Zoë takes a last drag and flings the cigarette end away. A heavy, scratchy blanket of nausea envelops her. She leans out over the blurred tarmac but she isn’t sick. She swallows hard, forcing the sourness down, feeling tears burning in the corners of her eyes. She can’t bear it, any of it. Pavlo, nodding off next to a burning car. Vangeli … She clamps her mind closed around that memory. The smoke rising above the sea, which they can see now, the hill cresting, the car speeding downhill towards houses, the jagged sweep of coast and the long back of Evvia across the gulf. She can’t bear the jolly whine of the engine. More than anything, she can’t bear the young officer with his scraped knees and his gentle, tired voice. But she feels him waiting for her to say something else, to perform. Anger stabs at her. The officer is watching her from under the peak of his cap. A lock of black hair has escaped and hangs diagonally across his forehead. His eyes are full of concern. She sees that his lips are chapped almost white. If she could, she would wave her hand and erase him from the world. But all she can do is speak.

‘Who taught me English?’ she says, drawing the words from her throat like steel wires. ‘Well, obviously …’ She forces her tongue to make the rudest imitation of every aristocratic Englishwoman who has ever graced the patched screens of the Piraeus cinemas. ‘Obviously, it was my nanny.’ Nanny. She draws it out, a sneer, three syllables, four, her eyes on him like razor blades.

The officer blinks and turns abruptly away. Good, she thinks. Now leave me alone. And then she starts, silently, to cry, and the breeze dries the tears into little streaks of cold on her cheeks.

A few minutes later she feels the car slow down. She raises her face from where she has pushed it into the crook of her arm, and sees that they are in a small town, almost a village, surrounded by British soldiers standing in groups, sitting against walls, in trucks, on motorcycles. The car judders to a halt and the two men in the front seat get out and walk over to a soldier with a red band around his cap.

She watches the officer – he is taller than she had thought – climb out stiffly. He shakes hands with the other two, walks quickly back to the car and swings into the driver’s seat. He struggles momentarily with the gearstick, curses, then grins as the car lurches forward.

‘Right, then,’ he says, to the dust-filmed windscreen. They drive off, and he doesn’t turn to look at her, not once, as they go past pine woods and clusters of half-built houses. Tentatively at first, then more confidently, she stretches out as far as she can across the back seat.