Thirty-seven
Kalami Cove Apartments
BB.
BB.
Blackberry Boudoir.
Tess squinted at the screen on Andras’s laptop, the sunlight making it almost impossible to see. Not that seeing mattered when she just about had no idea where to start with this rebrand. She felt it wasn’t now just a case of getting rid of the ill-shaped fruits, she wanted to rip up everything that had gone before and start afresh. She needed to be the one to make this right. Because at work, if not in her personal life, that’s what she did. She put things right.
She glanced away from the computer, turning slightly in her terrace seat, to look into the apartment. Sonya was still asleep and it was no wonder seeing as they didn’t get into bed until gone 3 a.m. There had been so many tears and a Facebook stalk of the woman named Ceri, who Sonya had turned into the Antichrist by 1 a.m. She hated Joey right now. Whether this friend was platonic or not, you didn’t check into four-star hotels with another woman when your almost-fiancée was feeling particularly insecure. Especially when habitually you were a Premier Inn kind of guy.
Sonya stirred, her red hair shifting on the pillow. Her friend had eaten all the baklava bites by herself and drank their whole supply of wine, but Tess had successfully talked her down from sending Ceri a message threatening to hollow out her insides with a crochet hook. Aware of Sonya’s intimate knowledge of all things Hobbycraft, even she was a bit afraid.
She clicked out of the McKenzie Falconer system she had eventually managed to log on to at a geriatric, handicapped snail’s pace and looked at her online banking. And there it was: eleven thousand eight hundred and fifteen pounds. She should feel some sense of achievement. With her apartment to pay for, she had forgone literally everything else to stash away that cash. The designer wear she’d needed to fit in in London was all second-hand from eBay and she had sold her car when she’d moved to the city. She was the career woman faking it on a shoestring, and it was no more than she deserved. But the pot was still thirteen thousand one hundred and eighty-five pounds short. She swallowed the guilty lump that immediately sprang up in her throat. She had thought about paying her parents back in instalments. She had even gone so far as to work out a repayment schedule, but that involved contact, talking about what had happened with Adam, not just leaving a catch-up message on a voicemail. No, it needed to be over in one go. Once she had every penny she would pay it back and hope for a full and final absolution.
She flicked over to Facebook and there was Rachel, her mouth being forced apart by some sort of plastic contraption. A quick scan of the comments told her it was a game called Speak Out. There seemed to be wine involved and four others were tagged in the post including someone called Pete ‘Mudda-Fudda’ Ames. Her sister looked well. Drunk, but well. Perhaps she was finally turning a corner regarding the Phil situation. She hovered over the comments box. Should she say something? Maybe just a smiley face? Or was that stupid? She sighed. Her sister didn’t need her. She was having fun with someone whose nickname was Mudda-Fudda. She clicked back to the fonts she was working on. Still nothing looked right. Maybe she should really take Russell’s advice and do this the old-fashioned way with pencil and paper.
‘Ow! It hurts!’
Tess turned back to Sonya who was moving, barely, one arm emerging from the sheets like a robot with severe battery drain.
‘What hurts?’ Tess asked.
‘Everything.’
‘Your little toe?’
‘What?’
‘Does your little toe hurt?’
There was a hesitation. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘See, things are looking up already.’
There was more groaning as Sonya finally raised her body up from the bed, hands sweeping away a bad case of bed hair. ‘It’s hot again.’
‘Yes, we really need to ask about a fan, regardless of anyone’s feelings about artificial air.’ She swallowed. Perhaps she shouldn’t have made reference to Joey.
‘I don’t expect there’s any artificial air in the rooms at the four-star hotel in Margate.’
‘Listen, Sonya, I really think you should call him now,’ Tess said.
‘What?’ Sonya said, gathering up the sheets around her body and walking out onto the terrace, swaying a little and needing to catch hold of the shutters. ‘But that means you think something is going on with this Ceri.’
‘No, it doesn’t mean I think that.’
‘I looked her up again, you know.’
‘What? When?’ Tess asked as Sonya lowered herself down on to the chair, wrapping the sheets around her like she was fastening a toga.
‘I know you thought I was asleep but … I couldn’t. So I waited for you to fall asleep and then I went through her Facebook profile.’ Sonya drew in a breath. ‘She makes quite a number of her posts public. If I was a concerned friend I would be suggesting she tightens up her security.’
‘But you’re not her friend,’ Tess reminded her. ‘You’re someone who wants to gut her with knitting implements.’
‘She’s a member of the Weston Re-enactment Society.’
‘That’s great!’ Tess exclaimed. ‘That means this is something to do with battles and bludgeoning and not gimp masks or paddles.’
Sonya shook her head vigorously. ‘No, you don’t understand.’ She took a breath. ‘Weston are Greenwich’s arch-rivals.’
‘Re-enactment Societies have rivalries?’ She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
‘Not all of them, but Weston, they’re known for being so showy-offy. They have a massive budget and they put on these outlandish events, you know … If we have musicians playing the traditional penny whistle, they’ll have a guy playing some ancient, only-one-in-the-whole-world Neolithic instrument.’
‘I see.’ She didn’t see. She didn’t get the whole re-enactment thing at all.
‘So the fact that he’s spending time with another woman, and a woman who is part of the Weston Society is just … well, he may as well be wearing a jumper stating his allegiance to Nazism.’
‘Sonya,’ Tess said softly.
‘Yes.’
‘I think you’re losing focus here.’
‘He hates Weston,’ Sonya continued. ‘He calls them the Weston Wan—’
‘OK, listen, stop,’ Tess urged quickly. ‘Let’s just look at the evidence here.’ She wasn’t sure she really wanted to look at the evidence but for some reason she really didn’t want to hear Sonya say the word ‘wankers’.
‘He’s in a four-star hotel in Margate with someone with much nicer hair than me who’s a member of a re-enactment society he loathes. It doesn’t get better, no matter how many different ways you try to look at it,’ Sonya sobbed.
‘We don’t know he spent the night at the hotel,’ Tess stated. She was a genius! And if she found out that Joey had spent the night in that hotel she was going to use more than craft supplies to disembowel him. ‘He’s just met someone at one. For a drink or something.’
‘W-what?’
‘Well, what time did he post?’
‘Eleven fifty-nine p.m.’
‘Greek time or English time?’ Was she clutching at straws?
‘I don’t know. Does Facebook change things to your own time zone?’ She was already starting to look more hopeful.
‘I think it does.’ She didn’t have a clue. ‘So that would mean it was only nine fifty-nine p.m. in England.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re saying,’ Sonya said, playing with the skin on her chest where her necklace should hang.
‘I’m saying this hotel might have a really cool wine bar or something and Joey is there – with other people too, not just Ceri – who aren’t his friends on Facebook so he couldn’t tag them. And it could be something perfectly innocent, like a truce between the two societies. Yes, a picking up of the gauntlet rather than a throwing down. And then he’s gone back home, or to his room, completely alone.’
Had that sounded plausible? She just felt she needed to nurse Sonya along. There wasn’t anything much either of them could do while they were in Greece unless Sonya made a direct effort to contact Joey and have it out with him. Despite what she’d said earlier, she wasn’t sure confrontation on the phone or via WhatsApp was the right course of action now, not when things were so up in the air and the baby factor was weighing on her friend’s mind.
‘Good morning.’
Sonya jumped in the chair, almost losing the sheets. ‘Oh my!’
And there was Andras in the gardens, just outside their terrace, dressed in the black trousers and white shirt that was his restaurant day ‘uniform’, dark hair perfectly tousled.
‘What are you doing here?’ Tess asked. ‘Don’t tell me you need your laptop back already.’
‘No.’ He shook his head.
‘We were going to meet this afternoon, weren’t we?’ Sonya added.
‘We were,’ he agreed. ‘But, if you would like, we can spend the whole day in Paleokastritsa.’
Tess observed his stance. He looked agitated, his hands by his sides but as if not knowing what to do with them. ‘I thought you had the restaurant to take care of.’
He nodded. ‘I decided to take a day off.’
‘A day off,’ Tess stated bluntly. ‘Just like that.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you don’t take days off,’ she said. ‘You told me you haven’t had a day off since—’
‘Tess,’ Andras interrupted. ‘I am offering my services as a guide man for the day to thank you for putting up with my family last night. If you do not want this then …’
‘Oh no!’ Sonya exclaimed, standing up and catching the sheets under her armpits. ‘Oh no, we do want it, don’t we, Tess?’
Tess turned in her seat to look at Sonya trying to stop herself revealing too much skin as she waddled towards the apartment doors. ‘Are you sure, Sonya? Because if you want to just hang out here and, you know, relax and think about things, then …’
‘No,’ Sonya said with a determined shake of her head. ‘I don’t want to think about things.’ She sighed. ‘I spent all night thinking about things. Today I want to do things. I want to see things. Lots of Greek things.’
‘OK then,’ Tess answered.
‘I’ll just get dressed. I’ll be two ticks,’ Sonya said, moving into the apartment and closing the shutters behind her.
Tess looked back to Andras, still behind the metal fence. ‘I think you’d better come over here and tell me what happened with your mother this morning.’
He shook his head. ‘It is that obvious?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Well, to talk about that will require more than the coffee you are drinking.’
‘Sonya drank all our wine.’
‘And I will be driving us.’ He reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a set of keys, shaking them at Tess.
‘Your car is working again?’
‘No,’ he answered. ‘I have Spiro’s.
‘It is a car, isn’t it? Not a moped,’ Tess checked.
He grinned. ‘Yes, it is a car.’ Putting two hands on the fence, he vaulted himself over and landed next to Tess’s chair like he was Louis Smith dismounting from a pommel horse. Snatching up her coffee mug he took a sip of it, then quickly put it down. ‘You have far too much sugar.’
‘I’m going to be needing much more if you and I are going to last until this wedding.’
He smiled, sitting down on the chair next to her. ‘It is a trial, isn’t it? All this being nice to one another, swimming from boats, visiting beaches and holding hands, dancing close.’
Was it her imagination or had he inched his body slightly closer to hers? Damn, he was hot. And he was making her hot. But Sonya was a couple of very flimsy shutters away …
‘And now my mother thinks you are someone trying to get your hands on my money.’
That was a passion-killer. ‘What?’
He smiled. ‘I will tell you all about it when we get to the other side of the island.’
‘I can’t wait.’