Skios: A Novel (18 page)

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?

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.

32

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.

“We go on?” said Spiros. “Life and death?”

“Wait,” said Oliver.

He was standing transfixed, gazing at the skirt. A horrible thought had come to him. When it said “Annuka Vos” on the label, it couldn’t possibly mean, could it, that this was a suitcase that belonged not to him at all, but to…? Oh, no!

*   *   *

Of course, thought Annuka, as she stood there with the mosquito netting in her arms. Of
course
! This is why the house was full of discarded tangerine knickers! This is why Oliver had had a bad night! This is why he had been thrashing about in bed!

How could she not have seen it at once, at the first glimpse of tangerine? After she had had seven months to learn what he was like!

She flung down the mosquito netting, ran back into the house, and snatched up her phone.

*   *   *

And if, thought Oliver, as he stood there in the middle of the track, his hands full of flowered silk and his head full of gradually dawning implications, if there was a suitcase belonging to Annuka Vos on the island, then possibly there was also—

His phone rang. He looked at the name that had appeared on the screen. Of course. As if hypnotized, he pressed the button and put the phone to his ear.

“The cleaning person!” said the familiar voice. “Yes! That’s me! The cleaning person! I don’t believe this! Even from you! Because it’s so absolutely
typical
! As soon as my back’s turned! And
here,
of all places! You bring her
here
!
I
borrow a place where we can quietly be together for a week!
I
borrow it, not you! Because it
doesn’t
belong to some people
you
know! They’re friends of
mine,
thank you very much! You’ve never even
met
them! And there you are, rolling around their bed with her great fat boobs flopping everywhere in her orange knickers! And before you know where you are you’ve smashed the place to pieces! And then you expect me to clean up after you! And you’re not even here! So where
are
you? And don’t tell me, because I don’t want to know, I don’t
care
where you are! Just so long as it’s not where
I
am! Drop dead, all right? And show your face here if you dare! The cleaning person? Right, then, I’m going to finish the cleaning!”

Oliver had drawn in a good supply of breath for the reasonable and pacifying reply that he would surely find himself uttering as soon as he had thought what it would be, but before he could convert any of it into words the phone had gone dead.

He threw the long silk skirt back onto the track.

“OK?” said Spiros, getting back into the car. “We go fast now?”

“Wait,” said Oliver.

“Wait?”

Oliver was thinking.

33

Georgie tried to go on sunbathing. But the sun was getting low in the sky, and she felt a bit guilty that her nakedness had obviously upset the cleaning person. She pulled the towel around her and went back to the house to put some clothes on. Just as she reached the door, though, it opened, and her clothes came out. They were in her open suitcase, which was being carried by the cleaning person.

“Oh, thank you!” said Georgie. “How sweet of you! And you’ve even folded everything up and put it away for me!”

The cleaning person said nothing, and the clothes marched straight past Georgie without stopping. She turned and watched, still holding the towel around her. The cleaning person was taking the clothes back to the lounger for her to get dressed. No, to the pool … And was tipping them in … was shaking the bag over the water to make sure she had got every last item out of it … was throwing the bag itself into the pool … was wiping her hands on a towel … was turning back to confront Georgie …