The Girl Below(76)

“Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“Because I’m not sure if it happened, or if I imagined it.” I thought of showing him the scab on my hand, but without the shoe that put it there, it didn’t seem proof of anything. “And it wasn’t the wardrobe this time.”

“Well, whatever it is, I’m sure it won’t bother you in Greece.” He laughed. “I don’t think ghosts can swim the channel.”

I wanted him to be right but was afraid that he wasn’t. “What if I’m the ghost?” I said. “Or I take it with me wherever I go?”

We’d reached the food cabinet, where I lost Caleb’s attention to a hundred plastic sandwiches and pastries in dinky cardboard boxes. “Can I get whatever I like?” he said.

“Go crazy.”

Fifteen minutes later, midchannel, the hovercraft buzz was at its most deafening, and Caleb sat beside me looking green. He got up suddenly and lurched toward the aisle, clutching his stomach. I got up to follow him, but Harold reached out to stop me. “He doesn’t need you to hold his hand,” he said.

It was the first time he’d spoken to me since we’d boarded the hovercraft.

“I wasn’t planning on it,” I said.

Harold gave me a challenging look. “Are you sure about that?”

“Whatever you think happened the other night,” I said, “you’re wrong. Caleb was just trying to help me sleep, that’s all.”

Harold said nothing, but I suddenly remembered his carnal cure for insomnia, and realized I’d only made things worse.

“I’m going to get another coffee,” I said, and decided not to mention it again.

We arrived in Calais as disheveled as if we’d been traveling for weeks. Back on dry land, after emptying his guts at sea, Caleb was ravenous again, and tucked into a stale pain au chocolat, while Harold stood on the concourse and smoked. Already the journey was starting to feel like punishment.

At Charles de Gaulle Airport, Caleb rode up and down the conveyor belts of the central dome, waving at us and pulling faces until, at the end of one trip, he decided simply to vanish. With less than half an hour to go before we had to board our plane, Harold dispatched me and my schoolgirl French to find him. I wandered the concourse, bewildered by foreign signage and shoving hordes, until I too was lost. The airport was hideously chaotic, overrun with thin, jabbering women and fat, smoking men, and an intimidating array of security guards and military police with guns. I wanted, very much, to lock myself in the toilet.

In the end, it was Caleb who found me and not the other way round. I was buying bottled water at a kiosk when he punched me on the arm and said, “Salut!” then tried to blow a smoke ring in my face. He seemed perfectly at home, another louche garçon with a Gauloise packet hanging from his shirt pocket.

“Where were you?” I said. “We’re going to miss the plane.”

“Je suis un flâneur,” he said, with a pretentious flourish.

“Oui, and je suis un rock star.”

We caught the plane, but only just, and Harold was furious about it for as long as it took him to pass out with a deep snore on the seat between us. Within seconds, Caleb was tapping me on the arm, asking me to order an extra glass of wine for Harold so he could drink it. When I refused to, he turned up the volume on his headphones and turned his back on me, the model of a sulking teenager. It was silly to even analyze it, but telling him off, and the casual way he’d rebuffed me, made me feel like I was his mother, and I wished that I hadn’t said no.

Hours and hours later, we were in the back of a hot, cramped bus from Athens to the port of Kymi when I first noticed that Harold had been crying. Only then did it dawn on me that his cantankerous mood probably had nothing to do with Caleb or myself. We were on our way to Skyros because his mother was dying, and I of all people should have had a little empathy.

Our hotel was a fleapit in an industrial quarter by the port, half the letters missing from its neon sign. In the dim lobby, Harold went to the reception desk to check in, while Caleb and I sat on our bags in the cracked marble foyer, yawning our heads off.

After what seemed like forever, Harold came toward us looking glum. “They didn’t get our reservation,” he said. “They’ve one room vacant, a double, and the best they can do is a trundle bed.”

“Fuck that,” said Caleb. “I’m not sleeping on a trolley.”

“There aren’t many hotels here,” said Harold, wearily. “But the girl at reception said she’d ring round to see if anything’s available.”

The thought of more travel was torture. “I’ll sleep on the cot,” I offered. “It’s sort of the only arrangement that works.”