Spin, page 1
SPIN
BY NINA ALLAN
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First published 2013 by TTA Press
Print Edition ISBN 978-0-9553683-6-3
Smashwords Edition ISBN: 9781301417698
Copyright © Nina Allan 2013
Cover by Ben Baldwin
Copyright © Ben Baldwin 2013
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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For my father, Stuart Stephen Allan
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CONTENTS
SPIN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SOON FROM TTA NOVELLAS
BACK PAGE
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SPIN
Low was her birth, and small her native town,
She from her art alone obtain’d renown.
Idmon, her father, made it his employ,
To give the spungy fleece a purple dye:
Of vulgar strain her mother, lately dead,
With her own rank had been content to wed;
Yet she their daughter, tho’ her time was spent
In a small hamlet, and of mean descent,
Thro’ the great towns of Lydia gain’d a name,
And fill’d the neighb’ring countries with her fame.
from Metamorphoses, Book the Sixth, The Transformation of Arachne into a Spider by Ovid, translated by John Dryden
Her father was not there to say goodbye. It was not unusual for him to get up early and take the boat out, but Layla knew that today it was deliberate, that he didn’t want to see her leave. She walked to the bus stop by way of the harbour front, hoping she might still catch a glimpse of him, his body a taut line above the water as he pulled back on the Auster’s sail rope, aiming the sea kite into the sunrise like an arrow into fire. She scanned the horizon expectantly, shading her eyes with both hands, but there was no sign of him. He was too far out by now, probably. It might be several hours before he returned.
She arrived at the harbour bus stop just after six. Dawn was stepping from the sea on to the sand. When she was a child Layla liked to imagine that her mother would come back to her that way, rising smoothly out of the water she had been drowned in, her sodden dress clinging to the curves of her body like a second skin, her long feet high-arched and pearly white in their pink suede flip-flops.
The stop was deserted. The seven o’clock shuttle would be much busier, something Layla had wanted to avoid. As it was the bus came late, rattling along the coast road in a trail of diesel fumes and fine white dust. She showed the driver her ticket then sat down on a bench near the front. She disliked the back seats, where the cloth merchants and wool gatherers played out their endlessly rolling whist tournaments and gave one another black eyes when they started to lose. She stowed her rucksack under the seat. This made the space more cramped but she didn’t feel like trusting her luggage to the open rack.
As the bus drew away from the waterfront and headed inland Layla wondered if it was true, what her nurse Iona had told her, that once you were away from the coast the Mani became another country entirely. She could sense the land’s rough breathing, so different from the sweet-mouthed breezes that stirred the breakers along the shoreline at Kardamyli. The road across the mountains was bumpy and gravel-strewn, still unmade in places, the slopes above steeped thickly in stunted olives and golden saxifrage. For the first time since buying her ticket, Layla felt queasy with doubt and something she supposed was homesickness. If the Taygetus were another country, Atoll City itself was an alien world.
They came into Kalamata at around midday. This was a scheduled rest stop, an hour to stock up on food or just stretch your legs. Layla walked down to the harbour, where a consignment of mirror glass was being unloaded from a steam freighter and lifted in gleaming stacks on to the open bed of a sky truck. The navvies glistened with sweat, while a tiny bearded man clutching an iPad dashed around yelling instructions. Layla bought a crab sandwich and watched the harbour traffic as it inched slowly towards the exit slipway that led to the ring road. The people in the cars were brightly dressed, their cheap garments a rainbow of synthetics, reductions of the hues her father had taken decades to perfect. Their loud cacophony raised an itching sensation in her nerve endings.
At five minutes to the hour she began to walk back. She knew more passengers would be boarding at Kalamata, and she didn’t want to risk losing her seat. By the time the rest stop was over the bus was full. The seat beside her, empty until the rest stop, was now occupied by an old woman. She was stick-thin, and frightening to look at, ugly in a way that was almost freakish. On her lap she held a knapsack, a leather drawstring bag that seemed to heave and pulse with a life of its own. Layla dreaded to think what horror might be inside. She stared fixedly out of the window, determined not to meet the crone’s gaze. She yearned to get out her embroidery, but her rucksack had slipped right back under the seat and she didn’t want to draw attention to herself by rummaging for it. It would be another five hours until they stopped for the night in Corinth. The thought of having the old woman wedged up against her for the duration made her feel sick. There was a toilet break at Tegea, where to Layla’s surprise the old woman vacated her seat as soon as the vehicle came to a standstill. Layla snatched up her rucksack and got off the bus. There was a roadside drinking fountain, a rusted length of piping set straight into the rock. Layla drank, filling her mouth and throat with the taste of coins. In spite of the heat of the day the water was icy.
The cicadas were in uproar. The uneven road shimmered in the heat like a mirage. After ten minutes or so the bus driver blew a whistle and everyone began to re-embark. Layla pushed to the front, not wanting the old crone to get ahead of her and grab the window seat. When the old woman didn’t appear she felt surprised. As they lurched out of the lay-by Layla scanned the roadside, half expecting to see her hobbling after the bus at a stunted run, the bulging leather sack clutched to her chest. There was no sign of her, however, and the seat beside Layla remained empty.
As the evening drew on the light softened, winding down from topaz through sapphire to a dusty amethyst. Layla opened her rucksack and drew out the miniature panorama she had been working on before she left. It was scarcely begun, with just one bright corner of stitching as proof of what she intended, but already the piece possessed her, had become for her as each new work inevitably did a material extension of her spirit.
She was using the smallest of her embroidery frames, the only one she had that would fit inside her rucksack without having to be taken apart. It was made of gingko wood, the timber sanded and then sealed with teak oil, its two interlocking sections a perfect fit. It had been Iona who had first shown her how to use it, how to stretch the canvas as tight as it would go over the inner circle then secure it by winding the four brass screws on the outer ring. Layla had been four at the time, and making a nuisance of herself by excavating the contents of Iona’s work basket.
No doubt Iona believed the child in her charge would soon become bored when faced with having to do something more constructive than simply making a mess; as it turned out she was wrong. By the afternoon of the same day, Layla was able to form a simple cross-stitch. A week later she presented her father Idmon with her first tapestry. The work was simple but it was extraordinary nonetheless. Where a less complicated child might have tried to work a simplified diagram of the house she lived in, say, or her pet monkey, the four-year-old Layla Vargas had coloured the entire area of the circular canvas with a forest of green stitching, an abstract design created from the odd tag ends of test silk she had found scattered beneath the workbenches of the master dyers. Idmon Vargas counted twenty-six different shades of green in all. The stitching itself was almost perfectly uniform, the standard of workmanship you might expect from a girl three times Layla’s age or even more.
Layla remembered being made a fuss of, she remembered becoming aware that in the eyes of Iona and her father and the workmen in the silk shops she had performed an unusual feat. But in her own mind these things were marginal and surface, like the wavelets that scurry along the shoreline at the first breath of wind. What mattered to her was the thing that happened inside her when she thought about silk. Until the day she learned to cross-stitch she had been surro
When she was twelve years old, Layla suddenly became convinced that her mother, Romilly Perec, had been a sibyl. It was the only way she could think of to explain her gift, and although all savants now held equal rights under the law, she had learned at school that sibyls were still being executed for crimes of clairvoyancy as little as ten years ago, especially in the provinces.
She hugged her thoughts to herself until they became too heavy to carry. Then she asked Iona if it was true.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Iona. Her face flushed a deep, turkey-wattle red, and Layla was reminded of something she didn’t usually think of: that Iona was the butcher’s daughter, that when she wasn’t cooking and cleaning for Idmon Vargas she was in the slaughterhouse, boiling up buckets of blood to make black puddings. “Your mother wouldn’t have known a needle if it jumped up and stung her. She wrote things, that’s all, stupid things. She had no time for clairvoyancy, just as she had no time for the law or for the forum or for honest work, come to that. Don’t you let your father catch you asking questions about her or he’ll tan you one.”
Layla felt like striking Iona across the face with her outstretched hand, pushing her backwards into the meat larder and reminding her that Idmon Vargas had never ‘tanned her one’ in her entire life. Instead she went to her room and lay down on the bed, digging her fingernails into her hands to keep from crying. It wasn’t that she objected to crying so much; it was just that she wasn’t going to let Iona Phillipos catch her at it. Later that evening she began work on what she later recognised as the first of what she called her panoramas, larger scale tapestries of the length and breadth of a dining table or even bigger, large enough to tell whole stories rather than just illustrations of particular scenes.
This first panorama showed a squad of triremes sailing out of the circular harbour at Limeni. In the foreground by the harbour wall two fishermen were dragging a woman’s body out of the water. The woman’s feet were bound. Water streamed off the naked torsos of the fishermen in rivulets of transparent aquamarine. The water effect was particularly hard to attain and Layla had worked on this obsessively, unpicking and stitching over until it was right.
The master of the leading trireme, a stocky, dark-haired man with a square black beard, was talking into a mobile phone.
When her father saw the weaving he went very quiet.
“Who told you?” he said at last. “I didn’t want you to know about your mother until you were older.”
“No one told me anything,” said Layla. “I made it up. All by myself.” She felt a flame-coloured spurt of annoyance, that he might think she had copied, assume that the images he saw in the tapestry were not her own. At that same instant Iona entered the room, her sturdy body purposeful as a steam train as she salvaged three dirty coffee cups, a slew of magazines, a plate of toast crusts. Iona was not supposed to enter Layla’s room without knocking, and Layla knew she was only doing it now because her father was there. She opened her mouth to remonstrate, but that was when Iona raised her head and caught her first glimpse of the panorama.
The coffee cups crashed to the floor. Two of them smashed, and Layla saw the third roll out of sight beneath a chair. (She retrieved it a month later, busy with mould.) Iona was pressing her hands to her mouth, and Layla saw with shock that there were tears in her eyes.
“It’s all right, Iona,” said her father. “Layla and I will finish tidying up in here. You get yourself home. You look tired.”
When Iona had left and they had eaten supper, Idmon Vargas told his daughter how her mother had died.
By the time they came into Corinth it was too dark to see anything much. The streets of the Old Town were steeped in a deep twilight, the ancient, bitter purple of woad. Layla put her work away and sat with her face pressed to the window glass, trying to see past her reflection to the city outside. Most of Corinth had been destroyed in the war with Carthage a century earlier, but pockets of older buildings remained: a cluster of narrow townhouses around an old pump-well, the shadowed bulk of a six-storey department store clad in traditional protective ironwork. Here and there a pale gold light stretched feeble fingers through the slats of a shuttered window. There was a deep silence, as if the place was still in mourning for itself, and it was not until the bus crossed the bridge into the modern portion of the city that Layla realised that Old Corinth was little more than a stopping-off place for tourists doing the rounds of the ancient sites.
The New Town was a garrison town, a place people passed through or left from, and seemed to consist mainly of a series of truck stops, connected by strips of broken grey asphalt and illuminated by the harsh neon lighting of the all-night bars and convenience stores that encircled them. The bus ratcheted its way across the potholed tarmac of the inner ring road and then drew itself to a standstill outside a sagging lopsided carcass of a building with fake Corinthian columns and a flashing fluorescent roof-sign depicting a bull. The place was called the Hotel Europa and Layla realised with a sinking feeling that it was their overnight rest stop. She had never been in such a place before. On those few occasions when she had travelled to Atoll City with her father they had invariably been put up in the luxurious private homes of one or other of Idmon Vargas’s business associates, and in Atoll City itself there were the plush corporate hotels strung out along the western end of the harbour front in cross-hatched gleaming diagonals of steel and glass. Her father held standing tariffs with at least two of them on account of his sales reps. The Europa was not much better than a truckers’ hostel, the kind of place Iona would call a dive.
Layla glanced around anxiously, wanting to see what the other passengers might make of it. Some would be ending their journey at Corinth of course, they wouldn’t be staying at the Europa in any case. As soon as it became stationary the bus erupted into hubbub and general upheaval as people hauled their bags down from the racks and rushed to stow stray possessions in their hand luggage. Layla waited until the bus was almost empty before making her way forward to the exit. She understood that a night’s stay at the Europa was included in her ticket price, but she wasn’t sure of the procedure for checking in. She glanced at the driver, a stout peasant with elaborately lifelike tattoos of handcuffs on both wrists and his black beard combed and stiffened to resemble a dagger.
“Excuse me,” she said. He rattled something at her in what sounded like Aramaic and waved his hands. She thought she recognised the words ‘ticket’ and ‘reception’.
“Okay,” she said. “Thanks.” She stepped off the bus and walked towards the hotel entrance, tagging along behind a group of shark fishermen who she remembered boarding the bus at Kalamata. Once inside they clustered around the reception desk, joshing and throwing mock insults in loud voices. A black woman in a teal blue headscarf was handing out keys. She was young, still under thirty, her dark skin lustrous as teak. Layla wondered where she was from. She was not used to seeing African women, although two of her father’s murex farmers were from Ethiopia. Idmon Vargas said they had a natural feel for the work, that the murex snails liked them.
The black woman handed Layla a key on a piece of red string.
“You’re on the third floor,” she said. “It’s a bit of a climb but at least you ought to get some peace and quiet.” She glanced pointedly towards the shark men and smiled. As she turned her head, Layla was horrified to see that the right side of her face was heavily scarred; a tube of twisted, thickened tissue cut through the taut, shining flesh of her cheek like a dug trench. The result of a knife wound, probably. Layla wondered if such things were an occupational hazard at the Europa.
