My Map of You Page 8

  He laughed out loud at this, then spent the next few minutes showing her how to stow things under the seat and how to balance the bike on its little metal parking rod. After a shaky start that almost saw her plough straight into the wall of a restaurant, Holly discovered that driving a moped wasn’t actually all that difficult. By the time she and Nikos had reached the base of the hill in Lithakia that led up to the house, she was positively bursting with pleasure.

  ‘I see you, tomorrow, at the beach?’ asked Nikos, using his feet to turn his bike round the right way.

  Holly pictured her aunt’s bedroom, packed full of clutter and still-unopened drawers.

  ‘I’ll try,’ she promised. ‘If not, then the next day.’

  This seemed to be good enough, and Nikos nodded briefly before buzzing off back down the road, showering her with an arsenal of grit as he went.

  9

  There was no sign of life from next door as Holly let herself into the house, but she still kept her eyes firmly on the ground just in case. She was reluctant to admit even to herself how much that morning’s encounter with Aidan had affected her. In the very short time that they’d spent together, he’d somehow managed to lure the real Holly to the surface – the side that she’d worked so hard to keep under wraps for as long as she could remember – and that made her nervous.

  Instead of heading straight upstairs to her aunt’s bedroom, Holly kicked off her flip-flops, dumped her bag on the table and opened the back doors. Stepping up on to the low wall, she could see the ocean spread out below her, vast and a deep midnight blue in the approaching dusk. It was stunning, and for a long time she simply stood still, drinking it all in. No wonder her aunt had loved it here. It had only been two days, and already the thought of London’s grey landscape was a depressing prospect in comparison to such raw and natural beauty.

  Aidan’s back garden, which was separated from her own by a long, knee-height hedge, was equally bare of decoration, but he had at least taken the trouble to arrange a wrought-iron table and chairs in the shade of a fig tree. Holly could smell its intoxicatingly sweet scent from where she was standing. There was also a rusty-looking bicycle propped up against the back wall of his house, and she was surprised to see that it was unlocked. Then again, she supposed this little island wasn’t really a place where people would steal from one another.

  The sun had dropped even further now, and as Holly gazed out across the water, she could see the faint white pebble of the moon on the horizon as it began its fruitless chase of the sun. The sky, which had been a stunning shade of azure blue all day, had now transformed into a mix of pinks, creams and dusty greys. The intense heat of the day had given way to a calm and comfortable evening temperature, and Holly shook her hair back with pleasure and drank in the view.

  She was roused from her blissful trance a few minutes later by the sound of a car door slamming and an Irish accent yelling, ‘Wait there, you little bugger,’ to an unknown entity. Lurching round in horror, Holly gazelle-hopped across the garden and slammed the back doors just as Aidan stomped around the corner. If he’d seen her, he didn’t comment, and a few seconds later she heard the sound of his own door banging shut.

  She really needed to get a grip. He was only some bloke – it wasn’t like she’d ever see him again after these two weeks. And so what if he’d had his hand down her U-bend? The memory of that was enough to send Holly scuttling up the stairs, as if Aidan would be able to see her through the walls. Distracted by the gut-wrenching humiliation, she found herself once again in her Aunt Sandra’s bedroom.

  Okay, so it was a little bit creepy in here, but she was a grown woman. As she looked around, wondering whether to just give up and bolt down the hill for some more village wine, Holly’s eyes fell on an ancient-looking radio that was sitting on a small table next to the bed. Dropping to her hands and knees, she found the plug socket and switched it on, smiling with relief as music flooded into her ears.

  After knob-fiddling her way through several Greek stations, all of which seemed to feature the same wailing old man plucking at a guitar, Holly found a channel playing English songs, and Tears For Fears were soon chasing away the last vestiges of creepiness.

  Humming and warbling along out of tune, she yanked open a drawer and spluttered noisily as a cloud of dust wafted out. Her Aunt Sandra had been a big fan of floral, she decided, peering with distaste at the fifteen or so patterned shirts. She found an empty brown suitcase on the top of the wardrobe and started packing most of her aunt’s clothes inside. She’d decided to head down to the bar a bit later and ask Annie if there was a way of donating stuff to charity. It seemed like an enormous waste to simply throw it all away, and actually, on closer inspection, some of the things she was pulling out weren’t all that bad.

  Aside from the frumpier stuff, Holly had also unearthed some gems: a white blouse embroidered with delicate lace, a cashmere shawl and a beautiful pale pink silk kimono. These things she folded carefully and set on the bed. Everything smelled faintly of lavender and, as she worked, Holly began to relax and take her time.

  When the chest of drawers was empty, she began examining the little ornaments that were clustered about the room. There were tiny china birds, porcelain ponies and a large number of turtles, some made from shells, others from clay and one from bright green and brown glass. As she bent forward to get a better look, one small turtle caught the light and seemed to glow from within. Holly had never really been a fan of trinkets, but for some reason this particular turtle had seized her attention. Picking it up carefully with both hands, she used the bottom of her vest to smear away the layer of settled dust. She had the strangest feeling that it wasn’t the first time she’d held it. Perhaps she’d had something similar as a child.

  ‘You’re coming home with me,’ she whispered to the turtle, immediately feeling stupid. As she laughed out loud at herself, the radio coughed out a burst of static and, in a flash, Holly was transported back to her mum’s grotty living room.

  In the weeks leading up to her death, Jenny Wright had been slipping further and further away from anything resembling normality. Drinking heavily on a daily basis, she spent all of her time either slouched in an armchair staring at the TV, or slumped at the kitchen table smoking. It reached a point where Holly couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her mum in clean clothes or with brushed hair. She’d tried to help her, of course, but Jenny only became increasingly upset.

  ‘I don’t have any reason to be alive any more,’ she’d wail, sucking on her roll-up and blowing acrid smoke into her daughter’s face.

  ‘That’s a nice thing to say to me, your daughter,’ Holly would reply, stepping around her mum’s scrawny frame and reaching for the tin opener. That particular day, she’d swiped a couple of tins of baked beans from the corner shop on her way home from college. It wasn’t like her mum was going to give her any money, not when she was pouring it all down her throat.

  ‘I never wanted all this to happen,’ Jenny continued, throwing a limp arm around the room and sniffing in disgust. ‘I should have let someone else take you in – we’d have all been better off.’

  Holly sighed. Once upon a time, those sorts of comments would have sent her running up the stairs in tears, but it had been years now since she’d allowed what her mum said to hurt her feelings. Jenny was always muttering about what a bad mother she was when she was drunk, but then a few seconds after an outpouring of remorse she would go on the attack, mumbling nonsense about the life she was owed and that it wasn’t her fault she had ended up like this. Holly had been sympathetic once upon a time, back in the days before Jenny had relapsed into her alcoholism for the fifth or sixth time. To Holly, it seemed as if her mum was choosing the easy option. She knew that she could fight harder to get off the booze, but she didn’t want it enough, and Holly found that very difficult to forgive.

  ‘Try and eat some dinner, Mum,’ she said, pointing at the beans on toast she’d just put on the table in front of her.
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  Jenny wrinkled her nose and reached for her coffee mug. Why she even bothered trying to disguise the fact she was drinking baffled Holly – it wasn’t as if either of them were deluded when it came to the cold, hard facts. It had been a very long time since Holly had bothered emptying any of Jenny’s bottles down the sink. It only caused a row, and she simply didn’t have the energy any more.

  It would always surprise her that she’d been so upset when her mum had died a few weeks later. She hadn’t thought herself capable of feeling anything any more, let alone sadness at losing such a malevolent presence. But the weight with which the death had hit her had felt like a wrecking ball smashing into a glass wall. She’d fallen apart completely, and had been painstakingly trying to piece herself back together ever since.

  Holly could only remember snatches of what happened on the day her mum died. After making the discovery, she had run back out into the hallway where she assumed she must have passed out. When she came round, she stayed on the floor for what felt like hours, telling herself over and over to get up and call the police. She couldn’t, though – she was as rooted to the spot as the old apple tree in the back field of the college. Some of the kids still climbed it, thinking that the twisty branches would disguise their illicit cigarettes. Holly never joined them, preferring to watch from a distance. She hated herself for envying them, with their Topshop shoes, highlighted hair and easy lives – they had no idea how good they had it. Holly would listen to them, bemoaning their latest break-up or whingeing about not having the latest mobile phone, and wish she could scream in their faces.

  She had no memory of the 999 call she eventually must have made, but at around eight in the evening an ambulance arrived, followed closely by a police car. While the paramedics rustled past her in their neon-striped jackets, a female police officer crouched down next to her on the hall floor and took her hands.

  ‘You need to come with us now, Holly. It’s going to be okay.’

  But it never was okay. It never had been, ever since.

  Suddenly spooked by the glass turtle in her now clammy hands, Holly tossed it down on to the bed, where it bounced lightly and slid off the edge.

  ‘Shit!’ She dived to her knees. Thankfully, the tatty rug had prevented any breakage, and as Holly leaned forward to retrieve it, she noticed a beige case poking out from under the bed beside a very dog-eared and dust-covered shoebox.

  ‘Oh, you little legend,’ she breathed, pulling out the case and ignoring the box. Yanking off the lid, she gasped out loud as a polished and gleaming sewing machine greeted her. It was a genuine thing of beauty, and Holly felt a wave of real affection for her late aunt. If Sandra had liked sewing, then they clearly had a lot more in common than Holly had first thought.

  It had been years now since she’d used one of these but, as she ran her fingers over the spool, she was overwhelmed by an urge to rip up the clothes she’d just packed and then refashion them all. What had begun as a necessity after her mum died, when she was buying all her clothes from markets and second-hand shops, had quickly become Holly’s favourite thing to do. She adored the whole process: collecting the material, planning new garments on paper, then creating her very own pieces from scratch. She’d loved building something new and beautiful out of other people’s discarded items – there was a sort of magic to it.

  Although she’d stopped making her own clothes after securing her first decently paid job, Holly still had a box of her stuff that she’d hidden away in the back of her wardrobe. Rupert was never likely to venture in there, after all, and knowing the box was there gave her a bizarre sort of comfort.

  As she knelt there now, her feet slowly going numb on the hard tiles that lay beneath the rug, Holly wondered why she’d given up her hobby. She didn’t need to make clothes any more, obviously, but why had she felt the need to give up something she loved so much? Thinking about it now, she realised that she’d stopped sewing at around the same time she first met Rupert. She tried to picture herself sitting at the breakfast bar in her boyfriend’s swanky east-London apartment, rattling away on her sewing machine while he watched TV. Nope, it would never happen. He wouldn’t see the point. He’d laugh and offer to take her shopping, tell her that it was weird to wear other people’s cast-offs. Still, there was nothing to stop her doing some sewing while she was here, all by herself, with nobody around to make judgments. Gathering up a pile of clothes from the suitcase and heaving the machine up under one arm, Holly switched off the radio, headed downstairs and prepared to settle in for the night.

  She’d decided to start with something fairly simple – a patchwork tapestry that she could hang up on the empty wall by the back door. She remembered seeing some decent-looking scissors in one of the kitchen drawers, so she collected these and started on the heap of old blouses and skirts she’d brought down.

  Using two old mugs to pin the material flat, she marked out rough square shapes with a pencil then set about cutting them out. It was fiddly work, but Holly immediately felt soothed by the monotonous action. Before long, she had enough patches ready to start sewing, and she spent a good ten minutes arranging them on the floor to work out the order. Sandra had certainly liked her patterns and her embellishments, and Holly smiled to herself as she pictured how beautiful the finished creation would look when the early morning light sneaked in through the glass back door.

  It felt so right to be back sitting at a sewing machine again, her nimble fingers sliding the thread on to the bobbin and pulling the material taut as the tip of the needle dived up and down. In that moment, she almost forgot that she was in a strange house and a strange country – all that mattered was what her hands were doing, what her eyes were seeing and what her heart was telling her. This was where she was happy.

  The pastel sky outside bled slowly into an inky blackness and the eager moon raced up to join the stars. As the light of the day vanished, the crickets ceased their incessant chorus, until the only sound came from the gentle lapping of the ocean.

  Far below where Holly sat, her brow furrowed in concentration and her bare toes resting lightly on the foot pedal of the sewing machine, an egg cracked open beneath the damp sand and a baby turtle wriggled free. He was all alone, but not frightened. He knew what he had to do. Discarding the sticky pieces of his first home, he made his way to the surface and paused to bathe for a moment in the comforting light of the moon. Leaving barely a mark on the sand as he went, the tiny, soft-shelled creature slithered clumsily down to the water and plunged fearlessly into his future.

  Tuesday, 6 November 1984

  Hello Sandy.

  I wasn’t sure whether or not to send this, but I thought you’d probably want to know that I was still alive at the very least. You always have been the sensible one, the sweeter one, the better one. I was planning to head to Australia, but I haven’t made it quite that far yet. I met a man – he’s called Nic – and I’m just staying with him at the moment. Are you still cross with me? I miss you so much that I swear I can feel it burning inside my chest. You’re the only person in my life that I care about – I just wanted you to know that. I hope the storms haven’t been too bad on the island. I keep picturing us running down the beach in the rain. I wish we still were. Please write back and tell me your news. My address is below. I love you.

  Jen Bear xxx

  10

  Holly’s mobile phone was ringing. Propping herself up on one elbow, she cursed herself for leaving it right next to the bed. Peering at the screen as she wiped the sleep out of her eyes, she took a deep breath and forced herself to smile.

  ‘Hi, darling!’

  ‘Hello, poppet – I didn’t wake you, did I?’ Poppet? That was a new one. Holly gritted her teeth.

  ‘Not at all,’ she told him. ‘I was just about to get in the shower.’

  In reality, she’d only put her head down three hours ago after sitting up sewing until the early hours. The last thing she wanted to do was be awake, especially as she’d been finding it increa
singly easy to sleep since she’d been here on the island. Zakynthos: one, Insomnia Troll: nil. Rupert was rabbiting on about some work deal he’d done and Holly felt her mind glazing over.

  ‘Did you hear that, darling?’

  ‘Sorry, sweetie – it’s not the best connection this end.’ It was a lie, of course; she could hear him perfectly well.

  ‘This new client I’ve secured – he’s worth over ten million for the business. I’m getting a nice bonus out of it.’

  ‘Wow! Babe, that’s great news. Well done you.’ Holly wondered if she sounded as bored as she felt. Poor Rupert. Here he was calling her to share his exciting news, and she couldn’t even be bothered to listen. She must be more tired than she thought. She was always grumpy when she got overtired.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Rupert sounded concerned. ‘You don’t sound like your normal happy self.’

  Her normal happy self?

  ‘I’m fine,’ she replied automatically. ‘It’s just been a bit weird, you know, all this.’

  ‘You poor thing,’ he said. There was genuine concern in his voice, which made Holly feel even worse. ‘I miss you,’ he added, and she felt her bad mood retreating.

  ‘I miss you too,’ she whispered, realising as she said it that she actually did. She knew who to be when Rupert was with her. Out here, it felt dangerously like another version of herself was on the verge of making a reappearance. ‘I really do miss you,’ she added. ‘Very much.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ he admitted. ‘It’s only been a few days, but you feel so far away from me.’

  Given that he spent a lot of time abroad with work, this revelation came as quite a surprise to Holly. He’d never talked about missing her so much before. Perhaps it was coming back to his flat alone every night that was getting to him.

  ‘It’s only two weeks,’ she told him now. ‘Less than two weeks! And I’ll be nice and tanned for you when I get back.’