want you to meet my brother.’ He turned to face him. ‘This is Nicos, he’s just arrived from Athens.’
The two brothers stood looking at her, their identical smiles flashing even white teeth.
‘Raphael!’ Calli heard herself say softly as she held out her hand to shake his.
‘How did you know about that?’ Nicos asked with obvious amusement and turned to look at Michalis.
At first glance the two brothers could have been mistaken for twins, but once Calli began to talk to Nicos and had observed him for a while, she established that the only identical aspect in their appearance was their smile. There was no doubt that their likeness was strong: they shared the same intense olive-black eyes and similar solid earthy stature. Yet something in Nicos’s manner, something in his look when his eyes were upon her, set them apart – or at least she thought so; no one else seemed to share this view.
‘The brothers are so alike and not just in appearance,’ her aunt said in the kitchen later that evening, ‘and they are both such good boys.’
‘They are like clones of each other,’ Chrysanthi added, seizing another bottle of cold raki from the fridge to take outside. ‘Don’t you think?’ She looked at Calli.
‘Well . . . I’m not so sure, yes and no,’ she replied, wondering what she meant by yes and no.
Now, as she lay in bed with an aching head, her mind kept returning to those words; the answer came to her when she recalled her first physical contact with Nicos. That, she realized, was where the difference between Michalis and Nicos lay.
It was a mere handshake – which admittedly did linger a little longer than she was accustomed to, as so often in Crete. That was all there was to it, yet the effect on her was profound. She had once read that communication between the brain and the skin is like the dialogue between the brain and the gut in conveying emotions. This made perfect sense to her, since she had experienced a version of this, usually when she heard a piece of music. If it moved her to tears or to joy, she would automatically feel goosebumps on the back of her neck, sometimes down her arm or even legs. This, the theory went, was triggered directly by the brain, so the emotional stimulus was transmitted into a physical manifestation on the skin; the same applied to touch. That night in Chrysanthi’s garden, when Nicos took her hand Calli experienced the thrill of this sensation spreading from the back of her neck down to her spine. The touch of his skin electrified her like no other skin-to-skin contact had ever done before, and during the course of the evening, whenever he touched her the sensation returned.
Throughout the party, Nicos and Calli seemed to gravitate towards each other to the exclusion of everyone else. She was reminded of the scene from West Side Story, when Maria meets Tony and the rest of the world fades away. She kept pushing the image away, berating herself that she was being ridiculous, but she couldn’t help it. She tried to stay by Michalis’s side. She made a point of returning to him each time she found herself spending too long with his brother, but each time it didn’t last. Somehow soon they would find themselves together again, as if a magnet was pulling them towards each other. At some point Nicos guided her towards two chairs under a tree away from the hubbub and they sat together, apart from the crowd. He made her laugh, perhaps too much and too loud, but by then she didn’t care. They talked and danced and sang and talked some more, as if they were two old friends.
When she first met Michalis, he had made her feel comfortable and calm and curious to get to know him. Nicos made her feel animated and excited and as though they already knew everything about each other.
11
So there she lay that morning, holding her head in confusion and trying to make sense of the night before. Michalis had been her constant companion for weeks; they were good together – had he not said so? Or at least he had implied it, and she agreed. Hadn’t she even allowed herself to fantasize about a life and a child shared with Michalis and his olive farm in Crete? Naturally such fancies were hers alone – not to be shared with him or anyone –