A Handful of Pebbles

by Sara Alexi

  A Handful of Pebbles

  by Sara Alexi

  Chapter 1

  In truth, the whole place looks like it could be abandoned, a ghost town. Everywhere greying whitewash, peeling paint and dust.

  Sarah hopes it is the wrong village.

  A central palm tree offers dappled shade to the village square. Laurence is not visible; he is paying and asking for directions under the awnings of the kiosk. Rolling the chilled water bottle, still wet from the fridge, across her forehead, Sarah stretches the journey out of her legs by walking over to a small, lifeless fountain. A crisp packet and a drink can lay still in the dry bottom. Around the fountain, abandoned in the heat, clusters of metal chairs are casually arranged around circular metal tables as if they have spilt over from the rather grim-looking café across the road.

  Cracking open the water, she takes a long sip, the iced liquid chilling down through her chest. Her clothes, which seemed so flimsy when she bought them, cling and weigh her down. She lifts the neckline from her throat.

  ‘Seira sou.’ The meaningless sounds float as a window opens at the charmless café opposite. Laughter and gruff voices are punctuated by a sharp thwack of wood on wood, the sound of a board game enthusiastically played.

  Sarah wanders around to the other side of the palm tree for a better view, to see the people who inhabit this world of unlimited sunshine, who have time to play games.

  The laughter and voices merge into a hum: relaxed, warm, inviting. Sarah takes a second drink of water.

  Inside the café, shapes move, men come into focus; tall, short, rounded, thin; some white-haired and some dark. Age and hardship etched on their faces. Uniformed in dark trousers and sagging, baggy shirts. Some talk with animation as if addressing everyone, others turn to their neighbour, exchanging quiet words, smiling, scowling. A man in a crisp white shirt with a halo of frizzy hair strides between tables, brandy glasses on a tray.

  ‘Yia mas!’ someone shouts, and drinks are held high.

  She rolls her water bottle down her neck. The café actually looks quite charismatic, engaging even, the stark walls and hard edges somehow appropriate in the heat.

  One of the men looks out and stares at her, and smooths his impressive moustache. She turns away and puts her back against the palm tree.

  ‘We are in the outback of nowhere surround by dimwits ...’ Laurence appears and strides towards the car. A donkey brays from somewhere on the hill behind the kiosk and Sarah looks up the rise behind the village. It is topped with a tuft of pine trees that sway ever so gently by an unfelt breeze.

  ‘For pity’s sake, why have you left the door open?’ Laurence breaks her stare. ‘It’ll get hot. Get in.’ Before she is fully settled in her seat, the air conditioning is on full blast. The hairs on her arm rise up in protest.

  ‘Here.’ He throws the map towards her. ‘The woman had no idea how to read a map. All she could do was giggle.’

  ‘Did she speak English, then?’ Sarah asks.

  ‘Not a word. I pointed to the village on the map but I might as well have been showing her Chinese hieroglyphics.’ He snaps his seat belt on. Sarah’s brow creases and a condescending smile tugs at the corners of her mouth. Hieroglyphics are Egyptian, not Chinese. Part of her would delight in pointing this out, but, then again, she searches her memory, perhaps the term applies to more than just Egyptian writing and Laurence is correct after all. The smile fades.

  ‘Did you try just saying the name of the place or the names of the people?’ she asks.

  His eyes narrow, and before they turn on her, she offers, ‘Shall I try?’

  ‘If she doesn’t understand then she doesn’t understand.’ Laurence checks the mirror and puts his hand on the gearstick.

  ‘I’ll try.’ Pushing the door open, the heat, like a wind, rushes into the cold car.

  ‘No,’ Laurence states, but Sarah is out and across the square. She doesn’t pause to close the door. As she ducks under the awning, the woman in the kiosk grins and raises a hand of welcome. Sarah’s fists unclench.

  ‘Hello,’ Sarah begins.

  ‘Hello. English.’ The woman laughs, her perfectly coiffured hair stiff with lacquer.

  ‘I am looking for ...’ Sarah’s eye is drawn to the rows of lighters, stacked packs of cigarettes, boxes of condoms, individual wrapped chewing gums, and endless other colourful piles that hem in the woman. Sarah pauses and pulls folded papers from her back pocket. Someone approaches; the man with the moustache from the cafe. Sarah shuffles around, turning her back towards him as she fumbles with the printouts. No one speaks or moves.

  ‘Please.’ Sarah half turns to wave him ahead of her to be served.

  ‘No, no,’ he replies in an accent strong enough to imply these are all the English words he knows.

  He stands with feet apart, his barrel chest stretching his shirt, a gold chain around his neck, and his thick, long moustache twitching. His eyes sparkle and Sarah is momentarily held in his gaze before snapping herself back to her papers.

  She skim-reads the printed email, self-conscious now and half wishing she had left this to Laurence after all. ‘Do you know Michelle or Juliet?’

  The woman looks blank but then starts to laugh; an embarrassed chortle. The man now grins, one hand in his pocket, the other swinging some beads on a loop of thread.

  ‘Michelle?’ Sarah persists. The woman stops laughing. ‘Juliet?’ Sarah tries.

  ‘Ah,’ the woman exclaims, raises a finger to indicate Sarah should wait, and turns her back. Going through the small door at the back of her protective hut, she emerges between stacks of bottle crates and newspapers to link Sarah’s arm. The man with the moustache steps aside as they march past the fridges and beyond in the direction of the palm tree. Eyes from the café are upon them. The smell of hairspray mixes with something fresh and chemical Sarah cannot identify; fabric conditioner, perhaps.

  The woman taps Sarah’s arm and points frantically up the street, saying something very loudly that sounds like ‘A key’.

  ‘Ti ginetai?’ The kiosk lady spins round at the sound of another woman’s voice behind them and as she does, she unlinks arms. A string of sounds spills from her matte-coloured lips and she pats Sarah’s shoulder before walking away back towards her kiosk with a brief wave.

  The approaching woman, petite, in a sleeveless floral dress, walks with loose limbs, a slight sway to her hips.

  ‘Tell me,’ she says in English. The sun is behind her; it is hard to see her face

  ‘You speak English?’ Sarah asks, squinting to make out her features.

  ‘Better than your Greek, I am thinking.’ The words are soft, her head tilted slightly to one side.

  ‘Oh well, I am looking for Michelle’s house, but the person I need to find is Juliet.’

  ‘Ah, you have come to stay, kala. I am Stella.’ She offers her hand and they shake. Stella is slow to loosen her grip, and Sarah is touched by her warmth and has an odd sense of belonging. Blinking a few times, she regains her sense of reality. A car horn sounds twice. Sarah looks back towards the kiosk where Laurence, in the car, is out of sight. Stella doesn’t seem to have noticed.

  ‘So you know where Juliet or the house is?’ Sarah brings her attention back to Stella’s face. Warm dark eyes, messy hair. She tries to age her.

  ‘Of course. We can walk together.’ Stella takes a lazy step.

  ‘Oh, actually my husband is waiting in a car.’

  ‘Ah, the man who sounded his horn.’ She draws her foot back.

  Sarah looks at the ground and finds it hard to meet Stella’s eyes. When she looks up, she searches for judgement in the woman’s face.

  There is none.

  ‘So you go here, turn left, take the low road, very sh
arp right, and follow the lane to the end,’ Stella announces directly.

  ‘Sorry, thank you,’ Sarah says.

  ‘Why to be sorry? It is to be happy.’ Stella’s hair swings as she trots across to the cafe, skips up the two steps. The door opens and a tall man resting on a shepherd’s crook leans out to talk to her. She is not invited in. The smell of smoke drifts to Sarah along with carefree laughter. She can almost remember the feeling, the lightness in her chest of such a laugh.

  The car horn sounds again.

  ‘Belt,’ Laurence says before Sarah has fully closed the door.

  A fly buzzes furiously between the windscreen and the dashboard. Others lie dead and dying in the acute angle. She presses the window open. Taking the road atlas and pushing some of the pages down between the glass and the hot plastic, she sweeps along, hoping to dislodge the living and dead alike. With a brisk final movement, one carcass flies out through the side window, another drops towards her lap and she quickly moves her legs, the half-dead creature twitching on the carpet.

  The remaining fly, still full of life, continues its assault on the window. Laurence buzzes her window closed.

  They turn off the square and drive a short distance.

  ‘Left here,’ Sarah announces. He brakes suddenly.

  ‘It can’t be. It looks like a river bed.’

  ‘The woman said left here.’

  ‘She can’t have. She didn’t speak English.’

  ‘Another woman.’

  Laurence looks dubiously down the lane.

  ‘What, up that sloping road?’ He shifts into first.

  ‘No, no, the lower road and a sharp right at the end of that wall, I think.’

  ‘We’re just going to get even more lost. I suggest we go back to Saros and start again.’

  ‘Just try it.’ Sarah can hear the sharpness in her voice and quickly follows with, ‘It’ll save going back all that way if it is right.’

  Laurence looks again, his hand on the gear stick. The car remains stationary.

  A dog runs towards them, shaggy, with a bouncy gait. Sarah opens the window.

  ‘Here boy.’ She clicks her fingers. It seems to catch her scent and lollops towards her, its tongue hanging out to one side. Sarah reaches, her fingers almost touching its nose when Laurence revs the engine and turns into the lane. The dog bounds sideways in alarm.

  ‘You scared it.’

  ‘It’s a dog.’ He buzzes the window closed again.

  ‘You still scared it. Right here.’

  ‘What, up there? It looks like a road to nowhere.’

  ‘That’s what the woman said.’ Sarah folds her arms and looks out of the window. The air conditioning is giving her a headache. They have turned into a steeply sloping little square, a house on each side and an opening in the top corner that leads to a lane just wide enough for a single car.

  Up this narrow, unpaved lane, there are low cottages on the left and a whitewashed wall on the right. The cottage on the corner seems abandoned, the garden overgrown, dried leaves on the porch. The road narrows even more and Laurence slows to a crawl. The next house has a garden full of brightly coloured flowers.

  ‘Oh look at the colours,’ Sarah says.

  ‘This can’t be right.’

  The next cottage has a chain on the gate but the yard looks swept. The building after that has a long, sloping roof that nearly touches the ground by the lane, and Sarah recognises it from the pictures the owner sent. There is a cutaway where they can park. Laurence’s silence suggests he recognises it, too. Sarah takes out the printed email again.

  ‘Go past the parking space to the end of the lane, to Juliet’s house, where you can turn your car around. Juliet will welcome you and show you around,’ she reads aloud.

  Sarah looks at the sloping roof as they pass and glimpses the sparkling blue strip beyond an orange tree behind the building.

  Laurence drives beyond the building they recognise and crunches the car to a stop on what is, presumably, Juliet’s gravel drive. A low L-shaped, whitewashed stone house faces them with a tiled roof, freshly painted blue shutters, pots of flowers, and on the patio stands a woman waving, barefoot, her hair loose, no makeup, and somehow decidedly English.

  ‘Hello, Sarah and Laurence, I presume.’ She laughs and holds out her hand, first towards Sarah. From the corner of her eye, Sarah can see Laurence has bristled and he retracts his hand in response to being greeted second. When the woman turns to him, he seems reluctant to shake.

  ‘Hi, I’m Juliet,’ she announces. ‘Long journey from the airport. Can I get you some water, or juice, a frappe?’ She indicates a rather sagging-looking sofa on her patio covered with a white throw. A cat is curled in one corner next to a brightly embroidered cushion.

  ‘I think we’ll just ...’ Laurence begins. Sarah edges towards the cat.

  ‘Oh but you must be tired after your journey. Please, sit. I am having a frappe myself. Sugar?’ Sarah nods in answer to Juliet’s question and sits tentatively on the edge of the sofa. The cushions give and the cat rolls into her, stretches, and offers its stomach to be stroked, purring in anticipation.

  Laurence jiggles the car keys in his pocket. From inside the house come the sounds of cupboards opening and closing, taps running, and Juliet soon reappears with three froth-topped coffees in glasses, ice cubes knocking the sides.

  ‘You must be so excited, you have two sons, right, and it’s the younger one that’s getting married did you say in your email?’ Juliet passes a frappe to Sarah. ‘It’s metrio, just a bit of sugar, but I can put more if you want it.’ She turns and holds out a glass to Laurence. ‘Same with yours.’

  ‘I don’t take sugar.’ He does not take his hands from his pockets.

  ‘Oh.’ Juliet looks at the glass and disappears back inside.

  ‘Why?’ Sarah hisses as soon as she is gone. ‘Just say thank you and try it. There was no need to be rude.’

  ‘There is no rude about it. She assumed, and she was wrong. I know how I take my coffee.’ Laurence makes no effort to lower his voice.

  ‘Oh for the love of God, how many cold coffees have you ever had?’ Sarah hisses.

  ‘I hope you are not starting with one of your moods.’ He fiddles with his keys and then takes his hands out of his pockets to pull his trousers up by the designer belt Sarah gave him as a present when he returned from his last long trip.

  ‘I just think ...’ But she stops and smiles as Juliet returns with another frappe.

  Chapter 2

  ‘Here you go, Laurence.’ Juliet hands him the chilled glass and indicates a chair. She sits with grace, her litheness belying the age that the smile lines around her eyes suggest. Laurence remains standing.

  Sarah shifts her weight, clears her throat, and looks down into her own glass.

  ‘I get the feeling that you would rather be in and settled.’ Juliet addresses Laurence, narrowing her eyes against the sun as she looks up at him. ‘Would you like me to show you round or ...’ Laurence shakes his head. ‘Okay, here’s the key. I’m sure you can tell the difference between the kitchen and the bathroom. If you want to put the air con on, you will need to put the card attached to the key in the slot by the door. Anything else, just ask.’ She looks over to Sarah, who makes no move to leave. ‘Sarah do you want a biscuit, or a sandwich even; are you hungry?’

  Laurence hesitates, looks at Juliet and then at Sarah, who busies herself stroking the cat, who stretches in response to her touch before it jumps down. Laurence puts his glass on the table and crunches back across the gravel. He looks almost unrecognisable in his new polo shirt and off-white trousers. Sarah tries to recall the last time she saw him not in a shirt or uniform but gives up and sinks lower into the sofa.

  ‘So, Sarah, it’s good to put a face to all those emails. How was your journey?’ Juliet’s words come unrushed, as if she has all the time in the world. She moves slowly, too, and blinks slowly, as if the heat has sucked all the haste from her life. How wonderful it mu
st be, living out here in the sun in such a beautiful spot. The flowers in the pots dot colour here and there, the trees against the wall bear some sort of unripe fruit; it is idyllic, hard to believe it is really someone’s life.

  ‘It was okay. It’s glorious here.’ She tips her head back to face the sun that finds its way through the vine leaves that shade the patio. ‘Why is travelling so tiring?’ She gives a little laugh; the sun on the inside of her eyelids glows red.

  ‘It is, though, isn’t it? Did your friends find somewhere?’

  ‘Liz and Neville? They booked the villa you suggested, just outside the village, I think. I can’t remember its name.’ She may never move again, spend the rest of her life motionless here on Juliet’s sofa with the sun on her face, listening to the distant sounds of dogs barking and the cicadas rasping love calls across the village.

  ‘Ah, they took Villa Katerina then?’

  Sarah reluctantly opens her eyes so as not to appear impolite.

  ‘Yes, that’s the one. Is it far?’ Somewhere in the village, a goat bleats and Sarah retracts every condemnatory thought she had about the place when they first arrived. No wonder the shutters on the village houses have peeling paint; why would you want to do anything but sit and enjoy the moment here?

  Juliet points over the whitewashed boundary wall. ‘You can’t see it sitting down, but just over there is a hill—well, two actually, one topped with pines and another behind it with a rocky outcrop. The house is in the scoop between the two, five minutes’ walk.’ She takes another sip of her coffee and rattles the ice cubes around the glass; Sarah doesn’t bother to stand to look for the house, content instead to stare at the endless blue sky above the wall.

  ‘So are all the arrangements made for this week?’ One of Juliet’s gold hoop earrings peeps through her long, reddish-blonde hair, catching the light. Her hand lazily trails a course down the soft, furry spine of the cat who now sits on her knee, making no complaint as Juliet stretches out her legs, pointing her bare toes.