She sits, knees together, on the ground beneath the stunted sea-cliff olive trees, smiles nicely as her mother and Paulina gather with the same women they gather with every day and pitch into the endless rolling stream of news. Someone is pregnant again. A daughter needs to go to the mainland to get her hare lip corrected and it will cost a thousand dollars. The cloth for their curtains – did you see it? Peacock feathers. You remember the son who went to Australia? He sent it. Isn’t it nice that a son will remember his mama from all the way across the world? Aren’t peacock feathers bad luck? Yes, but she says she doesn’t care!
A hiss of indrawn breath. Only a fool tempts the fates.
She feels drowsy and dull, as she so often feels, listening to the women talk. The tedium of adulthood, the smallness of their worlds. The men have gathered by the cliff. A bottle of grappa has appeared, as it always does at funerals. At weddings. On holidays and holy days. When dinner is finished. When visitors appear. When agreements are struck and disagreements repaired. To celebrate friendship. To fill a lull. It’s how it is. It’s how it has always been.
She looks around and notices that Donatella is gone, with Felix and most of the other children. Dammit, she thinks. I almost missed my chance. She slowly unwinds her crossed legs and gets to her feet. Brushes old oily leaves from her shins and thighs and backs away while the grown-ups are distracted.
No one glances up as she goes.
*
The temple was magnificent once. Traces of the elegant marble frieze that once ran beneath its eaves are still visible on scattered stones. Naked bodies, bearded satyrs, the remains of frolicking legs that would have caused her grandmothers to cross themselves and beg Holy Mary to protect them. Paving cracked and warped and warm beneath her feet, the scent of crushed camomile as she walks. Fallen roof beams. It’s taken two thousand years, but it won’t be long before all that’s left of Heliogabalus’s temple is a clutch of jagged hyperstiles, cutting the air like broken teeth.
Sometimes tourists wander around here with their cameras and their self-conscious watercolour sets and their portable canvas chairs, and sigh about the beauty of solitude before ordering chips at the Re del Pesce in the evening. And the Delias smile and smile and bring them limonxela, and never say a word about the ghosts on the plateau beyond. You don’t want to frighten the milk cows with ghosts. And you don’t let your children see them for themselves.
But children have minds of their own.
She hurries through the ruins. Glances at the altar as she passes, checks it for traces of ancient blood. A couple of oleanders have rooted themselves in the cracks at its foundation and have slowly raised it over the years until it stands lopsided among their tangled roots.
The distant sea, a hundred metres down, murmurs as she walks. The adults’ voices fade into the blue of the breeze.
Mercedes realises that she is still wearing her mourning scarf. She snatches it from her head, shakes out her curls with pointed fingers, and tucks it into her pocket. She steps out into the sunshine and sighs with pleasure at the feel of the breeze in her hair. Her destination is a few metres away, on the edge of the cliff where the land drops away. She hurries towards it, determined to see the Grota de las Sirenas with her own eyes before her mother realises what she’s doing.
All the other kids are there already. When she reaches the false horizon, she sees a whole knot of her peers gathered round the venthole, staring, silently. Felix Marino’s little gang. And her sister Donatella, three years older and half a head taller than the tallest of them, but gaping, like the rest, like a child.
‘Can you hear them?’ she calls.
Felix looks sharply up and presses a finger to his lips. They’ll hear you. Hush. ‘They’, the parents. And ‘they’, the inhabitants of the hole in the ground.
Mercedes slows, walks the rest of the way on the balls of her feet. Tingles with excitement. All their lives they have heard the tale of the sirenas. The lost souls of impure girls, flung into the dark and transformed by the ocean. You can hear them, if you’re quiet enough, said their abuejas. Mourning their fate, pleading for forgiveness. Never go up there by yourself. It’s dangerous. All they want is more to join them. They’ll draw you in, seduce you. Their song will make you dizzy and you’ll fall, be lost forever.
Donatella glances at her as she comes to stand beside them, and grins. There’s a glow about her face. She could be a mermaid herself, thinks Mercedes. Imagines the girls below, their silver scales, their naked breasts, hands stretched up to the patch of blue sky above them. Such wanton display.
She worms her way into the ranks and peers into the dark. The mouth of the sea vent is narrow – no more than a couple of metres round – and she can only see a short distance before the rock walls vanish. So dark, she thinks. What must they have seen as they fell? How did it feel, their broken bodies lying on the broken rocks, washed by the tide, staring up at their tormentors?
She strains to hear voices. Hears only the sound of her companions’ breath, the rustle of their clothes as they shift and settle, the groan of the waves inside the cliff face.
Their bones are still there, she thinks. They may have transformed, but I bet if you went down there on a rope you’d find that cave scattered with shattered skeletons.
She listens some more. Nothing. The bleat of sheep in the distance. A lark so high above that he is unseeable, singing a song of pleasure so pure it makes her shiver. But no human voices. Just Felix, breathing through his mouth because he gets congested away from the water. They can’t really think I’m going to marry him, she thinks. Imagine. Listening to that noise in the night for the rest of your life. And the smell of fish, on his clothes, under his fingernails. No. The boy I marry will be fragrant. He will shower every day, like my father.
As she concentrates, she slowly becomes aware of a strange throb in the air. For a moment, because it’s where she’s looking, she thinks it must be coming from the cave. But then she glances at her companions for validation and sees that they have all turned away, hands shading eyes like a military salute, and are gazing out to sea.
Something is approaching in the distance, over the water. A sound they’ve never heard before. Mysterious. Dynamic. Strangely ominous. Coming closer.
‘What is it?’ asks Eriq.
‘Is it the end of the world?’ asks Maria.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ snaps Felix, and Donatella laughs.
They squint to find the source of the sound. It goes from throb to rat-tat-tat. Low over the sea in the northwest, a glittering silver-white thing flies towards them over the fishing boats and the four white yachts that anchored this afternoon outside the harbour walls. A flying beetle. And then, as it gets closer, a dragonfly: wings above the fat little body whirring so fast they blur.
‘What is it?’ Felix tries to sound bored, but his squeaking voice betrays him. ‘An aeroplane?’
‘No,’ says Maria. ‘Aeroplanes look like this.’ And she puts her arms out at shoulder level. The remains of a German aeroplane from the war lies abandoned on the hillside above the castle, a play-fort for generations of Kastellani children.
‘I know what it is,’ says Mercedes, confidently. She’s seen a picture in a book. ‘It’s a helicopter.’