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them.Irini was happy to be meeting some people from other faculties, and even happier to feel the strong beam of this beautiful boy’s attention on her. On a raised area in the middle of the room, singers and musicians came and went, their prodigious talent hardly acknowledged by the throng of high-spirited young people.
    At four the bar was starting to close and Irini stood up to leave. She knew that one or other of her grandparents stayed awake until she returned and this pricked her conscience. Out on the pavement, though, Fotis took her hand and Irini immediately knew she would not be going home that night. She was always urging her grandmother to believe that she was old enough to take care of herself and tonight she hoped that the sweet octogenarian would take those words to heart.
    Close by in a crumbling apartment block, built well before the invention of the lift, Fotis, his flatmate Antonis and Irini climbed nine flights of stairs. The walls were covered with a pattern as intricate as lace, but on close inspection Irini saw that the design was made up of a thousand tiny letters. Just as at the university, even the yellowing walls of the landing screamed a political message.
    Irini resisted the urge to look over the low banister rail down into the sickening depths of the stairwell and was relieved when Fotis opened the door to their one-bedroom flat where a trail of dirty crockery led from sofa to sink and the air reeked of stale ash. There was nowhere for the fumes to escape.
    Like her, these boys were studying at the university. But there the similarity ended. Irini breathed in the scent of grubbiness, the aroma of this reality, this proper student way of life.
    Fotis’ windowless flat, with its low ceilings and dark paintwork, seemed far less claustrophobic than her bland if airy home. This struck her on the first and on every subsequent occasion when they strolled back to his place after an evening in the bar. It was always with Antonis that they walked home, three abreast with Fotis in the middle and when they got in, the routine was the same. Antonis would switch on the television and settle down in front of it, pulling his duvet out from underneath the sofa which would then become his bed and Fotis would lead Irini into his bedroom.
    In the narrow confines of his bed, she was scorched by the blaze of his passion. It was annihilating, wordless, and the muscularity of his slim body amazed her. This was more than she had ever expected from love.
    Not once did she see Fotis during daylight hours. They always met up in the same bar which attracted a huge crowd most evenings and then returned to his dark apartment and unyielding bed. Unlike the bedroom in her grandmother’s home, where a gap in the curtains let through a chink of light to wake her, there was no window here. It was the coolness of sheets that disturbed her in the morning, not sunshine. The incendiary heat and sweat of the previous night had chilled the bed linen to icy dampness and the clammy solitude made her shiver. Fotis had gone.
    The first few times she got up and crept quietly out of the flat, careful not to wake Antonis, but one morning as she opened the bedroom door, she saw him sitting at the small kitchen table. In these weeks of knowing each other, they had scarcely exchanged a word. Irini had sensed the possessiveness of an established friend and detected a whiff ofhostility. It had made her unsure of Antonis and now for the first time they were alone together.
    ‘ Yassou . . .’ she said in a friendly greeting. ‘Hi . . .’
    He nodded in acknowledgement and drew deeply on his cigarette.
    Though it was still early, he had put on the radio and the tinny sound of a bouzouki tinkled away in the background. There was a pyramid of cigarette butts in the ashtray in front of him and pale ash sprinkled across the table top like icing sugar.
    ‘Have you seen Fotis?’ she asked. ‘Do you know where he has gone?’
    Antonis shook his