Diary of a Lone Twin by David Loftus

Diary of a Lone Twin by David Loftus

Author:David Loftus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK


I tried to point out my window, my balcony, John’s window, but I could barely get the words out. The old sail store where our friend Peter used to sleep with the cockroaches, too tight to pay rent, had a ‘For Sale’ sign on the light green-painted shutters and ‘Jane’s Rooms’, though still with a sign, are shuttered up and look like they’ve been closed for a while. A local lady, probably the daughter of one of the widows in black, chunters in broken English that Jane now lives in Krios and no longer rents the rooms, but on asking for her number she catches me by surprise by yelling the name of Jane’s fisherman husband, ‘Agiris! Agiris!’

Telling everyone to wait by the church in Agios Konstantinos, which tops the hill of Kastro and was a favourite spot of mine and John’s to watch the sun setting over the Aegean Sea, I tentatively wander into one of the rooms literally built into the 4000BC ruins of the old castle, rooms that Jane used to call, accompanied by a hearty laugh, ‘the honeymoon suite’ as they had their own ‘zesto nero’ (Greek for hot running water, a veritable luxury in the Kastro).

And there he was, sitting on an old ouzo crate, in the cool and dark, covered head to toe in thick marble dust, hands covered in nicks and cuts and bits of plaster, hair matted and grey. Agiris, the older fisherman, building a new shower unit even though seemingly he could barely stand. In the dark he looked at me, framed and backlit by the doorway in the setting sun.

‘I can’t see you, but I know you,’ he said, ‘You are the twin.’ Barely able to hold myself together I stumbled over to him. His thick and gravelly Greek accent and broken English hadn’t changed, but the strong and athletic fisherman and captain was no longer. Hidden under the cloud of dust was an old man, broken and unwell. He told me it was nerves, damaged somehow, I didn’t really understand, but I could tell that he was not a well man. I held him firmly by his shoulder, listening to his broken smoker’s drawl as he remembered the twins who came to visit every summer.

Promising to tell Jane I was here, he continued his work and I walked up the last few ancient steps to the church, bathed in a deep orange light. Paros, Pascale, Ange and friends were sitting in a line, under the chapel’s arches, unchanged for centuries, much as John and I did every night, every day, for weeks on end, summer after summer. It was a quite extraordinary moment, towards the end of a beautiful but mentally bruising day, memories ganging up at times to embellish and remind me of the beauty of our shared youth.

And the sun set behind the rocks at Parikia port, as it did every night, and will do for ever more, unchanged, making way for a clear and star-filled sky.

Evening

The



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