Intimate Distance (11 page)

‘Why have him unbound as soon as he's born? He could hurt himself.'

Kiki croons loudly at the baby.

‘Your mother doesn't know how to look after you, does she, my golden one? Grandma will take you home soon and you'll be fine.'

‘I don't think so,' I say.

The room is very silent.

‘What do you mean?' Zoi asks.

‘I thought we could try and find a place of our own.'

‘We haven't even discussed it yet. Why bring it up now?'

‘Now is as good a time as any.'

I smile.

‘Don't you think a young couple and a baby need some space of their own?'

Kiki nods. She seems stunned. The other women sit on the bed in tacit support of her and it sags at the corners, the bedsprings creak in protest. Zoi's father asks if he can smoke if he leans out the window.

‘No.' I almost scream at him. Then I collect myself, ashamed at my reaction. ‘I'm sorry but we'd rather you didn't.'

Amazingly, Pan doesn't cry through any of this, merely continues to look about with his wide unperturbed gaze. Kiki attempts to appear industrious and bustles about the sink, fussing with the flower-wrappings, calling for a nurse to find vases, pouring whisky and handing around glasses.

‘Look, Mara,' Zoi says.

He dips his finger in his glass, moistens it and holds it to Pan's mouth. Pan slurps it up greedily.

‘See, he likes it.'

‘Zoi, don't do that. It's not good for him.'

‘Come on. It's good luck.'

Kiki spreads her hands out wide as if to encompass us all.

‘Now, now,' she says. ‘Let's not ruin this special day.'

Her voice is ringing, bright. The room is too quiet.

‘Let's cut the cake I bought instead. We can't celebrate without cake, can we?'

She croons at Pan, bustles about with the glossy box and plastic forks, handing each member of her family a perfectly folded paper napkin. The cake is an improbable confection of shaved almonds and mock cream, the icing dyed a violent blue. On top of it are piped the words in Greek,
May the beautiful boy live for us!
Kiki cuts into the calligraphy savagely, destroying the pale blue cream roses.

‘Thank you, I don't want a piece.'

I hold up my hand as Kiki stops, poised to give me a slice.

‘Really. I can't.'

She's shocked. ‘But it's for the future of your son – just a bite. For the good fortune of it. Please.'

I take the slice, nibble the corner. I'm furious at Zoi for being so ineffectual, for allowing this family of his to shatter my sense of self, trample over these precious bubbles of time. He stands at my side like the good father, the perfect image of the conventional couple, smiling, talking to this one and that with grace and ease. I distrust him for his acceptance of them, for his lack of strength
.
The rest of the family stands against the hospital walls in silence, eating their pieces of cake.

21

THEY'RE GONE. ON
every available space in the room are arrangements of flowers, the kind with silver helium balloons and signs exclaiming
It's a Boy!
in requisite powder blue. Garish colours, orange and red and yellow gerberas, those graceless blooms, impaled in florist's foam and crucified on wire, a stake through the heart of the bud. But I don't care. My eyes are closed and I'm drunk on the waves of fragrance from the heavy drooping heads of flowers.

Amber light from an oil-lamp wreaths Pan's face. Kiki placed an icon behind it; Pandeleimon, his namesake saint who bled milk and honey from his wounds when he was martyred. Shadowed eyes, a thin layer of gold leaf circling his upraised head, the metallic aura of his divinity. And Pan, lying in the crook of my arm, has for an instant turned his head toward the saint's solemn face.

Zoi and I lie on the bed, my leg over his buttock, his arm flung across my stomach. A moment. All is healed, if only for this brief white space of time. It's raining; dove-grey then silver sheeting through the city. White light outside, rain trickling through shards of sun like glass. His mouth locks onto my nipple, a drop of colostrum oozes into his body like light, the same light. Thin blood, rose-coloured, fading or brightening into white. Trickling out of brown nipples like rain.

‘Stop now. Don't waste it.'

I breathe the words. They're caught between my lips. Zoi lies back, blissful, aware only of this, the quiet pleasure, the soft low deep throbbing in my right breast. My hand cups his head at the crown, caressing the smoothness of scalp through thick hair.

22

ATHENS, 2013

ATHENS IN A
twilight hush. The café already shut down, one table remains occupied. I take a sip from my glass, my third drink after Zoi spilt the second, put it down again without having tasted what I was drinking this time. I feel his eyes on my brows, resting on my mouth, finally stopping at my eyes. The late summer wind picks up my skirt and lifts the fine hairs on my legs.

‘You don't understand, Mara. I'm bound to this place, these people –'

‘Against your will,' I finish for him. I know the routine by now.

We turn away from each other, looking out at the sea. Ferries ply out into the horizon, to islands and Levantine coasts I can only dream of now; remote shores Zoi dismisses with contempt. The last boat tips out of vision, swallowed by a trick of light. I order coffee and the reluctant waiter puts the tiny cups down with force on the white tablecloth. Zoi tries to leave after paying for the unfinished drinks.

‘See you at home. I have to go back to the hospital – I forgot some papers I'm meant to read this weekend.'

He shoves a bill into my hand.

‘Here, your taxi fare. I'll be back in about an hour.'

I nod, feel my eyes blurring, turning the street-lamps into washes of colour. He pats my arm where it rests on the table.

‘Zoi. Don't leave yet. Let's walk to the beach.'

We walk close together but don't hold hands. It's now I begin to see, like the dawning of some insurmountable storm, that I intend to leave him. That I've been planning it for weeks, if not months. It's there, the elegant certainty of it, in the silence between my words. I don't love him like that anymore. I don't love him, never loved him, only the idea of him. Yet I can't let myself think that. I still love him but something's missing. There have been too many travesties.

The sea is dark, infinite. It's easy for us to plunge into, forget ourselves in its vast illusion. I dare him to go in first, wanting to push him into proving himself. Lightning flashes messages we can't understand in the sky. I glimpse him as the sea rushes toward me in a white glare of light; he emerges close to the shore, grabs my leg, a pearl drop of water fastened on his earlobe like a baroque earring. I shed my clothes and join him, guarding against the shock of cold, but the sea is warm, familiar.

The first drops of rain fall like diamonds into the water and we float on our backs watching. Lightning comes quicker and quicker in flashes of code and thunder answers it far away from the coast of Turkey. As the rain pelts harder Zoi presses himself into me. I flail out of his grip, lurch out of the water, hiding under the trees. He chases me. I want him to look at my body, now so changed. Belly like stretched silk, a trickle of salt down my leg. I want the indelible material imprint of me to follow him when I'm gone, whether his eyes be open or closed, like the dark circle of the sun behind your eyelids when you've gazed at it too long. It's a selfish, brutal impulse, I know.

Yet when we finish our swim nothing has changed and dissatisfaction dances between us like a third person. We play at lust, touch each other lightly, tentative, but desire has been snuffed out, extinguished, consigned to memory. Zoi puts clothes back on his damp body with irritated movements, wanting to leave the empty, flat expanse of shore.

When he's gone, I sit on the pebbles for what seems like a long time. I want to go back to Pan, my body aches, my brain is filled with thoughts of his top lip, the sucking blister there, his tiny fingernails, his frown, but something keeps me here. The port glints far away in the last light and the fishing boats are bright for a moment, tossed on a sheet of water. Paper boats, makeshift jetties, improbable dolls' houses silhouetted against the hill. Large white birds crowd around with fluffed feathers, watching me with red eyes, waiting for nonexistent scraps. I realise these birds I once thought so strange, unclassifiable, foreign, are only seagulls, bigger than most, noisier than most, but only seagulls after all. I get up and they scatter and squawk to circle around me faint, then fainter, until they drop out of the sky into blackness.

When the cold of the approaching night becomes unbearable I decide to catch a taxi to the port. Part of me doesn't want to go back to the apartment yet, field Kiki's questions, chuckle over the television. I dread being in the brightly lit room, sitting on the sofa, murmuring of the weather and what we'll eat tomorrow, crossing and uncrossing my legs, shifting loudly on the plastic covering. Helping lay the table under the fluorescent bulb. Oiling the salad. Pass the lemons, Kiki says, no, don't cut it like that, this is the way, my awkward smile, Kiki's quick roll of the eye.

Pan is fine, I tell myself. He's had his fill of playing, fed my expressed milk, rocked in a sling till he's fast asleep and tucked into bed. I don't want to go back, watch Dimitri and know he feels my eyes on every angle of his simple movements; the crossing from the lounge to the fridge, the raising of the drink to the mouth, the flash of a smile thrown at me out of pity.

I walk aimlessly around the docks, stopping at lighted street corners, resting. I'm accosted by taxi-drivers and sailors. Students with placards block the main street out of Piraeus. The wind throws leaves in my path; they become caught in my hair. This strikes me as a beautiful thing. Beauty. How my life has been lacking it. Security. Yes. I begin walking faster, seized with a will to leave, to take Pan with me, to see my mother, to be safe.

I take a taxi home through narrow white streets, mouldy plaster, oblong windows with frosted panes looking out onto nothing. The apartment is silent. I check on Pan; the glass lamp in front of the icon smatters a web of light on the wall. Casting shapes shrouded, then naked, with a sudden clarity.

‘Mara.'

I pull a face. Dimitri sees it and is immediately at my side, his mouth close to mine. I can smell his breath; sour, distinctive. It reminds me of the last time we were together and I turn away.

‘What's your problem with me all of a sudden? ‘

I back away. Dimitri follows close behind, almost stepping on my heels. I wheel around and bark at him in a whisper, face distorted with the intensity of my fury.

‘Would you just leave me alone?'

He continues to follow me while I cover Pan more securely and sit on the edge of the bed.

‘What do you want, Dimitri?'

‘Nothing.' He sits down beside me, stares into my face. ‘How do you know Pan isn't mine?'

‘I don't know.'

He swallows; I can hear the saliva in his mouth in the silence.

‘I'm so sorry, Mara.'

‘So am I. And I don't know whether we should find out.'

‘No. No, Mara. Leave it as it is. You will never find anyone who loves you as much as my brother does. I told you that.'

‘Even you?'

‘Even me. I'm sorry.'

‘We're all sorry, I think. Especially your poor mother – '

The two of us begin laughing, rocking silently on the bed in twisted mirth.

‘Ssh,' I say. ‘We'll wake Pan. I can't sleep yet. Can you?'

He shakes his head. We feel our way down the corridor and he turns on the TV.

‘Turn it down. We don't want them all waking up. Imagine what they'd think.'

We collapse into another convulsion of laughter. Dimitri points. It's an old Greek movie; one of those black-and-whites with a virgin village girl, a love triangle, and a lot of dancing and singing. We've seen so many of them they're interchangeable. The young girl perches on a mountaintop and opens her mouth to sing. She's frumpy, with a headscarf and hammy makeup, but she's singing a song of our grandparents, a song of our childish dreams. Dimitri is mesmerised. He turns up the volume and murmurs beneath her voice.

I will steal all the roses, from your rose bush, to see what you will find tomorrow to place in your hair; I'll come at night time, when you're sweetly sleeping, and I will climb, slowly, slowly, all the stairs
…looking at me, his face beaming. He sings the word
s slowly, slowly
for a long while in Greek, pausing for emphasis before the next phrase, wiggling his finger. He prances around the room mouthing the words, skidding on the marble floor, holding his arms out.

‘No, they'll hear us.'

But his enthusiasm is too infectious. Soon I'm dancing, singing to him as we twirl around and around, hair blinding me, pyjamas flapping about his legs, stepping on each other's bare toes.

There's a third voice there, coming from the shadows of the hall. We fall apart from each other. Zoi emerges into the whitish light of the TV screen, arms folded across his chest. He's singing brokenly, singing off-key with a frown on his face.

And from your pot plant, so that you remember me, I will steal the slyest, and the smallest rose.

He stops midway, before the village girl does.

‘See, Mara. I can do it too.'

With that he turns and leaves us together in the flare of the screen.

 

Epilogue

SYDNEY, LATE SPRING 2017

THESE MORNINGS I
often wake early, before my mother and Pan. Today I wake even earlier, when the sun is a mere pearl glow behind the roofs of houses. Zoi's flight has just taken off and I didn't go with him to the airport. He decided to leave a week early. He didn't stay to help me. Part of me understands this, and forgives him. But I feel so bereft. I stand by the window and look up at the sky. It's Pan's first day at preschool. I arrange his bag on the kitchen counter: drink bottle, lunchbox, face-washer, a clean T-shirt and shorts, just in case.