Chapter 24 The Postcard #2
We were both quiet for a moment. The sea did its thing. A fishing boat crossed the far edge of the view, slow and deliberate, going somewhere with the particular unhurried confidence of something that knows its own direction. I watched it until it was past the headland.
"Elena knew from the ferry," I said. "She looked at the postcard and she already knew."
"Some people can see it," Priya said. "The people who are going to stay."
"Can you?"
She considered me for a moment. "I could see it in Dalston," she said.
"That night in the wine bar. You were telling me the Greenpath story, the real version, and somewhere in the middle of it you said: I just want somewhere that makes sense when I work hard for it.
You said it like you'd been saving it." She paused.
"I couldn't tell you where it was going to be. But I knew it was somewhere specific."
I looked at the postcard in my pocket.
"My grandmother knew too," I said. "Apparently."
"She had good instincts," Priya said. "It runs in the family. You just needed a bit longer."
"Six years."
"Some of us are slow readers," she said. Which, from Priya, who has never in her life read slowly or done anything slowly, was extremely gracious.
We sat quietly for a moment. The evening light was doing its best across the water.
"I said I'd tell you something," Priya said. "What Eirini actually said. The part I was keeping."
I looked at her. "You said three chapters."
"I miscounted." She had the grace to look briefly unrepentant about this. "Eirini asked me if you were staying. When we were leaving, she said it to me, not to you — she was watching you look at the view and she asked." A pause. "I said I didn't know. I genuinely didn't, then."
"And she said?"
Priya met my eyes. "She said: she knows already. She just hasn't decided to know it yet."
I looked at my coffee.
"Right," I said.
"Yes," said Priya. "Right."
"What are you going to say?" she asked. "To him."
I thought about it.
"The truth," I said. "The actually true thing."
"Not a soft version?"
"No." I looked at my coffee. "It's going to be awful."
"Yes," Priya agreed, with the equanimity of someone who has watched me avoid things for a very long time and is familiar with the specific relief of the moment when I stop. "But it'll be the right kind of awful."
We sat with that for a moment. The sea did its early-evening colour shift — turquoise deepening to something richer and darker, the way it does at this hour when the light comes in low and sideways and turns everything slightly cinematic without asking anyone's permission.
"When?" she asked.
"Tomorrow," I said. "Before service."
No probably. No if the moment's right. No when it feels like the time. I said it like a fact, which it was, because I'd decided it on the headland this morning and I wasn't going to undecide it.
Priya looked at me. She had the expression she'd worn in a wine bar in Dalston eight months ago, when I'd finally told her the actual shape of what had happened at Greenpath, and she'd been very still and then said: I'm glad you told me.
I'm going to tell you that you're going to be all right. You don't have to believe me yet.
"Good," she said now.
She refilled her coffee from Elena's pot.
"Now," she said, "I need to ask you something, and I need you to be completely honest with me."
"Of course."
"Is there anywhere on this island that does a decent souvlaki, because I genuinely ate something in Chios that I'm still not over and I need something I can identify with confidence."
"The kafeneion by the church," I said. "Barba-Nikos's son runs it. He closes at eight."
"It's quarter past six."
We went.
Barba-Nikos, still on his bench as we passed, looked at Priya again.
"He is definitely acknowledging me," she said.
"He is acknowledging that you are a person who walks past him," I said. "It is a different thing."
"On this island," Priya said, "I'm not entirely sure it is."
She was, I thought, not entirely wrong. The island makes note of who passes through and who stays. It had made note of Priya. It had, I was fairly certain, made note of me before I'd made note of myself.
The souvlaki at the kafeneion was, for the record, very good.
Barba-Nikos's son — a large, cheerful man called Kosmas who had his father's eyes and absolutely none of his father's economy with words — talked to us for approximately forty minutes while we ate, covering: the fishing season, the best way to prepare octopus (he had opinions; they differed from the taverna's; I kept this to myself), the property developer who had been sniffing around the north end of the harbour (I already knew about this; I also kept this to myself), and a very involved story about a tourist who had tried to hire Michalis's ferry for a private party and what Michalis had said, which I could believe entirely.
Priya recorded eight minutes of it on her phone for the newsletter.
"Regionally speaking," she said, on the walk back, "this island is excellent."
"Yes," I said.
"I'm going to need to come back."
"I know," I said. "I've already told you."
She looked at me sideways. "When did you start being smug?"
"I'm not smug," I said. "I'm certain. It's different."
She thought about this. "It is," she said. "It looks good on you."