Behind Closed Doors (8 page)

‘Oh, that’s what we considered, too. But she won’t say a word about them. It’s like she’s scared – terrified.’

Lou shook her head. Poor Scarlett. As desperate as everyone was to find out where she’d been for the last ten years, they were going to have to take things slowly with her.

‘But she’s also terrified of meeting her family again.’

Juliette had taken ages to get to sleep. Scarlett had known that this would be the main problem, as the younger girl usually spent a long time reading before turning her light off, often only doing so after Scarlett had nodded off. She didn’t know how long she was going to have to wait. She lay in bed – having changed into her pyjamas early and after suggesting an early night – yawning, going on and on about how tired she was in the hope that some of it would subliminally rub off on to her sister – and waited.

Juliette read.

Lying in the semi-darkness, Scarlett had been worried that she might fall asleep after all, wake up to the bright sunshine and stifling heat of the non-air-conditioned room as she had done every other day; but in fact she felt fizzy with excitement at what she was planning to do.

She lay still with her eyes closed and thought of Nico, thought about kissing him and what it would feel like. She constructed an elaborate fantasy around him asking her to marry him, and how she couldn’t tell her father and so she just eloped, pretended to be sixteen or eighteen or whatever the legal age for marriage was here in Greece… and she moved into Nico’s apartment with him. Long hours spent together, lying in bed.

He was going to be her first. She had made that decision the same way she had made the decision to sneak out once Juliette was asleep – quite simply, really. She’d thought about it and thought about it all the way to there being no possible alternative. She wanted him, and she could already tell from the way he had looked at her, the way he’d smiled all the way up to his eyes, the way he’d tucked that strand of hair behind her ear with a hand that might just have been trembling with the force of his feelings for her, that he wanted her just as much.

He was a boy, after all, so probably even more.

She thought a lot about how it would feel and wondered if it would hurt. And whether her parents would be able to tell. She thought about where she was going to get a condom, in case he didn’t have one. Of course she couldn’t get one herself. He would have one, or she would send him off to a bar or pub and make him get one from the toilets. She wouldn’t do it without, of course.

If her father found out – any of this, anything at all – she was dead. And of course, if she ended up pregnant, then he would find out. Her only chance was to not get pregnant.

Nico. His dark eyes, his smile… she wondered about his family, where they were. If he was working to support them – working to keep them fed because something prevented them working themselves. Or he might be an orphan, someone who had struggled all the time he’d been growing up, living on his wits, taking whatever job came along.

When they were married Scarlett would get a good job, as a translator or something like that – or she would be manager of a fashion shop in the market square, selling silks and furs to the tourists and telling them how fabulous they looked. Or she would write articles about being young and married and living in a foreign country, and sell them to the newspapers and magazines back in the UK. And her parents would read the articles and regret their behaviour towards her – and Cerys would read them and be insanely jealous of her new life with her handsome, gentle, caring husband.

Juliette moved, stretched out an arm,
finally
turned out the bedside light. Scarlett, her back to her in the twin bed, held her breath and waited, listening to Juliette’s breathing.

Now it was dark she realised how tired she was. Tired, and yet excited, so excited. It might happen tonight, after all, even though part of her was resolved to go no further than a kiss. Why rush? If he wanted her, if he wanted to be with her, he would wait. That was what she believed to be true: that her virginity was special and precious and not to be given to just anyone.

That was what her dad always said, wasn’t it?

Nico wasn’t just anyone. He was The One. She’d known him barely two days, talked to him for less than two hours, and yet she was as certain of it as she’d ever been about anything in her whole life. He would be the one to rescue her, to save her from the humiliating restrictions placed on her by her parents. In the darkness, her face turned to the blank white wall, she smiled and hugged herself.

Well, then. She would kiss him. That much was decided. She would see how she felt after that. What if he put his hands on her? The thought of that made her stop for a moment and reconsider. For that was what it was, after all. That was where it started. He would want to touch her. And he would probably want her to touch him. That was the middle ground between a kiss and having sex, the ‘sexual contact’ made famous by the lie detector tests on
The Jeremy Kyle Show
.

She knew all about that.

Could she do it, with him? Could she actually bring herself to do something like that, through choice?

Wait and see
, she thought.
Wait and see how it goes.

Juliette was breathing deeply. She gave it another five minutes, counting down the snail’s pace minutes on the fluorescent minute hand on her wristwatch, and then, slowly, quietly, sat up and turned to look at her sister.

The breathing was regular, deep, the merest hint of a snore catching at the edges of it.

‘Juliette?’ she whispered.

No response, the breathing the same.

Right, then.
 

She stood up slowly, making sure the mattress didn’t creak beneath her, crept across the room to the bathroom, and shut the door carefully behind her. She had put some clothes into a fabric bag on the hook of the bathroom door, a cover story ready-prepared about it being full of laundry if Juliette asked – which she hadn’t. She got dressed in the dark, put her nightshirt into the bag and opened the door with infinite care. From the bed, she could hear Juliette’s breathing, unchanged.

The most dangerous part of the enterprise: opening the sliding patio door, and closing it behind her. She had no idea if her parents would still be up – they might be sitting on the patio next door, drinking beer or wine or whatever. The door always made a noise as it opened. If she was caught, she would say she wanted to go for a walk, didn’t want to disturb her sister – that it was too hot in the room, and she didn’t want to just open the door because if she’d gone back to bed she might have fallen asleep with the door open and they might have been burgled or robbed or murdered in their beds.

Nobody was there. The patio was empty. The bedroom next door was in darkness, the door closed, the air-conditioning unit on the roof humming.

Out here, the noise of the cicadas and the crickets buzzing and drilling was almost deafening. Sandals in hand, she skipped through the shadows to the gate which led to the road and the shops and the market square beyond. When she got out of earshot, she pulled her sandals on and skittered down the road, tugging her skirt a little lower.

It was so busy! She hadn’t expected that. So many people, so many drunk people – and the bars all noisy with a constant thud-thud of the Euro-pop beat that was everywhere. People staggering around her, seemingly oblivious – and pushing into her, knocking her off balance. Blokes shouting and swearing at each other, beer bottles being dropped, swung around, girls with their arms around each other for support or sitting in the gutter. One girl puking, on her side, on the ground, and then a distant wail of some kind of emergency vehicle heading towards them.

The darkness was disorientating. It was like a negative image of the town in the daytime, the tourist shops mostly closed and in darkness, the bars and restaurants lit up with neon of every colour, flashing.

She had gone too far, skirted the market square somehow, because suddenly there was the Pirate Bay, transformed into a nightclub, the terrace outside heaving with people drinking and smoking and shouting to make themselves heard above the crashing beat.

How was she going to find him with all these people?

She pushed her way to the bar, conscious of her height and all these people and the fact that she was on her own. How was anyone going to believe she was eighteen? Behind the bar was a big Greek man along with all the other young bar staff who were dashing between customers, serving up beers and mixers and pitchers full of cocktails. He was sitting on a bar stool at the end, smoking a cigarette and with a newspaper spread out over his enormous thighs. This must be Nico’s boss – what was his name? Began with a V… Maybe Nico came on here after the pizza restaurant closed.

‘Hey, Vasilis!’ someone called out, and when the man looked up and raised his hand in an acknowledging wave Scarlett made a decision and approached him.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, and then louder when the man did not apparently hear her, ‘Excuse me! Vasilis!’

He looked at her with displeasure and then surprise and then amusement.

‘Can you tell me where I can find Nico?’

‘Who you want?’

‘Nico. He works here.’

‘I have no Nico work here.’

‘Oh. Well – I don’t know…’

One of the other bar staff shouted something across to him in Greek and laughed, and Vasilis laughed, and said, ‘I know who you look for. He is at Leonardo.’

‘Leonardo?’

‘Is in the centre. He work there on Tuesdays.’

‘You mean the pizza place?’

‘Yes, yes. Pizza.’ He laughed, showing four yellow teeth.

The restaurant must stay open late, then. The Pirate Bay was about a hundred metres from the market square, she realised, navigating through the crowds of people. She was scared. All around her, men and women who were older and taller, and all of them drunk and loud, were pressing against her. A hand went round her middle and grabbed clumsily at her breast, and she shrieked and pulled away and looked round to see nobody in particular. Nobody looking at her, or paying her any attention.

And then suddenly the road opened up and she was in the market square, the fountain in the centre, and hordes of people milling about. There were police officers, she noticed, or at least she assumed that was what they were – uniformed officers standing around the edges of the square, watching everyone.

She made her way to the pizza place where they’d eaten earlier. Chairs were stacked on tables and a young woman was wiping a mop up and down the tiled floor.

‘Excuse me,’ Scarlett said, and, as she had done with Vasilis, she had to ramp the volume up just to make herself heard. ‘Excuse me!’

The young woman stopped mopping and looked up. ‘We are closed,’ she said.

‘I’m looking for Nico,’ Scarlett said.

‘Who? Who you look for?’

‘Nico. The guy who hands out the flyers?’

But the woman just gave an exaggerated shrug and shook her head, and repeated, ‘We are closed.’

Scarlett felt her eyes prickle. She walked away, but, turning back to the market square with all the streets leading off it, she couldn’t remember which one had brought her here. She walked around the perimeter looking for a landmark she recognised, but all the bars and tourist shops – some of them open, here – looked the same. She wondered about asking one of the uniformed officers for help – but what would they do? They might take her back to the apartment and insist on waking up her father and telling him where they had found her.

The only thing to do was to stand up straight and lift her head and act as if she was eighteen and enjoying herself. Blend in. She was used to that, after all, trying to blend in.

But, as she headed away from the market square down a road that she wasn’t sure was right because it was so full of people that she couldn’t even see the shops, there were tears pouring down her cheeks.

‘Hey, hey!’ A man grabbed at her, pulled her round, a strong grip on her upper arm.