by Pat Barker
I turned and found Ritsa watching me.
“They’ll be all right,” she said. “I told you, didn’t I? I’ll keep an eye on them.”
My resolve not to cry lasted till we had to say goodbye, and then I broke down and howled like a little girl: “But I want you to be there!”—meaning when I went into labour.
“I would be if I could, you know that.” She patted my stomach, reassuringly. “You’ll be all right.”
On my way back to Pyrrhus’s compound, I called in on Hecamede. Nestor’s ships were also ready to sail. Another goodbye. I felt more optimistic about Hecamede’s future than I had for some time. Nestor’s health seemed to be improving, and as long as the old bastard managed to hang on to life, I thought she’d be all right. We hugged each other, and then I had to let her go.
First Ritsa, now Hecamede. I walked away, knowing that in all probability I’d never see either of them again.
* * *
——————
Wanting to dull the pain of parting from my friends, I made straight for the rock pools on the beach, where I squatted down, searching—though without much hope—for signs of life. Even with the anguish of leaving Ritsa behind, I felt some of the excitement I’d felt as a small child clinging to my mother’s hand as she’d helped me over the slippery rocks. One starfish, that’s all I found, and even that was dead. My mother used to love starfish—she loved all the life you see on the shoreline, but starfish in particular—and she passed that love on to me. I bent to examine the pallid corpse. It had been badly injured before its death, one of the limbs torn off and lying some distance from the body. As I leant forward, my shadow fell across the water, and immediately the starfish came to life and began inching towards a fringe of overhanging seaweed. Not only that, but the severed limb also began to move and make for shelter. I wanted to laugh, because now I remembered: This is what happens. I heard my mother’s voice explaining it to me: the parent starfish grows a new limb, the amputated limb becomes a starfish—and so, from one damaged and mutilated individual, two whole creatures grow.
Seeing that gave me hope—and yes, I do know it’s ridiculous. What could I possibly have in common with a starfish? And yet, suddenly, I found the strength to stand up, to look for the last time at Achilles’s burial mound, and to walk quickly back to the compound, where the Myrmidons were almost ready to sail.
The girls had put their few possessions into cotton bags and were clustered together on the veranda, waiting to be told where to go. Helle flared her eyes at me as I approached. Somehow, without ever talking very much, we seemed to have formed a friendship. I felt safe leaving the girls with her. I couldn’t see Andromache in the group, and that worried me, so I went in search of her. My footsteps echoed round the empty room, which suddenly seemed much bigger. I was about to go along the passage to her bedroom, when I heard a movement in the yard at the back. She was picking purple daisies, the kind that grow as vigorously as weeds at this time of year. In fact, they probably are weeds. Now, I can see great clumps of them from my bedroom window. Weeds or not, I’ve never been able to pull them up.
“Andromache?”
Arms full of daisies, she turned to face me and said one word: “Amina.”
“I don’t know where she’s buried.” Or if she was buried. More likely they’d just throw her body off the headland. Then I thought: But I do know where she died.
So, together, we wove the daisies into a wreath and took it along to the laundry hut, which looked much the same as it had always done: airing racks swaying in the draught, a row of tubs where bloodstained shirts were put to soak, and, right in the middle of the room, the big table with the marble top. I’d washed Patroclus’s body on that slab, and Hector’s, and Achilles’s—but I pushed those memories aside. This was Amina’s time.
We laid the wreath on the slab, and stood for a moment with our heads bowed. I’m not sure I managed to pray, but I did remember her: the wide-apart eyes, the straight shoulders, that absolute refusal to bend.
Then we went outside to join the other women, and a few minutes later, Alcimus appeared and led us down to the ships.
about the author
Pat Barker is the author of sixteen novels, beginning with her working-class masterpiece Union Street in 1982. Her Regeneration trilogy novels set during the First World War were awarded the Booker Prize and praised as one of the greatest historical works in British literature. Her last novel, The Silence of the Girls, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Gordon Burn Prize in the UK, and won the Independent Bookshop Week Award in 2019. She was made a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 2000. She lives in Durham, England.
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