by Alison Fell
Pericles had been sentenced to 2 years, and released on parole after 18 months. But his job had gone, and the shock had proved too much for his mother, who died soon afterwards. In the years since then he had drifted around the neighbourhood, doing odd jobs when they were offered, smiling his eager smile, smoking on the stoops of several shopkeepers who had adopted him. Pericles had been a reliable postman in his day, and because the people of Katomeli remembered this, he was seldom scolded or maligned, and never lacked for an ouzo or a glass of raki.
Yiannis hailed him cheerfully and hurried on. Pericles might be a wierdo, but his wits were largely intact, and it was worth sounding him out from time to time, for his eyes were sharp and his tongue always ready to wag for a good plate of kleftiko.
Dora’s place was a hundred metres farther down the hill, on the corner where Limonas Street met Vassilikou.
Xenes Glosses, announced the red neon sign above the street entrance: Foreign Languages. A growth industry, as Dora had correctly assessed some years ago. When her divorce had forced her to take money seriously, she’d given up her post at the High School and set herself up in business, teaching English and German to Cretans who aimed to make a career in tourism, and Greek to English and Germans, who aimed to make a life of it.
He glimpsed her dark-red head through the open window and stopped to lean on the high sill. She was in the office, watching TV with a group of students. Philippoussis was lumbering about the screen like a beetle-browed Hercules, fighting off match-points; Henman was the gadfly, tormenting him.
‘An English tennis lesson?’ said Yiannis in English.
‘Ai Yianni! You scared me!’ All in a fluster, Dora jumped up. She came to the window smoothing down her hair. ‘Won’t you come in? We are watching a re-run because it’s raining at Wimbledon, of course. Won’t you join us? It’s quite an epic. The British are eating their Union Jacks to ribbons.’
‘Chewing,’ Yiannis corrected. Dora’s English was fluent but not idiomatic. ‘Sorry, I’m still on duty. Tomorrow still okay? I’m meeting Tassos and Irini at 8.’
The flicker of anxiety in Dora’s eyes reminded him that he should have said ‘we’.
‘So you’ll.?’ Her lashes fluttered down demurely.
Yiannis was embarrassed for her. Nodding to a couple of students who were eyeing him with a mixture of curiosity and respect, he lowered his voice. ‘Pick you up. Of course. At 7.30.’
On the screen there was a reprieve. The score flashed up two sets all. The students roared with delight. Philippoussis clenched his fist at the crowd and scowled majestically. ‘Enjoy the match!’ said Yiannis, making his escape.
He and Dora had been seeing each other casually for a couple of years: an adult arrangement, or so he’d supposed. Lately, though, Dora had shown signs of the kind of deference he neither expected nor enjoyed in a woman. She seemed wary, submissive. She seemed to be waiting.
His irritation mounted as he rounded the corner and passed the park, a desultory plot bordered by scrubby oleanders, where some children were playing on a roundabout. More than once Dora had mentioned ‘talking about our relationship’, but about that he had nothing to say, for some unreconstructed prideful part of him insisted that he was not a man who had ‘relationships’, he was a man who had great loves. And Dora – sadly but certainly – was not one of those. But he could see no kind way to tell her that it was her friendship he required, her humour, and her energetic spite: all those attributes, in fact, which now seemed to be in decline, fading away into oblivion, like the unsaid words at the end of her sentences. It was possible, of course, that he was to blame for this diminishment, but all the same he couldn’t help recoiling from those shadowy lacunae, so hopeful and so vulnerable, and from the hidden contract he detected there, which seemed to say that to complete Dora’s sentences was to agree to complete her life.
5
At the east end of Panomeli’s small beach the Shoestring Bar stands on a rise, with a spellbinding view out over the great gleaming pelt of the sea. Although the heat is building, a comfortable breeze ruffles the corners of the paper tablecloth. Above her head tamarisk branches whisk about, soft and fluffy as feather dusters.
Her red sarong is dry now, her bathing suit only slightly damp at the crotch. She lights a cigarette and opens Alice Kober’s Notes on some ‘‘Cattle’’ Tablets from Knossos – the original typescript, xeroxed for her by the archivist at the Ashmolean. What she has to do is to tally the numbers Kober assigned to them in Scripta Minoa II with the system of numbering now in force at the Heraklion Museum. A laborious, finicky job, but one she hopes will up her chances of setting her eyes on the exact tablets, the ones Kober, for all her efforts, never managed to see.
The quotation marks around ‘Cattle’ showed Kober was still uncertain about what kind of livestock the logograms represented; not until after her death was it established that
the horned logogram actually stood for ‘sheep’.
Anchoring the article down with the ashtray, she brings out the Mycenaean glossary she downloaded from the Internet. You could download anything these days, even – amazingly – a standardised Linear B font, complete with keyboard code for operating it. The laborious hand-copying of the past is thoroughly obsolete. Alice, she imagines, would have been in seventh heaven.
Ingrid has never minded working while others take their ease. On the contrary, she loves the busy-bee feeling – so organic and secretive – that happens when you disengage from the collective, not to mention from the manic treadmill of Great Britain plc. It’s no surprise to her if people are leaving in droves these days. Upping sticks, downsizing. Rearing llamas in Spain or olives in Tuscany.
It isn’t as if she’s immune from the national obsession herself.
A hill-village in the Luberon, perhaps. Alternatively, the Cyclades: some kind of shack by the sea with a wooden jetty to moor a boat, an outboard (10 horsepower would do), some vines, vegetables, and goats.
A lifestyle with livestock, you could say. As it happens she does know how to milk a goat, and although she can’t make cheese, birth kids, or slaughter, these things can no doubt be learned. After all, according to Aunt Elsa Henderson, who has lately added genealogy to her list of hobbies, her Great-grandmother was a Highland crofter at Muirton of Ardblair. And the optimistic emigrants on the TV seem to set out with far fewer skills than she has. (What they do have, she reminds herself, is capital).
She has been gazing at the dazzle on the sea, and when she looks down at the glossary the page, in deep shadow, is an intense purple field. The syllabograms are ant-black, inscrutable. She stares unseeing at the triple logogram for ‘sheep’.
a) sheep b) ram c) ewe
There’s something too bland here, a gloss she can’t quite bring herself to accept. That missing third term again. If b) and c) for ram and ewe seem fair enough, what’s harder to swallow is a) sheep as general concept.
It’s logical enough, she supposes, to the contemporary conceptual thinker – less so, however, if looked at from the point of view of the Minoans, whose thinking would surely have been ruled by agronomic imperatives. The herd, by necessity, would have been composed mainly of females and castrates, with a minority of males. As few as 2-4 per 100 animals in Ucko’s estimate, if she remembers rightly.
So the herd, like the logograms, would have been trimodal.
While Kober had accepted that the variants indicated sex-distinction, she’d refused to commit herself on which variant was which. It’s a pity, thinks Ingrid, that the phallocentric thinkers who came after her had lacked her perspicuity.
She checks the article again On every one of the livestock tablets featured, the irksome ‘male’ sign glowers out at her. On Alice’s fb08, for instance, Heraklion Museum’s H304:
At the time Kober was writing the numerical system, at least, had been established: 100 was denoted by the circle, O, 10 units by a horizontal stroke, and single units by a vertical. Kober had interpreted the numbers on the far
right of the tablet as some kind of tax levied by the Palace administration on the total animals in a given herd – in this case, 100.
But a herd of 100 bulls is patently nonsensical, and as for sheep, what farmer in his right mind would keep a flock of 100 rams, with 100 pairs of horns, and 200 functioning cojones?
Ca’ the yowes tae the knowes, thinks Ingrid. Even Robert Burns had a better grip on farming basics.
A voice hails her from below the terrace, and she looks over the railing and sees Lynda the Rep. toiling up the stone steps from the beach. Her outfit is formal and frumpy – a billowing mid-calf- length dress with mid-length sleeves, and black court shoes with mid-heels. The material of the dress is printed with tiny Union Jacks. Reaching the top of the steps, she rounds the parapet.
‘Thought I might find you here!’ Her face, for once, does not wear the bright harrying smile of the salesman; she looks, Ingrid thinks, perturbed.
Ingrid has nothing against Lynda except, perhaps, that Lynda makes her feel guilty. She is not, in Lynda’s book, a good client. She has not gone on group outings, has missed the Turtle-Watching trip, and the Greek Barbecue, and has failed to sign up for the Sunset Cruise with Bouzouki Music. Slipping the livestock tablet sheets into her folder, she pulls out a chair and invites Lynda to sit.
‘No thanks,’ says Lynda, fanning herself agitatedly with her red plastic wallet-file. ‘Sorry to disturb you, but I’m just, like, rounding up the flock. We’re meeting at 6, at the Minimarket.’
‘Any particular reason?’ Ingrid is surprised. Has she missed something?
Lynda looks at her. ‘You haven’t heard?’ On her flushed face a small rosebud mouth works inscrutably at its worries. She puts her cellphone and file on the table and sits down. ‘They found someone in the wood. Drugs overdose, it looks like.’ She’s breathless, her big flustered bosom rising and falling. ‘The police need to check if anyone, you know, saw anything.’
‘Good God, when was this?’
‘This morning.’ Lynda fusses a straight blonde streak of hair back from her face and clips it into a sequined kirby-grip. Ingrid feels sorry for her – it can’t be much fun, after all, being the bearer of such uneaseful news
‘Look, can’t I get you a drink? A coke or something? You look like you’ve had quite a day of it.’
Lynda’s eyes glaze over with tears. She shakes her head mutely, batting away the sympathy with a stricken flutter of the hand. Jumping up, she gathers her things and gazes around distractedly. ‘You haven’t seen the Shapcotts at all, have you? The gentleman with the daughter?’
The Shapcotts are Ingrid’s neighbours, their balcony a mere half metre from her own. She confesses that she hasn’t.
Briefly from their vantage point she and Lynda scan the beach, the bar, the blue water, but the Shapcotts are nowhere to be seen. Near the off-shore rock where small boats are tethered, the Wilson-Wilsons, in tandem, are paddling their lilo across the shallows.
‘See you at six, then’ says Lynda, her flag-dress billowing again as she turns to go. ‘Sorry about this, Miss Laurie.’
6
By 6.15 most of the Flagstaff clients had arrived. Some had come straight from the beach, burdened with towels and tote bags, impatient for their showers and lotions and aperitifs. One couple, who were still dripping wet, lugged a large inflatable turtle. Sarongs were tied tight as tourniquets across ample breasts; flip-flops spilled sand on the freshly-washed patio outside the Minimarket. According to Yiannis’ sister Irini, who had trained as a hairdresser in London, the British spent their long winters in grey and black, and this was why they chose such gaudy colours for the summer: turquoise with blue, orange with pink, mauve with indigo. Colours that didn’t go well with the bleached hair of the women and the reddish flush of tans that resulted from too great a greediness for the sun, as if Mother Nature, who hated to be hurried, had imprinted her exasperation on their skin.
Yiannis had promised Gaylene Evnochides that the meeting would be strictly low key. The Harknesses, she said, were talking of leaving, and her boss in the London office was already fretting about compensation claims, so he could understand, couldn’t he, that she didn’t want the whole group to follow suit.
Lynda had arranged a semi-circle of chairs on the terrace, and Demosthenes’ wife Maria handed round cartons of orange juice and bottles of mineral water. While Lynda, haltingly, did the honours, Yiannis tried to correlate the company with the printout Gaylene had provided.
The Wilson-Wilsons. This was not a misprint, apparently, but a young couple who neither smiled at him nor met his eye.
The turtle pair turned out to be a Mr. and Mrs. Gifford. The jolly elderly Giffords, who were dressed like adolescents, were presumably Mr. G.’s parents.
Miss Dodge and Miss Ottakar looked settled and Sapphic, grazing contentedly on a saucer of pistachios.
Mr. Shapcott, a pursed-up, professional-looking type of middling years, sat with his teenage daughter Zoe, who wore her beauty like a brand.
Ingrid Laurie (Miss? Ms?) appeared to be the only single. There were no children in evidence, no doubt because school vacations didn’t begin until the end of the month.
Yiannis nodded sympathetically at Bill and Elaine Harkness. If death had laid a sobering hand on the Harknesses, it had also lent them an air of celebrity. They were dressed with marked formality, he in a suit jacket, she in a black linen dress that skimmed her ankles. The solicitude that surrounded them was palpable. Yiannis sensed that if he didn’t soft-pedal, he would risk the wrath of their co-tourists.
He began with an apology for the interruption to their evening, and went on to assure them it was merely a matter of routine, since at this stage no foul play was suspected. A white lie, but excusable.
Thirteen pairs of eyes – serious, citizenly – stared back at him. As always, he was conscious of the pressure of unasked questions: their eyes might be on him, but he suspected it was the corpse that their instincts strained to see. He tapped out his cigarette and turned on his smile.
‘Nevertheless. I’ll be grateful for any help you can give me. Anything unusual you saw or heard last night, or early this morning. Something that seemed trivial, perhaps, at the time.’
The Misses Dodge and Ottakar were nearest to Yiannis. ‘Ladies?’
They shook their heads as one. ‘We tend to sleep late, you see,’ ventured Miss Dodge.
‘On holiday,’ Miss Ottakar corrected her, with a reproachful smile. ‘But apart from the racket from the Totem Bar – which is rather too close for comfort, I have to say- I don’t remember hearing a thing.’
Yiannis nodded and turned his gaze on the young Mr.Wilson-Wilson. ‘And you, sir?’
The boy’s lips appeared to be trying to form sounds, but froze in the process. Yiannis smiled in encouragement, to no avail.
‘No,’ said the wife, with great finality.
‘Thank you,’ said Yiannis, passing quickly on to the Harknesses. It had occurred to him that although the track to Katomeli followed the beach, the body had been found higher up, on a path that might once have led to a beehive or water-tank, but which now led nowhere in particular.
He put the question casually. Had they climbed up in the hope of a view, perhaps, or of a shortcut to the beach at Katomeli?
The answer came with an embarrassed shrug. ‘Lainey – my wife – can’t stand mosquitoes.’
‘Mosquitoes?’
‘In the bamboo along the shore.’
There was a murmur of agreement. ‘It’s a proper swamp round there.’
The Giffords nodded solemnly.
‘Show them, Charlie.’ The elderly mother, elfish in her baseball cap, thrust out an arm to show off her bites. Loose skin hung in crepey folds from her shoulder to her elbow.
Elaine Harkness glanced at her husband and blushed visibly. Yiannis saw that it was a lie, if a harmless one. An alfresco screw, he decided, was more likely. The dappled light, the illicit impulses of summer. The thought made him feel distinctly w
istful. If only the heat still did for him what it seemed to do for the English.
The younger Mrs. Gifford – fit, fiftyish – wore a silver chain round her ankle. Her husband had pushed the turtle out of sight behind a potted palm, as a mark, presumably, of respect. The whole family had been in the Shoestring Bar till 2am, he told Yiannis, celebrating the parents’ 50th Wedding Anniversary.
‘My congratulations!’ said Yiannis, smiling at the old folks.
‘Later on we had a nightcap on our balcony and played a hand of two of poker. So we were a bit the worse for wear this morning, to be honest.’
Mr. Shapcott voiced something inaudible, and Mr. Gifford bristled. ‘Sorry mate. Just a one off. Special occasion, like.’
Yiannis, who had been trying to keep his eyes off the Shapcotts, now allowed himself to stare at Zoe. True to her name, Zoe was life itself, in its first fresh bloom. From the shiny waterfall of her hair to the peachy skin of her legs, she was jailbait, but innocent with it. Although she was almost as tall as her father, there was no gawkiness in her. Mr. Shapcott, in fact, was the one who looked awkward, as if abashed by warring currents of protectiveness and desire. Etsi ine o Zoe, thought Yiannis. Such is life. Although he had no children himself, it was easy to imagine the jealous frenzies such a daughter might provoke even in the best of fathers.
Tucking her bare feet up into a half-lotus, Zoe swept her hair back from her face. The gaze she fixed on Yiannis was frank and trusting.
‘I was awake at 6.00, but we didn’t hear anything, did we, Daddy?’ Her voice had the sweet clarity of a distant bell. Her brow contrived a perfect little frown. ‘Well, apart from that blasted cockerel!’