MORNING SERIAL
SHE had wanted to tell me she was cancelling the lease on my studio, and that if I didn’t take the art teaching position at the tertiary college next term she would leave me. She wanted to tell me it was not my talent that was driving us out of our home, but my personality.
At the lowest, loudest points in recent months she had said all of these things, and much more besides. I looked out over the family vacationers wandering the wide streets of Protaras, down to the waterfront, took in a lungful of warm salty air, and felt my head begin to spin. I put my feet up on the balcony and tilted my head back in the chair, knowing full well I would regret sleeping out there, inviting as I was the external noises to infiltrate whatever lucid drunken dreams were coming my way.
Three Mid-morning, a taxi took me through bright refreshing fields of yellow hyacinths to the Russian’s house in the wilderness land outside of Sotira.
For an island you can cover in half a day, these open flats gave an impression of vastness. It was something to do with the colour – that sandy scrub – but also the clean blueness of the sky, and the lowness of it. There was a place in those plains where neighbouring villas became dots on the horizon, and then trees began to sprout up in the south like bushels of broccoli from the scrubland.
We passed a few driveways that were not the routes to farmhouses, but to the isolated homes of people with money, and the further south we went the taller the trees became, the greater the distance between driveways.
My driver seemed to cool off a bit – he had been quite talkative despite his lack of English. Something about the Russian seemed to dry his mouth. The drive to Prostakov’s house was long but not at all hidden from the road – it was cleared of trees and unfenced – but then the road sunk into a strange valley and up past a concealing tump of earth.
> The Golden Orphans by Gary Raymond is published by Parthian www.parthianbooks.com