Excerpt
Ruins
Chapter OneThree Months EarlierIt was the sound of a child laughing, a sudden peal that pierced through the layers of sleep and delivered Emma back to the surface. She peered into the darkness of the inside of her sun hat and then slowly lifted it from her face, allowing her eyes to adjust to the blast of white sunlight. Julian’s towel was empty next to her, his novel lying splayed and abandoned. She located him in the ocean directly ahead of her, where he floated serenely on his back.
The child squealed again, and Emma turned in the direction of the sound. A family was setting themselves up on two of the deck chairs nearby. The mother had long blond hair arranged over one shoulder, and she wore an elegant red one-piece bathing suit and a large pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses. A sleeping newborn was slung from a piece of beige fabric fastened around her torso. Emma watched the woman as she moved in a businesslike manner, unpacking a tote of toys, snacks, and water bottles, before battling with the umbrella to adjust the shade covering the chairs. Meanwhile, the father walked their giggling toddler across the sand, growling theatrically, before grabbing the child and inciting another shriek of laughter. The mother, now spreading towels over the two chairs, had taken her sunglasses off, and even with the distance, Emma could see the deep, dark rings of total exhaustion underneath her eyes.
“It’s beautiful in there.” Julian sighed, collecting his book before dropping onto his towel. Emma could feel the lingering cool of the water radiating off him the way heat would. “Are you going back in?”
She nodded. “I think I’ll have one more dip.”
He located his sunglasses before lying on his back and closing his eyes. The heat was already drying the salty water into chalky lines on his skin.
They’d arrived in Palaiokastritsa, on the island of Corfu, four days before, and already Julian’s brown hair had been bleached under the sun, resembling the kind of sought-after balayage that would cost hundreds of pounds in a salon back in London. To add insult to injury, he’d also developed a deep, consistent tan, which made him look younger and healthier—carefree, even. Emma’s own pale skin did not take to the sun so willingly; it was provoked and antagonized, and in response, it spread brown freckles across her chest, face, and arms as if in defense, the numbers increasing daily. Her cheeks were perpetually florid. She’d taken to applying bright red lipstick when they went out for dinner in the hope that, by comparison, the color of her cheeks would appear more like an innocent, peachy flush.
On their first day, as they followed the sloping streets down to Agia Triada beach, Emma realized she’d left her hat in the room. The price of that mistake was a burnt scalp that hurt whenever she brushed her hair. It had begun to peel too. Just that morning she’d extracted a disturbingly large scale of skin and held it between two fingers, staring at the tiny pinpricks through which her hair had once grown. “Look at this,” she’d said to Julian, who was reading an article on his phone in bed. “I just pulled this off my scalp.” She walked over to him and held the piece of skin close to his face. He narrowed his eyes as he looked, and when the realization dawned, he recoiled. “Oh, gross,” he groaned. She laughed and threw it at him.
The mother called out to her husband in a language that sounded like German, and Emma saw Julian turn to look over at the family. She watched his lips unconsciously pull into a small smile as the father hoisted the child over his shoulder and returned to the deck chairs with his squirming, giggling captive. Emma felt a small, hard rock of dread in her stomach, like the pit of an apricot. The dread wasn’t new; Julian’s smile had just reminded her of its constant presence.
Before they discovered that Emma was pregnant, they’d had no desire to have children of their own, a mutual agreement they’d established early on. The matter was closed and never reopened for discussion, not even as they progressed into the first half of their thirties—Emma trailing two years behind Julian—and watched the couples around them introduce children to the world. Even then, they would smile and embrace these new members of their life, feeling a love for them that was immediate and intense, as if they were simply an extension of the people they loved already.
It was a shock then when the test was positive. Slowly, as they contemplated a new and different future, Emma watched Julian realize that, yes, actually, he did want this for himself. He took charge, walking excitedly ahead into this new territory as Emma apprehensively followed behind, unable to feel the same certainty that they were going in the right direction.
Glancing back now at the family, she saw the woman was breastfeeding the newborn, grimacing as she did so while attempting to entertain the restless toddler who, at that inconvenient moment, was demanding to sit on her lap and was growing increasingly hostile against her redirections. Meanwhile, the father was looking at his phone. Emma stood and walked toward the water, not stopping when she reached it, nor when the cool water hit her knees, and then her thighs, and eventually her stomach. She dived and reemerged, pushing her hair out of her face and allowing the shock to bring her firmly back into her body. She mimicked Julian and floated on her back for a moment, feeling the strange sensations of muted sound and warm sunlight as the water covered her ears and the sun shone down on her face. She tried to remain firmly present in the corporeal sensations, but in her mind, she saw the hopeful yearning on Julian’s face as he watched the young family.
When, at eleven weeks, Emma had a miscarriage, she and Julian were left adjusting their image of the future back to its original vista. It was then that she realized Julian was struggling to return. Of course she could sympathize with him; it was as if their names had been called out, and they had been ushered into a new room, only to be informed of the mistake and told to return. She suspected that, for him, the room they returned to, and had never previously been dissatisfied with, suddenly felt small and stifled, lacking in mystery and in a depth of feeling he’d only glimpsed and yet now missed. From that moment, he understood that he wanted to have children, and he’d simply assumed that Emma felt the same. He seemed to take for granted that they would try again, mentioning it here and there and watching young families with an open longing. Unsure of how to delicately approach this discussion, Emma had passively allowed his belief to grow. Soon, she surprised herself by wondering if having a child with Julian would actually be easier than ripping the root of his hope from the ground.
Seeking some other thread of thought, she opened her eyes and began to tread water, tracing the shelf of land that ran along the left of the Agios Spiridon beach and curved around to shelter it. Where the cliffs met the water, a group of people were taking turns leaping from the edge. Their laughs and shouts were carried to her by the breeze. She watched as the small figures of their bodies dropped into the water, some controlled, others flailing, and all of them, she thought, landing far too close to the rocks below. She recalled the grim story of a boy she’d attended sixth form with who’d gone cliff jumping in Malta. On one descent, he failed to break the water’s surface tension with his feet, landing instead on his coccyx and shattering his spine. His vertebrae, so the story went, had been like a line of fast-moving traffic, and it was as if the car at the front of the line had slammed on the brakes.
Emma watched as one jumper seemed to almost tumble from the cliff, waving their arms and legs as they fell. When they connected with the water, a sharp slapping sound ricocheted around the bay. Emma gasped, unable to stomach the moments before they either did or didn’t surface, and turned away.
Later, when the sun crept lower in the sky, and the bass from the surrounding bars and restaurants began to hum, they packed up their things and followed the dusty path that traced the bends of the road back to the small family-run hotel where they were staying.
To get to their room, they first had to walk up a steep driveway, past the pool and the poolside bar where Nico, the owner’s son, could often be seen watching something on his phone when he wasn’t being ordered around by the elderly couples who spent all day camped on the pool chairs drinking beer and eating peanuts. They waved to him as they passed, receiving a smile in response.
