It was past midnight and I couldn’t sleep because my room has no window or air conditioning. I am missing brown bread and Cheddar cheese and even look forward to the autumn mists rolling over the pear tree in my mother’s garden. I made my way to the balcony to take advantage of the cool breeze. I was now working on doing things to my advantage, so I thought I would take my pillow and sheet and sleep in the open air. Obviously Alexandra and my father had got there first. They were sitting side by side on two striped deckchairs like an elderly couple perched on the edge of the shore. She was in her nightdress, he in his pyjamas. I was trapped in the corridor, not wanting to interrupt but desperate not to return to the hot spare room.
I had nowhere to go, as usual, and no money to check into a hotel. Even the cheapest fleapit would have a room with some sort of window, or the most basic air-conditioning device.
I leaned my back against the wall and discreetly watched Christos moonbathing with his bridechild.
A sort of ritual was being peformed.
Alexandra offered him a cigar from a box that was resting on her lap. He took it between his fingers, and she moved towards him with a lighter. She waited while he sucked and exhaled and when the tip was glowing under the night sky she put the lighter back into the box. It was was perhaps an act of devotion. In the distance, the Parthenon glowed on the hill.
It curves upwards, this sacred temple dedicated to Athena, supreme goddess of war. What must it have been like in the fifth century BC when worshippers gathered to pay tribute to their goddess? Did an older man and a young woman, perhaps a girl, sit side by side under the stars at midnight? Did they share sacrificial meat? Girls were married off from the age of fourteen, and their husbands were often in their thirties. Women were for sex and birth, and for spinning and weaving and lamenting at funerals. It was the women and girls who did all the mourning for the loss of kin. Their voices were higher and had more effect as they wailed and tore at their clothes. The men stood further back while the women did the expressing for them.
My problem is that I want to smoke the cigar and for someone else to light it. I want to blow out smoke. Like a volcano. Like a monster. I want to fume. I do not want to be the girl whose job it is to wail in a high-pitched voice at funerals.
A snake. A star. A cigar.
Those were some of the images and words that Ingrid told me surface in her mind when she embroiders. I walked back to my bedroom and found the silk sun-top lying on my camp bed. I had been wearing it nearly every day. It smelt of coconut ice cream and sweat and the Mediterranean sea. I decided to wash it in the bath and then take a cold shower. Evangeline was murmuring in the room next door, her window wide open so her soft, black hair trembled in the breeze.
I bent over the bath which was now full of soapy water and held the wet silk in my hands. I lifted it closer to my eyes. And then closer still.
I had misread the blue word embroidered on the yellow silk.
It was not Beloved.
I had invented a word that was not there.
Beheaded.
It was Beheaded.
To be beloved was my wish, but it was not true.
I lay flat on my back on the cool tiles of the bathroom floor. Ingrid is a seamstress. The needle is her mind. Beheaded is what she was thinking when she was thinking of me and she did not unstitch her thoughts. She gave the word to me, uncensored, inscribed in thread.
Beloved was a hallucination.
The incident with the snake and then Leonardo undermining me kept colliding with other anxious thoughts as I lay on the white tiles. My eyes were wide open while the taps dripped all night long.
History
My sister turns her face in my direction and opens her lustrous, brown eyes. She is lying across her father’s knee on the soft, blue sofa. Alexandra rests her head against his shoulder. When he cups her chin in his hand and moves her closer to his lips, I can’t help thinking he has seen this exact move in an old film with Clark Gable playing the lead and he’s trying it out. Evangeline is beloved by everyone in the room, including me. The word Beloved is like a wound. It hurts. In this sense, Beloved is not so different from Beheaded.
I have a headache, the kind of pain my mother described as a door slamming in her head. I put my hands up to my forehead and trail my fingers down to my eyes, and then I press the tips of my little fingers into my eyelids so everything is black and red and blue.
‘Have you got something in your eye, Sofia?’
‘Yes. A fly or something. Can I speak to you alone, Papa?’
Alexandra’s childish shoes are half slipping off her feet and she’s smiling at me, her braces glinting as the sun floods into their living space. That’s what it is, a living space, and I am living too intensely in their space. Alexandra now has her arm around my father’s shoulder and her fingers are in his hair. He has to disentangle himself from her girlmotherlove to speak to me alone.
We walk to my room, and he closes the door. I’m not sure what I want to say to him, but it’s something to do with needing help. I don’t know where to begin. So many years have passed in silence between us. Where shall I start? How do we begin a conversation? We would have to move around in time, the past the present and the future, but we are lost in all of them.
We are standing together in the storeroom but we are in a time warp. There is no air in this windowless room, yet the wind is up and we are in a gale. The wind is blowing hard and it is history. I have been lifted into the air, my hair is flying, my arms are stretched out towards him. This force lifts my father, too. His back is slamming against the wall, his arms are flailing.
He wants to cheat history and cheat the storm.
We are standing very still, about a foot away from each other.
I want to tell him that I am anxious about my mother and that I’m not sure I can cope any longer.
I’m wondering if he might be willing to step in.
I don’t know what ‘stepping in’ means. I could ask for financial help. I could ask him to listen while I update him on where we are now. It would take time to do that, and so I suppose I am asking for his time. Is it to his advantage to listen to me speak?
‘What is it, Sofia? What do you want to talk about?’
‘I am thinking of finishing my doctorate in America.’
He is already far away. He has shut down his eyes and his face has become tight.
‘I will need to fund my studies. I will also have to leave Rose alone in Britain. I don’t know what to do.’
He shoves his hands into the pockets of his grey trousers. ‘Do as you please,’ he says. ‘There are grants available for overseas study. As for your mother, she has chosen to live as she does. It is not my concern.’
‘I am asking for your advice.’
He steps backwards towards the closed door.
‘What shall I do, Papa?’
‘Please, Sofia. Alexandra needs to sleep because your sister is eating her alive. I need to rest, too.’
Christos. Alexandra. Evangeline.
They all need to nap.
All Greek myths are about unhappy families. I am the part of their family that sleeps on a camp bed in the spare room. Evangeline means ‘messenger of good news’. What is my news? I am looking after my father’s first wife.
I walk back with him as he makes his way to join his kin on the soft, blue sofa. I am fuming. I stare at the wall to try to become calmer. But the wall is not a clear, cool space, it is full of grinning ducks. My father is furtively looking at me as he folds himself into the sofa with his wife and daughter. He wants me to see his new, happy family from his point of view.
Look at our calm resting!
Listen to the way we do not shout!
Observe the way we all know our place!
Look at how my wife manages our needs!
My view on his family is required to be his view on his family. He would prefer me not to see them from any other point of view.
I do not see things from my father’s point of view.
Point of view is becoming my subject.
All my potency is in my head, but my head is not supposed to be the most attractive thing about me. Will my new sister make her father less uncomfortable than I do? She and I have a secret game. Every time I stroke her earlobe, she shuts her eyes. When I tickle the sole of her tiny foot she opens her eyes and gazes at me from her point of view. My father is always keen for them to all shut their eyes.
‘Time for some shut-eye’ is his favourite sentence.