PART ONE
JOSIE
I pour myself some raki and drain it. Slam the shot glass down on the table and glare at him. ’Why are you here? Why now, after all this time?’
Tall Jim Alcock; still the same slicked-back hair, out-dated even in the ’70’s. Still the same heavy spectacles on his nose. Still a techie, fiddling with his phone. Good luck with that. No whisper of a signal in this part of the world.
He settles himself on the bench, smiling at the shimmering Libyan sea below — turquoise, perfect , as indifferent as the gods to our complicated drowning, our hurts and schemes and secrets. He tells me more about this podcast, explaining. I cut in: ’A radio programme, right?’
‘Yes,’ he says, patiently. ‘But you can earn money from it. I mean, they can. Anna and Tom.’
‘Anna?’ He can’t possibly mean her. Can he? ‘You’re trying to say you know my daughter?’ His bush-baby eyes, behind the glasses, get even bigger at the tone of my voice. ‘Never mind,’ I say. The damage is done. I pick up the package he’s brought. As I tear open the wrapping, I’m going on at him, ’Why would we help them, Jim? Why in God’s name?…’ He stares at the distant sea, at the hump of the island on the horizon. ’It was you that set me on the run. It was you that told me I was in the line of fire. It’s your fault my daughter won’t speak to me.’
He clears his throat. He’s not falling for that.
I’m holding a leather-bound copy of The Odyssey. Green binding, golden lettering. Takes me back to my student days. I look at Jim and he tips up his chin, lips pursed. —Work it out for yourself, dear.
There’s a yellow post-it stuck halfway along. I open the book there, and a note flutters to the floor. I pick it up, hold it away from me, reading without my glasses. Professor Grenfell’s handwriting was always clear. Spiky italic characters. Green ink. Still the same, after all these years.
‘I do not have long for this life. Forgive this terseness after all this time. You did right to go when you did, so long ago. Homer is never wrong. Now, even more, be careful my dear, but consider a resolution. Follow the basic rule, as they taught you. Security above all. I sent Jim, our usual Hermes. Go well!’
‘Show me,’ Jim says. I hand the note to him, though I’m reading the passage from the Odyssey: καὶ γάρ τίς θ’ ἕνα φῶτα κατακτείνας ἐνὶ δήμῳ…..
I relish the archaic Greek, letting its awkward sounds tumble in my mouth, as tricky as marbles, translating in my head as I go:
“For whoso has slain but one man in a land, even though it be a man that leaves not many behind to avenge him, he goes into exile, and leaves his kindred and his native land.”
I try to swallow, but my throat’s too dry.
Homer is talking about me.
2
I should never have opened the door to him. I should have let him go. Hidden on the balcony. Under the table. Anything. Not this.
He reaches into his shirt pocket and brings out a scrap of paper. ’Might make things worse, but anyway,’ he says, holding it out to me. ‘Here.’ I take it from him. There, in someone else’s handwriting, is my daughter’s name: Anna Petrakis — and a phone number she’s never given me. My heart’s beating so fast, I have to swallow hard. I flick my hand on the paper. ‘You’ve actually got in touch with her? Jesus.’ I glare at him, about to launch into a stream of abuse. Then I realise I’d be saying it all in Greek. Not the same impact.
‘Relax, Josie, relax. It’s OK. I know the situation. Tom, Tom Ainsworth? Heard of him? No. Well, he gave me the number. He’s our contact on the podcast. Producing. Not Anna. I’ve never spoken to her.’
My mind’s racing now. I clear my throat. ‘Why now? Why are you here now, sent by Grenfell? Or this Tom person?’ Jim opens his mouth to speak, to explain, but I’m sure it’ll all be concocted, encoded, nothing you can rely on. ‘Never mind,’ I say, and stomp back into the kitchen to the phone on the wall. I’m taking a big risk. Anna’s demand for no contact has been consistent and unbreakable. I look down at the scrap of paper with the stranger’s writing on it: her name, her mobile number. Can I trust it? Can I breach this wall of silence and risk making things worse?
What could be worse, I reason. What, really? Seeing her phone number, understanding that it’s possible to speak to her feels almost seductive, it’s so transgressive. I can’t believe how much I want to call her; how much I dread it at the same time.
I hook the phone closer under my neck, lean my bare shoulder hard against the cool wall. My hand’s trembling. I take another breath and tap in the numbers.
It’s ringing. That UK double-beep, which sounds so strange to me now.
Beep-beep… Beep-beep.
Ah. A click. Connection. Deep breath, and… no … just a lot of scrabbling about. Wait — is that her voice?
I clear my throat and say her name, the name I gave her: ‘Anna?’
Too bad. The click of disconnection, the single whining tone a slap in the face.
What else was I expecting?
Actually, I’m relieved. I wasn’t prepared for any of this. I turn and rest my forehead on the wall for a moment and put the phone back on its cradle. Jim, still sitting outside on the terrace, calls out, ‘No luck?’ He sounds sympathetic but also, for some reason, triumphant. As if I’ve simply proved a point for him. That annoys me as well. Bloody interloper. I was doing fine until I answered the door to this old chancer, instead of slamming it in his face.
He looms in the doorway to the balcony, grinning. ‘There is a signal, Josie,’ he shouts, waving his phone about. He bends over it, tapping away, nodding to himself. I slide down and sit on the floor, head in my hands, and listen to the blood beating in my ears. I pull out the tobacco pouch from my trouser pocket and start rolling a cigarette. Time to think.
3
ANNA
Running down the plush hotel stairs, something about the grey London light — a kind of ominous feeling — makes me stop. Lightning forks across the leaden sky above the Thames. A vacuum-suck of silence. Then a lazy, echoing boom of thunder ricochets through the heavens. The whisper of rain. Another roll of thunder, and a skyful empties itself all over tea-time London town.
My mobile’s buzzing. I delve for it in my bag, rain trickling down the back of my neck. I stand at the kerb, squinting through the torrent to spot a black cab’s welcoming, amber light. People swarm past, sploshing along the streaming pavement. I find the phone right at the bottom, press to answer. Rummage about in the bag for the end of the flex, squash the earbud in one ear.
‘Anna?’
A taxi spumes by, back seat loaded with a couple of shadowy shapes while I look at my phone. My hand’s shaking too much for me to be able to see who’s calling, their number. But I know. My body knows. That deep voice, treacly from four unapologetic decades of roll-ups, smoked daily from espresso to nightcap. Saying my name. There’s a vice clamping my chest, stopping me from breathing. I want to scream help — but nothing comes out. Like when you’re having a dream and your voice won’t work.
The lightness of the syllables, the delicacy, the slightly Greek inflection. A lilt of real affection there? No, never that. The feigned friendliness masks accusation. Disappointment. Judgement. The last few years with no tension, no possibility of hope or disappointment or rage, have been a blessing. Why destroy it? More important: who gave her my bloody number?
I tell myself to breathe for a second and do it. Just speak to the woman.
Another call clamours for my attention. I cut her off — it’s my agent.
The orange light of another taxi emerges through the downpour — I lean out from the kerb to hail it down. ‘Any news? Wait…’ I wrench open the door to the taxi cab and fling myself inside. It’s still pouring with rain. My agent says, ‘Are you sitting down, Anna?’
‘In a black cab. It’s OK, say more.’ I’m breathing hard, counting the breath in. The breath out. And it’s more than the effect of hearing my mother’s voice after all these years. I want the Yes. My writing career has ground to a halt and I’m desperate to get going again on something. So I’ve hooked up with Tom Ainsworth through a radio-journalism course he teaches. Harsh, the contrast in our fortunes. Though we trained as journalists together, Tom’s a celebrity now. Even so, he’s taken me under his wing. He needs me and my Greek half. We’re working on a podcast investigating the legacy of the Greek Junta. Far shorter than Franco’s or Salazar’s rule in Spain and Portugal, but still a dark time — yet another dark time — in Greece’s history. The Colonels, particularly keen on torturing any kind of resistance into submission, also welcomed tourist dollars, pounds and deutsch-marks. So people, even left-leaning governments like Britain’s, were on good terms with them. Or feigned to be. Turned a blind eye to the fascist side of it all. The Junta rode high on it for seven years, and then got booted out after a calamity in Cyprus. Since then, there’s been a kind of willed forgetfulness about this not so distant, rather shameful moment in Greece’s past. Just celebrations each year about a tragic confrontation between army tanks and students at the Polytechnic every November. It actually ushered in an even more repressive government, but people gloss over that.
I never knew a thing about it — not really — till now. And a scoop has come up: an MI6 file. A murder. An English girl called Laura Taylor. A cover-up by the authorities, the Greeks and the English. It’s remained a stubborn mystery, a small sore on the Establishment’s posterior, occasionally chafed by a lefty politician over the years; never healed, never fully obliterated.
‘We’ve got it.’ My agent sounds tense, as well as pleased.
‘Oh good. Good job.’ It’s a new moment for Greece now, as Tom keeps saying, riling me with his outsider’s take on it. It’s a good moment. Greece is on the up, recovered from its disastrous debt problems, and risen well to the challenge of the Covid pandemic. Covid. I nearly faltered about Josie in those times. I couldn’t think how she’d manage without a smartphone and apps and everything. You know, getting out and about there in Crete, getting permission to leave the house. The jabs. The QR codes. But I knew she was in the depths of the countryside where such things barely graze the community, and anyway, she always manages to come out on top. She dragged me and Babbah off to Vietnam one summer and we all went down with malaria. It was Josie that found some local remedy and had us up and running again in a couple of days.
All the same, given the global scale of it all, some perverse part of me kept expecting something from her, some whisper of a wave to show she cared how we were doing. Nothing. Lucky for us, none of us got the virus worse than a few days of aches and pains. And I knew, if something really bad ever happened to her, the Greek side of the family would get to hear of it and let me know.
I’m shivering, but I’ve got nothing with me to warm me up. It was high summer when I was getting ready this afternoon. How was I to know the weather had winter up its sleeve?
I’ve left Tom at the hotel lobby, still waiting for this old bloke, Jim Alcock, our source, in case he actually does turn up, and I’ve run off, speeding down the stairs, heart beating, worried about my daughter Maisie. She’s forgotten her key and she’ll be stuck on the front porch, drenched, by the time I get home. Her genius twin brother is still at his school maths club, feverishly revising for his premature ‘A’ level. I check inside my bag. Good. The laptop’s there. I didn’t forget it.
Tom’s last podcast was massive, about the Italian mafia and the holiday industry. Various villainous skeletons in a number of metaphorical cupboards exposed. False trails. Eccentric viewpoints. The usual. A hundred thousand downloads by the fourth ep. I’m flying in on his coat-tails and he’s utterly convinced this one will be even better, the two of us on air together and him producing. And not just because of my Greek, which will help us pull in contributors. The listeners will love it, the edginess of our relationship, the contrast in our voices. ‘Your voice,’ he’d said that very afternoon, looking at me when we listened to a few minutes of the pilot, sharing ear-buds. ‘Your voice is that good. Proper seductive. A bit slutty, like you’ve been caning it each night for a month.’
His voice, too. His dark, northern accent, the way he puts things, quick and neat and accessible. He gets to the point, he reels you in.
He certainly does that. He’s a bit younger than me, but he’s definitely got the upper hand. I need to redress the balance. Bailing from a business meeting because your teenage daughter’s forgotten her key? Not a good look. And, come to think of it, something Josie would never have done for me. ‘Fend for yourself, Anna, I always had to,’ she would have said. And stayed for the meeting. A wave of pride in my superior mothering skills washes over me. It’s been for the best that I kept her out of my life so long. Theo and Maisie: they both know in their bones that I care for them more than anything. With Josie it was never like that. I never felt safe with her.
The pilot episode we’ve made, our calling-card, is excellent. Crack production team, great sound design. Seven Years — through the lens of the murder story and its cover-up, based on the information Tom’s lead has given him. He won’t tell me anything much about this lead of his: Jim Alcock. Some old English guy. Ex-spook. Failed to turn up for the meeting, though the two of us set it up with a lot of fanfare and frou-frou, in that luxurious old hotel. Tom said it was a traditional place for spooks to meet, his face lit up by the intrigue. So far, he’s fed me facts and civilians to investigate while he focusses on the political back-story.
‘You’ve got to come up with an answer on it,’ my agent is saying, after a lot of stuff about sponsorship and deal structure. ‘You can’t leave it hanging, like all those other true crime stories. You’ve got to give us proper answers. Who’s the girl? Who killed her? Why? Deep State and all that.’
There’s money in the podcast if we get it right. I certainly need a success. My writing career — for no obvious reason — seems to have withered away. I haven’t had a blow-up with anyone. I had good feedback on the last few things I did for my usual clients. Now though? Tumbleweed blowing around my inbox. No fond return of WhatsApps. I’ve given up on the Insta, the socials. Nothing to post, basically. That’s probably the problem. I’m treading water.
My ex, Adam, isn’t the promptest of payers when it comes to maintenance. He seems to think me and Theo and Maisie can live on fresh air, and he’s never got over the way my clever lawyer got me every square centimetre of the house that he — an architect — so lovingly restored and extended, plus a sizeable chunk of money every month for the twins. When he pays. Nothing’s come through since April. Anyway, I hate relying on anyone for anything, least of all him.
So Tom’s sudden call a month ago about Greece and cover-ups and politics was, shall we say, very welcome. Now it looks as if some of his star-dust has rubbed off on us as a team. ‘It was nothing,’ my agent says when I thank him. ‘They loved everything about it. I’ll email you.’ He cuts me off to take another call.
The taxi’s taking me along Embankment. We stop at the traffic lights and I see Tom’s tall figure ambling along the zebra crossing, wheeling his old fashioned, drop-handled racing bike, changed out of his meeting-gear into his skimpy cycling shorts and zip-up jacket. Drenched, like me.
Funny that. He told me he’d stay another hour, convinced this Jim guy would turn up. I tell the taxi to pull in and I open the window, a roar of splashing wheels and outraged horns blaring past.
Tom leans in, a damp bundle of masculine energy. ‘Jim’s in Crete. He forgot about the meeting here. The Prof despatched him on something more urgent. He just texted me.’
‘We’ve got it,’ I say, patting my phone, not really taking in what he’s told me. ‘My agent just called to say we’re on.’
Tom shakes his mop of Heathcliff-hair, flicking raindrops onto my face. He grins: ‘You up for this?’
‘They love all the spook stuff. The murder. The cover-up.‘
‘They want answers, right?’ he grins. Then he notices I’m not the picture of joy. ‘What’s up?’
I wrinkle my nose. ‘I just had Josie on the phone.’
I don’t tell him I cut her off. He’s oddly fascinated about her, and the way we keep our distance. He makes me feel it’s rather French of us — insouciant and marvellous — not warped and fairly tragic. I go along with it, though I’ve a growing suspicion he thinks this will be the real story we end up telling, because isn’t that always the way with these true crime podcasts? They never solve the mystery, they get themselves shunted off into some sort of relationship drama. In my case: a mother and daughter who haven’t spoken for fourteen years. Buried secrets poisoning family harmony.
Tom grins. ‘Good,’ he says. ‘See you tomorrow for the interview. Try and speak to your mother, OK? I’m sure she’s key.’
My crotchety, prickly, self-obsessed, narcissistic emigré mother ‘key’? And this contact, Jim, in Crete now? He must have gone to see her. That must be why she called just now. That feels peculiar. She’s my mother, she belongs to me, no matter how badly I treat her. People I know can’t just barge into her life without my permission. I tell the cabby to drive on and the taxi jerks into motion again.
I get back to my phone, bringing up the missed call; looking at Josie’s Greek number on the screen. It’s felt so much safer these last years without the threat of her invading my life. Without those silences and unspoken expectations. That ceaseless feeling of nothing being safe; that an explosion could erupt about nothing. The way I’ve parted my hair; the cracked, unkempt tone of my voice — the very thing Tom likes about me. The way I look at her. The way I laugh too loudly. The way I didn’t finish my degree. The man I married, how unreliable he was. Nothing really said, most of the time. Just a look. A raised eyebrow. A sharp remark, always elliptical, that you had to decode. The cruel remarks about other people. That stink of her cigarettes, the click of the lighter and the laboured inhalation; the smell and the sight of it always made me nauseous. Why does she keep on with this filthy habit? As if none of the rules applied to her. The constant attention to something else. She never remembered anything I said. Always distracted, her mind on something else. I was never enough. Though I was her project, I could never match up to her.
She couldn’t understand: I wanted to be nothing like her. She had nothing she could give me and I wouldn’t give her anything of myself for her to sniff over and reject, claim for herself, or modify according to her strange codes and obscure Classical references.
I’m trembling. How did she get my number? How? And why did she call me? Is it bad news? Is she ill? If it’s something about the podcast, I don’t want her involved in it at all, but Tom keeps mentioning her. Cautiously, like something’s being brewed up behind my back. And now this bloke Jim is there with her.
I wipe my cheek, not sure if it’s rain or tears.
I don’t call her back.
Izzy Brown 