While telling these stories, Valia would cut slivers from the branches of the olive tree, and she and Penelope ran their fingers along the sapwood, along the opalescent green bone Valia would recall many years later, whenever she opened an avocado, and touched the flesh still stuck to the avocado stone.

Now it was September 1946: Valia Asproyerakas, twenty years old, married for five months, her hair done, apron tied, taking a break from the Achillion counter, pushed open the back door with her foot and went outside, where Penelope sat under the red vines, her mother’s dress burning in the incinerator behind her. Valia asked for a smoke, and she caught the single cigarette with one hand, a box of matches with the other. Like workmates, like teammates, they often threw things to each other.

Penny said: ‘I can hear you and Lucky at night.’

‘And what you do hear?’

‘I don’t need to spell it out.’

‘Yes you do. Tell me what you’re talking about.’

‘Valia, the tone in your voice is aggressive.’

Penny’s words were issued in a faraway voice.

Valia said: ‘If anyone is hostile in this family—apart from Achilles—it’s you. You are aloof. Aloofly hostile.’

‘Sorry, sister, but aloofly is not a word.’

‘Some days you’re all shrugs and never minds and you don’t care what’s going on around you, and that’s just another kind of hostility that puts me at some distance from you. I understand you’re young and young people can be difficult.’

‘You want me to be more friendly?’

‘That would be nice.’

‘I can hear you and Lucky in the middle of the night making love, or whatever it is you’re doing. It sounds like shoddy carpentry going on.’

‘You’d like us to be quiet?’

‘We all share this space, sister.’

‘I’m married, Penny. I sleep with my husband. We fuck.’

‘I see, that’s what sex sounds like when you’re married.’

Penelope, finished with this conversation, stood up to leave. In the kitchen she told Achilles: ‘I’m going out for a few hours.’

‘Why for? It’s a no-school day.’

‘I have a friend to meet.’

‘Who’s the friend?’

‘Someone you don’t know.’

Achilles said: ‘Your friends know where you are. They’ll come to the cafe. Bring them here. They won’t have to pay full price, unless they insist on paying. And it’s good manners for them to insist.’