Michael Frayn - Skios

“I know. Me, too — me you.”

She pressed the red button. She tried not to catch the taxi driver’s eye in the mirror.

“Spiros,” he said, and handed a card over his shoulder to her. “You want taxi? Spiros. Not Stavros. Stavros he’s my brother. He drive very bad. Kill you for sure.”

She wasn’t thinking about Greece, though. She was thinking about Nikki, at her foundation thing high in the Alps. She couldn’t remember now what Nikki had said about it. Only something about there being skiing there, or skiers. She thought about the skiers swooping across the whiteness of the high snowfields through the sparkling cold mountain air. And Nikki, up there with them, leading her clear, white, well-organized life. If only she could have been like that!

She pressed a number on her phone, then turned sideways to get away from Spiros, and hid her mouth behind her hand. There were some conversations that even she felt a little self-conscious about.

“Also electrical,” said Spiros. “Also genuine antique amphorae. Also smell by septic tank. Send for Spiros. You don’t like Mr. Fox Oliver? No problem. You phone, you ask for Spiros.”

Nikki was getting slowly undressed in the darkness. She was undressing slowly just in case Dr. Wilfred phoned and needed help of some sort. She had turned all the lights off and left the veranda windows open in order to breathe the natural air of the night for once. Every now and then the net curtains would stir and shift, or the plumbago sway in the security lighting. She didn’t look round. She wasn’t worried about intruders. And when finally her phone did ring she jumped out of her skin, she was so surprised. She let it ring on for a while before she answered.

“Nikki Hook,” she said, in a voice that went with pleasantly open eyes and crisply ironed shirts.

“Nikki!” whispered the voice at the other end. “It’s me!”

She couldn’t think of an answer. Whoever me was, it wasn’t the me she’d for one wild moment thought it was going to be.

“Georgie!” said the voice. Georgie? Oh, yes, Georgie. “Hello, Georgie,” said Nikki.

“Nikki, listen. I’m doing something rather silly.”

Of course. The only times Georgie ever phoned was when she was doing something rather silly. Nikki waited.

“I know, I know!” said Georgie. “Oh, Nikki! Why do these things happen to me? But listen, listen. I’ve got something dreadful to ask you. Now I know this is awful, but—”

“You’ve told Patrick you’re staying with me.”

“I’m so sorry, Nikki! I know I should have asked you first. I’ll never do it again! I promise, I promise, I promise! He won’t call you, I’m sure he won’t, he hasn’t got your number, but he might look it up somehow, it would be just like him, and if he does … It’s just that he sounded a bit, you know, scrungy when he rang a moment ago. What was the weather like here, and so on. He might start ringing up the weather people to check.”

“So what was the weather like?”

“I told him cool. Is it?”

“About ninety degrees.”

“Oh, no! Not very good for skiers!”

“For Skios? Oh, about usual. Don’t worry, though. If anyone asks, it’s cool. I’m thinking cool thoughts.”

“Oh, bless you, Nikki! What should I do without you?”

“It’s cool where you are, is it?”

“Actually it’s about ninety degrees here.”

“Which is where? Or I suppose I shouldn’t ask.”

“Well … I think it’s a secret. There’s this woman who keeps phoning him.”

“He’s married, is he?”

“Married?” There was a pause. Nikki could hear the distant sounds of a car driving over an unmade-up road. Also of Georgie thinking. “Probably, now you come to mention it.”

“Georgie! Don’t you even know ?”

“He won’t talk about it! He just kind of smiles!”

“Oh, no! Remember the last one!”

“I know. Oh, Nikki! If only I were like you! All sensible and snow-white, and running foundations and things!”

There was another pause, this time because Nikki was looking at the net curtains stirring and the plumbago beyond them swaying. And thinking. Wondering whether to say.

“Nikki?” said Georgie. “Are you still there?”

“The thing is,” said Nikki, in a suddenly small voice, “I think I may be, too.”

“What? You’ve gone a bit quiet. I’m in a taxi. It’s crashing about a lot. I can’t hear. May what?”

“Also be doing something silly.”

There was a colossal shriek down the line.

“Oh, no ! Not you! You don’t do silly things!”

“I know.”

“You’re the head girl! You’re supposed to be setting us all an example! Oh, Nikki! Even you! So tell, tell! What’s he like?”

“Well … he’s rather wonderful.”

“No, he isn’t! Don’t be silly, Nikki!”

“I know. But actually he is ! Tremendously distinguished and famous, and he knows everything, and he’s done everything, and he’s just so … ordinary about it all!”

“Mine’s terrible. A total no-hoper. You don’t know where you are with him from one moment to the next. How long have you known yours?”

“About two hours.”

“Well, there you go. Wait till you’ve known him for two weeks, like me. Is yours married?”

Now Nikki was silent.

“I don’t think so,” she said finally.

“Nikki!”

“I did actually ask him. But he’s like yours. He just smiles.”

“He’s married! Of course he’s married! Oh, Nikki! Head girl! Remember? And he’s famous? Nikki, you’re going to end up in the newspapers! So, what, he’s nice-looking?”

“Very. Like a kind of blond dish mop.”

“So’s mine! Exactly! How funny!”

“Two hours, that’s all, and I’ve only got him for one day more, and I’m sitting here in the dark because I’ve left the veranda window open just in case, and it’s all absolutely ridiculous, and I’m so ashamed of myself, and if I put the phone down suddenly you’ll know what’s happened.”

Georgie laughed and laughed.

“I know,” said Nikki.

“And is he Swiss?” said Georgie.

“Swiss? No? Why — is yours?”

“Mine? No. Only since you’re in Switzerland…”

But Nikki’s attention had been distracted. There was a noise coming from somewhere like an unoiled door being swung back and forth. Then shouting, and running footsteps.

“Sounds like someone screaming,” said Georgie. “What’s going on up there?”

“Sorry,” said Nikki hurriedly. “I’ve got to go.”

“Have fun!” said Georgie, as Nikki put the phone down. “Just don’t start being in love with him.”

* * *

The screaming, Oliver saw in the confused moment as the lights came on, was emerging from a woman who was cowering away from him on the bed above him as best she could while she kept her finger jammed down on the bedside panic button. She was richly and commandingly tanned and blonded, skin-creamed and silk-nightdressed. Oliver could see, even from where he was lying on the floor, even shocked and confused from having fallen off the bed with his foot caught in his bathrobe, that she was not Nikki.

There seemed to be three other people in the room, though it was difficult to see from where he was lying, and all of them in various states of social disarray. Coming through the open veranda window, where he himself had entered a few moments earlier, was the security guard who had been so eager to see his ID earlier, now struggling to conceal a lighted cigarette. Lowering above the woman on the bed was a bloated dark thundercloud of naked stomach. From the dense black bush beneath the stomach dangled a long male member. Above the thundercloud were piled more stories of hairy flesh, and looking out from on top of it all, like Zeus from high heaven, was a boldly featured face framed by a trim gray beard and a luxuriance of billowing gray locks, raining down thunderbolts of excited and incomprehensible Greek.