by Alison Fell
With a whoop of triumph, Donny slaps down the Ace of Spades. Well and truly trumped, Greta favours him with a ferocious scowl. Elsa rolls her eyes heavenwards, while the forester chuckles delightedly, the phlegm cataclysmic in his chest. Ingrid feels like hugging him. Maybe she should bring a bottle of sherry in with her tomorrow, see if that helps things along.
*
‘Postie’s been,’ Elsa announces, putting down her Sainsbury’s bags and sorting through the pile of mail on the hallstand. She hands Ingrid a padded envelope. ‘This one’s for you.’
The stamps are definitely Greek. She weighs the package in her hand. She’d forgotten there were still places in the country where no one bothered to lock their doors.
Elsa is shaking her head over a newsletter from the local Ramblers. ‘Would you credit it? Miss one meeting and they put you down to lead the Lairig Ghru. Do they think I’m Superwoman or something?’
Inside the envelope there’s a small oblong plastic box, but no message. She prises it open and finds herself staring at a remarkably tiny mobile phone.
‘Well it won’t bite, dear. Why don’t you turn it on?’ Taking the phone from her, Elsa pokes at the keyboard, and a screen begins to glow. She hands it back with a straight face. ‘Better leave it on, eh, in case you get a call?’
Elsa is no fool: she knows better than to ask who it’s from. Ingrid leaves the cellphone on the kitchen counter while they unpack the shopping, keeping it in her sight-line. Putting off the moment when she’ll have to get her glasses out and read the instructions.
Since the terrace is still awash, they’ll eat indoors for once: although dusk hasn’t even fallen yet, the damp has brought the midges out with a vengeance.
Elsa mixes pastry for an onion tart while Ingrid rinses beans in the colander, ready for stringing. The presence of the cellphone seems to alter the quality of the silence, stretching and thinning it. From time to time she risks a glance at the thing, just in case it springs a surprise on her.
‘He’s got an eye for our Greta, wouldn’t you say?’ Strewing flour across the oilcloth, Elsa thumps down the ball of pastry and sets about it with a rolling pin.
‘I noticed!’ Elsa doesn’t have to name him: Ingrid knows exactly who she means.
‘You know, pet, as far as I’m concerned you can stay as long as you like. But you heard what Fitzwilliam said. She could go on, well, for ages really.’
But Donny won’t, she thinks.
Light-headed, she leans against the sink. Images of the tall, stooped forester merge with memories of Yiannis – his hair powdered grey with flour, his chest sunken and decrepit at first … and then straightening, growing tall like a tree, magically rejuvenated by the dance.
Outside the lawn is strewn with rain-bludgeoned white petals and the mist rising from the valley is tinged with pink. She remembers his long fingers, his scrutiny. That quake in the stomach when someone reads you like a book.
A light burring sound makes her spin round and stare. The phone is vibrating, crawling across the formica counter like some alien insect.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Oh bless!’ sighs Elsa. ‘Someone’s texting you, dear.’ Wiping floury hands on her apron, she picks the phone up and flips it open with a wry smile. ‘And you’re supposed to be the brainy one?’
Ingrid finds her glasses and puts them on. Even so, it’s hard to make out the message on the screen.
Me poli agapi
Yiannis
Although the words are easy enough to translate their exact import eludes her.
With much love.
She stares at the keypad, at the inscrutable icons and arrows. ‘What do I press for reply?’
68
On the day after Ivo Kruja’s funeral Yiannis cleared his in-tray, said his yassous, and headed home. The interment, in a parched stony plot amid stringy oleanders – an area reserved for waifs and strays – was a bleak affair, attended only by the priest, Yiannis, and Prys, sweating in sandals and what looked like a charity-shop suit. Dust fine as ashes hung above the heaped soil by the grave, and the priest’s eulogy was interrupted by bursts of coughing. Prys had acknowledged Yiannis with a nod, but thereafter ignored him. He offered no explanation for the absence of his co-communards, and Yiannis didn’t ask for one.
After several phone calls, he had secured an agreement with a reluctant-sounding Elpis woman to deposit Kruja’s boxes at their premises in the western suburbs of the city, traffic permitting. That should leave him just about enough time to drop the cat off and get back across town to the airport.
On the bed, beside a pile of folded clothes, his suitcase lay open, ancient airline labels still looped around the handle. Kore was sitting on the linen chest, her paws precisely aligned and her eyes fixed on the case. She knew something was up, but what she didn’t know yet – he was waiting till the last minute to bring the cat-box out of the cupboard – was that she was going to be boarding with her Aunt Irini.
Once he’d changed out of his uniform he took his coffee out to the veranda, dialled Ingrid, and gabbled sweet nothings into the phone.
‘Have you got your passport?’ she asked, sounding even more nervous than he was, which instantly filled him with a kind of fatuous joy.
‘Of course,’ he said serenely, and remembered with a thrill of shock that he hadn’t. It struck him then that he hadn’t actually been out of the country for years. What if the damned thing had expired? He rang off and rushed from room to room, opening cupboards and rummaging through files. Finally he discovered it in the drawer of the old telephone table in the hall; with immense relief, he saw that it was still valid.
He rang back to reassure Ingrid, hustled the growling Kore into her box, and ferried his luggage out to the car. Even in the shade of the fig tree the air on his bare arms was like warm velvet, scented lazily with mimosa.
The sight of the shuttered house made him feel queasy. For a second he quailed at the thought that the whole love affair had been a particularly lengthy and vivid dream from which, in a few hours, he would wake and find himself impaled on the horns of reality. Light-headed, his pulse racing, he fumbled for his sunglasses and put them on. Blinkered, he felt safer, his compass set squarely on the future. It was a mistake to look back, he knew: the fates, pissed off, would always make you pay for it.
Throwing his case into the boot, he told himself, as he had once told Ingrid, that it wasn’t so very far to go – not half as far, certainly, as Australia.
Out on the dual carriageway he put his foot down, ignoring the protests from the back seat. Just past the Amnisos turn-off roadworks signs had sprouted like mushrooms overnight; temporary traffic lights had been erected, but – no doubt by some eldritch trick of the Highways Department – men and machines were operating under a cloak of invisibility.
Although the road ahead was clear the lights stayed stolidly red. Yiannis sat there, seething. On the dashboard clock the sweaty seconds ticked by. As he watched an Olympic Airbus lumbering down from the blue Aegean sky, he realised that he’d forgotten to pack his raincoat.
69
What is invisible to men, is visible to the gods.
In her dream the classroom door has been wedged open and the blinds lowered to keep out the Cretan sun. Yiannis is wearing cowboy boots, tapping the blackboard with a long wooden pointer.
There are signs chalked on the board, Linear A signs, untranslateable.
Ja-sa-sa-ra, Yiannis recites, smiling expectantly, and her mind, spurred to work at scintillating speed, not only marries sound and script but solves, once and for all, the riddle of the unknown language.
At last the meaning is clear as day. Her eager hand is in the air, her face lit up by the answer.
s
