Thirteen Days By Sunset Beach Read Free

he mumbled.
    "Why, Ray? You've earned a rest. You drove us to the airport when you should have been asleep."
    "I don't want to leave you alone."
    "You won't, will you? I'll know you're here."
    For years he hadn't slept much in the weeks before a holiday—every night his mind would run through all the tasks and items he had to remember, not to mention all the apparently innumerable things that could go wrong—but by now he'd forgotten how it felt to sleep all night or even for a few unbroken hours. "Say you'll wake me if you need me," he said.
    "I always need you, but if I need to wake you I will."
    Instead a dull impact wakened him. How badly had she hurt herself by slipping off the plastic chair? At least people were hurrying to help, except that when Ray widened his shamefully reluctant eyes he saw all the young holidaymakers heading for their luggage. He'd felt the ferry bump against a jetty, and Sandra was upright on the seat beside him.
    At first he thought Vasilema Town had been illuminated to welcome the newcomers. A multitude of white buildings tinged with red clung to a hill as haphazardly as shells on a rock, and window after window shone crimson. As he and Sandra hauled their cases onto the dockside the lowest; windows darkened, and before Ray could take much of a breath the next highest row of lights went out. He saw the light retreating from him and Sandra, and glanced behind him to confirm that it was just the sunset, the horizon having sliced the red orb in half.
    The darkness crept uphill as they followed their fellow passengers along the wharf to a coach attended by a girl in a Frugogo uniform. "Take your time," she called. "You're important to us."
    The driver seized each case and swung it into the compartment full of luggage while the cigarette between his lips kept hold of at least an inch of ash. Ray cupped Sandra's elbow to help her up the steps and felt how thin her arm had grown. She scrambled onto the seat immediately behind the driver's not unlike an excited youngster. As soon as he joined her Ray tugged the belt across himself to encourage her to be equally safe. He was trying to riddle the mechanism that would lock the arm of the seat in position when a young man leaned across the aisle to fix it by raising it above the horizontal and easing it down. "No probs," he said, and Ray felt mean for reflecting that the generation to which all the passengers except him and Sandra belonged seemed increasingly to speak in the language of their text messages. He'd often said so to his pupils at school, but the thought left him feeling even more out of date.
    The driver took a last drag at his cigarette and squashed it out between a finger and thumb varnished with nicotine as he climbed aboard. While he eased the coach forward the Frugogo girl picked up a microphone and stood with her back to the windscreen, beneath an icon of a Greek saint with a spear in his hand. "Kali mera," she said and, having explained that it meant good evening, repeated it until the passengers echoed it loud enough to suit her. "I'm Sam, and welcome to our island. Who hasn't been before?"
    "We haven't," Sandra murmured.
    "I'm promising some of you will be back. Lots of our guests say they've had the best nights of their lives." The travel representative blinked at Ray and Sandra as though she'd almost overlooked them, but her broad roundish suntanned face stayed placid. "If you've come for a rest," she said, "you'll get that too."
    She handed out envelopes that contained invitations to tomorrow's welcome meeting, together with an island map that Ray thought could have been more detailed. By now the coach was speeding along the coast road, beside which a ruddy afterglow was sinking into the ocean. Sam returned to the microphone to mention local drawbacks—mosquitoes, bathroom plumbing—which were so familiar from previous Greek holidays that Ray stopped hearing them. She'd said he could rest, and Sandra had as well.
    This time light