiter at their local taverna.

  Declan, performing handstands on the beach.