But really Sam just wanted to be alone. At midday she left her mother at the hotel and walked around the headland by herself. She passed the rock where Naomi and she had lain that first day and continued on into the wilderness where the thistles grew. She was suddenly sobbing to herself without knowing why, and below her the dark and churning sea offered a tempting annihilation. It would be an act of pure hatred, not self-hatred, and it would destroy everyone she knew because—it was just possible—they deserved to be destroyed. When she was far from Mandraki, in a place where no one passed, she stripped naked and clambered down to the sea. The water there was much colder and she endured it for ten minutes before climbing back up into the rocks. Naomi used to tell her how much she swam there alone. Now she had told her to lie low for a while and avoid contact with her. They had to wait and see what happened.
As Sam lay in the sun and dried off, her rage subsided. When she went back to Mandraki she found that her mother had left and she walked back to Hydra town as slowly as she could, lost in unpleasant thought. She sat morosely at the Pirate, and soon enough, as her mother had predicted, the young Americans materialized all around her and within a few hectic minutes she was swept up in their windup toy momentum. It was not entirely unwelcome. By then she had spent four days alone with her family and she was beginning to feel the mortifying effects. Like her, the boys were on the island for the summer, for the long haul so to speak. Like her they were finding it charmingly claustrophobic. Why didn’t she come with them to another party at another house? There was the promise of dope and ouzo and people who spoke the same slang as herself. Most of all, she wouldn’t have to spend the whole evening playing Scrabble with her father.
They went up as a group through the angled lanes, a boy with his arm around her. She had knocked back four shots of ouzo, but her legs were still steady. There was a house belonging to one of their fathers. A wide sea-captain terrace with the panorama of Hydra around it and low Turkish tables where the boys cut lines of coke. The boy who had sweet-talked her on the way up told her that they had met before, at the painter’s house, and that he knew the English girl she had been with that night. Their parents were friends.
“I kind of thought you two were together. It’s cool if you are.”
“That’s the second time today someone has said that. I’m not with her. I’m not with anyone. I don’t need to be with anyone. I haven’t seen her in days.”
“I have. I saw her at a bar three nights ago. She was totally wasted.”
“Naomi?”
“She was sitting there alone.”
“She’s a free woman, isn’t she?”
“Didn’t say she wasn’t. There’s a lot of gossip about her on the island.”
“I don’t want to hear it. If people don’t like her, that’s their problem, not mine.”
“Well, obviously. I didn’t say I agreed with it or believed it.”
But you want to say it anyway, she thought.
“The old people say she’s daimonizetai.”
“What’s that?”
“Possessed. It’s because of stuff she did when she was a child.”
“They can remember what she did twenty years ago? It’s better for us that no one can remember what we did twenty years ago.”
“Twenty years ago…I was one.”
“So was I. But you know what I mean.”
“Some of them can remember the children of the 1950s, let alone the 1990s. My parents say she was a little wild but not possessed.”
“I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean, possessed.”
“I guess they mean it in a Greek way.”
“What is the Greek way?”
“I think they believe in spirits in a different way.”
“Even now,” she said, nodding.
“They know what they mean, though. It’s very specific.”
His name was Toby. Suddenly he had grown more sympathetic. He too was on summer vacation, but from Princeton. He was in his first year there. She asked him if he had grown up on Hydra. His family, he said, had spent their summers there since before he could remember. He didn’t speak very good Greek. His father had bought their house at the same time that Jimmie Codrington bought his. They knew each other through the art market.
“Or the local chapter of alcoholics,” she said.
“Or that. It’s a possibility. They all know each other. They’re in London now, though. I have the house to myself.”
“Where is it?”
He pointed to the jumble of houses tucked on top of each other. It was there among hundreds of others now forming a maze of lights in the gathering dusk.
“I’ll come visit if you invite me,” she said.
“You’re invited for sure, Miss Haldane. You really ought to change your last name, by the way. It sucks. You could keep your first name and then change the second one. Sam Smith?”
“I like it.”
“Samantha Smithereens?”
They each did a line of the coke, but she remembered why she had always disliked this particular drug. It did nothing for her. It left her irritated and overactive. One didn’t always want to be too awake. The boys were playing guitars and drinking heavily. She thought that most of them were insidiously boring, tanned but fleshless. Toby was the exception; she had his attention. His eyes were quick and active, there was no toxicity in them. Besides, he knew about the Codringtons, which was useful. It was disconcerting to think how little she herself knew about them. She knew more about their death than about their life, but maybe Toby could fill her in a little. They were growing rapidly closer, and the idea of sex was becoming more likely. It would, in fact, make everything easier.
Her mother would even like Toby. A nice young Princeton man, backed by a good family and a fair amount of willpower. He was a bit more than that, but it was doubtful whether Amy would see his potential. They left shortly after midnight and she called home briefly as they clambered up the opposing hillside to the house he had pointed out two hours earlier. On the way they stopped at a late-night taverna and ate some souvlaki and downed a couple of bottles of Mythos. He too was by now addicted to Mythos. In this intervening period the drug sank into her and she felt delirious. They talked about college. Seen from the perspective of Greece and a slow hot summer, however, it seemed disturbingly trivial. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with the rest of his time at Princeton; she was already waiting for college to end and something else to begin. He wanted to know what it would be.
“My father says I should go into journalism. He doesn’t understand that journalism is over—long over.”
“Mine thinks I should be a lawyer. He has a point. But he knows I won’t.”
“Maybe,” she said, “I’ll drift for a bit afterward. Maybe I’ll come back here and get a job in a hotel.” Her voice trailed off, she couldn’t help it.
He said, “Are you sure you want to come up? You don’t seem sure.”
“I have anemia sometimes. That’s why I look pale.”
“I didn’t say you looked pale. I said you looked unsure.”
“But I’m sure.”