Songbirds(14)

In a moment it stopped. But not even ten seconds later, it began to ring again and once more I could do nothing but stand there, imagining the little girl on the other end, waiting eagerly to speak to her mother.





8

Petra

T

HE NEXT MORNING, AS SOON as the cockerel started to crow, I made myself some tea and toast and went to Nisha’s room. I looked around, without knowing what I was searching for. Her makeup was on the dressing table, neatly lined up. The brushes sparkled with rouge. Then I noticed a journal and, resting on top of it, a gold engagement ring. I had never seen her wearing this before – it was simple, with a decent sized diamond in a raised clasp. I placed the ring on the dresser and opened the journal. On the first page was a rough sketch of the garden – there was the boat and the orange tree. The rest of the pages were full of writing in Sinhalese.

In the drawer of her bedside cabinet, I found a gold locket. It was heart shaped and inside were two, roughly cut out photographs – one of her, and one of a young man. She never wore this locket but sometimes, in the evenings, when she sat down to rest and watch TV, she held it tightly in her palm or coiled the gold chain around her finger, like a Christian would their rosary.

In another drawer, I found a lock of hair.

‘That’s my Sri Lankan sister’s hair.’ I turned and Aliki stood in the doorway. ‘Her name is Kumari. She is two years older than me – she’s eleven.’ She stared at me. ‘Did you know that?’

‘Not really,’ I said. It occurred to me that I had never bothered to ask about her daughter, about what she looked like, what she was like, how she was doing without her mother by her side. When did Nisha even speak to Kumari?

The lock of hair was in a clear plastic bag, the type you might keep coins in to take to the bank.

‘But my hair is curly and hers is straight.’

I nodded.

‘That is a locket that Nisha’s husband gave her before he died. He is inside that heart. She would never, ever leave without him.’

So, these were Nisha’s most precious possessions.

None of Nisha’s clothes or shoes were missing. She owned three handbags, but only two were there, lined up at the bottom of her wardrobe. Her reading glasses were resting on her pillow. Her bed was neatly made, the covers folded at the corners meticulously.

Turning around to ask Aliki a question, I realised that she had slipped out of the room. Probably gone to make herself some breakfast.

There was a small antique desk by the glass doors and when I opened the top drawer, I found her passport. At this point I sat down on the chair, I was so confused. A part of me had hoped that I wouldn’t find these items, particularly the passport. I wanted to believe that Nisha had taken off somewhere – and that would mean she was safe. But, if she had, why would she leave her passport? The locket? I opened the journal again and ran my fingers over the foreign words, the beautiful lines that ran along the paper like the vines in the garden. I wished I could read it, hoping it would give me some clue to Nisha’s whereabouts.

She had simply vanished.

I took the locket and held it tightly in a closed fist, like Nisha did when she watched TV. It reminded me of Aliki’s tiny heart, during the last ultrasound I had had when I was pregnant, before going into labour.

Stephanos hadn’t been there. He had been an army officer and worked at the British base, which was why we had decided to stay here – in my parents’ house – after we got married. Stephanos was a British Cypriot, born in Islington, raised in Edmonton. His parents moved to London as refugees after the war. He’d enlisted in the army in England, but one summer he came to Cyprus to stay with relatives and we met and fell in love. After that he requested to be transferred here. The British still have a base in Cyprus, a remnant of their occupation of the island until its independence in 1960.

It was convenient for him to get to work, as he could walk there in ten minutes, or drive in two. By that time, Mum had already passed away and Dad had moved to a small flat in the mountains, so we moved into this beautiful Venetian property in the old city – the house I had grown up in.

It belonged to my dad’s aunt, and for a few years, when I was between the ages of five and seven, she lived above us, where Yiannis now lives. I remembered her as a tiny, pretty, old lady, with silver hair, which she always wore in a net. She used to sit in the garden and crochet tablecloths, curtains, wedding dresses and veils. She told me stories about the beginning of time and the end of time, her hands always busy. She told me once that she was buying time, that she would work until she was ready to leave this world and reunite with the man she loved – my father’s uncle, who had died fighting for the British in the Second World War.

Stephanos was diagnosed with cancer when I was five weeks pregnant with Aliki. It travelled from his prostate, to his bones, to his liver. He went from a man leaving the house in his military gear every morning, a man who ran laps around the old city in the evenings, a man who made me laugh till I burst, into a . . . something. Something shrivelled, not human. Something not alive and not dead. A creature; a tiny, dying bird.

Aliki continued to grow. She grew and she grew like a fruit on a tree, like a plump fig, growing and expanding my insides till I was ready to burst. She writhed and wriggled and pushed, and that’s when the idea of an octopus came to me.

By the time of the mid-pregnancy ultrasound, Stephanos was bed-bound. I promised to bring him the scan to see. He hoped, he’d said, that Aliki would be as beautiful as me. He had chosen her name. When he spoke like that, looking right into my eyes, I knew that he was still there. But then I would take in the rest of him; how alien he looked – bones crumbling, spine twisted, neck bent forward like a vulture’s – and I had a feeling that I wanted to melt away. I wanted to disappear into him, into his eyes, so that I could rest inside him and hold on to his soul. I began to see his eyes like tiny doors, leading to the man that I had always known. I would wait for him to wake up each morning, sitting by his side in the hospital. I would look at this shrivelled form on the bed, wired up to machines, and wait for those doors to open. When his eyes closed forever, I’d lose him completely.