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something, and he’d be in trouble.
    â€˜I’m a writer,’ he said quietly.
    Stavros set down his cards, impressed. ‘A writer!’ he said aloud, smoothing his moustache. He repeated the word in Greek. ‘Syngraféas?’
    Mikelis’s eyes flashed for a moment. He glanced over at the strange young man who looked so much like the twins he had played with as a child, fishing and hunting and roaming the forest looking for adventure. A writer. Mikelis wanted to say something, to commend this young man for doing what he himself had always dreamt of. For a moment he considered his work – his life’s work – and the possibility of bequeathing it to the young writer, who could perhaps make something of it, but language and pride and almost seventy years of secrecy stopped him. Instead he gave Oliver a thunderous slap on the back followed by a pantomimic drunkard’s hug.
    Panayiotis returned, but as play resumed a stunning young woman walked through the door. She had clear olive skin, thick black hair and enormous brown eyes that took up a great deal of her face. She looked like she’d stepped straight out of an ancient painting. Out of a stone carving. Out of history. Oliver’s heart lurched in his chest. She walked over to the refrigerator and took a bottle of soft drink, left some coins on the counter and walked back outside, where she sat at one of the plastic tables that lined the street. She looked back over her shoulder, caught Oliver’s eye for the briefest of moments and offered him the tiniest fraction of a smile.

    Illeana had been born around the same time the village mines closed and the family lost their sole source of income. Her father struggled to find new work, eventually managing to make ends meet by travelling the lengths of the Troodos Mountains offering his services as a handyman. She watched her older brothers grow up and leave school only to find that there was no work here in the village and that opportunity lay only in the port cities of Lemesos or Pafos, or the capital Nicosia. So, like the rest of the village’s young men, they moved away, chasing opportunity. When the young people left, the village became a museum, preserved in time and declining in numbers with every death. Illeana was clever and breezed through school, all the while planning her big escape. She would win a scholarship to university. She would get a job on one of the big cruise ships. Anything to get out of the village. But she didn’t get a scholarship and her parents wouldn’t hear of their only daughter moving away to the city, so she waited and watched for her chance. When the strange young man arrived, she saw an opportunity. It didn’t matter to her if they were cousins or that she didn’t speak much English. She wanted out. Right out. Australia would do.
    She threw pebbles at his window that night, brazen but uncaring. There was a thrilling silent kiss beneath the gibbous moon , then another, and another. By the second night Oliver had convinced himself things were turning around for him –  he had forgotten his heart was meant to be irreversibly broken – and by the fourth he felt so peaceful he’d mistakenly fallen asleep in her arms by the river and awoke to a village delighted by scandal.
    â€˜She is your cousin,’ Costa explained, momentarily enjoying the levity before burdening himself with the task of notifying Oliver’s yiayia of her grandson’s embarrassment. But while Costa and the rest of the village were laughing, Oliver’s yiayia belonged to a Cyprus long gone, and took the anecdote as a chainsaw of shame to the branch of the ancestral tree she now oversaw. And soon enough there was the phone call that would see him on the next available plane to Melbourne to bury his yiayia.
    The night before his flight there had been one moment, unexpected and unplanned, when Oliver had awoken at