listening. Then the connection was broken off.
It was shortly after midnight. She sat up. Who had called her? The silence had no identity. She could hear faint music coming from the hotel bar. She decided to go there. If she had a glass or two of wine she would be able to go back to sleep.
The bar was almost deserted. An elderly European man sat in a corner with a young African woman. Louise felt uncomfortable. She pictured the overweight man lying naked on top of the black woman who could hardly have been more than seventeen or eighteen years old. Was this the kind of thing Lucinda had been forced to endure? Had Henrik seen the same kind of thing that she was observing now?
She drank two glasses of wine without a pause, signed the bill and left the bar. The night breeze was mild. She passed the swimming pool and left the area illuminated by lights from the hotel windows. She had never seen a sky like the one that confronted her now. She thought she had eventually pinned down the Southern Cross. Aron had once described it as 'the saviour of seafarers in the southern hemisphere'. He was always surprising her with unsuspected knowledge. Henrik sometimes also took a whimsical interest in the unexpected. At the age of nine he had talked about running away from school to the wild horses of the Kirghistan steppes. But then decided to stay at home after all as he did not want to leave his mother on her own. Another time he had stated loud and clear that he wanted to go to sea and learn how to sail a boat all by himself. Not in order to sail round the world in record time nor to demonstrate that he could survive such a journey. His dream was to be alone on a boat for ten, perhaps twenty years without ever landing anywhere.
Her grief returned. Henrik never became a sailor, nor did he ever go looking for wild horses on the steppes of Kirghistan. But he was on the way to becoming a Good Man when somebody dressed him in pyjamas instead of a funeral shroud.
She was on the sands now. It was high tide, breakers were rolling in towards the shore. Darkness swallowed the contours of the beached fishing boats. She took off her sandals and walked to the water's edge. The heat took her back in her mind to Peloponnisos. She was overwhelmed by a tidal wave, a longing to return to her work in the dusty graves, to her colleagues, the eager but careless students, her Greek friends. She felt the urge to stand in the shadows outside Mitsos's house and smoke one of her nocturnal cigarettes while the dogs barked and the gramophone churned out its melancholy Greek music.
A crab crawled over her foot. In the distance she could see the lights from Maputo. Once again Aron came to haunt her: Light can travel long distances over dark water. Imagine light as a wanderer who could be fleeing from you, or coming closer and closer. In the light you discover both your friends and your enemies.
Aron had said something more, but she couldn't remember what.
She held her breath. There was somebody there in the night, somebody watching her. She turned round, lights from the bar in the far distance puncturing the darkness. She was scared stiff, her heart was pounding.
She started screaming, shrieking into the dark until she saw torches coming from the hotel. When she was pinned down in the beam from one of them, she froze like an animal caught in headlights.
Two men had come to investigate, the very young man from reception and one of the bartenders. They asked why she had screamed: was she injured? Had she been bitten by a snake?
She merely shook her head, took the receptionist's torch and shone it round the beach. Nobody. But there had been somebody there. She had felt it.
They walked back to the hotel. The young man from reception accompanied her to her room. She lay down on the bed, prepared to lie awake all night. But she managed to fall asleep. The red parrots from Apollo Bay came flying into her dreams. There were masses of them, a huge flock, and their wingbeats were totally silent.
CHAPTER 17
The sky was hidden behind damp mist when she went down to the dining room for breakfast. The man on duty in reception was somebody she had