Songbirds(62)

Seraphim clicked his fingers. A sound so sharp that I turned to face him. A waitress glided towards us with an empty silver tray.

‘Two whiskies, my dolly,’ he said.

‘No, I don’t want to drink.’

He ignored me.

‘I was with her last night,’ he said, flicking his eyes towards the woman sitting with the old men. ‘She’s lovely.’

I looked away. His face was making me feel sick.

‘You’ve been jittery lately,’ he said. ‘I hope you’re well.’

He didn’t hope I was well. He hoped I wasn’t bailing out. I’d heard him say the exact same thing to Louis before they’d burnt down his car – with his son in it.

The waitress returned with two glasses of whisky. She placed them on the table, one for me, one for Seraphim.

‘Go on,’ he said, ‘you look like you need it.’

I downed the whole glass without flinching, just to get the damn thing out of the way. ‘Seraphim,’ I said, ‘I miss Nisha, and I need to know what happened to her. Two people have confirmed that she was coming to meet you here the night she went missing. Please. Tell me what happened that night.’

I didn’t know how else to put it. I could hear the desperation in my voice, see my pathetic self in his eyes.

He glared at me. He smiled. Deep lines around his mouth.

‘This is the problem with being in love,’ he said. ‘It always creates a mess, and I like to keep things tidy, if you know what I mean?’

‘So she came to see you?’ I persisted.

He glanced around, over his shoulder. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘I don’t like talking about these things in public. How about we go to mine, have a drink there?’

He downed his whisky and stood up before I replied. He left some notes on the bar, winked at the barmaid and I followed him outside and along the street to his car.

We got into his Jaguar, doors opening like wings. The interior, soft leather. He had a top-of-the-range sound system and the engine purred like a tiger. I turned my face towards the window as he goosed the gas pedal and we flew into the night.

*

I’d never been inside Seraphim’s house before. It was a gated, white monstrosity with pillars and blue-tinted windows that looked like the sky. It was on a hill and looked down on the Famagusta Gate. It seemed to jut out of the earth at a strange angle; it reminded me of a huge cruise liner on a choppy sea.

When we stepped into the living room, a maid was standing on a chair in the middle of the room. She looked like she was in her fifties, a short woman with enormous breasts that she seemed to be carrying like an extra weight. A few lamps were on in the room and she was cleaning the chandelier – a huge crystal eyesore. When she saw us, she climbed down and turned on the main light. The crystals shimmered, the light sending thousands of orbs around the room.

‘I have finished, sir,’ she said, looking at Seraphim.

‘Good girl. Did you do all the other things on the list?’

She nodded.

‘You didn’t leave anything out like last time?’

‘No, sir.’

‘OK, go and get us some nuts and a couple of whiskies. Put them in the back room.’ He turned to me and said, ‘You should always keep your lights clean.’

The maid gathered her cleaning supplies and shuffled out of the room.

‘We have a dinner party tomorrow – my niece is christening her first child and the whole family is coming here. My wife is probably in bed. Let’s go to the garage, we can talk privately in there,’ Seraphim said.

We walked through a hallway of white marble – it was everywhere: the floors, the walls. Vivid paintings lined the walls, so extraordinary they were almost alive. Images of Troodos, orchards, streams, farms. One in particular grabbed my attention: an old man with a white goatee, large hands and black trousers, a deep crease in his brow, carrying what looked like a bag of wool across a field.

‘Is that—?’

‘Yes,’ Seraphim said behind me.

‘Why?’

‘These are my memories.’

I looked at the man’s face more closely, remembering my grandfather. I could almost smell the funk of sheep coming off him. Then I noticed the background, the landscape stretching out behind him, green and luscious with vegetation, but down in the valley a fire, raging, and threatening to grow and expand up the hills. There had never been a fire like this as far as I could recall.

‘Why is there a fire?’ I asked.

‘It’s the war,’ he said, matter-of-factly. ‘And other things.’

‘What other things?’

‘The things that threaten all that is natural and beautiful and right with the world.’

It was then that I noticed for the first time a sadness in his expression. It reminded me of Seraphim as a boy, before the rifles, before the black crow. Something came back to me, a boy with sad eyes standing on the trunk of a fallen tree, pretending it was a mountain, saying, ‘Look down there, Yiannis!’

The past echoed along the corridor. Seraphim placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘Now take a look at this one,’ he said.

The next painting was simply of an apple tree full of ripe fruit, a blue sky behind it. Bright greens, yellows and blues contrasted with shadows of deep red and purple.