by Alison Fell
He had indeed noticed, he realised, but long ago in the mists of boyhood and – in thrall, perhaps, to Theo’s sexual prowess – had somehow managed to erase it from his consciousness. Even now he had to force himself to look directly at the item – a truncated, hoof-shaped digit from the knuckle of which sprouted long curly hairs – to convince himself the flaw existed.
‘Back off!’ he retorted, pointing a warning finger.
‘I did think you were looking unusually, shall we say, twinkly? Uncle Theo doesn’t miss much, you see.’ Theo made a comedy of ducking down behind the tiger-lilies, and Yiannis laughed, his good humour restored.
Glad to put dissent behind him, he gave in to a simple urge to confide. He heard hiself say with mock solemnity, ‘Actually, I’m in love.’
After a dumb-struck pause Theo let out a whistle.
‘Ai Yianni!’ He gave Yiannis a pensive look. ‘Are in love, or want to be in love?’ Yiannis was startled by the distinction: on the whole he wouldn’t have credited Theo with such subtlety.
Theo was regarding him with what could fairly have been called a melting smile. ‘Well, that’s great news. Congratulations, pedi-mou, what can I say?’
Although velvet was an element Theo usually reserved for the female sex, his pleasure was apparently so sincere that Yiannis, caressed by warmth, was quite touched.
Crushing out his cigarette, Theo put his hand over his heart. He wiped an imaginary tear from his eye, reciting:
‘Qu’est-ce qui s’allume la nuit en lumières?
– La poésie.’
‘What is it that lights up the night?
– Poetry.’
If the words were soulful, the voice was robotic. Theo jerked his prehistoric thumb towards the video of Alphaville. ‘Lemmy Caution interrogated by computer. Didn’t know I spoke French, did you?’
‘Fuck off,’ said Yiannis, who was also quite capable of reading English subtitles.
‘No honestly. I envy you, I do.’ Wreathed in smiles, Theo loaded his arms with plastic bags. At the door he turned and said, ‘Don’t be a stranger, Yianni!’
38
Under the awning of the grocer’s shop the cool concrete step is flanked on one side by a postcard-stand and a stack of tomato boxes, and on the other by displays of melons, artichokes, and twelve-packs of mineral water bottles tautly shrouded in plastic. People trot in and out on last minute errands; some of them even stop to acknowledge Pericles with a nod or a smile. When ringed fingers press three euro coins into his hand he sees that it is Kyria Dora who lives on the corner, her pretty feet in silver sandals, her wide red skirt swishing past him like a wave of wind.
As the sun moves on its grand journey overhead, Pericles remembers the gold light on cypresses, the sounds and colours of welcome falling like honey from the air. In his ears the buzz of celebration still echoes, but the truth is that he did not go with his friends when they invited him, and because of this their disappointment is like a rheumatic in his bones.
Beyond the shadow-line of the awning ants run in and out of cracks in the pavement. When he lets his head rest sideways on his knees the world tilts and the ants scale precipices. The tomato-boxes and the postcard-stand yawn out over space. Passing cars ascend an impossible gradient, or else zip down from heaven and dissolve into the oleander bush on the corner, below which a vertical sea plunges, like his memories, into the abyss. But even on a slant the world reveals no entry-points, no way he can get back in. If he goes back there he will be arrested, this is what the Sergeant says, but if he cannot go back, nor can he go forward, with his dishonourable pockets and his head swollen with unsaid Sorrys.
Earlier Markos had brought him a Coke, coming out of the store in his apron and snapping the ring-pull open, so that noise fizzed out into the air. Pericles raises his head to suck on it and feels the cold liquid run down inside him. Two children are coming up the street: a small girl with a large handbag, unsteady on her mother’s high-heeled shoes, leading a bandy-legged toddler by the hand.
‘Mind the man who’s drinking, see?’ she warns importantly, ‘I’ll show you the way.’
As they climb the steps, skirting him carefully, Pericles catches the little boy’s eye.
‘Say Yassou,’ the girls instructs.
‘Yassou’ the boy chirps obediently. His gaze is clear and grave, his skin luminous in the shade of the awning.
When they have gone inside Pericles looks at his feet, suddenly ashamed of the gnarled old arches and the antler-like spread of raised blue veins.
He thinks of a little wooden train, blue and white for the Greek flag, with two open carriages filled with pebbles and snails. He thinks of his toy spade, and the day he met a snake coiled sleeping on the garden path. He thinks of killing the snake like a brave soldier and trundling it in to show his mother. He thinks of the clip-clop sound of the train wheels on the tiles of the kitchen floor, and then the slaps echo in his head like the night-noise of the bombs that fell on the harbour.
He clutches the coins, their copper and silver imprint on his palm, and thinks of what is owed. He thinks of dropping the coins into their hands, so that the friends will understand he wants to go with them.
When the children emerge from the shop the toddler stops to show Pericles his red and white striped ice-lolly, his eyes wide with amazement. The girl tugs him on down the steps, but he resists, turning to look over his shoulder, the lolly held high like an Olympic torch, until Pericles sees that he must in some way acknowledge the wonder of it.Only when he raises his hand in a salute does the boy smile and allow himself to be led away.
Markos has already begun to cover the displays of fruit; soon the shutters will roll down with a clatter and the street will thicken with lunchtime heat. Pericles wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, hugging to him the infant’s borderless pride. He feels the great festival swell inside him, with its bull-games, its bare-boobied ladies, its circus stripes.
39
Waking before Ingrid, Yiannis found himself in a characterless bedroom, white-walled and white-tiled, in which two single beds had been pushed together to make one. To the left of the bed was a low pine locker on which sat a packet of English biscuits, a half-empty bottle of mineral water, and a pair of small wax earplugs; on the right an identical locker held his own cellphone and wristwatch. Against the opposite wall a desk was piled with books and files; next to it, squeezed into the corner of the room, stood a generic pine wardrobe. It was a scene so stamped with transience that he felt his heart tighten with home-sickness, as if it were he, rather than Ingrid, who’d landed in a foreign country.
On the white expanse of the bed she lay curled on her side, clutching the sheet to her throat. It stretched tautly over her hips like a toga, leaving the curve of her back tender and bare. The loose tendrils of hair at the nape of her neck were dark and sticky with sweat.
She’d looked the words up for him in a big hard-backed lexicon, licking a fingertip and leafing rapidly through the pages. Melipnois, literally translated, turned out to mean honey-breathing. Kerinthophagia, however, was nowhere to be found. Reconstructing it from its elements, she’d come up with pollen-eating.
‘Fabulous word!’ she’d exclaimed, ‘Wherever did you dig that up?’
Over dinner at the Shoestring – he remembered how they’d rearranged their cutlery countless times, smoked a lot, and managed to eat almost nothing – he mentioned his problem with the thesis. She seemed genuinely intrigued, and listened with her chin propped on her hand, nodding gravely.
‘It’s the bee connection, then?’
He looked sharply at her. He’d been careful not to say anything about the identity of the writer. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Well, I did read the newspapers.’ She shrugged and sat back, wrapping her arms around herself. He sensed her withdrawal, but although the distance pained him, he’d already said more than he ought to. After that, she’d seemed muted and self-conscious, and had offered no more interpretations. A
t last, light-headed with ouzo, he admitted he was completely out of his depth with the thing and – without wanting to take advantage, of course – would really value her input. At the time it had seemed such a brainwave that he’d pushed to the back of his mind the obvious problem of authorisation.
On the bedside rug his trousers lay in a concertina’d heap, as if he had just stepped out of them. Ingrid’s underthings had joined the papers on the desk; her skirt was draped silkily over the back of the chair. Easing himself out of bed, he tiptoed to the desk, removed the skirt, and carried the chair over to the French windows, where he sat down, straddling it. The windows were wide open, and through the diaphanous curtains he could see it was just after dawn. The sky over the sea was filling up with watercolour blue, and the roofs of the houses down by the beach were beginning to emit a warm earthy glow.
Seen in the light of a new day, his happiness took on a more solid outline. In the night he’d been all too aware of the layers of history he brought to the encounter: what techniques he’d practised, and with whom; what pleased one lover, but left another cold. He was also conscious of how ignorant he was about Ingrid’s experience. As yet she’d said nothing about the men she’d been with, and it was hard not to feel that his performance was being scrutinised by these ghostly, unknown lovers, who stood in the wings comparing notes, and critically assessing his every move.
He’d worried, too, about his lack of finesse, even as he sensed that finesse was not one of her priorities; for, to be honest, there were things she had done – direct to the point of indelicacy – that had shocked him a little. Once she’d committed herself, her focus was absolute: she made love, he thought, as if hypnotised. There were no athletics, no cinematic archings of the back or vehicular collisions of the hips. It was as if her body commanded, and his own was more than thrilled to respond to its imperatives; at no point, mercifully, did he get the sense she was trying to flatter him. Her orgasm, when it came, was fruitful and full-throated, and left no room for doubt. The simplicity of it had brought tears of gratitude to his eyes. Afterwards, holding her, he’d felt ubiquitous, like a prince. When he tried to extricate his arm from under her body she let out a grunt of protest; she was breathing heavily, already half asleep. He gave up then, grinned to himself in the darkness, lay still and felt the moonlight cooling his sweat.
Overhead there were sounds of movement: the soft shuffle of bare feet on floorboards, a tap running. Outside Demosthenes’ house a workman was ferrying breeze-blocks from a pick-up truck and stacking them on the terrace.
He crept over to the bed and retrieved his watch. It was later than he’d thought. He bent over Ingrid, who snoozed on, apparently oblivious of the fly he now brushed tenderly from a nose which in most of the English-speaking world would be called Grecian, and in Greece, Roman, and as for the other, far-flung territories, well, who knows what name such noses went by in Samoa, for instance, or Tajikistan.
He kissed her ear and whispered, ‘Good morning, my love.’
She stirred, opening an unwilling eye. ‘What time?’
‘Early. I have to go home and change.’
‘Not yet,’ she grumbled complacently. Her arm came up and groped its way around his neck; he received a sleepy, dry-mouthed kiss. He was tempted to gather her into his arms and sink back into the rumpled white depths of the bed, but at that moment he heard rapid footseps on the external staircase, followed immediately by a thundering at the door.
Ingrid sat up abruptly, reaching for her nightshirt. ‘God, what now?’ she exclaimed, but he was already out of bed and pulling on his trousers. ‘No, I’ll go,’ she protested. Ignoring her, he put on his T shirt and padded into the kitchen.
When he opened the door the boy almost fell into his arms. He was barefoot, dressed only in pajama bottoms. Yiannis tried to recall the double-barrelled name: Watson-Johnston? Weston-Wilson? He thrust a mobile phone at Yiannis. ‘It’s my wife, she needs a doctor! I can’t get through.’
Ingrid’s head came round the bedroom door, her face wary and concerned. ‘Is something wrong?’
The boy was breathing hard, dancing from foot to foot. ‘She’s bleeding. Please … can someone come?’
Yiannis nodded at Ingrid and followed the boy up the spiral stairs. For one so young, he was badly out of condition – thick-waisted and ungainly, gripping the rail for support and wheezing his way up like an old asthmatic.
The top floor studio was a large oak-beamed room with a varnished wood floor and sloping eaves. The girl lay in the centre of the double bed, her head flung back on the pillows. She was waxy-pale and appeared semi-comatose.
‘She’s pregnant,’ the boy muttered, his eyes reddening with tears.
Yiannis sat down on the edge of the bed and put his hand to her forehead, which was cold and sweat-slicked. ‘How far on?’
‘Three months.’
‘Okay,’ said Yiannis, ‘What’s her name?’
‘Kylie.’
‘And yours?’
‘Darren.’
He reached for the girl’s wrist and felt the rapid flicker of her pulse. ‘Kylie? Can you hear me?’ Her eyelids stirred and a tremor of pain puckered her face. ‘Do you know where you are?’
Darren had crossed his arms over his bare chest and jammed his thumbs into his armpits; he was grey-faced, shivering. ‘Is she all right?’
‘Probably in shock.’
Yiannis heard Ingrid’s footsteps on the outside stairs. She knocked tentatively and came in.
‘Listen, Darren, I’m going to call an ambulance. In the meantime, tea. Hot, weak, and sweet. Is there a blanket anywhere?’
‘On top of the wardrobe,’ Ingrid said immediately. Grabbing a kitchen chair, she climbed on to it and retrieved two blankets made from a brown furry fabric.
Yiannis dialled Control and spoke quickly into the phone. He took the blankets from Ingrid and spread them over the girl, swaddling her to the neck. ‘Try to relax,’ he said. She nodded weakly, her eyes fixed on him. He shooed Darren into the bathroom to get dressed.
Ingrid was filling a kettle at the sink. She took cups from the draining-board and set them on the table, pushing aside a deck of cards laid out on the oilcloth: evidently someone had been halfway through a game of Patience.
He gestured to her to follow him outside. A tall date-palm grew up from the garden below, its fronded leaves drooping over the landing; the wiry stems which projected from the trunk bore yellow explosions of fruit.
‘Poor kid. She’s miscarrying, I reckon.’
Ingrid gripped the railing with both hands and leaned out over the garden; she looked bleary and ragged, as if weighed down by the transactions of the night.
‘Look, you don’t have to stay,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll wait with her till the ambulance gets here.’
‘It’s not that, it’s only … I feel such a pig.’
He stared at her, baffled. ‘She’s young, you know. She’ll be all right.’
She gave him a woebegone smile. ‘You should go back in. No really.’
Darren looked up hopefully when Yiannis re-entered the room; he had dressed and was sitting on the bed with his arm draped in an awkward arc across the top of the pillows, like a teenager in the back row of the cinema.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Yiannis, ‘They’ll be here soon.’
Ingrid had made tea in a pot, in the English way. He found milk in the fridge, spooned in sugar, and carried the cup over to the bed.
‘Try to get her to drink some of this.’ When the boy took the cup Yiannis saw that his hands were trembling. ‘Careful,’ he warned, ‘it’s hot.’
The girl jerked her head away and shut her eyes, but not before Yiannis had seen the flash of fury in them. Her lips were seamed tight, refusing. Concerned that she might be seriously dehydrated, he retrieved the cup from Darren and, taking his place on the bed, tried to induce her to drink a little.
When he heard the siren he went out on to the balcony to signal to the crew. Two male pa
ramedics bounded up the steps with the collapsible stretcher. He spoke to them briefly outside the door and followed them in. As they unfolded the stretcher Kylie looked wildly at him, her face tense with the anticipation of pain. He smiled at her, since nobody else had.
‘They’re going to take you to hospital, Kylie. You’ll be more comfortable there.’
The alarm beeped on his wristwatch and he turned it off. 7 o’clock. Somewhere outside a cockerel crowed in agreement. When they shifted her on to the stretcher he turned his head away from the bed and its spreading scarlet stain.
At the door of the ambulance he waited while a female paramedic fixed up a drip. Darren stood beside him, splay-footed, his hands in the pockets of his tracksuit bottoms. His eyes were downcast, his lower lip jutting. After a moment he said aggressively. ‘Don’t I get to go, then?’
‘Of course.’ Yiannis gazed at him in surprise. ‘You have your documents?’
‘Documents?’
‘Passports, insurance? You’ll need them for the hospital.’
Darren shook his head. Yiannis looked impatiently at the sloping, defeated shoulders.
‘Well go up and get them, then!’
In the white hygienic gloom of the ambulance the patient was strapped up and ready to go. The woman paramedic crouched next to the stretcher, her hand laid protectively across the blanket; she was talking to Kylie in a low, murmuring voice.
Yiannis remembered now what he’d dreamt in the night. There was a white room in the dream, in which two operating tables stood side by side. He lay on one of them, pale and still, under a sign that said nil by mouth. Theo was leaning over the other table, where Dora was stretched out, stark naked; he had a crab’s claw for a hand, with which he was incising her torso, painstakingly, from pubis to base throat.