by Alison Fell
With a furtive glance at Livia, Theo ran his tongue over his lips.
‘Malaka!’ Yiannis muttered, remembering, this time, to look hard at the deformed thumb.
Livia, luckily, was deep in baby-gossip with Irini and Dora. Beaming at them, Tassos cracked another pistachio nut with his thumbnail. He was building a small mountain of shells on the table.
Yiannis could see Theo was bursting to tell him something. ‘What?’ he demanded, praying to be spared yet more baby surprises.
‘In confidence?’
‘That depends, doesn’t it,’ Yiannis said sourly.
‘Well, I don’t want to blind you with science, but I will say it’s had the backroom boys scratching their heads.’
Yiannis sighed. ‘So go on, blind me.’
Theo’s eyes darted at him. ‘You know about mitochondrial DNA, right?’
‘I know it’s maternally inherited, that’s about it.’
‘Well, the cool thing is, you can use mtDNA to trace the human phylogenetic tree back in time, by how many mutations there are from the nucleotide bases in the standard CRS genome – that’s the Cambridge Reference Sequence,’ he added unhelpfully. ‘Basically it’s the genome of a British woman in the 1980s.’
‘You don’t say!’ Yiannis said sarcastically.
Just then a youngish man with stringy, colourless hair materialised at his elbow. He laid a cheap-looking cigarette-lighter beside Yiannis’s plate, and a card which explained in Greek, English and German that he was a deaf mute. Yiannis dug some coins out of his pocket, but waved away the shoddy lighter.
Theo had spread out a paper napkin and was scribbling a kind of upside-down tree on it. Yiannis saw that the branches were labelled with different letters.
‘These are the Haplogroups, see? L for the original African group, then subdivisions down to H and V – the main European ones.’
‘What kind of timescale are we talking here?’ asked Yiannis, who personally didn’t need fancy diagrams to trace Theo back to the ape.
‘Oh, about 170,000 years.’ Theo waved an airy hand. ‘But what concerns us in this case are the most recent mutations, maybe 35,000 years ago.’
‘Your point being?’
‘My point being, it’s no wonder you couldn’t get a match with your lady communards! A match would be impossible with any modern genome.’
As if alerted by some marauding insect, a small legion of hairs stood to attention on the back of his neck. ‘Come off it, Theo! That sample could have been degraded. Contaminated in some way.’
‘Degraded at exactly these locations in the nucleotide base? Huge odds against, pedi-mou. Huge.’
‘So what are you saying? That Kruja was fucking some antique corpse?’
Theo shook his head. His grin was triumphant. ‘Think bodily fluids, Yianni! We’re not talking archaeology here. It’s causing quite a stir in boffin-land, believe you me. I predict a rash of scholarly papers by Christmas.’ He sat back smugly, one hand smoothing the hairs that protruded at the open neck of his shirt. ‘The original European genetic profile. Awesome, huh?’
Yiannis shivered, a phylogenetic tremor that started at the base of his spine, where knowledge lives before it collides with refusal. Across from him Theo’s face was flushed with smiles, his mouth jabbering, but Yiannis heard nothing. He stared past Theo, past the fairy lights to the strings of stars above the black horizon of the sea. Knowing it couldn’t be so, but still hypnotised by the image.
A youth divesting himself of his clothes, a youth who’d fasted for days before filling his belly with Christ knows what archaic hallucinogens. A youth who anointed himself with honey and released the bees from their jar. Offering himself up on a plate.
And what if She, the Someone, manifesting herself in some high and blinding way, had sampled him and found him wanting? Or perhaps the bees, snacking peaceably enough, at first, on the sticky glaze of honey, had detected his deceit and turned on him? The bees he’d written of as the final arbiters. Poor Kruja with his blind mimesis, trying to replicate some sacred marriage. Who’d failed the last test of the eniautos, who could never be the Prince he wanted to be.
Who was no match for her.
‘Stop him, Yianni!’ Livia leaned over abruptly and clamped her hand over Theo’s, her beaded earrings dancing against the coppery skin of her neck. ‘No more shop talk!’ Her mother was Chilean, and Livia had inherited the severe profile and bitumen-black hair of the Aztec. Yiannis had always been convinced she disliked him, perhaps because the two vertical lines etched in the skin between her brows gave her a permanently disapproving look. ‘Help us get the happy couple on their feet!’ Although her tone was playful, there was no mistaking the commanding edge.
Egged on by Dora and Livia, a bashful Tassos rose and led Irini out on to the floor, where a few couples were already dancing.
Aretha Franklin’s ‘Natural Woman’ floated from the PA system, a voice like the night itself breathing in and out. Broad-beamed and paunchy, Tassos was well on his way to male-pattern baldness; Irini was taller, delicate as a deer in a slim black shift dress with diagonal metallic threads. Arms round each other’s necks, they began a slow, swaying shuffle.
As he watched, Yiannis felt a tightness in his chest. He was aware of the light falling on his sister’s face, her secret, custodial smile. For a moment he was overwhelmed by a rush of protectiveness, and looked away quickly, feeling like a tresspasser. Was this brotherly love, or brotherly envy of the way her energies were realigning, focussing on the perfect mystery within?
Theo nudged him sharply in the ribs. Evidently he wasn’t finished yet. When Yiannis ignored him he leaned in closer, breathing aniseed and smoke. ‘But hey, it’s pretty cool, isn’t it? Mixing it with the Great Mother Goddess? Talk about literally going out with a Bang, eh!’
‘Ai gamisou!’ Rage seized him by the throat. Within an inch of thumping Theo, he jerked back angrily, clenching his fists by his sides. Nothing was sacred to Theo, not love or death, no mystery so tender that it couldn’t be despoiled. Show Theo your heart and he’d only take a scalpel to it, just to see what it was made of. Speechless, he watched melting ice-cubes slither across the tablecloth. His recoil had knocked Theo’s glass over, but he wasn’t about to apologise. What he himself held sacred he couldn’t have put into words, but what he did know was that there was a bottom line, and Theo had crossed it.
Out on the dancefloor the couple swung briefly apart as Tassos steered Irini into a lazy pirouette.
Dora and Livia were on their feet, clapping. As Yiannis rose to swell the applause, tears pricked violently at the corners of his eyes. While he wasn’t even aware that he was thinking of her, the realisation leapt into his mind that he could not, would not, let Ingrid go.
63
Down on the Firth the sun is struggling to penetrate a fine sea-mist. Under the portico Elsa and Ingrid nip out their half-smoked cigarettes and drop them in the sand box. They’re already late, after detouring by the coast road to pick up fish and chips for Greta’s lunch. The food served in the Unit is unidentifiable even by smell – a green puree might be cabbage or stewed apple, a red one beetroot or tinned plums; a brown one could be minced beef, or equally chocolate mousse. No wonder poor Greta can’t stomach it.
Dr. Fitzwilliam, as it turns out, was right about the urinary tract infection. Since starting on the antibiotics Greta seemed more like her old self. Her speech, generally, was clearer, whole sentences tripping off her tongue without a blunder. There were fewer frights, fewer excursions into the cobwebby realms of dream. She seemed aware, at least sporadically, of her surroundings.
Once, looking around the TV lounge, she’d said with resignation, ‘This is my life now, isn’t it. With the gaga girls.’
Ingrid knew she ought to see this clearsightedness as a step forward. On the other hand, given the conditions, who could swear that reality, or the facing of it, was an absolute good? Surely it made as much sense to take refuge in the consolations of magic, b
e the star of your own strange firmament?
As they turn down the corridor that leads to the lounge the salt and vinegar smell goes ahead of them. Although no one has mentioned a ban on takeaways, Ingrid feels shifty, like a smuggler concealing his contraband. It’s almost noon: her mother will be ravenous by now.
After a concerted campaign she and Elsa have established the principle that Greta should be dressed and ready when they arrive. Sometimes she’s even resplendant in makeup, depending on which Care Assistant is on shift. She’ll be waiting in the lounge, prinked up for visitors, but her equanimity won’t last for long.
Ahead she spots the hunched back of tortoise-man, scuttling along with his zimmer frame. ‘He’s doing well, isn’t he,’ she remarks, struggling to look on the bright side. ‘Really getting those laps in!’
‘Oh aye,’ says Elsa, poker-faced, ‘Shame he’s got no head, eh?’
It’s neither the time nor the place but the laughter is all the more explosive for that. Ingrid stops dead and sags against the wall. Tears stream from her eyes. The man with no head has vanished round the corner but the image remains. Elsa joins in, shaking her head, laughter wheezing in her chest. ‘Och, that’s better, though! I don’t like to see you wearing yourself to a thread.’
At the far end of the lounge Greta is strapped into her wheelchair, on her lap a large yellow teddy-bear with a prize-winning red rosette pinned to its breast. World’s Best Mum, the legend proclaims.
‘Oh for God’s sake!’ Elsa hisses. ‘Where did that come from?’
‘Not from me!’ says Ingrid, suppressing another burst of hysteria.
‘Well I hardly thought so, pet!’
Watching them approach, Greta frowns suspiciously. ‘What’s so funny, eh?’
Ingrid leans over to kiss her. ‘Nothing, Mum. Just a silly joke.’ If her mother is aware of the teddy-bear she gives no sign of it.
One of the nurses puts her head round the office door, twitches a distracted smile at Ingrid and Elsa, and retreats inside. There are half a dozen other inmates parked in the lounge but none of them has visitors. Where are the other nurses, she wonders. Having coffee? Smoking on the patio? She imagines them in a cosy huddle, clock-watching, gossiping heartlessly about boyfriends and husbands, about the bustling off-duty lives they leave behind to put in their ill-paid hours.
The TV on the wall blasts out a Tom and Jerry cartoon but no one’s laughing. All around the patients are fidgetting and whimpering in their seatbelts, without the words to communicate what they need. Out of sight, out of mind, when anyone with an ounce of empathy could see that a hug or a word would mean the world to them.
Unzipping her backpack, she wafts it under Greta’s nose. ‘Get a sniff of that, then!’
Greta’s mouth forms an excited Ooh. She glances around with furtive triumph: nothing she likes better than to be one up on the others. When she grabs for the backpack Ingrid passes it over to Elsa
‘It’ll be quieter in the Conservatory, Mum.’ Releasing the brake, she backs the wheelchair out of the carpeted area, away from the lost upturned faces, the eyes that beg for rescue.
*
She sits on the bottom step of the portico, taking deep draughts of the fresh damp air. Inside the Unit she breathes shallowly, open-mouthed, trying to block out the miasma of air freshener and its undertone of disastrous smells.
Elsa takes two cigarettes from her packet and passes one over. ‘She’ll have forgotten all about it by now,’ she says, bending to light it for her.
The sea-fog hasn’t dispersed, but thickened; the Firth has vanished, and the tree-fringed lawns languish under a bright shadowless mist. In the urn on the balustrade a cobweb glitters dewily among the geraniums. A spider hunkers at its centre, waiting for insect weather. She blows smoke at it, unconvinced. ‘Will she?’
Elsa exhales with an angry sigh. ‘Well, the fish and chips hit the spot, at least.’
They’d brought napkins and a plastic fork and knife but Greta dug straight in with her fingers and didn’t raise her head until she’d finished. She allowed her chin to be cleaned up with a napkin, belched contentedly, and subsided into a doze.
Flanking her like sentinels, they’d mulled over her progress. Appetite was a good sign, they agreed; they’d even talked of taking her for a run down the coast, now she seemed a bit better.
False optimism. Why is it so impossible to accept that every improvement is quickly followed by a downturn? Because she so wants to prove she can haul her mother back to health, to convince herself that unstinting effort is as good as love – and, like it, can conquer all?
When Elsa went out to the patio to check on her rhododendron the noise of the sliding door had woken Greta. Within seconds, her vague, dazed gaze turned to one of unseeing fright. As if of their own accord her hands jerked up in front of her face, fingers steepling rigidly together, like the spire of a Presbyterian kirk. In the high, piping voice of a young girl, she began to recite the alphabet.
Grasping her hands, Ingrid tried to massage away the rictus, but Greta resisted, chanting her mantra even faster, as though it was her one defence against inexpressible terrors. Panicked, Ingrid called out for her aunt.
It was Elsa who read the situation. Gripping Greta by the shoulders, she said loudly, ‘Have you got a pain, Greta?’ Indigestion, she explained: she’d seen it happen before – although, admittedly, not accompanied by the alphabet. She slipped the tablet on to Greta’s tongue like a professional, patted her back until at last she stilled and cried quietly, holding on to Ingrid’s hand.
If she’d always dreaded the moment of parting, this time her mother’s grief was unrestrained. Clinging to her hand, Greta refused to let go. She remembers the strength of her grip, the stickiness of the chip-grease on her fingers. The teddy-bear she’d exiled earlier smirking at her from the sofa. Greta begged, she demanded, her face red with uncomprehending fury.
The wail still rings in her ears. Why can’t you stay?
Greta like a dark star, sucking her in. The memory fills her with a kind of nausea, as if something in her is still straining to make from this magma a locus of sleep, trust, love. She knew she couldn’t leave, had neither an excuse to leave nor the words to make it. The alternative didn’t bear thinking about: Greta rejected, Greta abandoned to the gaga girls.
If your mother’s needs are indivisible from your own, how can you deny her?
Elsa had tried to tug her away. ‘Just go!’ she hissed. As if it was as easy as that. Finally she dashed out of the room and returned with Belinda. Ingrid remembers their scolding and jollying, Belinda’s white teeth bared in a forbidding smile. The sight of the wheelchair whizzing away down the corridor.
A deer steps out of the forest and stands in an eerie mist-halo, like a messenger from another world. Foreleg poised, it scents at the air, and leaps marvellously, vanishing into the trees. Sweat itches at the roots of Ingrid’s hair. The skin on her arms, sleeked by two weeks of sun oil, looks old as Greta’s now, desiccated. She looks helplessly at Elsa. ‘Nothing’s ever enough, though, is it?’
Elsa taps ash into the sandbox with exaggerated care.’What you’ve got to understand, pet, is that old people are very selfish.’
Ingrid feels as if she’s been slapped. It’s her mother they’re talking about, not some wilful, manipulative child. How can Elsa be so callous?
‘She’s sick!’ she protests. ‘She’s frightened.’
‘I know that.’ Elsa stabs her key fob at the car, which leaps to attention like a willing gun-dog. ‘All I’m saying is, you’ve got your own life to think about, too.’
Only a few miles inland the sea-fog lifts, and heat shimmers up from the tarmac. Elsa is staring straight ahead, her eyes narrowed against the bright road or her cigarette smoke.
‘No one’s omnipotent, pet,’ she says emphatically. ‘You can only do your best.’
On the left hand side of the road a low safety barrier masks a steep drop to the valley below. She looks down at the wide l
oop of the river, where cattle stand thigh-deep in the shallows, cooling their heels. She remembers the dream of shadow-boxing, the amorphous, unbeatable opponent. What she can’t explain to Elsa is that it isn’t a question of choice, nor even of the noble virtues like like duty or devotion. Rather it’s a feeling of chronic compression, as if something’s out to remind her there’s absolutely no point trying to wrestle with your own destiny.
64
Like those dreams you forget on waking, the unsolved cases are the ones that haunt you the longest.
After the inquest the body had been released for burial. Since there were no State funds available for repatriation, nor next-of-kin to request it, Kruja’s remains would be interred in one of the few city cemeteries that made provision for foreigners. A funeral without family. It was as bad a thing as Yiannis could think of.
Which left him, however, with the problem of the personal effects – the books, the clothes, the thesis Ingrid thought might even be worth publishing. That the burden was self-imposed seemed irrelevant; what mattered more was the certainty that he wouldn’t feel easy with his conscience if the boy’s last vestiges ended up in the incinerator.
Did the Roma have libraries? Some central archive, perhaps, from which a rich culture might eventually burst forth?
His Internet search had drawn a blank, and while the Sokadre lawyer had subjected him to a tirade of details he’d rather not have known about – that the camp of 500 Roma at Dyo Aorika, for instance, consisted of shanty houses without water supply, electricity, sanitation, or garbage collection, and that although they were permanent residents, the local authorities had refused to register the inhabitants on the municipal lists – the man had been unable to provide him with an answer, and had finally – grudgingly, Yiannis thought – referred him to Elpis.