A Handful of Pebbles

by Sara Alexi

  The tears in her eyes blur everything into sunlit prisms. It comes as a shock to know that all these years that she has been clinging to the idea that Laurence cared for her and that made her feel, well, loved, needed, safe. But all this time, Laurence had never deluded himself with the same belief. They played the same dirty trick on each other, but it is she who has just had the illusion ripped apart, it is she who is in shock. He faked it for how long? Twenty-six years this year. Twenty-six years, he said nothing. Twenty-six years, she said nothing. Twenty-six years of her life wasted.

  She pulls the thought back. It was not wasted; she has Joss and Finn. She takes a side road. She cannot face the square. She is not really sure where she is or which way to go, just moving, running from Laurence’s cold, matter-of-fact stance. She feels so used, humiliated by him. But he has only done to her exactly what she did to him. Her eyes fill again, disgusted with herself. The lane she has mindlessly taken begins to climb a hill. There are trees on the top that beckon her. The heat and the incline slow her to a march but her arms pump and her legs stride as fast as they can. Sweat pours from her brow.

  She knew what she doing to Laurence was wrong, unfair, but she never really thought how cold and hard his life must be without love. How had she kidded herself he loved her all these years? Now that he has told her that he never felt love for her, it has been obvious in all his behaviour. All these years she has excused him, been kind to him, believing he just found it hard to express himself. What about the dinners on Saturday night, the flowers he would arrange on the hall table when he came home from a long turn around, buying her clothes? Was that not him finding a way to let her know the depth of his feelings? Were they just his pleasures and amusements? If so, that makes her what? A pawn, a doll? She deserves to feel ridiculed. But what hurts more is the bleak reality of abandonment that has engulfed her now she knows she has been living all this time without love. The knowledge that she is unloved bites the hardest. Her sight blurs again as she crests the hill. The trees are to her right. She has bypassed them in her determination to keep going, keep moving, onward, upward.

  Reprocessing snippets of Laurence’s behaviour that jostle to be recalled, she cannot believe how clinical he has been, dispassionate, uninterested.

  She suddenly recognises the landscape around her. She has come over the hill and has joined the road that becomes Liz’s drive and the house is now just down the other side before her.

  Her friend being so close draws her. She will talk to Liz; she must talk to someone. Sarah clutches at her chest as a pain shoots across. She is out of breath from the climb. She stops for a moment and the heartburn spasms again. She doesn’t wish for more pain, but a heart attack would solve everything: no more struggle, no more awareness of her misery, just a blank end to it all.

  Gripping her ribcage, she looks forward. The house looks still.

  If Neville is there, she doesn’t want to talk to him, but nor will she care if she is rude. She wants to talk to Liz alone. The pain pinches again and she winces.

  ‘Liz,’ she calls as she reaches the patio. The doors are shut but she tries them. They are not locked. The house feels chilled after the sun, and dark. It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust until she can make out the stairs to Liz’s room. The nearness of her friend brings a release, and the tears come faster as her legs wobble. ‘Liz,’ she calls again in an unsteady voice before she can see no point in making any further effort and her boneless body half-sits, half-falls onto the sofa. She lays there sobbing deeply, alone. Liz does not come. The house is silent.

  Sarah has no idea how long she lays there, but as her wailing subsides, the pain in her chest demands some action. She makes an effort to sit up. Liz’s makeup bag is on the coffee table, the contents spilling out. Bottles of pills amongst eye shadows and mascara-blackened cotton buds. Liz always keeps her hangover pills in with her makeup. Maybe there will be some indigestion tablets. Sarah tips the rest of the bag out and several brown plastic bottles with white labels are amongst the cosmetics. Bottles like the ones Liz had made tasteless jokes about in the restaurant. Picking the nearest up, she finds Neville’s mother’s name typed above the directions for dosage. Prescription drugs. Extreme pain killers that she took near the end.

  They offer a direction.

  The easiest way out of all.

  The tears dry up within seconds of making the decision. The heartburn is immaterial; soon, nothing will hurt. She picks up all the bottles and takes them to the kitchen counter. Lifting a glass from beside the sink, Sarah fills it with water and, settling stiffly onto the kitchen stool, she begins to systematically undo the bottles and pour out the pills, making neat lines with the contents next to each uncapped bottle.

  There is easily enough.

  She takes one last long look out of the window, the sun brightening the colour of everything it touches, the world a beautiful place but with no place for Sarah. A butterfly fights the windowpane, its wings brushing at the glass, a futile dance until death.

  ‘I know how you feel,’ Sarah tells it and hears her own words keenly, knowing they will be her last. Tomorrow, the sun will still shine, the butterfly will probably still be fighting for its freedom, everything will carry on as normal, only she will feel no more pain.

  The butterfly, spent, takes rest on the sill. Sarah’s last act will be a kind one. She slides from the stool and, moving slowly so as not to scare the insect, she opens the window and watches as its antennae twitch, its wings open, and it takes flight into the sunshine, red wings brilliant against the blue sky. It flies higher and higher and further and further away until Sarah is not sure if she can see it at all.

  With a sigh, she returns to the lines of pills, sliding back onto the stool. She takes a drink of the water to wet her throat and picks up one pill after another. She can probably manage to swallow five at a time.

  Pills in hand, she tips her head back and opens her mouth, adjusting the pills in her hand so they will pour from her palm more easily.

  The back door smacks the wall, ringing like gunfire as it suddenly and forcibly opens. Sarah jumps and drops several of the pills. Nicolaos falls through the open door, shoulder first. He holds a wood plane and a chisel.

  ‘I have come to fix the door,’ he says before looking up. Steadying his balance from his charge, he raises his head, at first surprised to see Sarah and then a frown follows as he takes in the counter top, her position in front of the lines of pills, and the absence of anyone else in the room.

  Sarah’s back stiffens. She still holds the glass of water near her lips; in her fingers, the few pills that remain in her grasp. In one bound, Nicolaos is upon her, squeezing her cheeks to open her mouth, knocking both pills and water from her hands. The glass smashes. Sarah struggles. Nicolaos grips her harder, her mouth open.

  ‘How many have you taken?’ he demands without loosening his grip. It is impossible for Sarah to reply; his fingers are locking her jaw open. She scrabbles at his arms, his immovable arms.

  ‘How many?’ he shouts in her face, releasing his grip and pushing her backwards. Grabbing the counter to regain her balance, she is on her feet.

  Who the hell is he to be so angry?

  In that moment, he is the source of all her problems, all her pains. He is the unfairness of life, the loss of Torin, the cold of Laurence and her self-hatred, her disgust at who she has become.

  ‘None!’ she shouts. The word comes out like a curse, venom of spite, and Nicolaos rocks back on his heels with the force of her hatred.

  Again she runs, across the room, out through the patio, down the drive, over the wall, and into the olive trees. The branches ripping at her hair, she stumbles and falls, but she is on her feet again and running. She hears material tearing as her arm is pulled back by a wooden post but she is heedless, her pace hardly faltering. As she leaves the olive grove, tufts of hair remain clinging to branches and her left knee has the imprint of the stone where she fell. But still, she keeps going. The downwards
slope of the hill hastens her steps on the track and she does not stop until she is on the main road, where she turns away from the village. Gasping for air, holding her sides and bending over so she can breathe, still she keeps going. Slowed to a march but still brisk and purposeful, she keeps walking with no idea of her destination or when she will stop, or if indeed she will ever stop.

  Chapter 22

  Her thoughts are tumbling in chaos, the image of Nicolaos’s fear and anger condemning her. Tears dry on her skin as she marches, the pumping of her arms releasing her anger, her frustration. Overpowered by too many emotions jostling for dominance, her mind goes blank, a numbness sweeps over her, her legs keep striding, and she becomes the movement. The road passes unseen beneath her, the unnoticed landscape around her nothing but fields and fields of fruit trees as she heads deep into the country.

  After half an hour of pounding the road, her consciousness registers the tarmac, its solidity, its homage to civilisation, and she resents it. A quarter of an hour later, she is glad when it thins, crumbles, and gives way to a mud track. The compounded earth is cracked in places as if it dried out quickly, spring breaking into summer, perhaps. After some time, the track, too, peters out as it grasses over, trodden flat in lines as if different people have taken different routes across it. Her pace slows and she licks her dried lips. She is thirsty.

  Ahead opens out into a stony field, too open, too bare. She would feel exposed. But there, to the left, a break in the grasses where she can go into the orange grove. She takes it, playing out the need to keep moving.

  The air becomes still under the umbrella of dark green. There’s a hush, as if the world is waiting for something, a timelessness that grasps all possibilities. She passes a flat stone on the path, cigarette ends scattered around it. Maybe it is a shepherd’s spot. Would they bring sheep into dark orange groves? She continues, but her steps have lost purpose. As she ambles, thoughts return, her head swims, and every emotion is played so loud it distorts, its meaning lost. Nothing takes shape except the pulse in her temple. Up ahead, searching for a focus, the trunks are interrupted by something reddish-brown rearing up vertically. Drawing closer, seeing more, it appears to be a small barn made from large bricks of dried mud. The corner facing her is weathered, the bricks eroded, carved away around the mud mortar, sculptural, dramatic.

  At the front of the building is an area without trees, and sunlight creates a stage. A bark-bare trunk lies near the opening into the barn, the inner wood worn smooth and flat. Upon it lays a fork, tines up, and on the ground in front, a pan without a handle upturned next to a pit of charcoal. Sarah becomes still, trying to work out if the camp is still in use, but the pan and a single abandoned shoe look so old, it seems impossible. Besides, no one lives in such conditions these days. Her emotional pain subsides the more absorbed she becomes in the abandoned hovel. She pokes at a dirty cheap rucksack with her foot.

  The barn has no door and inside, daylight streams between broken tiles, rods of light spearing the mud floor. A breeze whispers through the orchard and a plastic sheet on the roof billows and collapses with a crinkling sigh. The place looks as if it has been dismantled and half put together again. Some wide wooden shelves lie on the floor, others are secured to the wall. The one she steps on has been grafittied with pen and knife. She moves out of her own light to read. She can make out the words Azen, Behar, some dates, a carved heart, Sergiu, Aaman and in capitals JULIET. Perhaps Juliet from the village, but what would be her connection to this place? And there are lines, six straight, one crossing, like the marking of weeks, repeated again and again. It is all a little frightening, as if this has been a prison within an orange orchard.

  A pair of boots sits side by side next to one of the shelves. There is movement and a man jumps down from a high shelf. He is dark skinned, white eyes. Sarah lets out a squeal and turns to run but the door is blocked by two men, one leaning either side of the opening.

  One of her rings glints in a streak of sun that pierces the roof. Her hand jerks up to her necklace, the wealth around her wrists and studding her ears suddenly terrifyingly visible.

  One of the men in the doorway is chuckling. He is very dark skinned, African maybe, with a Nike t-shirt on. The other looks European but the dome at the back of his head is flat and his forehead is very low. His clothes would stand up by themselves, the dirt is so ingrained. Sarah turns quickly to check what the third man is doing—the one who jumped from the shelves. He is putting on the boots.

  Brave it, Sarah. Just push past and walk out. But the voice in her head is inconsistent. They will rob you, kill you, or worse, and no one will hear. No one knows where you are, and Laurence is right, you are irresponsible. She bristles with rage at her own thoughts.

  Breaking into movement, she marches to the opening.

  ‘Excuse me.’ She looks the African in the eye and waits for him to move, but he doesn’t. She turns to the European, who has a nasty scab on the bridge of his nose. He looks back but makes no movement.

  ‘Excuse me. I want to get out.’ She can hear the quiver in her own voice. Another man appears behind the two, out in the sunlight, and yet another rolls from a shelf behind her. Sarah stands motionless as, emotionally, she collapses inward. The situation is futile, but her fists clench and there is renewed energy in her legs. She will fight if she has to.

  There are five of them. There is no chance to fight; it might make it worse. Remain still, unmoving, don’t respond, then it won’t antagonise them. Or run, suddenly, push ‘flat-head’ out of the way, he is smallest, but then there is the man behind.

  ‘Whatchu wanting?’ the man wearing the Nike t-shirt asks, the words rolling from his tongue, a quiver on the vowels as if the whole thing is amusing.

  ‘I want to leave.’ Sarah swallows. Sweat is running from her forehead into her eyes but she keeps her fists locked, her hands by her side. She blinks to retain clear vision.

  ‘Nah woman, yous came in here for something. Whatchu wanting?’

  Her heart is beating so strongly, they must be able to see it through her t-shirt. Flat-head is looking at her breasts.

  ‘I was lost.’ She turns again. The first man now has his boots on. He walks around her and leans with the others against the doorframe. He has a scar through one of his eyebrows; there is a leaping puma on his shirt.

  ‘Lost is it?’ Nike turns to Puma and chuckles as he speaks. ‘She says she lost.’

  ‘Lost and alone,’ Puma replies.

  Flat-head says something, but it is in a foreign language, and the other two ignore him. Spotting the divide, Sarah turns to flat-head, walks right up to him, and says, ‘Move.’ She raises her hand to push him.

  ‘He don’t understand the English, woman. He’s from Bulgaria or Albania or somewheres.’

  Sarah lowers her hand without making contact and steps back.

  Flat-head steps forward. He is grinning, showing missing teeth. He takes another step and Sarah backs again. Nike and Puma are silent. The man who was outside now fills the space in the doorway that flat-head vacated.

  Flat-head raises his hand. Sarah shrinks as his fingers touch her hair.

  ‘Get off,’ she snarls.

  His hand thrusts around the back of her neck and takes hold of her hair, pulling her head backwards, a beam of sunlight on her cheek. The sharp pain from her hair tearing from its roots jolts her body into a spasm. Her arm flies sideways and one knee reflexes upwards. His grip releases and he collapses to the ground, his hand in his groin. Puma and Nike and the other man start laughing.

  ‘She feisty, man. Too much for you,’ Nike says, his laughter coming from deep in his stomach.

  Sarah looks from one to the other to the prostrate man on the floor. If they see her reflexes as aggression ...

  ‘Sorry. I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to,’ she says to no one in particular.

  ‘Lady, don’t you be sorry to him.’ Nike laughs. ‘He showed you no respect.’ Nike regains some control of his laughter.
r />   ‘I didn’t know he had balls to hurt.’ Puma is still laughing.

  ‘So is you really lost?’ Nike asks. He unfolds his arms, takes his weight from the doorframe and puts his hands in his back pockets. Puma pushes past him into the sunlight. The other man in the door steps back into the light and sits on the fallen tree trunk. Puma pees against a tree.

  Flat-head starts to get up.

  ‘You best stay where you is man, or she will flatten you for sure,’ Nike advises. Flat-head crouch-walks to one of the shelves to sit.

  ‘Lady?’ Sarah turns back to look at Nike as he addresses her. ‘Is you lost or is you from the government?’

  ‘The government?’ Sarah breaks eye contact with him and looks all around, trying to make sense of what he has just said. ‘Oh, are you illegal?’ Her hand seeks out the silver snake bracelet on her wrist.

  ‘Ha. That is funny, you ask if we are illegal. What you think, woman? You think we want to live in a mud hut like this?’ He looks at flat-head, who has now laid down.

  ‘I am afraid I have no idea.’ She looks at the shelves and the mud floor again. Someone has put up a calendar with a picture of a sports car. It hangs from a twig embedded into the mud brick wall. ‘No, actually, I cannot imagine anyone choosing to live like this.’

  ‘Nah, and you would be right.’ He chuckles again. Sarah unclenches her fists. He wanders out into the sunlight. Sarah follows him into the sun. He heads into the trees where he stands, his turn to relieve himself. She could run now, but would it be an overreaction to the present situation? It may ignite a flame that is not yet lit. She thinks of all the films Nicolaos has seen with willing victims fuelled with hope. She glances at the path again, best to run.

  ‘Get up. The woman, she need a seat.’ Nike pushes the man on the tree trunk sideways, and he stands and wanders to sit on a flat stone. ‘Sit,’ he encourages Sarah. The men move slowly, loosely, unthreatening, but with the wrong move from her, could it all quickly change? She sits.