D is for Darkness
Prologue
Summertime and the living was easy…
Steve had trained and become a private and well patronized private music tutor in guitar and piano, well liked and reasonably well paid, steering would be impresarios towards a career in the music industry or just pursuing a lifetime hankering for some soul searching. On the side he wrote his own music using Sam’s lyrics. Supported and encouraged by Steve, Sam continued with her writing leaving Steve to send off her manuscripts to largely disinterested agents and publishers while she worked part time in the local animal rescue centre. He was religiously persistent with the regularity and number of the approaches.
“It’s a numbers game?” said Sam demurely.
“Well yes” said Steve surprised. He had been considerably more competent at Maths than Sam and went on to propound various statistical theories while Sam thought about Rob and Kate and wondered.
Life was tidy and equable and almost normal.
One evening Steve came home and while slapping peanut butter onto digestive biscuits to fill the hole until dinner out of the blue said
“What about a bit of island hopping?”
“What’s brought this on? What sort of island? Define hop!” said Sam suspiciously.
Steve had been known to hop in the Hebrides, watching seagulls and other airborne carnivores. Sam had nothing in particular against seagulls as such. She was sure that in their own way they were fascinating. Especially to each other. But hopping over tumultuous seas in horizontal rain to be shat on and pecked half to death even by the most fascinating of creatures was not top on her list of fifty fun things to do before you die.
To be fair her opinion of seagulls was somewhat unfairly coloured by a boat trip off the coast in Wales in her youth. She was small and had ingenuously thought to share her sandwich with a member of the seagull family in a gesture of friendship and common bonding. The said individual had snatched the whole thing from her grasp (not unlike Kevin she much later reflected but with rather more pointed bits and less finesse) and half her finger with it. Miserable, cold and sore, she had spent the next thirty minutes keeping her head down and watching rivulets of water making their way across the boat’s deck and wondering if they were going to sink and she was going to be fish as well as seagull fodder. The result of this relatively innocuous occupation had been nausea followed by violent vomiting, sandwich first and the preceding meals of the day in reverse, chronological order.
It was a lot later that she learned of the importance of horizons to the human orientation.
Steve was also known to do motorcycle hopping. He had a very smart Honda 750 and hopped over the English Channel to France but to judge by the photos he had brought back and the state of his bike leathers, rain, although perhaps not the horizontal breed, had also featured quite prominently.
“What sort of islands?” she repeated. “Where exactly?”
“Greece” said Steve.
“Oh!” said Sam, seasickness forgotten. “Just fucking, freewheeling and food?”
“yeah” said Steve. “Why not. Just not necessarily in that order.”
“Yes! Where were you thinking?”
“How about Paros, Delos, Mykanos, Sifnos and Santorini?”
“How about it! What’s brought this on?”
It was very unSteve like to do organized although he did have a fascination for grubbing around in historical and archeological dirt.
“What’ve you got planned?” she added before he could answer.
“Nothing” said Steve grinning.
Very Stevelike.
“But it’s summer, we’ve got a gap and I’ve got money! D’you have a better offer?”
The truth was precisely, No.
“And when’s all this happening?” said Sam.
“When you book it” said Steve with a disarming smile.
“Ah”
There was always a catch. But heh! – small price- for starters - Santorini! – Thera! Where the tumultuous volcanic eruption had covered the town of Akrotiri in molten lava and preserved its haunting beauty – And – she looked at Steve in his blue jeans and his black biker jacket – and for desert-
“How long were you thinking of going for?”
“Oh I dunno” said Steve laconically. “Five months?”
“Five months?!” said Sam splattering peanut butter and digestive biscuit all over him. “Sorry but five months?”
“Well there’s a lot to see” said Steve absentmindedly brushing bits of biscuit off the front of his T-shirt.
“But what happens if we don’t get on?”
“”We do get on. We live together.”
“Yes but only in the evenings. We’ve never spent five months together twenty four seven! The only person who has had that dubious honor with me is my mother and she hates me!”
“Well as it seems you’re worrying about how I’ll cope with you for five months I give you my solemn word that I will behave with the utmost tolerance and fortitude” said Steve.
Sam gnawed her bottom lip.
“Five months” she said again. What would Kevin think?
“And what happens if we have a major falling out?” she persisted.
“Well we can always get separate rooms and not talk” said Steve.
“You really are serious aren’t you?”
“You bet. Seems like a fair test of a relationship and you don’t need words for sex and-”
“And?”
“And it might be fun!”
It might be an unmitigated disaster thought Sam.
What the hell.
“”OK. Lets do it.”
“You’re helping with the booking remember?”
””Yeah but I need to know where the hell we’re planning on going first!”
*