by Tanith Lee
Despite the light, it often clouded over. It rained a lot. A worrisome wind blew. Then came intermittent days of tranquillity, crystalline pauses, which grew longer. Flowers opened on balconies, hardy foreign geraniums, and large purple blooms, and a kind of iris, all shut in pots. Conversely the mauve tangle of wisteria began to fade on the courtyard wall.
He dreamed one afternoon that he was wandering along a shore-line, where tall crags rose and the virtually tideless sea crashed with green breakers between single rocks like fangs. He could not remember his name, and was desperately trying to do so. But every burst of the aqua-violet sea into green robbed him of any clues he had amassed. When he woke, a Hoover was busy in the apartment above. He tried for his own name. Nicolas. Nick. There.
At night, after a dinner in some small nearby restaurant, he returned, drank bottled water, slept again. Always until the morning.
One day he was eating lunch, when some tourists entered the taverna. After a lot of undiluted ouzo an argument broke out among two of the men, which roiled away outside, became a fight, and vanished round a corner taking the other man, and one of the girls, with it. The Scandinavian-blonde girl left behind turned out to be an American.
“Oh for Christ’s sake!” she had exclaimed, then turned to Nick to apologise in good Greek for her blasphemy.
“It’s OK,” he said.
“You’re English,” said the girl.
They had a drink together - she had not been party to the ouzo. Instead of sleeping Nick employed the afternoon in walking about the streets with her, listening to music, and drinking coffee. She said she and he must go up on the finicula to see the temples and the Parthenon, the Virgin House of Athene. But in the end they went back to the flat and had sex.
Her hair was natural, up to a point, and she was already tanned from a sun-lamp, but quite nicely. Her American teeth were scorching white, of course. They had split all the bills, and he knew, though he had treated her with the same courteous attentiveness he applied to his clientele, that payment had no part in their dealings.
Sexually, she liked what he did. She seemed less intrigued by Athens than by the geography of Nick’s body, or at least her own response to it. As he had thought, at no point was money broached. But they did not spend too much of it anyway, never actually going to the top of the Acropolis, let alone on the island-hopping boat trip she had once or twice suggested. There was no talk of sentiment. They were ‘friends’. No strings.
On no other level did their short liaison operate. But then, no liaison ever had, for him. He had felt nothing intense for any of his clients either, only a potential genuine wish to please and satisfy them, a sort of faint fondness when he did. Where they had charm he always appreciated it. But anything in proximity was improved by charm. One could be fond of a painting or glad to use a particular type of notebook. He did not analyse, any of this. He had been aware already, and if sometimes he felt he had not suspected all of it, he was unsurprised, unimpelled to view himself more clearly now.
When she left he did not accompany her to the airport. Nick was then slightly mystified by the sensation which lifted in him and also flew away. He watched as a fresh torrent of rain cascaded past the spider’s cages of balconies above, and he drew in several slow breaths. Relishing his renewed aloneness.
That night he stayed in the flat.
He turned out the lights and did not mind the flit of neons along the street, strobing the blinds. Falling asleep he dreamed the cat was in the room, but only lying, also asleep, on the rug.
He knew better than to stroke it.
But then he sensed it was about to open its eyes, and in doing that it would let loose some power, some malign wish.
There was, even in Athens, superstition of the Evil Eye. In the islands this would be worse. The guide book and the travel agent had warned him. It was undoubtedly this - his dream of the cat’s eyes which, when undone, as he had foretold in the dream, would be a clear frozen blue.
Epsilon
Nick had found the pin (the Roman pin) during the couple of days at the old flat in London. He was sluggishly packing up anything he wanted to take with him. He had already arranged for larger items to go into storage. The men would arrive after he had gone. He did not want to meet anyone else calling on him there.
These arrangements made, he put various things into another bag. He included no DVD’s or books. He found the thrillers and other stuff later. Afterwards he found he missed nothing he had left behind.
But the pin he found when he stripped the bed.
It had lain just below the undersheet, against the mattress. He had no idea how it had got there. Had he put it there? Nick thought not. Maybe it had only fallen from his hand, rolled, become caught. It was a wonder he had not damaged it, lying on it…
Oddly it appeared less green, the verdigris rubbed a little. But the carved small emotionless face with its fanciful hair was as he recalled.
He took it to the hotel with him.
When he decided he would go to Greece, also he took the pin with him. He wrapped it carefully, and somehow thought no one would detect it, or if they did think it worth investigating. Nor apparently had they. If it had been valuable, as he had at first suspected, then his own attitude was most unwise. Either he did not care, or he had never truly believed it was worth a sou. Another of Laurence’s tricks…
At the holiday flat in Athens, Nick kept the pin, still in its container, in his bag. He had no urge to look at it, had no notion why he retained it, if it meant anything at all, let alone to him. But then again, he did not quite know why he came to Greece. To someone else it might have been imperative - and he had expected all the while he stayed on in England that Serena would call him, to demand if he meant to follow up the ‘lead’ the old Franks woman had supplied, or what the address was in the ice-cream notepad, and if it existed. Serena though did not call. No one did by then.
Two days after the American girl had gone, the ferry began to run to the island. His passage was already booked.
As he vacated the apartment for the metro to Pireas, the thin cat, seated on a lump of stone across the way, watched him.
The girl had been concerned about the cat. The Greeks, she had said, were notorious for their blank indifference to animal welfare. But, although thin, the cat’s coat, a dark malt shade, shone as if burnished. The eyes were not blue, naturally. Later, however, he could only seem to remember them that colour.
On the front of the boat - or ship - a catamaran of some size, there were two blue eyes, drawn in thickly on the red and white paint of the hulls.
The eyes, their purpose, was treated as a sort of joke between the captain and most of the passengers, several of whose cars squatted on the car-deck. The crew seemingly insisted the eyes be present, to protect the vessel and the persons manning it. Also, of course, so the boat (or ship) could see the way it/she had to go.
The catamaran set out across an Aegean of cornflower colour, under a blaze of sun. The other travellers were of several, perhaps to be anticipated, sorts, fit middle-aged or over-fit under twenties, these last noisy and excitable.
As the mainland drew away, the world opened out brazenly and indomitably. On every side far off islands began to appear, beckoning green, or alabaster with buildings. Black-headed gulls were circling. Once a swarm of some sort of fish went glittering by below, cleaving the drown-blue water with their knives.
His lung had begun to ache. Nick sat under an awning and drank an intense orange drink. The light, sheering from the sea, made him think of beautiful smashed crockery, possibly gilded with silver. He should take a written note of how it all was. He did not.
The voyage took a little more than six hours. The catamaran called nowhere else, being the property of the island, which it greeted with its own proprietary bleat of a horn.
It had been early, before noon, when they left Pireas, but the sun swam lower, it and the light still clear as coppery glass.
Nick knows he is
afraid to enter the harbour. To disembark. But it occurs to him he always secretly has been, of entering any port, any coast, and of any type - the other universe of a country, or a relationship - unless, obviously, it was strictly business. Maybe, he thinks, as he readies himself to leave the transporting intermediary of the ship, even to be born had unnerved him: no longer a pampered passenger in the sweet, luxurious privacy of Claudia’s womb, but a stranger put ashore on the unknown landmass of life.
Zeta
His current hotel lies just behind the port, where the coastal village runs along in white blocks, caged with painted wooden balconies. Some of the blocks are steep steps, some houses. But there are terraces above the beach, crowded with cafés and bars, psistariés and tavernas, several shaded by gigantic mulberry trees.
A little farther along the curved hip of the coast a second resort - pensions, bars and discos - has sprung up. After sunfall these erupt in sound and flexing lights. Yet from this distance they are less intrusive, their flashing colours, he thinks, only like partly tamed lightning.
The island itself is largely volcanic. Above the village paths carve into the hills. Pines and cypresses, fresh springs sparkling as the sun shoots at them.
At the centre of it all three mountains rise, not of colossal height, but seeming quite impressive from the coast, their heads still slightly chalked with snow.
The eyed catamaran goes, and returns every five days, birthing new arrivals.
There is the summer wind.
This wind, they say, is a living being. It forms in the north and then blows southward at and about the isles all summer, easing only after dark, to sleep.
A wind that sleeps.
A once volcanic island.
There might always be appalling earthquakes. They may happen at any hour, any moment. There are still those who recall the horrors of a quake over fifty years ago.
Then there are treks about the hills to be had, the seventh century church of a saint, the ruins of a monastery, a temple to the wine god. And there is the Venetian place, residue of the Empire of Venice, beyond the first bank of hills, the area called, for ‘fun’, Little Venice. And there is the painting course.
It will be so interesting, the course, Nick has been told. The tutors are excellent, the situation splendid. Everyone is always thrilled. The scenery - in another month he will be astounded, shattered by joy at the paintable views. He will want a taxi to get there, perhaps, or there is the bus - but half the time it is full of locals going over to the other village, and with livestock, (chickens, the odd goat, even once a small flock of sheep).
Nick waits in his hotel, which seems made for smaller humans, at least two feet shorter than Nick and more narrowly built. In a small walled garden a vine grows up a fig tree. Cicadas soon sound in the afternoons, or at least Nick hears them.
When the sun drops below the sea, now often in a glorious haemorrhage, he beholds the famous and uncanny green blink on the water.
About three - or is it five? - days later, he sees her. Kitty. Kit.
He is sitting at one of the outdoor cafe tables, with a watered ouzo, and along the terrace walks a slim young woman accompanied by a large man. The man is large, that is, in the sense of musculature and height. He is about six-four, and his big arms bulge in his jacket. He looks Greek, perhaps with a dash of the Middle East, dark, hawk-nosed. He is grinning at something the woman has said. Then they both laugh.
Kitty has dyed her hair a very deep henna red, and it is longer than Nick recalls.
Otherwise she looks, he thinks, physically the same. She wears a milk-white dress, and a sort of crocheted white cardigan, and white high-heeled sandals. Her fingernails are painted white. Her skin is still very pale. Her lip-gloss matches her hair. He is surprised somewhat that he remembers her so well that now he can identify her this ably.
Supposing it is not Kitty? Everyone has a double, etc:
No, it is Kitty. Kitty is meant to be on the island, and here Kitty is.
He sits immobile, and they both walk right past him. He is almost certain she does not see him. Perhaps, in her case, she does not remember him well. After all, she had done what she set out to do, presumably with all three of them, Nick, Laurence, Serena. It was just that, in Laurence’s case, things had gone rather too far.
She does not, as he looks at her through his dark glasses, seem troubled. Something glints in the sunlight as it lies on a chain around her neck, some small gold pendant.
Then they have turned off between a pair of mulberries, moving into the village.
Should he go after them?
He tenses to get up and follow.
Then sits back.
In a couple more days he will be going inland. To the venue of the painting course. Where else should Kitty be but precisely there, as mad Jonquil Franks had promised in her scribbled note, just below the name of the island, the identification of the house, the time of the course, the ferry. And that other thing. That other, even more astounding, thing she had written there. The thing he had been glad he had not let Serena see, or that apparently Serena had had, ultimately, no interest in seeing.
Nick takes the early bus. He shares it with about twenty persons mostly old women in black, and a coop of chickens who voice loud disapproval.
The road is steep; crags tower. The sea lies below everything, a blue rim to the sky. He might have made a few notes, on the bus. He is by now used to not making notes. A relief, a bewildering loss. He thinks probably he will not write again. Or draw anything. The art course is not his reason for being here.
Behind her in the hallway is a cool dark cavern. But the floor is a deep wine-red. It is tiled, he sees, and the interstices about these tiles show a faint paler outline, lending a definite receding perspective to the space.
“Kalispéra,” Nick says, politely.
The woman is fat and firm, dressed neatly in black. She blinks once and speaks to him in English. “This is a private house.”
“Yes, kyria. I know. I’m looking for…” Nick checks. He amends, “I want to see Kitty Andrew.”
She speaks in Greek then.
And Nick retaliates insultingly from his phrase book: “Den katalavéno.” Don’t understand.
In English the woman says, “You are at the wrong house.”
“No. I am at the right house. Perhaps she’s called Price, here. A young woman, twenty-eight years old, long red hair - about the colour of those tiles.”
As he had walked up the track from the olive groves, only now shedding their spun green blossom, the huge house had loomed behind high white walls. There is an escutcheon over the entrance, Venetian no doubt, renovated or a copy, a lion with a little ship balanced on its back. The garden is laid with flagstones and planted with three pink almond trees.
The fat woman is frowning at Nick. She says, “You are from the painting people.”
“The course. Yes, in a way.”
“That is in the village.”
“I know where it is. My name is Nick Lewis. I am here to see Kitty. Perhaps…”
The woman speaks in Greek again, but just then the big Greek man Nick saw in the other coast village days before, appears from a corridor at the back of the hall. He says something to the woman. Instantly she moves away from the doorway, and then the man addresses Nick.
“Come in, Mr Lewis. You must not worry about Pera. She is always like this, with a stranger.”
Nick thinks he does not, in fact, seem to be quite a stranger, not to the Greek man.
The man anyway leads him across the wide hall and into another wide space, this one tiled blue. Furniture is minimal. On a whitewood sideboard, a dish of various ceramic fruits, two cigarette boxes, three cut glass ashtrays, bottles that shine white, dark blue, green or yellow.
“I take it then,” says Nick, sounding to himself over-precise but cool enough, well chilled even, “She’s here. I mean Kitty. Or,” he adds, “is that still her name?”
“Kirri,” says the man. “W
e call her Kirri.” He smiles his faultless teeth. “You may know, Mr Lewis, it comes from the goddess of bees in the old Greek times. Q, then the mark, the apostrophe, then RE. Her mother, you see, was fanciful.”
Nick stares at him.
Nick has just felt all the blood drain, or seem to, out of his brain and head. He thinks he is going to pass out, but cannot make himself move towards any of the sparse furniture in order to hold on, or drop into it. He has a dizzying horror of falling flat on the hard floor, and hurting his half-repaired lung. Maybe this precognition steadies him enough that he stays conscious. And gradually the lights come up again in his vision. His ears cease to drone. Drone, bee-hive - bees - queen-bee. A fanciful mother.
The man seems not to have noticed anything.
“Let me offer you a kítron,” he says. “Will you like the stronger or the softer type? Or we have a medium. I can have them fetch some ice, if you like.”
Kítron is quite difficult, Nick had heard, to obtain now. But here, of course.
“Thank you. Dry,” he says. “No ice.” Now he can walk he crosses to a glass door that looks out on to a perfect post-card grove of olive trees, spilling in steps away downhill. At the bottom is a clip of sea, blue-tiled like the floor.
The man comes over and hands him the yellow drink.
He is about five inches taller than Nick, and built far larger. How old is he? His twenties, probably, or just a little more. Blue-black hair and that coaxing smile; as if amused, glad to humour the visitor who matters not at all.
“Now I must be elsewhere,” says the man who had walked with Kit-Kitty-Kirri-Q’re along the terrace and between the mulberry trees.
“How long will she be?” Nick asks.
“Oh,” says the man. He smiles on, and shrugs. “You know how they are. Women.”