Demons (14 page)

‘
I’ll take your word for it
Chris.’

‘
You don’t have to,’ said
Chris, alert again, past the point of exhaustion I suspected. ‘All
you have to do is look at a picture of it to know. I’ve got one
with me.’

‘
You’re joking?’

‘
No, seriously.’ He reached
into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out some carefully folded
pieces of paper.

An extract from Chris’s notebook

The Tower of the
winds

Situated in the agora
(where our word agora-phobic comes from), or market place, of
ancient Athens. Octagonal marble tower, encircled by a frieze of
the eight winds. Inside, remains of a reservoir and

an astronomical water
clock. Constructed by

Andronikos of Kyrrhos. The clock inside the
tower was operated by a water-driven wheel on which the
constellations were represented, and across it a metal wire
representing the horizon. The clock showed which constellations
were rising and setting, day and night.

A metaphor for miracles

‘Doesn’t look much,’ I said.

Truth was, it didn’t. The photo showed a
squat, crumbly, marble-white ruin, in amongst trees and other
ruins. ‘What did you say was so special about it? It doesn’t even
look like a tower. Not what I’d consider a tower.’

‘
Lots of
things make it special,’ said Chris, developing that intense look
I’d witnessed only a couple of times before, including the day when
we’d read, and discussed,
The
Bacchae
together on the
hills.

‘
This isn’t going to turn
into a lecture, is it?’ I asked.

‘
I’ll try not to let it,’
Chris said, a bit miffed. ‘I just wanted to share something with
you that’s important to me.’

‘
OK,’ I said nobly. ‘Carry
on.’

He did.

‘
Like I said, it’s one of
the most complete ruins in the Agora.’

I had to smile. ‘Isn’t that a contradiction
in terms?’

‘
Yes and no. Sure, it’s
just a shadow of what it once was, the carvings are broken, bits
are missing, but the essential structure’s there. Archaeologists
have been inside, they’ve been able to reconstruct the

inner workings. See,’ - and he showed me
another

picture, a cutaway diagram of the Tower this
time. - ‘this is how it worked. It looked like magic to the
ordinary Greek but behind its construction was a scientific,
rational, thinking mind.’

‘
Unlike the religious
mind?’ I asked leaping to the conclusion that I was about to hear
another sermon on the topic of religion. ‘Chris, is all this meant
to prove how silly I was to have believed in God?’

He shook his head
emphatically, impatiently. ‘No, no, that’s not what I’m saying at
all. I’m just trying to show you why
I’m
the way I am.’

‘
All right
then.’

‘
The way I see it, The
Tower of the Winds is like a metaphor for a miracle when it wasn’t
anything like. Unless you knew how the clock device worked’ - and
here Chris jabbed at an intricate line-drawing showing pipes,
floats, drains, pulleys, counterweights - ‘you might actually
believe the whole thing was operated by the gods rather than it
being a very clever piece of engineering.’

‘
So
what
are
you
saying Chris? That religion’s just a few cogs and drive shafts and
that people who do believe in God are complete idiots. I’ve just
overheard Shane Moore say much the same thing, but using far fewer
words.’

‘
Shane who?’

‘
Never mind. Tell me, why
would anyone have gone to all the trouble of trying to swindle the
Mr Average Ancient Greek?’

‘
They didn’t set out to,
not deliberately,’ said Chris. ‘But if you came say from the
countryside just outside Athens and didn’t know anything other than
the old rural superstitions well, you’d think the Tower

of the Winds was pretty amazing, wouldn’t
you?’

‘
Until you discovered the
truth.’

‘
But then it became even
more amazing,’ said Chris. ‘See what I mean?’

‘
I guess,’ I
said.

‘
So my problem,’ said
Chris, ‘if you can call it a problem, is that I’ve always known too
much to be religious.’

‘
That,’ I said, ‘sounds
pretty arrogant.’

‘
I didn’t mean it to come
out that way,’ Chris said. ‘To most people it won’t ever matter
knowing or not knowing that the Tower of the Winds existed. But it
matters to me. I know it existed. I care it existed. If it hadn’t
existed I might have been a completely different
person.’

‘
Gullible like
me?’

‘
Of course not. Don’t be
silly.’

I guess I sort of did
understand what he was getting at. It was less to do with knowing
facts and more to do with passion, belief, commitment. It was
knowing that the
knowing
mattered.

‘
You know that the guy who
built the Tower was called Andronikos, don’t you?’

‘
Yep,’ I said.

‘
Well, it’s close to Andrea
isn’t it?’

‘
Is it? I
guess.’

‘
So could
I call you Andy? A sort of private nickname. Short for
Andrea
and
Andronikos.’

‘
Is that what you’ve been
leading up to asking?’ I said. ‘Why would you want to call me
Andy?’

‘
Because then you’d be both
contemporary and classical. Have a foot in both worlds, like
me.’

A living link between past and present.
Andy. A boy’s name. It took a bit of thinking about.

‘
Oh why not,’ I said at
last, remembering Mum’s

litany of nuns, many of them with names of
male saints. ‘It’s my birthday after all. Might as well be born
again with a new name.’

Second thoughts

At some early hour in the morning the people
who were staying overnight unpacked their sleeping bags and spread
them around the marquee, on mattresses that our hosts had provided
or using their own if they’d brought one. No one bothered to get
changed. We just crawled inside our bags as we were.

‘
It’s like being on a
marae,’ said Chris, shortly before he dropped off. ‘Not that I’ve
stayed overnight in one but I’m sure this is what it would be
like.’

‘
Surrounded by the
ancestors,’ I murmured.

‘
Yeah.’

It was strange going to sleep in the same
space as Chris. Him on one side of me, Mum and Dad on the
other.

‘
Night,’ we said to each
other.

‘
Happy birthday Andrea,’
they all said to me again. ‘For yesterday!’

Yesterday, already
gone,
had
been a
happy day but today had started on a worrying note. Despite feeling
so tired, I couldn’t fall asleep as quickly as everyone else. My
mind whirled, sifting and sorting the events of the past few
hours.

I felt pleased Chris had taken the time to
reveal something about himself to me but, in doing so, he had
revealed more to me about me. I couldn’t honestly any longer say
that I had the same commitment to, and passion in, something
outside myself, not as he did. Once, I guessed, it had been
religion, my Catholic belief. A sense of a greater purpose, a God
working the machinery of the Tower

of the Winds that was the world.

But that was gone, wasn’t it? And it hadn’t
been replaced with anything else.

Looking up at the roof of the tent I
fingered my bone pendant hopefully, wondering about my ancestors
and where they were. As I stared through half-closed eyes at the
softly billowing folds of material above me, I visualised its
plain, creamy surface transforming and transformed into
Michelangelo’s luscious frescoed ceiling, at the centre of which
Adam and God strained towards each other.

Even when I closed my eyes, the vision
stayed with me.

Time in between

The year unrolled like one
of the scrolls Ms Shapiro said had been the ancient world’s
equivalent of our modern book. The memory of St Pat’s day receded
and I gradually became more optimistic again that I had made, and
was continuing to make, the right choices in my life. Chris and I
continued going out regularly, a few more walks until the summer
turned into late autumn and ice began clinging to the hill tracks.
Movies, coffee bars and takeaways after that. We became two
of
Pizza2Go
’s
staunchest customers.

At school our faint hearts had built up some
resistance and we had actually started to talk seriously about
entering the University’s Classics Competition and what we’d have
to do to be up there with the top schools.

But the future or, in my case, the absence
of a definite future continued to remain a question mark. I hadn’t
made any choices about that yet. After school finished what then?
Chris was definitely going to uni,

he said. Do a degree in Classics. What
else?

‘
We could do the same
papers,’ he said en-thusiastically.

But I stayed undecided. I
didn’t know if uni was going to be for me or not. By way of
encouragement Chris took me to the University’s Classics Department
one lunchtime to see a fragment from the Horologium, which they
kept under glass in their small museum collection. It was a piece
they had just bought, he said, and he was hugely excited about
it.

I got all wound up on his behalf, so much so
that when we stood at the entrance to the room where the precious
piece was kept my heart was bouncing up and down like a yo-yo on a
string. And, after all that build-up, it turned out to be nothing
more than a minute corner of the base of the Tower, looking like a
chip of modern-day broken concrete.

‘
Don’t be crazy,’ Chris
said, when I said as much to him. ‘Look. See the writing
there.’

I had to peer really hard to see any
writing, eventually glimpsing what looked like a faint squiggly
line in the stone.

‘
It’s an ancient piece of
graffiti,’ he said in reverential awe, almost as if he’d been
standing in a church.

‘
Is it?’

‘
Yes. They think it was
carved by a Roman tourist in Greece.’

‘
A modern day
tourist?’

‘
No! An Ancient Roman of
course. They had their OE like everyone else.’

‘
Right,’ I said. Of course.
I should have re-membered Becs had said her randy souvenir was a
copy of a copy of a copy, going way back.

‘
What does it say? Can you
tell?’

‘
I
can’t,’ he said. ‘But the experts think they’ve sussed it out, even
though it’s only a fragment and the bit it was joined onto has
disappeared. I think it’s meant to go,
A
strong wind often turns into a gentle breeze
.’

‘
That doesn’t sound like
graffiti,’ I said. ‘Not as we know it. More poetic than
anything.’

‘
People
wrote all sorts of things on ancient buildings,’ said Chris. ‘Some
of it
was
quite
serious and poetic, like this.’

‘
Hmm,’ I said.

‘
It’s as much the idea that
we’re making a connection with the distant past,’ he went on. ‘It
was so long ago yet it’s still right here in front of us today. The
Roman tourist lives.’

‘
I understand,’ I said.
‘Yes, I do.’

‘
Let’s do it,’ he said,
momentarily startling me into a different train of thought. ‘Let’s
come here and study together.’

At that precise moment I loved him so much I
almost said yes. ‘Maybe,’ was what I did say. ‘I’ll think about it
Chris. I still have time to decide.’

The way to a man’s heart

Chris’s September birthday came around fast
and I couldn’t decide what to get him for a present. I’d been into
a gift shop called Ankh and had nearly bought a small replica of an
Egyptian sarcophagus but changed my mind the second I handed it
over at the counter. I’d never thought to ask if Chris was as keen
on things Egyptian as he was on things Greek.

‘
Take him out for a meal
instead,’ said Mum when I told her my problem.

‘
A takeaway wouldn’t be
anything special,’ I said.

‘
I don’t mean a takeaway,
for heaven’s sake,’ Mum said. ‘Go somewhere special.’

‘
Expensive you mean?’ I
said.

“
More
expensive than
Pizza2Go
,’ said Mum.

‘
I’ve saved up a bit,’ I
said. ‘I suppose I could afford it.’

‘
Well then,’ said Mum. ‘Is
he worth it?’

‘
Yes,’ I said.

The South Bank Restaurant

‘I’ll pick you up at around eight,’ I
said.

‘
It’s my turn to drive,’
said Chris.

‘
It’s your birthday. I’m
driving us. Besides, my parents don’t seem to mind if I borrow the
car, not like your father does.’

‘
That’s true,’ said Chris.
‘The usual?’