by Simon Mawer
From a third-floor window a face peers out through grimy net curtains as though to view the progress of their conversation. Is that Kale’s mother? The word ‘mother’ means two things to him – other people’s mothers, mere pieces of biology; and his own mother, on whom he was once some kind of parasite and who now lives, parasitically, in his own mind. What would she have thought of this place, of this mother called Kale and her child, now crossing the turd-littered grass into the shadows of a urine-scented archway? Her short skirt and pale legs, her jacket with GLAMOUR across the shoulders. What would she have thought of his confession of love?
‘See you,’ Kale calls.
Has she gone for good? Part of him poses the question objectively, as a point of academic interest as he drives across the city back to his flat; another part of him feels that dreadful sickening of loss, something akin to bereavement, anguish and misery coupled with anger. She loves him or she does not love him. The choice is hers. Or rather, it is not even a matter of choice but of some subtle work of chemistry and circumstance. Certainly it is beyond his powers of influence.
He opens the street door to his apartment. There’s the familiar smell of disinfectant and damp in the hallway, the familiar sight of the bicycle belonging to number 2A propped against the wall and the pram from number 3A tucked under the stairs. The light switch fires a relay and sends current up the stairwell to dim and dusty light bulbs on each floor. Climbing the stairs, he thinks of his mother and of Kale, of memory and forgetting and the fragile borderline between the two. In the future will Emma remember him as he may or may not have remembered Nicos? Will he stay lodged in her adult memory and will she try to make sense of his presence there? Or will he just be consigned to a scrap heap of forgetfulness, along with dozens of other men who have lain, briefly, with her mother?
On the fourth floor he struggles with his keys and discovers, with surprise, that his front door, armoured and reinforced, with bolts that sink into lintels and jamb, opens on the first turn of the main key. He pushes the door open cautiously, Kale momentarily forgotten. Did he forget to lock the place up properly? Or has someone broken in? He steps in, fearing the chaos of a break-in, doors flung open, clothes strewn all over, cupboards emptied, drawers tossed on the floor, electronic equipment vanished. There’s noise coming from the living room. Someone’s there. Tapping, and the sound of footsteps and music. He turns the handle and opens the door, prepared for flight or fight, or anything in between.
‘Is that you, Dad?’
Phil. It’s Phil, sitting on the sofa with his back to the door and his computer plugged like a parasite into the television across the room.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Been here since yesterday.’
‘Yesterday?’
‘Yes, yesterday.’ There’s a little man on the screen, a cartoon figurine moving back and forth through a maze of tunnels and caverns. For the moment there’s no way out. The word PAUSE appears and the figure freezes. The boy turns with that wary, belligerent look. ‘It was my weekend with you, Dad.’
Thomas closes his eyes and sits heavily on the sofa beside his son. ‘Oh Jesus. I’m sorry, mate.’
Phil shrugs. ‘It doesn’t matter. Forget it.’ PAUSE vanishes. The little figure on the screen goes back to searching, his feet splashing through puddles, the inane repetitive music following him round on his quest.
‘I’m really sorry, Phil.’
‘Forget it, Dad. I’m concentrating.’
‘Why didn’t you ring?’
‘I didn’t know where you were, did I?’
‘I was at Aunt Paula’s.’
‘How was I to know that?’
‘Well, you could have tried her number.’
The manikin has found a hidden lever. Along the bottom of the screen it says ‘walk to’, ‘push’, ‘pull’, ‘give’ and half a dozen other functions you need for life. There’s even ‘talk to’, but there’s no one to speak with at the moment and so that option is conveniently greyed out. ‘Pull’ is the command that Phil selects for the lever, and immediately the wall of the cave opens. Some mechanism inside the computer whirrs and clicks. The manikin is no longer in the cave but in an open room where there’s a single window, a single table and a single exit. Nothing else. A pistol lies on the table. ‘Yeah!’ the boy exclaims.
‘Why didn’t you phone your mother?’
‘She’d have gone ballistic, Dad. You know that.’
‘Yes, but here all by yourself—’
‘It’s all right. Really.’
‘What have you been doing all the time?’
‘Playing.’
‘What did you eat? Did you find things? Tell you what.’ He moves closer to his son and makes an attempt to put an arm round his shoulders. ‘Hey, can I join you? We’ll get a Chinese, have some fun.’
‘You get bored, Dad, you know that. And I had a Chinese last night. Oh yeah, I said you’d pay them later so you’d better not forget that.’ The manikin has picked up the gun. ‘Pistol’ it says at the bottom of the screen, to go along with ‘old book’ and ‘whip’ and other arcane possessions. ‘You were with a girl, weren’t you?’
Thomas hesitates. ‘Yes, I was. She’s called Kale.’
‘And is she the real thing?’
‘I think so, yes.’
The manikin has begun searching for the way out of the room. He could try the door, but the window looks more attractive. ‘You always say that,’ says Phil.
The class is discussing interpretations of history – the Whig interpretation, the Marxist interpretation, modernist and post-modernist interpretations. They are all there, the motley collection of androgynous youth, the jeans and the trainers, the sloganed T-shirts and the glowing shalwar-kameez, and, next to that, Kale in her tight denim skirt and the jacket that says GLAMOUR across the shoulders. ‘What d’you mean, “interpretation”?’ Eric asks, in that nasal way he has. ‘Isn’t there just what happened?’
Thomas catches Kale’s eye. She holds his gaze for a moment before glancing down at her notes. ‘There are differing views of what history means,’ he explains. ‘Historians try to understand what went on as well as just record the events.’
‘I don’t think it means anything. I think it just was. Chaos, like. History’s just the pattern we make out of things after they’ve happened.’
‘That,’ Thomas says with a little smile of triumph, ‘is precisely what I mean. It’s an artificial construct developed after the event in order to explain what happened.’
She stays behind after the class breaks up, sorting things in her bag, waiting while the others leave. She seems smaller than he remembers. How ridiculous, that memory can be so deceptive, even giving someone physical stature they do not in fact possess.
‘What you said on Sunday,’ she says, looking up at him. ‘Do you still mean it?’
‘Of course.’
She nods. ‘I’ve been thinking. Maybe love is like history. Maybe it’s an artificial construct developed after the event in order to explain what happened.’
He can’t help but laugh. ‘It’s more real than that. It changes things. History never changed anything.’
‘Changes for better or worse?’
‘How do I know? That depends on your response.’
‘Difficult, isn’t it? Confusing.’
‘How about some lunch? Maybe we can sort it out.’
‘ ’Fraid I can’t. I’ve got to get back.’ She picks up her bag and slings it over her shoulder, making for the door.
‘What about next weekend …?’
She pauses in the doorway. ‘I’m not sure …’
‘Like I said, I thought we could go to my mother’s house. Just the three of us. Emma’ll enjoy it. You know she will.’
‘I’ll give you a ring,’ she says. ‘Let you know.’
From his office window he looks down on the grey concourse and the bright figure crossing it. Even at that distance he can see the shape of h
er legs, the sway of her hips, the slight toss of her head as she acknowledges something said to her by the man on the gate.
He watches her on to the traffic island in the centre of the road, willing her to look the correct way, left, the word spelled out there in white letters at her feet. How absurd that a portion of his whole well-being is invested in that small figure out there among the traffic and the anonymous crowds, travelling to a part of the city that he doesn’t understand, has barely visited, thinks of as a foreign country. She appeared one day in his class, and smiled at him, and said, ‘Cognate with cabbage, you’re thinking,’ a phrase that seemed witty and perceptive at the time, and she slept with him speculatively, as they do these days, and now she hesitates on the kerb, like Persephone pausing on the edge of the upper world before stepping into the unknown. She glances left, pauses for a double-decker bus to rush past, then crosses safely to the other side. The contingent event avoided.
Never get yourself on the wrong side of an unequal relationship, that’s what his father warned him. But you can’t legislate about it. You can’t choose your moment of fall.
Sitting at his desk, he tries to replace her image with quotidian tasks, checking over some lecture notes, giving a desultory glance at a pile of student essays, going through his mail. There are a dozen letters, from journals, from acquaintances, an invitation to attend a conference in Bratislava in the autumn, a call for papers for another the following year. And one with a Cyprus stamp and postmark.
Dear Professor Denham.
Thank you for your letter inquiring for informations concerning a certain Nicos or Nikolaos Kyprianou. After exhaustive enquiries in a number of archives (I append detail), I am confirming that a man of the same name and occupation (a former taxi driver, resident in Limassol) was a member of the EOKA organization from at least 1958. It seems that he spent some time in British detention in that year for possession of firearms, but was released in the amnesty that followed the settlement of 1959. Records show that he was afterwards killed in action against Turkish irregular forces (TMT) in the Kokkina enclave in August 1964. There is some evidence that he was killed in air strikes by aircraft of the Turkish Air Force. I enclose a document that I found in the national archive which relates to the man in question that may be of interest. I hope these informations are of use to you, and take the opportunity to convey my greetings and assurance that I am at your disposition for any further works in this or related areas.
Yours faithfully,
Costas Nicolaides, Professor.
Department of History,
University of Cyprus.
enc.
The enclosure is a photocopy of a military document: ‘147 Field Security Section’, it says at the top, with the date 12th May 1958. The title is in bold: SUSPECTS, EOKA, LIMASSOL AREA, and across one corner there is a faint stamp: the single word RESTRICTED. Below the title are photographs of three men, each with a brief biographical sketch. One of the photos shows Nicos – it’s a mug shot that might have been taken for a passport, but it’s clearly recognizable as the youth posing beside his mother in that photograph. Nikolaos Kyprianou, it says beneath. Part educated in England and speaks English almost like a native. Strong London accent.
Thomas shrugs. So what? So nothing. Just a fact. The man called Nick, the man in the snapshot with his mother, the man called Kyprianou, the Cyprian, the man he vaguely recalls for the hollowness of his cheeks and the slicked quiff of his hair, was a member of EOKA. What does that mean? Maybe it matters, maybe it doesn’t. History is full of that kind of thing, facts that you give weight to, incidents that you blow out of all significance.
What was it Voltaire said? History is a bag of tricks played on the dead by the living. Something like that.
Sixteen
Nothing happened, that was the strange thing. Life went on. The sun shone, with that alien insistence that it had out there in the eastern Mediterranean, and nothing had changed. Binty organized a picnic at Aphrodite’s Rock, with Geoffrey and the Frindles and another couple who had only recently come out from England. The newcomers were as white as larvae in their swimming things, as though they had lived in the dark for years. Moonburn, Geoffrey called it. He stood with the great rock as a backdrop and, despite Binty’s objections, gave them his spiel: ‘It was here,’ he told them: ‘the most momentous event in the history of mankind – Aphrodite arrives in the world. How does she do it? Well, it’s not your usual epiphany, I can tell you that. Uranus, if you’ll forgive the expression, was her father, see? His son, Cronos, cuts off Daddy’s private parts and tosses them into the sea, and out of the foam – his semen, really, and not the kind you find in ships – comes the goddess of love herself.’
Binty was shocked. ‘I really think you could moderate your language in front of the children, Geoffrey.’
He considered her protest with mock seriousness. ‘Which bit don’t you like, old thing? Uranus?’
The children went swimming. They dived and swam and splashed one another, while Dee sat detached from the group, gazing out to sea and smoking. The water was still, as calm as a jelly. No foam today, no sperm. Geoffrey came and sat beside her. ‘When does Edward get back?’ he asked. ‘Haven’t seen him for ages.’
‘Tomorrow. Binty and Douglas are taking us to the airfield.’
‘How are things with you? Been managing on your own? You look rather unhappy.’
‘I’m all right,’ she assured him. ‘Just fine.’
He watched her carefully. ‘Tell me something.’
One of the boys was swimming far out, way out of his depth. He was older than Neil and Tom, more self-assured. She watched him, the strong confidence of his strokes. ‘Tell you about what?’
‘About your taxi driver.’
She drew on her cigarette and held the smoke in her lungs for a few moments, then expelled it in a careful stream. Her hand, the hand that took the cigarette from her mouth, was unsteady. ‘There’s nothing to tell, Geoffrey.’
‘It’s just that he’s gone.’
She looked round at him sitting in his deckchair. ‘Gone?’
‘It’s all right, you don’t need to raise your voice. He’s vanished, my dear. No longer found in his usual haunts. I thought you might know something.’
‘Nothing at all.’
He sipped his beer, staring out to sea as though the goddess herself might suddenly rise up out of the water. ‘You saw him the day before he did a bunk, didn’t you? He drove you down to the SSAFA canteen.’
She felt a small pulse of fear. ‘Perhaps he did. He used to drive me down there most days. Tuesdays and Thursdays, at any rate. Him or his uncle. I don’t remember.’
‘Oh, you remember all right, Mrs Denham. He turned up in the morning and you invited him in.’ Geoffrey was smiling, watching her through the haze of his cigarette smoke, and smiling. ‘You spent a couple of hours together, didn’t you? What were you doing all that time, I wonder? Discussing the weather?’
‘Were you spying on me?’ Her voice rose in pitch. She hoped it sounded angry. ‘Are your nasty little men watching me? He was trying to teach me Greek, Geoffrey. O kairos einai kalós. The accent’s not very good, but you get the meaning, I’m sure. He’s a friend. Maybe the idea is strange to you. That nonsense you talked about his being a member of EOKA or whatever – he’s what I said, just a young man a bit out of place here, and eager to have a chat with someone from England. He’s more English than Greek and the soldiers he meets are suspicious of him, of course they are, and so he’s befriended me. What’s politics got to do with it?’
‘But his Greek friends are murderers. Maybe he’s one himself.’
She gave a cry of some kind – disbelief, protest, horror, it wasn’t clear. ‘How can you say such a thing?’
‘It’s not difficult, you know, not when you move in that sort of world. The creed justifies the means, doesn’t it? It always seems easy to kill in the name of a belief.’ He sipped his beer, glanced across at her. ‘I think y
ou warned him off, didn’t you? Is that it? Did you betray our little covenant of salt?’
She got up from the deckchair. Where was Tom? Paula was splashing around in the shallows, but where was Tom? ‘There was no understanding, Geoffrey,’ she said flatly. ‘None at all.’
*
There’s another boy, a newcomer called Stephen. He’s older. Fourteen, perhaps fifteen. A strong swimmer. He goes out, way out of his depth, swimming freestyle. And Tom follows. There is a moment when he detaches from land. It’s almost a boundary crossed, some invisible but real borderline on the languid surface of the sea. Up to that point you are swimming with the others, turning and calling and waving to them to show them how it’s done; and then you’ve crossed the border and suddenly you are at sea, and they are mere figures on the shore, barely distinguishable for sex or age, their sound coming to you from far away and long ago.
Never has he been out so far. Never has he been out of his depth like this. He pauses, treading water and looking down through translucent layers to the seabed far beneath. He’s flying. It’s like one of those flying dreams he has, where you can just step up into the air and all is easy and all is possible. Fish pass below him, cautious about the shadow overhead. Stephen is still further out. Tom is all alone here, in the midst of the ocean, Aphrodite’s ocean, where the goddess drifted towards the shore and began to play havoc in the lives of men and women.
‘Tom!’
The sound doesn’t intrude. It’s from another world.
‘Tom!’
Someone is swimming out towards him from the shore – a mere head floating on the surface, hair plastered. His mother. ‘Tom!’ she cries and then sinks back into the flurry of disturbance that she has made for herself. ‘Tom!’ She hasn’t crossed the border yet into this distant world of the ocean where Tom floats. She is shouting and trying to raise herself out of the water, attempting to rise above the surface, waving her hand and calling – ‘Tom!’ – and falling back and swimming on. He hangs, suspended. Time seems suspended. He can see his own shadow, far below him on the seabed.