The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
It sounds to me as if she’s getting ready to send me off swimming again. They met while I was, our second morning at the hotel. When I came out of the sea my father had moved his towel next to hers and she was giggling. I watch Spi-nalonga Island float over the horizon like a ship made of rock and grey towers, and hope she’ll think I’m agreeing with her if that means she’ll leave me alone. But she says, “I suppose most boys are morbid at your age. Let’s hope you’ll grow up to be like your father.”
She’s making it sound as if the leper colony is the only place I’ve wanted to visit, but it’s just another old place I can tell my mother I’ve been. Kate doesn’t want to go there because she doesn’t like old places—she said if Knossos was a palace she was glad she’s not a queen. I don’t speak to her again until the bus has stopped by the harbour.
There aren’t many tourists, even in the shops and tavernas lined up along the winding pavement. Greek people who look as if they were born in the sun sit drinking at tables under awnings like stalls in a market. Some priests who I think at first are wearing black hat boxes on their heads march by, and fishermen come up from their boats with octopuses on sticks like big kebabs. The bus turns round in a cloud of dust and petrol fumes while Kate hangs onto my father with one hand and flaps the front of her flowery dress with the other. A boatman stares at the tops of her boobs which make me think of spotted fish and shouts “Spinalonga” with both hands round his mouth.
“We’ve hours yet,” Kate says. “Let’s have a drink. Hugh may even get that ice cream if he’s good. ”
If she’s going to talk about me as though I’m not there I’ll do my best not to be. She and my father sit under an awning and I kick dust on the pavement outside until she says, “Come under, Hugh. We don’t want you with sunstroke.”
I don’t want her pretending she’s my mother, but if I say so I’ll only spoil the day more than she already has. I shuffle to the table next to the one she’s sharing with my father and throw myself on a chair. “Well, Hugh,” she says, “do you want one?”
“No thank you,” I say, even though the thought of an ice cream or a drink starts my mouth trying to drool.
“You can have some of my lager if it ever arrives,” my father says at the top of his voice, and stares hard at some Greeks sitting at a table. “Anyone here a waiter?” he says, lifting his hand to his mouth as if he’s holding a glass.
When all the people at the table smile and raise their glasses and shout cheerily at him, Kate says, “I’ll find someone and then I’m going to the little girls’ room while you men have a talk.”
My father watches her crossing the road and gazes at the doorway of the taverna once she’s gone in. He’s quiet for a while, then he says, “Are you going to be able to say you had a good time?”
I know he wants me to enjoy myself when I’m with him, but I also think what my mother stopped herself from saying to me is true—that he booked the holiday in Greece as a way of scoring off her by taking me somewhere she’d always wanted to go. He stares at the taverna as if he can’t move until I let him, and I say, “I expect so, if we go to the island.”
“That’s my boy. Never give in too easily.” He smiles at me with one side of his face. “You don’t mind if I have some fun as well, do you?”
He’s making it sound as if he wouldn’t have had much fun if it had just been the two of us, and I think that was how he’d started to feel before he met Kate. “It’s your holiday,” I say.
He’s opening his mouth after another long silence when Kate comes out of the taverna with a man carrying two lagers and a lemonada on a tray. “See that you thank her,” my father tells me.
I didn’t ask for lemonada. He said I could have some lager. I say, “Thank you very much” and feel my throat tightening as I gulp the lemonada, because her eyes are saying she’s won.
“That must have been welcome,” she says when I put down the empty glass. “Another? Then I should find yourself something to do. Your father and I may be here for a while.”
“Have a swim,” my father suggests.
“I haven’t brought my cossy.”
“Neither have those boys,” Kate says, pointing at the harbour. “Don’t worry, I’ve seen boys wearing less.”
My father smirks behind his hand, and I can’t bear it. I run to the jetty the boys are diving off, and drop my T-shirt and shorts on it and my sandals on top of them, and dive in.
The water’s cold, but not for long. It’s full of little fish that nibble you if you only float, and it’s clearer than tap water, so you can see down to the pebbles and the fish pretending to be them. I chase fish and swim underwater and almost catch an octopus before it squirms out to sea. Then three Greek boys about my age swim over, and we’re pointing at ourselves and saying our names when I see Kate and my father kissing.
I know their tongues are in each other’s mouths—getting some tongue, the kids at my school call it. I feel like swimming away as far as I can go and never coming back. But Stavros and Stathis and Costas are using their hands to tell me we should see who can swim fastest, so I do that instead. Soon I’ve forgotten my father and Kate, even when we sit on the jetty for a rest before we have more races. It must be hours later when I realise Kate is calling, “Come here a minute.”
The sun isn’t so hot now. It’s reaching under the awning, but she and my father haven’t moved back into the shadow. A boatman shouts “Spinalonga” and points at how low the sun is. I don’t mind swimming with my new friends instead of going to the island, and I’m about to tell my father so when Kate says, “I’ve been telling your dad he should be proud of you. Come and see what I’ve got for you.” They’ve both had a lot to drink. She almost falls across the table as I go to her. Just as I get there I see what she’s going to give me, but it’s too late. She grabs my head with both hands and sticks a kiss on my mouth.
She tastes of old lager. Her mouth is wet and bigger than mine, and when it squirms it makes me think of an octopus. “Mmm mwa,” it says, and then I manage to duck out of her hands, leaving her blinking at me as if her eyes won’t quite work. “Nothing wrong with a bit of loving,” she says. “You’ll find that out when you grow up.”
My father knows I don’t like to be kissed, but he’s frowning at me as if I should have let her. Suddenly I want to get my own back on them in the only way I can think of. “We need to go to the island now.”
“Better go to the loo first,” my father says. “They wouldn’t have one on the island when all their willies had dropped off.”
Kate hoots at that while I’m getting dressed, and I feel as if she’s laughing at the way my ribs show through my skin however much I eat. I stop myself from shivering in case she or my father makes out that’s a reason for us to go back to the hotel. I’m heading for the toilet when my father says, “Watch out you don’t catch anything in there or we’ll have to leave you on the island.”
I know there are all sorts of reasons why my parents split up, but just now this is the only one I can think of—my mother not being able to stand his jokes and how the more she told him to finish the more he would do it, as if he couldn’t stop himself. I run into the toilet, trying not to look at the pedal bin where you have to drop the used paper, and close my eyes once I’ve taken aim.
Is today going to be what I remember about Greece? My mother brought me up to believe that even the sunlight here had magic in it, and I expected to feel the ghosts of legends in all the old places. If there isn’t any magic in the sunlight, I want there to be some in the dark. The thought seems to make the insides of my eyelids darker, and I can smell the drains. I pull the chain and zip myself up, and then I wonder if my father sent me in here so we’ll miss the boat. I nearly break the hook on the door, I'm so desperate to be outside.