My Map of You Page 16

  ‘That sunset was amazing,’ she said, turning to Aidan and finding the whites of his eyes in the darkness.

  ‘Some people prefer the sunrise,’ he said, his voice barely a whisper. ‘But I prefer this. The darkness that follows is so absolute out here.’

  ‘On that note …’ Holly forced a shred of humour into her voice. ‘You are going to be able to get us back to shore, aren’t you?’

  Aidan laughed. ‘Yes. Don’t worry. This boat does have a light and there’s probably even a compass, somewhere on this wreck.’

  ‘Whose boat is this, anyway?’ Holly asked, shifting slightly against the weight of his hand, which was still resting on her back.

  ‘Just a guy I know, a Greek bloke,’ he muttered. ‘He’s got a few boats, I think, but this is the worst of them.’

  ‘I feel so flattered,’ Holly giggled. She was keen to get the atmosphere back from serious to jovial, and she was enjoying the sensation of being this close to Aidan – more than was safe.

  ‘I’ll take us back to Keri in a minute,’ he told her, ‘but first I want you to shut your eyes and lie down.’

  ‘You want me to what?’ Holly spluttered.

  Aidan laughed. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not trying to have my wicked way with you, woman – just trust me.’

  Holly shut her eyes and let Aidan guide her down on to her back. The boat was still rocking against the waves and she felt horribly vulnerable not being able to see what was going on. After arranging his life jacket under her head, he lay down next to her and brushed a stray finger against the back of her hand.

  ‘Okay, you can open them now.’

  Holly opened her eyes and gasped. The sky was absolutely littered with stars, hundreds of them. It was as if someone had sprinkled glitter, and each one sparkled with such magical beauty that Holly felt a lump form in her throat. She’d read about things taking your breath away, but she realised in this moment that she’d never experienced it herself. There were no words to describe what she was seeing, just feelings. She could feel her heart hammering away in her chest and she could feel Aidan’s too. He must have seen these stars so many times before, but even he had been hushed into reverent silence by the sheer majesty of this night sky.

  ‘It never gets old, this view,’ he whispered, reading her mind as he always seemed to do. ‘The first time I came out here, I knew I could never leave this place. I’m not afraid to admit that these stars made me cry. I wasn’t sad, I was just moved, and I’m still moved by them now.’

  That was it, that was what she was feeling. It was impossible not to feel small and insignificant down here, so many thousands of miles beneath those stars, but at the same time she also sensed that this moment was huge, that it was one that she would never forget, and she wanted to wrap it up and take it with her.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Aidan turned to her at the same time as she turned to him, and for a second she thought he was going to kiss her. His eyes flicked to her lips then back to her eyes, and she felt her body start to throb with energy. He brought his hand up and gently stroked a curl off her cheek, letting his fingers rest for a second in the soft part where her jaw met her throat. She knew she should move, but she couldn’t, so instead she forced her eyes away from his and back up towards the glittering canopy above. There was a pause and Aidan took a deep breath, pushing himself back up into a sitting position and reaching for his bag.

  ‘Is it time to go?’ Holly asked, still unable to tear her eyes away.

  Aidan sighed and stole one last glance at the sky.

  ‘Yes, Holly – it’s time to go home.’

  17

  ‘Holly! Where the hell have you been?’

  Rupert was not happy.

  After Aidan had dropped her off the previous evening, Holly had unearthed her phone to find seventeen missed calls and a flurry of increasingly agitated text messages. Unable to face talking to him so soon after her and Aidan’s almost-kiss on the boat, she’d done the cowardly thing and switched off her phone, before heading down the hill for a nightcap at Annie’s bar.

  ‘I’m so sorry!’ Holly pleaded. ‘I was out all day and forgot my phone. They don’t really have payphones here, either.’

  She really should stop telling so many lies.

  ‘I was so worried,’ Rupert said, clearly angry. ‘I thought you’d bloody drowned or something.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, sighing under the weight of her guilt. ‘I don’t know what to say. I promise it won’t happen again.’

  She heard him mutter something to someone in the background and tried to flatten her heckles. He was always distracted when she spoke to him on the phone. She knew it shouldn’t matter and she knew he had a busy job, but it still wound her up when she was cut off mid-sentence.

  ‘Is the house on the market yet?’ he asked now, making her even angrier. She’d been on the island less than a week, for heaven’s sake.

  ‘Not yet, no – I haven’t been able to get an appointment with the estate agent until next week.’ That at least was the truth, but what she didn’t tell Rupert was that she was secretly dreading it. The more time she spent in this house, the more she loved it. Was it really worth selling it, when she’d still not even be able to afford a bedsit in a grotty area of London?

  ‘I really miss you,’ Rupert said now, making her feel like the worst girlfriend in the entire world. She had plans with Aidan again this afternoon, and she knew deep down that her feelings for him weren’t as innocent as she had been trying to convince herself they were. What that meant for her and Rupert, she didn’t know, but it was something she was starting to realise she had little control over. The sensible thing would be to stop spending time with him, of course, but the stubborn part of her refused to play along. Perhaps she was more like her mum than she’d thought.

  ‘I miss you too,’ she told him. She couldn’t believe that she’d been away from London for such a short time yet had changed such a lot. Would Rupert even recognise her when she got back?

  ‘Do you really need to stay there another week?’ he asked now. ‘I miss my girlfriend. I miss kissing you and … Sorry, just one second.’

  There were more sounds of background chatter and Holly used the time to cut up some tomatoes for her breakfast. She was feeling mildly guilty about the fact that she hadn’t been back to Kalamaki to see Nikos, and wondered if she had time for a quick drive before Aidan came to pick her up. Today they were aiming to cross off two more locations from Jenny and Sandra’s map, one dubbed ‘nosebleed point’ and the other simply ‘blue caves’. After that it was only the secret beach to go.

  ‘Where was I?’ Rupert was back. ‘Oh yeah, I was saying how much I miss kissing you – and I don’t just mean on your mouth, I mean in that other place … What? Oh crikey.’

  Holly sighed.

  ‘Sorry, darling. Toby needs me for something. Promise me you’ll call again tomorrow morning?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Okay. Bye, darling. I love you.’

  ‘I love you too.’

  As she pressed the red button and stowed her phone back in her bag, Holly thought again about what Aidan had said about learning not to love. She had the opposite problem with Rupert – she was still trying to learn how to love him. There were so many things about him that were lovable: his kindness, his intelligence, his loyalty, his politeness, his good looks, his ambition. She ticked them off on her fingers, waiting to feel something.

  Perhaps these things just took time? Perhaps love was something that grew as you were together, something that you needed to nurture and spend time working on. It had stung Holly when Aidan had spoken so openly about the love he felt for his ex-girlfriend. It had made her relationship with Rupert seem silly and childish by comparison, and telling him she loved him just now had made her feel like a fraud.

  The truth was, she wanted to love Rupert. She wanted to love him very much, but she’d always assumed that it was her that was the problem. It was her fear and insec
urity holding her back from feeling anything too deeply, and nothing to do with how she really felt. Rupert told her that he loved her all the time, but she never really felt it. She wanted to know for sure, and she didn’t.

  Taking her phone back out of her bag, Holly flicked through her photos. There were a few of the house here, the beach at Kalamaki and an assortment from her two trips out with Aidan, but after that they were mostly of herself and Rupert. She wasn’t a big fan of having her photo taken as a rule, but Rupert was the opposite, and most of these pictures were ones that he’d taken of the two of them. She peered at her face, trying to detect something in her own eyes. She looked happy, she was smiling, there was even a hint of laughter in some – but in none of the photos was she smiling at Rupert. Wouldn’t she be looking at him if she felt love for him? And if she hadn’t been, shouldn’t she start trying harder?

  As she sat pondering these questions in the back garden, Holly realised she’d left it too late to go to Kalamaki. She’d have to go tomorrow. She was already aware of a mild tug of panic over the fact that a week had almost passed. Today was Friday, which meant she only had eight days left. It didn’t feel like long enough – not even close.

  Nosebleed point turned out to be a simple patch of dry earth at the highest point of the island. They had to drive off-road to get there, and Holly was very glad that Aidan’s vehicle of choice was a jeep. Even in that they were thrown around all over the place and Phelan, who had climbed from the back seat right across Holly’s lap and into the footwell below, whined as they bounced off every bump.

  ‘You wouldn’t want to come up here on a moped,’ Holly shouted over the roaring of the engine.

  ‘You couldn’t!’ Aidan yelled back, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.

  Whatever awkwardness had been there between the two of them the night before, after the boat, there was no trace of it from Aidan today. He’d shown up at the door looking his usual scruffy self in a faded green polo shirt and beige cargo trousers, and presented her with another of his oranges. Holly had eaten it on the way over and Phelan, much to her surprise, had eaten the skin.

  ‘Daft mutt would eat plastic bottles if I let him,’ Aidan had said affectionately, as Phelan choked down the rind.

  There were more clouds in the sky today, but it was still brilliantly sunny. Holly had pulled on a white dress at the last minute and left her trusty denim shorts on the bedroom floor – a decision she was already regretting due to the amount of dust pouring in through the open windows. When they finally left the dirt track and rolled on to the smooth concrete of the proper road, she was sure she heard Phelan actually sigh with relief.

  ‘You see that island?’ Aidan was standing next to her pointing north. Holly looked out across the ocean and squinted. Sure enough, she could make out a mass of land, its edges blurred with distance.

  ‘That’s Kefalonia,’ he told her. ‘And that,’ he added, swinging his arm round to the west, ‘is the mainland of Greece.’

  ‘How long would it take to get there?’ she asked, still squinting.

  ‘Kilini on the mainland is about an hour away by ferry,’ he said. ‘And Kefalonia is around the same, I think, although I haven’t been there for a while.’

  ‘Isn’t that where …?’

  ‘Yeah, my mum lives there. She met a guy here and moved there with him. But, like I said, I haven’t been to see her in quite a while now. We sort of lost touch.’

  She didn’t say it to Aidan, but all Holly could think was how nice it must be to have a mum just an hour away. It was none of her business and she could tell by his tone that he didn’t want to elaborate, but she felt frustrated all the same. Hadn’t the time he spent with Sandra taught him that grudges are pointless and self-destructive? Then again, she’d been holding a grudge against her own mother for as long as she could remember.

  ‘You’re very quiet today,’ Aidan said. He’d walked to the edge of the flat area of ground and was peering down over the side of the cliff. It seemed bizarre to Holly that there were no fences up to prevent people from falling, but apparently nobody ever had. She’d asked Aidan about it as soon as they’d arrived.

  ‘Not quiet,’ she smiled across at him. ‘Just enjoying the view.’

  ‘You know, on a clear day you can see Big Ben from here,’ he told her.

  ‘Really?’ Holly stood on tiptoes for a second and stared again at the middle distance.

  ‘Yeah, really,’ Aidan said, then he started roaring with laughter.

  ‘Oi!’ Holly picked up a nearby pebble and hurled it at him. ‘You cheeky arse.’

  ‘Too easy,’ he chuckled again. ‘And here was me thinking you were a smart cookie. I was wrong about that …’

  She hurled another pebble.

  ‘Incoming!’ yelled Aidan, ducking to avoid a third and laughing again as Phelan leapt between them, barking with excitement at this new game he didn’t understand.

  Holly was laughing now too, and for a few minutes she continued to make half-hearted attempts to hit him with stones and old twigs.

  ‘Did Sandra ever come up here?’ she asked him eventually, pausing in her pursuit of him to take a gulp of water from the bottle in her bag.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ he frowned. ‘Certainly not with me. She only had this little car that was practically held together with bits of string – if she’d brought that thing up here she’d have had to carry it back down in pieces.’

  ‘What happened to it?’ Holly asked.

  ‘She got it scrapped before … You know. She wanted everything to be organised so that nobody else would be left with any burden.’

  Holly nodded. Sandra may have taken care of her car and her cat, but she hadn’t provided Holly with any of the answers she really craved. And then there was the house. Why had she been so adamant that Holly should have it if she’d never met her?

  ‘You’ve gone quiet again,’ Aidan nudged her with his tatty trainer. ‘Shall we get going to the Blue Caves?’

  Holly agreed and followed him back to the jeep, but she didn’t really feel ready to leave this place yet. It was so desolate up here, with the wind blowing the dust around her ankles and the undergrowth peppered with the crunchy corpses of long-dead plants. What had her mum and Sandra liked about this place enough for it to warrant a mention on their map? It certainly afforded a good view, she supposed, but there must be more to it than that.

  ‘It’s really nice of you to do this,’ she said when they’d cleared the dirt track for the second time and were back on the relatively smooth roads. Phelan was still sitting in the footwell and every now and again he would bring his head up and rest it on Holly’s knee.

  ‘It’s no bother,’ Aidan replied.

  ‘I feel bad eating into so much of your time,’ she went on. ‘I mean, what about all the sick animals?’

  ‘Before this week, I haven’t had a day off in about six months,’ he told her. ‘I do have someone else at the clinic, a lady who works for me, so the animals are just fine.’

  ‘Oh right,’ Holly said, mentally conjuring up a sexy young Greek woman wearing a tiny vet’s uniform and a coy grin.

  ‘Yes, Paloma,’ Aidan went on. ‘She’s married and has a daughter.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She was doing that thing again where she lost the ability to speak properly around him.

  ‘Our busiest time tends to be towards the end of the season,’ he explained, slowing down as they drove through a rustic little village. Two old women sitting on wooden chairs outside one of the houses gave them a friendly wave.

  ‘The seasonal workers, you know, the kids that work down in Laganas for the summer, they often take in stray puppies and kittens that they come across in the street or down at the beach.’

  ‘Isn’t that a good thing?’ she asked.

  ‘You would think so, right, because they get fed and looked after. But the problem is that they get too domesticated. There are plenty of cats and dogs that live in the wild here and look
after themselves pretty well, but if they’re taken in by us humans too young then they never learn those vital survival skills.’

  ‘I see,’ Holly said, giving Phelan’s head a pat. It was horrible to think of dogs and cats living on their own – especially dogs, who always seemed to Holly to be so helpless without their owners.

  ‘Come October, the workers all go home and turf their pets back out on to the street, then they become my problem. We have so many brought in that are close to death. It can be quite harrowing.’

  ‘What happens to them after that?’ Holly asked, dreading the answer.

  ‘Well, me and Paloma try to rehome as many as we can, but if the injuries or malnutrition are too severe then we have to put them to sleep.’

  ‘That’s sad,’ she said, feeling lame.

  ‘There is a charity here that goes round and gives a lot of the strays the jabs they need and treats them for any ticks or worms they might have picked up,’ he added. ‘Sandra used to help by taking a few of the poorly kittens in while they recovered. That was how she came to have Caretta.’

  Holly liked this side of her aunt. Nobody who cared that much about animals could be a bad person, no matter what mistakes they may have made. She had never had a pet in her life, but thought if she ever lived here then she’d probably end up with a houseful.

  When she said as much to Aidan, he laughed uproariously and told her to keep that nugget of information under her hat before he moved half the clinic into her spare room. The mood between them was different to that of the previous day, when Holly felt Aidan had been in a more serious frame of mind. Today he was definitely feeling playful, and proceeded to tease and taunt her all the way up the island.

  The Blue Caves were situated in Cape Skinari, which was the northernmost cape on Zakynthos, and were only accessible by boat. This meant that Phelan had to stay behind, and Holly and Aidan were forced to share the local shuttle boat with a handful of British tourists who had just rocked up on a convoy of quad bikes.