One Core Belief E-Book

Amanda Apthorpe

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Delfi Kazan dreams of living in Athens and starring in her favourite soap opera on Greek regional television, but confined to a small island and caring for her widowed father, there’s little chance of ever being discovered by talent scouts.

That is, until an arranged marriage with Nikolas – a handsome engineer based in Athens and heir to the popular Hestia’s Taverna on a nearby tourist island - keeps her dreams alive. But Nikolas is still reeling since his fiancé, Linda, left him, and he has lost the passion for the Athenian life.

Deflated, he returns to the family home and Hestia’s Taverna, and acquiesces to his mother’s insistence that he marry a Greek girl, but his heart is not in it. Rather than treading the red carpet, Delfi finds herself peeling potatoes under the critical eye of her mother-in-law, and the disinterested glances of her husband.

An offer, a seduction could provide her with a way out. But can she reach her dreams?

Leseprobe

ONE CORE BELIEF

AMANDA APTHORPE

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Acknowledgement

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About the Author

Copyright (C) 2021 Amanda Apthorpe

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2021 by Next Chapter

Published 2021 by Next Chapter

Edited by India Hammond

Cover art by CoverMint

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

For Chris, my champion

They were different and yet there was something, a core that they shared, a belief in the significance of love, of family and of belonging.

INTRODUCTION

Delfi’s aim was off. The potato peeling had missed the inside of the bucket and was now stuck to its exterior. She shook the water from her hands and began to dry them on her apron, pausing to take in the effect of its pale shape against the black plastic. She cocked her head and had to stifle a laugh when she realised that the peel had formed an unflattering cameo of her mother-in-law, Evangelina. She turned back to the sink, scrubbing the potatoes with renewed vigour, her shoulders trembling under the weight of her suppressed laughter. From behind her, she heard determined steps on the slate floor and the click of Evangelina’s tongue against the roof of her mouth. Delfi set her shoulders in soft defiance and scoured the potatoes with brutal force. From the corner of her eye, she saw her mother-in-law bend to the bucket. She waited for the reproach, but the older woman seemed to be deep in reverie and merely extracted the peel and, without a word, returned to the small storeroom at the rear of the taverna. Delfi was intrigued and wondered what Evangelina would do with it. She would like to think that she would keep it to laugh over later with Josef as they sipped ouzo between the lunch and dinner trades. But Evangelina didn’t drink, nor did she sit companionably with her husband, and she would certainly not store the cameo for a laugh, but as further evidence of her daughter-in-law’s shortcomings.

Nikolas angled the box of tomatoes through the doorway of the second storeroom. Soon, he resolved, he would widen the door’s frame when he found the time. He set the box onto the floor and began to straighten the kinks out of his back. His perspective from the rear of the taverna spanned the indoor and outdoor tables to the sea. The morning sun had just risen over the eastern peninsula, the opposite prong of the island’s horseshoe, and was already shedding white light. His mother and father would be happy, he thought, as the warmer the day, the more tourists came. For Nikolas, though, as he stood with his hands resting on his hips, it was enough to just take in the beauty of the moment.

In the shadowy space to his left, Delfi was peeling potatoes, striking at them with a murderous intent. He smiled at the sight of his wife’s solid frame, the ample curves accentuated by the apron’s ties at her waist. He could go to her, quietly, and surprise her. He would part the thick coil of her hair and kiss the white of her neck. He imagined himself cupping her voluminous breasts. She would turn to him as she did in the privacy of their bedroom and…Delfi threw a peeling at the bucket against the wall. It missed but stuck to its exterior. She shook the water from her hands and began to dry them and, just when Nikolas thought she would remove it, she seemed to reconsider and turned back to the sink, every now and then glancing at the bucket. Nikolas thought he could see her shoulders trembling. His mother appeared from the other storeroom. At sixty-five, Evangelina was still nimble. The calves beneath her apple-shaped torso were strong and she could outpace most. Nikolas knew that Evangelina had seen the transit of the potato peel, and he waited to see what would happen next. Delfi had not moved, and he could tell that her shoulders were braced. Evangelina stood at the bucket, seemingly transfixed. When she bent to pluck off the peel, Nikolas envisaged her next move—to place it with a clear statement of displeasure inside. Instead, she kept it in her hand and returned to the storeroom without a word. Nikolas saw Delfi’s shoulders relax, and she began to hum a popular tune and sway her substantial hips in time with its tempo. The sight of his young bride, the sound of the waves as they retracted through the pebbles on the shore, and the warmth of the rising sun stirred Nikolas and his pleasure ran like warm honey through his body.

Evangelina was not having a good morning. She had risen, as usual, at four thirty in plenty of time for Mass. It was a ritual she had maintained since her youth when she would accompany her mother and grandmother to the chapel in their village on the island of Skosias. This morning, she had called in to see Sophie, as she did every day, and found the old woman still in her bed with a heavy cold. Though Evangelina was anxious to get on her way, she was reluctant to leave her and called Sophie’s daughter who lived just a twenty-minute drive away. Evangelina could have left but chose to wait. When the daughter arrived one hour later, her displeasure oozed into the space between them. Evangelina hurried to the Chapel of The Dormition of Our Lady but was too late. The Mass was halfway through, and she would not be seen to be tardy. Instead, she stood outside, out of view beneath the window, and gave her own salutations to Theotókos, Mother of God.

Evangelina’s relationship with Mary the Mother of God was deep. They shared certain traits—unwavering faith and a tolerance for the shortcomings of their human husbands. In sentimental moments, Evangelina could see the very strong resemblance between the two men. Her Josef, too, was kind and gentle and had kept a donkey in the early years of their marriage. The strongest connection between the two women, though, was their love for their sons. Of course, Evangelina would not assume that she knew the depth of Mary’s grief, but she had her own worries.

Feeling incomplete without the Communion wafer, Evangelina had made her way to the taverna. Between work, family and her commitment to the church and her neighbours, Evangelina would reflect that her life was full, or partly so because there was still special room left for grandchildren, a prospect that might now finally come to fruition. For many years she had despaired that Nikolas would never find a suitable bride. Despite her strong belief in the intervention of God, she was no longer willing to wait for an answer to her prayers and had taken matters into her own hands.

Though she had left her own island many years ago when she married Josef, Evangelina returned often to visit her family. While there twenty-one years ago, her second cousin’s niece Delfinia was born on the feast of the Assumption. Evangelina had mentally marked the day as portentous and had tucked the knowledge away in her heart for a rainy day. When Nikolas came back home to live, at forty and without a wife, Evangelina produced her trump card. Surprisingly, her son was receptive to the idea of marriage but, in retrospect, his agreement was too passive. Though the girl, Delfinia, was only eighteen, she agreed. Evangelina had no doubt that she would. Her son was a catch—handsome, intelligent, gentle and kind. But lately, she was beginning to suspect that the young Delfinia was shrewd, if not calculating. Nikolas was, after all, the heir to Hestia’s Taverna, a better prospect than on offer from the local boys of her island.

In the little storeroom, Evangelina prepared the kalamari and sardines for the grill. The morning sun was already white and so, with experienced calculation, she took out an extra two handfuls of each from the salted water. It was messy and smelly work and, for that reason, was done away from the dining tables. Eventually, Evangelina would hand this work over to her daughter-in-law, but for the moment, she gave her the simpler jobs. Customers seemed to like the domestic touch of the preparation at the sink inside the taverna. They could see that their potatoes, aubergines and salads were freshly prepared, though the gutting of fish was another matter.

As Evangelina turned to the container to pull out another ‘just in case’ handful of sardines, through the open door to the taverna, she saw something fly from Delfinia’s hand to the bucket placed at a ridiculous and impractical distance from the sink. Evangelina waited for her daughter-in-law to retrieve the offending waste that had adhered to the outside of the bucket, but Delfinia stood stubbornly at the sink cocking her head this way and that. In the wake of Sophie’s daughter’s tardiness that morning, Evangelina had had enough of the younger generation of women who, in her mind, were lazy and spoilt. This included her own daughter, Elektra, but Evangelina was in no mood to think about her today. She threw aside the towel she kept solely for wiping fishy hands and strode purposefully behind Delfinia to the bucket. As she bent to retrieve the peel, she paused to take in its effect against the black plastic. Inwardly she gasped when she realised that she was face to face with a perfect image of the Mother of God in profile. Gently, Evangelina lifted it off, careful not to distort the holy shape, and returned to the storeroom with the relic softly enclosed in her palm.

Josef was oblivious to the goings on inside his taverna, though this was not unusual. He disliked tension and, although he was fond of his young daughter-in-law, the atmosphere between her and Evangelina was too much for him on most days. He would hear about it later anyway, on the way home in the truck. In the five-minute drive, Evangelina would unleash her frustrations with the girl—the irregularity of the potatoes, the density of the baklava, tables left for too long before being cleared—pausing only to make the sign of the cross as they drove past the church. Evangelina would give him a look, but Josef explained, every time, that to take his hands from the wheel to cross himself would put their lives at risk and he was certain that Theotókos, the Mother of Jesus, would not want that. Josef had no interest in the church, despite his name. Like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him, he went through the motions of formal religion to appease his wife, but, like those wonderful men, his devotion was to the sea, to his fresh catch of fish each morning, to his olive trees and grape vines. For Josef, the smell of his tomatoes warming on the vine was better than any frankincense; the sun’s light on tiny wave crests more brilliant than any gilding; the murmur of the sea as it filtered back from the shore more mesmerising than any communal prayer. And then there were his canaries. What hymn could cause as much rapture as the song of his beloved birds?

Josef scraped off fragments of charred meat he had missed in the cleaning the night before with a wire brush. His eyesight was not as good as when he was a boy, but at sixty-six, it wasn’t too bad either. He didn’t bother with spectacles—he didn’t read anyway. As long as he could see the first green shoots of the garlic bulbs, the first feathery carrot leaves and the tiny green buds of his lemons that was good enough.

As he cleaned, Josef found himself thinking about his youth, as he often did these days. Perhaps it was the warmth of the morning, perhaps it was a scent carried across the water, but Josef was thinking, with a small twist of something that felt like grief, about the first time he saw the young and beautiful Evangelina. He remembered that he had been on his way home from a long day’s fishing. As he passed the island of Skosias, he stopped in the shelter of its bay to eat his bread and cheese and to savour a cigarette. He had pulled the boat on to the shore and was resting in the sun with his back against a large rock when he heard her. Evangelina’s laugh, carried to him on the breeze, was the first thing he had fallen in love with. It was a sound he no longer heard, and Josef’s knot of grief tightened as he remembered. He had turned on his knees at the sound and removed his cap, which was new and brilliant blue. With his nose resting on the cool rock and his eyes just above its rim, he had watched. He saw a girl, not much younger than himself, up to her knees in the sea and an older man in the shallows by the shore. The girl’s skirt was knotted across her thighs and, even from a distance, Josef could see the strength of her legs. The man, who Josef would learn later was her father, was short, and the girl was shorter still, but her curves…ayyy…The older Josef with a wire brush in his hand remembered those curves. Hidden from view, he had watched the two of them for a while. Together they worked as a team. She would go further into the sea and loosen the net while the man would haul it in. When one corner of the net seemed to be stuck and the two struggled to release it from the sand’s grip, Josef summoned up his courage. Rocking back on his haunches, he dusted tiny stones from his trousers and, with heart racing and hands trembling, he folded his bread and cheese into a clean handkerchief and placed them into the boat. He steadied himself, took a deep breath as he replaced his cap and stepped onto the stretch of beach towards them as though he was out for an afternoon’s stroll.

‘Yeia sou,’ he called.

The two were both knee-deep now and were struggling, their strength sapped by laughter.

‘Yeia sou,’ the man returned.

‘Can I help?’ Josef was addressing the man, but his eyes never left the girl. She stopped when she heard him and stood up quickly. Her hands released from the net and one tugged at her skirt while the other clutched at her blouse. A lock of hair, as black as the vein of rock in the cliffs that housed Josef’s family taverna, had escaped its ties and was hanging over her forehead. The man, who waded then between Josef and the girl, sized him up and down. Josef felt as though his longing was exposed and shifted his cap about his head.

The older man shrugged with a look in his eyes that only now, as an older man, Josef was able to interpret and said, ‘Ne, that would be good.’

Josef’s pants were already rolled to his knees. The girl had not moved though her head was now bent, and she was staring into the water. As he waded into the sea, its thickness strained against destiny from rushing towards him.

‘What is your name?’ the man said.

‘Josef.’

The girl’s head jerked up and she eyed him with, what Josef hoped, was interest. She released her hand from her blouse and tucked the curl of hair behind her ear.

‘Welcome, Josef. I am Stavros. We could do with your help. My daughter, Evangelina here,’ the father’s arm swept back as though to draw her in, ‘is strong, but not enough today. I could use a son.’

‘Baba!’ Evangelina scolded her father.

She has a sharp eye, Josef thought with amusement and a stirring of passion.

Evangelina had come out of the taverna and was standing beside him at the grill. From the corner of his eye, he could see her clasp and unclasp her hand around something she held in her palm.

‘Josef,’ she whispered, and in Josef’s nostalgic mood, the hint of passion that stirred was like the echo of a lost time. He turned to her. From behind her, the sun lit the wayward strands of her now grey hair and formed a soft halo. Evangelina’s eyes were still sharp and clear, but this morning they seemed to be illuminated by something else.

‘Agapi mou. What is it?’ His voice had caught in his throat, and he had to cough.

Evangelina hesitated, then opened her hand. She looked down at the thing in her palm and, when her eyes met his, he thought of the young girl on the beach forty years earlier. When he failed to respond, she thrust her hand closer. He knew he was expected to make a response, but was anxious now that, whatever he said, it would be wrong. It was a potato peeling that she was showing him. Delfinia must have cut it the wrong way and Evangelina was holding the evidence out to him.

‘Ahh.’ He nodded as though he understood and knew that his response would not be good enough. Evangelina’s face wore the look of disappointment he had come to expect. She closed her fingers over the peeling.

‘Why do I bother!’ she said and left him standing at the grill, the wire brush still suspended in his hand. Josef shifted his cap with the other hand and sighed.

Elektra stood in front of the mirror and ran her fingers through the short strands of her new style. Christos had cut it shorter than usual, but the fringe was fuller in comparison and tapered to a chic point over her left eyebrow. The colour was darker too; it was red black, not what she would have chosen but, she had to admit, the effect was great and made the speckled gold in her dark eyes stand out. Her vision shifted to the reflection of Sappho’s behind her; her café. She loved to take it in this way. Reflected in the mirror, it had a surreal quality as though it was still a part of her imagination.

The honeyed wood of the polished bar and the collective gleam of the glasses suspended above it, the wooden tables and stools—they were all as they had been in her daydreams. Elektra turned from the mirror and sucked in the reality of it all. She knew she had a lot to be happy about. The café-bar had tripled its takings in just two months since the liquor license had been granted; she had finally found reliable staff in Anton and Paulo, and she was in love. But there was a shadow that she couldn’t ignore.

Elektra could feel her blood pressure rising at the thought of her family. They enraged her. In fact, it was only Evangelina who maddened her because she adored her father, but there were times when she wanted to shake him too. Elektra’s anger was a habitual distraction from guilt. Evangelina and Josef had set her up in the café; she was grateful, but that gratitude weighed her down. She wanted to get on with life, to branch out, but she felt now more than ever as though she was bound to them by an invisible rope that stretched from Hestia’s Taverna in the west of the island to Sappho’s in the east. The way Elektra countered this was to ignore them. She often didn’t answer her mother’s calls, saying she was too busy. Nikolas and Delfi are there, she reminded herself whenever the guilt surfaced, and Evangelina and Josef were only an hour’s drive away. After all, they didn’t go out of their way to see her, she mentally argued in her own defence. Elektra pictured her parents trying to negotiate the traffic of the island’s capital in their old truck. She held back the thought that she had visited them only once in the past four months.

Josef and Evangelina were like a cramp in her little toe.

CHAPTERONE

Three years earlier

Nikolas pressed the button on the coffee machine. It gave one mighty hiss as it expelled steam and dripped dark amber liquid into his cup. Breathing the aroma deeply into every cell of his body, he removed the cup with one hand then slid aside the heavy glass door to the balcony with the other. He stepped out, as he did every morning. This was his favourite time of the day before most of Athens woke.

There were two cushioned wicker chairs on the balcony, but Nikolas always sat in the one furthest from the door. As he settled back into its comfort, he took in the view across the park from the vantage of the fifteenth floor. It was a view that he never tired of because the morning light was never the same. He knew that it was because its angle of refraction changed according to the proportion of pollutants, but it cast an ethereal glow on the uppermost branches of the trees while the under-stories retained the secrets of the night. At this height, he imagined that he was edging ever closer to the gods, though the Acropolis still towered a good twenty metres above.

These moments of solitude were becoming increasingly important to Nikolas, a time to take stock of his life. Linda would still be asleep for another half an hour or so. Once, he would have waited with impatience for her to wake but more often now when she did, the mornings were filled with a quiet tension. He wanted to ask her why, sometimes he came close to it, but he didn’t want to hear what she might say. Life had been perfect, and he couldn’t understand what had changed.

Behind him, through the open glass door, he could hear her in the kitchen. He felt as though he was at war with himself, wanting to go to her, to kiss the sleep from her eyes, but at the same time feeling as though he was bound to the chair. She would know that he was there. He waited. The juice extractor whirred, butter was scraped across toast. When there was silence, he could feel that she was watching him. Now, he thought. The chair-legs moaned on the tiles as he propelled himself forward. His mouth was filled with words, but they were too randomly placed. As he stepped inside, he heard the quiet click of the bathroom door. The toast and juice had been abandoned on the marble bench top.

The screen flickered, interrupting transmission and the critical dialogue between Katerina Matsouka QC and her assistant George. Delfi cursed under her breath. Now she would miss the vital clue in the murder case of Doctor Christos Vegos. The screen steadied, but Katerina Matsouka’s face was frozen in thought. Fortunately, she was suspended in a flattering frame. Delfi studied the face—the curve of the highly arched eyebrows, the perfect line of black kohl on her top and bottom lids, the way the colour of the coral lipstick deepened at her lips’ edges. Delfi’s own dark but unaccentuated eyes rested on Katerina Matsouka’s significant cleavage and the hint of a lace-edged brassiere just visible in the opened neckline. Delfi looked over her shoulder towards the door and, when sure she that she was alone, unbuttoned her own blouse to the fourth button. She placed her hands around the outside of her breasts and plumped them closer. When she caught her reflection ghosted over the stilled face of Katerina Matsouka, she was amazed at their likeness. The two of them could be sisters.

‘Delfi!’ Her father’s voice was fluted through the gaps in the external wall of their modest home.

She leapt from the couch and hit the off button on the television. Katerina Matsouka, caught in what now looked like an expression of objection, flickered and then blinked into blackness.

‘Yes, Baba? I’m here.’ Delfi fumbled with the buttons of her blouse and, as though in an act of contrition, deftly hooked the top button as well, even though it pulled tightly at her neck.

Manoli Kazan supported himself with a hand on the door frame as he manouevred one arthritic leg into the room.

‘Baba.’ Delfi rushed to him and held his arm as he dragged in the second arthritic leg. ‘You mustn’t work so hard.’ She added a scolding note to her voice, but her father wasn’t fooled.

‘Ee mikrí mou, just like your mother.’

Delfi tried to ward off the sensation of a thickness in her chest that grew at any mention of her mother, as she had for the ten years since her death during the birth of a stillborn son. The sensation had begun as the grief of an eight-year-old girl who had lost her mother, but over time it festered into guilt, especially because, as a girl, she couldn’t help her father in the way that a son could.

With one hand behind his back, Delfi guided her father to the table. As he sat, Manoli wedged the willow branch that served as his cane between the chair legs and rested his hand on its orbed head. Delfi stood back to admire the meze she had prepared for her father’s lunch. He sat quietly, taking it in.

‘What is this, ee mikrí mou?’ He pointed with his free hand towards the plate closest to him.

Her words tumbled across the table. ‘Kofta, babaganoush …’

Manoli raised his hand from the orb and gave a tired laugh. ‘It is beautiful.’

Delfi removed the napkin she had carefully folded and placed at her father’s setting. Standing behind him, she flicked it out with rehearsed ease. She reached around him and placed it across his chest, then tucked one edge into his collar with great tenderness, as she knew that that was what her mother would have done. When she sat down at her own place opposite him, she saw a single tear in the corner of her father’s eye. The sensation grew in her chest and strained the button at her neck. She looked down at her empty plate, her appetite all but gone.

‘Kalamata!’ Elektra threw the potato knife with her free hand at the sink while simultaneously sucking blood from the index finger of her other hand.

‘Elektra!’ Evangelina’s voice, tunnelling from the rear storeroom, enveloped her daughter as though she was standing beside her.

‘Kalamata, Kalamata, Kalamata.’ This time Elektra murmured her curse like an invocation to the devil. ‘I can’t peel anymore! I’ve cut my finger!’

Evangelina hesitated in the door frame, wiping her hands on the cloth suspended in the apron cord at her waist. ‘Put a band aid on it.’

‘It’s too deep.’ Elektra put her finger back in her mouth, wondering if her mother would care enough to take a look.

‘Show me,’ Evangelina demanded, holding out her palm as she moved toward her daughter.

Elektra slid the finger out of her mouth obediently and presented it to her mother. In the space between them the air crackled. Just at the point of touching, Elektra withdrew deliberately. Evangelina’s hand did not flounder in the void between them but brushed the air with a gesture of dismissal.

‘Go. Leave them,’ she said, nodding at the potatoes. ‘I will finish.’

Elektra stood her ground, resisting the thirty-two-year history of submission. She didn’t want to peel potatoes, but she didn’t want to be told to leave either.

‘Go!’ Evangelina had moved closer now. She was shorter than her daughter, but her stocky frame and sharp eyes would have made Atlas tremble.

Elektra could feel one mutinous foot take a small step backwards as her mother released the cloth from her waist and flicked it at her as though her daughter was no more than an irritating fly. Elektra’s resolve was broken. She turned on her heels and released the apron from her own waist to the floor. Sucking at the blood from her injured finger, she swept past the tables set for the lunch trade, tugging with her free hand at the fold of a tablecloth. The setting for two clattered to the floor, leaving the bare wooden table naked and as though in shock.

‘What’s wrong?’ Josef called from the grill.

A small knot of remorse was forming in Elektra’s gut, and she softened her stride as she approached her father.

‘Are you all right, my darling girl?’

The determination in Elektra’s step faltered as she levelled with him.

‘Baba.’ Elektra could hear the plea in her own voice. She wanted to cry with frustration into her father’s chest as she had when she was a little girl.

He was facing into the taverna and so was in shadow. Elektra knew that his large, dark eyes would look sad, but his mouth beneath his thick moustache would be smiling just looking at his only daughter. The knot moved higher into her chest and felt like it was caught behind her breastbone.

‘Fuck!’ she roared to the sea behind him, to the gulls gathering for their morning conference and to the shadowed face of her father. ‘Fuck.’ She brushed past him and ran, almost stumbling to the beach, but regained her composure and paced it out with thunderous intent. She hardly wavered in the irregularity of the basalt stones that constituted the shore as her heavy shoes crunched them into the soft sand beneath. These were the same stones that fluted waves into the hypnotic chant of sirens; the same stones that held the memory of the deep, dark forces that had transformed the island’s topography and history. That history was now preserved under canvas in the archaeological dig above Hestia’s Taverna. Tourists came to marvel at the remnants of a once mighty maritime civilisation caught in its final moments of despair, and represented most simply by an overturned water urn, which was three thousand six hundred years old.

‘Fuck!’ The word spat from her lips catching an oncoming stroller by surprise. She heard the woman’s gasp and smiled to herself with satisfaction, though hot tears were pricking the corner of her eyes. She crunched on, until her energy lagged, and she took rest upon an upturned crate in the shade of tall salt shrubs at the rear of the beach.

Elektra inspected the cut finger. The bleeding had been replaced with a seeping of clear plasma, but the pain had intensified and was hot and throbbing. She looked out to the water and saw a fisherman wading waist-deep just off the shore. He was too entranced with his fishing line to notice her sitting on his crate. She envied his poise and his concentration. Even from the rear, Elektra could tell by the ease of his shoulders that he was a man content with his life. She was adept at this observation of other people because she so desperately wanted to know their secret. A flapping sound to her left distracted her from the fisherman. Beside her, in a large ice cream bucket filled with water, a red mullet flipped once and then paused, caught in suspended animation that suggested it had resigned to its fate that it would never be free.

Elektra knew then that she had to leave.

‘No offence, Mother of God, but you do not have a daughter, so I don’t expect you to understand.’

Evangelina flipped the red mullet onto its other side and ran the scaling rake from tail to head with one deft movement.

‘If you had,’ she continued, ‘you would know what to do. Or perhaps, you could ask your Son…’ Evangelina was about to add ‘or your husband’, but she stopped. Mary’s real ‘husband’, not the Josef husband, was a mystery and, in truth, she liked it this way. It was as though Holy Mary’s husband was always at sea allowing the two women to share a more intimate relationship than if he was constantly around.

Evangelina placed the fish in a bucket of ice. She held the new scaling rake that Elektra had bought her up to the light. The scales had clustered at its end and were milky white, but one or two were still transparent like tiny windows. She remembered how Elektra had insisted that the rake would be better, faster and safer than the old knife that Evangelina had been using for years.

‘Get with the times, Mother,’ she had said with exasperation, as Evangelina held the rake to the light, as she did now. Evangelina had conceded, for her daughter’s sake. Now, she placed the rake in the sink and, with a new fish in position, took out the old knife from its equally old scabbard. Evangelina scaled with devotional attention, as though she was preparing the mullet for its burial. It had been caught in Josef’s net only two hours earlier, but it was not her job to kill it. She did not like to kill the Lord’s creatures, though had she had a sharp-pointed blade and a live fish in front of her right now, she could no longer be sure of that.

What have I done wrong? Evangelina mentally implored. She threw the fish in the bucket with elite-athlete precision. Automatically, she pulled out another and her knife slid along the body with a rhythm that beat time with her own thoughts—a mental list of all the things she had done for her daughter: the embroidered shawl, the taffeta communion dress and now the beaded evening gown for Nikolas’s wedding, all done with her own hands, at night, when she was tired. Evangelina thought of Elektra’s derision when she held up the dress.

‘I told you, Mama, I do not want to wear a dress.’

What sort of a girl didn’t want to wear a dress to a wedding, especially her own brother’s wedding? Evangelina knew the answer and was ashamed. To make matters worse, her son was about to marry an English woman.

What have I done wrong?

The mullet eyed her with suspicion.

Josef lay very still in the small space he had created between the bait bucket and wooden crates whose purpose he no longer knew. His right foot was housed in the same black leather slip-on it had inhabited for twenty years; despite Evangelina’s vigorous polishing, deep cracks betrayed its age. His left foot was bare except for the end of a fine fishing line wedged between his big and second toes. His left arm lay across his abdomen while his right hand rested on the edge of the closest crate and a coarser fishing line was loosely held between his index and mid fingers. From above, it would have looked as though he was pinned diagonally to the sea. If Josef had known this, he would have been pleased. He could think of no better place to be pinned down.

Josef closed his eyes and imagined that life beneath the boat. It was the best that he could do now. Beneath the boat, beneath the placid water whose surface had the viscosity of oil, life moved with the precision of a choreographed dance. A school of sardines swirled in a dark funnel, wide beneath the hull of the boat and narrowing to a single point, metres below, a photographic flash emitting with each rotation of their silver bodies. Larger fish darted, skirting the edges looking for the small, the weak, the lazy, and in the ink-black depths, a ray dipped and rose, dipped and rose with graceful ease as it skimmed the sandy bottom.

He had fished for more than fifty years, but it had been thirty since he had broken the surface of the water to enter that world. When he was young it had been his job to retrieve a snagged line for his father, and more rarely for his grandfather, for he was the superior fisherman. Josef had taken great pleasure and pride in stripping off his shirt and, with the arrogance of his youth, flexing his muscles in front of the older men.

‘Hey, Duripi, our Kikeru look for mermaids!’ called Rusa, using the name he had given his grandson.

Always, Josef felt that his arrogance had been misplaced. There was no envy in their eyes and the young, strong Josef longed instead to be them.