Ghost Flight Book Launch Reading 2/4
An extract from Melina's part of Ghost Flight, as read at the book's 26 June 2025 launch in Nicosia.
Ghost Flight: Chapter Ten
“What’s his name?” Chloe asks.
“Petros,” Melina says, and breathes. Her fiancé’s name like a sigh of relief.
In moments like this, speaking it is as comforting to her as he was, that first day on Cessac Beach. There was a shelf of rock overlooking the sand. Beyond it, the sea that imprisoned Melina in Cyprus. Above, the sky that had stolen her most beloved friend, Alison, away. Melina had scrambled up there to sit with her tragedy, beneath the planes making their approaches to Larnaca Airport. They lowered their wheels just as they turned across the bay. Why wasn’t Alison on board, flying into Cyprus and not out of it, never to return? Melina craned her head back until her neck ached, searching the underbelly of every aircraft for an answer.
She would more likely have received one on the ground, from the British Army whose territory she was encroaching on. Or were they encroaching on hers? It was murky to Melina, the history of who had invaded whom in the years preceding her birth, and exactly when and what for. There was her parents’ story of running to escape the Turkish tanks that had rolled into their home village, Achna, in 1974. Her grandparents talked of the fifties and their struggle to oust the British. By the time of her parents’ flight, the Dhekelia Army Base had been one of two left over from Britain’s colonial rule, and its soldiers had let them in to take shelter. The conflict had ended. The island had cleaved. Achna had been lost, and so its residents had resigned themselves to their forest settlement just up from the base, calling it Dasaki Achnas.
Petros, too, had been born a refugee in his own homeland. Like Melina’s parents, his mother had fled from Achna. And like Melina herself, he had waved a loved one off to the Gulf War of that August, 1990. When they met, Melina was beside herself with the suddenness of so many soldiers’ redeployment, Alison’s father among them. Petros revealed that his father had flown out, too.
Melina turned and saw that Petros was, indeed, a shade paler than she was. She saw that, like her, he had spent considerable time on the Dhekelia Base, and not gritting his teeth the way that her mother did as she cleaned the houses. For Petros, Cessac Beach held meaning. And so he came to mean something to Melina, in their many returns for plane-watching.
Chloe lowers her pen. “I’m sorry.”
Melina nods.
“So, Petros’s father was British?”
“Yes.”
“And his mother?”
“Cypriot.”
Chloe opens her mouth, glances at Wendy, and closes it. Melina, too, decides to stay quiet rather than admitting that Petros’s mother was not only on the run from Turkish troops the night that she conceived him, but sixteen years old. She decides not to say that she and Petros have agreed to keep both their mothers at a distance from their wedding planning, for fear of reminding his of the cake she never cut, and the photos she never framed, and the siblings she never gave him, because Cyprus remained a stoutly traditional place despite – or perhaps in resistance to – its many invasions and overhauls, and so no one would marry a displaced and disused child-mother. Petros grew up in his grandparents’ house, to be fiercely loyal. Hardworking. Protective.
“We comforted each other. We were best friends,” Melina says.
“Just friends, at that time?” Chloe asks, with a smile.
Blinking, Melina finds that her eyes are wet with tears. “Yes, well. He told me he was planning to get on a plane one day himself . . .” She stops short of saying ‘to find his father’, before going on, “I was afraid he would break my heart. But he was persistent. And when I finally agreed to go out with him in high school, he said he would stay.”
“How romantic!” Chloe cries, clasping her palms to her chest. “Brávo, Melina mou. You have a beautiful story . . .”
Even as Melina thanks her, she feels troubled by this tale. By the fact that Petros never fulfilled his dream of going to London, and by the chair at their top table that will sit empty as a result. Over the years, Petros has become more outspoken against Britain. His hatred has grown with every person that has left him for that Promised Land. First his father, then Aristos. Melina feels acutely aware of Wendy, the walking reminder of Aristos’s betrayal, sitting beside her. She feels acutely aware of her ancient love for Alison, which Wendy’s arrival has stirred up inside her.
“We still watch the planes, sometimes,” she says, stupidly.