I sighed. I didn’t think it necessary to reply. But you wouldn’t shut up.

  “More efficient than your Hilton Honors reward scheme,” you said.

  Again, I didn’t reply. You sighed.

  “Don’t you think Isabella is acting super suspiciously?”

  “No. I really wish you’d—”

  “That boy in the photograph. He’s got something to do with the sleepwalkers.”

  “What boy?”

  “Hamza, she said he was called? He was at the window earlier, outside the dining room. He looked totally fucking mental. We saw him at the harbor before. Oh, and I think he brought the doilies for the dinner party.”

  “Doilies?”

  “Right?”

  I rolled my eyes. “What’s that got to do with the sleepwalkers?”

  “That’s what I’m going to find out.”

  You got up and put on the hotel dressing gown, just as you had earlier, in the shambolic reenactment.

  “Evie,” I said. “Don’t.”

  “I just—”

  “If you’re so worried about getting murdered then why don’t you just stay here quietly instead of blundering off ‘to investigate’?”

  “Like the sleepwalkers did.”

  “We don’t know what they actually did!”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve got some idea. I think they lay down and went to sleep and never woke up. Or maybe they woke up in the sea, wondering how the hell they got there.”

  “But—”

  “Come on, even you must admit to seeing the way Isabella reacted to the photograph of the sleepwalkers that had Hamza in it. He’s the key, I promise you.”

  You were determined to go downstairs, so naturally I followed you. I thought at least I could explain to Isabella, apologize for you or something.

  The rain lashed against us as we walked down the stone stairs.

  “You’re mad,” I said. “Really, Evie.”

  “And I need to get my phone back,” you said, ignoring me.

  “From where?”

  “Where I left it recording. In the dining room.”

  And you really did look unhinged then, the rain gushing violently into your hair and face like some kind of extreme bukkake as you grinned at me in the darkness.

  “You did what?” I said over the sound of a car crunching up to the house.

  On the driveway below, Marcus and Debbie were being helped into a large black car by a chauffeur holding an umbrella.

  “See,” you said. “I predicted this as well.”

  “Goodbye!” called Debbie happily.

  “Take care!” said Marcus. “We’ll be in touch.”

  There was the sound of more goodbyes and thank-yous and the thunk of the car door, and—

  “I told you,” you hissed through the rain. “Smash and grab.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “They didn’t even stay one night,” you said.

  “OK, but how exactly does that work with your theory that they were freeloading?”

  “It’s probably the storm. They’re making a break for it while they can.”

  “They brought their own food too,” I reminded you.

  Isabella didn’t see us as we stole into the reception area just after the car pulled away. But we saw her. She thumped the wall with her small hand and then traipsed sadly into the dining room. I felt so sorry for her then. You were probably right; I could see that. Her one dream was coming to an end.

  You didn’t care. You went straight for the guest book.

  “I’m sure it was here,” you said, flicking through the pages.

  “What?” I asked, with slightly gritted teeth.

  “Oh my God,” you said, pointing inside the guest book. “Look.”

  “What?”

  “Someone’s ripped out the pages! The pages where the sleepwalkers’ children wrote all about them.”

  “Really? This wouldn’t just be in your fantasy world again, would it?”

  “The rip marks are literally here, Richard.”

  I didn’t look, deliberately, to spite you.

  From the dining room there came a big crash.

  “I’m not doing this anymore!” came a male American voice.

  Then someone with a French accent said, “You don’t have any choice, idiot.”

  The first voice continued: “If this is going to be made into a movie, we are all screwed.”

  “You wouldn’t dare. You’d go to prison.”

  “Yeah? And so would you. All of you.”

  I didn’t look at your face, but I bet it was smug.

  Isabella appeared in the hallway, her face red. Behind her came Christos, looking angry. The dapper little man hovered in the background, holding a Polaroid camera.

  “You are here,” Isabella said to us. “Why? And what is the meaning of this?”

  She held up your phone. The lock screen appeared, with the old photo in the background of the stage from the original Fringe version of The Chambermaid. In the top left-hand corner was a little yellow microphone graphic, pulsing on and off. It was the app you use to record yourself practicing for auditions, or to transcribe your ideas. It transcribed unknown voices laughably badly—as you loved to point out whenever you used it. Whenever someone said your name, it would come out as “a violin.” You always secretly recorded the meetings you had with casting directors and producers, which I’m not sure was totally ethical.

  “You have been recording us. Why?” Isabella approached you. “Please, you must tell me how to switch off and delete.”

  “Why?” you said. “I thought you had no secrets here. I thought everything was public and open?”

  “Please,” said Isabella.

  You reached out your hand to take the phone, but Isabella didn’t want to give it to you.

  “That’s mine,” you said.

  “Tell me how and I do it,” she said. “Then you have back.”

  I mean, she had a point. Isn’t it illegal to record someone against their will?

  “No,” you said. “Keep it. I have the recording online anyway.”

  “This is an invasion of privacy,” she said, biting her lip. “You have accidentally recorded very private things.”

  “Yeah? I bet I’m not the only one,” you said bitterly. “You’ve been listening to us since we arrived. Do you get off on it somehow? And what have you done with the notebook I left in my room?”

  Isabella made a complex face then that you might have described as “sneering.” But you really were trying her patience. And mine.

  The next thing Isabella said startled everyone, especially me.

  She took a step forward and touched my arm. She looked into my eyes.

  “Are you coming to bed, Richard?” she said, with a crisp smile.

  I should have said no immediately, but I didn’t. I hesitated.

  I may have taken just one small step toward her.

  The dapper little man raised his camera, pointed it at you and clicked.

  You screamed and ran out of the hallway into the storm.

  So, OK, I admit it. I did want her. It had been brewing since our first day at the Villa Rosa, if I’m honest, when I’d gone into the wrong room for breakfast. I’d seen Isabella naked then for the first time, and I’m afraid the image rather took hold of me. She’d been pale and trembling on a chaise longue, stretched out like a hairless cat.

  The dapper little man had also been there that first morning, by the way, sketching Isabella in charcoal. I possibly should have told you, but you’d already decided you didn’t like her and I didn’t want to make things worse.

  Anyway, I hesitated, because I am human. I fear I’ll be dead or in prison within the month, so why not at least think about indulging my final desire? Some men want KFC or a rib-eye steak. I just wanted Isabella. I’m so sorry, for that, and for everything.

  I hesitated only a moment longer, and then I chased after you.

  I ran up the stairs through the thick wet rain and into our suite. You’d locked yourself in the bathroom. I lay on the bed and waited for you to calm down. I must have dropped off, because the next thing I remember is Isabella’s flesh on mine, and then waking to find you gone.

  Actually, no. Maybe there was something else? A huge crash of thunder in the very dead of night, and the room all lit up bright yellow for a second, and you—sitting at the desk writing something. Yes! What were you writing, Evie?

  And then, even deeper into the night. You seemed to be shaking me.

  “He’s out there, Richard! He’s bleeding!”

  But maybe I dreamed that second one? Maybe both?

  The second time, I thought I could see your suitcase in the background, and you had your Gucci belt-bag on, the one my father bought you as a honeymoon gift.

  I wish you hadn’t left. But you did. You left me, Evie.

  So maybe it’s time to tell you my terrible secret? How it all started.

  You can’t interrupt now, or explode when

  23/09/2021

  The hotel is rather charming. It sits like a plump little king at the end of a dusty driveway, all pomp and hauteur, as if it’s just ordered a bowl of peeled grapes and is waiting for them to arrive. It has a quaint majesty, so out of place on this small island. You almost want to pat it on the head and say, There there, your highness, the grapes will come soon. The owner is called Isabella. She has the same baffled look of everyone here. Is it something to do with the light? Isabella apparently inherited the whole place from her dead husband, a much older man who for some reason I picture wearing a ragged vest and drinking bottled beer every night on the veranda. Although if he had been elegant and white-shirted that would perhaps have chimed more with the place. In fact yesterday I saw a picture of him, and he loomed moodily out of a too-small chair with a broken nose and gold watch, but when I tried to press Isabella for more details she pretended not to have understood me and said she had to go and boil some eggs.

  “I will lend you a boy,” she says to me today, after breakfast.

  “I’m sorry?” I say. But then I realize she means she has found me a guide to go to the refugee camp, which I’d asked her about yesterday.

  She is a woman of few words, but she has been kind to James, who has not been feeling so well these last weeks. It’s difficult to know what to do when your husband has found God, and you haven’t. It’s not that I didn’t try. But our long quest across the US, with all the big trees and big egos and big gurus—for me it was about travel, movement, escape, and for James it was about finding stillness. But such is the case with so many marriages of our vintage, of course.

  James says that God gives you sickness or troubles when he knows you can handle them, when you are strong enough. He persists in seeing his own weakness as a strength. But this is not about James. And I will write no more about James, after the last time.

  The boy arrives late. I want to call him something else—a man, a bloke, a guy—but he is a slip of a thing in his high-waisted shorts and cut-off Lou Reed T-shirt. Where does one buy clothes like that around here? I have found only one acceptable shop on the island, but you would not be able to buy anything genuinely stylish there, or proper moisturizer, or good makeup. Yet the boy has traces of makeup on his face. Scrubbed black eyeliner that has not quite gone from the corners, something electric blue. He reminds me a little of the fa’afafine I encountered in the Pacific all those years ago, with his slender wrists and the way he walks. The dark pink of his full lips.

  “My English is not so good,” he says, in remarkably good English, with a trace of an American accent. “I apologize.”

  “Well, I have no Greek,” I say. “But we’ll muddle through, I expect.”

  He doesn’t tell me then that he is actually Turkish; I discover that later. They are not fond of Turks here, it seems. They like the English, and the French. They dislike Muslims and Arabs. They believe their closest neighbors to be bad tourists: dirty and cheap.

  The taxi driver is gruff and taciturn, and seems to mistrust my guide. He does not want to take us to the camp. So much for my useful helper. Yet the boy is persistent. He wriggles through the smallest gaps in conversation, and negotiates with a ratlike persistence. He has been to the camp before, of course, like everyone on the island. How they put us to shame on these small islands where they are eager to help refugees, not leave them to drown or starve. They may not like Muslim tourists, but refugees are a different matter. And perhaps the people here have learned from their Islamic neighbors that when someone is hungry, you must give them food, or God will be displeased. I have to say, although I don’t believe in God-God, like James suddenly does, I do rather cling to that universal principle of goodness that makes people want to care for one other.

  The camp itself reminds me of Glastonbury, except for all the crying babies. Who brings a baby to a place like this? But then I realize they have probably been born here, poor little wretches. Everything is so flimsy. There are sad washing lines with hoodies and hijabs hanging limply on them. Rubbish is piled high in black plastic sacks and old carrier bags bearing the logo of the nearby shop. It’s less Glastonbury and more Christiania, perhaps, with that feeling of a long-term encampment. Although the sweet pungent fumes here are not hashish and lentil burgers, and this is no happy play-utopia. The tents are worn out and threadbare. People’s coughs sound frightening. Everyone wears a mask.

  “Not so many people come to help now,” says the boy, contradicting what he told me before, and what other islanders have said. “The residents are angry with the rubbish, and they say there is crime and disease.”

  The boy’s name is Hamza. He seems to be a general helpmeet and fixer around the camp. Everyone knows him. People want to see him, touch him. A teenage girl in a turquoise hoodie has been waiting for him, it seems, wearing what appears to be all the makeup on the island that isn’t in Hamza’s own possession. He hands her two gaudy packages—sim cards for her friends. She has some English and they converse greedily, like birds in the early spring. He promises to come back next week with news of a photo shoot and even a movie. I hear the phrase “Your dream will come true,” and she looks as if she wants to believe it, but doesn’t quite. He hastily snaps portraits of her with his beaten-up phone and promises to show the pictures to the “lady who decides.” The girl reminds me of someone, but I’m not sure who it is. She seems to carry her important things in a fabric bag that bears the legend Istanbul is Contemporary.

  I feel like a voyeur here, and so we don’t stay long. Not for the first time I wish I had James’s first-aid skills, and his ability to genuinely care. He would find the right things to say and do, while I can’t wait to leave the miasma of depression and desperation that envelops the camp in its thick fug. I imagine every resident of this place feels exactly the same way. But while I can leave this afternoon, their claims for asylum can take a year, two years, or may never be processed at all.

  On the way back Hamza evades my questions about the girl, and instead tells me about a new camp the authorities are building in the mountains. Many concrete structures, apparently, with basketball courts and flushing toilets. Walls. Better hygiene. But there are terrible rumors about similar camps on other islands, camps from which you may only leave twice a week, or not at all; camps with immense fortifications built around them, with moats and drawbridges; camps that are essentially prisons, or awful reminders of the Second World War.

  Is this his way of talking about the girl after all? It’s obvious he wants to help her, to save her from this fate, and I realize I do too, although it’s not at all clear how one might do this. I suppose James would now simply pray.

  As we travel back across the island, Hamza becomes fascinated by Google Lens, which he has never heard of, and the way I use it to read the tatty flyer the girl gave me, which is written in Arabic.

  “Look.” I show him. “It makes in English.”

  (I have no idea why I can’t stop myself speaking a kind of pidgin when talking to someone foreign. And all I can say in my defense is that yes, I am aware of it.)

  He peers at my screen, eyes wide like he’s watching a conjuring trick. The flyer is not that exciting. It tells of an exercise class, “dance fitness,” which will take place on the beach near the camp at nine a.m. every Thursday.

  “You can do this with any language?” Hamza says, astonished.

  When we arrive back at the Villa Rosa I pay him more than double the going rate, and add a large tip. Then Isabella comes out and says something about a tablecloth, and Hamza darts off like the rabbit in a greyhound race.

  The tablecloth is perhaps for the dinner party Isabella is insisting on throwing for James and me later this evening. James is keen and I am not. I feel tired and arthritic, and I still need to finish the piece that will pay for all this. There is something troubling about Isabella that I can’t completely fathom. There is gossip about the mean husband having been murdered, and some ripe chemistry between Isabella and the French man from the harbor. Isabella seems to believe that James and I are a celebrity couple, but it is not at all clear why she would want to woo us. She has a dream too, it seems, but what it might be remains mysterious.

  Late in the afternoon, Isabella

  y who decides”?

  so very sleepy, perhaps

  because of all the wine? I hope James will come up soon. I expect he will be cross because I ventured too many questions about the girl in the camp, and Hamza, and why exactly

  Dear Richard,

  I’ve just gone for a walk up the hill.

  See you later.

  E xxx

  You sweep me off of my feet, baby.

  Бізге көмектес!

  AUDIO TRANSCRIPT 1/1

  21:03

  SPEAKER 1

  Of auntie! Eat up Richard and will begin.

  SPEAKER 2

  Yes come on kids this’ll be fun.

  SPEAKER 3

  I’m not sure. This plan has a little Magnus in it.

  SPEAKER 2