Swimming to Ithaca (34 page)

She doesn’t respond, just looks out of the window at walls scrawled with lurid slogans and indecipherable tags, daubed with fists and faces. ‘It’s not so bad, you know. This place, I mean. It’s all right.’

‘I never said it wasn’t.’

‘It’s genuine, the people are genuine.’

‘Genuine what?’

She shrugs. ‘Genuine poor.’ The lights change and they move on. ‘Is that bathos? I read that word “bathos”, but couldn’t really get it.’

‘It’ll do.’

She nods and lights another cigarette. ‘Good to know I’m making progress.’

They slow down to pass a street market – clothes mainly, racks of dresses shrouded in polythene – where people stare in through the windows of the car as though they are intruders from another continent. A woman recognizes Kale and waves. ‘Just a friend,’ she explains, as though it might have been an enemy. Beyond the market they turn past a newsagent and an Afro-Carib restaurant, past a pub with graffiti on its walls and last night’s vomit on the pavement, and finally they reach an anonymous road of jerry-built housing from the nineteen-fifties. He parks the car where Kale indicates, in front of a block of flats with balconies and steel-framed windows overlooking the road. There are no doors. The doors are all inside, through tunnels, up staircases, like a medieval fortress barricaded against the world.

Kale gets out of the car. Thomas has a feeling of loss, the understanding that if he does let her slip away she will be back in this strange world for ever, like an animal returned to the wild. ‘What about next weekend?’ he asks. ‘I tell you what – we could go to my mother’s house.’ He turns to Emma, who is emerging from her sleep, her face crumpled and unsmiling. ‘Emma would like that, wouldn’t you?’

‘Will Linda be there?’

‘Just the three of us, at the seaside. There are boats and seagulls and things.’

‘I don’t want it if Linda’s not there.’

He turns back to Kale, as though for adjudication. ‘What about it?’

‘Maybe.’ She looks at him thoughtfully, her mouth twisted. He knows the answer now: can you feel the little shreds of skin where she has nibbled? You can’t. It’s all painless, without any damage. ‘What you said back there. Did you mean it?’

‘Of course I did.’

She nods. ‘Puts me in a sort of awkward position, doesn’t it?’

‘And me.’

She turns to undo Emma’s seatbelt and help her out of the car. ‘Come on, Emms. Let’s go and see how Gran is.’

‘Will you be in college this week?’ he asks.

She glances round. ‘Of course I will.’

From a third-floor window a face peers out through grimy net curtains as though to view the progress of their conversation. Is that Kale’s mother? The word ‘mother’ means two things to him – other people’s mothers, mere pieces of biology; and his own mother, on whom he was once some kind of parasite and who now lives, parasitically, in his own mind. What would she have thought of this place, of this mother called Kale and her child, now crossing the turd-littered grass into the shadows of a urine-scented archway? Her short skirt and pale legs, her jacket with
GLAMOUR
across the shoulders. What would she have thought of his confession of love?

‘See you,’ Kale calls.

Has she gone for good? Part of him poses the question objectively, as a point of academic interest as he drives across the city back to his flat; another part of him feels that dreadful sickening of loss, something akin to bereavement, anguish and misery coupled with anger. She loves him or she does not love him. The choice is hers. Or rather, it is not even a matter of choice but of some subtle work of chemistry and circumstance. Certainly it is beyond his powers of influence.

He opens the street door to his apartment. There’s the familiar
smell of disinfectant and damp in the hallway, the familiar sight of the bicycle belonging to number 2A propped against the wall and the pram from number 3A tucked under the stairs. The light switch fires a relay and sends current up the stairwell to dim and dusty light bulbs on each floor. Climbing the stairs, he thinks of his mother and of Kale, of memory and forgetting and the fragile borderline between the two. In the future will Emma remember him as he may or may not have remembered Nicos? Will he stay lodged in her adult memory and will she try to make sense of his presence there? Or will he just be consigned to a scrap heap of forgetfulness, along with dozens of other men who have lain, briefly, with her mother?

On the fourth floor he struggles with his keys and discovers, with surprise, that his front door, armoured and reinforced, with bolts that sink into lintels and jamb, opens on the first turn of the main key. He pushes the door open cautiously, Kale momentarily forgotten. Did he forget to lock the place up properly? Or has someone broken in? He steps in, fearing the chaos of a break-in, doors flung open, clothes strewn all over, cupboards emptied, drawers tossed on the floor, electronic equipment vanished. There’s noise coming from the living room. Someone’s there. Tapping, and the sound of footsteps and music. He turns the handle and opens the door, prepared for flight or fight, or anything in between.

‘Is that you, Dad?’

Phil. It’s Phil, sitting on the sofa with his back to the door and his computer plugged like a parasite into the television across the room.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’

‘Been here since yesterday.’

‘Yesterday?’

‘Yes, yesterday.’ There’s a little man on the screen, a cartoon figurine moving back and forth through a maze of tunnels and caverns. For the moment there’s no way out. The word PAUSE
appears and the figure freezes. The boy turns with that wary, belligerent look. ‘It was my weekend with you, Dad.’

Thomas closes his eyes and sits heavily on the sofa beside his son. ‘Oh Jesus. I’m sorry, mate.’

Phil shrugs. ‘It doesn’t matter. Forget it.’ PAUSE vanishes. The little figure on the screen goes back to searching, his feet splashing through puddles, the inane repetitive music following him round on his quest.

‘I’m really sorry, Phil.’

‘Forget it, Dad. I’m concentrating.’

‘Why didn’t you ring?’

‘I didn’t know where you were, did I?’

‘I was at Aunt Paula’s.’

‘How was I to know that?’

‘Well, you could have tried her number.’

The manikin has found a hidden lever. Along the bottom of the screen it says ‘walk to’, ‘push’, ‘pull’, ‘give’ and half a dozen other functions you need for life. There’s even ‘talk to’, but there’s no one to speak with at the moment and so that option is conveniently greyed out. ‘Pull’ is the command that Phil selects for the lever, and immediately the wall of the cave opens. Some mechanism inside the computer whirrs and clicks. The manikin is no longer in the cave but in an open room where there’s a single window, a single table and a single exit. Nothing else. A pistol lies on the table. ‘Yeah!’ the boy exclaims.

‘Why didn’t you phone your mother?’

‘She’d have gone ballistic, Dad. You know that.’

‘Yes, but here all by yourself—’

‘It’s all right. Really.’

‘What have you been doing all the time?’

‘Playing.’

‘What did you eat? Did you find things? Tell you what.’ He moves closer to his son and makes an attempt to put an arm
round his shoulders. ‘Hey, can I join you? We’ll get a Chinese, have some fun.’

‘You get bored, Dad, you know that. And I had a Chinese last night. Oh yeah, I said you’d pay them later so you’d better not forget
that
.’ The manikin has picked up the gun. ‘Pistol’ it says at the bottom of the screen, to go along with ‘old book’ and ‘whip’ and other arcane possessions. ‘You were with a girl, weren’t you?’

Thomas hesitates. ‘Yes, I was. She’s called Kale.’

‘And is she the real thing?’

‘I think so, yes.’

The manikin has begun searching for the way out of the room. He could try the door, but the window looks more attractive. ‘You always say that,’ says Phil.

T
he class is discussing interpretations of history – the Whig interpretation, the Marxist interpretation, modernist and post-modernist interpretations. They are all there, the motley collection of androgynous youth, the jeans and the trainers, the sloganed T-shirts and the glowing shalwar-kameez, and, next to that, Kale in her tight denim skirt and the jacket that says
GLAMOUR
across the shoulders. ‘What d’you mean, “interpretation”?’ Eric asks, in that nasal way he has. ‘Isn’t there just what happened?’

Thomas catches Kale’s eye. She holds his gaze for a moment before glancing down at her notes. ‘There are differing views of what history means,’ he explains. ‘Historians try to understand what went on as well as just record the events.’

‘I don’t think it means anything. I think it just was. Chaos, like. History’s just the pattern we make out of things after they’ve happened.’

‘That,’ Thomas says with a little smile of triumph, ‘is precisely what I mean. It’s an artificial construct developed after the event in order to explain what happened.’

She stays behind after the class breaks up, sorting things in her bag, waiting while the others leave. She seems smaller than he remembers. How ridiculous, that memory can be so deceptive, even giving someone physical stature they do not in fact possess.

‘What you said on Sunday,’ she says, looking up at him. ‘Do you still mean it?’

‘Of course.’

She nods. ‘I’ve been thinking. Maybe love is like history. Maybe it’s an artificial construct developed after the event in order to explain what happened.’

He can’t help but laugh. ‘It’s more real than that. It changes things. History never changed anything.’

‘Changes for better or worse?’

‘How do I know? That depends on your response.’

‘Difficult, isn’t it? Confusing.’

‘How about some lunch? Maybe we can sort it out.’

‘ ’Fraid I can’t. I’ve got to get back.’ She picks up her bag and slings it over her shoulder, making for the door.

‘What about next weekend …?’

She pauses in the doorway. ‘I’m not sure …’

‘Like I said, I thought we could go to my mother’s house. Just the three of us. Emma’ll enjoy it. You know she will.’

‘I’ll give you a ring,’ she says. ‘Let you know.’

From his office window he looks down on the grey concourse and the bright figure crossing it. Even at that distance he can see the shape of her legs, the sway of her hips, the slight toss of her head as she acknowledges something said to her by the man on the gate.

He watches her on to the traffic island in the centre of the road, willing her to look the correct way, left, the word spelled out there in white letters at her feet. How absurd that a portion of his whole well-being is invested in that small figure out there among the traffic and the anonymous crowds, travelling to a part of the city that he doesn’t understand, has barely visited, thinks of as a foreign country. She appeared one day in his class, and smiled at him, and said, ‘Cognate with cabbage, you’re thinking,’ a phrase that seemed witty and perceptive at the time, and she slept with him speculatively, as they do these days, and now she hesitates on the kerb, like Persephone pausing on the edge of the upper world before stepping into the unknown. She glances left, pauses for a double-decker bus to rush past, then crosses safely to the other side. The contingent event avoided.

Never get yourself on the wrong side of an unequal relationship, that’s what his father warned him. But you can’t legislate about it. You can’t choose your moment of fall.

Sitting at his desk, he tries to replace her image with quotidian tasks, checking over some lecture notes, giving a desultory glance at a pile of student essays, going through his mail. There are a dozen letters, from journals, from acquaintances, an invitation to attend a conference in Bratislava in the autumn, a call for papers for another the following year. And one with a Cyprus stamp and postmark.

Dear Professor Denham.

Thank you for your letter inquiring for informations concerning a certain Nicos or Nikolaos Kyprianou. After exhaustive enquiries in a number of archives (I append detail), I am confirming that a man of the same name and occupation (a former taxi driver, resident in
Limassol) was a member of the EOKA organization from at least 1958. It seems that he spent some time in British detention in that year for possession of firearms, but was released in the amnesty that followed the settlement of 1959. Records show that he was afterwards killed in action against Turkish irregular forces (TMT) in the Kokkina enclave in August 1964. There is some evidence that he was killed in air strikes by aircraft of the Turkish Air Force. I enclose a document that I found in the national archive which relates to the man in question that may be of interest. I hope these informations are of use to you, and take the opportunity to convey my greetings and assurance that I am at your disposition for any further works in this or related areas.

Yours faithfully,

Costas Nicolaides, Professor.

Department of History,

University of Cyprus.

enc.

The enclosure is a photocopy of a military document: ‘147 Field Security Section’, it says at the top, with the date 12th May 1958. The title is in bold:
SUSPECTS, EOKA, LIMASSOL AREA
, and across one corner there is a faint stamp: the single word
RESTRICTED
. Below the title are photographs of three men, each with a brief biographical sketch. One of the photos shows
Nicos – it’s a mug shot that might have been taken for a passport, but it’s clearly recognizable as the youth posing beside his mother in that photograph.
Nikolaos Kyprianou
, it says beneath.
Part educated in England and speaks English almost like a native
.
Strong London accent
.

Thomas shrugs. So what? So nothing. Just a fact. The man called Nick, the man in the snapshot with his mother, the man called Kyprianou, the Cyprian, the man he vaguely recalls for the hollowness of his cheeks and the slicked quiff of his hair, was a member of EOKA. What does that mean? Maybe it matters, maybe it doesn’t. History is full of that kind of thing, facts that you give weight to, incidents that you blow out of all significance.