How could her life ever be the same again?

Worse than that, how could she break it to her father that she knew who he really was? And what else could he be hiding?

9

Catrin

‘If they could see me now, that little gang of mine …’ she sang quietly to herself as she rinsed out the last of the shampoo. This had to be the most bizarre experience of the holiday so far and yet she was loving it: washing her hair, leant over an old tin bath in the middle of a barn in the Troodos Mountains, using two buckets of warm water, an empty tin can for pouring, and a bottle of Vosene. And all of it observed by a curious nanny goat and her kid, who stood watching in the corner.

Doing the ‘squeak’ test with her fingers to check her hair was clean, she squeezed out the excess water and reached over for the faded towel. She wrapped it tightly round her head and tucked it in at the back. Catching sight of herself in an old cracked mirror, she smiled. Her smile was different now. Had been ever since Sol. Though only she realized that.

It had been a whole week. A whole seven days living with the painful and ecstatic knowledge that he existed in the world; that he was somewhere right now – probably in his bed in Bayfield, sleeping, breathing, this human being of whom she’d been blissfully unaware until that fateful day in Crete and who had now taken up permanent residence inside her head. She still hadn’t told Judith or Lana about Sol. Keeping him a secret somehow kept it magical.

When she’d made her weekly phone call home a couple of days earlier, she’d felt the most peculiar sensation – like she was somehow defrauding her parents. Keeping from them her big beautiful secret, knowing that the daughter they’d left at Bristol airport a month ago was not the same daughter who’d be coming home.

‘Now tell me, are you getting enough roughage?’ Her mother’s voice on the crackly line had crashed into her thoughts. ‘Because it seems to me – and your nana agrees – that over there it’s all meat this and meat that, with your souvlakis and moussakas and kebabs and what have you—’

‘A souvlaki is a kebab, Mum,’ Catrin had said, only to be ignored.

‘I mean I’m sure they’re all very nice people, the Greeks, but I do worry about their diet. And the last thing you want is to be getting constipated!’

‘Mum!’ Catrin had felt herself redden.

Suddenly her brother’s voice had come hurtling down the line as he shouted into the receiver, ‘Nana wants to know if you’ve opened your bowels yet!’ And she heard him scurry off laughing – he knew how to make her smile. This frequently used expression of their nan’s had always entertained them: the idea of ‘opening a bowel’ sounded like something a local celebrity would do by cutting a ribbon with a pair of golden scissors and getting their photo on the front page of the Gazette. Bodily functions were readily discussed in the Kelly household, which her father said was healthy. Catrin just found it mortifying.