Artemis

Greece, the Eighties

The sun was already stretching over the port when Artemis came to, perhaps awoken by the sound of her own moaning. Or maybe it was the cloying damp of the sweat on her forehead that caused her to shiver and stir, her heart tapping out a rhythm against her ribcage.

She had been deep in dreams of the earthquake – the same dream, mutated over time: the earth cracking so that the ground opened up beneath her, preparing to draw her in. Screams quickening into a shrill vibrato.

Artemis sat upright and gave herself a minute, taking in the scene, as if half-expecting to find herself in the old cot-bed she had slept in as a child, in the village at the top of the mountain rather than where she had passed out the previous evening, safely tucked up down by the water in the same house she and her family had lived for the past twenty years. Ever since—

She paused her thoughts there.

Reaching for the Walkman on the side table, she pulled the headphones over her head and pressed play, hearing the click before the music seeped in, Simple Minds’ ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ instantly blotting out the world around her.

Sinking back into her pillow, she closed her eyes and drank in the sounds, dozing for a few minutes before standing to face the day, dressing quickly and heading out into the sun-bleached morning.

It was a Saturday, mid-July. On the street she turned right, away from the corner window of the bakery where her mother would have long been at work, away from the fishing boats bobbing at the edge of the water. She stretched her hands above her head, then reached into her bag for her Walkman. Pressing rewind, she yawned as she moved up the mountain path, towards the old village and the freshly emerging tremor lines that she could not yet see.

The old village, which stood at the top of the mountain, rang with the intermittent sounds of new life that summer. Twenty years after the earthquake that had taken their home and what lay inside, her father, Markos, behaved as though this act of nature had been a cruel and cunning ploy orchestrated by foreign developers seeking to take hold of the island on which his family had lived for generations. Even now, he refused to come up here, too scared of the ghosts that lingered among the olive trees, repelled by the steady churn of diggers as Europeans – from across Germany and France predominantly – snapped up property that had lain abandoned for two decades.

Artemis despaired of and loved her father in equal measure for his unshakeable loyalty to a past life. In the two decades since the house had fallen, taking with it his youngest child, the carcass of the building now symbolised for Markos a physical and spiritual sacrifice. Unable to focus on the true horror of his loss, the earthquake represented not just the event that had taken away his three-year-old daughter, but had become an emblem of a world – his world – that was now under threat from the emergence of a frivolous new Greece. To his broken mind, the earthquake was no longer an act of God but a threat to the foundations of the land he loved.

It wasn’t rational, of course, but then what would be an acceptably rational response to the death of a child? This wasn’t a question his fellow villagers were willing to take time to consider. So many people had lost so much that night, and in refusing to come together with his neighbours in his suffering, unwilling to conform to their collective grief, Markos had outcast himself and – by association – he had cast out his family, too.

The last time Markos ventured to the old village, he had returned with a look of dread. Rena had held out a hand to comfort him but he pushed her away.

‘Perhaps regeneration is exactly what this island needs,’ his wife had tried softly. ‘A bit of fresh life – for all our sakes.’

‘What are you saying, Rena? You think we need to move on?’

She barked back at him and Artemis had snuck away, leaving them to scrap like dogs over the bones that lay buried in the rubble.

Artemis walked with no particular direction in mind this morning, running her fingers along the mottled stone of the narrow alleyways, past flashes of the original Venetian walls and an old Byzantine church, her head bobbing occasionally to the beat of her mixtape. The morning sun brushed lightly against her skin, warming her.

Athena would be working all day. They had agreed to meet that evening at the opening of Nico’s, a new restaurant that was launching in the village’s central square. Now that foreigners had started to trickle in for the summer, Athena was keen to hang out in the places where she imagined some loaded, far-flung visitor might step in and whisk her off her feet. This was despite her on-off relationship with Panos, the boyfriend Athena was head-over-heels in love with one minute, and in total denial about the next. Absent-mindedly, Artemis scuffed the dusty path with the toe of her shoe as she walked her usual route to Carolina’s shop. Athena had no idea what she had; more to the point, she had no idea what it was like to be Artemis and to be considered an untouchable, even among boys like Panos; nice boys. And God knows those were few and far enough between.

It wasn’t that Artemis needed, or really actively wanted, a boyfriend. But there was something about the idea of someone wanting her. Objectively speaking, she was attractive. On the island, though, she was branded for life – partly due to her father’s idiosyncrasies, and partly due to manifestations of her own trauma, which ranged from the nightmares to, when she was younger, wetting herself in class; both irresistible fodder for the bullies who smelt her weakness, along with the urine that had sometimes streaked down her legs suddenly in the middle of a lesson, causing her to freeze.

And then there was Jorgos.

Artemis shuddered. Pulling out a cigarette and lighting it, she stopped and inhaled sharply, perching on the edge of a low wall where the side of the mountain tumbled down to the sea, grateful for a sudden gust of light wind.

It was early still and the few tourists who might follow the sign guiding them from the street at the top of the village, through Carolina’s grocery store and out towards the makeshift gallery in the back-room where Artemis’ paintings hung against stone walls, would likely still be asleep. She could afford to take a moment. Reaching into her bag, she pressed stop on her Walkman and closed her eyes, breathing in deeply as the ghosts rose up around her.

There was something soothing about sitting here, letting that night play out on loop in her head. In wakefulness, she could control the way her mind worked through the memory in a way that she couldn’t in sleep, though she never found the answer to the same question that came up again and again. Up here, in the middle of the day, the heat prickling against her skin, Artemis could try to make sense of what had happened – why she had survived while her sister, Helena, who had been sleeping just a few feet away, had not. It was the same question she would sometimes see flash behind her parents’ eyes when they looked at their remaining child. The question that vibrated silently between them when they fought.

It was a morbid pleasure, returning to this spot, one that offered the same eerie solace now as it had then, when the bullying was at its worst. Back then, Artemis would sneak out through the back door of the school at the end of the day, running all the way up the path to the ruins of her old family home. It was here that she would sit and wait until she knew the boys who would otherwise have taunted her all the way back to the bakery would have grown bored and headed home to their mothers. No one, not even Athena, knew that she came up here, back then or now. There weren’t many things she had to herself on an island as small and as incestuous as this one, but this spot was her own private world.

Reaching into her bag, she pressed play and turned the volume up to full before pulling out a sketchbook and pencil. As the tip of the lead touched the paper, she felt a hand on her shoulder. The unexpected contact caught her off-guard and she lurched away from it; feeling herself about to fall, her hands gripping the inside of the wall.

The man touched her shoulder again, this time to steady her. ‘Whoa. Are you OK? I didn’t mean to scare you …’

He spoke in English.

‘I’m fine.’ She shook her head. Something about the look of concentration on his face made her expression soften into a reluctant half-smile. ‘Oh, it’s you.’ She paused. ‘Honestly, I’m fine …’

‘Bloody hell, you speak English?’ he said.

‘Better than your Greek,’ she replied, rubbing her arm where he had grabbed it.

‘Well, it’s all Greek to me.’ He laughed, without blushing, and she remembered the self-belief on this man’s face as he’d asked her about one of her paintings in the gallery, the previous Saturday. He was a few years older than she was, maybe twenty-eight or twenty-nine, and a commanding presence in every respect. Twice he had been into the gallery in the past couple of weeks, poring over the strokes of her brush on the canvas. It wasn’t unusual to see the same faces again and again at the height of summer, given the scale of the island, but something about this particular face had caught her attention.

‘I was actually going to ask you directions,’ he ploughed on. ‘I came for a walk and I appear to have got a bit lost.’

‘Really? Where are you staying?’ she asked.

‘I’m not quite sure. That’s the thing about being lost, you see,’ he replied, rubbing his chin. ‘I’ve bought a house here. I say house – it’s more of a shack, really. Just over …’ He looked at her and shrugged, as if where it might be was no longer of relevance. ‘Somewhere over there.’

She laughed, despite herself. There was something vaguely ridiculous about the prospect of this man ever being lost.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

She paused. ‘Artemis.’

‘Artemis.’ He repeated it, enunciating each syllable, and she felt a chill brush over the backs of her knees.

‘Clive, Clive Witherall,’ he replied, reaching out a hand and holding her with his eyes until she had to blink.