Free Small Wars by Sadie Jones

followed it. He had told him, as politely as he could, that if he would only tell them where Demetriou was hiding, his family would be safe and he would keep the families of others safe, too. Loulla Kollias had conceded.
    He was left on his own then to sleep, but confined by physical pain and the shame of his weakness, he didn’t sleep. In the dark part of the night, after the moon had gone and before the sun came up, he died. He died of a heart-attack, which couldn’t have been prevented, and perhaps was nobody’s fault, but it was a very lonely death, and fearful.

Chapter Eight
    In March and April the hillside behind the garrison and even the cliffs below were bright with wild flowers. It hadn’t been a bad winter, compared to English winters, but it was good that the thunderstorms were over and the roads were better.
    The houses on Lionheart Estate were small and semi-detached; Clara thought living there must be what being working class might be like, except for the outside lavatories. She didn’t know how anybody lived with those. Deirdre and Mark Innes were on one side and another officer and his family on the other; she felt a stronger sense of community than she had ever felt, even during the war. In Germany they had moved around a lot, and married quarters for a captain and his wife were very different from those for a major with a family.
    Sometimes Clara could hear Deirdre and Mark arguing next door and she hoped they couldn’t hear her and Hal making love. The twins were unwakeable, but she pictured Deirdre and Mark, sleepless in their beds, overhearing them. She tried to be as quiet as she could but it was difficult. Hal was virtually silent when he made love to her, perhaps a legacy of the etiquette of the boys in their lonely beds in the dormitories at school. He would please her, sweetly, and hold off and wait; the more intensely he felt, the quieter he would become, and Clara felt closer to him than if he had demonstrated noisy masculinity. He would hide his face in her neck, forced closer to her, made vulnerable by his silence.
    And laughing afterwards, too, was noisy. She would cover his mouth and her own with her hands and feel his breath on her palm.

    In Cyprus there were strawberries in the early spring.
    A grocery van owned by a Greek Cypriot named Tomas visited the houses on Lionheart, Marlborough and Oxford Estates almost every day. Tomas was something of a favourite with the officers’ wives. He was flirtatious and unattractive – but pleasantly so – the father of four children. Sometimes one or two of his children came with him, and sat on big bags of Cyprus potatoes in the back, getting streaks of red earth on their legs. The van was small and dark green, with corrugated sides that rolled up and a diesel engine you could hear stopping and starting along the curved roads of the estates. The wives would go out with baskets or string bags to buy lettuces, vegetables and fruit.
    Clara’s first strawberries of the year were bought from Tomas. It was nine o’clock, and Hal had just left. They had made love that morning – even more quietly because it was daytime – and she had stayed in bed with her legs stretched out, listening to him downstairs, getting ready to go. He had brought the girls in for tickling and Clara felt very happy with the early sun coming in onto the creases of the white sheet and the girls’ hair, tangled from sleep. It was a slow ecstatic morning. After breakfast she heard Tomas and they went out to catch him.
    Clara stood in the road, which was quiet and empty. Tomas handed her the strawberry box last and she walked back with it in her hand, not putting it into the shopping bag. The corners of the cardboard were stained pink. The string of the heavy bag was digging into the fingers of one hand and the strawberry box was light in the other. The girls walked behind, slowly, not in straight lines.
    In front of their house Clara put down the string bag and sat on the