Spin

* * * * *

.

First published 2013 by
TTA Press

Print Edition ISBN
978-0-9553683-6-3

Smashwords Edition
ISBN: 9781301417698

Copyright © Nina Allan
2013

Cover by Ben
Baldwin

Copyright © Ben Baldwin
2013

The right of the author
to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No
part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the
prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise
circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which
it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on
the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record
for the printed version of this book is available from the British
Library

Proofread by Peter
Tennant

Designed and typeset
for print by the publisher,
Ebook v2 RG

TTA Press
5 Martins Lane
Witcham
Ely, Cambs
UK, CB6 2LB

ttapress.com

* * * * *

Smashwords Edition
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* * * * *

For my father,
Stuart Stephen Allan

* * * * *

SPIN

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SOON FROM TTA NOVELLAS

BACK PAGE

* * * * *

Low was her
birth, and small her native town,

She from her
art alone obtain’d renown.

Idmon, her
father, made it his employ,

To give the
spungy fleece a purple dye:

Of vulgar
strain her mother, lately dead,

With her own
rank had been content to wed;

Yet she their
daughter, tho’ her time was spent

In a small
hamlet, and of mean descent,

Thro’ the
great towns of Lydia gain’d a name,

And fill’d the
neighb’ring countries with her fame.

from
Metamorphoses, Book the Sixth, The Transformation of
Arachne into a Spider
by Ovid, translated by John Dryden

Her father was not there to say goodbye. It
was not
unusual
for him to get up early and take the boat out, but
Layla knew that today it was deliberate, that he didn’t want to see
her leave. She walked to the bus stop by way of the harbour front,
hoping she might still catch a glimpse of him, his body a taut line
above the water as he pulled back on the
Auster
’s sail rope, aiming the sea kite into the sunrise
like an arrow into fire. She scanned the horizon expectantly,
shading her eyes with both hands, but there was no sign of him. He
was too far out by now, probably. It might be several hours before
he returned.

She arrived at
the harbour bus stop just after six. Dawn was stepping from the sea
on to the sand. When she was a child Layla liked to imagine that
her mother would come back to her that way, rising smoothly out of
the water she had been drowned in, her sodden dress clinging to the
curves of her body like a second skin, her long feet high-arched
and pearly white in their pink suede flip-flops.

The stop was
deserted. The seven o’clock shuttle would be much busier, something
Layla had wanted to avoid. As it was the bus came late, rattling
along the coast road in a trail of diesel fumes and fine white
dust. She showed the driver her ticket then sat down on a bench
near the front. She disliked the back seats, where the cloth
merchants and wool gatherers played out their endlessly rolling
whist tournaments and gave one another black eyes when they started
to lose. She stowed her rucksack under the seat. This made the
space more cramped but she didn’t feel like trusting her luggage to
the open rack.

As the bus
drew away from the waterfront and headed inland Layla wondered if
it was true, what her nurse Iona had told her, that once you were
away from the coast the Mani became another country entirely. She
could sense the land’s rough breathing, so different from the
sweet-mouthed breezes that stirred the breakers along the shoreline
at Kardamyli. The road across the mountains was bumpy and
gravel-strewn, still unmade in places, the slopes above steeped
thickly in stunted olives and golden saxifrage. For the first time
since buying her ticket, Layla felt queasy with doubt and something
she supposed was homesickness. If the Taygetus were another
country, Atoll City itself was an alien world.

They came into
Kalamata at around midday. This was a scheduled rest stop, an hour
to stock up on food or just stretch your legs. Layla walked down to
the harbour, where a consignment of mirror glass was being unloaded
from a steam freighter and lifted in gleaming stacks on to the open
bed of a sky truck. The navvies glistened with sweat, while a tiny
bearded man clutching an iPad dashed around yelling instructions.
Layla bought a crab sandwich and watched the harbour traffic as it
inched slowly towards the exit slipway that led to the ring road.
The people in the cars were brightly dressed, their cheap garments
a rainbow of synthetics, reductions of the hues her father had
taken decades to perfect. Their loud cacophony raised an itching
sensation in her nerve endings.

At five
minutes to the hour she began to walk back. She knew more
passengers would be boarding at Kalamata, and she didn’t want to
risk losing her seat. By the time the rest stop was over the bus
was full. The seat beside her, empty until the rest stop, was now
occupied by an old woman. She was stick-thin, and frightening to
look at, ugly in a way that was almost freakish. On her lap she
held a knapsack, a leather drawstring bag that seemed to heave and
pulse with a life of its own. Layla dreaded to think what horror
might be inside. She stared fixedly out of the window, determined
not to meet the crone’s gaze. She yearned to get out her
embroidery, but her rucksack had slipped right back under the seat
and she didn’t want to draw attention to herself by rummaging for
it. It would be another five hours until they stopped for the night
in Corinth. The thought of having the old woman wedged up against
her for the duration made her feel sick. There was a toilet break
at Tegea, where to Layla’s surprise the old woman vacated her seat
as soon as the vehicle came to a standstill. Layla snatched up her
rucksack and got off the bus. There was a roadside drinking
fountain, a rusted length of piping set straight into the rock.
Layla drank, filling her mouth and throat with the taste of coins.
In spite of the heat of the day the water was icy.

The cicadas
were in uproar. The uneven road shimmered in the heat like a
mirage. After ten minutes or so the bus driver blew a whistle and
everyone began to re-embark. Layla pushed to the front, not wanting
the old crone to get ahead of her and grab the window seat. When
the old woman didn’t appear she felt surprised. As they lurched out
of the lay-by Layla scanned the roadside, half expecting to see her
hobbling after the bus at a stunted run, the bulging leather sack
clutched to her chest. There was no sign of her, however, and the
seat beside Layla remained empty.

As the evening
drew on the light softened, winding down from topaz through
sapphire to a dusty amethyst. Layla opened her rucksack and drew
out the miniature panorama she had been working on before she left.
It was scarcely begun, with just one bright corner of stitching as
proof of what she intended, but already the piece possessed her,
had become for her as each new work inevitably did a material
extension of her spirit.

She was using
the smallest of her embroidery frames, the only one she had that
would fit inside her rucksack without having to be taken apart. It
was made of gingko wood, the timber sanded and then sealed with
teak oil, its two interlocking sections a perfect fit. It had been
Iona who had first shown her how to use it, how to stretch the
canvas as tight as it would go over the inner circle then secure it
by winding the four brass screws on the outer ring. Layla had been
four at the time, and making a nuisance of herself by excavating
the contents of Iona’s work basket.

No doubt Iona
believed the child in her charge would soon become bored when faced
with having to do something more constructive than simply making a
mess; as it turned out she was wrong. By the afternoon of the same
day, Layla was able to form a simple cross-stitch. A week later she
presented her father Idmon with her first tapestry. The work was
simple but it was extraordinary nonetheless. Where a less
complicated child might have tried to work a simplified diagram of
the house she lived in, say, or her pet monkey, the four-year-old
Layla Vargas had coloured the entire area of the circular canvas
with a forest of green stitching, an abstract design created from
the odd tag ends of test silk she had found scattered beneath the
workbenches of the master dyers. Idmon Vargas counted twenty-six
different shades of green in all. The stitching itself was almost
perfectly uniform, the standard of workmanship you might expect
from a girl three times Layla’s age or even more.

Layla
remembered being made a fuss of, she remembered becoming aware that
in the eyes of Iona and her father and the workmen in the silk
shops she had performed an unusual feat. But in her own mind these
things were marginal and surface, like the wavelets that scurry
along the shoreline at the first breath of wind. What mattered to
her was the thing that happened inside her when she thought about
silk. Until the day she learned to cross-stitch she had been
surrounded by colour and texture without realising that something
might be made of it. Afterwards the gingko frame became for her an
‘o’ as vast as the world, a circular window she could climb through
into realms and realities of her own choosing. With this ‘o’ she
could draw sense from colour and make it her slave. She could bind
it to herself, refine it as the High Priestess at Delphi refined
the empty echoes in the hollow rocks below and brought them forth
into daylight as the voice of a god.

When she was
twelve years old, Layla suddenly became convinced that her mother,
Romilly Perec, had been a sibyl. It was the only way she could
think of to explain her gift, and although all savants now held
equal rights under the law, she had learned at school that sibyls
were still being executed for crimes of clairvoyancy as little as
ten years ago, especially in the provinces.