MORNING SERIAL

The Golden Orphans

I WAGERED Prostakov had a house filled with rip-offs looking down on Siberian tiger hide rugs. I was angry at how seedy Francis’s ending had been, with little evidence other than that created in my own imagination. I was angry I had gone all the way out there to begin with, to see it, to have this Francis now the one of my memory, and not the dashing, darting swashbuckler I had known back in London.

Two

There is no one easier to lie to than the person standing the opposite side of a bar to you, and yet, for me at least, a barkeep always seems to bring out a frictionless truth. The day after Francis was buried, I had walked around Paralimni, a characterless circular town of mall-shops and clean pavements, until I made myself comfortable on a barstool in a place looking out across the town square. The barmaid asked me how long I would be on the island, and I said, without even thinking, “I honestly couldn’t say at this point.” “So you are not on a holiday?” she said. “I wouldn’t call it that, no,” I said. “I came to say goodbye to an old friend.” She was wiping glasses, then cleaning surfaces, then dicing lemons as we spoke, and there was nobody else at the bar, just another waiter relaying drinks orders from scattered people at a few tables on the veranda. “And what is it you do for a living?” she asked. I said I was an artist, a painter, and she smiled in a lackadaisical way, not too impressed, but something more engaged perhaps than if I had said I was an insurance broker or a structural engineer. The usual set of questions came next, the ones that break down the defences of that original answer – What kind of artist? What do you paint? What’s the most you’ve ever sold a painting for? And it’s the last answer that always sticks in the craw. The most? A great deal. The only thing that matters is that it was a long time ago. It matters even more I should probably have got double for it. But the dominant point is that I had not sold a painting in nearly four years. “I think I have been holding out for a miracle, and unfortunately it was my friend who was the guy who usually provided them,” I said. “Your friend could not help you?” “Not this time.”