Michael Frayn - Skios

Did he? He heard the familiar voice issuing from some dull inaccessible place a couple of feet above the lectern. He saw the faces raised expectantly towards him. Most particularly the one directly in his eyeline in the middle of the front row that was beginning to close its eyes and sink helplessly into sleep. He saw the woman halfway along Row E who was struggling to get over people’s feet and out, for reasons that everyone in the room was now trying to guess at. He heard the man who made strange little noises, and the woman with the whistling hearing-aid, and the man who laughed at every mention of hunger and disease. He saw the questioners at the end rising to ask him about the existence of God and the moral responsibility of scientists. He heard the never quite enthusiastic enough applause, and the never quite convincing enough “Thank you for that stimulating talk.”

Then he thought about roaming the hillsides for game and fish, for fruit and olives. He thought about Georgie being the only girl in the world and him the only boy.

“I don’t, actually,” he said. “I don’t want to give it. I’d like to make a new start in life.”

“Off you go,” she said, and pushed him towards the taxi. He bent down to get in, then suddenly straightened up at the last moment and gave her a kiss, just at the same moment as she suddenly bent down and gave him one, so that their foreheads collided.

“I bet you saw that coming, too,” she said, rubbing her head.

* * *

Five assorted T-shirts lay neatly folded on the table by the ironing board. Annuka picked the stack up and felt it against her cheek. They were smooth, they were warm. They felt right. They still smelled alien, though; where had he got them washed? She couldn’t recall any of the logos on them, now she came to look at them; where had he acquired them?

She held up the two pairs of chinos. She was somehow softened to see that his legs were shorter than she had remembered.

Yes, she thought, as she ironed the chinos, however had she got involved with him? She recalled a party. At Vaclav and Bianchetta’s. A lot of noise. Impossible to hear what anyone was saying. Then out of the noise and the darkness, this lopsided smile had appeared, and handfuls of blond hair being brushed out of soft brown eyes. She had somehow got the impression as they talked that he was writing a history of sixteenth-century Tibet.

And he had been so modest about it.

* * *

Georgie stretched herself out on the lounger again. The sun was beginning to decline, but at least she didn’t have to cover anything up now.

She had the first premonitions of hunger for the next meal. She should have gone with Wilfred, she realized, at least as far as the nearest supermarket. Or asked him to buy something on his way and bring it back. She knew with a sudden absolute certainty that Oliver wasn’t going to come. What on earth was she going to do?

She suddenly thought she could hear something inside the villa. Footsteps … No. Nothing. Or…? No.

She felt the goose pimples spreading over her skin, even in the heat and light of day. The night was coming. And she was going to have to spend it here alone.

Wilfred lay facedown on the soft grass, watching his hand trailing in the stream in front of him. His fingers were softly undulating in time with the water weed around them. Yes, and there was the trout, flicking lazily through the weeds. He watched it edge nearer and nearer. He could feel its cold scales on his quietly tickling fingers. And then, whoosh! It was in his fist! In the air above his head! In the keep-bag he had improvised out of creeper! In the hot ashes of the oven! On the table under the stars! On the fork he was lifting up to her smiling lips …

“So,” said Stavros, nodding at the suitcase beside him, as the taxi bounced along down the unmade-up mountain road, “airport?”

Georgie’s smiling eyes were shining in the candlelight. She moved closer and closer to him. The trout had vanished from the picture. “Yes?” she whispered.

“Yes,” said Wilfred. “Yes. Yes!”

“Not a problem,” said Stavros.

Not a problem. Wilfred slowly emerged into the light of day. Stavros. Of course. Taxi. And he himself was not Wilfred, sharing home-caught trout under the stars with Georgie, but Dr. Wilfred, on his way to give the Fred Toppler Lecture at the Fred Toppler Foundation.

They bounced on down the hillside. He was flung sideways by the hairpin bends, and up against the roof by the potholes; he had presumably been flung around in much the same way ever since they had left the villa, but had been too involved with the trout to notice. Now that he was conscious of his surroundings, though, he realized that in the air-conditioned chill of the taxi his wet clothes were hanging noticeably dank upon him.

He dragged his suitcase over from the front seat. There was something subtly alien about it. And even before he had lifted the flap of the luggage tag to check he knew with a sudden dull certainty what it would say. It wouldn’t be Dr. Norman Wilfred. It would be exactly what it had been before.

Yes. “Annuka Vos.”

Of course. Naturally. They had sent the same bag. The wrong bag. The transvestite’s bag.

And all at once he was hit by a bolt of black lightning. Every single thing had gone wrong since he had arrived on this horrible island. He was Dr. Norman Wilfred, for God’s sake! Not a helpless victim of forces beyond his control, but a rational human being in a rational world! He was used to something better than this! And he had been mocked and humiliated! Led around like a bear on a rope by idiocy and incompetence, by chance and misunderstanding, by coincidence and two moles on a shoulder blade!

The suitcase sat there beside him, the visible embodiment of all his frustrations. He opened the window and heaved it out. It hit an outcrop of rock in the track with a satisfying crunch, rolled over and over in the wake of the taxi, burst open, and scattered a long trail of clothes in the dust.

The taxi stopped. Stavros turned and looked out of the back window, and then at Dr. Wilfred. His mouth was slightly open. The carapace of apparent indifference that taxi drivers develop to the waywardness of their customers was visibly dented.

“Not mine,” said Dr. Wilfred.

* * *

Annuka took the T-shirts and chinos she had ironed back to the bedroom, hung the chinos in the wardrobe, and laid the T-shirts away in the chest of drawers. There seemed to be no tissue paper to fold in with them, but perhaps it didn’t matter too much. It was only for a week.

She turned back to the still hopeless muddle of clothing on the floor. Men! She picked up a small tangerine-colored garment. Underwear. Tangerine-colored underwear. Also lime-green. Sky-blue ones. Black underwear so scanty that they were scarcely underwear at all. She looked at it all in surprise. None of the underwear that Oliver had left scattered around her floor had ever been anything like this. He had obviously been running a little wild since she last put him out.

She was about to iron them, but somehow the iron hung in the air above them. Tangerine underwear, lime-green and sky-blue underwear, black underwear so scanty that they were scarcely underwear at all — they weren’t things that she wanted to put an iron to. If they had belonged to her, or to some other woman, it would have been a different matter. But to a man …

She folded them all thoughtfully, and put them away unironed.

* * *

Stavros had got out of the taxi and walked back to the long slew of clothing that stretched away up the track from the eviscerated suitcase. Dr. Wilfred could see no reason to accompany him. He looked at his watch. They should be getting on. The adrenaline began to drain out of his bloodstream. What was Stavros up to? What business was it of his what his customers chose to throw out of the window?