Ghost Flight Book Launch Reading 1/4
An extract from Aristos's part of Ghost Flight, as read at the book's 26 June 2025 launch in Nicosia.
Ghost Flight: Chapter Four
Within weeks, Aristos and Wendy are living in one of the many apartments that his father owns. It is two-bed in the centre of Larnaca, with high ceilings, glass sides and a view of the sea. The day they moved in, Wendy asked Aristos where his parents’ money had come from. She sounded conflicted, both incredulous and accustomed to such apparent wealth. Aristos explained that his father had been lucky with stocks, invested in seedy Camden and been lucky again when the area came up. Now, Marios has an extensive property portfolio, and has invited Aristos to get involved in ‘the business’ until he finds a job.
After their run-in with the CMP investigator, Aristos wanted to say no, fly back to London and his graduate work as an auditor. To isolation and order. But he had come to Cyprus, and couldn’t keep his girlfriend cooped up in a hotel room forever. The refusal crumbled on his tongue.
For all her incredulity, Wendy looks at peace in their broad bed in their big apartment, her hair a spill across the pillow. Her skin smells sweet for the night they have spent beneath the sheets. Faintly sore, Aristos gets washed and dressed around her. Even when he pushes their wardrobe door shut – harder than he means to – she doesn’t stir. Again, that flicker of envy. He leaves her asleep, closing the front door, softly, behind him.
He walks the fifteen minutes to his father’s office, the penthouse apartment in a building that Marios owns outright. Aristos can smell the woodiness of its many books from the stairwell. They line the walls upon mismatching shelves, as though Marios has collected them in maddened dashes, only realising once he has lumbered in with each new armful that he will need somewhere to store it. Slowly, Aristos enters. The place unsettles him. It is the only sign he has ever seen that his father might be a man of passion, poring over ancient Greek dramas and musings – by Aeschylus and Sophocles, Aristotle and Plato – where no one can disturb him. As a child, Aristos thought him stern. He hadn’t imagined, before seeing these shelves, that there might be a depth to his father’s silences. A privateness, yes, perhaps even a darkness. But not the tenderness implicit in books.
Down the hallway, a toilet flushes. Aristos turns from the shelves.
“You walked,” his father observes, from the doorway.
Aristos follows his gaze to the damp patches beneath his shirt sleeves.
He tuts. “I got used to it, in London.”
“Nai,” Marios agrees, “too used to it.”
He resumes his stride across the room, to a desk set in yet another window with the blind pulled over it. Down the hallway the pipes stop rattling.
“The weather is turning now,” Aristos says, to dispel the silence. “I guess I should start—”
“And talking about the weather. You got used to that, too.”
He blinks.
Sitting down, his father drags a file across the desk. “Since you’re the expert, why don’t you take a look at this?” He withdraws a page.
An email, Aristos sees, crossing the room.
“From our estate agent in Islington.” Marios sits back.
Dabbing at his forehead, Aristos scans the text. It is not his first time seeing Latin letters since his departure from London. Last week, he ordered new blinds for a local property, bidding the curtain maker geiá sas and efcharistó before receiving his bill in English. Why? he asked his father. Because of the so-called ‘Cypriot dialect’, Marios sneered, people speaking a language that didn’t exist in a written form. There were no Greek letters for the ‘c-h’ sounds with which so many Cypriots replaced their ‘k’s. They were a people confused, resorting to English for a lack of confidence in their own mother tongue. If they only spoke ‘proper’ Greek . . . Aristos paid the bill.