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“I saw him today in a shop. He’s been working here. Just working. Nothing had happened to him. He’d just decided to stay, to be here and not somewhere else.”
She smiled a smile of sexual intensity; so incongruous, so intense, so content. I remember the pale dragonfly. The butterfly of her imagination. They could be hovering round her now like she was a Chinese lantern. On her outstretched fingers pale delicate blue wings flap in the night breeze, glowing against her fingers.
“You slept with him?”
She says nothing, turns to walk away from me, into the growing light. I trip over stones as I look up, walking towards her but she has gone. Gina and Ed are laughing. Above, cars pull up, motorcycles and mopeds. An army of partygoers emerge. A boat starts quickly to the side of me, a guttural heaving; everyone runs down the hill, racing, jumping over rocks and swinging round dying olive trees. All around are people shouting.
Dawn, like a precocious, spoiled child, is growing sharp and fat. Light settles on the hills, on the trees, on the land like a vibrant effervescent covering of dust, picking out contours and undulations. The sky changes from glowing blue to translucent pink yellow grey sliced through with shades of blue. Everything looks still. The sky lightens in seconds, the land lightens. My eyes squint, yet the sun isn’t in view. Light illuminates my arms.
There is Jude, smiling still. I race after her, touch her. She is with a man: well-dressed, light beard on his chin, hair scorched by the sun. She whispers in his ear and he turns to me.
I’m caught in a spotlight, shadow-puppet, moving statically. Her flesh in my hand, mouth, me licking my palm. Her eyes crinkle like she’s eaten something nasty.
She says, “Go home.” Gina reaches me. We are all slow motion. I feel like screaming. Gina smiles to Jude. They say they are heading out to the islands.
“But you can’t go,” says Jude, “You’ve a flight in...” she looks at her watch, “three hours. Poor babe.” She laughs, walks slowly away, looking back over her shoulder as she descends to the boat.
I follow her. I have to follow her - I cannot be alone. I trip on the rocks. My feet stand in water. The light returns to normal as she and the boat head out into the rising sun. She leans on Richard. She has gone. A dot in the distance, as small as a dragonfly.
The light is ordinary now, boring even. New-born daylight steals my strength. I should hitch a lift on a returning moped to Athens, to the hotel room, to the airport, to England.
But instead my knees loosen; I flop into the water as if boneless, dropping photos like confetti from my pockets, face down now in the water, tasting salt in my throat. Photos - a Grecian sky; of a sweet face among many less appealing; of the view of the harbour from our window at Nafplio; of a sidewards-posing body in a hazy focus - arc away from me, drifting with the current, while water pushes over my legs, my arms, my back; as the sun rises blazing, scorching, making the sky as white as the sclera of an eye, blocking out the lightest blue.
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