by Alison Fell
Most of the night she’d been hard at work, cutting her high hopes down to size. Only when she’d edited the story down to one she could believe in did she feel normal, and fell into the blanked-out sleep of the thoroughly deflated.
If she were in London, eating with Maxine and Hilary in the cosy, noisy Euro-restaurant on the corner, how would she tell it? Maxine and Hilary are on her side; they can always be counted upon to lend an empathetic ear.
There would be a post-mortem with giggles, advice, strategies. Her excitement – absorbed, applauded – would settle into place. She might even be able to accept it herself.
Perhaps she should call them, let them soak up her overspill of nerves. She can’t just close her eyes and take a leap at the thing, for she knows exactly where that will get her. When you’re careless with your life, other people – alerted, like sharks, by asymmetry – will zero in on your unwariness. She’s no longer capable of following the kind of instincts that tumble you into unsuitable beds, and also, which is worse, turn you against the suitable men, the ones who want, perhaps, to love and keep you there.
She had made herself eat breakfast, had even worked a little, although not enough to feel virtuous. After drafting several versions by hand, she’d finally replied to Pamela D.’s email, conscious that Pamela might well be granted access to the Death Certificate, but, as a relative, might not wish to divulge the actual cause of death. However the request was phrased it sounded prurient: somehow she couldn’t quite convince herself that she – or the public at large – really had a right to know.
As she swims slowly back towards the shore, the beach separates itself into contrasting horizontal stripes: bright blond sand, and, under the sunlit domes of the umbrellas, deep violet shade. She locates her umbrella by the beacon of the red sarong, but then, with territorial annoyance, notices someone sitting under it – a dumpy, old-ladyish figure, which appears to be wearing something mauve. Unless that’s merely a trick of the shadow.
It must be Androula, she decides: who else would dress like that on a midday beach? Except that Androula normally makes her rounds at 10.30, then again at 3, and the rest of the time sits sharp-eyed under a raffia-roofed shelter where the steps lead down from the road. It simply isn’t her habit to plonk herself down on someone’s sunbed and wait impatiently for her money.
Anxious now, she strikes up a fast crawl and steams towards the shallows. At the edge the sea laps noiselessly at the Dutch excavations, whose ramparts are melting away now and filling the pit with greyish silt. When she wades out she sees her towel folded on the sunbed, her sunglasses and sun-cream on top, just as she left them; there’s no sign whatsoever that anyone has been there.
Ken is sitting astride his sunbed, bent over a copy of the Daily Express. Water-drops glisten on his oiled shoulders.
‘The old girl?’ he says, squinting up at her. ‘Nah, gone off for her siesta, most like.’
Glenys unloads a two litre bottle of Fanta from a plastic Minimarket bag and drops a packet of postcards on her sunbed.
‘I ran into Lynda up top, she said there was a call for you.’
Ingrid’s heart leaps with alarm. Flashing on the corkboard on the wall of her mother’s room, the still unsent postcard, her mind clocks up every catastrophe that could possibly happen in a Care Home. If anything ‘s gone wrong, it’ll be Aunt Elsa who calls, not Buncranna House: Elsa isn’t only the archivist of the family, but also the rock-solid repository of travel details.
‘Did she say who from?’
Glenys puffs out her cheeks. ‘I think she said the police.’
‘Looks like you’re in trouble, love.’
When Ken lets out a snort the penny drops. The glance he and Glenys exchange makes Ingrid cringe, but there’s still a residue of alarm, enough to dull the embarrassment. She stands dripping, screwing up her eyes against the glare.
‘I’d better go up, then.’
‘Aye,’ grins Ken, ‘Better had.’
Lynda is at the photocopier when Ingrid arrives. She’s wearing shorts, for once, which make her look fatter, but also younger, and her blonde hair is tied in two Spice-Girl bunches above her ears. She spins round, one hair-bunch flipping forward over her shoulder.
‘Oh great. You’ve saved me a trip You had a call.’
‘Was it urgent, do you know?’
Lynda shrugs. ‘He didn’t say.’ She dumps a pile of photocopying on the desk and tears a square of paper from a memo pad, which she passes it over to Ingrid, along with a flyer which advertises a day-trip to the windmills of Lasithi.
Ingrid indicates the phone on the desk. ‘Do you mind if I use your land line?’
‘Sure, yeah, help yourself.’
Lynda looks surprised, as well she might. If Ingrid has held out against cellphones it isn’t only because of her superstitious distrust of all microwaves, but also because she hates the idea of being wide open to invasion at all hours of the day and night. Her mother’s grasp on time, like her ability to recognise boundaries, has always been fragile, and recently she seems to have relinquished it altogether.
Under the red sarong her bathing suit is still soaking wet, so she bends over the desk and punches the numbers standing up. The sweat is slippery on her fingers. What will happen if she hits the wrong key, makes a hash of it?
The voice barks out, unrecognisable, from a cavern of noise. ‘Nai, embros.’ She hears phones trilling in the background, and the light pitter and patter of keyboards.
‘O Yiannis Stephanoudakis ine ekei?’
There’s a pause, and a sighing outflow of breath. A door closes, and the noises recede. ‘It’s Ingrid?’
The room seems too bright suddenly, dust-hazed. Turning her back on Lynda, she shields the mouthpiece with her hand.
‘I’m in the Flagstaff office. Is anything wrong?’
‘Wrong? No, nothing’s wrong.. I want to see you.When can I see you?’ His voice is so peremptory that she feels ambushed. ‘Tonight?’ he says. ‘I can be with you by 8.’
Backed up against the desk, she passes a hand across her eyes. Faced with the definite possibility that his version of events may not be the same as hers, her first reaction is that she won’t allow him to dictate. Obviously he hasn’t thought it through like she has, isn’t the type to question his own judgement.
That’s the trouble with Greeks, she decides. It isn’t just the machismo. They’re just so much better at drama, at deceiving themselves. She studies her feet, which are sandalled, salt-crusted, and sensibly on the ground.
‘Okay,’ she hears herself say, ‘Tonight, then.’ But even though her voice sounds cool, almost offhand, some liquid, intangible element is beginning to short-circuit her brain. Her nostrils prickle, remembering her cheek against his, the faintly juniper smell of him. She sneezes several times, apologises, and gropes in her beach bag for a Kleenex.Yiannis says something that sounds like Bless you.
The signal is begnning to break up; sonic beeps and crackles are reducing the language to stray phonemes, syllables adrift on some powerful current of feeling.
She hears him swear in Greek. ‘Losing you,’ he complains.
Behind her the photocopier whirrs into life and starts up its rhythmic thud, spitting out another bunch of flyers.
‘Okay!’ she shouts into the phone, ‘I said Yes!’ She replaces the receiver and stares at it with disbelief, wondering how she managed to convince herself that nothing was going to happen.
37
From Essenes to Adorants: Redefining Masculinity in the Prehistoric Aegean and Near East.
Stretching his legs across a chair, Yiannis sipped his medio and stared, confounded, at the title. The fan had been filched, and it felt hot and claustrophobic in the barrel-vaulted basement.
Kyriaki had relayed his instructions down the phone.
‘You’re the one with the English, Yianni – enjoy!’
That English, however, was proving no match for the discourse of academia – even the title had him running
upstairs to borrow a dictionary. Nor had anyone explained to him the exact purpose of the exercise, so he wasn’t at all sure what he was looking for.
Kyriaki had rung him first thing, her voice thrumming with good tidngs. ‘These prints forensics got from the commune stuff ? They’re a perfect match for our victim!’
Yiannis hid his excitement. ‘Right,’ he said, as if bulls-eyes were what he hit every day, and therefore only to be expected. ‘And is there DNA?’
‘Not through yet – but it’s him, all right. Hang on, the boss wants a word.’
Vasilakis’ voice boomed down the line. ‘Nice one, Yianni! I always said you had a nose!’
The Co-Ops team had also had a result – remarkably, Yiannis thought, given what he knew of Albanian bureaucracy. An Ivo Kruja was indeed registered as a PhD student at the Univeristy of Tirana, and the local police had confirmed a family address on the outskirts of the city. However, apart from the mother – an ethnic Roma, currently resident in the acute wing of a State asylum – no living relatives were on record.
So far, so good, then. All the same, he couldn’t help feeling, as usual, that the action was elsewhere, while he was stuck with the reading.
The typewritten pages were double-spaced and dense with handwritten inserts: the ‘thesis’ was clearly more of a work in progress. On the inside front page a Table of Contents listed 9 chapters, each with a digest. In the hope that by reading these he might avoid having to plough through the whole thing, he forced himself to concentrate.
Chapter 1 appeared to deal with the dawn of the Neolithic, the domestication of animals, and the shift from hunter-gatherers to settled farming communities. He glanced through the synopsis and looked at Chapter 2. This focussed on Catal Hoyuk, wherever that was, and promised to supply ‘skeletal and iconic evidence for gynocentrism’.
He ran his eye quickly down the page, but the terms used throughout were so specialised that he couldn’t be certain he’d grasped the meaning. A word he did understand, though – and one which cropped up rather too often for his liking – was castration.
According to the digest, the final chapter focussed specifically on the Kouretic cults of ancient Crete. This, presumably, was what Kruja had come here to study.
The initiated kouros, Yiannis learned, was a ministrant of the Goddess. Once initiated as eniautos, he became eligible for the position of Consort. Consort to whom? he wondered, realising that to find this out he’d have to tackle the whole damned chapter.
He got up and went along the corridor to the Gents Toilet. At the sink he splashed cold water on his face and dabbed himself dry with a paper towel. His eyes in the mirror looked bloodshot, the pupils strangely dilated.
Beyond a faintly toxic aura of New Agery, the text conveyed little to him, the images it conjured up a muddle of happy pagans in goatskins, pan-pipes, and eco-druids genuflecting to the sickle moon. The sort of thing he could imagine the pietists of Eleftheria getting up to in their spare time. And the communards of Halcyon? he wondered, as he returned to his studious seat, but somehow he couldn’t see it.
Lighting another cigarette, he stared glumly at the headings. Pre-nuptial selection rituals of the eniautos were listed by number:
1) by foot-race
2) by bull in the tavrokatharpsia
3) by bees in the melipnois or kerinthophagia.
Yiannis froze. In his mind’s eye he saw the bees, torpid or dying in the dappling shadow. He remembered the boy’s hand, half-open, the fingers curled softly like a calyx. Inside, two or three bees, gold-striped, investigating.
The words were clearly Greek, but it wasn’t a Greek he knew. Hoping to find clarification in the actual text, he grabbed the second binder and fanned through the pages till he found Chapter 9. The chapter, however, was barely a page and a half long, and ended abruptly in mid-paragraph. Still shaken, he stared at the last sentence:
‘How else are we to interpret the dedicatory posture of the eniautos as he thrusts forward his pelvis, offering his genitals to the Goddess?’
Just then the door opened and Theo pushed in, carrying two bulging supermarket bags and using his behind to manoeuvre. A bunch of leeks protruded from one bag, and from the other, a sheaf of tiger-lilies. He wore a red polo shirt and white jeans that were one size too small, and cased the room with what could have been described as a slouching pout, his eyes flicking here and there as if he expected a nymphette to be hiding in every alcove. A strong smell of prawns assailed Yiannis’ nostrils.
‘Off your usual patch, aren’t you?’ he said warily.
Dumping his bags on the floor, Theo tapped the side of his nose.
‘Things to do, people to see.’ He produced a video cassette from one of the bags and slid it across the table; it was Alphaville, Yiannis’ favourite Godard, just ahead of Breathless. ‘Thanks a lot,’ he said, with a regretful glance at the cover, ‘That Anna Karina’s really something.! They’ve got these flat faces, haven’t they, Frenchwomen. And these big smeary sort of mouths.’
‘Karina was Polish,’ Yiannis pointed out, eyeing a globe-shaped vegetable which had spilled from one of the bags and was now rolling across the floor; it was rutted and greyish and looked like a small planet, recently deceased. ‘So what’s with the shrunken head?’
Theo the footballer caught up with it and blocked it neatly with his foot. ‘It’s celeriac.’
‘Looks more like a souvenir from the mortuary. Been shopping?’
‘It’s Livia’s birthday. I’m on barbecue duty.’ He gave Yiannis a sidelong look. ‘Don’t say it. Livia already asked Dora, so …’
‘No problem,’ Yiannis said quickly, feeling the slight but definite sting that comes from exclusion.
‘Unless you’re having second thoughts, of course?’
‘I’m not. Wish Livia my best, will you?’ He scanned Theo’s face for signs of malice, waiting to discover why he had really come.
‘So how’s it going?’
‘So-so,’ Yiannis grunted, resisting a schoolboyish urge to cover the open page with his hand.
On Theo’s face suspicion wrestled with amusement, and lost. ‘Are you holding out on me?’
And screw you too, thought Yiannis. He decided it was high time he confronted him. ‘So how do I know it won’t go straight into Messoghios?’
Theo gave an aggrieved laugh. ‘Is that what you think? Jesus, Yianni!’
Immediately Yiannis felt defensive. He scowled at Theo. ‘Well, some little bird’s been whispering to the big bad she-wolf!’
‘Don’t look at me! How many sticky fingers d’you think tox reports go through, for Christ’s sake?’ Extracting a squashed packet of cigarettes from the back pocket of his Levis, he lit one and blew smoke out sullenly. ‘Not my style, Yianni, you should know that. Not my league, either.’
Shrugging, Yiannis pushed the ashtray towards him. The relief he felt was tainted by remorse. His suspicions had so paralysed him that he hadn’t even been able to call Theo. He wasn’t proud of his capacity for avoiding confrontation; all the same, he wasn’t quite ready to apologise.
Theo shook his head sadly. ‘You know your trouble, my friend? You’ve got a nasty suspicious nature.’ He was fingering a necklace made from plaited strands of leather, which was rakish, rather hippy and, in Yiannis’ opinion, far too young for him.
‘So did you talk to her?’
Theo shook his head sadly. ‘But hey, you know, so what if I had? All’s well that ends well. You got your case, didn’t you?’
There was no answer to this one; it was both cynical and undeniable.
‘We’ve got an identity,’ he admitted. ‘Albanian student. Looks like he sneaked in without papers.’
‘Well, there you go,’ said Theo, nodding sagely.‘Any more on our mysterious female?’
Yiannis tried to dismiss a residual tremor of unease: after all, what else was instinct but a judgement with no supporting evidence? ‘Not yet.We’re still waiting for the DNA.’ Relenting, he said, ‘Look, h
ow about a coffee?’
‘No way. I’m under heavy manners from Livia.’ Theo began to assemble his shopping bags, fussing elaborately with the blush-pink heads of the tiger-lilies, which had become entangled with the handle. ‘Rumour has it, by the way, that you were spotted at the Medusa last night.’
‘I was?’ said Yiannis innocently, undersanding that this was the real reason for the visit: nothing Theo liked better than to keep abreast of the gossip. He flicked open his mobile and studied the screen, as if perusing a text message of some import. If he couldn’t deflect Theo’s enquiry, at least he could delay it.
‘And do I know the lucky lady?’
As he shook his head Yiannis felt the smile spilling out across his face. ‘You don’t. She’s English. Actually, Scottish.’
Theo studied him through a cumulus cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘Panagia-mou! If I didn’t know it was impossible, I’d swear the man was actually blushing. Does she have a name?’
Yiannis hesitated. ‘Ingrid.’ Despite himself, his mouth tingled at the utterance. He heard the church clock of Agios Titos chime three times as he held his breath, trying to suppress the flood of pleasurable sensations.
‘Ingrid,’ echoed Theo, sounding out the syllables in a lecherous, lip-smacking way. ‘A noble name indeed.’ He cocked an eyebrow at Yiannis. ‘I hear she’s a natural blonde, too.’
At the thought that he would at some point be obliged to expose Ingrid to Theo’s priapic aura, Yiannis felt a primitive surge of jealousy; he wished, now, that he had left her name unspoken, that boastful pride hadn’t simply got the better of him.
Once, after an evening out during which Dora had flirted cheerfully with Theo, Yiannis had demanded to know if she found him attractive.
Dora had laughed and looked at him with incredulity.‘You mean you haven’t noticed the dodgy thumb?’