up against the woman’s leg and puts her small hand on the woman’s arm. The hand is very brown from sun. Poso khronon iseh? the woman says, then tells the other woman, I’m asking her how old she is.
It’s when they go to pay the bill that the woman on the up slope will find out that the wad of euros she had, folded deep down in her pocket, isn’t in her pocket anymore.
It isn’t in any of her other pockets.
Then they’ll remember the child backing off and calling to the squeezebox boy, then both disappearing in among the hundreds of off-duty soldiers.
It was a piece of perfect thievery, a piece of artistry so good that the doing of it was invisible. All the way back to the hotel that night the down slope woman, the one who hasn’t had her money stolen and who has had to pay for supper, will be annoyed with herself that she has witnessed such a perfect act of thievery and somehow not actually seen it happen. She will berate herself for this not-seeing. She will feel, as they walk back to their hotel, the sheer unfairness of her own life again as the up slope woman, walking next to her, argues on her mobile the whole way back at ten o’clock at night with the 24-hour desk at her travel insurance company. Neither will notice that the bars and pubs they both walk past along the tourist harbourfront are surreal with outsized beer-glasses, glasses a foot and a half high; on all their counters, all their outside tables, beer-glasses shaped like seven-league boots, with see-through straps and buckles and see-through leather flaps sculpted in the glass they’re made of. It’s winter. The trees are bare. A woman and a man have gone to see a production of a play at a theatre. He bought the tickets months back, in the summer. She likes this kind of thing. But their time as a couple is nearly up, the man knows, because he has seen how the woman has begun to despise him. He saw it on Saturday evening, when he was cutting courgettes into strips for a stir-fry, he saw it cross her face. He feels that the end of their love must be something to do with the way he cuts vegetables. He doesn’t know what else to blame. It has made him uneasy in his own kitchen and tonight, when they ate out at a restaurant near the theatre, he could touch nothing green on his plate.
On the stage a woman has disguised herself to go and meet her lover in a wood; her lover has been banished by her father, the king. The woods thicken. The plot goes crazy. She takes what she thinks is a medicine and falls into a sleep so deep that it looks like death. Her new-found friends in the wood put her in a tomb, believing she’s dead. They sing a song above the body. The song is about death being a place of no more fear. When he hears this song the man in the audience starts to cry. He can’t help it. The song is very moving. She takes his hand. She holds it. He stops crying.
He doesn’t dare open his eyes in case the opening of his eyes will mean she will let go of his hand. All round him, in the dark of his own shut eyes and then in the sudden lights-up of the theatre, in the light which comes as suddenly through his shut eyelids as it would were his eyes open, as if eyelids are no protection at all, there’s sudden applause. Interval. The play is half over. It’s summer. The nights are long and light. Right now it’s the brief summer dark of early morning, just before the light comes up. A young woman wakes up next to her new lover and sees someone sitting there in the dark at the end of the bed. It is an old woman moving her hands, knitting. The young woman shakes her lover gently. She doesn’t dare say anything out loud in case the old woman is startled. But her lover is fast asleep.
The next day at breakfast she describes the figure to her lover. It sounds like my mother, her lover says. Her lover’s mother has apparently been dead for a decade. Was she singing? her lover asks. Yes, the young woman says, she was, she definitely was. What was