‘I’m a woman in the prime of life,’ Hunter tells her, ‘with certain powers. Clear-eyed and undeluded.’
‘Yes,’ Neith replies. ‘So I’ve heard.’
The pigeons fly up and away, taking the world with them, and then she’s half crawling, half lying on the front step of the house. She grasps for the emergency button on her glasses, the one they call the Ave Maria, but her fingers are clumsy and numb. She pulls up a weather forecast for tomorrow, crime statistics for the street – laudably low, well done – and finally fumbles her way to the alarm. She looks for the confirmation signal, and finds a string of messages telling her help is on the way, there’s no need to press the button. The Witness flagged her for immediate assistance the moment she emerged from the Faraday cage. She knew that. Of course she did. That’s the whole point. The Witness is always there. The best friend you can imagine. The only friend you need. Although if the dog-walker is around, perhaps he might like to render some assistance. Good citizen. Strong arms.
Sadly, he’s gone to work. Oh, well. The step is very comfortable, for stone. She feels unconsciousness rushing to embrace her, brown and purple at the edges of her eyes. She’s going to pass out – and when she does, she will very likely dream dreams of Diana Hunter, as the origami file unfolds inside her head.
She closes her eyes and lets go of all this needless fuss.
A moment later, she nearly screams when she quite unexpectedly sees a shark.
man water shark
THERE ARE NO great white sharks in the Mediterranean.
Actually, I know there are. There is a breeding population in the Sicilian Channel, where the water is warm and rich. That’s one of the things about all those refugee ships at Lampedusa: there’s really not a worse place to have to swim for your life than right where they sink. But I am not in the Sicilian Channel, I am on a sport dive off Thessaloníki with a girl named Cherry who, after three weeks of pneumatic screwing and no conversation, inexplicably announced this morning that she thinks she’s going to be my wife. Maybe the shark will eat her.
Except that she’s a way away, looking at a bit of fallen temple, and the shark is here, with me.
Not that it’s really a great white shark, because there are no great white sharks in this bit of the Med. Or not many. Just the one, maybe, lost and a bit bewildered. I try to see the huge shape as hapless.
It’s not fucking hapless, it’s a fucking great white shark.
It’s not moving. Sharks have to move to stay alive. They need water flowing over their gills. This one is not moving. Perhaps it’s dead.
It shifts in the water, ever so slightly, button eyes blinking. Do sharks blink? It certainly looked like a blink. Maybe I blinked.
‘Professional courtesy.’ That’s the joke, isn’t it? A shark sees a banker in the water, doesn’t eat him. You know why? Professional courtesy! Ahahahahahah! Ahaha! Ahah.
I’m sufficiently insane that I think: If I take a photograph, it will make for some serious bragging rights. Oh, yeah, you know what I saw on a dive near Athos? Like close enough to touch? Great white. No, I’m serious. Swam with it for a while. Then it left. Well, I thought you might say that, so suck on this unphotoshopped image of me petting the seven-metre torpedo of bikini-chomping death like my grandmother’s puppy. Balls of steel? Steel is for shit. You know what Zeus has, my friend? You know what he tells his girls when he comes to them in the shape of a swan? He doesn’t say he’s got balls of steel. He throws back his head, spreads his arms, and he says: ‘I am the king of the gods, the son of Kronos and Rhea and the master of lightning! I am palaces and power and pleasure and treasure and appetite walking around in tight pants, and better than any of that crap, you know what I got? I got balls like Constantine Kyriakos!’
And hell, it’s not like I can do anything else. If the shark wants to eat me, it is very much going to. I cannot outpace it, fight it off, bribe it or trick it. It hangs in front of me, the biggest living thing I have ever seen. The closest was an elephant. But elephants are not predators, and being a predator makes things bigger: conceptual mass. It is massive anyway. From the tip of the first dorsal to the bottom of the pectoral fin it is taller than I am. And that’s like me lying down and the distance from my arse to my stomach being taller than someone.
The moment is possessed of an indifferent perfection: man, water, shark. Nothing else exists. I swim closer, get my photograph. (Not dead. Neither of us. Yet.) Don’t quite touch the shark. I’m not going to take liberties. Feel a tugging at my fingertips, a fluttering, like a wind beneath the sea, and my mouth opens in an O. I nearly lose my mouthpiece. The shark is resting in a narrow band of ocean current, a river beneath the sea.
It’s just hanging out, like me. It’s a lazy shark.
The eyes roll. A flicker of interest, and suddenly I’m awake, not dreaming of fate and destiny and the primitive comradeship of monsters. I am in the water, arm’s length from a (great white shark) large and admittedly dangerous animal.
Do not panic.
Fuck.
Do not behave like prey.
Fuck.
Do not let your heartbeat spike.
Fuck-fuck. Fuck-fuck. Fuck-fuck. FUCK-FUCK. FUCK-FUCK. FUCK-FUCK.
I haven’t prayed since I was a boy. My mother is Armenian, so I’m not even Greek Orthodox, I was baptised into her communion. She insists it’s the oldest Christian church in the world, the true successor to St Paul, and fuck the Pope. But now I’m praying, and I’m not praying to God at all. I back away: you don’t turn away from a shark, they’re ambush predators. Without regret, I let the shiny wristwatch I wear diving in defiance of common sense fall into the depths, watch the shark’s eyes shift as it tumbles, end over end. I keep inching backwards through the water, trying to remember where the boat is, and I’m holding out the little waterproof camera in front of me, preparing to trigger the self-timed flash and let it go as another distraction. It’s a Sony, overpriced from an airport shop, because I was bored. So this is how I pray:
Don’t eat me. Oh, please. I’ll do anything. Don’t eat me.
The shark twists in the water. Brushes past me. Down, snatching the tiny spark of my wristwatch, vanishing with horrible ease into the water. It is still quite large in my vision when it becomes indistinguishable from the background.
Sacrifice accepted.
The camera is still in my hands. I didn’t have time to drop it.
*
For a few days after the shark story hits the news, I am a local celebrity. I go on talk shows and give interviews in newspapers. Der Spiegel sends a man to talk to me, and a photographer to take my picture. I ask the photographer if she has ever modelled, but apparently she hears this a lot and doesn’t bite.
However, I do not have to buy myself a drink for the duration, and being on TV is a great way to start a conversation in a bar. The whole near-death issue allows me to say goodbye to Cherry. I am reconsidering everything in my life. I have been changed. Annealed. I need time to reflect, to go mad, to get sane, to drink, to be sober. I am a new person. I’ll call her when this spiritual journey is at an end.
I do keep her number, but more as a warning to myself.
In a private villa at Elounda, as part of this healing process, I commission a foam party. My shark picture is projected on to the walls and I arrange for a special Kyriakos cocktail with blue Curaçao and shark fin ice cubes. There is a six-foot ice-luge in the shape of a nude male diver, suitably heroic but still recognisably me, reaching down like God in Michelangelo’s painting to bless the shark. Branded vodka is poured into the back of the statue’s scuba tank and flows freely from his partly engorged penis. I also fly in a group of adventurous art students from Camberwell and pay them to paint the same tableau across the naked abdomens of five Crazy Horse girls. At midnight, two artists and a dancer persuade me to take off my clothes – thank God I’ve been on a fitness jag so my body is muscular beneath a layer of fat, and I can tell myself I look titanic rather than obese –
and they shave me from neck to ankle right there on the leather sofa and wash me in Cristal. At which point the whole night really kicks off, and it’s a carnage of oral sex and orifices and everyone has a great time. I personally get laid on top of the ice luge, roaring and thrusting as my balls brush the melting ice and my arsehole gets very cold, but my partner is totally into it. She’s screaming and yessing as if she’s never had an orgasm before, and that makes me feel pretty fantastic.
You know what Zeus says to his girls? He says—Yeah, okay, I told you already.
Best. Party. Ever.
Except for that one really weird moment, later on, when I’m falling asleep under a duvet made of a dreadlocked sculptor and a junior account executive from a London ad firm, when I could swear a young woman, with short dark hair and very white skin whose dress falls in a perfect indigo cascade down her elegant back to reveal two centimetres of hypnotic buttock, winks at me, and her eyes are completely black and her mouth stretches to reveal the teeth of the shark.
*
Constantine Kyriakos, party man. Never seen without at least one model. Never underdressed, never without some bling. Right? Fast cars and expensive art and champagne and yeah, some coke, but mostly it’s about the women and the style.
Let me tell you, I was not this guy when I was at school. Okay? I really was not. I was on the outside looking in. You know what principally determines that, among boys at school? Football. I had never watched a football match when I arrived, and although they didn’t know it and I didn’t know it, that meant I was fucked as far as the other kids were concerned. I did not speak the common language. This is my advice to parents: teach your son the language of football, at least in some measure, so that he knows enough to parlay with the enemy.
I don’t mean I’d never sat on the terraces. I mean I’d never watched a match, not even on TV, because no one in my family did. It just wasn’t their thing. My father had a bad leg, and spent his Saturdays making jigsaws in his workroom. My mother thought public sports coarse and possibly even profane. So I did not know, for example, that although the game is notionally non-contact there’s a great deal of shoving and colliding. When I played it I just thought anyone who did those things was cheating and I did not understand why the referee did not intervene. Moreover, because I was averse to punishment and the social disgrace it seemed to entail, I did not do them myself. That meant I couldn’t hold on to the ball, so the other kids found me useless, and my teachers mistook my obedience for physical timidity and wrote me off. It never occurred to them to explain that the rules were flexible and interpretable, because everyone knew those things. Boys – automatically, genetically – knew them. That I did not was not something they contemplated.
And then it turned out I was good at mathematics – very good – and that’s another alienation, because almost no one is very good at mathematics. Least of all my teacher.
‘Show your working.’
I have. (Thinking: Are you an idiot?)
‘Show your working.’
It’s here. (Exactly where have I missed a step?)
‘What is this number?’
It’s a moon number. (What can I tell you? There are ordinary numbers and moon numbers and this one is a moon number. Moon numbers are good for making long multiplication simple.)
‘Don’t do that. If you don’t know how it works, you can’t depend on it.’
I do know how it works. You don’t. That’s not the same thing.
‘Don’t be rude. And no moon numbers. Do it properly.’
I’m staring at him now and of course that makes it worse, but okay, if I’m not allowed to use moon numbers I can use angel numbers instead. Angel numbers are not like moon numbers. They are almost moon numbers inside out. Moon numbers increase the amount of stuff you have to hold in your head but they make operations very simple. Angel numbers do the opposite. I’m careful to express answers in ordinary notation, and to show how I work with the angel numbers, every step, so that even my teacher will be able to follow.
He can’t.
Instead he gets angry and sends me to the headmaster, and that’s where Professor Cosmatou probably saves my life, because they’d have expelled me and then I would have got a job working for my uncle and never touched real mathematics again and I would probably have killed myself when Stella died. Or I’d never have loved her at all, because we’d never have met without the Old Girl.
I’m sitting outside the headmaster’s office with my angel numbers, waiting to be told I’m not educable. I’ve been warned about this. If you can’t learn the way other children learn – if you are disruptive, Constantine Kyriakos – you will have to leave.
I sit and wait for the firing squad. I’m ten years old. Fatalism regarding adult insanity is one of the few things I share with my peers.
And then in comes providence, in the form of a narrow, angular woman with her hands in the pockets of a long suit jacket and a grubby white plastic bag dangling from one wrist. She is clearly over a hundred years old, so I guess her actual chronological age at around forty-five. She’s smoking a roll-up with mace in it, so the room very quickly smells like sausage and burning cream.
The old girl looks at me. Glances at my papers. Raises her eyebrows. Extends her hand.
Why not? What could possibly make it worse at this point? I pass them over, grubby thumb print on the white margin at the left, and she nods and smooths them on her knee. She settles, and sighs to herself as she puts on a pair of overlarge glasses with bifocal lenses. Her eyes look owlish and enormous.
She looks over my work. Sees red ink. Frowns. Gets her own pen out – green – and draws a single line through all the red. Turns the page. The green pen makes another flourish, an illicit and complicit contradiction. Constantine is right and you are wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong … and wrong. Writes a simple tick at the bottom next to my conclusion. And then I hear her scribble something, the nib of the felt-tip whistling and scratching. She hands back the last of my papers, and I see this:
ω2 = –5 – 12i
z2 – (4 + i)z + (5 + 5i) = 0
I imagine that means nothing to you? Then imagine she has sketched a perfect half-figure in the style of Rembrandt, and left it with me to complete.
‘Let me know when you come to the end,’ she says, and walks past me into the headmaster’s office.
I don’t really notice the passage of time. I work, and then it’s done. I knock on the headmaster’s door and submit my work to the old girl, who smiles, and thanks me, then shuts the door. I don’t know what else to do, so I wait.
I hear an argument. It largely concerns me, although it occasionally branches out into a more general debate over whether the school is a haven for the imbecilic or the merely mediocre, whether there is any point in schools at all if this is the sort of fatuous shit in which they trade, and whether the old girl is going to rip the headmaster’s empty head off and use it to wipe her arse or whether she is merely going to rescue ‘that poor benighted fucking Ramanujan out there’ and ‘never darken the doorway of this mean-minded educational clip joint ever again’.
‘He’s disruptive.’
‘Of course he is disruptive if you have been trying to make him crawl along with the others! Do you make your sprinters walk the hundred metres as well? Must your best literature students read the same baby-food books as the ones who find every sentence a trial? No? Then why? Eh? Because he uses strange words for things you do not understand? So do I, pea-brain. He may or may not be a genius, but he has something. You need not give it a name, I don’t care. But seeing it in action, you should recognise it, or hypothesise it.’
‘And why, pray?’
‘Because,’ she says, and all the bluster is replaced now by something like fatigue, or fury, ‘you call yourself a teacher.’ There is a suffused silence. ‘Fine, then. Kick him out. We’ll take him.’
‘You will? Who will?’
‘The university.’
Yes, really. True sto
ry.
*
I’ve had enough of sharks and ridiculous performance sex, so I go home. Sanity is in Glyfada, and Glyfada is in – but not really of – Athens.
Before I moved in, I split the flat in two and the connecting door is always locked. The public half is very much what you’d expect: black velvet drapes, mirrored bar, jacuzzi in the middle of one room like an altar, sunken fireplace in another; thick carpets and leather; and an actual disco ball, because I have no shame. There are beds, too, in various flavours of decadence and excess, but very little that feels like home. The connecting door is behind a heavy curtain.
On the private side of the door everything is different. It’s plain, clean and off-white. There are comfortable sofas I bought from a discount place on the ring road, a CD player which was old in 2000, a lot of mismatched Delft pottery with cracks in it to eat and drink from, and some old books from university. For lunch I make sure there’s always hummus and taramasalata with sesame bread. Under the kitchen counter there’s a case of Italian white wine made in the hills over Pompeii. It tastes of volcanoes and it’s not expensive. I buy half-bottles so that I can drink alone without getting drunk. Otherwise there’s water – Badoit, because chilled it tastes the way anaesthetic feels – and sometimes I shove some fruit through the juicer with ginger.
Home at last. Kettle’s on. Chair smells just a little musty: friendly rot.
On a side table there’s a picture of my sister before her breakdown – she’s much better now; I saw her a month ago and she was basically back on track and very scathing about everyone else’s mental health, which is probably entirely fair. There’s another of my mother smiling toothily, and one of my father with a huge fish we caught one summer, a third of me accepting my degree from the Old Girl: ‘Your work has meraki, Constantine Kyriakos. It’s got your heart in it. It is the thing that you are. You should stay here, with us, and do this. It will not make you rich, but it is best.’