Songbirds(58)

‘What about Kumari?’ I said. ‘Won’t she be trying to contact her mother? The girl must be beside herself with worry now, if she hasn’t heard from her.’

‘Nisha used to speak to Kumari at my place.’

I nodded, not knowing what to say, feeling ashamed that I had not known this.

‘I’ve spoken to Kumari,’ he continued. ‘I’m trying not to worry her too much until we know more.’

I nodded again, concerned.

‘Leave it with me,’ he said. ‘Kumari knows me. I’ll deal with it.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘At least we can agree that she was heading in the direction of Maria’s.’

‘Yes. That is one thing, at least.’ But it felt like nothing. ‘Can’t we check her bank account,’ I said, ‘to see if money has been taken from it?’

‘It’s not possible to check her account without the police.’

He offered me another coffee, but I declined. I had left Aliki alone and I needed to make dinner; it would be getting dark soon.

‘Listen,’ I said, as I headed to the kitchen door, ‘this guy – Tony – he’s going to call me to arrange a meeting with the employer and the sister of the other missing women. Would you come with me?’

‘Of course,’ he said, immediately. ‘Thank you, Petra.’

‘Thank you, too,’ I said.

As I walked back down the stairs, my feet were heavy and I felt tears begin to well in my throat. I wasn’t ready to face Aliki yet – I didn’t want her to know I had been crying – so I made my way over to the abandoned rowing boat and got in. Clutching my sweater around me, I sat on the rough wooden plank and thought about the day that Nisha had first arrived from Sri Lanka.

It was spring, a week after Stephanos had died; I was thirty-two weeks pregnant. I had prayed that he would live to meet our baby. Before his illness, I’d envisioned our future like a storybook: we would have a beautiful garden full of fruit and flowers; Stephanos was going to build a small BBQ out of brick, on the far right by the cactus; we would have two children. We’d made these plans before I even got pregnant. If someone had told me then that soon my only hope would be that my husband would live long enough to see his only child just once, I would never have believed them. We didn’t understand how bad things would get: neither of us had any experience with cancer. We had assumed that things would be tough for a while, and then return to normal. Treatment. Remission. Like so many others.

Then, one day, I had had to carry my husband to the car. With the help of a neighbour, we lifted him into the seat and we drove in silence to the hospital. My husband’s eyes were yellow and his hands black, and we carried him, twelve months pregnant with bile, over the threshold to no man’s land.

That Christmas Eve, when he could not lift his arms or his eyelids or his lips to smile, I kissed him. I fed him and brushed his hair and filled the creases around his eyes with cream, then I folded the white sheet beneath his chin and tucked it in around his bones and waited for him to say, ‘I’m here.’

He lay in his faeces with a catheter and a keepsake from the church, and drank soup through a straw. He had no voice and no hope and no more days left.

After he was gone, a blur of people came. My mother was still alive in those days and she and my father would turn up together, at any time of the day, with shopping bags and oven-dishes of warm moussaka – which they knew was my favourite. They tried so hard to keep me from sinking. Later, after my mother’s fatal stroke, my father bought a boat and moved to Greece, finding his solace on the sea where he always belonged.

Friends and neighbours visited. They would ring the door-bell, come and go like ghosts. I had hot food and hot cups of tea. They tried to keep the house tidy. They made sure I ate and bathed and slept. They brought gifts for the baby: yellow gifts – candy yellow, sunshine yellow. Life-before-death yellow. Stephanos and I had chosen the room facing the orange tree for the nursery, so that’s where I stored the gifts in a pile, like a castle, on top of a changing table.

I drifted through it all, but I was not there. My mind was stuck in the life we had planned; it could not fathom this new reality. All the evidence was that Stephanos was still there. His clothes and military gear were in the wardrobe. His aftershave and cufflinks on the dressing table. His razor by the sink in the bathroom. The canister of his shaving foam still had froth on its tip. His hair was still in the comb. His shoes in the wardrobe. Our bed still held his smell.

Nisha arrived soon after. She was dropped off by the agent’s representative. She had one small suitcase and copper eyes. She wore a black dress, the material too fine for the cold weather. She stood by the door behind the agency woman, looking around, then her eyes settled on me. The woman – Koula or Voula – wore a grey suit and had a blonde bob and was talking, but I wasn’t really listening. I remember signing the contract on the dining table, while Nisha stood watching by the door.

‘You’ve got a good one,’ the woman said. ‘She speaks English. My girl is from Nepal and doesn’t know a word. It’s a nightmare, I’ll tell you.’

Thankfully, that was the end of the conversation.

When the woman left, I showed my girl to her room. She put her suitcase down by the bed and asked me if she could open the blinds. For the first time in a long time, the sun came in.