Michael Frayn - Skios

He turned round in spite of himself and looked. Stavros was picking up random items of clothing and letting them fall again. In the sunlight their colors appeared brighter than they had at the airport. Now he was holding up what seemed to be a pair of high-heeled silver diamanté shoes.

Under the men’s clothing that he had seen at the airport a layer of women’s clothing must have been concealed. So was Ms. Vos a double agent? A trans-transvestite? A woman dressed as a man dressed as a woman?

Stavros tossed the shoes down on the track with the rest of the clothes, walked slowly back, and got into the taxi again. His face was expressionless.

* * *

Annuka picked up the next heap of clothing on the floor to sort out. It wasn’t clothing, though. It was gauze netting. Yards and yards of torn gauze netting.

Heap after heap of it she picked up. She shifted the heaps from hand to hand, gazing at them in bafflement. Why would Oliver pack half a suitcaseful of torn gauze netting to go on holiday? Or even half a suitcaseful of untorn gauze netting, and then tear it?

With a slowly dawning dismay, the truth came to her. It was a bridal veil.

She sat down on the bed, as if the floor beneath her feet had become all at once uncertain. The Oliver she had known for seven long and difficult months had sprung surprises enough on her. But this was something else again. What she now had to envisage was an Oliver with a secret penchant for dressing up in — yes, it was obvious, now she had found the veil — women’s underwear and see-through bridal outfits. Which he then rent, perhaps in some sickening symbolic representation of defloration.

She looked round the room for any further evidence of ritual perversion. A whip. A crucifix.

From a rail above the far side of the bed hung more swathes of gauze netting, this time still intact. From the hooks on this side hung torn shreds and scraps of the same stuff.

Oh, yes. Mosquito netting.

Her outrage slowly began to subside. He had simply had a bad night. Had thrashed about in his sleep, or flailed wildly against a plague of invading mosquitoes.

As her outrage subsided her irritation returned. She angrily beat the undersheet smooth, thrashed the pillows against each other, and snatched up the duvet from where it was nervously skulking on the floor. How characteristic of him to offer her such a thrilling new cause for dissatisfaction, and then to snatch it away again.

Though there was still the underwear. Her outrage returned.

As Spiros swung the taxi at reckless speed, hairpin by hairpin and pothole by pothole, up the mountainside, Oliver was flung back and forth and up and down like a shirt in a washing machine. He was too busy thinking about the forthcoming encounter to notice, though. If the potential rapist was still camped outside the bathroom door he was going to have to confront him. He didn’t fancy his chances of doing anything too egregiously brave; he was being quite brave enough by simply showing up. Calming words seemed a more plausible option. “Perhaps we could sit down and talk about this over a drink.” It might help if he was a psychiatrist. He had done very well as whatever Dr. Norman Wilfred was. There was no reason why he shouldn’t go on to become some sort of mental health professional.

And if the man had already broken down the bathroom door …

“Still faster, if you possibly can,” he said to Spiros. “Life and death.”

And then, in either case, there was the question of the explanation he would have to give Georgie as to why he hadn’t got her messages earlier. This needed a bit of work. Phone out of range, of course. Battery run down. But then how had he eventually managed to get the messages? Moved within range. Oh, sure. Recharged the battery. It was all a bit too plausible. In his experience an explanation really needed to have a touch of the outlandish, even the impossible, if anyone was going to believe it. Phone snatched by wild goat. Stolen by Albanian bandits. Yes, this might be one of those rare occasions when it was necessary to assist fairly actively in the encouragement of misunderstanding.

It was so unfair, though. Whatever explanation he came up with, it would be ungentlemanly to reveal what this dash to her rescue was costing him — the once-in-a-lifetime chance of delivering a learned lecture on a subject that sounded as if it might be important, and to do it before an audience consisting of some of the richest and most influential people in the world. Still less, of course, could he tell her that it meant giving up his one hope of a night with Nikki. Unless he could think of some good reason why he had to return to the foundation. Left his passport behind, perhaps. He felt his pockets. Yes! It was actually true! He had left his passport behind!

There was another taxi coming down the mountainside towards them. As it drew level both drivers stopped, wound down their windows, and exchanged a few words in Greek.

“Keep going!” said Oliver. “Keep going, keep going!”

“Stavros,” said Spiros, as they resumed their climb. “My brother. You thank God you not got him drive you. You go fast with Stavros? You’re a dead man.”

Three hairpins and nineteen potholes later they stopped again.

“ Now what?” said Oliver.

Spiros gestured at the roadway ahead of the car. An open suitcase lay facedown in the dust, with a muddle of what appeared to be old clothes stretching away beyond it up the track.

“Yes, but don’t stop!” said Oliver. “Come on! Keep going!”

Spiros began to squeeze the taxi past the remains of the suitcase.

“Stop!” said Oliver. He was gazing through the rear window of the taxi. Something about the suitcase …

“Wait!” he said.

“Wait?” said Spiros.

Oliver got out and walked back. The suitcase had a red leather address tag on it. He lifted the flap. “Annuka Vos,” it said.

Yes. It was his. His missing suitcase.

* * *

Annuka had found needle and thread, and tried to repair the shredded mosquito netting. She was still too angry with Oliver to give the work the patience it demanded, though, and in the end she simply bundled all the stuff up to go in the dustbin. Which was presumably outside the back door.

She opened it, and there in front of her was the rippling, glittering blue you expected to see outside a Greek villa. Beside the pool a swing seat, a barbecue, loungers already spread with towels. And on one of them a naked brown body, facedown.

She felt a familiar double shock of anticipation and irritation. How absolutely like Oliver not to have been here when he should have been, and now to be here when she had got used to his not being!

“Oh, so you are here,” she said. She held up the mosquito netting accusingly. “You seem to have wrecked the place already.”

Oliver raised his head sharply. So sharply that two substantial breasts appeared, squeezed between the arms supporting him. Something very strange had happened to him. Even his face had altered out of all recognition. He was no longer Oliver. No longer even he. He was she.

But if not Oliver … “Who?” said Annuka. “You! Who are you?”

“So sorry!” said not-Oliver. “I’m Georgie. We’re staying here. Me and Oliver — me and Mr. Fox. We’ve borrowed it from these people he knows.”

She nodded at the mosquito netting.

“Are you the cleaning person?” she said.

* * *

How his suitcase had got itself onto a dirt track halfway up a mountain Oliver couldn’t easily imagine, nor why it was broken open, and all his possessions scattered. He hastily shoveled them back into the bag, guilty at delaying his mission of mercy by even two short minutes. Another thing he found difficult to understand was why, as he now noticed, he seemed to have brought a pair of silver diamanté high-heeled shoes on holiday with him. And a silk nightdress. And a long flowered evening skirt.