A Handful of Pebbles

by Sara Alexi

  ‘Did it help?’ Sarah says. ‘At the time, with your wife, I mean?’

  His chuckle is dry and short. ‘I invited her to sit and talk with me the day after I had these thoughts, but she refused as usual, saying we had been over and over everything and nothing was going to change, that it would just end in an argument. But eventually, I got her to agree and instead of picking over the bones of the past and inviting a conference on what was whose fault, I started with hope.’

  Sarah listens intently. As the goats close in on them, she picks up a pebble and throws it at the big one’s feet. It starts and all the herd run a few paces away. The munching grows quieter.

  ‘I asked her what would make her happy. She said moving back to Greece. Obviously, we both had jobs in Oz, and we had no income in Greece, so it looked impossible. So I said, ‘I will go first, clean up the house, create an income, and you can follow when you are ready. I can still see her face as she turned to look at me. For the first time in years, she looked me right in the eyes.’ Sarah finds she, too, is looking in his eyes. They are a deep brown, soft.

  As he meets her gaze, his eyes speak of kindness and humour. ‘And in her eyes, I could see hope, not just for her to come to Greece but for us as well, as man and wife. So I came back to Greece with hope in my heart. I came alive.’

  Sarah does not take her eyes from his. ‘So you sending her the divorce papers the other day was the end of hope?’

  ‘Only briefly.’ He breaks their stare and slaps his knees before rubbing his palm on his trousers. ‘For life to make sense, it must have meaning. We talked about this the other day, yes?’ He stops rubbing and looks out across the plain. ‘Well, for many years, I tried to make my wife my meaning, but she was a difficult, hard woman. When I was young, when she was young, that was exciting, but as the years went by, it became a source of misery. It is hard to make a source of misery your meaning. So when I moved here, so far away from her, I had to find another meaning.’

  ‘I thought you said you woke up each morning and decided what sort of meaning you were going to give the day?’ Sarah gently teases.

  ‘I did and I do, but I have big and small meanings now. My big meaning is to make the world a better place. My middle-sized meaning is to produce a better herd each year so I can make the world’s best goat cheese, and my small meaning is to do something each day to make myself happy.’

  ‘And that’s enough?’ Sarah asks.

  ‘Live your life’s choices to extremes, do everything to the best of your ability, and take pride in what you achieve and then, whatever you choose is enough.’ It sounds like an often-spoken mantra.

  Sarah turns his words over in her mind. Laurence achieves. He just changed who he flies for with a massive increase in pay and everyday, he successfully achieves the transporting of hundreds of people to their destination. The boys both achieve, daily. Even Liz achieved something, keeping Neville’s mum comfortable all these years. Apart from cooking, what does she achieve on a daily level? What has she achieved this year, or last year, or even the last five years? She has achieved nothing since the boys left home.

  The weight in her chest has returned. She squints her eyes against the sunlight. If she is honest, her perfect little life, in her perfect house highlighted with ritual dinners with Laurence at quality restaurants every Saturday he is home, is not enough.

  She gasps at the ingratitude of her thought, the guilt. If she looks at her life, her life with Laurence, her life with the boys, her life since Torin, all of it, there is only one person who is responsible. She pulls in and bites on her bottom lip. There is a rushing sound in her ears and watery film covers her eyes. It is easier to sleepwalk through life.

  ‘You okay?’ Nicolaos asks.

  Chapter 19

  ‘I am a sleepwalker,’ she says.

  Nicolaos’s mouth curls to laugh but he looks at her and his face straightens.

  ‘It’s true. I might as well not be alive.’

  ‘Careful, life might be listening.’ Lifting his weight, he takes a couple of crouched steps and sits next to her. Even though he’s on the ground with no rock for a seat, he is the same height as Sarah and she dully realises how tall he is. Taking out his beads, he grasps hold of her wrist to put them in her hand.

  ‘Flick them over your top finger one by one. When you reach the end, swing them all back into your palm again.’

  She has little interest, and with the first efforts, her rings get in the way, but after a couple of tries, the beads satisfactorily click together.

  ‘You see, everything starts with a thought. You think to push over a bead and then you push over a bead.’

  The last bead goes over and Sarah performs a very unstylish flick. The beads land back in her palm and she begins again.

  ‘Thoughts are the whole problem,’ she says. ‘Most of the time, I just get on with life but then, from nowhere, an ugly dark thought comes and sits heavily in my stomach and blackens my day, or my week, or longer. I think I did a very wrong thing a long time ago and it haunts me this way.’

  ‘But.’ He draws the word out slowly, gently. ‘Thoughts are not the truth. They are just thoughts. They do not arrive from God. Do not give them this power.’

  Sarah stops clicking beads to look at him. The stubble on his upper lip shines with perspiration. The heat is relentless.

  ‘If a thought serves you well or makes you feel positive, then keep it. If it does not, then let it go, reject it. This is one of the secrets to happiness, I think, and if you do it often enough, it becomes easy.’ Sarah stares at him intently. ‘But no one can do this for you. This one, you have to do for yourself.’

  Her face must show scepticism because he adds reinforcement. ‘You are not obliged to think your thoughts, you know.’

  Having never considered her own thoughts in these terms before, Sarah says nothing as she plays with the idea that she is not obliged to think her thoughts, that it might be that they are not the truth. But she knows what she has done, she knows what the truth is.

  ‘Are all your thoughts right?’ He looks directly at her, scanning from one of her eyes to the other. ‘It is very grandiose to believe that they are. Thoughts must be examined, questioned.’

  ‘But we know really, don’t we?’

  ‘Do we?’ It is not a question. ‘When my wife used to stay with her sister in Perth, I would say to her, "call me." It came about that she would call every day at five o’clock. One day, she did not ring, and I had three thoughts: that she was not with her sister and she had lied to me, that she had had a car crash and was badly hurt, or, and this was the worst, that she simply did not love me enough to call me anymore. The first thought, that she had lied to me, made me angry; the second, that she had had an accident, made me anxious; and the thought that she no longer loved me made me feel rejected. I knew it was one of the three, so I was deeply unhappy.’

  ‘And which was it?’

  ‘Someone had felled a tree which had brought down the line to my sister-in-law’s phone.’

  Sarah gives a little laugh.

  ‘But you see, I thought I knew. In my mind I was saying, "She hasn’t phoned," but the truth was she couldn’t phone. But I thought I knew and allowed my thoughts to run wild, and it brought only misery.’

  ‘But I know I did this bad thing.’

  ‘You know you did it or you know it was a bad thing?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘You want to tell me?’

  Sarah stops clicking over the beads and looks closely at them. They are a deep orange, and inside one is a fly.

  ‘Amber.’ Nicolaos points at the beads. ‘I bought them for myself the day I posted the divorce papers because they are beautiful and looking at them and feeling them makes me happy.’ He puts his hand in his pocket and pulls out another set. ‘There are my old ones.’ They are slightly smaller, the colour of the sky.

  ‘I married for the wrong reason,’ Sarah says.

  ‘This is the bad thing that you know
you did?’ Nicolaos runs the blue beads along the string from one hand to the other, an action so familiar, he does not appear aware that he is doing it. Sarah nods.

  ‘Well, some cultures would say love is not a good reason for a marriage anyway.’

  ‘I married because he had a good job, because he had money, because he would offer security, and because Torin was dead.’ Sarah recites the list.

  ‘Torin?’

  ‘Torin. The love of my life, my childhood sweetheart, the man who made living fun and exciting and worthwhile.’

  ‘And he died and took the excitement with him?’

  ‘He took me with him.’ The trees begin to swim behind tears.

  ‘And you chose to die with him?’

  The tears stop and her lips tighten into a line. ‘Are you making fun of me?’

  His beads keep clicking.

  ‘No, just observing.’

  It is not the reaction she expected, and he clearly does not understand how wicked what she did was.

  ‘I married Laurence because he asked me. I married him because I didn’t feel I could say no. I married him because I made a pact with Liz to marry a rich man. I married him because I was doing nothing else with my life.’

  ‘Ah, there is your sin!’ He stops clicking beads. ‘You were doing nothing else with your life.’

  ‘It was greed.’ The rushing stops in Sarah’s ears but her mouth is dry.

  ‘It was laziness.’

  Her eyes flash. ‘I was grieving.’

  ‘Then you should have bought some amber beads. It was laziness.’

  Sarah stands, opens her mouth to speak, shuts it, and sits down again.

  ‘Laziness,’ Nicolaos repeats.

  Her chest feels like it is imploding. ‘Marrying out of laziness. That has to be as bad as it gets.’ Her voice is flat.

  ‘Has it?’

  ‘Oh don’t. It must be the worst reason in the world to marry.’

  ‘For whom? Your husband is not divorcing you, so perhaps it is not so bad for him. You have children?’

  Sarah nods.

  ‘So your marriage was good for them.’

  ‘Yes, but to lead Laurence on like that, to marry him letting him think that I loved him, how deceitful is that? I have robbed him of all these years when he could have found someone who did love him, have a real marriage with him.’ There is a tightening in her throat. ‘He could have had what Torin and I had even if I couldn’t.’

  ‘Maybe he did. Maybe you were it.’ Nicolaos picks up a pebble to throw at the lead goat. ‘How old were you when Torin died?’

  ‘Just turned eighteen. He was twenty.’

  ‘What happened?’

  After a deep breath, Sarah looks over the plain and tracks a dot that is a car tracing a tarmac curl of grey between the regimented orange groves.

  ‘We moved to the Isle of Man, him, me and Liz, his sister. I don’t know if you know this, but the island is famous for the TT races, motorbike racing on the roads.’

  ‘He was a motorcycle racer?’

  ‘No, he was selling burgers. We—Liz and I—hung around his van, which didn’t harm trade.’ She gives a little laugh, pauses as her glory day memories flood through her mind. ‘Anyway, one biker came for breakfast lunch and tea and we got to know him. Bernard, he was called. We even went for a drink with him. The last day of the races came and went, and he won some medal for something. The whole island was winding down, people leaving by the boatload. Torin’s lease on the burger van was up.’

  The sigh is so heavy, the weight of the world seems to hang in it.

  Sarah once again smells the warm heather at Creg-ny-Baa. Torin chose this sharp, notorious corner on the mountain course because here, spectators filled the car park of the double-fronted hotel that had stood back from the ninety-degree bend for decades. Wooden stands had been erected in the fields on either side for spectators to cheer and watch in fear and awe.

  ‘Here.’ Torin pulled the van into a siding just beyond the pub. He had chosen well. The stands were overflowing with hungry spectators, and Torin sent the girls searching for more frozen burgers as the regular customers came for breakfast, dinner, and tea as well as for snacks in between. They got to know some of them by name.

  But now, the races were all done and only one or two motorbikes passed, taking advantage of the roads that were still closed to traffic. The speed of these unofficial, straggling wannabes was sedate compared to the professionals of the previous days, and they were given little notice by anyone left by the course. With the fields now empty, Liz lay on her back watching the high white clouds. The heat wave continued.

  ‘I wonder how much he has made altogether,’ Liz mused. ‘It must be enough for our next move—to London.’

  She rolled on her stomach. ‘Oh look, Bernard’s back.’ The day before, Bernard had celebrated his success with bottles of beer all round, and he proudly displayed his medal to anyone who would take notice. Behind him today was a car, the driver’s window down. Bernard waved his burger at the girls and got into the car, which drove off.

  ‘I wonder why he is not on his bike. He’s staying here, isn’t he?’ She rolled over to look up at the Creg-ny-Baa hotel, where many bikes were still parked, and she could not tell if Bernard’s red Suzuki was amongst them or not.

  ‘Hey, look what Bernard forgot.’ Torin came out of the side door of the burger van jangling some keys.

  Neither Sarah nor Liz found this very interesting and neither responded. Sarah lay on her back, staring up at the blue.

  ‘Hey, look.’ Torin jangled the keys again.

  ‘So what?’ Liz said.

  ‘So, shall I?’

  Sarah turned, deciphered the look on Torin’s face, and scrambled to her feet. ‘Can I ride on the back?’

  ‘Oh guys, that’s not right.’ Liz sat up as she caught on.

  ‘Yeah, okay.’ Torin swung the keys round his finger, marching off. Liz scrabbled to her feet.

  ‘Did he say you could?’ she called after them.

  ‘Jump on, Sarah.’ Torin effortlessly straddled the bike with Sarah pulling on his jacket to clamber up behind him. With a turn of the key, there was a brief, high-pitched whine before the engine throbbed. Torin twisted the grip and a bass note vibrated up through her. She felt a thrill as if suddenly drunk. She wanted Torin, and her hands explored their grip around his waist.

  ‘Hold on,’ he shouted.

  ‘Don’t be a prat,’ Liz called, only just audible, as they were gone with speed flowing through Sarah’s hair, and the world was a wonderful place.

  They only went down the hill and back.

  ‘Right, off,’ Torin commanded as the bike ground to a halt next to Liz.

  ‘Oh why?’ Sarah wined.

  ‘I want a proper go.’ That was all he said. It was then that Sarah noticed he still had his short wrap-around apron on, smeared with grease and ketchup over a faded Megadeth t-shirt. ‘I’m going to go up to the A14 and then I’ll go down as far as the first houses in Douglas. Cheer me on when I come round this corner.’ They didn’t have time to answer as he twisted the grip and the bike shot off, one of Torin’s legs not yet on the foot rest.

  They waited ages. Liz lay down again and still, he did not come.

  ‘There is no way he could take this long to get there and back,’ Sarah said. Liz had her eyes closed. ‘Hang on. Liz wake up; here he comes.’ Liz was awake in a second, and they ran to the edge of the road with their hands in the air, cheering him on. As he came to the corner, Sarah mouthed ‘I love you’ and she saw his eyes leave the road for that moment. The back wheel of the bike juddered, left then right. His foot lifted from the rest for balance. For a moment, control was lost. Sarah exhaled as the bike stabilised.

  A car appeared from nowhere, driving with speed. Torin leaned right to corner the notorious Crag-ny-Baa. The car was coming fast, and its wheels skidded the corner. It was in Torin’s path.

  The back wheel of the bike slid. Torin leaned left an
d then right. He zig-zagged out of the car’s path. Sarah heard Liz exhale. The car passed him safely. The driver’s head was turned away from them, looking over his shoulder, back at Torin.

  The bike was screeching, unable to regain balance. The tyres descended the hill in parallel. Rubber smoke rose until the back wheel split from under him. The bike went one way and Torin the other.

  With a sickening metallic shriek, the bike slid off across the tarmac and over the bracken. Torin skidded on his back over the gravel edge of the road, up the grass incline. Speed took him into the air. He sailed clear over the barbed wire fence and behind a hillock. For that second, Sarah thought he had come to a stop there. But he bounced and, like a rag doll, arms and legs at every angle, he sailed over the stone wall beyond and was hidden from view. The green car that had stopped on the bend now accelerated away.

  ‘He’s fine,’ Sarah shouted to Liz as she started to run. He had missed both the barbed wire fence and the wall; he had been lucky. An unsolicited chuckle rose to her throat at how funny he had looked as he sailed through the air. The brief chuckle smothered her gasp for air and released sprung steel muscles around her chest. Liz did not respond. Her eyes locked, her jaw hung open, and she stood unmoving.

  Sarah thrust her way through the barbed wire fence as it tore at her jeans, gouged lines in her arms, and ripped hair from her head. ‘Torin,’ she called towards her unseen hero, ‘that was spectacular, but I think you’re going to have some bruises in the morning.’ Her laugh was loud and hollow and shrill.

  Rounding the wall end, there he was, in his ketchup-covered apron, leant up against a hillock, pretending to be dead.

  ‘Ha ha, very funny.’ She looked away from him, searching for the bike, an intense buzzing inside her ears. ‘Come on, what are we going to do about Bernard’s bike?’ And then she looked back at him and she felt cold, ice cold, and her limbs became rigid as her denial no longer fitted the scene before her. Torin’s left leg was bent back under him, his right arm at an odd angle behind his head, touching his opposite shoulder, and his eyes stared at nothing.