Jane DowningShe left the bright lights of the promenade when the crowd began to feel unpredictable. She could breathe more easily as she headed away from the coastline with its seething beach and festival atmosphere, and into the balm of the darker streets. Distant voices echoed and sharp corners muffled footsteps. Ouzo fueled her, for now. Too much ouzo perhaps. No one had been counting.
A church loomed ahead, dominating a corner. Its bell tower rose above the surrounding buildings and businesses. The church itself was low sitting, with eastern style domes above the front sections. Red domes. Dried blood red in the night. Aly hadn’t been lost down these streets before. This was only her third day in Cyprus, her first in Larnaca. The day before, she’d bathed in a pool at the birthplace of Aphrodite and felt for a moment as powerful as a goddess. Now, up ahead, a god was on the itinerary.
There was a considerable paved expanse in front of the church, not, though there were parallels, like the forecourt of a service station, she decided after an initial surmise. This court was older and more oft-trodden. The gate squealed in the silence. Aly pushed through, following a stray cat into the colonnade of perfectly balanced arches that ran down one side of the church; both transgressors, loitering briefly in the shadows away from the moon’s interrogating light.
She wanted to sit awhile but she found the church was locked when she tried the main door.
At this moment, before Aly’s brain could decide what next, a message pinged in her pocket. The face of the mobile became a startling torch. Read: Lost you in the crowd. Her partner would worry. Only to reply, Aly would have to know where she was to say where she was.
Google instantly offered a detailed street map of Larnaca. She zoomed in on the little red flag that geolocated her – traced her footsteps back from there to the medieval fort on the coastal road where Richard the Lionheart had rested on his way to the Crusades to kill the infidel. Her real and digital self synced up. Then she peered closer to read the name of the church that dominated this corner: the Church of Lazarus. The name Lazarus stirred memories, ouzo let them through the barrier she had built around the past. Sunday school and miracles. Jesus raising a man from the dead.
All the information she needed about the church was a hyperlink away, including the history of the man after the miracle. No-one in her Sunday school class had thought to ask what had happened to Lazarus once he was presented with more life to live.
Aly had not told her partner about the awful miracle of her own life. Forgetting had never really been an option. Building a dam, yes, and running away from reminders and mirrors to her grief had seemed the only answer. Her parents had stayed rooted, but she’d got on the train the day after school ended for good and lost herself in a city that didn’t care. And onward to more cities that didn’t give a fuck about one more dead-eyed woman.
Her mobile vibrated and pinged again. She’d felt the device in her short’s pocket, jamming into her flesh, at the fort as she’d imagined herself a sweet Maid Marion while a young man from the tour group took the role of lusty crusader. Her body craved sex to remind it she was alive, alcohol allowed it to give into wild impulse and there was always someone willing, and who knew, possibly wrestling with demons of their own. Her finger skidded over the slick surface of the mobile. Read: Ping me your location. I’ll find you. Her partner was of the forgiving disposition. But everyone has a breaking point.
Aly knew she was lost. A gust of voices buffeted down the street. A sensor light went on over a doorway. A couple walked from the way she’d come, totally absorbed in each other. Two vehicles winked rear and headlights before the owners got to them. Cries of kalinichta (goodnight) were loud and joyous. And no wonder – it was spring, Easter was around the corner, both reminders of resurrection and new life. The cars nudged their way out of tight spots and into the street. Each honked last goodbyes.
She almost missed the next ping amidst the revving of engines. She put her mobile back in her pocket without looking. Lost didn’t mean you could be found so easily.
The cat was back. It must have identified a fellow traveller. It rubbed itself against her ankle, brushing the last of the sand from her skin. Aly wondered how many hours it’d been since she was laughing fit to wee on the Larnaca beach, her back to the promenade, watching the lights skip off the hard surface of the Mediterranean. Having another drink. Then another.
They – the cat and Aly – settled against the door of the Church of Lazarus. The wood retained a little of the day’s warmth and felt good through the cloth of her blouse, brand new from their last stop in Greece, and embroidered thick around the neck like blue tattoos. The cat plaited itself around her legs until settling full-length along Aly’s thigh, chin raised at just the right angle for a scratch.
She hesitated. How bad could fleas be? Scratched lightly, then with more purpose.
Her words too were at first hesitant, as is the case with the long unspoken. ‘Honestly Gatto, I don’t want to talk about it,’ she began, ostensibly to the cat, while turning her face to the moon in its journey towards fullness.
Her preamble was of course a lie. She spoke again. ‘The newspapers even said it was an unspeakable tragedy. We were just a small town halfway up a mountain,’ she explained. A Cypriot cat would know mountains; there was a Mount Olympus a bus ride away. ‘I was on the bus coming home from school.’ The cat purred. Why was this such an encouraging sound?
‘We never made it home. The bus careered or careened or cartwheeled, who fucking knows, down an embankment and into a gully and we all died. Nine of us. My friends and my best friend and my arch rival and my crush, and the driver. Thank God. His life would not have been worth living…’
Discomfort shifted her slightly. The cat objected. Aly settled again, the wood against her back smoother than the rough brick of the fort. But abrasion had been a good thing. Physical pain can mask the worse kinds.
‘So you see, I am a ghost,’ she sighed.
That was the last straw. The cat jumped up and shot into the colonnade. Aly called softly after it. Silly. It wasn’t coming back.
And it wasn’t the truth about being a ghost, obviously. She’d spent three weeks in a coma linked up to all the machines in the world that went ping and now here she was. Someone has to be that tiny percentage on the winning side when the odds are stacked high against you.
Not that the other parents saw it that way. She was a walking, talking constant reminder of their dead children, a cruel trick to taunt, to drive home the absolute unfairness of the world. She was the salt in the very open wounds, the cursed child. She could see it in the eyes of the teachers and everyone on the streets: why had some Almighty power chosen her? Her? She wondered, slumped in the moon shadow of the Church of Lazarus, whether there had been gnashing of teeth over why Jesus had chosen Lazarus and not some other brother or father or son to raise from the dead?
‘I need more ouzo, or some of that apricot brandy,’ she thought, exerting her right to be part of the world and to kill herself slowly – or fast – who cared? Her miracle of survival one time had only brought guilt and shame. But if the world hadn’t managed it, she still had self-destruction.
‘My love, my love, my love.’
The hand on Aly’s shoulder shook her back into consciousness. The sky was pink behind the silhouette of an angel who smelled of fresh bread.
‘How did you find me?’ she asked her partner.
‘Scouring the street. I knew you couldn’t have gone far.’ Laurie picked Aly’s strappy, wedged sandals off the stone steps. ‘Not in these ridiculous things.’
‘It’s been hours?’ Aly asked.
‘Yes, it has been hours.’
Aly straightened herself. Her shorts, her top, the embroidery of the blouse sitting heavy on her chest. Remembered where she was.
‘This is the Church of Lazarus,’ she said, ‘the guy who was raised from the dead. The wiki entry says he lived for another thirty years and never smiled.’
‘He must have cracked a smile. Look at this lovely place.’
They looked. The buildings were gilt with early light.
‘He was a bishop here. This church is built over his tomb. His second tomb. His last tomb.’
‘I know.’
‘Know-all. But no you don’t, I bet,’ Aly accused.
Laurie pulled a paper bag from a capacious beach tote and slightly breached the top. The smell of fresh bread was overwhelming now.
‘A bakery back that way just opened. These are lazarakia. The baker told me they’re special for this time of year, just before Easter with the big resurrection, these commemorating your Lazarus.’
Aly held one of the burnished offerings in her hands. It was still warm from the oven, this creased and crumpled looking bread roll, fashioned into the shape of a corpse swaddled in a funeral shroud.
‘Do you want to go down to the promenade and watch the sun rise over the sea while we eat?’ Laurie asked.
Aly didn’t move. ‘Can we stay here a little longer?’
Her partner picked cat hair from Aly’s blouse and blew it into the air like fairy dust. ‘Whatever you need.’
A man walked past with a rat-dog on a lead. The whole world was beginning to wake up.
‘Will you eat from the feet or the head first?’ Aly asked. Poor Lazarus. Forever devoured. Then she made a small step into the future, adding, ‘I feel like Lazarus.’
‘The unsmiling bit or the dead bit?’ Laurie asked back, around a mouthful of bread, having demonstrated the answer to Aly’s question by action and sunk all teeth into the tapering end of this crusty representation of grave clothes.
It hadn’t been thirty years of rebirth for Aly, but it had been almost twenty. ‘It – the online entry for Lazarus – said he couldn’t smile because he was haunted by the things he saw those four days while he was dead…’
Laurie interrupted. ‘More likely,’ taking a gulp to fully swallow the lump of sweet bread, ‘maybe it was what he saw when he was alive again that stopped him being chirpy. All those years when everyone around him died and stayed dead. How much of an outsider would you feel? Can you imagine, always wondering: why me?’Laurie could clearly imagine enough to ask this question. Aly let mouthfuls of lazarakia soak up some of the ouzo still oozing in her bloodstream. Feared Laurie could still walk away as easily as the cat. Started slowly to unwind her story anyway.
