An Inch of Time

by Peter Helton

  In the courtyard, the coals on the barbecue had quietened down to a perfect heat and I cooked the kebabs Greek-style: rubbed in olive oil, highly seasoned with pepper and oregano and doused with lemon juice.

  The best that could be said about the local wine was that it was cheap and there was never a shortage of it. Derringer wasn’t hungry for once, presumably because he had recently eaten someone small and Greek. Rob’s painting had not been found. He had embarked on a new canvas, a view of the overgrown churchyard, and his mood had much improved by the time we popped the cork on the third bottle.

  I woke at an uncertain hour but with a definite wine-induced headache in the darkness of my room. The door was ajar, allowing Derringer to move in and out, and I had the vague feeling that he had just slipped from the room. As I felt around for my bottle of Loutraki water in the near total darkness, I could hear the cat outside, making one of those small noises that mean he is not quite sure about something. I thought of lighting the oil lamp but changed my mind as my eyes were adjusting to the dark. I got up and stepped into the yard. The air smelled cool and clean. The moon was just setting behind the shoulders of the hill, leaving enough light in the sky to see by. Perhaps a stroll in the ozone-laden night air would clear my head enough to get to sleep again. I went back inside, dressed and, with provisions of water and Greek cigarettes, walked out amongst the ghosts between the ruins.

  I quickly realized that unless I stuck to the paths I remembered I would be stumbling on every hidden root and stone. Aiming for the olive press, I walked uphill, feet crunching across dried leaves and small twigs snapping under my weight. The rhythmic sighs of the sea were a faint background to the rustlings in the undergrowth and the night calls of some bird I couldn’t identify. Two or three crickets kept up a desultory chirp in the long, dry grass.

  Somehow my memory of the village layout failed to connect with the realities of the night. Each dark, looming presence I took to be the press turned out to be a different ruin or else shrank back into its shadows to reveal itself as a mouldering outbuilding. Not that it mattered; I just thought the press would give me something to aim for. I sat down on the uneven rim of an old well and lit a cigarette. Temporarily night-blinded by the bright flame of the lighter, I sat and smoked, the fragrance of the Greek cigarette curiously sympathetic to that of wild oregano on the night air.

  That’s when I heard a small sound. Somewhere to the left, in the direction of Morva’s house, something moved. Dog, I thought immediately, since it was probably what I feared most at that time: an encounter with a wild Greek dog who might consider me an intruder on his turf. Being a coward, I decided to arm myself with a stick and go back. I dropped the cigarette butt down the well where it disappeared into the void without the expected hiss. Bone dry like the surrounding countryside. The only stick I managed to lay my hands on in the dark wasn’t big enough to frighten a puppy, but it felt better than nothing in my hand.

  There was the sound again, and it was definitely moving about. I advanced slowly towards it. In the dark, something was stalking the high grass. The sounds moved slowly from left to right, then died down again between the ruins. Two legs or four? I thought of calling out a challenge but changed my mind. As Morva had said, anyone had the right to walk here, but whoever this was did not behave like someone taking the night air. Instinctively, I adopted a low loping gait, following some genetic imprint from hunter-gatherer days. But even in those days we were probably armed with more than a short, slightly bendy stick. I heard a click further away, and thought it was a mechanical, not natural noise. Whatever moved out there did not use the paths but negotiated the high grass, perhaps familiar with the lay of the land.

  Just then I thought I saw a light in the corner of my eye, above and behind me, near the spot where I had smoked a cigarette. Trying to focus on it and determine its origins, I stopped. It was a tiny light source, whatever it was, quite low to the ground. It was also moving towards me. I turned around to listen for the clicking but instead found another tiny light had appeared further down. This one quivered, diffused by the high grass. These were no electric lights; they moved and danced in the soft sea breath that sighed through the ghostly valley. They had to be flames. Another one sprang up further down and only seconds later a fourth and fifth just where the dark shape of Morva’s farmhouse squatted. I made a beeline for the closest light. What I saw made me stop dead.

  Coming towards me through the dry grasses with madly glittering eyes was a large tortoise. On its back it carried a stumpy white candle and in its wake it was leaving a trail of smouldering grasses, here and there fanned into flame by the breeze. Trying to get away from its own fire-trail, the big tortoise was moving at quite a pace. I snuffed out the candle and started a stomping war dance on the smouldering grass. As I looked back, I could see I had six other dance engagements further down. I’d never do it by myself. I had to call for help.

  ‘Fire!’ My voice fell dead between the ruins. Once I thought I had stomped out the first fire I galloped towards the closest glow of light and kept calling. ‘Fire! Wake up, everyone!’ Even though I was shouting at the top of my voice, I wasn’t sure it would wake anyone at the other end of the village.

  It didn’t. The patch of burning grass was beyond dancing on. I doused the candle on the fleeing tortoise, emptied my half-litre of water on the grass and beat at the flames with my jacket. There were still five fire-tortoises marching about between the ruins, laying ever longer trails of smouldering grasses. Two of the fires were close to the house. ‘Fire! Wake up, you deaf bastards! Fire!’ At last I could hear calls and excited voices from the direction of the house and soon I saw movement, too. A silhouette looking much like Helen’s was beating out flames close to the house. Morva shouted something from the direction of the cistern.

  Just as I realized I was losing the fight with my spreading circle of fire, Sophie appeared next to me carrying a two-litre bottle of plonk in each fist. ‘Seems a waste but it was the first thing I could grab on my way out.’

  ‘I’ve got a blinding headache that says that wine can’t be wasted. Start pouring the evil stuff.’

  Sophie began a leisurely but well-aimed libation and between us we smothered the fire. It left us standing in the dark and smoke, the place smelling like a burnt-down wine bar.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ asked Morva as she panted past us carrying two buckets of water, not waiting for a reply. I ran towards the patch of fire furthest from the house, an S-shape of flames licking up at the branches of a twisted olive tree. My now smouldering jacket made little impact. ‘Someone help over here!’ I called. Then I remembered Matilda. There was a tiny fire extinguisher hanging next to the cooker. I made it to the motorhome and back in record time, aimed the nozzle and slapped the red knob on the top. The extinguisher was pathetically small, but at point-blank range the hissing powder jet did an excellent job. When it fizzled to a stop after ten seconds, most of the fire was out and I flailed the rest with my seriously singed jacket.

  Dawn was breaking at last. I could see no more flames anywhere, just thin curls of smoke rising from a few patches of ground here and there. I could see Morva coming from the cistern, carrying buckets of water but unhurried now, making sure of things.

  By my feet sat a tortoise, withdrawn into its shell on a patch of blackened ground, the candle it had carried completely melted away. I picked it up. The shell was intact and didn’t look burnt at all. There was no immediate way of telling whether the reptile had survived his ordeal by fire. I brought my mouth close to the front. ‘All right, spit it out: who put you up to it?’

  TEN

  ‘Attack of the Fire Turtles.’ I set the reptile on the kitchen table. It was either dead or still happier inside than out.

  ‘That’s a tortoise,’ Rob corrected me. ‘Turtles live in the sea, terrapins in fresh water. On land, it’s tortoise.’

  ‘But with candles on their backs, it’s fire turtles. Special branch of the land turtle, subspecies
candelabrum. I still can’t believe you slept through all this.’

  ‘I’m a heavy sleeper – I could sleep through a bomb going off.’

  ‘Let’s hope it won’t come to that,’ Helen muttered.

  ‘Still think it’s kids?’ I asked Morva.

  Morva prodded the motionless shell on the table with an accusing finger. She bent her face towards it and asked the same question I had asked earlier. ‘Who sent you, you fiend?’

  ‘I think you’re talking to its bum hole.’

  ‘Yuck.’

  We were slurping much needed Greek coffees – except for Sophie who had found another two-litre bottle of red and was making a start on draining it. ‘It’s the sort of thing kids would do, though, isn’t it? Half-arsed, with no guarantee it would work. A sort of hey-let’s-just-see-what-happens. A real arsonist would pour some petrol round the place and chuck a match on it.’ She raised her glass in a toast to the thought. ‘It’s moronic kids from that weird village down the hill.’

  This time I disagreed, yet kept it to myself. Sophie was right, of course: throwing petrol around would have guaranteed results for the arsonist, but it would also be detectable afterwards. Candles, on the other hand, will melt away unnoticed in the fire or else disappear on the backs of the surviving tortoises as they made their way back to where the firebug had found them. As I looked out over the landscape around us, my perception of it changed; idyllic became isolated, deserted turned to desolate, and the lack of phones and electricity was beginning to lose its eighteenth-century charm.

  Only Rob and Helen felt like painting that morning. Sophie wandered off into the ruined village without her painting gear. Ever since Helen had mentioned the suicide attempts, Sophie’s habit of suddenly stopping and staring at a tree or a dried-up well looked to me as though she was asking herself whether it would support a rope or be deep enough to throw herself away in it. I felt she needed looking after, but Morva disagreed. ‘You can’t be there day and night. If someone wants to kill themselves, they’ll do it somehow. I actually think she’s improving. At least she doesn’t ride her motorbike drunk along the cliff tops any more.’

  ‘Quite an improvement.’

  ‘Especially for the sunbathers below.’ I could already see the headlines: Grieving Kamikaze Mum Ruined Our Hols.

  We wandered among the trees near the shuttered but roofless church. The adjacent churchyard, from where Rob was painting a view of the bell tower, was less overgrown than the surrounding land. ‘Apparently, one or two of the old folks still make the pilgrimage up here, usually just before Lent, to visit graves of relatives. They clear up a bit, leave bunches of wild flowers.’

  ‘Are those actual photographs?’

  ‘Yeah. Go and have a look if you like. I’ll wait here; they give me the creeps.’

  Set into many of the low, simple headstones were fading black-and-white photographs of the deceased. They were looking out from behind glass in mostly round or oval metal frames. The earliest examples I could find dated back to the 1940s. Apart from some flocking and the inevitable fading, the pictures had held up well. Many were of old people, often in traditional garb, but a few, poignantly, were of children. The photographs brought a ghostly quality to the silent, sun-flooded place. I was almost glad I couldn’t read the mournful inscriptions. There were a couple of unfinished graves. Both were marked with blank stones and their round picture frames stared blindly. They probably dated from the time when the village was at last abandoned.

  I was glad to rejoin Morva outside the crumbling churchyard wall. ‘So where is this private little beach you promised?’ I still hadn’t set foot on a beach and had seen the sea mostly through the windscreen of a car or in paranoid glimpses in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Don’t expect too much, Chris. It’s one hell of a climb unless you’re a goat, and when you get there, it’s a tiny cove with a pebbly beach. In winter it completely disappears under the waves. But I’ll show you where you can get down without breaking your neck. It’s just off the track to Neo Makriá.’

  We walked on past the last blackened patch of grass near where the broken cobble path stopped and the drivable track started. We both stared at the fire damage, but neither of us spoke. Morva now seemed eager to have the children’s pranks theory accepted for everything that happened in the village, yet she was clearly tense and uneasy. Thinking back now to the welcome she gave me, carrying a murderously sharp billhook, made me wonder whether perhaps she had moved here for reasons other than those she had given. But from time to time I tried to remind myself that not everything had ulterior motives or needed investigating.

  We passed Matilda and the Fiesta which I had parked at the top of the track and walked downhill in the baking sun. Now and then we heard small startled sounds in the growth along the verges. ‘Snakes and lizards,’ Morva explained. ‘Here it is.’ The ground between two olive trees on the seaward side, eroded through hundreds of years of use, showed where the descent to the cove began, though from up here only a glimpse of the sea was to be had. Much of the path and the cove itself were hidden from view.

  Boyish excitement bubbled up as I stood at the top of it. ‘You sure you don’t want to come?’

  ‘No thanks. As I said, I hope you won’t be disappointed. Have you got some water? It’s a thirsty climb.’ I patted my shoulder bag in answer and started the descent.

  Climbing down is as tiring as climbing up. My muscles started protesting instantly as the uneven path, no more than two feet wide, first zigged and then zagged steeply down. ‘Don’t break your neck now,’ Morva called from above.

  ‘Are you still there?’ I grabbed hold of a tuft of dry grass to steady myself and looked up. Morva was standing at the edge above, waving. I waved too and prepared to turn back to my path when a movement in the corner of my eye made me look up again. All I could see from my low vantage point was the rust-red roof, but it was clear that the Fiesta was on the move, coming fast down the hill on the narrow track. ‘Look out!’ was all I got out, but Morva too had seen or heard it. She turned and moved rapidly out of my sight. There was a thud and a low cry, then the whole car bounced into view through the verge above me, tilted and crashed into a stunted pine tree growing out of the very edge of the cliff. The back of the car bucked and slid towards me. I ducked away from the shower of stones kicked up by the impact, then looked up. The Fiesta had come to a precarious rest against the tree, right next to where the goat track began. I was sure that if I sneezed it would come tumbling towards me. There was no sign of a driver. ‘Morva? Are you alive up there?’

  Her voice was shaky. ‘Yeah. Kind of. Get up here, will you?’

  The goat track would lead me right under the gravity-defying car, so I decided to find an alternative route to the right, then straight up. Hand over fist, I pulled myself up on the sharp, tufty vegetation and baking hot rock, sending crumbling soil and stones seaward every time one of my feet slipped. Did I mention I’m no good with heights?

  As I crawled over the edge on all fours, I could see straight away that Morva was in trouble. She was lying on her side, clutching her legs and looking pale. ‘The bastard car ran me over. There was no one driving the damn thing. You must have forgotten to put the bloody handbrake on. I think I broke my ankles; the tiniest movement makes me want to scream. At you, mostly.’

  ‘Shit, that’s terrible. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. We’ll need to get an ambulance up here. I’ll call one from the village.’

  ‘I don’t want a bloody ambulance. At least not until I know they’re really broken. There’s a doctor in Neo Makriá; he’ll come out. You’ll have to get me back to the house. But first give me some of your water. Ow!’

  Morva sat up a little to accept the bottle and more apologies from me, with one or two qualifications. ‘I’m truly sorry, Morv. Only I seem to remember not only putting the handbrake on but leaving the car in gear as well. I always drive ancient vehicles; it’s second nature to leave it in gear.’

  She
gave me a hard stare for a few seconds, her lips pressed tightly together in pain and disapproval, then inhaled noisily. ‘Damn, and I believe you, too. Bloody hell. I wanted it to be your fault.’

  ‘I can imagine. Doubly sorry. Someone around here really doesn’t like you, Morv.’ We both looked at the Fiesta, hanging precariously against the tree, one rear wheel off the ground. ‘I’ll go and get the others; we’ll carry you back to the house.’

  I sprinted up the hill. Rob was painting in the churchyard, but it took me a moment longer to find Helen at her easel. There was no sign of Sophie. Morva, it turned out, couldn’t stand up at all, the car having bashed her knees and run over her ankles. Together, the three of us managed to carry her back in a woollen blanket. It was a stupid way of doing it and caused her considerable pain. She swore all the way back to the house, mostly in Greek, some of which she refused to translate. When Sophie turned up, just as we deposited Morva on the sofa in the living room, it was clear she had polished off the two-litre bottle of wine. ‘Oh, I’ll fetch the doctor on my bike; take two mins that.’

  All four of us protested immediately and loudly. ‘All right, no need to shout, I was only trying to be helpful. Bike’s quicker than your old van, that’s for sure.’

  ‘You’ve got a point. Can I borrow it?’

  ‘Don’t see why not.’ She tossed me the keys. ‘Don’t crash it.’

  There were enough scrapes and dents on the little red Honda to show that Sophie was used to crashing. All levers were bent and had the ends snapped off, and the tank was so dented I doubted it could hold much petrol, but the engine started straight away and I hassled the bike downhill. I managed not to drop it and zipped into Neo Makriá only to realize I had no idea who and where the doctor might be. Dimitris started his chiding straight away. ‘Living in that place is trouble. Someone will get killed because there is no help near. You are in luck; the doctor is just crossing the square.’ He pumped up his lungs and shouted, ‘Yatré!’ A slightly built man in a dark suit carrying a newspaper and a carton of cigarettes looked across. Dimitris waved him over and talked rapidly at him in Greek, pointing at me, the bike, the direction of Ano Makriá and the heavens. The doctor, who was probably not even forty yet but seemed to cultivate a middle-aged style, looked at me through old-fashioned gold spectacles and sighed. He stretched out a well-manicured hand for me to shake. ‘I’m Spiros Kalogeropoulos. Just call me “Doctor” if you find it a mouthful.’ Doc Kalogeropoulos spoke good English with only a hint of a Greek accent behind a definite American twang. ‘I’ll come right away. I’ll just get my bag.’