My Map of You (13 page)

She knew that her mum had got pregnant with her at the age of twenty, which seemed ludicrously young by today's standards. She was about to turn thirty and she still didn't feel like an adult. Perhaps it was because she'd been forced to look after herself from such a young age. Now that she finally had a bit of security again, she was at last beginning to enjoy life.

But are you
really
happy?
a small voice whispered.
Is your life in London with Rupert what you really want?
For some reason, as soon as she started to think about Rupert, Aidan popped into her head. Aidan, with his tatty clothes, messy hair and singsong Irish accent. Holly wondered what he was doing here. Why had he chosen Zakynthos as his
home? He'd mentioned that his mum used to live here, but there must be a deeper reason. Holly vowed to find out on their trip the next day.

The thought of spending so much time with him was starting to make her feel nervous, but it was a nice feeling at the same time. She and Rupert had got into such a routine, and she'd found herself cherishing the predictability of their relationship. Now, however, she was being reminded what it felt like to have that buzz you get when you first meet someone. All the uncertainty and excitement bubbling away whenever you know you're going to see them. There was something about Aidan that made her feel excited, but it was almost more to do with who she was when she was near him than the man himself. She didn't feel as if she had to be anything other than herself, and it had been a very long time since she'd allowed that side of her to take over from the cautious, more guarded Holly Wright.

A waiter scurried over and swept up her empty plate, and as she headed to the till to settle the bill, Holly reached into the freezer and grabbed herself a chocolate ice cream. Little Maria wasn't the only girl in this place with a sweet tooth. Tearing off the wrapper and stepping back out into the sun, Holly headed back down the stone steps towards the sea below. She was in paradise; it was a fact. Whatever had happened to make her mum leave this place behind, it must have been pretty bad.

Choosing
what to wear for her first day out with Aidan was proving to be far more difficult than it should, Holly decided, as she hurled a dress across the room in frustration.

She was also already feeling irrationally annoyed at the man himself for not telling her what time they were setting off, so she had no idea if he was about to bang on the door and find her standing uselessly in the middle of a heap of clothes.

It was 7.30 a.m., and the sun was still low in the sky. A pleasant morning light was snaking its way slowly across the tiled floor, and Holly forced herself to take three deep breaths as she watched it. During her sessions with Joy the counsellor, she'd been taught about the calming benefits of slow and measured breathing. Apparently most human beings never breathed properly, only taking the air in as far as the level of their shoulders before exhaling, when you were actually supposed to take it right down into your stomach. That was all well and good, the grief-stricken and grumpy Holly had rudely pointed out at the time, but who the hell had time for that?

She remembered her first date with Rupert all those months ago, how nervous she'd been and how many dresses, trousers, blouses, skirts and different sets of underwear she'd tried on in preparation. Of course, it
hadn't mattered what she wore in the end, because he'd taken her straight out to buy a new dress and then insisted she put it on right away. It had been such a perfect day.

Cheered slightly by the reminder that she already had a lovely man in her life and so shouldn't be worrying this much about a new one, Holly pulled out her cut-off jeans and fed one of Sandra's old patterned scarves through the belt loops. She fished a plain white vest out of the heap on the bed and pulled it on over her bikini top. That would have to do, she told herself stubbornly. It wasn't like she was trying to impress Aidan, anyway.

The sound of barking came just before a knock at the front door.

‘Ready to go exploring?' Aidan said as she opened the door. Today he was wearing black shorts, frayed espadrilles, a navy blue T-shirt and a grin almost as large as Phelan's, who was sitting panting by his feet.

‘Sure,' she flashed him a shy smile. ‘I'll just get my bag.'

Aidan peered over the threshold as she gathered her stuff from the table. Away from her ordered London life, Holly had slipped back into her old untidy ways, and there were ripped up bits of material littering the floor.

‘Been busy?' Aidan held up the remains of a particularly garish sarong.

Holly flushed an even darker shade of red than the tatters in his hand. ‘I like sewing,' she told him, wondering why she'd suddenly started speaking like an inarticulate moron.

‘Right.' He dropped it back on the floor. Phelan had been sniffing around underneath the table and was now happily chewing on the underwire of a very large flesh-coloured bra.

‘Phelan! Drop it! Leave it!'

‘Oh, don't worry,' Holly was whooping with laughter now like a mad hen. ‘It's not mine.'

Aidan's eyes flickered straight to her own, far less ample chest, and she folded her arms self-consciously. Was she imagining it, or was he the one blushing now?

‘I like what you've done with the place,' he told her, motioning to the new tablecloth. Holly had created it from the remains of Sandra's cotton dressing gown and some lace doilies she'd found in a kitchen cupboard. She'd also finished the patchwork wall hanging the previous evening and hung it up by the back doors where it did, as she had predicted, look stunning in the daylight.

‘I just thought it would help the place to look more like a home,' she said. ‘I'm selling it, so I need it to look nice for potential buyers.'

Aidan raised his eyebrows at this, but didn't comment. Instead, he asked if he could nip to the loo before they set off. ‘Don't worry,' he joked as he headed up the stairs. ‘I won't flush any paper!'

‘Oh, ha ha,' retorted Holly, but she was smiling.

Phelan leapt around their legs in excitement as they headed out along the path to where Aidan's jeep was parked. It was covered in a thick coating of dust on the outside, but Holly discovered that it was impressively clean on the inside. A faint smell of antiseptic greeted her as she opened the door, and there was a tartan blanket covered in red-gold dog hair spread across the back seat. Phelan clambered in happily and stuck his glossy head out of the window, dribbling a trail of saliva through the grime on the door.

Holly buckled up and dumped her bag on the floor. She had already switched her phone over to silent in case Rupert called. She'd played the perfect girlfriend yesterday evening and spoken to him for a full hour after she got back from Porto Limnionas. He was missing her like mad, he'd told her. She was never to go away without him again, apparently. He'd actually sounded genuinely interested when she'd told him about what she'd seen on the island, obviously omitting all the stories Annie had told her about her aunt. Talking about Sandra would inevitably lead to the subject of her mum, and Rupert had no idea what had really happened to Jenny Wright. But thankfully, he hadn't mentioned Sandra at all. She wondered if it was because he could sense that she didn't want to talk about it, or because he just wasn't that interested.

‘Have you eaten breakfast?' Aidan was staring at her, his hands on the steering wheel.

‘Yes. I mean no. I mean yes.' Holly gave up. Talking coherently was clearly something she was unable to do around this man.

‘Righto,' he replied cheerfully. ‘I think I know where I'll take you first, then. We'll grab a bite and then try to track down a few of those places on Sandy's map. What was it again, field that smells of shite?'

Holly giggled and wound down the window as he started the engine, breathing in the sweet aroma from the surrounding fig trees. As Aidan wrestled with the gear stick and turned the jeep round to face downhill, his bare knee brushed against Holly's and she felt a bolt of electricity shoot into her chest. She really needed to get a grip.

They set off in a northerly direction, and for the first
ten minutes neither of them spoke. Holly was content just to sit and take in the view and Aidan didn't seem to be bothered by the silence. Phelan eventually curled up on the back seat and put his silky head on his paws, looking up at each of them in turn from under his eyelashes.

There were a few more clouds around today, but they simply served to make the skyline look all the more dramatic. After following a coastal road for a few miles, Aidan turned the jeep inland and soon the roads started to get steeper. Holly took advantage of his concentration to study him surreptitiously. She liked the way his hands looked as they gripped the wheel and the way the muscles in his forearms rippled as they rounded a corner. Despite the wind rushing in through the open windows, she felt an overwhelming need to start fanning herself with the folded map.

‘So, Holly,' he finally turned briefly to face her. ‘What is it that you do, back in … Where are you from?'

‘Well, I live in London,' she told him. She wasn't really ‘from' anywhere. ‘In Dalston, which isn't far from Hackney – do you know it?'

‘Nah, sorry,' Aidan grinned at her. ‘I've never really fancied London. I grew up in the countryside and then spent years on the go. I think a big city would scare me.'

Holly thought privately that nothing much could possibly scare a man as big and confident as Aidan, but instead she said, ‘I work for a website that sells clothes. It's called Flash.'

‘Flash?' Aidan failed to hold in his laugh. ‘Are you for real?'

‘I know,' she laughed too. ‘It is probably the most naff name in the world, but there are worse places to work.'

‘I always wanted to be a vet, right from when I was a little boy,' he continued. There was a stooped, ancient-looking man up ahead herding a load of goats across the road, and Aidan stopped to let them pass. ‘I found a lamb once, when I was about six or seven. The poor little thing was tangled up in this barbed wire fence and I couldn't get him out. He was struggling and bleeding and it was miles from anywhere.'

Aidan paused to shout something cheerful in Greek to the man with the goats, before putting the jeep into gear and looking again at Holly.

‘What happened to the lamb?' she asked, a certain amount of trepidation in her voice.

‘He died,' Aidan told her simply, smiling at Holly's gasp of horror. ‘I ran the three miles back to the farm and all the old bastard farmer did was drive out there with his rifle and shoot the poor bugger.'

‘That must have been a bit traumatic,' Holly said.

‘Well, I never forgot it,' he admitted. ‘I thought to myself that day, “I'm going to learn how to look after animals so that next time this happens, I'll be able to help”.'

‘I still don't really know what I want to do,' Holly told him, not realising what she was saying until the words had left her mouth.

‘Well, that's easy.' He rested an elbow on the jeep door. ‘What are you passionate about?'

‘I like sewing,' she told him in a small voice.

‘So do that.'

‘It's not that easy, though, is it?' she said. ‘I can't just sew stuff.'

‘Why not?'

God, he was so infuriating.

‘Because London is an expensive place to live.'

‘Surely all those top designers, you know, Dulchy and Gaffney or whoever, surely they all need people to sew for them. Or better still – why don't you become one of them and design the stuff as well?' He was actually being serious, Holly realised.

‘I should just become Dolce and Gabbana?' she enquired. ‘Start speaking Italian and charge thousands of pounds for socks?'

‘Would have to be some socks,' Aidan laughed. ‘But seriously, you should do what makes you happy.'

Absurdly, Holly felt tears gathering in her eyes. Turning away from him, she wound the window back up and surreptitiously wiped her eyes on her bare arm. If Aidan noticed anything, he didn't comment, instead smoothly changing the subject by pointing to a tiny, dilapidated church that was on the left up ahead.

‘My mam got married there,' he said as they passed.

‘Oh?' Holly made an interested sound.

‘It didn't last. The marriage, I mean.' He shrugged at Holly's expression. ‘Only a matter of months. My mam never was very good at the whole relationship thing. I'm actually amazed that she seems to be making the latest one last. If I was a betting man I'd have given it no more than a few months.'

Holly didn't know what to say; she was suddenly uncomfortable with how much Aidan was telling her.

‘Sorry,' he turned to her. ‘I didn't mean to kill the mood, like. As you can probably tell, my mam and I aren't the closest.'

‘Don't be sorry,' Holly was mortified. ‘It's not like I can say anything about not having the best relationship with your mother.'

‘What about your Auntie Sandra?'

It was an innocent enough question, but Holly felt herself start to clam up.

‘I'm sad that I didn't know her better,' she said carefully. ‘I get the impression that we're quite similar – I mean, that she would have been like me.'

‘Well, she did like to sew,' Aidan agreed. ‘And you do look like her sometimes, just the way you hold yourself. It reminds me of her.'

Had he been studying her that closely?

‘I didn't even know that my mum and her were twins until this week,' she blurted. ‘I haven't even seen a photo of Sandra yet, either.'

‘Really?' He sounded shocked at that. ‘There must be some in the house, aren't there?'

‘Not that I've found,' Holly told him. ‘I was expecting there to be more, you know, letters and stuff, but I haven't found anything.'

Aidan was quiet for a few seconds as he concentrated on steering them round a particularly narrow bend. The stone walls on either side of the jeep were only a foot or so away, and Holly reflexively squeezed her shoulders together as they passed through the lane.

‘We're not far now,' he told her. Ahead Holly could see what looked like a small village. There were windmills visible on the hillside above them and what appeared to be a circular stone tower nestled between low white houses.

‘This is Volimes,' he said, slowing right down as they
passed a cluster of squat buildings. ‘I'm not sure if it's marked on your map there, but it's somewhere I like to come, so I thought I'd show it to you.'

They drove into a small square and Aidan parked in the shade of a large tree. Phelan whined with excitement and pawed at the door as he waited to be let out, then promptly lifted his leg on a nearby patch of grass. The square was deserted save for one old man who was standing by some makeshift stalls. From where they were parked, Holly could see a variety of pots in all shapes, sizes and colours, plus a heap of rugs and some neatly packaged bags of wild herbs.