Never Ending by Martyn Bedford Page A

the pick-up into another sharp curve. As he changed gear, Nikos let his fingers brush against the outside of her bare leg. Fleeting, but it sent a jolt through her. She shot a glance at Declan, beside her, but he was oblivious, hanging his head out of the open window like a dog, his hair whipped by the wind. Yodelling, for some reason.
    At the head of the valley the road levelled off. They were following the line of a ridge that ran beneath the craggy cliff of the summit. It was quieter now the engine no longer strained against the incline.
    Declan pulled his head back inside the cabin.
    “Yodelling?” Shiv asked. “This is Greece, not Switzerland.”
    “I wasn’t yodelling. I was shouting hello to the goats.”
    “The ghost ?”
    “ Goats , deafo.” He stuck an arm out the window as though signalling a turn. With his free hand, he punched some buttons on the radio. “Does this work?”
    A man speaking in rapid Greek competed against a fuzz of static; it might have been a ranting politician, a sports commentator, or an ad for cereal. Nikos adjusted the dial to pick up a music station. And so, as they bumped along the mountain ridge, they listened to some kind of Greek techno-punk.

    From where they left the pick-up it was only a thirty-minute hike into the ravine, mostly downhill, but beneath the furnace blast of a mid-afternoon sun they were soon soaked in sweat. The idea of falling off a windsurfer into the clear, cool sea no longer seemed so unappealing.
    Nikos led them along the bed of a dried-up stream, flanked on either side by steep, rock-strewn banks. The ground was parched, fissured, and their feet were coated with dust. Shiv paused to swig from the bottle of water Nikos passed round, shuttering her eyes against the bleached glare of the hillside.
    “It’s like the moon up here,” Declan said.
    To Shiv the land was biblical, a desert wilderness where a bush might burst into flames at any moment.
    “We’re almost there,” Nikos said.
    “Where?”
    He smiled at her. “The place where we’re going.”
    As he took the bottle back and raised it to his mouth, the sun caught the hairs on his forearm, making them glisten. Shiv watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed the water. Watched his moist lips as he lowered the bottle and replaced the cap. She longed to kiss him again. More than she’d ever wanted anything.
    But how could she, with her brother right there?
    “Lizard!” Dec said, pointing.
    The creature was as big as a squirrel, sandy-grey tinged with yellow, basking on a boulder. Studying them with its swivelly eyes. Raised on its forelegs, the lizard looked as though they’d interrupted it in the middle of a set of push-ups.
    “Stellion,” Nikos said. “It means ‘star’ – see the patterns down its back.” Then, after a pause, “Very nice in a kebab.”
    “You eat lizard?” Shiv said.
    “Mmm, much tastier than baby turtle.”
    At which point Nikos let slip a smile and Shiv whacked him on the shoulder for making fun of her. If Declan noticed the intimacy of the gesture he gave no sign, too preoccupied with the lizard. When the creature tilted its head on one side, Dec did the same; when it raised one foot, as though waving, her brother waved back.
    “I think he likes me.” But when Declan turned back the lizard had gone, with not even the parting flick of a tail to suggest it had ever been there.
    “Come on.” Nikos gestured up ahead. “Let’s get moving before we burn up.”
    Not that it was apparent how they might escape the sun; as far as she could see, the dry terrain shimmered with heat haze. They rounded an outcrop of rock a little further along, where their route left the dried-up stream and forked sharply downhill.
    Instantly, the three of them plunged into the coolest, sweetest shade. Not only that, the landscape was transformed into an oasis of green – a long stripe of lush grass and overgrown trees where a cleft split the hillside like a rip in the flesh of a