Never Ending (3 page)

“Fifteen,” Shiv says. “You?”

“Seventeen. So that puts me in charge and
I
say we do the sit-down thing.”

“Walking, sitting – what’s the third part of the triathlon? Smoking?”

Caron lets out a snort of laughter and smoke. “That’s actually quite funny.”

They sit down. They fall quiet, the tranquillity of the surroundings seeming to cast a trance over them. It’s a companionable silence, as though they are old friends rather than two people who’ve only just met.

“Why were you crying?” Caron asks, breaking the spell at last. Then, “Actually, scrub that. Why
wouldn’t
you be crying? Why wouldn’t any of us?” She draws on her cigarette, her lips making a kissing sound. “So, what
else
did you do to get sent here? Apart from the obvious.”

“I smash stuff,” Shiv says. “Windows, doors. A load of wine bottles in Tesco. Car windscreen wipers – I went right along our street one night, ripping them off. Some of the wing mirrors too. Anything, really.”

“Yeah?”

Shiv tells her about setting fire to her school books.

“Actually in one of the
classrooms
?”

“No, at home – in the garden.”

Caron seems disappointed.

“One time,” Shiv goes on, “I lost it so badly with the educational psychologist, she had to buzz for back-up.” She shrugs. “It’s funny, at first, when I went back to school – you know, after Greece – I worked harder than I’d ever done in my life. Class nerd.” She shudders with the chill as the evening starts to close in. “Outside school I was doing all sorts of shit but … I guess it was the one thing I hung on to.”

“A life raft,” Caron suggests.

“Exactly. Then, one day, I thought,
Why bother? Why not just let rip?
” Another shrug. “If it wasn’t for my
extenuating circumstances
I’d have been kicked out long before the summer holidays saved them the trouble.”

“And, what, you’re the coolest kid in school now?” Caron says, teasing.

“No, I’m the weirdo. The one nobody looks at or talks to.”

“Yeah, well, better that than
sympathy
.” The older girl makes a gagging sound.

Shiv gives her a sidelong look. Caron’s face is pale in the gloom of the grotto. It’s good to meet someone as sick of sympathy as she is. Who understands.

“What about your friends?”

Shiv thinks of Laura and Katy. “They hug me a lot,” she says. “But it’s like I’ve been diagnosed with something – so, even while they’re hugging me, I get the feeling they’d rather not touch me in case they catch it too.”

Caron nods. “What they want is for you to be the way you were before. But you
can’t
, can you? None of us can ever be that.”

Just as the dinner gong sounds and they get up from the bench to head back inside, Shiv spots him.

A glimpse of white among the rhododendrons down by the drive. He stops, as though aware of being observed, and half turns their way. Then the figure continues, disappearing, swallowed up by the bushes. The briefest of sightings … but she could swear it was Declan.

Shiv realizes she has been holding her breath. She releases it.

Usually, she sees him in the street, or a busy supermarket, or on the school field – crowded places where some boy has Dec’s haircut, or build, or his way of walking, or a top the same colour and style as one he used to wear. This is the first time she’s seen him on his own.

“You OK?” Caron looks where Shiv was looking.

“I’m fine. It’s nothing.”

Kyritos

As the hire car crunched to a halt on the dazzlingly white stone chippings of the villa’s parking bay, Shiv released her grip on the door handle and sank back into her seat. She gave an exaggerated sigh. Beside her in the back, Declan – who had both hands over his face – tentatively parted his fingers.

“Are we … are – are – are we … still
alive
?” he said, through fake sobs.

“Blimey,” Dad said, laughing with relief. “I thought the drivers in
Italy
were crazy.”

“Is that
you
, Daddy,” Declan said, with childlike wonder, “or am I in
heaven
?”

Shiv turned her face to the window, her shoulders shaking. There was a stone wall overflowing with a brightly flowered climbing-plant of some kind; if she focused on those flowers, on the bees gathering pollen, she might not wet herself laughing.

“You handled it
very well
, love.” This was Mum, her teasing voice. “Foreign roads, an unfamiliar car, several hundred kamikaze Greek drivers – and you only swore seventeen times.”

“One of those was the C-word,” Shiv said. “Doesn’t that count treble?”

“Look –” Dad let go of the wheel and splayed his fingers – “I’m shaking.”

“Mum,” Dec said, “I think you’ll find
kamikaze
is Japanese, not Greek.”

Dad exhaled, tipping his head back against the headrest. As he did so, his foot must have slipped off the clutch and the car, its engine still running, stalled with one last lurch.

Declan covered his eyes. “No, nooo, we’re
moving
again!”

They burst out laughing.

Dad lowered the windows, letting in flowery, resinous smells so familiar to Shiv from previous holidays. The blast of heat was delicious. Ahead, a small olive grove separated their villa from the next, each grizzled tree standing in the scrawl of its own shadow.

They were here! The early start, the long trip … all of it fell away like a shrugged-off coat.

“D’you think we can go the whole two weeks without using the car?” Dad said.

While Dad unloaded the cases, Shiv followed her mum and brother round the side of the villa, spring sunshine soaking into her skin. It’d been sleeting when they left home, the weather’s parting gift for their holiday. They’d viewed the property from every conceivable angle in the photo gallery on the website – even so, as they entered the garden, the sight of the real thing stopped them in their tracks.

“Oh, my goodness!” Mum said.

They were on a stone-flagged terrace, patterned in marshmallow pink and white, overlooking a glittering swimming pool and, beyond that, the land descended to a bay – a swathe of blue-green sea so still it might have been painted there. Just the other side of the garden’s low stone wall, a solitary goat grazed in the shade of an olive tree. Their appearance on the terrace caused the goat to lift its head with a jerk and cast an inscrutable stare in their direction.

“Hey, look – springboard,” her brother said, nodding at the pool.

Dec had found a tennis ball and was bouncing it on the flagstones. Bounce–catch, bounce–catch. With his dark hair and olive skin, he could almost pass for Greek.

“This is
so
—”

“Beautiful,”
Shiv said, finishing Mum’s sentence.

“It’s very foreign, isn’t it?” Declan said.

“Funny that.” Shiv gave him a friendly shove and the tennis ball popped out of his hand, bounced down the steps and into the pool with barely a splash.

“You know,” Mum said, “I think this is even better than Sardinia.”

Shiv gave a mock gasp. “But that was ‘the villa to end all villas’.”

“The goat isn’t happy,” Declan said. “Look, he’s at the end of his tether.”

Mum and Shiv groaned. Shiv felt a bubble of joy well up; the first day of a holiday could sometimes be fraught – the travelling, the tiredness – but not this one.

She went down the steps, skirted the pool and stood on the wall at the bottom of the garden to take a look at the bay. From there, she could see the zigzag path through the dunes that led to the beach they’d read about on the website –
a gentle stroll brings you to a quaint fishing village with its welcoming tavernas, and just beyond the harbour, an unspoilt sandy beach ideal for swimming
. She spread her arms, closed her eyes and tilted her face into the sun.

Which was when the wet tennis ball smacked her in the back of the head.

“First strike of the holiday to the Boy Declan. Oh,
yesssss
.”

By the time she’d caught Dec and brought him sprawling onto the grass, they were weak with laughter. They untangled and flopped onto their backs, side by side, gasping for breath.

“You fight like a girl,” she said.

“So do you, as it happens.”

Sisters weren’t meant to like their kid brothers, especially when the brother was too smart for his own good. Her friends
hated
theirs. Declan, though, had always made Shiv laugh, right from when he started to talk. He was her mate. Often, they didn’t need to speak to know what the other one was thinking, or to set themselves off laughing over some private, unfathomable joke.

In cahoots
, Mum called it.
You two are always in cahoots over something
. Dad reckoned they were twins who happened to have been born two and a half years apart.

She even liked his clothes. Borrowed them, sometimes. Like he was an older sister rather than a younger brother. That baggy T-shirt he was wearing now, for instance – a birthday present he’d barely taken off since he got it – that was pretty cool, with its line from
The Catcher in the Rye
:

Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody
.

Not that Shiv was altogether sure what it meant.

One time, Aunt Rosh had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up and, without a moment’s hesitation, he’d said, “Holden Caulfield.”

Now, Mum joined them on the lawn, sitting on one of the wicker sunloungers. She’d got the camera out already and was firing off the first of what would no doubt be several hundred holiday snaps. She might’ve been posing for a glamour photo herself – yellow summer dress dazzling in the glare, the villa reflected in duplicate in the lenses of her sunglasses. Like a 1960s film star.

“It looks bigger in the flesh,” she said.

“The villa is made of
flesh
?” Declan said.

Shiv took her first proper look at the building. It was in the Greek style, with white walls, blue window frames and shutters, tiled roof, and a pergola draped with vines that shaded a dining area on the lower terrace. A balcony overlooked the poolside – an ideal place to watch the sun set over the bay. That was where Mum and Dad would share a bottle of red, last thing, their voices drifting to Shiv’s room. She still associated family holidays with falling asleep to her parents’ murmured conversation somewhere outside at the end of a long, warm day.

“There’s a welcome hamper!” Dad called from inside the villa.

“Wine?” Mum called back.

In reply, Dad made a whining noise.

“It’s a form of mental cruelty,” Dec said. “
Dad Jokes
. Banned in forty-seven countries around the world.”

“Forty-six,” Shiv said. “North Korea refused to sign the treaty.”

“Ah, yes, you’re
right
, Shivoloppoulos. Can’t believe I forgot.”

Declan got up and perched on the edge of Mum’s sunlounger. Shiv sat the other side of Mum, who put an arm round each of them, massaging their backs.

“So, Child A and Child B – do we like it here?”

“Hmm,” Shiv said, “I suppose it’ll do until we reach the holiday villa.”

At that moment, Dad appeared, wearing his tartan swimming shorts and goggles, his nose gleaming white with sun-block. “Right,” he said, “who’s coming for a dip?”

2

After dinner, the residents are shown into a small, windowless room done out in shades of blue and furnished with six chairs in a single row facing a plain oval desk with a further four chairs lined up behind it. The residents fill up the row of six, as instructed. Shiv sits between Caron and a girl called Lucy: a plump, moon-faced chatterbox, the same age as Shiv – friendly, if over-eager – who dominated the conversation (and the food) at Shiv’s end of the table during dinner. Next to Lucy is a girl whose name Shiv can’t recall, then one of the boys – the younger one.
Mikey? Yes, Mikey
. He must be thirteen, or he wouldn’t be here, but could pass for ten. Short and slight, twitchy with nervous energy, continually roughing his fingers through his shortish, dark-blond hair or fiercely chewing his nails.

“OCD,” Caron whispered to her at dinner, nodding in his direction.

At the end of the line is Docherty, who insists on being called by his surname. He looks seventeen going on twenty, with a US-army-style buzz cut and a spider’s web tattoo on his right elbow. Good-looking in a hard, getting-into-fights kind of way. He barely spoke at dinner. It was a strange meal all round, the conversation stilted, cramped by self-consciousness. They all seemed to heave a sigh of relief when it was over and the orderly who’d supervised them ushered everyone out of the dining room.

“Shame to break up the party,” Caron muttered to Shiv on their way out.

Shiv tried hard to keep a straight face.

Now, as they settle into their seats in the Blue Room, a second door opens and four staff file in. Two men and a woman are in blue-and-grey uniforms, a cross between a tracksuit and something a paramedic might wear. At the rear is an older woman in a sharp grey business suit carrying a stack of buff cardboard folders.

The uniforms sit facing the patients across the oval desk but the suit remains standing, taking up a position at one end of the desk. She sets the folders down.

“Good evening, everyone,” she says. “And welcome to the Korsakoff Clinic.”

She beams, arms spread in the mime of an embrace, the illumination from the spotlights in the ceiling reflecting off her glasses and giving her mannishly short, salt-and-pepper hair a silver sheen.
Fifty? Sixty?
Those glasses look expensively stylish; the twinkly eyes behind the lenses are the same shade of green as Mum’s.

“I am Dr Pollard,” she tells them, “the Director of the clinic. My colleagues –” she points in turn “are Assistants Webb, Hensher and Sumner.”

Shiv tags them: Webb is the cool black guy; Hensher is the awkward ginger guy; Sumner is the too-smiley, fake-tanned blonde. None looks older than thirty.