One Core Belief

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One Core Belief - book excerpt

Chapter 1

Three years earlier

Nikolas pressed the button on the coffee machine. It gave one mighty hiss as it expelled steam and dripped dark amber liquid into his cup. Breathing the aroma deeply into every cell of his body, he removed the cup with one hand then slid aside the heavy glass door to the balcony with the other. He stepped out, as he did every morning. This was his favourite time of the day before most of Athens woke.

There were two cushioned wicker chairs on the balcony, but Nikolas always sat in the one furthest from the door. As he settled back into its comfort, he took in the view across the park from the vantage of the fifteenth floor. It was a view that he never tired of because the morning light was never the same. He knew that it was because its angle of refraction changed according to the proportion of pollutants, but it cast an ethereal glow on the uppermost branches of the trees while the under-stories retained the secrets of the night. At this height, he imagined that he was edging ever closer to the gods, though the Acropolis still towered a good twenty metres above.

These moments of solitude were becoming increasingly important to Nikolas, a time to take stock of his life. Linda would still be asleep for another half an hour or so. Once, he would have waited with impatience for her to wake but more often now when she did, the mornings were filled with a quiet tension. He wanted to ask her why, sometimes he came close to it, but he didn’t want to hear what she might say. Life had been perfect, and he couldn’t understand what had changed.

Behind him, through the open glass door, he could hear her in the kitchen. He felt as though he was at war with himself, wanting to go to her, to kiss the sleep from her eyes, but at the same time feeling as though he was bound to the chair. She would know that he was there. He waited. The juice extractor whirred, butter was scraped across toast. When there was silence, he could feel that she was watching him. Now, he thought. The chair-legs moaned on the tiles as he propelled himself forward. His mouth was filled with words, but they were too randomly placed. As he stepped inside, he heard the quiet click of the bathroom door. The toast and juice had been abandoned on the marble bench top.

***

The screen flickered, interrupting transmission and the critical dialogue between Katerina Matsouka QC and her assistant George. Delfi cursed under her breath. Now she would miss the vital clue in the murder case of Doctor Christos Vegos. The screen steadied, but Katerina Matsouka’s face was frozen in thought. Fortunately, she was suspended in a flattering frame. Delfi studied the face—the curve of the highly arched eyebrows, the perfect line of black kohl on her top and bottom lids, the way the colour of the coral lipstick deepened at her lips’ edges. Delfi’s own dark but unaccentuated eyes rested on Katerina Matsouka’s significant cleavage and the hint of a lace-edged brassiere just visible in the opened neckline. Delfi looked over her shoulder towards the door and, when sure she that she was alone, unbuttoned her own blouse to the fourth button. She placed her hands around the outside of her breasts and plumped them closer. When she caught her reflection ghosted over the stilled face of Katerina Matsouka, she was amazed at their likeness. The two of them could be sisters.

‘Delfi!’ Her father’s voice was fluted through the gaps in the external wall of their modest home.

She leapt from the couch and hit the off button on the television. Katerina Matsouka, caught in what now looked like an expression of objection, flickered and then blinked into blackness.

‘Yes, Baba? I’m here.’ Delfi fumbled with the buttons of her blouse and, as though in an act of contrition, deftly hooked the top button as well, even though it pulled tightly at her neck.

Manoli Kazan supported himself with a hand on the door frame as he manouevred one arthritic leg into the room.

‘Baba.’ Delfi rushed to him and held his arm as he dragged in the second arthritic leg. ‘You mustn’t work so hard.’ She added a scolding note to her voice, but her father wasn’t fooled.

‘Ee mikrí mou, just like your mother.’

Delfi tried to ward off the sensation of a thickness in her chest that grew at any mention of her mother, as she had for the ten years since her death during the birth of a stillborn son. The sensation had begun as the grief of an eight-year-old girl who had lost her mother, but over time it festered into guilt, especially because, as a girl, she couldn’t help her father in the way that a son could.

With one hand behind his back, Delfi guided her father to the table. As he sat, Manoli wedged the willow branch that served as his cane between the chair legs and rested his hand on its orbed head. Delfi stood back to admire the meze she had prepared for her father’s lunch. He sat quietly, taking it in.

‘What is this, ee mikrí mou?’ He pointed with his free hand towards the plate closest to him.

Her words tumbled across the table. ‘Kofta, babaganoush …’

Manoli raised his hand from the orb and gave a tired laugh. ‘It is beautiful.’

Delfi removed the napkin she had carefully folded and placed at her father’s setting. Standing behind him, she flicked it out with rehearsed ease. She reached around him and placed it across his chest, then tucked one edge into his collar with great tenderness, as she knew that that was what her mother would have done. When she sat down at her own place opposite him, she saw a single tear in the corner of her father’s eye. The sensation grew in her chest and strained the button at her neck. She looked down at her empty plate, her appetite all but gone.

***

‘Kalamata!’ Elektra threw the potato knife with her free hand at the sink while simultaneously sucking blood from the index finger of her other hand.

‘Elektra!’ Evangelina’s voice, tunnelling from the rear storeroom, enveloped her daughter as though she was standing beside her.

‘Kalamata, Kalamata, Kalamata.’ This time Elektra murmured her curse like an invocation to the devil. ‘I can’t peel anymore! I’ve cut my finger!’

Evangelina hesitated in the door frame, wiping her hands on the cloth suspended in the apron cord at her waist. ‘Put a band aid on it.’

‘It’s too deep.’ Elektra put her finger back in her mouth, wondering if her mother would care enough to take a look.

‘Show me,’ Evangelina demanded, holding out her palm as she moved toward her daughter.

Elektra slid the finger out of her mouth obediently and presented it to her mother. In the space between them the air crackled. Just at the point of touching, Elektra withdrew deliberately. Evangelina’s hand did not flounder in the void between them but brushed the air with a gesture of dismissal.

‘Go. Leave them,’ she said, nodding at the potatoes. ‘I will finish.’

Elektra stood her ground, resisting the thirty-two-year history of submission. She didn’t want to peel potatoes, but she didn’t want to be told to leave either.

‘Go!’ Evangelina had moved closer now. She was shorter than her daughter, but her stocky frame and sharp eyes would have made Atlas tremble.

Elektra could feel one mutinous foot take a small step backwards as her mother released the cloth from her waist and flicked it at her as though her daughter was no more than an irritating fly. Elektra’s resolve was broken. She turned on her heels and released the apron from her own waist to the floor. Sucking at the blood from her injured finger, she swept past the tables set for the lunch trade, tugging with her free hand at the fold of a tablecloth. The setting for two clattered to the floor, leaving the bare wooden table naked and as though in shock.

‘What’s wrong?’ Josef called from the grill.

A small knot of remorse was forming in Elektra’s gut, and she softened her stride as she approached her father.

‘Are you all right, my darling girl?’

The determination in Elektra’s step faltered as she levelled with him.

‘Baba.’ Elektra could hear the plea in her own voice. She wanted to cry with frustration into her father’s chest as she had when she was a little girl.

He was facing into the taverna and so was in shadow. Elektra knew that his large, dark eyes would look sad, but his mouth beneath his thick moustache would be smiling just looking at his only daughter. The knot moved higher into her chest and felt like it was caught behind her breastbone.

‘Fuck!’ she roared to the sea behind him, to the gulls gathering for their morning conference and to the shadowed face of her father. ‘Fuck.’ She brushed past him and ran, almost stumbling to the beach, but regained her composure and paced it out with thunderous intent. She hardly wavered in the irregularity of the basalt stones that constituted the shore as her heavy shoes crunched them into the soft sand beneath. These were the same stones that fluted waves into the hypnotic chant of sirens; the same stones that held the memory of the deep, dark forces that had transformed the island’s topography and history. That history was now preserved under canvas in the archaeological dig above Hestia’s Taverna. Tourists came to marvel at the remnants of a once mighty maritime civilisation caught in its final moments of despair, and represented most simply by an overturned water urn, which was three thousand six hundred years old.

‘Fuck!’ The word spat from her lips catching an oncoming stroller by surprise. She heard the woman’s gasp and smiled to herself with satisfaction, though hot tears were pricking the corner of her eyes. She crunched on, until her energy lagged, and she took rest upon an upturned crate in the shade of tall salt shrubs at the rear of the beach.

Elektra inspected the cut finger. The bleeding had been replaced with a seeping of clear plasma, but the pain had intensified and was hot and throbbing. She looked out to the water and saw a fisherman wading waist-deep just off the shore. He was too entranced with his fishing line to notice her sitting on his crate. She envied his poise and his concentration. Even from the rear, Elektra could tell by the ease of his shoulders that he was a man content with his life. She was adept at this observation of other people because she so desperately wanted to know their secret. A flapping sound to her left distracted her from the fisherman. Beside her, in a large ice cream bucket filled with water, a red mullet flipped once and then paused, caught in suspended animation that suggested it had resigned to its fate that it would never be free.

Elektra knew then that she had to leave.

***

‘No offence, Mother of God, but you do not have a daughter, so I don’t expect you to understand.’

Evangelina flipped the red mullet onto its other side and ran the scaling rake from tail to head with one deft movement.

‘If you had,’ she continued, ‘you would know what to do. Or perhaps, you could ask your Son…’ Evangelina was about to add ‘or your husband’, but she stopped. Mary’s real ‘husband’, not the Josef husband, was a mystery and, in truth, she liked it this way. It was as though Holy Mary’s husband was always at sea allowing the two women to share a more intimate relationship than if he was constantly around.