I don’t know what I’d expected, but I asked Steve, ‘When do we get to Salamis?’
She replied, ‘It’s all around you. You’re inside an old Roman city right now, swallowed up like the castle in Sleeping Beauty.’
A couple of hours later we sat alone in an ancient, stone-tiered theatre, ate cheese and apples and washed them down with that thin Cypriot white wine drunk from the bottle. We hadn’t seen another soul all morning. I took her back to an earlier conversation, and asked, ‘Do you remember the men you go with?’
Steve took a bite of a sweet, green apple, and thought before replying.
‘Does a jockey remember every horse he rides?’
It may have sounded abrupt, but was an oddly reassuring answer. I leaned back and watched gulls thermalling in the blue sky. A necklace of cumulous clouds stretched low along the northern horizon.
I asked, ‘Where do we start, Steve?’ I knew what I meant, but also that the words I’d used hadn’t expressed it all that well. She took her time anyway. Waited until we were looking at each other. She was smiling, and I wondered if my smile was as wary as hers. She leaned forward, and kissed me quickly full on the lips.
‘We start by telling each other the worst thing that we’ve ever done in our lives – the very worst. Then there’s no turning back. We start with the bad and work our way forwards towards the good.’
It made me uncomfortable, but I’d asked for it.
‘OK. You first. It was your idea.’
She leaned over, and kissed me briefly again. There was a lightness about her that caught you up with her somehow.
‘Not here, Charlie. Even after two thousand years the acoustics are so good that if I whispered my secrets to you, someone could hear them up in the gods. Let’s walk over to the gymnasium – it still has columns and walls. I’ll tell you there.’
‘You think I’m an American, don’t you? Most men do.’
I said, ‘Yes.’
‘I’m not. I’m from South Africa. We have a family farm about fifty miles from Durban.’
‘Then why—?’
‘Hush . . . I’m going to tell you . . .’
We had counted the columns down one side of the gymnasium, and Steve was leaning against one of the stunted walls, one foot raised and braced against the stonework behind her. The area inside the square of columns was mown rough grass, the sun was almost directly overhead and the shadows were short. She had looped the basket containing the remains of our food over one shoulder, but put it down now while we talked. She said, ‘The worst thing I did was seduce a native houseboy named Saul when I was about twelve. He and I had been brought up together – I’d known him all my life. I was always a precocious child – I had tits soon after I was ten, and boredom was the enemy all my childhood. By the time I decided it wasn’t what I wanted, it was too late – we were doing it.’
‘What happened?’
‘You guessed it. I ran to my father, and told him Saul had raped me. So my father beat him with a bull whip, and nearly killed him. He crippled him before turning him off the farm. The whip cut so deep you could see the white of his ribs.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘I have no idea. He didn’t come back. What happens to a cripple with no money and no prospects? In SA most of them die.’ I thought it best to say nothing, but she hadn’t finished anyway. ‘That wasn’t the end of it. I did it again with a neighbour – early access to booze and the boredom again, I suppose. But my father saw through me. He watched me go to work on the guy at a family party, and walked into my bedroom while we were at it. I think he must have realized immediately that what had happened the first time was my fault. After that I think he never stopped hating himself for what he’d done to Saul.’
I used almost the same formula I’d spoken before.
‘What happened?’
‘A few weeks later they sent me away to a church school in the States – fresh start. I was thirteen. I never went home again. I could never forgive them for sending me away. It was like banishment.’
I took her hand, and we walked. We walked around the columns of the gymnasium again. When the silence between us was easier again she said, ‘Your turn. What was the worst thing you did?’
I did some Duke Ellington in my head for a couple of minutes, because I didn’t want to hear the words aloud.
‘I shot the woman I loved,’ I told her. ‘I think I killed her.’
Steve stopped walking immediately. I felt her fingers tighten around mine.
‘Christ, Charlie!’ That was the second time she’d said that. We took a couple more paces. Then, ‘Any mitigating circumstances?’
I could have said that she’d shot at me first, and hit me, but I didn’t. I shook my head. I still had Steve’s hand. We started walking again. I felt the sun on my neck.
What had she said? Explore the ruins, paddle in the sea and make love in the undergrowth? We walked for a couple of hours in the ruins, paddled when our feet were hot, and finished the food and the wine. We didn’t get round to the other thing: instead we sat on a tumbled column for an hour, and didn’t say much. She sat with her back to me, and I sat with my arms wrapped around her. I supposed that it was all up to her now. When we stood up by unspoken consent we began to
