Una

Chapter One

When Una came home from the British Museum, I knew I was in trouble. Something about the way she swept through the door like a gust of wind carrying dust clouds and scattered leaves unsettled me.

I was in the living room, bashing the sofa cushions back into shape. When she looked at me, I realised I was using too much force. It felt violent. I’d been caught. Her green eyes made me uneasy. She’d always had this way of staring straight into me.

“How was the trip?” I asked, patting the cushion, putting it back in its place.

I was expecting her to say, “Fine,” in that flat tone she’d taken on as a teenager. Instead, she pulled off her scarf, sat on the sofa and said, “Oh, Mum.”

I had an impulse to sit beside her and invite her to tell me everything, but I knew better.

Instead, I said, “Hmm?” and carried on tidying the room.

“They were gorgeous,” she said, “and also sort of grotesque. Tragic, really.”

Tragic was Una’s new favourite word.

“What caught your attention?” I asked, dusting the mantelpiece.

“The Elgin Marbles,” she said, “although we shouldn’t call them that. They were stolen from the Parthenon. They should be in Greece.”

“What makes you so sure?”

Something crossed her face. Disappointment, maybe disgust.

“Some British ambassador marched in and helped himself.”

I was impressed by her passion, if a little intimidated too. My knowledge was hazy, but I was aware of an ongoing dispute. Some hundred years ago, the statues were in ruins. Lord Elgin rescued them and brought them to Britain, and now Greece wanted them back.

“Those marbles were neglected,” I said, half recalling a phrase from the news. “Elgin wanted to preserve them.”

“One of his ships was wrecked,” she said. “Statues sank to the bottom of the sea.”

“Well, that sounds like an accident.”

“He sold the rest to the British Museum.”

“Where they’ve been looked after ever since.”

“They scrubbed them with acid to whiten the skin,” she said, almost breathless. “As if to restore them. Imagine. They were never even meant to be white.”

I was out of my depth.

“They’ve lasted a very long time,” I said. “Elgin meant well.”

“Elgin was an arrogant prick.”

She held my gaze, as if daring me to contradict her, then looked away first and sank into the sofa.

When she spoke again, her voice was flat, as if the anger had burnt itself out.

“There were bodies,” she said, “carved out of stone, but alive. Mutilated. Faces without noses, torsos without limbs, pelvises without cocks. People laughed at those, but not me.”

I unfolded a grey cashmere throw and draped it over the back of the sofa. She shifted, as if I were disturbing her.

“Worst of all,” she said, standing up, “was a girl who looked as if she was ready to fight.”

Her feet were apart, her fists clenched.

“Except she’d been chopped at the knees, the shoulders, the neck.”

She slumped on the sofa again, took the cushion I’d just plumped and held it tight.

“I sat on the floor underneath her,” she said. “I don’t know how long I was there. A security guard came to ask if I was all right.”

Instinctively, I moved towards her, the way I used to when she was small enough to carry. She leaned in for a moment, then pulled away.

I busied myself with the cloth, dusting her violin lying in its open case. The strings rang out, discordant.

“Don’t touch that,” she said.

“You haven’t touched it in weeks.”

I didn’t press her any further, but I was concerned. She was going to become a professional. Her heart was set on it. Her tutor, Mrs Cruickshank, said she had what it took. We’d been looking at conservatoires, the Royal College of Music, Guildhall. She was planning to take her grade eight that year, ahead of her GCSEs. Now she had stopped. For no reason I could discern. The house felt unnervingly quiet.

“I’ve never needed to tell you to practise,” I said. “Don’t turn me into one of those mothers.”

“I don’t feel like it,” she said. “It’s not that deep.”

She left the room. I heard her footsteps on the stairs, then the soft thud of her door.

I wondered whether to follow her up or respect her boundaries. My indecision carried me halfway up the stairs, where I paused, listening for muffled music or voices on the phone, but I heard nothing.

“Are you hungry?” I called out. “I’m making supper.”

Food had become a delicate subject. One week she was vegan, the next she was devouring stacked burgers. I’d found Galaxy wrappers under her bed. I didn’t confront her. Every evening, I laid the table for two, whether or not we both sat down.

Just as I turned back downstairs, her door opened a little.

“I can’t get her out of my mind,” she said. “That girl. You can’t just take parts of people away.”

I might have said, it’s made of stone. It doesn’t have feelings.

Instead, I said, “Are you vegan tonight, or will you eat steak?”

She closed her door.

In the kitchen, I opened a bottle of Malbec, filled a glass and drank. I put potatoes on to boil, peeled an onion, washed the kale. I stood at the window, looking out into the street. The sky was darkening, rain spitting, leaves scuttling in the glare of a passing car. Boys went by on bicycles, one wheel up. Girls tottered by, underdressed for the weather. A hooded figure moved in the shadows, breathing smoke.

I thought about the world outside our house. Primrose Hill and Camden Town. Places Una had grown up in and was beginning to move through alone. Pubs that smelt of hops and lime. Men who leaned in too close. Weed drifting up from the towpath. Green algae on the canal.

I’d tried to teach her to notice danger, to keep herself safe. I’d expected rebellion in her teens, a missed bus, a late-night phone call, slurred words from too much alcohol. Not this. Not marble statues and grief.

After a while, she came back downstairs.

“That smells nice,” she said.

What did she want?

She perched on the kitchen counter, holding her phone, barely suppressing a smile.

“Miss Meadows is taking us on a trip to Athens this summer. Say I can go.”

“Athens?” It barely came out.

“There’s an oracle at Delphi. You can ask it things. It tells the truth.”

“That’s a myth,” I said, draining the kale.

“No, it knows things. Miss Meadows told me so.”

Miss Meadows was beginning to get on my nerves. Fresh out of teacher training, she couldn’t have been more than twenty-three. She floated about in wispy dresses, wearing flowers in her hair. She wanted to bring classics back to life, she said in the school magazine, to show the younger generation how relevant it was. Una’s face softened whenever she said her name. It was a crush, unmistakably. The knowledge lodged inside me like a trapped nerve.

Why I should care that my daughter admired a teacher, I couldn’t say. I’d had crushes like that at her age, but I’d carried mine secretly, like shells I’d found on a beach and held in my hand. Not that my mother would have noticed if I’d laid them out on the kitchen table. But this seemed different. An afternoon at the British Museum was one thing. A trip to Athens was something else.

I reached for my phone and searched my inbox.

“There’s nothing here from the school.”

“It isn’t official,” she said. “Miss Meadows has her own place over there. She’s only inviting a few of us. The ones who want to read classics at uni.”

“Classics?” I said, almost spitting the word. “What about your music?”

She shrugged. “There are orchestras at unis. I can do music on the side.”

I tore the steaks out of their packaging and tossed them into the pan.

“You’re not going to Greece.”

She put her phone down and glared at me.

“What have you got against the Greeks?”

“Nothing.”

“Racist.”

“Don’t speak to me like that.”

“Xenophobe then.”

“I am not those things. You don’t even know me.”

“Because you never tell me anything.”

“You wouldn’t like it there,” I said. “It’s crowded, noisy, hot. You’d be overwhelmed. Besides, is it ethical for a teacher to take her students to her own place?”

“Isla,” she said.

I widened my eyes. This was new, the use of my name.

She squinted at me. “You’ve used so many excuses.”

“Reasons,” I said. “Valid reasons.”

“When you use so many excuses, I smell a lie.”

“I’m your mother,” I said, pulling my shoulders back. “I know what’s best for you. As long as you’re under my roof, you do what I say.”

“You always do this,” she said, tugging my throw from the sofa. “You spread grey over my life.”

“That’s cashmere,” I said, folding the blanket, trying not to sound hurt. “It’s soft.”

She had already run up the stairs and banged her door.

Silence followed, then soft, broken sobs.

I went up and stood at her door.

“Una?”

She said nothing.

“I don’t mean to throw grey over things. I’m trying to protect you.”

My forehead rested against the wood.

“You’re a dreamer, like me. Reality can be harsh.”

She mumbled something I didn’t catch.

The smell of burning meat crept upstairs.

“I need to turn down the heat,” I said. “Will you come down and eat with me?”

There was a pause.

Then quietly, she said, “You never tell me anything.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Nothing,” she said.

I half turned.

“Who are my grandparents? Why don’t you speak to them? Where is my dad? Does he even know I exist?”

I stood there, the smell catching in my nose, my throat.

“Not now,” I said. “The smoke.”

I turned and hurried downstairs.

In the kitchen, I turned off the stove, opened the window and scraped the charcoal from the steaks. I set the table for two and sat down opposite an empty chair.

I couldn’t eat.

It sat in my stomach, unsaid.

I topped up my wine and drank until the room lost its edges, flattening into grey.

Chapter Two

Stray cats draped themselves over hot stone steps, their bones wrapped in patchy fur, their eyes half-closed to the sun, drifting into a dream. Now and again, a tail flicked or a paw scratched at an itch, then grew weary and settled back into its place.

The air hung heavy with heat and the scent of lemon and thyme. Bees hovered over lavender. Figs lay split and baking on the ground. A donkey sloped past, head bent, its steps slowed by the weight of its load. It moved like rough music, bells jangling, hooves striking the cobblestones. Beyond the hill, the sea played its bassline, a rush and crash against the rocks.

I took a breath. This was Hydra. In spite of myself, I had arrived.

For a long time, the island had lived in my mind, drawing me in as much as it repelled me. This was where I was conceived. My parents liked to tell me so on my birthdays, usually after a few drinks, oblivious to my embarrassment. So when Imogen, my oldest friend, handed me a leaflet for a retreat here, I was both unsettled and intrigued.

Kairos, the leaflet read. Ten days in Hydra. A lifetime of change.

Had anyone else handed me this, I would have screwed it up and thrown it away. But Imogen and I had shared a dormitory at Thistledown. We’d cried for our mothers in the night and consoled each other when they didn’t come.

I’d gone to her house in Sussex when my marriage broke down. She’d offered me a futon, rounds of tea and jam on toast. Seth and I had lost a baby. A strong marriage might have weathered it, but not ours. The fault lines had been there for years, and this was the final crack.

Imogen was pregnant again. She tried to hide her bump in loose jumpers, but it showed. She and Daniel had two boys and now they were expecting a girl. They needed space. I felt like a burden in their spare room while their life expanded around me.

I was staring at a future without children, and all I saw was fog. The thought of an eternal, dreamless sleep almost seduced me. I might have said, with Keats, that I was half in love with easeful death, although when I imagined pills, or filling my pockets with stones and wading into the Ouse, the fear took hold. I knew it wouldn’t be easeful.

I didn’t tell Imogen about these thoughts, but I don’t think I had to. She knew. I was on the edge. I had to do something dramatic to get my life back.

So here I was in Hydra, the island of Leonard Cohen’s love story, my parents’ night of passion, the fact of my conception. I had come back to my beginning in search of a way to go on.

I had expected to feel something here, a sense of belonging. But the sun burned, sweat stuck my clothes to my skin, and all I felt was hot and exhausted, not only from the journey, but from the past year.

It was three months since we sold the house.

Six months since Seth left me.

Nine months since I’d given birth to a baby made of stone.

I sat on the steps among the cats. One of them caught my attention, slate grey with pale green eyes. There was something ancient about her. She reminded me of Misty, my childhood cat. It was her I missed most during term time. One Easter I came home and asked where she was.

“Don’t make your mother feel worse than she already does,” my father said.

I packed my grief in my suitcase and took it back to school.

This street cat was thinner than Misty had ever been, even at the end. I reached out to stroke her, forgetting she wasn’t mine to touch. I should have known better than to approach her directly. Startled, she darted away.

I walked on to the Kairos Centre, a large white house with a shaded courtyard. Something inside me recoiled as I approached.

What was I doing here?

I hesitated at the gates, tempted to turn back, but the thought of ten days alone was even worse than the thought of group therapy. Dark thoughts gathered like clouds whenever I was alone. I was afraid of the storm.

A woman with blonde dreadlocks introduced herself as Gaia. Her voice carried easily, the kind trained to hold a room. She handed me a glass of something over ice. It tasted of rosemary and lime. Clean, but disappointing. I wanted something stronger.

People gathered in clusters, some moving easily, others hovering at the edges. Somewhere behind me, a woman spoke quickly in French, then broke off.

“It said everything would be in English.”

“Oui, oui.”

A young couple stood before me, a man and woman from Italy. They were openly affectionate, always touching. I found it distasteful. They seemed to be in their honeymoon phase, which struck me as a strange reason to choose this place.

Two young women in matching red dresses came next, arms linked, voices overlapping. Their names were Ellie and Allie, they said. They weren’t sisters, although people assumed they were. They finished each other’s sentences and laughed too loudly. They had both left their boyfriends on the same day and were planning a hot girl summer.

A sharp irritation moved through me. They were too loud, too pleased with themselves. Then, just as quickly, I caught myself. The judgement felt ugly. It was something I did when feeling insecure. I imagined these people were all judging me.

I moved away. At the edge of the courtyard, an older man was struggling with a corkscrew. His name was Max. He’d had a pig of a day. Delays at the airport. An argument with a taxi driver. Nausea on the boat. A donkey ride that nearly finished him. He needed a drink.

“I don’t know much about Greek wine,” he said, “but we’ll see.”

He poured, then handed me the bottle. We both tasted it and winced.

“Vinegar,” he said.

“Sour grapes,” I said.

We toasted to that and drank.

When I turned, I found myself face to face with a thin man who called himself Spike. I didn’t ask why. He moved in sharp, jerky angles. He looked at my wine glass and blinked.

“Ninety days sober,” he said. “One hundred by the end of the trip.”

I didn’t care for any more judgment. I turned away and spoke to the woman beside me.

She had an open face, an easy smile, a gap between her front teeth. She wore loose khaki trousers and a black vest, beaded bracelets on her wrist. Her voice was rough in a way I found reassuring. Her name was Josie, she said.

A chiming sound cut through the courtyard. Voices fell away. Gaia stood on a raised step, tapping her glass.

“Good evening,” she said. “Welcome to Kairos. We’ll be working in English so everyone can follow. Who can tell me what Kairos means?”

People offered words like opportunity and transformation.

Gaia smiled. “It means the right moment. The moment when change becomes possible, if you’re willing to let go of who you’ve been.”

She looked from face to face. For a moment, her eyes rested on me.

“This is the homeland of transformation, metamorphosis. Like Ovid’s myths.”

“Wasn’t Ovid Roman?” someone called out.

A pause.

“He wrote about Greek myths, I think.”

A ripple of half-laughter.

“We borrow stories,” Gaia said. “We reshape them.”

She let that sit.

“We’ll be learning a little Greek as we go,” she added. “Just enough to get by. But mostly, we’re here to understand you.”

A few people began to share their stories. One woman said she had dreamed of a white house long before hearing about the retreat. Another said it felt like fate. The Italian woman spoke about her mother, who had always believed that some places were meant to find you. Spike said getting sober had felt like that for him. Once he surrendered, everything had fallen into place.

People began to talk about timing. About relationships that had felt written in the stars. About breakups that had also felt destined. I withdrew into my thoughts. I had once believed in fate, but not anymore.

Years ago, Imogen had sent me to a psychic. The woman wore jangling jewellery and too much lipstick. She leaned in too close when she spoke. Her breath smelled of stale cigarettes.

She told me I would have a daughter. Just one. She would be my everything. I held on to that promise. It carried me through three more rounds of IVF. Through the money and the hormones and the hopes that were raised and dashed.

I once believed I was destined to have a child. Now the word destiny felt cruel.

I hadn’t been listening. Gaia was looking at me. Everyone was looking at me.

“And you are?” said Gaia.

“Suzanne,” I said. That was my name at the time.

“Suzanne,” she said. “What brings you here?”

“My friend gave me a leaflet,” I said. “A lifetime of change sounded appealing.”

Laughter rippled around the courtyard. We had all bought into this promise. The absurdity hit me now with the awful wine.

“And how are you feeling?” Gaia prompted.

“Mixed,” I said.

“Mixed is honest,” she said, “Ambivalence is so human.”

After the meeting, people drifted away in small groups. I found myself walking beside Josie down the path. We didn’t say much. But I felt at ease in the silence. At a fork in the path we hesitated, then went our separate ways.

Back in my apartment, I sat on the terrace with my notebook and wrote. Nothing polished, just a few scattered fragments. The sandy cat watched me from the wall above, her pale green eyes fixed on me.

I didn’t approach her. Instead, I went to the kitchen, poured a bowl of milk and set it down outside. I sat in my chair and carried on writing as if I didn’t care she was there.

After a while she crept forward. She drank with her eyes closed, as if she were praying.

A sturdy woman passed along the path below, her tanned, weathered skin pulled tight over strong bones, her dark hair scraped into a bun. She carried a basket of oranges on her hip. She stopped when she saw me.

“Kalimera,” she said.

“Kalimera,” I replied, pleased with myself for knowing the word.

She looked at the cat, then at the bowl. She frowned and said something in Greek.

“I’m sorry,” I said with a shrug, “I don’t understand.”

She seemed to search her mind for the words.

“Milk,” she said, pressing her hand to her stomach, looking pained. “No good for cats.”

“But look how she loves it,” I said, with a wave of a hand. “She’s lapping it up.”

The woman tutted, shook her head, and moved on.

Guilt fought with indignation. I hadn’t meant to insult her. At the same time, who was she to intrude, to criticise my small act of giving? She might be local, but I had paid to be here. I was entitled to take up space, to feed a poor cat. The village had hardly taken good care of her. I could see the bones beneath her fur.

I wrote more freely after that. The cat stretched out her limbs and curled up on the hot tarmac by my feet. I stayed where I was, my notebook filling with fragments. The sun softened, gold and pink spreading across the sky, slipping through olive leaves, dancing across the wall of the terrace.

I opened a bottle of Greek wine and drank it quickly, more for the effect than the taste. The cat sank into sleep and hardly flinched when I touched her.

I slept easily too, for a while, until I woke up in the early hours, the wind wrestling with the wooden shutters. As I lay there listening to the creaks and groans, the woman’s tutting wouldn’t leave my mind.

Chapter Three

We were meant to watch The Traitors together. It’s what we’d always done. I liked the way the clever ones deceived. Una liked it when they were caught.

I went upstairs and knocked on her door.

I heard the tapping of keys, then, “Mm hmm?”

The room was warm and smelt of Una’s perfume, notes of diesel and gin. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed with her laptop open, the screen lighting her face. A book of Sophocles lay beside her. Notes were scattered across the duvet and the floor. I hesitated in the doorway, as if I were interrupting something private.

“It’s Traitors time,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “I’m writing an essay.”

“You’ve been working for hours,” I said. “You deserve a break.”

“I’m into it.”

I’d never known her to be so absorbed in her work. Last year she had an essay on Hamlet. The deadline had loomed like a black mood, the stress etched on her forehead. She would have given anything to be rescued. I was curious. I sat on the edge of the bed.

“What are you studying?”

“Oedipus.”

I screwed up my face. “The one about incest?”

“No,” she said. “Well yes, but that’s not the point. It’s about prophecy and truth.”

I widened my eyes.

“The city is sick, you see,” she said. “The crops are failing. Women are losing their babies.”

I felt the blood drain from my head, but I stayed very still. For a moment I saw white hospital light. A nurse turning away. Then it was gone.

“Everyone knows that something is wrong,” she went on, “but nobody knows what it is. The play is about the search for the truth.”

I asked what her title was.

“Hamartia,” she said. “Most people think it means a fatal flaw, but it’s more complicated than that. It’s like something set in motion that can’t be stopped.”

She spoke with an excitement I recognised from when she was little, trying to explain a dream before it slipped away. I watched her face and felt, absurdly, that I should stop her. Instead I nodded.

She went on to tell me that Oedipus was cursed by his own fate. A prophet had told his parents he would grow up to kill his father and marry his mother, so they bound his ankles and sent him away.

“That’s abuse,” I said. “And neglect. How could anyone do that to a child?”

“But then he was found and taken in. Adopted. Only he didn’t know it.”

Something tightened inside me. Did she know something? No, how could she know? She was talking about a Greek play, a set text, nothing more.

I shifted on the bed. One of her notes drifted to the floor. I bent to pick it up. I caught only one word before she snatched it from my hand. Identity.

She didn’t make space for me to return to the bed, so I sat on the floor.

“But then there’s this prophecy again,” she went on. “He leaves his adoptive parents to avoid killing his dad and marrying his mum. But then he kills a man and marries a woman and guess who they are?”

“His original parents?”

“Exactly. The real ones.”

“Not real,” I corrected her. “Biological.”

“Whatever,” she said. “When he finds out the truth, he can’t bear it. He gouges out his own eyes.”

I stood up too quickly. The room tipped slightly. I put my hand on the desk to steady myself.

“Greek plays are gruesome,” I said.

She gave a small shrug, as if that were part of their appeal.

I went downstairs and put on The Traitors. Someone had been killed, someone falsely accused. Someone defended themselves too quickly and made everyone suspicious. Faces shifted from trust to doubt. A lie changed shape as it moved around the table.

It should have held my attention, but I couldn’t follow it. My thoughts were flying like frightened birds.

I poured a glass of wine and drank.

Upstairs, Una’s light stayed on. I could feel the story still burning in her.

I told myself there was nothing to worry about. It was just a play, just a phase.

I picked up my phone, my fingers moving before my mind could catch up.

Hydra.

I hadn’t done it in months. I told myself that as I typed, as if it made a difference. I had been good. I’d abstained. But there it was again, my fix.

In the early days, I’d had nightmares. The knock at the door. Police moving through the house. Drawers pulled out. Cupboards searched. The laptop taken. Just as they do for abusers. But I was not like those people. Not evil. Not corrupt. I hadn’t done it for pleasure. I hadn’t done it to harm.

The old news still lived online. Twelve years ago, it had flared, then faded, archived but not gone. I opened the reports and found photographs, timelines, statements laid out in sequence. I read as if I were checking facts, as if this were work, not memory.

I went further, found older articles, longer threads. Speculation layered over speculation. The story didn’t end where I thought it did. I followed it down, further than I meant to, clicking from one version to the next, each one shifting something slightly out of place. I could feel it narrowing around me, like a labyrinth. Why couldn’t I stop looking?

“What have I missed?”

I looked up. Something dropped through me, sudden and cold. Una was standing in the doorway.

“I thought you were writing your essay,” I said.

She looked at me oddly. “I thought you wanted my company.”

I shifted on the sofa. She sat down beside me, her shoulders held stiff, her legs crossing and uncrossing.

I put my phone face down. It felt hot in my hand.