Read Online Intimate Distance by Katerina Cosgrove - Free Book Online Page B

hand.
    An apple tree in summer is a beautiful thing. Trembling against a china sky, growing new leaves. We sit beneath it and watch the delicate patterns made by the branches, designs that seem almost Japanese, tracing over our faces and bare necks.
    â€˜I no longer remember the words,’ she whispers.
    â€˜Excuse me?’
    I’m beginning to think the old woman is mad. No wonder she’s an outcast.
    â€˜I’m forgetting the words for things,’ she says. ‘I can see the object in my mind’s eye, I can see its colours, remember the way it feels to the touch – but the word is gone. I can’t remember the words; for the top part of a shovel, the smell of earth after rain, the –’
    â€˜Like my mother,’ I say. ‘That’s the way she felt before the Alzheimer’s hit.’
    â€˜Hmm?’ She turns to me. ‘I don’t know what that is,’ she says carefully.
    â€˜It’s a disease of the brain.’
    My Greek is faltering.
    â€˜It gets worse,’ I say. ‘I hope not.’ She laughs. She seems to be thinking of something else. ‘I tell fortunes,’ she says. ‘From the apple leaves.’
    â€˜Can you tell mine?’
    â€˜Of course I can.’
    She smiles artfully and I catch a glimpse of what she must have been like as a young girl. She strips a low branch of its leaves and lays them on my palm.
    â€˜Now you squeeze them together and then fling your hands out as if you’re drying them. Whichever leaves are left will show us the future.’
    I feel the leaves disintegrate as I rub them. When I’ve shaken my hands out, five leaves still cling to my palms: two on the right and three on the left.
    â€˜First the bad news. Give me your left hand – that’s it, show me.’
    Alcmene leans over my palm, so close her coarse grey hair tickles. She picks over the leaves with the tip of her finger.
    â€˜Oh,’ she says. ‘I see three people hurting each other.’
    I look up, scan her face.
    â€˜Who told you?’
    â€˜I know nothing, child. I only speak what the leaves tell me. Now, show me your right hand.’
    I stare down at the two leaves, glued to my palm and translucent with sweat. She grabs my fingers and spreads them out and up to the light.
    â€˜Good news. Two people will reach a safe harbour.’
    She studies my face, speaks slowly.
    â€˜But it may take a long time.’
    Then she looks up.
    â€˜Look at the leaves dancing. Don’t you love them?’
    I stay with Alcmene to watch the leaves.
    14
    WE’VE BEEN IN the village two weeks; and I feel close to my time, although I know it’s still months away. This morning I sit on the terrace gazing at the view: mountains cleaving together in numerous rifts, close, close, closer, until I’m caught in two folds, squeezed by the earth without an inch of air to breathe in. A shredded sky. But my far-off glimpse of the sea consoles me. The blue is limitless, full of possibility. Our only hope, I realise now, lies in the birth of my child, whoever the father is.
    I’ve set up a table and the ubiquitous chairs sold by the gypsies from the back of their trucks. Each week they peddle the sort of produce nobody in these mountain hamlets can make or grow for themselves; oranges from Israel, packets of fine-ground coffee and sugar, white boxes of Turkish loukoum . And these cheap plastic garden settings. Each night we sit on them, waiting for the evening breeze that begins every day at exactly the same time, coming off the pines. Twilight hugs the coast, the mountains, our faces and hands, like a lover. From the kitchen I bring small bowls, cold food given by relatives and neighbours. Just to help out, they say, and offer fresh eggs with grey feathers still clinging, dried lines of blood in the cracks. A round of hard yellow cheese, a jar of briny olives. Rose-hued wine out of an old whisky bottle. As we eat, the sun