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The Lightest Blue
Three rolls of used film sit on a grubby white bedspread, where they’ve been for the last six hours, not shifting an inch since my girlfriend Jude left the hotel room. Even though I've dropped clumsily onto the bed a number of times, they haven't moved, gripping to each other like compatriots. I want to hurl them across the room.
Crass Greek TV adverts have amused me as I’ve emptied the room bar. Red Bull, Pimms, and now I drown in revolting retsina. It stinks of mould, sharp pine, loo cleaner.
It's liberating being drunk alone, but the room feels hurried as if it’s impatient to be rid of me, and reeks of toiletries - lavender room spray and lemon disinfectant - and Jude’s expensive perfume. I haven't eaten since this morning's rolls. The immensity of the space is frightening. Without her the room and the city feel monstrous.
The room, as wide as the QE2, sways as I stand up quickly, the window latch opens; air and car noises rush in. Papers flurry in motion. I trip over a can of Heineken. The room slides; my feet rock, legs buckle. Through fluttering curtains something blue, almost fragile, flicks through the air, landing delicately on a roll of film. A dragonfly in the lightest colour of blue hangs there. The blue looks as if it will fade into itself any second and emerge translucent white. The dragonfly clutches the top edge of the roll of film, hanging perpendicular to its sides. I move over to look closely. It flies away, vanishes.
I think of the dragonfly as I leave, carrying the rolls of film. I can even imagine it clinging to my dark hair, its excreta sticking to my scalp.
Darkness. People like barriers cross in front, surrounding me with stale sweat. Men call from restaurants. I search for the photo developers the hotel recommended. The street carries the stench of meat freshly thrown from the market. I hand in the rolls of films. An hour. It is important to see her face again.
“The Plaka,” Jude had said, “ - shopping. Andy, please stay here as I won’t be long. I want to get you something and you only get in the way.”
A good excuse, it seems now. I loved the Plaka when we went yesterday. We had walked down to Hephaestus’s temple as the skeletal cats exited for the night, and bought a bright blue shawl from one of the shops opposite. I said it was the colour of her eyes; she'd laughed and said she hadn't realized I was such an old romantic. My eyes never leave her; maybe she’s taken herself from me deliberately as a lesson, to experience freedom.
I stand now in a square listening to music coming from an upstairs flat. Shadows of people reach around corners. People come out of a downstairs door. At first I think the girl with her arm round the chap is Jude. The girl wears the face of someone about to make love: intense, earnest and unreal, her mouth open slightly and turned down, her eyes screwed up and nostrils flared.
Jude in the hotel shower, water streaming down, her back turned, her body dipping forwards, my arms around her. Jude in the boat round Nafplio, hands deep in the blue water, her face glowing, her up-turned nose burnt a vibrant red, the intense sky, the spooky cries of cormorants. Jude, asleep, puckering her lips, shivering in dreams.
This is what I think about now in the streets without her, partying with Ed, a newfound Greek friend, as noise floats down from the flat above, bringing with it smoke and laughter. Someone is sick in a gutter near a trash pile. Well-dressed evening restaurant-goers pass disdainfully as I lift another Heineken to my mouth and feel immediately nauseated as it courses down my throat. Heat gathers in the street, around our feet, rising insidiously to hiss at our eyeballs. Monotonous music pulsates along the pathways in my head, insinuating into my flesh.
Jude’s image, liquid-thick, washes over my eyes, into my sockets and down the slopes of my cheeks, moving, changing, reshaping, saturating me. I open my eyes for a second and look up at the balcony of partygoers - a face staring at me, eyes like blue ice floes, whites shocking, hair blonde and dazed. If I blinked long enough could Jude reform here, slide from the images over my eyes and stand before me?
Once she told me when making love she felt like a butterfly flying above her head, that coming had been a transcendent experience and she had felt above and beyond herself. But this wasn’t with me.
It’s not something I have ever been able to forget.
Just two days ago she told me about Richard and his disappearance; her words coming soft and slow in a honeyed-little-girl voice as we lay in the hotel bed having just made love. Heat from the window, a slight breeze, covers off, our minds open and our bodies vulnerable.
He had made her feel like this a few times, though what different thing he did that no one else had she didn’t know, but it made him unforgettable. A fluke, she said, this feeling, an accident of nature. In every partner after, she waited for that feeling, to arise out of herself, free, hovering, imagining herself with wings, soft and gentle, butterfly teasing the air, flapping, rising with dust, carrying herself on motes of light, before tumbling back to flesh, smiling.
She waited, but it never happened. Only ever with him. It remained a memory of transcendence: a transient, drug-like moment of feeling completely light, and released.
Some months after they had broken up, Richard vanished. As Jude spoke, languidly, carefully, her arm reached along the top of her head as if smoothing something down, as if this had been something she had previously rehearsed many times in her head. He’d done this exact Greek trip with his then-girlfriend and at some point along the journey had disappeared.
She stood up, walked naked to the window. Sweat trickled down her back. I sniffed the space she had left impregnated with her sweat and shape in the hollow of the bed. He could be out there, she said, hidden in the smog and the heat and the shadows rising from the hills. She worried about him. “I’ve tried to imagine his shape vanishing as he ran the track at Delphi, or a pillar at Hera’s Temple at Olympia opening him up and swallowing him. Or maybe just the streets of Athens taking him. He’s been gone a year.” The whole time we had been together. Then she smiled and I lurched inward, suddenly tasting bile. The taste of fear, the smell of loneliness; the immensity of space around me. Never tasted before.
Suddenly Ed, my small Greek friend walks away, “Where you going?” I shout, bile once more filling my throat. He makes a motion with his right hand to indicate going for a pee. I smile, relax, covering the bile with fresh Heineken from a new can. He returns from the darkened alley behind the square with a girl, whom he is glad to see, even though she doesn’t stop talking in Greek. He looks at me and shrugs his shoulders.
“Andy, you come with Gina and me,” he says, “A group of us are heading to Cape Sounion on the coast. Someone is performing. Much fun. Everyone in Athens will be there.” He races away back to the alley and I hear a car. People scream and move rapidly out of the way as a car lurches into the square with my Greek friend behind the wheel. An American Cadillac convertible. He grins at my surprised face. “You like?”
“It’s yours?”
“Of course. Everyone will be in their best cars tonight circling the city! Get in. Tonight we celebrate... Gina, what is it we celebrate?” Gina shrugs her shoulders. He laughs. “We celebrate! We will learn what soon enough! Who knows where we’ll end?” They wait while I collect my photos and then we are gone.
At Mycenae, where the wind left scratch marks on our faces, Jude slipped away on one of the many pathways. I found her in Agamemnon’s tomb way down the hill. She said she liked being alone in such a place, where somehow you felt overawed - by the tomb, by the height of the hill where Mycenae lay, tucked into the mountainside like a child lying with its mother. The colours of the day were beige and grey. Beige the ground, beige the weeds cut and torn by the wind, darker beige the earth and grey the sky, littered with black clouds. She said it made her want to cry, to see it like this, so raw, exposed.
Tourists walked, heads bowed into the wind while buzzards screeched above. It wasn’t like Delphi where the sky had been the lightest blue and Jude said she felt light like chiffon.
I try to open the photos but Gina stops me, grabbing them. I want to see Jude at Agamemnon’s Tomb. Her absence makes me think I invented her.
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