that we looked authentic.
‘You are a beautiful couple,’ he said smiling. ‘You look like you have stepped out of a magazine.’
‘What do I look like?’ Afra said to me later as I was getting ready to make my deliveries.
‘You don’t look like you.’
‘Do I look horrible?’ she said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course not. You are always beautiful.’
‘Nuri, now all the world can see my hair.’
‘Really they can’t,’ I say, ‘because it is a different colour.’
‘And they can see my legs.’
‘But they are the legs of Gloria Baresi, not yours.’
Her lips smiled, but her eyes didn’t.
We were due to leave the next day, and that night there were more packages than usual. I locked Afra in the room and I put the key down on the coffee table for a second to count the boxes and tick them off the list. At that moment Mr Fotakis came in to tell me about the travel arrangements to the airport. He then helped me to carry the boxes downstairs to the van. It wasn’t until I was halfway across Athens that I realised that I’d forgotten the key. I couldn’t turn back to get it – I had ten people to meet and they all had their designated time slots; if I was late for one, I’d be late for all of them. So I kept going and I tried not to think about Afra; I remembered her again only when I was heading back into the city in the early hours of the morning.
When I got to the apartment I rushed up the winding staircase and into the living area, but the key was not on the coffee table where I’d left it and the door was locked. I knocked and there was no answer.
‘Afra,’ I whispered, ‘are you asleep? Can you open the door for me?’ I waited like that with my ear to the door, but I could hear nothing, no answer and no movement, so I resigned myself to catching a few hours’ sleep on the sofa. I was just lying down when I heard the key in the lock and the door open. Afra stood there. I looked at my wife’s face and I immediately knew something was wrong. The morning light that reflected so coldly off the walls of the other buildings revealed a scratch on her face, red and raw, running from her left eye to her jawbone. Her blonde hair was a tangled mess around her face. In this moment, she was not my wife. I could not recognise her. I could not find her. Before I could say anything, she turned away and went back into the bedroom. I sprang up and quickly followed her, closing the door firmily behind me.
‘Afra, what happened?’ I asked. She was curled up on the bed with her back to me.
‘Won’t you tell me what happened?’ I put my hand on her back and she flinched, so I lay beside her without touching her or asking any more questions. It was early afternoon by the time she spoke again. I hadn’t slept at all.
‘Do you really want to know?’ she said.
‘Of course.’
‘Because I’m not sure you really want to know.’
‘Of course I want to know.’
There was a long pause, and then she said, ‘He came in here – Mr Fotakis. I thought it was you because you’d locked the door. I didn’t know he had the key. He came in here and he lay down beside me, just where you are lying now. I realised it wasn’t you because of the smell of his skin when he came closer to me, and I called out and he put his hand over my mouth and his ring scratched the side of my face, and he told me I should be quiet or you would come back and find me dead.’
She didn’t need to say any more.
13
THE SKY IS BIG AND blue and full of seagulls. They sweep across and dip down into the sea, and up again, up and up and up, into the heavens. There is a cluster of multicoloured balloons above me, rising and becoming smaller until they fade into the distance. There are voices around me and then someone has my wrist in his hand. He is checking my heartbeat.
‘Strong heart,’ the man says.
‘What’s he doing here?’ A woman is standing in the sunlight.
‘Maybe homeless.’
‘But why is he in the water?’
Neither of them asks me, but I don’t think I could speak anyway. The man lets