The Orpheus Descent (7 page)

‘Trying to put yourself to sleep?’ Richard stood in the office doorway. ‘That’s confidential, you know.’

‘Just seeing what Lily’s been up to.’ Jonah closed the book and pushed it away. ‘There’s a page missing.’

Richard’s face froze. ‘Really?’

‘Just so you don’t think I stole it.’

‘Too paranoid.’ Richard jangled the car keys at him. ‘Let’s go and find Lily.’

Back at the hotel, the marina was coming to life as the shadows lengthened. Children kicked a football in the road using dumpsters for goals; nut-brown men in Speedos hosed off their yachts. Jonah went straight up to the room. He wanted the day to end, the day that had begun in Berlin and ended on the shore of the Mediterranean. He wanted to see Lily, to touch her and fall asleep and wake up with her beside him. It wasn’t complicated.

The room was unlocked. The tension inside him began to dissolve. ‘Lily?’ he called. He pushed open the door.

The room was empty, so empty it took him a moment to really process it. No Lily – no anything. The clothes on the chair, the alarm clock, the shoes and the laptop – all gone. New towels lay folded on the freshly made bed. As if she’d never existed.

He checked the number on the door to make sure it was the right room. He slid open the cupboards. Empty. Ditto the bedside drawers, ditto the bathroom. When he pulled open the shutters, the red towel and bikini had gone from the balcony rail.

He swivelled around slowly. Or perhaps the room turned, and he simply took it in. His legs had turned to wax. In the pool, a girl shrieked. He sat down on the bed.

Water gleamed on the tile floor next to the bedside table. The water from the glass he’d knocked over while he slept. This was definitely the room.

The phone vibrated against his thigh as if he’d been stabbed in the leg. He snatched it out of his pocket and read the message that had arrived.

Family emergency – had to dash home. So sorry I missed you. Will explain later.

He read through it again, trying to understand. But that wasn’t possible – it made no sense. Why hadn’t she called? He dialled her number, his sweaty fingers fumbling the phone.

Once again, it rang into infinity. The flat monotone of the continental phone system, not the homely
ring-ring
of home. At least she was still in the country. Perhaps she was driving, or couldn’t answer.

He hung up and punched out an urgent message.

Are you OK? Where are you? What’s going on?

The ten minutes that passed were some of the longest of his life. Then:

Mum had another fall. I need to be with her. Low on battery. Will call when I get to London.

He fell back on the bed and watched the ceiling fan spin.
When I get to London
? He’d driven almost twenty-four hours to reach her, and now she was flying to London? Without seeing him.

‘So why the hell am I in Italy?’ he said to the room.

He sat up and went out onto the balcony. Below, children were splashing and fighting in the pool, while their parents lay on their sunloungers with their phones and cigarettes. And among the tanned bodies, a pair of hideously white legs in beige shorts, sticking out from the shade of a sun umbrella.

Jonah ran downstairs and out to the pool. Richard was sitting up, a novel tented open on his lap and a phone in his hand. He slipped the phone in his pocket and looked at Jonah from behind a pair of oversize sunglasses.

‘I was just coming to find you. I got a message from Lily.’

‘So did I,’ said Jonah. ‘She’s gone.’

‘Rather short notice.’

Short notice
? She knew he was coming today. She must have known he’d arrived: she couldn’t have missed the van parked outside. So why didn’t she find him before she left? All she had to do was call.

‘Did she say what it was? Richard asked.

‘Her mum had another fall.’ Two years earlier, Lily’s mother had fallen on the stairs and broken her hip. The leg had recovered, but not her confidence: she lived in terror that it would happen again.

But Lily’s sister lived virtually next door. Couldn’t she have looked after her mother? Why the race to be home?

He should call her family and find out what was going on. But first …

‘Where’s the nearest airport?’

‘We usually use Bari. Naples and Brindisi are a similar distance.’

The hotel’s wi-fi reached the pool terrace. Jonah used his phone to connect and started searching for flights. Precious minutes passed: the internet crawled along as if somewhere down the line, someone was laboriously hand-writing every word.

‘What time is it now?’ he asked Richard, not looking up.

‘Nearly five thirty.’

The last flight was at ten to nine. ‘How far to the airports?’

‘They’re all about three hours away.’

Jonah swore. Richard took the phone from him and read the flight times off the screen.

‘You’ll never make it – not on a Friday night. Looks like you’re stuck with us. Unless you’re thinking of driving back?’

Jonah put his hand in his pocket and felt the van keys. For a moment, he really considered it. If it would have got him to Lily sooner, he’d have been behind the wheel that instant, even though the thought of twenty-four hours more driving made him sick.

But it wouldn’t gain him any time. There was an early flight next morning: he could be in London for lunch, about the time the van would be crossing the Alps if he drove.

‘I’m sure it’ll all work out,’ Richard said. ‘Just one of those things. We meet for supper on the terrace at eight – you’re welcome to join us.’

He stood up, then remembered he was still holding Jonah’s phone. He stretched out his hand to give it back.

With a slap of wet feet, a small girl in a frilly swimsuit came racing around the pool, chased by her big brother. Richard jerked out of the way, slipped on the wet stones and threw out his arms to balance.

‘
Shit.
’

Jonah’s phone flew out of Richard’s hand. Jonah lunged towards it, but it was too far and he was too late. It dropped into the water with a splash. Tiny bubbles popped out of the case as it sank towards the pool floor.

Jonah grabbed Richard’s arm. ‘What the—?’

‘I’m so sorry.’

Behind sunglasses and newspapers, every pair of eyes around the pool was watching them. A boy duck-dived to the bottom and surfaced with the phone. He handed it up to Jonah, then kicked away in a plume of spray. Jonah stared at the dead slab of metal and glass in his palm.

‘Don’t try turning it on,’ Richard warned. ‘You need to let it dry out.’

Jonah’s look would have turned Richard to stone, if he’d had the power.

At five to eight there was a knock on his door. Jonah groaned and didn’t answer. He didn’t want to go to dinner. He didn’t want to see anyone. He hadn’t moved since he came back from the pool, his thoughts racing the same circles until they blurred into static. Not thinking or feeling, not asleep and not awake, just
being
. The only sensation was a vague nausea, like the hum of a light that was about to pop.

His arms were cramped from so much driving. He stretched out to the end of the bed, curling his fingers around the end of the mattress.

And felt something. A book, fallen between the mattress and the wall. She must have missed it when she packed. He could imagine her reading it in bed, up too late, slipping it under the pillow and then pushing it down the back of the bed in her sleep. He tugged it out.

The book fell open at the first page. His eye read it automatically.

I went down to the Piraeus, yesterday, with Glaucon …

He flipped back to the cover. Plato’s
Republic
. Not exactly beach reading, he guessed: she must have had it for work.

As the cover flapped open, an inscription on the inside caught his eye.

To Lily—

Love is Truth, Adam

A dull ache, like heartburn, passed through him. It must be an old book: she hadn’t seen Adam in years. He wondered why she’d brought it to Italy.

Another pang – and he realised it wasn’t anything more complicated than hunger coming back with a vengeance. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, a rest-stop somewhere up near Naples. At least he could do something about that.

He put down the book, got up and splashed water on his face. His T-shirt was filthy, and he had no clothes in the room, so he went down to the van and dug out something fresh. He looked into the lobby to see if he could use their phone to call Lily, but the receptionist was away.

He found the dig crew at the back of the hotel, on a terrace overlooking the marina. They sat out at a long table, laughing and flirting in the glow of the fairy lights strung along the rails. Richard sat at the head. There was no seat for Jonah.

‘Weren’t sure if you were coming. I’ll get them to lay another place.’

Jonah loitered awkwardly while the volunteers shuffled along and a new chair was fetched. His presence seemed to cramp the conversation.

‘I spoke to the office,’ Richard said. ‘They were very sympathetic. They’ve booked you onto the first flight out of Bari tomorrow morning.’

‘Has Lily called?’ He felt desperate without his phone, locked out of his life. He needed to hear from her.

‘She’ll be on the plane now, I suppose.’ Richard looked into the sky, as if they might see Lily’s flight winking among the stars.

Jonah tore open a piece of bread and stuffed it in his mouth. Yacht lights shone off the water; on the far side of the marina he could see an enormous motor-cruiser lit up like a stage.

Antipasti plates had arrived. Richard reached over and speared a sun-blushed tomato, clumsily. Jonah had to grab his wine glass to stop it knocking over.

Another kick of anger hit him as he remembered the phone. The one time he needed to speak to Lily more than ever, and he was impotent. He couldn’t call her family, their friends … all their numbers were in the phone. Hers was the only one he knew by heart – and she wasn’t answering.

‘Lily didn’t say anything about her mother before she left?’

‘Not a thing.’ Oil oozed out of the tomato as Richard bit into it, dribbling onto his pink shirt. He’d always been a careless eater. ‘She just said she was going to the lab.’

Across the marina, a car pulled up on the dock beside the cruiser. Vast and black, it looked like the Mercedes that had nearly run Jonah off the road. There couldn’t be two cars that size in the area.

He kept watching as four men got out of the car. Even at a distance, there was something predatory in the way they moved: spread out, heads turning slowly as if they anticipated danger. Two climbed the gangplank and disappeared inside the boat. Two others returned to the car and pulled a large package out of the back. It needed both of them to lift it.

Along the table, Jonah heard one of the volunteers make a crack about Mafia. Others laughed, some nervously. This was southern Italy, after all.

But one of the men looked familiar. So much had happened to him that day that it took a moment for the answer to come. He was dressed differently, too: a black shirt and jeans, not the white T-shirt with the alligator on the chest.

It was the plumber who’d come to fix the shower – the shower that worked perfectly well. So what was he doing here?

Nothing made sense. He pushed back his chair and stood. Blood rushed out of his head, he swayed and grabbed the table. The students looked at him as if he was drunk. Fragments of foreign conversations kicked around him like dust.

‘It’s so bling.’

‘Sandi didn’t think so.’

‘Ari’s such a creep.’

As he turned, he caught the woman at the next table staring at him – not a casual glance, but full bore. She was strikingly beautiful: black hair cut straight across the fringe, delicate features made golden in the fairy lights. A lotus-flower tattoo blossomed on her bare shoulder. He had the nagging feeling he knew her from somewhere, though it might just have been implicit in her too-familiar gaze. Maybe a gig?

She looked back at her food and he decided he’d imagined it. Every night, for the last six weeks, he’d seen hundreds of faces flashed up at him as the lights framed them for an instant. Subliminal overload. Somewhere, his brain probably stored them all. It would explain why he felt déjà vu so often.

But unless he’d imagined the whole incident with the plumber, the man on the dock was no false memory. He ran out of the hotel, down the street. The resort was staggered around the marinas, the condos and hotels built on long fingers divided by moorings. The dock opposite was only fifty yards across the water, but to reach it without swimming was most of a mile. He ran it in ten minutes and felt like throwing up before he was halfway there.

Two blocks away, a macho rumble told him he was too late. He tried to run faster, but the harder he tried, the slower he seemed to go. The engines throttled up; he heard the gassy sound of propellers churning water. He reached the dock just in time to see the lights on the fly-bridge floating away into the night. The wake glowed luminous white; across the transom, he read the name NESTIS.

A blazing white light picked him up. The Mercedes had been waiting in the shadows; now it came to life. The driver, invisible behind the lights, gunned the engine, then dropped the clutch so suddenly the whole three-ton car leaped forward. The light swamped him: for a moment, Jonah thought it would run him right into the water.

The car stopped at the last minute, executed a sharp three-point turn and raced away. Jonah’s eyes swam. Behind him, he heard running footsteps.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ Richard’s face was red as a balloon. His shirt-tails flapped untucked, and one of his shoelaces had come undone. He doubled over, clutching a stitch. ‘Jesus.’

‘I thought …’
What?
The energy drained out of him. Had he really seen the plumber on the dock – in the dark, over the water? Or was his overtired mind just throwing up images at him? More déjà vu.

A bird swooped over the marina. Across the harbour, he saw the others watching from the hotel terrace. A billion miles away. He realised how ridiculous he must look to them. The water was still, only a few gentle waves lapping the pilings to show the boat had ever been there.