Songbirds

by Christy Lefteri

  Then she took me to my room. The bed was neatly made, the mirrored wardrobes had been cleaned and the room smelled of polish.

  ‘I will leave all your husband’s things until you tell me.’

  I was grateful for this.

  But, eventually, I let her clean out my husband’s belongings. I felt a throb of shame that I could not bring myself to do the task, but by then I had become so used to letting Nisha do everything for me – and for the baby, when she eventually arrived – that it took almost nothing to turn to the window and sip my coffee, Aliki asleep in her bassinet, while Nisha removed every trace of my marriage from the room.

  *

  I suddenly noticed that Aliki was standing in the garden looking at me. She was holding Monkey.

  ‘Does that cat belong to us now?’ I asked, pretending to be cross.

  ‘Ask him,’ she said. At that, she released Monkey, who took the opportunity to spread out on the ground and set about licking himself. Then Aliki stepped into the boat with me.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘Are you going to make supper?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, my baby, I will make it in a moment. I’m sorry it’s gotten so late.’

  ‘That’s OK. But I am hungry.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But first, would you tell me about the Sea Above the Sky? I’m feeling sad. I’m missing Nisha and I think I would like to hear a story.’

  She looked at me for a moment, then said, ‘OK, then. Close your eyes.’

  I did as she said.

  ‘You mustn’t peep. I can tell if you are peeping!’

  I scrunched up my eyes, to prove that I wouldn’t cheat.

  ‘Most boats go forwards and backwards, but this one goes upwards,’ she said. ‘Into the sky. We have to go through the layers of sky and then we get to the sea.’

  ‘Isn’t the sea on the ground?’ I asked.

  ‘No. And don’t interrupt. Just be patient,’ Aliki said.

  I smiled at the scolding. Just be patient. Those words reminded me of Stephanos. I was always more eager than him to get on with things, to make plans, to get married, to get pregnant. Chill out, Petra. Just be patient. It’s not because he didn’t love me, I had no doubt about that, but he was a man who wanted to take everything a step at a time, slowly, as if we had all the time in the world. It was also how we made love, so unrushed, so slow, and it made me go crazy for him.

  ‘We’re there,’ Aliki said. ‘But don’t open your eyes.’

  I nodded and kept my eyes closed.

  ‘Up here it’s eight hours ahead,’ she said, ‘so the sun is coming up. But just coming up, so it’s still kind of dark. The sea is shiny, all silver and gold. The sea is as wide as the sky, it never ends, so you can sail above any country in the whole world. When you look down through the water, you can see the earth, all the trees and rivers and houses. And the people.’

  ‘Are there people up here, too?’ I asked.

  ‘Sometimes, but not today. There are plenty of birds, though. They are birds that have died and now they are here and they make promises to each other. Some of them used to be human and they came here to find each other again. But not all – some of them were birds before.’

  I opened my eyes now and looked at my daughter. Her hair was wild about her shoulders, and shining a deep glossy brown. She was wearing her pyjamas and her wrists and ankles seemed to be bursting from them. How had she grown, this child of mine? I could see the past in her eyes, Stephanos looking out at me, just for a second, before the memory of him vanished and then there was only Aliki. Aliki. Aliki in her own right. With her beautiful almost-translucent skin and silver veins on her lids and flushed cheeks and soft ridge in her brow and cheek bones like half-moons. She took my breath away.

  The cat jumped on my lap and rubbed its head against my arm, my shoulder and my face, its soft purr close to my ear.

  ‘Can we have dinner now, Mum?’ she asked.

  Mum.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I miss Nisha.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So do I.’

  ‘Is she coming back?’ Aliki asked.

  ‘I don’t think so, but I don’t know for sure.’

  ‘Are you trying to find her?

  ‘I am.’

  Aliki was quiet for a while and then in a very serious voice she said, ‘She was worried about the birds.’

  ‘The birds?’ I said.

  ‘The ones that get trapped on the lime sticks by their feathers and legs. She was going to tell the man to stop stealing all the birds from the sky.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘He’s called Seraphim.’

  I tried not to react. I chose my words carefully. ‘Did she go to speak to him?’ I said, as gently as I could.

  ‘Yes. When we came back from the mountains. When she tucked me into bed, she told me that she was going out to talk to the bad man about the birds and that I should be a good girl and stay in bed. You know, because sometimes I need to wee and I knock on her door because it’s too scary at night for me to go to the toilet all on my own.’

  I didn’t know that, but I nodded.

  ‘I think we should go back now,’ she said. ‘The waves are getting bigger. We can come again another night.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Would you like to come up here again?’ she said.

  Once more I nodded, but I found that I couldn’t speak.

  The man with the army boots is walking out of the water, wet to his ribcage. He is completely dressed in black, with a windbreaker that has an orange trim around the lapel. Guided by the light of the moon, he bends down to pick up his phone, which he has left on the yellow rock by the side of the lake, and makes his way up the crater until he comes across the decomposing hare. He flashes the light of his phone over the corpse. A beetle climbs out of the empty eye socket.

  The man walks away from the lake, picking up a black rucksack that he’s left beneath a wild thyme bush; he catches the smell as he bends, and he pauses for a moment and inhales the scent with closed and distant eyes. Perhaps he is trying to replace the smell of death, which is clinging to his nostrils. With the rucksack over his shoulder, he walks a few yards to his car. He does not turn on the headlights as he drives away.

  20

  Yiannis

  E

  ARLY IN THE MORNING, THERE was a knock at the door. I jumped out of bed thinking it was Nisha, but Petra was standing there, looking pale as the moon.

  ‘Can I come in?’ she said.

  ‘Sure.’

  She was wearing pyjama bottoms and a white T-shirt. She had dark circles under her eyes. ‘I haven’t slept,’ she said.

  I led her into the kitchen and put the coffee on the stove. She looked up at the wall clock.

  ‘My god, I didn’t realise it was that early.’

  She seemed disoriented in the chair, trembling hands in her lap, shoulders sagging. She reminded me of a moth. Usually she was so put-together. This wasn’t a woman who cuddled or cried. She did not fall apart. Her name, Petra, means ‘stone’. I’d never really liked her, to be honest. She was the wall that stood between Nisha and me. Her, and the whole damn system.

  The little bird hopped around on the windowsill, bobbing its head, looking at the world outside.

  ‘It wants to fly,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Yes. But it’s not quite ready yet. It won’t survive if I release it now.’ I placed the coffee in front of her and she took a few large gulps. ‘Watch it,’ I said, ‘it’s scorching,’ but she didn’t seem to hear.

  ‘I have some more information,’ she said.

  I sat down opposite her. My heart beat fast but I tried to keep calm.

  ‘I was talking to Aliki last night. She said that on the night that Nisha went missing, she had put Aliki to bed and told her that she was going out to meet a man about birds.’

  I straightened, heat creeping up my neck. ‘Who?’

  ‘Serap
him. According to Aliki, he was stealing birds out of the sky and Nisha wanted to make him stop.’

  I felt sick.

  ‘The thing is,’ she continued, ‘I’ve been up all night thinking, trying to work things out, but I’m missing all the pieces. If there is something you’re not telling me, Yiannis, I think now is the time to do it.’

  She said my name with bitterness, as if she knew I was guilty of something. And I was. I could tell she knew by the way she had drawn her shoulders back now, challenging me. This was the Petra I knew.

  ‘Is there something I should know?’ she said.

  I instinctively looked over to the spare room.

  ‘Look, I’m not messing about.’

  ‘Neither am I,’ I said.

  ‘What is this thing with Seraphim and the birds? I know you know something.’

  I got up and asked her to follow me to the spare room. I unlocked the door and we went in. She looked around at the fridges, the lime sticks and the hunting gear.

  ‘Right.’ She opened the fridge closest to her, looked inside, turning her face away immediately, closing it. ‘So this is what you do.’ It wasn’t a question.

  ‘I got involved when I was made redundant. I got in and couldn’t get out.’

  ‘Nisha knew?’

  ‘Eventually, yes.’

  ‘She was trying to get you to stop?’

  ‘Yes.’ I felt a wave of guilt surge through me. So big that warm liquid came up to my throat, and I remembered again Nisha’s flesh and blood in the toilet.

  ‘And Seraphim?’

  ‘He’s above me. The middle man.’

  ‘How do they stop you from getting out?’

  ‘Usually arson. They come at night. That’s the first warning.’

  ‘And the second?’

  I didn’t reply.

  She nodded now and looked around the room, thinking.

  ‘So, Nisha went to talk to Seraphim. She wanted to help to free you. Could he have hurt her?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You don’t sound too sure.’

  I stood up and opened all the windows; my neck and face were on fire.

  ‘She went to speak to him, then she vanished. She went to speak to him, then she vanished. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘We can’t go to the police.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You need to find out what happened, Yiannis.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I will.’

  *

  I called Seraphim and arranged to meet him that night. He told me he would be at Maria’s from 10 p.m.

  ‘Join me anytime you want,’ he said. ‘I’ll be there. I’m always there.’

  In the meantime, I couldn’t sit down, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t think about anything else. I was supposed to be putting the birds in their containers and sorting them for delivery, but I spent the whole day sitting on the bed where Nisha and I used to talk and make love, staring out of the window at the street below and trying to piece the story together: I asked her to marry me. She left holding the ring. She went to speak to Seraphim. She wanted to free me. She was not seen again.

  That night, I walked passed the flyers of Nisha posted around the neighbourhood. Nobody had called Petra. I watched people walk by and Nisha’s smiling face looking out at them. They did not see her.

  I found Seraphim sitting at a small round table near the bar. There was a young woman sitting with him, petite with large, brown eyes – like that of a child – hair as black as coal, leaning into him, smelling his neck.

  ‘Off you go,’ he said to her, when I arrived. She obeyed. I watched her as she walked over to another table where two old men sat smoking. One of them removed some food from his tooth with his finger. The other stubbed out his cigarette. Whose fag-yellow breath would she be inhaling tonight? I hated these men. I was not one of them, I was sure of that. Had Nisha become involved in sex work? Had she got herself trapped? Maybe she was desperate to make extra money, desperate to get out of here, to get back to Kumari. There was desperation everywhere in this place: it dripped from the windows in condensation, it made the tables wet.

  Seraphim clicked his fingers. A sound so sharp that I turned to face him. A waitress glided towards us with an empty silver tray.

  ‘Two whiskies, my dolly,’ he said.

  ‘No, I don’t want to drink.’

  He ignored me.

  ‘I was with her last night,’ he said, flicking his eyes towards the woman sitting with the old men. ‘She’s lovely.’

  I looked away. His face was making me feel sick.

  ‘You’ve been jittery lately,’ he said. ‘I hope you’re well.’

  He didn’t hope I was well. He hoped I wasn’t bailing out. I’d heard him say the exact same thing to Louis before they’d burnt down his car – with his son in it.

  The waitress returned with two glasses of whisky. She placed them on the table, one for me, one for Seraphim.

  ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘you look like you need it.’

  I downed the whole glass without flinching, just to get the damn thing out of the way. ‘Seraphim,’ I said, ‘I miss Nisha, and I need to know what happened to her. Two people have confirmed that she was coming to meet you here the night she went missing. Please. Tell me what happened that night.’

  I didn’t know how else to put it. I could hear the desperation in my voice, see my pathetic self in his eyes.

  He glared at me. He smiled. Deep lines around his mouth.

  ‘This is the problem with being in love,’ he said. ‘It always creates a mess, and I like to keep things tidy, if you know what I mean?’

  ‘So she came to see you?’ I persisted.

  He glanced around, over his shoulder. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘I don’t like talking about these things in public. How about we go to mine, have a drink there?’

  He downed his whisky and stood up before I replied. He left some notes on the bar, winked at the barmaid and I followed him outside and along the street to his car.

  We got into his Jaguar, doors opening like wings. The interior, soft leather. He had a top-of-the-range sound system and the engine purred like a tiger. I turned my face towards the window as he goosed the gas pedal and we flew into the night.

  *

  I’d never been inside Seraphim’s house before. It was a gated, white monstrosity with pillars and blue-tinted windows that looked like the sky. It was on a hill and looked down on the Famagusta Gate. It seemed to jut out of the earth at a strange angle; it reminded me of a huge cruise liner on a choppy sea.

  When we stepped into the living room, a maid was standing on a chair in the middle of the room. She looked like she was in her fifties, a short woman with enormous breasts that she seemed to be carrying like an extra weight. A few lamps were on in the room and she was cleaning the chandelier – a huge crystal eyesore. When she saw us, she climbed down and turned on the main light. The crystals shimmered, the light sending thousands of orbs around the room.

  ‘I have finished, sir,’ she said, looking at Seraphim.

  ‘Good girl. Did you do all the other things on the list?’

  She nodded.

  ‘You didn’t leave anything out like last time?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘OK, go and get us some nuts and a couple of whiskies. Put them in the back room.’ He turned to me and said, ‘You should always keep your lights clean.’

  The maid gathered her cleaning supplies and shuffled out of the room.

  ‘We have a dinner party tomorrow – my niece is christening her first child and the whole family is coming here. My wife is probably in bed. Let’s go to the garage, we can talk privately in there,’ Seraphim said.

  We walked through a hallway of white marble – it was everywhere: the floors, the walls. Vivid paintings lined the walls, so extraordinary they were almost alive. Images of Troodos, orchards, streams, farms. One in particular grabbed my attention: an
old man with a white goatee, large hands and black trousers, a deep crease in his brow, carrying what looked like a bag of wool across a field.

  ‘Is that—?’

  ‘Yes,’ Seraphim said behind me.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘These are my memories.’

  I looked at the man’s face more closely, remembering my grandfather. I could almost smell the funk of sheep coming off him. Then I noticed the background, the landscape stretching out behind him, green and luscious with vegetation, but down in the valley a fire, raging, and threatening to grow and expand up the hills. There had never been a fire like this as far as I could recall.

  ‘Why is there a fire?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s the war,’ he said, matter-of-factly. ‘And other things.’

  ‘What other things?’

  ‘The things that threaten all that is natural and beautiful and right with the world.’

  It was then that I noticed for the first time a sadness in his expression. It reminded me of Seraphim as a boy, before the rifles, before the black crow. Something came back to me, a boy with sad eyes standing on the trunk of a fallen tree, pretending it was a mountain, saying, ‘Look down there, Yiannis!’

  The past echoed along the corridor. Seraphim placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘Now take a look at this one,’ he said.

  The next painting was simply of an apple tree full of ripe fruit, a blue sky behind it. Bright greens, yellows and blues contrasted with shadows of deep red and purple.

  ‘That’s the tree outside my house, back in the day, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘These are phenomenal.’ I could feel myself being sucked back, drawn to a time almost forgotten. I found myself surrounded by my past.

  ‘You painted these?’