She paused and looked up at the ceiling where a brass chandelier hung above her.
‘The last time I saw Nisha, madam, was Sunday night.’
‘What was she doing?’
‘Usually, madam, she comes to say hello. This time she was walking very quickly.’
At that point Yiakoumi’s mobile rang and he got up to speak in the storage room at the back.
‘What time was that?’ I asked.
‘I arrived here maybe an hour earlier, so I think it was after ten. Sir wanted me to work Sunday night because customers come in the morning. I cleaned his house in the morning, had a break and then came here at nine o’ clock.’
‘Did Nisha say anything to you?’
‘No, madam, she said nothing. Normally she waves, sometimes she comes in and makes a joke and we laugh, often she brings me fruit. No, she didn’t stop to see me and I tell you, she looked worried.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, madam. I have been working here opposite Nisha for a year. I know her face. I know my friend’s face when she’s happy, sad, angry, tired. This time I tell you she was worried.’
‘Do you remember anything else at all?’
‘Well, madam, maybe this not an important thing, but the cat was following her.’
‘The cat?’
‘Yes. I looked down the road as she walked off. I was outside. The cat followed her all the way and turned the corner when she turned. So the cat might know where Nisha is.’
I stared at her. Was she being serious?
‘It was this cat, madam.’ She pointed out of the window, where the black cat with the different-coloured eyes was sitting on the table, washing itself amongst the pots and vases. The one my daughter now called Monkey.
*
That afternoon, I picked up Aliki from school. I didn’t take the car because I wanted to walk with her. She was wearing her favourite K-pop idol girl T-shirt with some light blue jeans, and she’d released her hair from its ponytail so it hung in thick waves over her shoulders.
‘Aliki,’ I said, ‘I went to the police today.’
She quickly glanced up at me, cheeks rosy.
‘I went to report Nisha missing, but they wouldn’t help me. They said she’s probably run away to the north. But I don’t believe them,’ I said.
Suddenly, her eyes filled with tears.
‘I’m not saying this to upset you. I want you to know what’s happening. I’m looking for Nisha but I’m confused. Did she say anything to you? Do you know anything that might help me to understand what is going on?’
Aliki looked down at her feet as she walked.
‘Aliki?’ I said. But this just made her withdraw further – she walked over to a shop front and stared at the shoes on display. She’d cut herself off from me completely.
*
At home, I made potato salad. The vegetables in the fridge had started to rot – Nisha had always done the shopping – so I chopped them all up and threw them in the salad: red peppers, tomatoes, spring onions and parsley. Aliki poked at the food with her fork, humming something under her breath.
Later, I stood by the large window at the front of the house, looking out onto the street, hoping with each second that passed that I would see Nisha turning the corner. I couldn’t tamp down that hope. Maybe any moment she would appear in the lights of Yiakoumi’s shop and Theo’s restaurant, coming to our door and turning the key in the lock, putting down her handbag and explaining where she had been.
I must have stood like that for half an hour, maybe more. Like a cat, Aliki came in and out of the living room, standing beside me for a while and leaving again. She was anxious. I could hear it in the way she moved, in the urgency of her footsteps.
The olive tree opposite was illuminated by the shop lights. Yiakoumi came out and sat beneath it with a coffee. A woman was singing at Theo’s restaurant – I couldn’t see her because the men sitting beneath the grapevine at the tables around her obscured the view, but her voice was pitch-perfect, so full of pathos, so full of beauty and sadness, that something welled up inside me and I began to cry.
Who was this woman who sang in a foreign tongue? Where had she come from? What had she wished for before coming here? These questions brought me back to Nisha in a way that I had never thought about her before. I had failed to recognise that she too was a woman with pain and hopes. I had known this only as a distant thought – I had never absorbed it into my heart. For she too had lost her husband. She too had come from an island ravaged by war over the years, one besieged by colonialists. Its beauty and its people had suffered too. And these things live on: they carry themselves silently into the future. Who was Nisha? What had life taught her? Why had she travelled such a great distance? To save her daughter . . . from what?