“Don’t worry,” said the woman. “I consider this as my ne’ssary inoculation against bandits.” She laughed, a high, hiccoughing sound, like the call of some exotic bird. Layla shrank back, ashamed that the woman had caught her staring. There were tiny faceted gemstones in her ears, the yellowish, sun-spattered green of peridots. The sallow gleam of the overhead bulb seemed to spool itself around them like a tapeworm. Layla took her key and went upstairs. Her room was tucked under the eaves, and the light from the flashing bull sign threw coloured patterns across the bare lino. There was a smell of sun bleached air and spent tobacco and from somewhere within the depths of the hotel there came the muted but insistent droning of a crying baby.

  It was such a relief to be away from people that Layla barely noticed these minor discomforts. She took off her trainers and lay down on the bed. She thought she would fall asleep immediately but the strangeness of the place and the accumulated heat of the day, stuffed beneath the rafters like a goose-down quilt, kept her from doing so. She dozed, a series of images from the day’s events flickering across the backs of her eyelids like trapped moths. She was jerked out of this half-sleep by someone knocking at the door. She drew in her breath, heart hammering, thinking about the woman with the knife wound and wondering how loudly she would have to scream in a place like the Europa before anyone would take any notice. She waited to see what else might happen and when nothing did she tiptoed across to the door and cracked it open. Outside in the corridor stood a crock of water and a tin bowl filled with rice and keftedes. Layla’s innards seemed to swoon. She realised she had not eaten since the crab sandwich on the harbour front at Kalamata. She wolfed down the food in less than ten minutes and soon afterwards she fell asleep for real. When she woke it was morning and daylight was pouring in through the uncurtained window. She pulled on her trainers and reached for her rucksack. She noticed how different the little room looked in daylight, less tawdry. There was a framed print on the wall, a page from Agnes Sartoria’s Manga Aeneid. Layla hurried downstairs. She felt certain it had been the black woman who brought her the food the night before and she didn’t want to leave without thanking her, but there was no sign of her in reception and the desk was now being manned by a youth with a lurid crop of pimples on his forehead and flimsy-looking wire-framed glasses.

  “The bus is out front,” he said. “You’d better hurry or it’ll leave without you. You overslept.”

  He grinned as she ran for the door. The bus was full again and because of her lateness Layla had to make do with an aisle seat. She closed her eyes against the glare of the sun and did not open them again until they were pulling into the Atoll City bus depot.

  Macy Persimmon was there to meet her as arranged. Macy was Idmon Vargas’s Atoll City accounts manager. Layla suspected she was also his mistress, or at least had been at some point in the past. Layla had never seen her hair the same colour twice and on the day she arrived in Atoll City it was lapis blue.

  “Oh my God, you’re here!” Macy cried. “Was the bus ride terrible? I bet it was. I told your father he should have made you come by skyway.”

  “It was no problem,” Layla said. “Honestly.” She had forgotten how exhausting Macy could be. She felt like saying her father was no longer in a position to make her do anything, that he had offered to pay her skyfare and she had refused because having to rely on his money at the very moment she stepped into her new independent life as an adult would have seemed like an admission of defeat. She said none of these things of course. Macy Persimmon with her mirror-glass hair and effortless elegance always had a way of making her feel like a tongue-tied child.

  They drove in Macy’s car to Macy’s flat in Amberville, a part of the city beyond the financial reach of anyone but the intercontinental shipping magnates and the spice traders. Macy’s apartment was about the size of a large broom cupboard. It was also a tip, a compost heap of expensive perfume and designer underwear. Macy had offered to put Layla up on her zed-bed until she found somewhere more permanent. The zed-bed was in the corner of the lounge-cum-kitchen, jammed in behind a stack of cardboard boxes overflowing with fashion magazines and an enormous vTV monitor. Macy’s bed was on a platform above, accessed via a wrought-iron ladder that appeared to double as a clothes-drying area.

  The whole apartment buzzed with colour, but of an inferior, ephemeral kind, the plasticised glare of acrylic as opposed to the lustrous patina of oil. Layla couldn’t help feeling there was a mismatch between the clamorous brightness of the things Macy owned and the nervous way she darted about, as if in spite of her sparky confidence she feared close scrutiny. Layla gazed at the cast-aside stockings, the strew of magazines and old takeaway menus and felt the pressure of tearful laughter beneath her ribs. She knew she could not work here, that the dusty cubby hole at the Europa would have been preferable. She would have to make her escape as soon as she could. She did not want to feel uncharitable towards Macy – it was Macy after all who had found her the job at Minerva Textiles – but the tottering profusion of unnecessary objects filled her insides with a miasma of despair.

  “I’m meant to be in meetings all day, really,” Macy was saying. “Will you be all right by yourself until I get back?”

  “I’ll be fine,” Layla said. Macy nodded and smiled, but her thoughts were clearly miles away already. She was like a bird of paradise, Layla thought. One of the high-stepping lorikeets that were kept in wire enclosures in the Botanical Gardens. Mostly the birds died, because the European winters were too cold for them. But those tough enough to survive went on for years. Macy fluttered about the flat, shoving things into her handbag and chattering incessantly. Eventually she left. Layla went to the window and looked down, watching Macy’s blue head bobbing along the street like the cursor in a game of Hive. Once she was out of sight Layla fetched a drinking glass from the cupboard over the sink and ran herself some water from the tap. The water tasted slightly sour, the way Atoll City water often tasted, especially in summer. Layla turned the glass in her hand, noting its weight, the blue-green depths of the crystal, the pattern of vine leaves etched around the rim. It was a beautiful thing, at odds with almost everything else in the flat, and Layla could not avoid what she knew, that the glass had been a present from Idmon Vargas. She could feel his fingerprints on the crystal as if he had been holding it in his hands the day before. She did not know how she knew this, but she did. It was like a smell she picked up, a trace of something left behind from a person’s memories. The same thing she tried to weave into her panoramas.

  She felt bad about her father and Macy. Macy was harmless and meant well, yet Layla hated the thought of her father being involved with her. In the end though it was none of her business. She felt a wave of relief at the thought, the knowledge that now she had left home she could let all that go. Macy Persimmon could move in with Idmon Vargas if she wanted and it need not concern her. She was free. She had a sudden vision of the pine-panelled white-painted breakfast room of the house in Kardamyli, filled to bursting with Macy’s mirrored scatter cushions and her apparently innumerable family of glass elephants.

  The vision was horrible but so implausible it was almost funny.

  The Atoll City Museum held the largest collection of the sibyls’ works in the whole of Europe. The modern era works were mostly in good condition but many of the older tapestries were faded and torn in places, their subjects partially obscured by centuries of inculcated dust. It was widely known that the museum’s curators were caught in a seemingly inextricable deadlock over whether the weavings should be cleaned or not. The museum’s director and his allies were keen to employ the latest biochemical cleansing techniques to restore these important artefacts to their former glory, but many of the older trustees were firmly against it. There were those among them that believed as the ancients had that tampering with the work of the sibyls could give rise to involuntary time amendment, a spontaneous unravelling of history that could theoretically result in the deaths of millions.

  Layla had always dismissed such theories as primitive nonsense. She revered the sibyls’ work, not out of any superstitious belief in its power but for what it was: the highest achievement to date of the weaver’s art. Livia Sol’s weaving of Poseidon’s stallions, the handkerchief-sized petit point of the children in the furnace by the then fifteen-year-old Crea Atoll – these were works of such high technical accomplishment and profound emotional impact that for Layla it did not matter whether they had in fact predicted the Nantucket tsunami or the ovens of Belsen as many had claimed. The point of the work was the work, and nothing more.

  The prodigy Crea Atoll was the last of the sibyls to be granted official sanction but it was precisely during her lifetime that the anti-clairvoyancy laws had been passed and towards the end of her life she was forced to emigrate. Her works were priceless now but in many of the official historical accounts the facts of her life were often glossed over or even altered.

  It was seen as bad manners, somehow, to talk about the difficulties she had encountered.

  Layla had read both of the full-length biographies of Crea Atoll as well as the illustrated brochure you could buy in the museum gift shop and the lengthy scholarly treatise by Duchen Selwar. Selwar’s book had been banned briefly but was now available again, albeit in a small and prohibitively expensive print run that had put it beyond the reach of most interested readers. There was a copy in the public library in Kardamyli but it was for reference only. Layla had been forced to read it on six consecutive nights under the close scrutiny of Admos Tsoilkos, the head librarian.

  When she first asked if she might read the book he had looked at her in a strange way, as if to convey that she, Layla Vargas in particular might be better off reading something else.

  It was because of her mother, of course. They thought it was catching.

  The colour reproductions in the Selwar book were stunning, but next to the real thing they looked like dull lithographs. Standing for what must have been the fortieth time in front of Crea Atoll’s The Barbarians at the Gate, Layla found herself wishing that old man Tsoilkos had been there beside her, so she could tell him that what she admired most about Crea Atoll was that she was a mortal woman who never claimed anything for her works other than what was there before the eye. The rest of it, the myths and the counter-myths and the downright falsehoods were the invention of academics and proselytisers, pompous acolytes who grafted on their theories and imaginings and vested interests until the inevitable political backlash sent them scurrying back into their rat holes.

  Crea Atoll had been a weaver, an artist. Her greatness had nothing to do with the supernatural; her power lay in her ability to translate the inner workings of her imagination to a physical form, to reveal in the images she created such intellectual and emotional complexity that those who viewed them could be persuaded they were being granted a glimpse of the sacred. This was what all artists strove for but few achieved. It was the depth of Atoll’s commitment that was divine. To Layla, godhead was like beauty or physical strength: unearned, and therefore of little consequence.

  She left the museum and entered the network of narrow streets that formed its hinterland. She had grown accustomed to the city almost overnight, recognising in its parched squares and sunken gardens and junk-filled backyards a landscape that tolerated her presence and soothed her spirit like no other. Also there were colours, colours everywhere. What she was used to was the aqua-sage-rust palette of Kardamyli and the Taygetus. But on the streets of Atoll City the sheer profusion of peoples and commodities meant these three base hues were overlaid with a thousand others: wasp-orange and devil-white, the sour blue of mould, the sweet chestnut of horse dung, the weeping pink of azalea blossom, the searing catamite yellow of the robes of choirboys on their way to temple. In the slashed-mauve lips of the movie actress Bella Lukic – the posters for her latest film were everywhere when Layla first arrived in the city – she recognised again the royal purple first made famous by her father then copied and diluted by a thousand others.

  Her job at the textile factory meant rising at six and taking the tram to Bethsheba, a region of stunted palm trees and bleached concrete where stray dogs trotted hopefully between the dumpsters and loud-mouthed adolescents sprawled on parched lawns playing raucous music on ancient ghetto blasters salvaged from the wrecked steam freighters that blistered and peeled on the rocks outside the harbour. The work itself – designing print templates for the Minerva factory’s line of soft furnishing fabric – was not difficult but it was sometimes interesting and it meant that she had money in her pocket, money she had earned and that was sufficient to pay the rent on the studio flat she had found for herself behind the fish market. And when her shift finished at three she was free to wander the city as she pleased. The afternoons were hot, but she relished the heat, even in the city centre where every ironwork bench and stone-flagged entranceway seemed to magnify it. Once the shutters came down on the meat markets and the garbage trucks had done their rounds the streets became quiet, criss-crossed with knife-edge shadows, patrolled softly by cats. People trod softly then also, as if afraid of waking the giants that according to legend slumbered away the days in the abandoned oil refineries and factory wastelands to the north of the city.

  There were thrift stores Layla liked to visit, places where you could pick up a set of pearl buttons for three drachmas and occasionally turn up a Regina Wilding jacket or a Bullinger belt. Most of all though she liked just to wander, letting her feet learn the city, eventually coming to rest in some overgrown local park or shut-down marketplace where she would listen to the cicadas and let her fingertips and her mind absorb the colours. She especially loved the lacquered craquelle green of the thorn bushes that grew inside the walled gardens of the tall, whitewashed merchants’ houses on Athenaeum Street. These thorn bushes were home to many dozens of orb-weaving spiders, attracted by the heat stored in the great fissured blocks of sandstone that made up the walls. Layla came to think of the bushes as spider-citadels, their crenellated upper bastions hung with silk banners, their narrow windows set with snares to trap invaders.

  The Christian cultists called them Saint Joan Spiders, or Johannas. Iona had always insisted this was because the Christians believed the spiders were the secret emissaries of their peculiar god, but Layla thought it was more likely to be their distinctive markings that gave rise to the name, the simple white cross on the sweet nutmeg-coloured background of their plump little bodies. She liked to watch them as they worked, their focussed determination as they spun out the silk from inside them, measuring and cutting each length with the practised exactitude of the true artisan.

  It’s not just silk to them, she thought. It’s life. A material extension of their being.

  At first glance the Johannas seemed identical, an interchangeable army of miniature monsters, but close to, Layla found she was quickly able to distinguish between individuals. The discovery fascinated her. There was one spider in particular she felt close to: a large and agile female with a pendulous, rose-brown belly, the cross on her back so clear and so bright it looked as if it had been painted on. She liked the way that so long as she kept still and didn’t say anything the spider seemed perfectly happy to let Layla watch her at work, demonstrating her methods in a thousand patient and skilful repetitions, almost as if she was giving a masterclass in advanced web building. Layla got into the habit of visiting her most days. She liked to think the spider recognised her, that she even looked forward to her coming.

  The first of July was so hot that the soles of her trainers felt sticky against the paving stones. Beneath the thorn bushes, the sandstone walls were alive with geckoes and red-tailed leafcutter bees. The spider was there as usual but her web was in tatters. Layla thought the damage had probably been caused by a lizard, or by the successful escape attempt of a particularly large hornet. She watched as the spider set about the painstaking work of repairing it. The heat was making her head swim. Time, in that hidden sunny place at least, seemed to have stopped.

  “She puts us to shame, don’t you think?”

  Layla jumped inside her skin and turned around. She had been so absorbed in watching the spider that she was not aware that she was no longer alone, that she too was being watched. People – tradesmen and peddlers, mostly – did sometimes make a short cut along the access path but the voice seemed to come out of nowhere. The figure she saw before her seemed enclosed in heat haze, not so much a human being as a concentration of energy. Layla shook her head, trying to clear it, and saw the shifting bands of sunlight reassemble themselves into the body of a hunched old lady.

  “I’m sorry, dear,” said the woman. “I didn’t mean to startle you.” She nodded her head, as if agreeing to a suggestion that had not yet been made, and Layla saw with consternation that it was someone she recognised, the ancient crone who had sat beside her on the bus between Kalamata and Tegea. The old woman was as ugly as she remembered, ugly in a way that had little to do with vanished youth or beauty but in an outlandish, almost spectacular way that could only be described as a displeasure to the eye, the repulsive visual anomaly that might be recognised in a stonefish or wolverine.

  Her eyes though were lovely, and so unusual in their violet coloration that Layla found herself wishing she had brought her watercolour box with her, so that she could make an attempt at mixing the colour herself for later use. The beauty of those eyes in that desiccated face formed a contrast that was somehow indecent. It was as if the eyes belonged to someone else entirely, a lovely young woman who was being held prisoner in the body of the monstrous hag.

  “I know you,” Layla said. “You were on the bus.” She had no idea why she said this, only that she wanted to startle the woman as she had been startled, to make surprise dawn on her face, to see her freakish features rearrange themselves into something more human. She gave a small laugh, impatient to get a reaction. The old woman leaned forward, peering directly into Layla’s face. Layla could smell her breath, the almond-sugar scent of macaroons.

 

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