Free Gargoyles by Bill Gaston Page B

beach with other, ever-changing travellers, and an outdoor taverna was their base for telling stories, and the long evening’s retsina. Then at some point a waiter told them about the captive girl up the hill. In bits and pieces they got the story: a sixteen-year-old Australian girl who had lost her parents in a car accident had been sent to Greece to live with her next of kin, a Greek uncle, here in this village. From Sydney, she was a typical city teenager. At first she had been allowed out to the market, and to school, but she had been seen with a boy. Now her uncle kept her locked indoors. A rumour said he made her wear all black. Lately she had been sending notes — sometimes paper airplanes out the window! — begging for rescue, asking the Australian government for help. A waiter, Georges, had seen some of them himself. There was little sympathy for her in this village of arranged marriages and men-only tavernas, but Georges whispered that he was “her fren’” because she wasn’t
really
Greek, and that people had heard her screaming, and in any case the uncle was “assahole.” The girl’s name was Cindy. Shaking his head, Georges added that Cindy “no eeffen speak a Greek.”
    The travellers talked about her. They were Canadians, Americans, a New Zealander. One night two Aussies drifted in and were outraged by the story. After much beer they walked the hill and pounded on the door of Cindy’s prison and got into a shoving match with an older man and his sons. It was never determined if they got the right house. In any case the rest of them talked about what should be done. She was a minor,living with legal next of kin. Fate had landed her in a set of backward customs. The phrase “weird karma” had some of them nodding sagely.
    He sometimes still wonders about Cindy. She’d be in her late forties now. He imagines her married, at a kitchen window peeling potatoes, long resigned to her fate. She speaks Greek now, of course. She’s married to a man who treats her well enough because he knew from the start that she was different. She has not had children of her own.
    But he didn’t think about Cindy for years. Actually he didn’t remember Cindy until after they found Andrew in the cement.
    He’s three blocks from the McGonnigals’ street and he wonders if he’s ever walked it, McRae Street, before. While his mission often takes him new places, the story is generally the same. He’s going to ask them to hear their daughter’s side of things and not to punish her. He’s going to suggest that they ask
her
forgiveness. What he’s going to remind the McGonnigals tonight is that their daughter is beautiful in every way.
    He sometimes sees girls her age on street corners. Rarely, but he does, whenever he makes a point of searching for them. He’ll spot one and pull up to the curb and roll his window down and she will step through the ghost of her own breath, closer. He feels doubly sorry for them in winter, when they dress just warmly enough not to freeze to death yet still show off their bodies. There is something not visually right about a girl in a tiny skirt and sheer pantyhose breathing white plumes of breath into the night air, something incongruous about a girl shivering and yet smelling of luscious, fruity perfume. When they approach his car window they are too out of it to care, or desperate for their next fix, or just stunned myopic —but some study him clear-eyed to see if he’ll be a danger. What they see in his eyes often does scare them, but of course it’s not what they think. Only when he tells them, “Someone loves you very much. Please —
please
— go home,” do they know what kind of danger he represents.
    Sometimes he feels guilty for making them remember what they might be working so hard to forget. He does understand that they might in fact have no one at home who loves them.