Never Ending Read online

  It’s all anyone is talking about.

  Or not talking about. Some of the residents – Lucy, especially – are too upset to discuss it. Caron looks dreadful as well: no make-up, her hair unbrushed, her eyes puffy. No one had much sleep, it seems. Docherty is angry, wanting to know how the clinic could pull a stunt like that without warning. Wanting to know how they got hold of the pictures in the first place.

  Shiv knows where the image of Dec came from. It’s one of countless photos her mother took in Kyritos; which means Mum herself – or, more likely, Dad – must have given it to the clinic. Not that they necessarily knew what it would be used for.

  The picture stayed on Shiv’s wall for maybe an hour before the beam shut off. All the time, she didn’t take her eyes off it – shifting the armchair and settling herself in front of the photo as though watching a DVD. Even after the room snapped to black again, she went on sitting for a while before fumbling her way back to bed. Sleep was a long time coming. So, like the others, she’s exhausted.

  But is she upset? Is she angry?

  Shiv isn’t sure how she feels. What she does know is that when her wall went blank she desperately wished the image of her brother would come back again.

  Assistants Webb and Hensher breeze into the dining room just before 9 a.m. to muster the residents for the first activity: Walk.

  They won’t discuss last night’s picture shows.

  “Everything we do is part of your treatment,” is all Webb says as the group crowds around him, firing off questions.

  Amid much grumbling, he and his colleague usher everyone out of the room and along to a corridor at the back of the building. It leads to the door where Shiv and Caron exited Eden Hall for their stroll in the rose garden yesterday evening. Already that seems a long time ago.

  Ranged along one side of the passageway is a set of shelves lined with neatly folded yellow jumpsuits and pairs of wellington boots in various colours and sizes.

  “Girls, can you change in there, please,” Webb says, indicating a door marked LAUNDRY ROOM. “Mikey and Docherty, you can use the utility room.” He nods towards another door on the opposite side of the corridor. “All the gear is labelled with your names and should be the appropriate sizes.”

  “Jumpsuits,” Caron says to no one in particular. “In yellow?”

  Once they’re all changed, Webb and Hensher lead the six of them outside, the residents filing out in their lurid jumpsuits like terrorist suspects entering the exercise yard at a detention centre.

  This time it’s the white guy, Hensher, who addresses them. Less self-assured than Webb. His voice is nasal, a little high-pitched and, as he talks, a mottled flush spreads across his throat. “Hundreds of years ago, Eden Hall was a monastery,” he says, as though reciting, “and our activity this morning is modelled on a walking meditation practice used by the order of monks who lived here at that time.”

  Assistant Hensher smooths the palm of one hand over his scalp, shedding flakes of dandruff from his ginger stubble. “So –” he clears his throat – “we will walk in the grounds for an hour and a half—”

  “An hour and a half?” Caron blurts out. “The walking I’ve done in my entire life doesn’t add up to an hour and a half.”

  One or two of the others snigger. Shiv, too, glad to see Caron getting back to something like her sparky, sarky self.

  “An hour and a half.” Hensher, flustered, tries to stay on-script. “We walk in single file, with Assistant Webb leading. Keep to his pace, please – no quicker, no slower – and leave a gap of about two metres between you and the person in front.” He pauses. “We will walk … In. Complete. Silence.”

  “’S that it?” Mikey pipes up. “We’re going for a walk?”

  Webb cuts in to correct him. “Walking meditation. You walk … and think.”

  “What about?” Mikey still sounds cross. Truculent.

  “You could think about your sister, Mikey,” Assistant Webb says, matter-of-factly. “Same for all of you. Walk is an opportunity to reflect on the person you lost.”

  Dawn was hours ago but it feels like daybreak as they set off; a weak light leaks over the land and the air is chilly, the grass soaked with dew. Their route traces a figure-of-eight around the gardens and grounds and tree-clad slopes of Eden Hall. It passes quite near to the lake at one point, though Shiv is relieved to see that a chain-link fence prevents them from going too close. DANGER: DEEP WATER, a sign on the fence says.

  Shiv takes care to keep her eyes on the ground along that stretch of path.

  At first, Walk barely warms her, so gentle is the pace. Her limbs feel heavy, her joints stiff, and she can’t strike any kind of rhythm. None of them can. It might be down to embarrassment at the weirdness of what they’re doing, or just that it’s harder than it looks to walk very slowly, in a line, in synch with seven other people.

  She’s supposed to focus on Declan but all she can think about is Mikey’s face when Webb said what he did. About his dead sister.

  So, Shiv and her Buddy have both lost a sibling.

  Mikey is three places ahead. He might be improvising a mime on “anger”: arms flailing, legs scissoring away as though kicking the heads off imaginary flowers. He repeatedly veers out of line or strays too close to the person in front (the “shaman” girl, Helen), like a driver in slow-moving traffic – frustrated, desperate to overtake.

  It’s not until the second circuit that Shiv begins to close down the distraction. The simple, hypnotic repetition of setting one foot in front of the other takes effect. A litheness seeps into her limbs. Her mind stills. Not a meditative trance or anything like that; it might just be that the lack of sleep is finally catching up, reducing her to a state of semi-stunned autopilot.

  Whatever, it is pleasant. Strangely calming and invigorating all at once.

  In some ways Walk reminds her of the hikes Aunt Rosh took them on when they visited her in the school holidays. Only without the constant chatter, the pauses for tree-climbing (Shiv and Dec), or bird-watching (Aunt Rosh).

  On the third circuit, Webb calls them to a halt and Shiv can’t quite believe an hour and a half has passed when it barely seems ten minutes since they set off.

  Walk has finished in a grassy clearing in the woods.

  Caron flops on the ground with an exaggerated groan, as though they’ve been made to run the whole way. “Where are the foil blankets? The high-energy drinks?”

  There are drinks. Webb and Hensher produce bottles of water from their rucksacks and pass them round, along with muesli bars. Shiv sits down beside Caron. The others sit too – or, in Lucy’s case, lie flat-out as though sunbathing. Mikey remains standing, at the far side of the clearing, scuffing around among the undergrowth. Mumbling to himself. Docherty sets himself apart too, sitting with his back to them on a fallen tree at the edge of the bark-chip trail.

  “Thirty minutes,” Assistant Webb announces.

  Caron unwraps her muesli bar. “Jee-zuss, what exactly is this? It looks like hamster food stuck together with glue.”

  “Not glue,” Shiv says. “Snot.”

  “Oh, nice.” She lets out a laugh. “Thank you for that, Shiv.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  They’re quiet for a moment, side by side on the grass, elbows touching. A cabbage-white butterfly performs an air dance from one side of the glade to the other. Shiv bites into her snack bar. It tastes better than it looks and she finishes it in three mouthfuls, washing it down with a long swig of water, conscious of Caron watching her. She expects the older girl to make some jokey comment. But she doesn’t.

  Voice lowered, Caron says, “I hardly ate anything afterwards.”

  Shiv holds her gaze. “Me neither,” she says, just as quietly.

  “I lost about ten kilos.”

  Shiv nods. “My counsellor called it a ‘manifestation of guilt’: my brother can’t eat any more so why should I?” She scrunches the wrapper from the muesli bar, then flattens it out again. “But I
just didn’t see the point of anything any more. Including food.”

  “Maybe you were trying to join him?” Caron says.

  “Join him?”

  “Starve yourself to death.”

  “Oh, right.” Shiv looks around but none of the others seems to have overheard.

  “Has it ever crossed your mind to … do something, Shiv?”

  Shiv stares off into the trees. “I’ve never actually tried to, no.”

  “I have. Antidepressants.” Caron places a hand on Shiv’s back and gives it a rub, as though Shiv was the one who’d just confessed to taking an overdose. “Want my advice?” the older girl says. “Don’t ever imagine that getting your stomach pumped is a fun way to spend an evening.”

  In another part of the woods someone is chopping logs, the thwock-thwock of the axe echoing in the trees. It’s hard to tell which direction the sound is coming from. Shiv saw one of the gardeners from her window this morning, tending the vegetable plot. An old guy who reminded her of Panos, on the boat in Kyritos; most likely, there was no resemblance but the idea had come to mind because of the picture in the night.

  Beside her, Caron has lapsed back into silence. She is breaking her muesli bar into pieces and letting them fall into the grass between her feet.

  “Caron,” Shiv begins, then trails off.

  “Hmm?”

  Shiv hasn’t found the right moment, or the nerve, to ask this question before. She asks it now, so softly she’s almost whispering. “Who did you lose?”

  Caron doesn’t reply, doesn’t even look up from what she’s doing.

  “D’you mind me asking?” Shiv says.

  “My best friend. Melanie.” Caron dusts the last of the crumbs off her fingers; keeps her head lowered, eyes fixed on the ground. “We were at a party and there were some pills going around and I…” She stops, takes a breath. Starts again, nodding to herself, “I took one and talked Mel into taking one as well. She’d never done E or anything like that.”

  Shiv doesn’t ask anything else. The girl looks wrung out. The feisty Caron is the screen she puts up in front of this one.

  “Her first time,” Caron repeats. “How unfair is that?”

  Shiv could take her hand, or put an arm round her – rub her back, as Caron did for her just now; but Shiv is two years younger and, somehow, it doesn’t seem right. Instead, she just lets their elbows come into contact again.

  Hensher is moving among the group, collecting wrappers and empty bottles, when…

  Webb is the first to react. Then Hensher, scattering the litter everywhere.

  On the far side of the clearing, Mikey is standing at the base of a tree, repeatedly drawing his head back and smashing it against the trunk as hard as he can.

  Kyritos

  By the third day, Dad was relaxed enough to sing as they drove away from the villa in the morning. For once, no one begged him to plug in the iPod instead. With the car windows open and the fragrance of spring flowers mingling with the chlorine-scent of their hair, damp from a pre-breakfast swim, the collective good mood washed over Shiv like a warm breeze.

  She inspected her forearms to see how her tan was progressing. “So what’s the story with these turtles?” she said.

  “I had a flyer here, somewhere,” Mum said.

  “I’ve got it.” Declan brandished the leaflet.

  The trip had been his idea. Each of them had proposed a what-I’d-like-to-do-tomorrow plan before all four options were put to a ballot. “A democratic process, here in the birthplace of democracy,” as Dad put it. And so there they were, heading for a half-day cruise with lunch, turtle-watching and snorkelling included.

  Declan read aloud: “Why not let Poseidon Adventures take you on a—”

  “It is not called that,” Shiv said.

  He showed her the leaflet. Sure enough, Poseidon Adventures.

  Shiv laughed. “So, what, we get hit by a tidal wave and the boat capsizes—”

  “Ah, no,” Dad said. “That’s on the full-day cruise – we’re on the half-day.”

  “That was such a sad film,” Mum said. “The scene where she drowned – what was her name? You know, the big woman with the curly hair.”

  “Shelley Winters,” Dad said. Mum always forgot actors’ names and Dad always knew who she meant. “And she didn’t drown, she had a heart attack after swimming underwater for too long.”

  “Anyway,” Declan said, with a wave of the leaflet. He cleared his throat and resumed reading, adopting an actorly tone. “Why not let Poseidon Adventures take you on an unforgettable tour of the … blah-de-blah … oh, here we go: Our glass-bottomed boat permits you – permits you? – a close-up encounter with the famous turtles for which this island is re-known. That would be renowned, then.”

  “Can we have the unedited version?” Shiv said.

  Her brother looked at her over his sunglasses. “Shivoloppoulos, I am in the zone here.” Then, back to the leaflet: “These magical prehistoric creatures have frequent our shores since the dawn of time. They live for up to a thousand years and –”

  “Thousand years, my arse,” Dad snorted.

  “– and can grow as big as ten metres in diameter.”

  “Ten –”

  “If you are lucky,” Declan continued, “you might see one attack a dolphin foolish enough to stray into the turtle’s territory. When these marine beasts are evenly matched, the fights can last for hours, leaving the waters awash with blood, while local fishing crews gather to watch the spectacle and to place bets on the outcome.”

  “Read it properly,” Dad said, amused.

  They were winding their way down the precipitous clifftop route to a harbour a few kilometres along the coast from the villa. The sunlight made a golden haze of the dust the tyres kicked up from the roadside verge. Shiv tried not to look over the barrier at the sheer drop to the sea far below.

  “According to Greek mythology,” Declan went on, “the very first turtle was created by the great god Poseidon when he cast one of his sons adrift at sea, nailed hand and foot to an upturned shield, as a punishment for having sex with an otter.”

  “Oh, Declan, nooo,” Mum said, trying not to laugh. “That’s disgusting.”

  At the wooden jetty, the boat was bobbing at its moorings and a line of holidaymakers – mostly German and British, by the sound of it – had formed, ready to board. Shiv, Mum, Dad and Declan tagged on to the end.

  “Poseidon IV,” Dad said, reading the name on the far-from-gleaming-white hull. “I don’t like to ask what happened to the first three.”

  The Brits in the group laughed.

  The smell of salt, seaweed and fish was pungent but not unpleasant. A breeze would have been good though. Even through rubber flip-flops, Shiv felt the heat of the boards boring into her feet. Gulls shrieked and the mooring posts creaked as Poseidon IV shifted on the swell. At the back of the boat, an oldish bloke (a sea-dog cliché, with wrinkled nut-brown skin, shaggy dark hair and beard) was doing things with ropes. Towards the front, facing away from the waiting tourists, a much younger guy sorted masks and flippers into two large plastic tubs. He was tall and broad, the thin yellow cotton of his polo shirt drawn taut across his shoulders as he arranged the snorkelling kit with easy efficiency. Shiv caught herself staring at his calves, the muscles flexed beneath bronzed skin as he braced himself against the roll and pitch of the deck.

  “Welcome, welcome!” This was the beardy one, who’d finished with the ropes and was doing the smiley, meet-and-greet thing. “You folk ready to see some turtles?”

  He pronounced it with a “d” in the middle.

  “Turdles?” Declan whispered, raising an eyebrow at Shiv.

  “Baby turds,” she whispered back. “They’re surprisingly cute.”

  The boatman received a self-conscious chorus of yesses. “OK.” He offered a hand to the first of the passengers. “Please, sir. Be careful when you step, yeah?”

  Shiv had stopped paying attention because the young guy was makin
g his way to the rear of the boat to join in helping people aboard. The curly black hair, the brown eyes, the slim hips, the sinuous grace of his movements. He looked eighteen or nineteen, she reckoned, but … wow!

  As the queue shuffled forward, she was tempted to position herself so he’d be the one to take her hand as she stepped off the jetty, and they’d lock gazes … but, no. They were going to be on the boat together for the next three hours, so there was no need to be too obvious. Not so soon, anyway. She got in line for Old Beardy. Smiled and said thank you as he helped her aboard. Sat down with the others. Posed for the first of the photos Mum would take during the trip. And, the whole time, Shiv didn’t catch the young guy’s eye or even glance in his direction.

  Old Beardy was Panos; the younger one was Nikos. Father and son. Panos skippered the boat out to sea, while Nikos looked after the front-of-house stuff: taking the money, health-and-safety announcements, the sightseeing spiel. His English was very good. For his age, he had so much confidence and charm. The nice kind. Not the flirty, sleazy self-assurance of a guy too aware of how attractive he is. Male or female, young or old, each passenger received the same open smile, the same warm tone. To the children he was a fun-loving entertainer, while with the pensioner couple from Kent (We’re here for turtles, not snorkelling), Nikos was solicitous and respectful.

  The only awkward moment came when he remarked on Declan’s T-shirt (the Salinger one, again) and asked him to display the quotation to the other passengers.

  “Any friend of J.D.’s is a friend of mine,” Nikos said, offering a handshake. But Dec just flushed several shades of red and, for once, was lost for words.

  As for Shiv, Nikos paid her no more or less attention than anyone else.

  For a while, during the turtle-watching, she almost forgot about him. Along with everyone else, Shiv was transfixed by the strangely beautiful creatures – whether she was scanning the sea for a glimpse of a reptilian head breaking the surface, or gazing into the shimmering depths as a turtle glided beneath the boat’s glass bottom.

  After lunch, Poseidon IV sailed further up the coast with the son at the wheel while the father sat at the prow, smoking. One way and another, Shiv wasn’t getting to see as much of Nikos as she’d hoped. The ache in the pit of her stomach had nagged at her since she’d first set eyes on him and, if the boat trip hadn’t been so wonderful, she might easily have made herself miserable. But the turtles, the light sparkling on the water, the lulling rhythm of the boat, the spectacular cliffs, the tingle of the sun on her bare skin … on a day like this, she couldn’t fail to be blissfully happy.