They fly to a neighbouring island and transfer to Kyritos by boat to avoid the TV crews and photographers. To be on the safe side, Shiv wears a floppy hat and shades. Dad’s lawyer meets them at the dockside and drives them to a “safe” house: his uncle’s, in a village up the coast from the main town.
These tactics will only delay her encounter with the press – they’ll be waiting for her on the steps of the courthouse tomorrow morning.
“Is this where you usually stay?” Shiv asks.
Dad shakes his head. “No, I stay in the town.”
Of course. His isn’t the face they want to splash on their front pages and news bulletins. He isn’t the star witness.
The lawyer is a little man, shorter than Shiv, with an unpronounceable name and dark hair on the backs of his hands. He spends the morning briefing them about the hearing: going over the questions Shiv’s likely to be asked, coaching her how to answer them. Just as importantly, how to present herself to the court.
Both defendants admit driving while intoxicated, he explains – they couldn’t deny it, after their breath and blood tests the night of the accident. That a young boy died as a result adds another layer of severity to the charges. But the pair deny they were racing. If the lawyer can nail them for that they’ll go down for a long time.
Shiv is the prosecution’s emotional trump-card: a grief-stricken fifteen-year-old girl traumatized by her brother’s horrific death. If she stands in that witness box and says the right things, cries in the right places – paints a vivid picture of Declan’s last moments of life – the jury will believe her over the two in the dock.
“I made them do it,” Shiv tells the lawyer, not for the first time.
“That is not our case, Siobhan.”
“It’s the truth though.”
“Shall I tell you what is the truth?” he says. “They were the ones who rode the mopeds when they were drunk. The ones who raced with each other. It was one of them who lost control and crashed.”
“But—”
“They killed Declan. Not you.” He stares her down. Then, miming bags under his eyes, he says, “Stay up late tonight, yes? And no make-up tomorrow.”
Yeah, and make sure to shave your hands, she doesn’t tell him.
“He wanted Mum to testify as well,” Dad says, after the lawyer has gone. An extra tug at the jury’s heartstrings.
Like that would happen.
Her mother is improving, but she won’t be coming back to Kyritos any time this century – and certainly not for a court case she wanted nothing to do with.
In the difficult silence that follows, Shiv wonders if Dad has begun to have doubts too. Before she went into the clinic, his quest for justice – for revenge, really – was an obsession. He wanted Joss and Nikos punished. Now that the trial is here, he seems uneasy. Like someone caught up in events he initiated but which have gathered their own momentum, sweeping him along. Dad used to tell the lawyer what to do; these days, it’s the other way round.
After lunch, Shiv takes a nap beneath the deliciously cool draught of a ceiling fan in a bedroom that houses a small shrine to a haloed Greek saint. She sleeps for an hour.
She sleeps a lot just lately. Nightmare free, mostly. In between sleeps, she has been eating the food Aunt Rosh piles up before her. That’s where the three of them are staying, now – back in England – while they’re waiting for the house sale to go through so they can start again in a place where Declan never lived.
Going to her aunt’s, rather than home, was the second surprise when Dad collected Shiv from the Korsakoff.
The first was the sight of Mum standing there with him in the car park.
That was seven weeks ago. Her mother is still an imitation of the woman she was before Kyritos but, day by day, she is evolving a new version of herself. Like her family, Mum will never be whole again, but she is finding a way to live with what’s left. When they hugged beside the car, it was as though Mum was the one who’d spent two months in a clinic and Shiv had come to take her home.
Her parents, her aunt, have barely asked Shiv about her time at the clinic.
They treat her like a shell-shocked soldier; whatever they do, they mustn’t upset her with talk of the war. So they sit in Aunt Rosh’s lounge, and watch TV, or a DVD, or play Scrabble, or read. She’s fine with that. She doesn’t need to talk about her treatment and they don’t need to hear it. And so Shiv sleeps and eats and makes a start on resuming something like normal life. She’s met up with Laura and Katy a couple of times (coffee shop, cinema). She’s even catching up on her schoolwork and there’s talk of her being able to go back in January.
Phase 3, as Dr Pollard called it, at Shiv’s final debrief: life without Declan.
In the months between leaving Kyritos and entering the Korsakoff Clinic, what Shiv had thought of as learning to live without her brother was nothing of the sort. Her greatest delusion – her “primary confabulation”, according to Dr Pollard – was that, when she looked in the mirror of her life, all she saw was her brother, the embodiment of her everlasting guilt.
“We’ve tried to help you smash that mirror,” the Director told her.
“By making me look over and over at the thing you didn’t want me to see?”
“Yes. If you stare at something long enough and closely enough, it begins to change, to become – to mean – something different.”
Shiv couldn’t help laughing, giddy and a little reckless with the imminent prospect of being discharged. “I still think psychotherapists are full of crap,” she said. “I guess I just have to sort out the good crap from the bad crap.”
Dr Pollard smiled. “I must include that phrase in our promotional material.”
A glimpse, there, of the woman who’d thrown everyone’s case notes into the bin all those weeks ago. Shiv had liked her, back then. After what the treatment had put her through, she wasn’t sure “like” was the right word any more. But she’d ended up trusting Dr Pollard.
Had ended up thanking her.
Looking back, Shiv isn’t sure she’d have been so ready to understand the point about the mirror if it hadn’t been for Mikey. Witnessing his torment that night down at the lake – staring into his abyss, with him – brought Shiv face to face with the chasm that might open up in front of her, if she let it. The treatment had taken her to the edge so that she saw exactly what she was stepping back from. But standing at the end of the jetty with Mikey, talking him down, Shiv found that the words she spoke to him were also the ones she needed to hear herself. That the reasons he shouldn’t die were indistinguishable from her own reasons for re-learning how to live.
Mikey.
She doesn’t suppose she’ll ever see him again. Isn’t sure she wants to, or that he’d want to see her. In any circumstances it would be hard to have a friendship with someone whose life you’d saved – to have that hanging over both of you. Harder still when the other person didn’t want to be saved.
Turning away from the lake, still hand in hand with Shiv as they retraced their steps along the jetty onto solid ground, he had looked despondent. As though he had failed.
Maybe he’ll have another go when no one’s there to stop him.
Or maybe, one day, he’ll feel differently. Come to value his life again, find a way of living without Feebs, and be glad Shiv helped him have that chance. Maybe, years from now, she’ll see Mikey on a bus or train, or in the street, or in a café or pub, and there’ll be a spark of recognition in their eyes. A shared, tentative smile. The awkward beginnings of a conversation that might or might not lead somewhere.
She splashes cold water on her face after her nap and heads downstairs. Dad’s in the kitchen with the lawyer’s uncle; they’re sipping coffee. The sight of the tiny cups and the bitter aroma rekindle a memory of dancing in the street with Nikos.
She dwells on that for a moment.
There are flowers on the table, wrapped in cellophane. Dad starts to ask if she managed to sleep but Shiv interrupts, indicating the bouquet. “What’s that for?”
“I thought we could go out there.” He hesitates. “If you want to.”
Out there. The road where the crash happened, he means. Or the beach where Declan’s body washed up. But those places have nothing to offer Shiv.
“Dad,” she says, “I want to go to the villa.”
The uncle drives them along the coast road in a battered blue Fiat. He pulls up in the approach to the holiday villas and Shiv gets out onto the track, standing in a slowly dispersing cloud of dust kicked up when the car braked to a halt. Dad asks the guy to wait, please. He answers in Greek and flicks on the car radio.
As they set off, Dad explains that he got the old man to park here, rather than right by the villa, in case the current occupants are in. On foot, the pair of them could recce the place more discreetly.
“Recce?” Shiv says.
“It’s short for reconnoitre.”
“I know what it means. I’m just wondering if we should black up our faces or wear camouflage or something?”
He gives her a look. She’s seen the same question in Mum’s and Aunt Rosh’s expressions: Do we do “funny” yet?
Shiv shoulders her bag and walks silently beside her father, unable to help remembering the time she sat on the front step watching Nikos’s pick-up bounce along this same track with two windsurf rigs in the back. Or the time she followed Declan back to the villa in the dusk after her brother had caught them kissing.
“I still don’t think this is a good idea,” Dad says.
Shiv doesn’t reply. They’ve had this argument already, in the kitchen of the safe house. She has something she needs to do, she told him. That’s all. Since she left the clinic, there’s been a quiet resolve to Shiv that none of her family knows how to deal with. There’ll come a time when they learn to refuse her again but, for now, she gets whatever she wants.
As they near the villa, Dad diverts them onto an overgrown path.
His plan is this: they follow the path into the olive grove, where the low wall will offer a clear view of the rear of the villa, the garden and pool area. If anyone is about, they’ll simply carry on as though they’re out for a stroll and skirt back round to the track where the lawyer’s uncle is waiting.
Shiv looks at him. “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”
He doesn’t answer for a moment and she thinks he’s going to deny it. But he says, “Yes,” his voice a little husky. “I’ve come up here a few times.”
“To do what?”
“Just … I sit on the wall. And look. That’s all I do, Shiv. I look.” Then, with an odd laugh, “You know, I even thought about renting the place so I could come here whenever I felt like it.”
“Bloody hell, Dad.”
“I know, I know.”
“And I’m the one who gets sent to a clinic.”
He laughs and the look he gives her is so full of love it takes her breath away.
The villa is different from how she remembers it, the images in her head merging with those projected onto the walls of her PTU. She knows she’ll never quite be able to separate the two from now on.
Bizarrely, as she gazes at the rear of the villa, she half expects to see Caron – in her scarlet dress – lazing on a lounger beside the pool, smoking a cigarette. Ah, you made it, she says, spotting Shiv. When she messaged Caron on Facebook about her plan to visit the villa, her friend replied: r u TOTALLY mad?!? Then, another message: dont u DARE come back with a tan!! ;-) xx
Laura and Katy said pretty much the same thing, oddly enough.
Shiv’s going down to London to stay with Caron next weekend; meet her folks, see the sights. Her first nights away without her dad since she left the clinic.
“No goat,” she says to Dad, nodding towards the olive grove.
It might be dead or just tethered somewhere else. She asks if her father recalls Dec trying to feed it an apple, but he doesn’t.
Shiv steps over the wall and into the garden, catching Dad by surprise.
“Shiv, no – what if they come back?”
She keeps going and he doesn’t have much choice but to follow, drawing up beside her as she comes to a stop at the poolside.
It’s late October, the end of the holiday season, but the villa is in use. A pink inflatable dolphin, lilo and stripy beach-ball cluster at one end of the pool. Other signs of occupation: a game of quoits not cleared away; a cup on the table under the pergola; four pairs of flip-flops (two adult, two child-sized) by the patio door; towels flapping listlessly on the line. But the windows are shut and everywhere is perfectly quiet.
“I wonder if they know?” Shiv says. About us, she leaves unsaid. About who rented this place back in the spring and what happened to their son.
“It’s like we were never here,” she says under her breath.
Beside her, Dad says, “I thought the same, first time I came back.”
“When I was little, I imagined the places we stayed on holiday didn’t exist except for the time we were there. I couldn’t bear to think of other kids sleeping in our beds or swimming in our pool or playing where we played.”
We. Her and Declan. Shiv slips a hand into her father’s.
“Why did you come here, Shiv?” He’s being gentle, patient; but she can tell it bothers him that the holidaymakers might return.
If she didn’t want to do the thing with the flowers, what does she want to do?
Her gaze settles on the pool. She thinks of the hours she and Declan spent in that water. Then, another thought: the lake, the jetty. Funny how the lake at Eden Hall used to remind Shiv of the sea at Kyritos – and now the pool reminds her of the lake.
Dad’s hand is sweaty in hers. The sun is bright and warm but Shiv’s arms are covered in goosebumps.
“You coping OK with this?” Dad asks.
“Not really, no. How about you?”
“No.” Then, giving her hand a squeeze, “Look, we should—”
“Yeah. OK.”
He doesn’t know yet, but Shiv won’t give evidence tomorrow; not the way the lawyer wants her to. Won’t help them “win” the case. The two defendants weren’t racing, she will say, her voice strong and clear. It was an accident. No more, no less. She shouldn’t have gone to the party in the first place, or accepted a lift home when she knew the guys had been drinking. However much trouble it would’ve got her into, she should have phoned to ask her parents to collect them in the taxi.
Then, she will describe how Nikos risked his life to save hers – scrambling down the cliff and onto the wave-swept rocks, pulling her back from the edge when she was about to dive into the sea after Declan. Holding on to her.
“I’d have died if it wasn’t for him.”
That’s what she’ll tell the court.
Dad will be furious. Or not. Perhaps it won’t surprise him that much. In time, maybe he’ll come to realize it was the right thing to do.
Dad has clung to this case as grimly as Mum once clung to Declan’s room; just as Shiv once clung to the idea of her indelible guilt. As though, so long as they have something of Dec to hold on to, it prevents him from being finally, irretrievably dead.
Her brother is dead, though. But Shiv’s love for him remains. Her memories of him remain. It is these things – weightless, formless as they are – which raise her to the surface and let her live in the light. Not absolved of her guilt, not freed from grief and loss, but absorbing all of it into who she is. Atoning for Declan’s death by living the life that she can, with enough joys and sorrows for both of them.
She goes to the patio and picks up a plastic spade from the beach set. It’s encrusted with sand, and the buckets, she notices, are half-filled with pretty-coloured pebbles.
“What are you doing?” Dad asks.
Shiv doesn’t answer. She makes for the flower border where she spotted the ball that time. Finding a clear patch of soil, she kneels down and starts to dig – little scoops of earth that she sets aside in a heap, conscious of Dad watching her from the other side of the pool.
When the hole is deep enough, Shiv sets the spade down and opens up the bag, her hands grubby and damp with perspiration. She reaches inside.
“What’s that?” Dad says. She didn’t hear him approach and the closeness of his voice makes her jump.
Unfurling the T-shirt, Shiv holds it up for him to see. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
Her father doesn’t speak.
She folds the T-shirt again and places it in the hole. A pause. Shiv looks at the shirt for a moment then covers it over with soil, filling the hole right up and levelling it off so that you’d never know the ground had been disturbed.
She stands up, brushes the earth from her hands. Dad doesn’t say a word, or hold her hand, or pull her into a hug, or anything like that. But he stands next to her by the flower border and when she turns away he turns with her.
A last gesture, as they step back over the wall and into the olive grove. Shiv stops and takes another item from her bag.
A yellow tennis ball.
She stands on the wall, takes aim, and gently lobs the ball into the pool for one of the children to find.