She enters a room whose angles seem familiar. There are holes in the walls where the storage has been ripped away. The tiny cubicle bathroom is also gutted. Only the splashbacks are left, and ugly plugholes in the floor and the walls, like nostrils without a nose. At the end of the room, the sliding glass patio doors are ablaze with light.

The patio is as she remembers it, small, not private, its view blocked by a grove of olive trees. She sits on the low wall. Since the walk down the long dusty corridor, she has not reached for her inhaler. She does not feel anxious at all. There are memories here, but she has brought them with her. Nothing new occurs. Nothing is dislodged.

*

It was cold, at night, on the terrace. Bumps rose on her arms and legs, and she drank partly to obliterate this, to forget her flesh and the terrible ease with which Jane inhabited her own body. The plastic chair bit sharp ridges in Claire’s thighs. Even this discomfort had faded by the time Nikos appeared, and, with a sudden grand swell of sociability, she welcomed him into the group, making room at the table, dragging up a chair. He was already drunk. His and Kostas’s cigarettes burnt orange holes in the night, drew legible swirls like sparklers. Somewhere downhill a donkey cranked out its miserable cry. Claire’s breath grew scratchy, a wheeze she could hide at first, until it made her cough: a deep, rasping note, a masculine distress. The boys looked at one another in amazement. ‘Yitharos!’ Kostas exclaimed, and Nikos shouted with laughter. Kostas spoke to Jane and Jane laughed too. Claire’s face inflamed. She didn’t know for sure what it meant, she told herself.

*

Movement among the olive trees: a woman. She comes closer. She has not seen Claire yet. Small and bent, dressed all in black, she drags something black behind her – a net. The whole grove of trees is swagged in black nets, like the nets inside the rigging of a circus tent, to catch the olives when they fall.

The woman stops under the trees. Now she sees Claire: she turns, a hand to her brow. Then she unleashes a flock of Greek words that fly from the grove towards the deserted hotel building. Claire sees some of them catch in the nets, catch in the netted branches of the trees, all the spiky Greek letters unfolded – upsilon, theta, gamma, psi – staggering towards her. She is suddenly aware of herself as a trespasser, and she holds up her hands in a gesture of surrender. The woman slashes with her arm. Claire steps off the patio and hurries away from her, away from her torrent of indecipherable words, down the path that will take her to the terrace and the wall she climbed and the road and the nautical girl.