Songbirds by Christy Lefteri

Author:Christy Lefteri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Fiction

In the village there is a guest house: a small, rickety building with brown shutters and whitewashed walls in the back garden of a widow’s home. There have been no guests, though, for many years. Once in a blue moon, someone will call from a distant land and make a booking and the old woman will take down the details in a black notebook she keeps by the phone. Then she will go to great efforts to clean, and fluff up the towels and cushions. She will place fresh tea-bags and honey and sugar on a tray, and lay sugared almonds on the pillows and bake pistachio cakes, which she’ll wrap in cellophane decorated with paper daisies and display on the dressing table. She will sweep the leaves and dust from the patio and leave a tourist brochure by the bed.

It is dark when the phone rings. A young man, calling from a hotel in Beirut, with one of those transatlantic accents she has only ever heard on TV. He is travelling around Europe with his new wife, they will be arriving next week, all being well. The old lady jots down his name and number and date of arrival in the black notebook beneath a doodle of a clown riding a donkey that her granddaughter has drawn.

The nights are getting longer and colder and she goes out to collect the washing from the line. The children across the street have gone in and their maid is out picking apples from the tree in the dark. A breeze blows. Good evening, she says, but her voice is carried away.

Along the path a mist settles and darkness settles too, as there are no houses there to light up the way. Further along, there are only trees and clouds and sky, until the earth becomes jagged and dry and drops down to the red water of the lake, which is as black as the night and as the empty eye socket of the hare glaring up at the sky.

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