She is. Clio did want a treat for herself–an underwater camera. A second-hand one which was on sale at the bookshop in Naxos Town where we swapped our novels and where backpackers would sometimes sell stuff when money got short.
Clio loves snorkelling. She says it’s a bit like flying and I’d like to say I know what she means, but I don’t. I’ve got a snorkel and mask too, but touching the bottom with my toes is as far out as I go. And on Naxos where the drop off is pretty steep, that’s only one step removed from paddling. What freaks me out, the few times I’ve tried snorkelling, is the huge bank of blue you see when you look out towards the open ocean. Turning my back on it, the scale of it–I don’t know. Mainly, I’m expecting something massive to come rushing out the second I look away and bite my legs off, but partly, maybe, it’s also the scale of the blue itself. Knowing how swimming towards that wall of blue can only make it bigger and bigger and bigger until its face is impossibly massive and all around and behind you too, with the sea floor sloped away to black. But the scale of the deep doesn’t bother Clio at all. She’s done parachute jumps too, and extreme skiing, although I don’t want to give you the impression she’s a health freak or whatever. We’re both fairly outdoorsy (don’t you hate that word?), but the idea of anything we do being healthy usually spoils it. I don’t think either of us have ever understood the whole no pain, no gain thing. Here’s something I especially love about Clio Aames; she likes to laugh at joggers. There are joggers on Naxos. The temperature is touching forty on the mainland and it isn’t much cooler out here but still, joggers on the beach. Clio has taken to saying “wrong” and sometimes pointing at them as they go past.
One of Clio’s all-time favourite facts is how the guy who invented jogging died of a heart attack. Someone at a barbecue last summer spent ages explaining to her how the jogging guy was actually born with a heart defect and how the heart attack was coming all along. So it wasn’t actually caused by the jogging per se, he kept saying, but that didn’t spoil it for Clio at all.
“You see what they’re like?” she said, as we staggered home that night. “Only a jogger with a heart defect could invent something as fucking ridiculous as jogging.” I laughed and said, “That doesn’t make any kind of sense at all,” and she pushed me into a hedge.
“That’s it.”
“Hmmm. How do you know it works?”
“If it doesn’t work I’ll bring it back and get a refund.”
I looked at the sand-blasted collection of window junk and crease-covered backpacker books. The underwater camera looked grubby, scratched and duff.
“A refund from here?”
“Don’t be doubting my abilities, Sanderson.”
We’re not going to go into any of the Clio Aames complaints and refunds stories. “Can you actually get thrown off an island do you think?”
“Do you really not want me to have it?”
I looked at the camera.
“Course I want you to have it if you want it.”
“I do want it.” She grabbed my wrist. “Hey, I know–it can be my present for looking after you the other day when you went mental.”
“Does that mean I don’t have to have a hammock?” I said, then, “I didn’t go mental.”
“Yes you did–Clio, Clio, help me I’m a total nut job,” she said, doing a voice.
“Look, I can’t help it if I’m sensitive and creative, can I?”
“Whatever,” she smiled. “So can I have the camera now?”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay.”
So Clio now has an underwater camera. She hasn’t used a full roll of film yet, so we still don’t know if it works.
I did go mental a couple of days before we bought the camera, for an hour or so anyway. It happens sometimes. The otherness just rolls in on me like angry clouds and there’s nothing I can do. That evening, I had a rising fear–terror–of being trapped on the island and not being able to get off. I was tiptoes on the edge of a panic attack, everything around me suddenly waiting to become groundless and horrific.
We were sitting outside our tent reading books when it happened. Clio was going through the guidebook putting more stars on all the things on Naxos we still hadn’t done.
“I don’t feel right,” I said. My voice sounded thick and odd, like sound bursting out of bubbles made in some deep and strange place.
“I know,” Clio said, sucking on her biro and not looking up. “He does that to me too.” She meant Paul Auster–I’d been reading The Invention of Solitude.
“Clio,” I said, and I meant it to start a sentence but there were no more words to follow on.
She put down the book and looked at me, distracted. I saw the concern focusing her eyes. “Honey, what’s up?”
I tried my best to explain, handling and gently passing the words over to her like they were small spiky mines, careful, careful, careful.
“What are you like?” she said. “Maybe you should go for a walk or something. Stretch your legs.”
“Maybe.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“No, I think I should be on my own.”
“Okay. Well, the sunset fish’ll be in the surf now. You could take what’s left of the sandwiches and feed them if you want.” She smiled again. “And maybe bring back some ice cream too?”
This is how Clio punctures my panics, by bringing them down into the same familiar world as vacuuming and Saturday afternoon TV. By being kind and by calling out to my child-self–it’s okay, here’s something fun–making warm redirections to safe and happy things. Clio’s deep honest kindness–you could call it a mothering streak even–is something most of our friends probably wouldn’t even guess at. But it’s there, bright and straightforward and obvious, if you know what you’re looking at. A sort of on-show secret.
“I think that might help,” I said. “The sunset fish are cool.” We sometimes save pizza crusts from dinner to feed the little fish that gather in the evening surf.
“It will help, honey,” Clio said. “I am always right, remember?”
“I do remember.”
“Good,” she said. “Well, there’s a start.”
And I laughed in spite of everything.
“Hi. How are you feeling?”
“I forgot the ice cream.”
“I was really worried about you.” Clio was still sitting outside writing in the guidebook when I came back to the campsite half an hour later.
“I know you were,” I said, sitting down next to her on the reed mat.
“I feel so terrible. I never know how to help.”
“You always get it right, anyway,” I said, then, “I’m sorry it happens.”
She put her arm around me, hand still holding the book, and hugged my head onto her chest with the hook of her elbow.
“What a dick,” she said gently, rocking me from side to side.
The underwater camera is a chunky yellow and black thing living inside its own close-moulded Perspex bubble. There’s a tough yellow plastic porthole around the lens held in place by a ring of six silver screws. Instead of a viewfinder, it has a foldaway plastic crosshair on top and the take a picture button is basically a plunger. Now we’d bought it and it was sitting on the café table with our new books and our frappés, I realised I liked it. It was scuffed and battered and probably didn’t work, but I liked it. I found myself thinking how it looked brave. To boldly go where cameras have never gone before. It reminded me of Buzz Lightyear.
“You can have a go with it too if you want,” Clio said. After buying the camera we’d gone for drinks on Naxos harbour. There was time to kill before the bus back to the campsite. “You could kneel at the edge of the surf and stick your head in.”
“For a girl who I know has seen Jaws at least twice,” I said, “you’re pretty fast and easy about the sea, do you know that?”
“I’m not the one who always watches it through my fingers.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Tha
t’s what I’m saying. It’s terrifying.”
Clio looked at me.
“That bit when the head pops out of the hull? With the eyes all hanging out?”
Clio looked at me.
“And the end–Chief Brodie, Richard Dreyfuss and that mad fishing guy all on that rickety boat? I can’t sit still and watch that. I have to get up and walk around.”
“I know,” Clio sighed, shaking her head at me.
“In all other respects though,” I shuffled, pretended I’d been caught out, dropped my voice, “in all other respects, I’m incredibly manly and brave.”
Clio laughed.
“Okay, prove it. Come snorkelling with me. There are some amazing fish out by the rocks, I wish you’d come out and see them.”
“Well, I’ll be able to see them now, won’t I?” I patted the top of the underwater camera.
“But it’s not the same,” Clio dragged the words out in a little girl whine. She smiled. “If you loved me you’d come.”
“Don’t you think it looks like Buzz Lightyear?”
“I said, if you loved me you’d come.”
“To infinity and beyond,” I told the chunky yellow and Perspex bubble, ignoring her.
Clio sucked hard on her straw, staring at me.
“Make it so, Number One,” I told it. “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
“It is mine you know,” Clio said, pulling the camera towards her protectively.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I know. I know. Totally.” I sucked up a mouthful of iced coffee and winked at the camera in a knowing way.
“Stop it,” she said, covering the lens.
Out past the harbour shops, cafés and bars, along a narrow sea-sprayed causeway, you can see what’s left of the temple of Portara; mainly, a huge stone doorway looking out over the bay. This is known as Ariadne’s Arch, where, according to legend, the daughter of King Minos of Crete had the pleasure of watching heroic love rat Theseus sod off back to Athens without her. Heartbroken Ariadne eventually married Bacchus, god of wine and song, and they lived happily ever after. Which, Clio reckons, is a way of saying she became a crazy drunk and stopped giving much of a fuck about anything.
“And the moral of the story is?” Clio had asked as we’d sat eating ice cream on an ancient world masonry block behind the arch one afternoon.
“Don’t go offering your ball of wool to strange soldiers in underground tunnels?”
Clio laughed. “No, do,” she said. “But don’t bother going home to meet the folks afterwards.”
She was still playing with her camera, so I had a flick through the new books we’d picked up. I’d got a copy of Crooked Cucumber, Shunryu Suzuki’s autobiography. I’d already read his Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. Backpackers seem to leave a lot of Zen literature behind them, and, because it was everywhere, I’d started to read it. I’d bought a copy of Shogun too, although it looked like a feudal Japan rewrite of War and Peace; almost as thick as it was wide and I knew I wouldn’t be carrying it off the island with me. We also picked up another book on Greek mythology (we had three). I’d already forgotten why we had to have this one as well.
“Do you feel like doing one of the guidebook things tonight?” Clio asked, putting the camera down.
“Dunno,” I said. Apart from Ariadne’s Arch, we’d failed to do any of the archaeology adventures we’d planned. We hadn’t even gone to see the giant stone man in the quarry. Instead, we’d kept up our uncultured routine of breakfast, beach, taverna and bar for almost three weeks–If I see another ancient clay pot I’m going to kill somebody–and in six days’ time we’d be sailing back to the mainland for the plane home.
“I was thinking of going out to the animal bay, what do you reckon?”
“Ahhh,” I said. The guidebook says there is a small secluded bay about twenty minutes’ walk from our campsite filled with large flat stones, some of which look like animals. The book reckons this bay at sunset is one of the most romantic places in all the Cyclades, and also mentions, in a surprisingly frank way, that it’s a great place to have sex outdoors.
“Okay,” Clio said. “So here’s what I’m thinking–we’ll take one of the small rucksacks with tops in for if it gets cold, towels to sit on and I thought at least three bottles of Amstel, so you’ll need to find the bottle opener. We should wear trainers for getting over the rocks and I’m going to wear my blue summer dress without knickers. You can wear whatever you want. If we decide we need any other stuff we can pick it up from the shop on the way. I don’t think I’ve forgotten anything. Are you with me, Sanderson?”
I nodded, once, seriously.
“I’m with you Aames.”
“Excellent,” she said.
We sat on a large flat rock with our trainered feet dangling over the edge, both of us looking out to sea. The animal bay wasn’t romantic in the way the guidebook had said, but it was beautiful and secluded. Clio sat staring out at the horizon, her hands tucked under her knees so the hem of her little blue summer dress stretched tight across her legs. Her feet kicked gently in mid-air. I tried to match her time, swinging my feet with hers, but my legs are longer and so slowed out of synch after a couple of beats–I had to keep stopping and restarting to get back into time. There was a slight breeze coming from the sea and the sky hazed around the edges. Clio had been quiet for most of the walk and stayed quiet when we arrived, climbing up onto the rock and looking out at the waves. I know my role when this happens just like Clio knows what to do when I have one of my strange turns. My job is to stay nearby and say nothing, just to be there and to wait for it to pass. Sometimes, after a length of silence, Clio will explode about some little thing I did or didn’t do or something that went wrong earlier in the day. Then, it’s my job to listen without arguing and to be ready if there are tears. I fished a bottle of Amstel out of our bag and popped off the top. I had a swig and offered it to Clio. She had a mouthful and passed it back.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“I don’t think I want to have sex.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
A group of gulls dive-bombed something I couldn’t see out in the swell.
“I’m not doing it on purpose.”
I put my arm around her and pulled her shoulders up against mine.
“Why would I think you were doing it on purpose? Doing what on purpose, anyway?”
She let me hug her like that for a while before gently pulling herself away. After a few minutes, she started running her thumbs up along the line of her jaw, up behind her ears and then slowly down her neck in attentive little circles. It had been a while since I’d seen this.
“Don’t,” I said, taking hold of her wrists and gently bringing them back down to her lap. “You’re fine. There’s nothing there.”
“I didn’t even know I was doing it,” she said, facing out to sea.
“Sorry.”
“Do you think I’m crazy?”
“Clio, you’re not crazy at all. I’m crazy, remember. You’re–well, special maybe, but not crazy.”
This made her smile. “Shut up,” she said.
“Do you want me to check your neck?”
“No.”
“It’s all over, you know. You’ll never have to go back.”
“I can’t go back.”
“You won’t have to.”
She thought for a while, gently kicking her legs, before speaking again.
“There’s, like, a cheerful united outlook, you know, in the staff. They’ll do anything for you. You can have a TV by your bed, videos whatever. Everyone’s so upbeat. Eric, it’s fucking awful.”
“Hon, you’ll never have to go back. I promise.”
“You can’t promise that.”
“I just know you’ll be fine.”
The tavernas around the campsite all have multi-coloured lanterns hanging from their porches, like oversized Christmas tree lights. They refle
ct in the sea all along the shoreline at night, projecting blue and red and green and yellow out onto the waves. Out at the stone animal bay, the sea is left quietly to its own colourings.
“It’s like they say about soldiers coming back from a war. People all around you are dying. Really dying, Eric. You go in for a week’s chemotherapy and you’re in a ward with people who are really, actually dying, there and then and doing their best to come to terms with it. When the week’s up, you go home and you see your family and your friends and everything’s normal and familiar. It’s too much. You think–one world can’t possibly hold both these lives and you feel like you’re going to go crazy when you realise the world is that big and it can fill with the most terrible things whenever it wants to.”
We sat quietly for a few minutes.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there with you.”
“This isn’t about you. Or whether you’re sorry or not.”
“That’s not how I meant it, you know I didn’t.”
“You didn’t even know me.”
“I’m still sorry. I feel like I let you down by not knowing you sooner.”
“Well, that’s stupid.”
“Some things are stupid. It doesn’t stop them being true. I’m stupid and I’m here.”
Clio took the Amstel bottle and smiled. “That’s true.”
“Listen–I love you and whatever happens I’ll always be here, if you want me to be. But you do need to start letting go of this. You don’t want to end up freaking out like me all the time, do you?”
Clio looked out at the water. I knew she was deciding whether to be angry with me or not. Minutes passed. The gulls ate or lost whatever they were interested in and went shouting up into the sky. A plane left a straight white vapour trail.
“The hospital had its own library, you know.”
“Yeah?”
“A whole library and nothing to read. If I never see an Arthur Conan Doyle book again it’ll be too soon.”
I laughed.
“I’ve read them all and do you know what I learned?”
“What?”
“Sherlock Holmes isn’t clever at all–it’s just that Dr Watson is a fucking idiot.”