Крис Бекетт: Spring Tide

‘There was an Irish woman here earlier, a young woman about your age,’ his host said. ‘ Very pretty. She had arranged to meet some friends here for camping, but they missed their flight. It will be a couple of days before they join her, apparently. I offered her a room, but…’ he paused to give a comically bewildered shrug, ‘but she said she was going to sleep outside.’

His name was Spiro and his rugged face kept reminding Thomas of a gone-to-seed version of Zorba the Greek, as played by Anthony Quinn. Thomas suspected that Spiro was well aware of the Anglo-Saxon stereotype of the earthy, sensual Mediterranean man, and consciously played the part: a Greek playing a Mexican actor playing a Greek. But then again Thomas knew that, when the worm stirred inside him, it always made him ungenerous and a little paranoid.

‘There’s a temple here, isn’t there? A ruined temple? I thought I’d go and look at it before the light goes.’

‘The temple of Aphrodite,’ Spiro winked broadly, ‘the goddess of love. It’s about two kilometres away, along that track just there.’

The track led through a dry, open forest of pine trees and wiry scrub, the warm air heavy with resin and pulsating with the constant shrill scraping of millions of cicadas. After an outcrop of bare grey rock the track dipped down, and a side path branched off from it along a small wooded valley towards the sea. There was a clifftop down there, he knew, and below it a beach, which you could also access directly via a path from the village. But for now Thomas stayed on the main track as it climbed up again, past a metal shrine that smelled of honey, and began to skirt round the broad shoulder of that extinct volcano.

The temple stood on a kind of terrace on the right-hand side of the track, with the wooded slope beyond it leading down to cliffs above the sea. There wasn’t much left of the building itself, just a stone floor, the bases of the columns round the edge, and on the near side, a couple of broken columns that still rose about a metre from the ground. In front of it was a rusty sign with an empty beer bottle at its foot. The sun was almost at the horizon, and a pathway of yellow light stretched across the sea towards the island. All around, in every direction, the cicadas kept beating out their unrelenting rhythm, like a million children shaking dried peas in yoghurt pots.

Thomas sat on a piece of fallen column that lay a few yards on from the temple itself. The light faded much more quickly here than it would have done back at home, and in a short time, a warm, scented darkness had closed round him. But more light was on its way. The sea along the horizon was already silvery with moonlight and soon the moon had risen high enough above the mountain behind him to illuminate the temple’s broken columns, cast faint shadows over its pale floor, and transform the forest around it into a kind of stage set: empty still, but full of dimly lit places where characters would meet, and shadows where they would hide. Thomas noticed that he no longer felt that worm of doubt inside him. This was the world and he was in it. And that, for the moment, was enough.

Then he noticed he wasn’t alone. Someone else had stepped out onto the stage, coming from the direction of the village. To begin with the stranger was merely a pattern in the patchwork of shadow and dim light, distinguishable from the rest only because it moved. He couldn’t see a face, or make out the colour of the clothes, but quite soon he could tell somehow that this was a woman, and he sat and watched as she took form, knowing that he himself would be invisible as long as he stayed where he was. In fact, she still hadn’t spotted him even when she stepped onto the floor of the temple, but he could see that she was about his own age, slender, athletic, and wearing the clothes of a tourist like himself, and he assumed she was the Irishwoman that Spiro had told him about. Perhaps the old Greek had pointed her this way.

‘Hi there,’ he called out, standing up. He’d been reluctant to separate himself from the shadows, but to hide any longer would just be creepy.

‘Oh hi. Jesus, you made me jump! I thought I was on my own.’

Yes, she was certainly Irish.

‘Sorry, I should have spoken sooner.’ He walked towards her, stepping up onto the floor of the temple, worn shiny by two and a half millennia of feet.

They were standing beside one of the broken columns now: man and woman, dimly lit in shades of grey. There was no black or white. Everything was provisional, everything on the point of dissolution.

‘I’m Siobhan. You’re must be the Englishman the café guy mentioned.’

She reached out her hand. Their palms and fingers touched, suddenly firm and solid, and she looked up into his face with friendly but appraising eyes. He wondered if she was as aware as he was of the obvious narrative which the universe, perhaps with Spiro’s assistance, had set up for them.

So where did you two first meet?

Would you believe it, we met by moonlight in the Temple of the Goddess of Love .

‘Hi, I’m Thomas. I gather your friends have been held up?’

‘Yes, a couple of days.’

‘And you’re sleeping out in the open?’

‘I am. The others have got the tent.’

‘Are you short of money until your friends come? If so I could easily—’

‘I’m fine. It’s no hardship sleeping out when the nights are as warm as this.’

‘I guess not. I just wondered whether there was a problem because your—’

‘There’s no problem at all. And I’m looking forward to a couple of days by myself if I’m honest. I like being on my own.’

Thomas nodded.

‘Me too.’

He did like it, actually, if he was in the right frame of mind, but that was something he’d only recently learnt about himself, as he grew older and became very gradually better at separating out the question ‘what do I want?’ from ‘what, right at this moment, would be the easiest thing to do?’ He’d lately discovered, for instance, that he didn’t really enjoy staying up drinking until 4 in the morning, or hanging out in places where you couldn’t talk but only bellow like a beast. This had been the cause of an ugly row with the friends who’d come with him to the resort at the far end of the island, and was the reason he was now here. It had all been rather unpleasant and, in retrospect, he could see he’d handled the whole thing very badly.

‘There isn’t much to do at this end of the island, is the only problem,’ he said. ‘The only things open in the village are Spiro’s café, and one other café that looks like it’s very much for locals only.’

‘Yes, I know. I’ve kind of resigned myself to a very early bedtime. I’m hoping the journey will have worn me out enough to get me off to sleep.’

‘Well, why not have a drink with me back at the village before you settle down?’ would have been the obvious thing for Thomas to say at this point. It would have been a natural thing to do, in no way difficult or awkward, and certainly not pushy or overfamiliar. Arguably it would actually be rather unfriendly not to make the offer, given that it was very early in the evening to lie down to sleep, and Siobhan couldn’t retreat to a room as he could, or read a book by electric light. And what was more, Thomas liked Siobhan immediately. Not only was she very pretty – Spiro was quite right about that – but she projected a kind of lively curiosity that he found instantly appealing. He liked the fact that she was Irish too, and different in that small way from himself.

But he didn’t suggest a drink all the same.

‘Well, nice to meet you, Siobhan. I’ve actually been here a while and I was just thinking of heading back.’