MORNING SERIAL
“I don’t know what it is I’m supposed to be looking for,” I said.
“Okay, well, it’s hardly visible from space,” Lou said, and she marched back to the car and came back with her handbag, pulling out a pair of binoculars as she returned.
“You have binoculars?” I said, surprised.
“But be careful with them,” she said handing them to me. “They may think we’re spies.”
Lou grabbed me by the elbow and ran me over to a more secluded spot, behind a man-moved boulder at the edge of the peak and under the cover of some drooping tree branches.
“I don’t want to be arrested as a spy, Lou,” I said, trying to unfurl the binocular strap from around my neck. But Lou tugged the strap back down and urged me to look back out over the way.
“You’re British, it’ll be fine,” she said, and she held the lenses up to my eyes.
“Okay, okay, okay. What am I looking at?”
“The wall was put up in ’seventy-four, to separate Greek Cyprus from the Turkish side. Can you see it?”
The binoculars were surprisingly powerful, and I was more sure – although not wholly convinced – that the shadow I had been looking at before was Ayia Napa. Limassol, much closer and to the south, was clearly visible with them. Lou took the binoculars without taking the strap from around my neck, tugging me close to her, cheek to cheek, and she focussed back out to the east.
“There,” she said, and put them back to my eyes. “The wall.”
I could see a thin line of fudged grey that may or may not have been a wall. It was so far away – fifty, sixty miles?
“It stretches the length of the island,” Lou said. “From north to south. It even cuts towns in half.”
“It cuts through Nicosia – is that right?” I knew a little, had read a little.
“That’s right.” She mock punched me across the shoulder. “Straight through the middle of the capital.”
> The Golden Orphans by Gary Raymond is published by Parthian www.parthianbooks.com