Never Ending Page 8

  When Declan’s rig collapsed, Nikos was still a hundred metres away.

  He brought her brother in.

  Declan had managed to scramble back onto his board and lie face down on top of it, clinging like a limpet. Somehow, Nikos hooked a line from his own sailboard to Declan’s and towed it back into the calmer waters of the bay, where her brother promptly stood up once more, raised his rig, and sailed ashore looking so pleased with himself you’d have thought he was the one who had rescued Nikos.

  “That,” Declan said, grinning all over his face, “was totally bloody excellent.”

  6

  “Why are you here, Siobhan?”

  Shiv frowns. “You told us why we’re all here. The other night, you said—”

  Dr Pollard interrupts. “No, why are you here? You, specifically?”

  “That’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?”

  “To stop doing the stuff I do. To stop being the way I am. And,” Shiv adds, tapping her temple, “because the magistrates said I have to get this seen to.”

  The Director shakes her head. “I didn’t ask why you feel you should be here. I don’t doubt that your mother and father, your social worker, the police, the youth court, your counsellor, the people whose property you’ve vandalized all want you to get well.” The woman pauses, adjusts her glasses. “But do you want to?”

  “Yes. Yeah, of course.”

  “Do you, Siobhan? Really, truly?”

  Really, truly. The phrase sounds wrong, unprofessional, on the lips of someone running a psychiatric clinic. But Dr Pollard has shown already that she doesn’t mind doing things differently.

  “Yes,” Shiv repeats, aware of sounding petulant. “Really, truly.”

  The woman looks a little disappointed, as though she’d expected better of Shiv. But Dr Pollard lets it drop, for now. Switches to safer topics: Does Shiv like her room? Does she like the food? Is she settling in OK?

  They are sitting outside on a balcony at the front of the building, just beneath the domed clock tower, facing each other across a wrought-iron table laid out with tea and biscuits. The white table is too bright in the sunshine. It’s the afternoon of Shiv’s second full day at the Korsakoff Clinic and the Director is seeing each resident today for a one-to-one consultation.

  The balcony is nothing like the one at the villa in Kyritos but, even so, as Shiv was led out here an image flashed through her mind of Declan, in red swimming shorts, sunbathing on a wicker lounger.

  “How were Walk and Make this morning?” Dr Pollard asks.

  “OK, yeah.” Shiv nods. Then, “Actually, a bit tougher than yesterday.”

  “Tougher, how?”

  Shiv explains that she was even more tired this morning, after being woken for a second consecutive night by a holiday photo of her brother on her bedroom wall – Dec playing beach tennis. “Also,” she says, “I couldn’t get him in my head today. I was just walking and drawing, basically.”

  “It’ll come,” the Director assures her. “This is only Day 2.”

  Day 2 of sixty. Plenty of time for Shiv to attain what Dr Pollard refers to as immersion in her brother and in his death. At the moment, she’s barely dipping her toes in the water. This is the Korsakoff Method, it seems, or part of it anyway: to submerge residents in the object of their loss, their grief, their guilt. But the Director doesn’t want to say too much about that just now.

  “Lose yourself in the activities, Siobhan, and you’ll find Declan soon enough.”

  “And the sleep deprivation?” Shiv asks.

  “No one makes you look at those pictures. I believe that when the projections started last night some of the others simply pulled the bedcovers over their heads and went back to sleep.”

  True. They were talking about it at breakfast. Shiv shakes her head. “If I know Dec’s there, I can’t not look at him.”

  The woman shrugs. Then prepare to be tired, the gesture says.

  She is dressed for business again – black jacket and matching skirt, her white blouse fastened by a black bootlace tie held with a metal clasp in the design of a fox head. Whenever she takes a sip of tea or bites into a biscuit she cocks her little finger.

  “I heard about the incident at Write yesterday,” Dr Pollard says.

  The water jug, she means. Shiv nods.

  “You’ve had a few of those blank moments.” A statement, not a question; it’ll have been in Shiv’s case notes, which the Director claimed to have read before she trashed them. “And usually coinciding with one of your outbursts.”

  Outburst. It’s a good word: it can feel like something’s bursting out of her, or like she’s bursting out of herself. If she’s aware of it at all.

  The sense of release never lasts very long though.

  “All those wine bottles I smashed in Tesco – I didn’t even realize it was happening,” Shiv says. “I denied it, afterwards. Couldn’t figure out why this security guy was marching me off to the office.” She almost laughs at the ridiculousness of the memory. “They had to show me the CCTV to make me believe I’d done it.”

  Dr Pollard removes her glasses and sets them down on the table, their lenses casting two discs of rainbow-tinted light onto its white surface. “These lapses in awareness – in cognition – are not altogether uncommon in post-traumatic patients.”

  A pause in the conversation follows. Shiv wonders who’s speaking in Talk. And how Mikey is getting on. His face looked worse, if anything, when he turned up for Walk this morning. He made it unscathed through Break and into Make, although still very much the loner in the group. A sullen, sulky presence.

  At lunchtime, Mikey went off somewhere by himself.

  “Now,” the Director says, “there’s something I need to ask you.”

  Shiv expects it to be about what she wrote in Write: I killed my brother. From talking to those who had their one-to-ones this morning, she knows that Dr Pollard has seen what they put in their notebooks at yesterday’s session. But the woman asks,“Is it the lake?”

  “What?”

  “When you joined me just now, that chair was facing forwards, looking out towards the lake.” She pauses. “But you repositioned it so you’d have your back to the view. Was that a conscious decision. Hm?”

  “So you throw my counsellor’s notes in a bin,” Shiv says, half smiling, “but you’re happy to borrow her theories.”

  “It wasn’t the counsellor who repositioned your chair. And it wasn’t me.”

  When Shiv doesn’t reply, Dr Pollard leans forward, as though the change of angle will offer her a better perspective. She looks much younger without her glasses. Friendlier, even though the conversation has taken a less friendly turn.

  “Could you move your chair back the way it was, do you think?”

  “What is this, aversion therapy?”

  The woman pulls a face, as though she just swallowed something bitter. Shiv can’t tell if it’s the sarcasm she finds distasteful, or the term “aversion therapy” itself, or the fact that a resident has used the jargon.

  “It isn’t that.”

  “What, then? You want me to look at the lake – I mean really look at the lake – until I can see that Hey, it’s just a lake! Just a plain old English lake.”

  The Director shakes her head. “I want you to see the lake for what it is.”

  “That’s what I just—”

  “What it is to you, Siobhan. Look at the lake and see whatever it is that you see there, in all its horror. Don’t turn your back on it.”

  Shiv stays sitting right where she is though, her back to the view.

  Dr Pollard puts her glasses on again. Leaning back in her seat, she looks at the place where her glasses lay a moment ago, as though perplexed by their disappearance. Shiv expects her to warn against “repression” or to ask Shiv once more to reposition her chair. She says, “You dream about your brother.” Another fact from Shiv’s file. But her tone is less confrontational. “You have flashbacks to what happen
ed too.”

  Shiv nods. “They’re sort of mixed up though. A bit of nightmare, a bit of flashback – sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which.”

  “Horrible, I imagine.”

  “Yeah, they are. Horrible.”

  Shiv had one last night, sometime after the picture show on her wall had clicked off.

  Declan, at the poolside, in a bloody, broken heap on a sunlounger. Two dogs – feral-looking mongrels – sneak up on him, take hold of a limb each in their jaws, drag him off the lounger and across the flagstones, leaving a trail of smeared blood, before disappearing with her brother into a dense bank of rhododendrons. Shiv woke at the moment when she heard the dogs feeding on him.

  She describes the nightmare, or whatever it was, to Dr Pollard.

  “Is that a typical example?” As she speaks, a sudden breeze raises one corner of a paper napkin on the table, holds it there for a moment, then lets it back down.

  Shiv lifts her gaze from the napkin to the Director. “None of them are typical.”

  She tries to explain that no matter how surreal they might be – no matter how far removed from what actually happened to Dec – they are more real to her than some of her violent outbursts while she’s wide awake.

  Shiv exhales, tips her head back. The sky is perfectly clear but for the vapour trail of an aircraft, like an unseen hand sketching a chalk line across a pale blue page.

  For the next few minutes they talk more generally about Shiv’s life since Kyritos, especially about the effect of Declan’s death on Mum and Dad.

  “They’re going to miss you, these next two months,” Dr Pollard says.

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Shiv doesn’t dilute the sarcasm. She thinks of Mum, so absorbed in grief she barely registers Shiv from one day to the next. As for Dad, he’ll be “working late” again tonight, or planning his next trip to Greece in his quest for “justice”. “Actually, they can hardly bear to look at me any more.”

  The Director studies her, her expression unreadable.

  “So, it’s good if I’m out of the way for a bit. You know? They don’t have to keep being reminded that, if it wasn’t for me, their son would still be alive.”

  “You believe what you wrote in your book? That you killed your brother.”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “It’s interesting,” Dr Pollard says.

  “What is?”

  “Just how emphatic you are about that.”

  “It’s why we’re all here, isn’t it?” Shiv says. “Lucy’s baby niece dies because she doesn’t check on her; Mikey’s sister drowns because he can’t save her; Caron kills her best friend by giving her Ecstasy.” She stops, thinking about the other two. Helen’s father died in a skiing accident after she fell and he swerved to avoid her; Docherty crashed a car – his girlfriend didn’t survive.

  Dr Pollard spreads her arms. “Yes, you are all here for the same basic reason. Each one of you believes you killed someone you loved.”

  “Believes?”

  “Believes.”

  “And, what, you’re going to make us believe we didn’t?”

  The Director says, “Let me take you back to the question I asked earlier: Why are you here? What do you hope to get from us, from your time at the Korsakoff Clinic?” She wants an honest answer this time, her tone says.

  “Do you want to ‘get well’?” she prompts, when Shiv doesn’t respond. “Do you want to ‘move on’? Do you want to return to being the girl you were before, the kind of girl everyone else expects you to be? Is that it?”

  “No,” Shiv says, after a bit. “That’s not why I’m here.”

  The woman nods. “Of course not.”

  Shiv places her hands on her thighs to stop them trembling. Her gaze drifts to the biscuit crumbs scattered on Dr Pollard’s plate, to the napkin, flapping again in the strengthening breeze. She gives an involuntary shudder, cold all of a sudden.

  “So, why are you with us, Siobhan?” the Director asks. Gently.

  It takes Shiv an age to get the words out but, finally, she says, “Because if I can’t find a way to live—” She breathes.

  “What?”

  Shiv starts over. “I’m here because I don’t know how to live with what I did to Declan.”

  Kyritos

  After a picnic lunch on the beach they still had almost three hours before Shiv and Dec were due back at the villa. Nikos suggested they’d windsurfed enough for one day and how about a trip to the most special place on the island? Shiv, who’d windsurfed enough for one lifetime, was quick to agree and, for all his bravado after being rescued, her brother raised no objection.

  “Thank you,” Shiv whispered to Nikos as they loaded the rigs in the pick-up.

  “For what?”

  “For giving him an easy get-out.”

  “I’m a guy too, remember,” Nikos whispered. “We don’t like to lose face.”

  He drove inland, following a zigzag route into the hills. Only a 4x4 vehicle and a driver with a steady nerve could handle those gradients, those hairpin bends on steep drops into the valley below.

  “And this is safer than windsurfing?” Shiv said, over the roar of the engine.

  “It is so long as I keep my eyes on the road,” Nikos said, turning to grin at her.

  “Nikos!”

  He looked forwards again, laughing, swinging the pick-up into another sharp curve. As he changed gear, Nikos let his fingers brush against the outside of her bare leg. Fleeting, but it sent a jolt through her. She shot a glance at Declan, beside her, but he was oblivious, hanging his head out of the open window like a dog, his hair whipped by the wind. Yodelling, for some reason.

  At the head of the valley the road levelled off. They were following the line of a ridge that ran beneath the craggy cliff of the summit. It was quieter now the engine no longer strained against the incline.

  Declan pulled his head back inside the cabin.

  “Yodelling?” Shiv asked. “This is Greece, not Switzerland.”

  “I wasn’t yodelling. I was shouting hello to the goats.”

  “The ghost?”

  “Goats, deafo.” He stuck an arm out the window as though signalling a turn. With his free hand, he punched some buttons on the radio. “Does this work?”

  A man speaking in rapid Greek competed against a fuzz of static; it might have been a ranting politician, a sports commentator, or an ad for cereal. Nikos adjusted the dial to pick up a music station. And so, as they bumped along the mountain ridge, they listened to some kind of Greek techno-punk.

  From where they left the pick-up it was only a thirty-minute hike into the ravine, mostly downhill, but beneath the furnace blast of a mid-afternoon sun they were soon soaked in sweat. The idea of falling off a windsurfer into the clear, cool sea no longer seemed so unappealing.

  Nikos led them along the bed of a dried-up stream, flanked on either side by steep, rock-strewn banks. The ground was parched, fissured, and their feet were coated with dust. Shiv paused to swig from the bottle of water Nikos passed round, shuttering her eyes against the bleached glare of the hillside.

  “It’s like the moon up here,” Declan said.

  To Shiv the land was biblical, a desert wilderness where a bush might burst into flames at any moment.

  “We’re almost there,” Nikos said.

  “Where?”

  He smiled at her. “The place where we’re going.”

  As he took the bottle back and raised it to his mouth, the sun caught the hairs on his forearm, making them glisten. Shiv watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed the water. Watched his moist lips as he lowered the bottle and replaced the cap. She longed to kiss him again. More than she’d ever wanted anything.

  But how could she, with her brother right there?

  “Lizard!” Dec said, pointing.

  The creature was as big as a squirrel, sandy-grey tinged with yellow, basking on a boulder. Studying them with its swivelly eyes. Raised on its forelegs, the lizard looked
as though they’d interrupted it in the middle of a set of push-ups.

  “Stellion,” Nikos said. “It means ‘star’ – see the patterns down its back.” Then, after a pause, “Very nice in a kebab.”

  “You eat lizard?” Shiv said.

  “Mmm, much tastier than baby turtle.”

  At which point Nikos let slip a smile and Shiv whacked him on the shoulder for making fun of her. If Declan noticed the intimacy of the gesture he gave no sign, too preoccupied with the lizard. When the creature tilted its head on one side, Dec did the same; when it raised one foot, as though waving, her brother waved back.

  “I think he likes me.” But when Declan turned back the lizard had gone, with not even the parting flick of a tail to suggest it had ever been there.

  “Come on.” Nikos gestured up ahead. “Let’s get moving before we burn up.”

  Not that it was apparent how they might escape the sun; as far as she could see, the dry terrain shimmered with heat haze. They rounded an outcrop of rock a little further along, where their route left the dried-up stream and forked sharply downhill.

  Instantly, the three of them plunged into the coolest, sweetest shade. Not only that, the landscape was transformed into an oasis of green – a long stripe of lush grass and overgrown trees where a cleft split the hillside like a rip in the flesh of a ripe fig.

  “Wow!” Shiv said.

  Nikos turned to smile. “Beautiful, isn’t it? I call this my Shangri-La.”

  They paused, standing on grass as vivid as an English lawn. “How come it’s so green?” Shiv asked.

  “There’s water underground. In the rock.”

  “An aquifer,” Declan said.

  “Yes.” Nikos looked impressed. “Just here, the aquifer is close to the surface.”

  Nikos’s Shangri-La was no more than a hundred metres long and ten or so wide, following the course of a V-shaped channel overhung with the trailing branches of the willow-like trees that grew there. He led them further along to a point where the water surfaced, briefly, forming a miniature waterfall over a waist-high shelf of rock.