Free Spin by Nina Allan Page A

you,” she said.
    “ I wouldn’t worry. There are servants. Real ones, I mean. They
keep me clean and tidy, mop up the mess.”
    “ Don’t joke about it.”
    “ I’m not.” His hand shifted in her grasp as he tried to
squeeze her fingers. “I’m so happy you came back. Will you again,
do you think?”
    “ I will,” Layla said to him. “Soon.”
    She made her
way back through the house, listening for the sounds of Nashe Crawe
cavorting with her simulacrum, but there was nothing. The silence
was deep and total, and if she had not been with Alcander just a
moment before she would have sworn that the place was empty and had
been empty for years.
    It was a ghost
place, like the bombed tenements she had seen out in Tsokla. She
could almost imagine that if she were to return to Alcander’s room
and fling open the door there would be no one there.
    The house, she
thought, was like a glass palace. Viewed in a certain way and in a
certain light it would slide out of existence entirely. She
remembered something John Caribe had once said to her, that once
you surpassed a certain level of material wealth you attained a new
level of madness, something the rest of the world had no conception
of. She had reacted with scorn at the time. Now she found herself
inclined to believe him.
    The afternoon temperatures were in the high
nineties, and without
air conditioning the flat became too hot to work in. Once her shift
at the factory was over Layla rode the trolleybus out to Voula
where she would swim off the rocks and afterwards take an iced ouzo
at one of the beach tavernas. The friable heat of late August made
her glad to escape the city, and during those hours she spent
staring across the water towards the humped island mass of Aegina
she could almost imagine she was back in Kardamyli, that if she
stayed at the beach just a short while longer she would catch sight
of her father, steering the Auster into port. It was at these times that she thought of
leaving Atoll City, of packing up her studio and secreting herself
in one of the dozens of dilapidated farmhouses out at Stoupa or
Areopoli. She could work there undisturbed and in total
safety.
    She did
not know why the word safety kept returning to her with such insistence but it did. She
could not help thinking of Livia Sol, who went mad in the end,
tortured or so it was said by her own visions. But as the
temperature dipped in the late afternoon, and the gusty breeze
brought the reek of lobster pots and shark entrails from the
fishing rigs tethered in the harbour at Piraeus she returned to her
apartment and to her work on The Night Hounds with renewed intensity. There was something in the
obsessive struggle between the seaman Atlas Tyburn and Telos
Mavrommatis the assassin that reminded her of the vendetta between
Alcander’s father Demitris and the nameless warlord whose son he
had killed. She supposed she had known this from the beginning,
that it was this knowledge that had determined her choice of The Pirates as the subject for Alcander’s
panorama.
    Whatever the
truth of the matter, Layla did not waste time dwelling on it. The
work had reached the stage where it was in and of itself the
inspiration, and it occupied her thoughts to the exclusion of
everything else.
    It was the
character of the hound master Aegesth who preoccupied her the most.
He appeared in Panteleimon’s poem only briefly, but his role was
significant, and Layla had placed him in the foreground of the
action. He was a slim, mercurial youth, lithe and whip-backed as
one of his own hounds, and Layla knew he was really a stand-in for
Alcander. For his naked flesh she chose a moon-coloured silk of the
finest grade available. She worked his form with care, and as the
days progressed the youth came increasingly to life beneath her
fingers. There were nights when she did not lay down her work until
the sea had begun to reflect the first light of dawn.
    For the first
part of the day she was barely awake, and