—
They went down the path in the direction of the sea and the beach at Nisiza. Sam was more at ease now. She hung back a little and watched the other two from behind. Naomi had told her to bring her swimsuit, so she must have foreseen this detour all along, and under a brilliant sky there was no room for suspicion or smallness of spirit. In a few minutes of walking in the heat they were soon laughing together, in synchronicity, and there was no ambiguous complexity to ruin the moment. It was there, but it could be left behind for a while. The path was difficult to negotiate and it took a long time to come down to the water. She wondered, and not for the first time, if the old men had followed them down or were watching them from somewhere. The path dipped downward in the shade and delivered them to the small church of Agios Ioannis, with the sea just on the far side of the cliffs.
They sat there against a wall and drank from their water bottles. The beach was by a skerry a few hundred meters away, the promontory uninhabited and encircled by shallow water—a short but prickly hike.
“You know secret places,” Faoud said to Naomi. “How did you find a place like this?”
“I used to come here alone as a girl.”
“Is there anyone on that little island?”
She shook her head. Sam took off her sunglasses and let the ocean blind her. There were withered olive trees all around them, the earth a pale chocolate color. The wind rushed off the cliffs from the choppy water. She felt now how subtle Naomi had been to bring them down here, away from the world. It normalized things. She felt calm, too, in the shade of the sea-beaten church, lonely on its perch and adrift in the centuries. It must be where the people of Episkopi came. They stood up eventually and scrambled down the rough slopes to the small beach that joined the skerry to the land. They stripped to their swimsuits, Faoud in his shorts, and they waded into the cool water until they were up to their chests. Then they kicked off and swam out around the skerry. Sam, swimming more weakly, trailed behind them a little and the wind whipping off the water deafened her. The other two were talking. On the far side of the skerry they got out and sat on the rocks. By the time she joined them they were halfway through some discussion or other. They seemed to be getting on well, and she felt a shiver of jealousy. “Ridiculous,” she corrected herself. She had no right to be jealous of anyone, but it irked her a little that Naomi seemed to have scored a small advantage over her with the stranger. She hauled up beside them and she was gloriously aware of the slight superiority of her body, the way it detained his eye for a moment despite himself. So her power had not ebbed entirely before the magnetism of a rival. Naomi had other advantages, but not that at least. They lay then in silence for a while, soaking up the sun and the saline wind. But Faoud kept his eye warily on the sea. The police have boats and he knows about them, she thought.
“What if we were all alone here?” she said idly. “Just the three of us. It would be kind of nice, wouldn’t it?”
“I was thinking that too,” Faoud said. “Fine, but impossible.”
“Maybe we’d hate each other by the end of the first day,” Naomi said.
That’s exactly how it would be, Sam thought.
“What about your parents?” he asked both of them at once.
“Mine,” Naomi said, “should just go live elsewhere. This island is far too small for them. They overwhelm it. If they left I wouldn’t be sorry. I’d be delirious.”
He smiled with a timid puzzlement.
“Are they unpleasant?”
“They’re who they are. I shouldn’t say anything. Sam here, on the other hand, has nice parents. We might let them stay.”
Sam decided to say nothing.
“I see,” Faoud murmured. “It’s always better being alone, isn’t it?”
“I dream of that all the time,” Naomi said.
The two women both thought about it, unknown to each other.
Sam thought of a Japanese film she had seen over the winter called Battle Royale. In the film, children are culled from troublesome schools and sent to an island, where they are forced to play a televised game. They are issued different weapons, and explosive collars are fitted around their necks that control them; they are then forced to kill each other one by one, until only one is left alive. The girls seem to be the more vicious and effective killers. Social bonds, amorous crushes, and platonic loves all fall by the wayside the closer death comes. Even the Japanese island looked like Hydra, lacking merely the sirens, the cannons, the ruined military bunkers in which to hide.
She rolled onto her side and let the stones burn a little into her legs. She wondered if the idea was appealing—an island as a killing zone with nowhere to run. What weapon would she choose—a scythe, a hammer, a recurve bow?
Naomi stood, flexed her arms, and without a word to either of them dropped back into the water and swam away.
Faoud turned mildly to Sam. To her, his eyes had the color of black olive tapenade.
“She could be your older sister. Does she boss you around?”
“Not really. But I wouldn’t mind if she did.”
He got up as well, and his downward glance was skeptical.
“You coming?”
“I’ll wait.”
In the end she walked alone over the skerry back to the beach. As she came through the low trees she heard their voices, amused in tone and feckless, the sexual energy unmistakable. For a moment she hung back unseen and watched them lying side by side in the harshness of the sunlight. They seemed unconcerned. They were only a few inches apart and their voices were modulated to complement each other, the ancient dance of words. She crouched and tried to hear what they were saying, but it was carried off by the wind. There was just the beating of her own heart, and the acceleration that betrayed a hatred.
—