My Map of You (34 page)

The
moment Holly stepped out of the air-conditioned cabin and into the warm, early morning air, she knew she'd made the right decision. The heat slipped around her like a welcoming embrace as she made her way down the metal staircase and on to the toasted tarmac below, and she skipped rather than walked over to the waiting shuttle bus. She could feel her senses exploding into life as she breathed in the dusty air and gazed at the distant mountains. There was something so reassuring about the solid, dependable way they were still here, just as she remembered them. She picked up a citrus scent in the air and closed her eyes with pleasure: it was the smell of home.

She had assumed that everyone in London would be baffled at her decision to leave behind the life she'd so painstakingly spent the last few months putting into place, but she couldn't have been more wrong. Ivy had taken her hand and told her to go for it, while Aliana had simply said it was ‘about time, you silly cow'. Holly told them both the same thing: that she could have stayed in London and made her life work, but that she had realised something was missing. Zakynthos had wormed its way under her skin, and she knew the yearning in her heart wouldn't settle unless she came back here.

This was where her family lived, and she wanted to have a life with a dad and a sister, and perhaps even a
slightly reluctant stepmother in time. She wanted to see them every day, watch little Maria grow up and teach her how to sew. She wanted to wake up to that view from the back garden and breathe in the warm, fig-scented air; she wanted to look at herself in the mirror and actually like what she saw. Zakynthos was the only place she had ever been able to do that. And, of course, she did want to make peace with Aidan.

She belonged here, it was as simple as that, and the realisation of that fact, as she stood waiting for her case to trundle out inside the airport, was nothing short of miraculous.

Instead of getting a taxi to her house in Lithakia, Holly asked her chatty Greek driver to head into Zakynthos Town. She was meeting Dennis in the Square for coffee, breakfast and, as he had cryptically texted in clumsy English, a ‘speshall saprise'. As they passed hotels, souvenir shops, restaurants and scrubby fields dotted with olive trees, Holly felt the last of her London tension evaporating. She even laughed out loud when they stopped at a set of traffic lights to let an untethered goat trot haphazardly across the road.

She had thought the prospect of seeing her father again would be a bit daunting, but as they neared the town, all she could sense within herself was excitement. Now that she had arrived, Holly wondered why she'd waited so long. What had she really been so afraid of? Okay, so she was probably about to hear more things about her mother that might cause her some upset, but it was nothing she couldn't handle. Being back here in Zakynthos made her feel stronger, as if the mountains on the horizon were her
personal guardians, and the turtles down on the beach her very own little army of soldiers.

Solomos Square was tucked just one street in from the coast, with a cluster of gardens at one end and a large museum at the other. A statue of the Greek poet Solomos looked down on passers-by from his impressive plinth in the centre, and a number of small coffee vendors were dotted along each edge.

The last time Holly had seen her father he'd been propped up in a hospital bed looking drawn and deathly pale. He'd seemed incredibly small and frail to her then, so it was a nice surprise when he stepped out from the dappled pool of shade underneath one of the square's many trees and enveloped her in a strong embrace.

‘My girl,' he smiled as he stepped back. ‘You are here.' There was a smudge of colour on each of his cheeks as he beamed at her, and Holly noticed the telltale nicks of a recent shave across his jaw. He was wearing a dark blue shirt tucked into canvas shorts, and was clutching a bottle of water. There was a short pause as neither one of them said anything, both awed into silence by the sheer pleasure of seeing each other again. Holly found herself overcome with shyness, as if their long and boisterous chats over the phone hadn't been happening over the past few months. She knew how to talk to this man, but to be confronted with him now, standing strong and tall and proud in front of her, felt quite overwhelming.

Dennis was looking at her with a mixture of what looked to Holly like admiration and trepidation, and she wondered how much of her mother he could recognise in her. It was something that she'd struggled with when she
was young – how little she looked like Jenny. Where she was softy rounded and olive-skinned, her mother was angular and pale. When she was still a small child and before her mother's life nose-dived into alcoholism, Holly had thought of her as the most beautiful woman in the entire world, and it would upset her greatly that she didn't look just the same. Being here, though, in front of Dennis, it was very clear to Holly exactly whose attributes had been the most dominant. Nobody could deny that she was his daughter.

‘Are you ready for your surprise?' he asked her now, still beaming.

‘That depends.' She cocked a playful eyebrow. ‘What is it?'

Dennis boomed with laughter and pointed towards the harbour behind them. ‘We are going on my boat,' he declared. ‘I want to tell you a story, and there is no better place to listen than on the water.'

Holly looked into his eyes, so like her own, and detected a sparkle.

‘Lead the way.'

Dennis Maniatis had always loved women. With a doting mother and five older sisters, he'd grown up surrounded by an abundance of bosoms to be clasped against and relished his position as the golden boy of the family.

Dennis senior, not keen on how precocious and self-involved his teenage son was becoming, started taking him out on the fishing boat every weekend, working him until his hands bled and sweat ran in rivulets down his cheeks. Angry that he was missing the opportunity to
hang around at the beach with his friends, but far too proud to ever let on, the young Dennis gritted his teeth and got on with what he was asked.

In time, he even began to look forward to those long hours out on the water. He and his dad grew closer, and Dennis was absolutely devastated when his father died suddenly from a rare virus that affected his heart.

Despite nearing seventy, his lithe dad had always been fit and healthy, with only a sprinkling of grey over his head and through his beard. He'd always seemed invincible, and his death threw Dennis into a dark depression. It hurt him to see his mother so upset too. She was far younger than her late husband, but Maria Maniatis continued to shroud herself in the traditional black and seemed to almost turn herself inside out with grief. Dennis watched, with increasing despair, as his once vibrant and lively mother seemed to shrink and fade in front of him. His sisters did their best to rally round, but Dennis was the man of the family now and he took that position very seriously indeed.

As his friends drank beer on the beach and romanced holidaymakers over the summer, the nineteen-year-old Dennis borrowed enough money from his mother's two brothers to buy a small plot of land in Laganas and built a small restaurant. His friends mocked him, his mother fretted about him and the other bar owners in the area openly laughed at his modern ideas, but by the end of his first season, Dennis had paid back almost half of the capital his uncles had lent him.

He was a fair boss and he worked tirelessly at his little beachside taverna, arriving at 7 a.m. to rake the sand and
set out the loungers and leaving long after midnight every night. On Sundays, he left his oldest sister in charge for the day and took his father's boat out just as the sun was rising. There he would sit, listening to the waves lapping gently against the keel and smoking cigarette after cigarette – his only real vice alongside the odd glass of whisky. During the winter months, when the island was free of tourists and the rain lashed against the mountains, Dennis would allow himself time off. He and his friends went on hunting trips and played poker through until the early hours. He also loved to read, and would spend whole days lost in another world. His English was steadily improving thanks to summers spent in the company of holidaymakers, and he pushed his level of understanding up a notch by picking up novels written in English. There was always an abundance of them left in hotels over the summer months, so he never ran out of options.

Dennis' love and admiration for women had never left him, but he often found himself quickly disillusioned when it came to relationships. Greek girls wanted to marry him and English girls wanted to use him to satisfy their own curiosity. He had no problem with being someone's holiday romance, but after a few years even the consistent stream of meaningless sex began to bore him. He wanted to fall in love with someone as deeply as his parents had fallen for one another, and eventually promised himself that if he couldn't have that, then he would have nothing.

The first time he'd set eyes on Sandra Wright had been on a nondescript Tuesday afternoon in April 1984. He was at the restaurant, balanced at the very top of a rather
rickety wooden ladder, repainting the sign in preparation for the start of the season in a few weeks' time. There was barely a soul in sight, so he'd spotted her coming from quite a way off. He found himself drawn to the way she moved with such fluidity, her long hair blowing round her shoulders and a wide smile on her face. She appeared to Dennis to be simply smiling at the view, and she stopped every now and again to pick things up off the sand by her bare feet. By the time she neared the bottom of his ladder, he was utterly entranced by her.

‘Yassou,'
she said, coming to a halt behind his hairy calves.

‘You speak Greek?' he asked, turning to face her. She was wearing a rather tatty-looking white vest and a red sarong was knotted at her waist.

‘Oh God, no!' She laughed at him, flashing small, neat teeth. ‘Just the basics, really. I'm hoping to learn.'

The Dennis of old, who had female tourists eating out of his hand in mere minutes, would have shimmied slowly down the ladder and offered to teach her himself, but something about this girl made him feel uncharacteristically nervous.

‘Is this your first time in Zakynthos?' he asked instead, putting his still-wet paintbrush carefully on the edge of the open pot.

She shook her head, causing those brown shiny locks to fall excitingly round her shoulders. Dennis fought an overwhelming urge to step down and run his hands through them.

‘I came here with my mum and dad when I was a little girl,' she told him, fiddling absent-mindedly with a shell
that she'd picked up. ‘We came every summer for many years.'

‘Are they here with you now?' he said, thinking privately that if he had a daughter who looked like her there would be no way on earth that he'd ever let her out of his sight.

She shook her head again. ‘They died.'

Dennis clambered down the ladder so he could look her in the eye. ‘I'm so sorry,' he told her sincerely. ‘My own father died, so I know how it is to feel such pain.' For a few uncomfortable seconds he had to blink away unexpected tears, and when he looked up again she was smiling at him, a misty glow of pity detectable in her eyes.

They chatted for a while about their remaining families – his mother and sisters and her twin sister, who she told him was called Jenny and who was travelling in the Far East – and he told her about his business and his love for fishing.

‘I used to love going fishing!' she exclaimed, suddenly animated. ‘I used to go with my dad.'

‘It is the same for me,' he smiled, thinking to himself right then that Fate himself must be alive and well, because surely he had led this angel here to him.

‘I can take you fishing,' he offered. ‘Every Sunday I go. I have a boat.'

This seemed to thrill her and she nodded her head enthusiastically, rushing out lots of ‘are you sure's and ‘only if it's not too much trouble's. By the time she finally headed off in the direction of Kalamaki with a promise to meet him back at this spot at 6 a.m. on Sunday, Dennis was pretty convinced that he'd just fallen in love at first
sight. He thought about little else than his mysterious English angel for the rest of the week.

When Sunday morning arrived, he drove to the beach via the bakery and picked them up some breakfast, his hands shaking slightly as he wrapped up the pastries in paper and set them carefully in a picnic basket he'd found at his sister's house. The sun was rising as he strolled along the sand to find Sandra waiting there, a straw hat shielding her eyes from the sunlight and a bag of similar breakfast goods clasped in her hand. From that shared moment of laughter, the day passed in a blur of fun, happiness and excitement, and Dennis found himself falling harder and harder for her. She was so easy to be with, so full of kindness and so sweet in nature: it was as if his subconscious had created the perfect girl and now she'd come to life, brighter and better and more beautiful than he would ever have believed possible. By the time the sun was heading south and they were sitting with their bare feet up on the edge of his boat, a bottle of slightly warm beer in each of their hands and a bucket of fish between their chairs, Dennis was telling Sandra that he hadn't felt this happy since before his dad died – and it was the absolute truth.