Intimate Distance by Katerina Cosgrove Read Free Book Online

sugarplums and glacé figs like Victorian children’s bonbons. Now I regret how much I spent. I don’t know how to make ends meet now I’m looking after my mother and Pan. When he starts preschool I’ll work some morning shifts in the tiny café down the road, the one with milk crates scattered about for outdoor seating and its relentlessly fashionable clientele. I’ll do it on the days the homecare nurses are here – or maybe that won’t be a problem anymore.
    Pan’s awake now. I make breakfast and watch him play in the front garden from my mother’s bedside, while I feed her. He’s talking to the flowers, bending his glossy head to them, sticking his tongue out into the centre of the petals, whispering his secret thoughts. Something in the way he bends his head and opens his mouth, pinching his eyes tight, reminds me of Dimitri. Silly. Pan’s nothing like him. Then I stop, watching my son, shielding my face with my hand. My heart’s stopped, breath stilled. Pan’s voice chanting to the flowers is drowned by the perfume of Dimitri’s presence. Dimitri is Pan’s uncle, after all. Or father. Why shouldn’t they share something, if only the memory of a gesture, years ago in a darkened room?
    THE SHUTTERS WERE closed although the day’s heat had long since abated, and the traffic that drove me mad during the day had thinned on the coast road. I sat on the bed watching Dimitri. He bent his head and kissed my bare shoulder. We decided to go to the Hilton Hotel near the stadium, with its cocktail bar on the top floor and 360-degree views of the city.
    â€˜Come on,’ he said, standing above me. ‘Put on your beautiful dress.’
    I stood, holding it up against my body. The silkiness of it cooled my skin.
    â€˜This one? Don’t you think it’s too formal?’
    â€˜No. Don’t be afraid.’
    â€˜I won’t fit into it now. I won’t.’
    â€˜Yes you will.’
    He watched me put it on over my head and came to my side to fasten the crystal buttons at the back. It was an empire-line, accommodating my belly with only a slight swelling to indicate I was pregnant.
    â€˜How do you feel?’
    I turned toward him, his hands still fastening the buttons, so that his arms were right around me now. I bent my head so he couldn’t see all of my face.
    â€˜I don’t feel anything. Now finish doing up my dress.’
    I can barely remember the occasion, only that we had to be somewhere else within the hour. Some reception in a suburban club: a christening party maybe, or an engagement. Zoi wasn’t with us. Again, he was at work.
    We wandered around the ruins of the stadium in the summer twilight and all the crushed colours of dusk and the distant sounds far below were intermingled. We linked arms and walked slowly, like lovers. All over me, under my skin, was an overwhelming peace, the realisation that I didn’t have to talk or smile or even think. Walking with him in silence. Remarkable.
    Since getting pregnant, I’d become intensely aware of the quality of light, its shifts, transmutations, its effect on my open or closed eyes as I struggled to sleep, on my tender skin, the veins of my hands and temples.
    We weren’t admitted into the cocktail bar. It was full or perhaps we didn’t look right for the place. Dimitri was wearing a tie but his suit didn’t sit well on him, he was so short. So we went to the old underground bar and he drank shots of colourless liquid. I drank water. A faded mirror across from us, heightened in the dwindling light. Searching each other’s faces for who we really were.
    We’d finished our drinks and ordered more when Dimitri turned to me. I found it hard to tear my eyes away from the mirror behind the bar, at my own face among the coloured bottles on the glass shelves. An unreasonable pain took hold of me then, at the injustice, the chaos of the world. I forced