Sleepwalkers

by Scarlett Thomas

Genres: Literary Fiction; Romantic Suspense; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

From “one of the UK’s most interesting authors” (Kirkus Reviews), Patricia Highsmith meets White Lotus in this surprising and suspenseful modern gothic story following a couple running from both secretive pasts and very present dangers while honeymooning on a Greek island.

Still reeling from the chaos of their wedding, Evelyn and Richard arrive on a tiny Greek island for their honeymoon. It’s the end of the season and a storm is imminent. Determined to make the best of it, they check into the sun-soaked doors of the Villa Rosa. Already feeling insecure after seeing the “beautiful people,” the seemingly endless number of young models and musicians lounging along the Mediterranean, Evelyn is wary of the hotel’s owner, Isabella, who seems to only have eyes for Richard.

Isabella ostensibly disapproves of every request Evelyn makes, seemingly annoyed at the fact that they are there at all. Isabella is also preoccupied with her chance to enthrall the only other guests—an American producer named Marcus and his partner Debbie—with the story of “the sleepwalkers,” a couple who had stayed at the hotel recently and drowned.

Everyone seems to want to talk about the sleepwalkers, save for Hamza, a young Turkish man Evelyn had seen with some “beautiful people,” as well as the “dapper little man”—the strange yet fashionable owner of the island’s lone antiques and gift shop she sees everywhere.

But what at first seemed eccentric, decorative, or simply ridiculous, becomes a living nightmare. Evelyn and Richard are separated the night of the storm and forced to face dark truths, but it’s their confessions around the origins of their relationship and the years leading up to their marriage that might save them.

Exhilarating, suspenseful, and also very funny, The Sleepwalkers asks urgent questions about relationships, sexuality, and the darkest elements of contemporary society—where our most terrible secrets are hidden in plain sight.

Release date: April 9, 2024

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Print pages: 224

Sample

Chapter 1

September 23rd, 2022

Dear Richard,

You’ll no doubt think I owe you some sort of explanation for what I’ve done, so here it is.

Of course, I don’t know where to begin. Just before our first proper date, when your mother told me the color black washed me out and that I should borrow her white silk blouse instead? Or that moment at our wedding when we both knew—but never actually said—that our love was forever cursed? Maybe I’ll start in a more dignified way with the small plane we took to get here almost two weeks ago, all the tiny islands like a map beneath us, the plane’s slender propellers naked and somehow savage, cutting through the air like white machetes.

Or perhaps I should skip to the moment when we turned up at the Villa Rosa and first met Isabella. Isabella. I find it so hard to write her name. But you have to face the things you fear, so here it is again: Isabella. Isabella. Isabella. But of course if I start with her, it’s already over, and the dogs have won, and we are now just piles of bones.

So maybe I’ll simply start with the night before we checked into the Villa Rosa. The beachfront taverna, moonlit and warm; only us, our friends and the beautiful people left on the island by then, or so it seemed.

The beautiful people? Well, I don’t think you listened to anything I ever said about them, although perhaps you know who they are now. When I go over it all in my mind I can still see her so clearly, the prettier girl, the dark-haired one, a sleek heron in a black bikini and a thin orange sarong. She was walking down the road in the sun carrying a bag that said Istanbul is Contemporary.

She really was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen.

Amidst all the usual traffic on that narrow beach road—rusty utes carrying mineral water and bottled Coke, or Greek men on mopeds with their “amusing” cargos that Paul loved to point out: a large side-saddle wife, a massive watermelon, a white poodle—there she was. She was alone and free and, well, sometimes I look at young women and remember what it was like to be them, but I don’t remember ever being her, with those sharp, wingish bones and her extraordinary long calves.

I imagine you reading this letter too fast in the hot and windy dark, or maybe in the calm of tomorrow morning, skimming to get to the headline, the facts, having decided that this lead-in is irrelevant. You are probably wondering where I am. Because I am going to go when I finish this. It’s time, don’t you think?

I see you holding this letter, having found it on the pillow where I plan to leave it later. You probably have that look you get whenever I try to explain something, and I start at the very beginning—or at least what the beginning was for me—and you act like you are struggling through bracken and maquis and dense thicket until I mention something you recognize as part of your story and only then do you stand still for a second and listen. But neither of us really wants to go back to the start, do we?

So feel free to skip ahead if you like. That’s the beauty of a letter, after all: it’s not a forest, not a complicated undergrowth, not a loud argument. Take your machete and fuck all of this. Take your soft-mouthed dogs and beat out the birds and sight them and shoot them down and then you’ll know.

That was the only time I saw her on her own, the beautiful girl. Most of the time she had her shorter, blonder friend with her, and the two boys trailing after them. Those beautiful boys. When they weren’t trailing after the girls they were flittering down the street with their shirts off, carrying bottles of local beer, which they actually took care to put in the recycling bin once they were empty. Or they were strutting with their rooster chests high and proud, eating fruit or throwing a ball. One of the boys was skinnier than the other, with long bony fingers that fluttered through the air like the legs of a tiny creature that did not want to be picked up.

I kept wondering where these kids had come from. They looked rich to me, or, at least, expensive. I pointed them out one night over dinner in George’s Taverna, but you weren’t interested. You just thought they were normal young people, nothing unusual about them. You assumed they were from a British private school like the one you and Paul had both gone to, and didn’t think it was at all interesting when they started speaking in a language none of us knew. I decided it was Turkish. You could see Turkey from the beach. And, well, Istanbul is Contemporary.

It gave me something to talk about with Beth at least. We had nothing in common otherwise. Since I’m an actor and she’s a makeup artist, we should have had a riot. But I’m mainly in sweaty plays and she “does” politicians for the BBC News, so when I tried to ask her what she thought the best mascara on the market currently was, she just looked at me blankly while I burbled on about Chanel, and how hard I found it to tell the difference between the waterproof mascara I wear in sad times, and the normal one I prefer because it is more black, like the very bitterest depths of the night. Like now.

Paul seemed to have chosen Beth the way he picked all his girlfriends. She was to be adored yet hated; violated but also revered. She had that rubbery sex-doll look of all his women, but there was something human and raw about her too. Something in her slightly pimply skin and visible contact lenses; and the way she would let her DD boobs flop around in her strappy lemon sun dress without even a bikini underneath. I once suggested to you that Paul had made her wear the dresses that way and you said you didn’t know what I meant. Instead, you wondered about the etymology of the word seersucker, and why you’d never heard of it. You have always seemed so innocent, and mostly I’ve loved that.

Or, I did love it, once.

During those last, hot days, while you and Paul swam out as far as you could, beyond the buoys and the yachts, racing each other in that subtle way you do, Beth and I wondered whether the beautiful people had come from one of the boats. One day we saw four figures on the deck of the largest yacht, and we said that was it, that was them. But it wasn’t them. Even from that distance you could see the small, puffy rolls of fat on the women. There was no fat on those girls. Not on the boys either.

Then one day we saw their shoes. Four pairs of dirty espadrilles, all with holes and signs of over-pronation. What is it about poverty and pronation? The beautiful people were out of place in a way we couldn’t figure. Beth and I brainstormed what beautiful boys like that would become when they grew up, but we found it hard to imagine them as parents, or at a dinner party. What on earth would they talk about? What shoes would they find to wear?

While you were swimming, we speculated about what it would be like to sleep with boys like that. Our friendship had warmed up at last. What would it be like to be touched by a boy whose limbs were not made from money, but crafted from something different, like hope, or hard work? I recollect a photo on your mother’s dresser of you in a short-sleeved linen shirt somewhere tropical, and even then you had a flush in your skin that those boys didn’t have. A ripeness. Like a polished apple.

During those last days I became quite obsessed with the thin dark girl, and her friend. I suppose I wanted to sink into other lives that were not my own. I could see their rivalry, something you’d tell me I was imagining, probably, but the girl from Istanbul, the one you showed me photographs of later, was flirting with both the boys: the blond one in his faded pink shorts, the dark skinny one in faded lime green. Touching their tanned, slim arms—all muscle, of course, but not the sort you can get in a gym. The other girl noticed, but she never touched their long, lean lines herself. She frowned and, just once, looked tearful.

Perhaps the boys’ muscles were from tying knots? We thought maybe they were staying on the white catamaran, Beth and I. It was a large, impressive vessel from which speed boats shot every night like sharp pellets, perhaps taking the beautiful people to hot, glamorous parties in the hills: you couldn’t really tell in the dark. But then the catamaran went and the beautiful people were still here, on the island.

The summer itself was slowly creeping away. All the other yachts left. The swallows flitted across the water for the last few times and then they all flew off together, heading for Africa.

The other tourists were long gone.

The motorcycle man closed his shop and no longer asked me if I wanted to rent a scooter every time I went past him. The strange wreath in front of his shop remained, though, commemorating the ?p??ß?te?, or ypnovátes: the “sleepwalkers,” a married couple who’d drowned in that part of the sea the year before.

George’s Taverna stopped serving fresh fish, because the fisherman had taken his wife to Athens. Those last days of Greek salads with old dry feta and toasted bread, because by then even the bakery had closed. Those last days. Our last days together. I will always treasure them, even though they were so very tainted.

The fat, slow hornets; they were still there. And the beautiful people. And us.

That last night before Beth and Paul went too, and left us alone for the final part of our honeymoon, we agreed that the island was the most incredible place we’d ever been. What was it? The zealous bougainvilleas, perhaps, or the rest of the greenery, so much more lush than on other Greek islands we’d been to before? There were eucalyptus trees and fig trees and pomegranates. Little whitewashed houses that seemed stuffed with peace. That soft heat in which everything slowed and made life back home seem almost insignificant. The kind of heat in which secrets melt, like beef tallow.

We made plans to return, earlier in the season next time; maybe even get an apartment for me to write in, if I carried on writing, of course. The only shadow over everything was that my second one-woman play hadn’t been picked up for TV in the end, and my finances were a bit grim. I couldn’t sponge off you, even now we were married, so I was probably going to have to apply for a permanent teaching job when we got home. I’d remortgaged the small house I owned via some complicated arrangement only you and your mother understood. Before the summer was out I was supposed to have written something new, something to finally bring back the success I’d grown so fond of, and to make me feel like myself again.

But when was I supposed to finish writing another play? Certainly not before we came on our honeymoon. The gift had been well meant, you insisted. A week at the exclusive Villa Rosa, recently reviewed in both Vogue and the Daily Telegraph. But the only way we could honor your mother’s wedding gift and fit it into our lives was by changing the date of the actual wedding and then coming to the island a week before the suite was available. A slightly shit honeymoon while we waited for the perfect one to be ready. The kind of logic you’d grown up on.

The first week was so cheap we paid for Paul and Beth too. Our hotel rooms cost forty-five euros per night and had whitewashed balconies looking out to sea, with wire clothes-drying racks, orange pegs with rusty hinges, and handheld showers. When I first saw the showers I wanted to cry. But I got used to them in the same way I’d got used to your mother hijacking our engagement with her gift of a honeymoon in the first place.

“A little treat,” Annabelle had said to me, handing over the envelope just after our engagement lunch, her voice booming oddly like a master of hounds in the tiled entrance hall of your childhood home. “Somewhere to write, perhaps?”

I’m still not sure why she felt the need to do it. You must have hundreds of thousands in your various funds and ISAs. You’re not poor. I am not without good taste. Did she think you were ten years old again and had to have your holiday chosen by Mummy? And who actually works on their honeymoon? The whole thing was just terribly inconvenient, but you forbade me from ever mentioning that.

I ended up enjoying the handheld shower, anyway. I felt rustic and ordinary again, briefly, and my skin glowed with a new kind of exfoliation that made it seem as though I sparkled, and was clean, at least on the outside. There was no shortage of hot water in the cheap hotel, and I needed an awful lot of hot water after our wedding.

Maybe you felt the same after Luciana, with her dark peach dress and long shining hair, spoke the words that ruined us? But I guess we’ll come back to that, because I’m not sure you know exactly what happened, even now. I’m not completely sure I do. And yes, this is me saying it, the thing we silently decided not to acknowledge. Or at least, I’m building up to it. I mean, did you even hear? But you must have done.

You can’t have known all along, surely? The thought makes my flesh creep.

We left for our honeymoon right after the wedding reception, with Paul and Beth due to follow two days later, when she could get off work. We had a sweaty silent layover in Athens before catching the propellor plane first thing the next morning. In Athens we were so wrecked we didn’t even leave the airport hotel. None of the windows opened, and the air-con drifted around like a lost phantom—but you’d been pleased you’d got some extra air miles from booking it. You ended up drinking Scotch with some golfers from Finland while I sat on my own and drank an entire bottle of sweet rosé that tasted like rancid petals.

You said later that I’d been determined not to like the Villa Rosa right from the start. You implied it was because it was your mother’s gift, but I’d always got on surprisingly well with Annabelle, and the Villa Rosa was objectively a good choice. The antique wooden floors, the tulip paintings, the white muslin curtains that waltzed sleepily in the breeze. Everything was so timeless and relaxing. I’d recently realized that my style, the authentic one I’d been able to discover only after making a significant amount of money, was quite similar to your mother’s. Antiques, old mirrors with wooden frames, high ceilings, slightly stained maps, old-looking documents and letters tied with string.

And so I should have loved the Villa Rosa, because it was exactly that, but in a hot place—and I like hot places, I really do. The candle lamps, the lazy white ceiling fans and mosquito nets. But I felt out of place here from the very beginning. Maybe because at heart I am still the kind of girl—woman—girl—who wants to get married in a field. Maybe I am just that. The field was my choice; the Villa Rosa was the corrective.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. There we were on our last night with Paul and Beth, in George’s Taverna at the beach: them due to go home the next day, us due to move from the cheap hotel to the Villa Rosa. We sat at our usual table under the palm trees with the sea lapping gently by our feet and George talking again about the fabled storm that we didn’t really believe in.

“It will come,” he said, putting down a basket of slightly stale bread. “End of September, it always comes and takes away the beach. The water will rise up, high, high, over the stones, and the road. My chairs and tables here—all gone. Until April. Then another storm will come and bring the beach back and the summer will begin again.”

George looked ready for the end of the season. His eyes were tired and his clothes and footwear had become more ragged even in the eight days we’d already been there. It seemed he spent the entire season running back and forth from the water’s edge—where the tourists ate—across the road and into his taverna where groups of elderly Greek men sat in the darkness under a ceiling fan laughing or shouting things at him. The motorcycle man was George’s brother or cousin, and he sat there every night as well, looking sadly into the bottom of his glass of tsikoudia, a Cretan spirit I also rather liked.

“How could a storm ‘take away the beach’?” you said when George ran off in his shredded trainers to get our second carafe of white wine. “That’s just ridiculous.”

“I think they make it all up,” Beth said. “Stories for the tourists.”

I caught Paul’s eye and I could tell he liked the violent romance of it as much as I did. He tossed a stale bread roll into the water and we both watched as the fish came to eat it like a milk pot gathering itself to the boil, a strange little volcano under the water’s surface. Paul glanced at me again and his look lingered for a few seconds longer than it should have. But I broke the connection first, I promise.

That night the beautiful people were sitting with some elegant older men; they were perched on the very edges of their chairs, all angles and pointy elbows like pallid birds in a modernist painting. They were the only people in the restaurant with bare feet. I sat with my back to them so that I didn’t just stare. It probably didn’t help, all my staring, although I can’t say you ever noticed. I couldn’t work out whether I was more fascinated by the thin dark-haired girl who walked with such an air, or with the boy with the long fingers, who I’d seen one day with a streak of gold glitter on his face.

I joined in as we shared stories of our school days. I’d gone to the worst comprehensive in my area, where the other girls carried knives and MDMA, and I’d hidden from them by going to drama club, where everyone was very deep and sensitive and into Chekhov and Stanislavski. You and Paul had gone to the most expensive school in the same small city where I’d gone to university. You were always so awkward talking about your youth, but Paul was hilarious, with endless stories of the disgusting habits of private schoolboys. Is it strange to have a friend come on your honeymoon? I never thought so. Your mother found it a bit odd, though, which was another reason for her gift. “So you can have some time alone together without Paul for a change.” Yep. That went well.

Anyway, that night we started talking again about another of our favorite topics: what we’d do if we lived here all year round. Like if we got a villa and just moved here, to the island.

“I’d be a day trader,” said Paul. “Laptop and deck shoes. Who needs more than that?”

“Deck shoes?” said Beth. “Please no.”

“Paul’s deck shoes are probably Gucci,” I said.

Did Paul do something to Beth under the table then? She sort of winced, just for a second, then covered it. He never liked being teased by his girlfriends. Only I could ever get away with that. I sometimes thought I was the only woman he actually respected.

“Dior,” he said to me, with a half-hidden smile.

“It would get boring,” you said, not noticing. “There’s nothing to actually do except lie in the sun.”

“You could chuck out your vitamin D tablets,” said Paul.

“You could do an honest job in the day,” I said, “and read or party at night. It would be like being retired, but young. Best of both worlds.”

“You just used the word party as a verb,” Paul said. “Why is that exciting?”

“Because it means to have sex,” Beth said. “You know, like in tabloids? When the celebrities or whoever ‘partied’ all night?”

“Like Christos,” Paul said.

“Christos doesn’t party all night,” I said. “He works all night.”

Christos was American and—don’t quote me on this—possibly related to George in some way. He’d come to Europe on a year-abroad program and never returned. On the night when you and Paul climbed up to the ruined castle and left Beth and me to have pre-dinner drinks alone in the harbor, we talked to him. He told us all about his favorite authors and how he spent every night reading until three a.m. before getting up at nine a.m. to open the taverna. He worked at the taverna until three p.m., and then read for an hour before crossing the island to work his evening shifts in the expensive fish restaurant in the harbor. I’d suggested he go home and do his master’s in American literature but he said he was happy here, being a waiter. He was living his dream, he said. He’d found his treasure already.

There’d been an awkward moment after that when Christos had frowned as if he were not that happy; as if the dream had gone sour. He’d looked as if he was about to say something important, then didn’t.

“You should come and see my books,” he’d said. “I have a whole library up in my apartment. And the view is to die for.”

He’d pointed out across the harbor to a ramshackle group of old villas and tavernas with several floors.

Now you snorted. Does that sound wrong? Maybe just “laughed” is better. But it wasn’t immediately clear what was funny.

“Christos is wasting his life here,” you said.

“Is he?” said Beth. “Or is he actually living the simple life we all dream of?”

“You can’t live that life when you’re young,” said Paul. “It’s cheating.”

“He’ll have ten kids by the time he’s forty,” you said. “And an enormous gut.”

“A hernia and a porn addiction,” added Paul.

“Why is he called ‘Christos’, anyway?” said Beth. “He’s American, right?”

“He’s gone native,” said Paul. “Which would be another danger.”

“I think he’s got a massive secret,” I blurted out, before I’d really thought about it. It was one of those moments when you don’t realize you believe something until you actually say it.

“You think everyone has a massive secret,” you said. I suppose you meant it to sound fond, but it actually sounded like you already thought I was crazy.

“Maybe everyone does,” said Paul lightly.

Then there was a strange moment when you sighed, shook your head and glowered at him, and he picked up a small packet of sugar and crushed it in his fist while pretending not to notice. Then we talked about other things while George ran back and forth with more carafes of wine and small bowls of Greek yogurt and preserved lemon.

But perhaps there was a slightly strained atmosphere between you and Paul for the rest of the evening? Things hadn’t quite been the same between you after the row you’d had the day Paul and Beth had arrived on the island, a row I had not understood at all. It seemed to have been just another thing that had gushed out of the black cloud we’d both been under since the wedding. The row—or, I guess, fight—had started in the curio shop, and I wasn’t at all sure what had triggered it. But I’m going off track again, and I know how much that annoys you.

We had sex on that last night in our cheap bed in our cheap beach hotel. The mattress was so thin I thought we might go through it, or bounce it off its plywood frame. While you pounded me I imagined I was a glamorous but sad nightclub dancer, and I’d picked you up that evening and didn’t know your name. In that scenario, you looked a bit like Paul.

We’d left the balcony doors open and the curtains flickered occasionally, although there wasn’t much of a breeze. I don’t think either of us noticed how humid it was becoming, how sultry, how close.

The Villa Rosa was so near that we didn’t know how to get there. We couldn’t call a cab to take us 400 yards around the corner. In the end we decided to walk there with our suitcases.

You insisted on dressing up, because we were now going to what you called a “proper hotel.” You wore your white shirt and your navy chinos. I dressed as usual in my beach stuff. I was the one who read instructions and itineraries, so I knew we probably couldn’t check in yet and would have to leave our bags. I was ready to walk back to the beach after that and just have a normal day. I didn’t want anything to change. I wanted to lie on the same lounger on the same patch of beach and feel the sun knead the back of my thighs like hot dough while I tried to plot my new play.

“I wish we didn’t have to go,” I said to Marlena, the manager of the cheap beach hotel, as we checked out.

“You will be back,” she said, smiling. “Next year.”

“Next year,” I agreed, and she squeezed my hand. “Have fun in Italy,” I added.

She was leaving that day to visit her sister. She’d been telling us all about it. Her sister had been here helping with the refugees on the north of the island, but had got burned out and had to leave. The hotel was shuttered and locked up, except for our room. Paul and Beth had already taken the early boat. Marlena now gave us two pieces of homemade coconut cake wrapped in foil—the same sort she’d made for the refugees, she said—and made us promise to come back later and get our beach towels for the day as usual. The way it worked here was that the sun loungers half belonged to the hotel they were in front of, and half belonged to the public. To claim one, you had to put a towel on it. If you were staying in a hotel, they gave you the towel.

“I’ll leave them with Raoul,” she said. Raoul was the barman. Tomorrow he was departing for Athens too.

“I’m sure they’ll have towels at the Villa Rosa,” you said.

“But probably not until after we check in,” I reminded him.

We couldn’t officially check in until two o’clock, but we were going to try our luck now anyway. We’d promised Marlena that we’d check out early so she could get to the airport in good time. She was worried about the plane to Athens, especially in the wind that was due to pick up later that day. We didn’t want her to have to hurry as well.

I’d forgotten how heavy my leather handbag was. It cut into my shoulder as I wheeled my two suitcases out of Marlena’s hotel and down the tarmac road. We took the first turning on the right. It was a narrow back street, dusty and still, with overhanging trees and pale green cactuses with dying flowers. Our suitcase wheels kept getting stuck on hard seed pods, or churned up with small stones. I had to yank mine along and the movement was so awkward that at one point I ripped a fingernail.

It seemed to get hotter as we walked. The houses were not like the whitewashed squares along the seafront. Here were darker, grander villas, with tall gates and long fences. Dogs barked, and every gate had a sign saying Beware of the Dog in Greek. Outside one of the bigger houses, a collarless, ragged-looking Alsatian ran hard along the fence as we passed, then growled at our backs as we walked on.

Eventually, our suitcase wheels red with crushed berries, we turned into the driveway of the Villa Rosa and walked past more tired-looking cactuses, exhausted lemon trees and big, sleepy hornets. A massive pomegranate tree slopped its bruised fruits onto the path. There were still dogs barking in the distance, always the sound of the dogs barking, but there were no dogs at the Villa Rosa.

There she was, in the shade of the stone veranda, in a prim white dress. Isabella. I can barely even write her name. From now on, everything I say I will imagine you disagreeing with, saying, “It wasn’t like that” or “You’re not being fair” and all I can do is bow my head slightly and say, “OK.” And then just not react. Because I don’t know what else to do. There’s no point arguing anymore. And yes, perhaps it wasn’t the way I say, and perhaps I’m not being fair, and perhaps leaving at the first sign of the storm easing, as I am about to do, to walk to the airport (a mere seven miles), to take the first plane out of here in secret, and to never see you again—perhaps that proves I am the one who