Ghost Flight Book Launch Reading 3/4
An extract from Wendy's part of Ghost Flight, as read at the book's 26 June 2025 launch in Nicosia.
Ghost Flight: Chapter Twenty-One
Art is a petty friend, not content to ‘pick up where they left off’ when Wendy calls for the first time in months. It demands her attention, constantly. She opens her sketchbook to a double page spread of past works, and it leaves her to wonder. When was she capable of such brilliance, and how can she achieve it again?
With no messages to respond to, Wendy slides the keyboard back behind her phone screen. Through her living-room window, she watches a plane descending from the blue sky towards Larnaca Airport, and casts back to the day that hers touched down. Nine months ago. She can’t recall thinking, then, that she would stay here so long. Only that she needed to come.
Wendy forces herself on through her sketchbook, a gift from Yvonne towards the end of their time together. On the early pages are long, laboured lines. Then the short, breathless kind that came of her meeting Aristos. The radiance of Cyprus, in the corridors of light through her shading.
These drawings are good – they smell as woody as the pine trees outside – and yet Wendy can see less of her heart in each one. For her, novelty left Cyprus with the spring. August rendered her world as small as the distance she could stand to walk in its forty-degree heat. And it changed Aristos. After Athens, their game of emotional hide and seek turned from teasing to sinister. Wendy sensed that he was no longer playing with her but against her, no longer the parent looking, indulgently, under the table before addressing the bulge of their child behind the curtains, but the one leaving them there. Counting to one hundred with no intention of coming to look.
Wendy turns the page from her last surreal picture to a series of literal renditions – of Finikoudes Beach and Larnaca’s Medieval Castle – unlike her usual style. They aren’t bad. They just don’t say anything of their own. They repeat after their subjects in the straightforward terms that even unartistic people could understand. People like Aristos, Wendy thinks. And she wonders whether she hadn’t wanted him to know her better, after all.
She takes a breath. Slides the keyboard out from her phone. Toys with the thought of texting Grisha before sitting back in her butterfly chair. Arriving at a blank page, she watches it settle like a fresh bedsheet.
‘TIME, UNCHRONICLED’, she scrawls.
The words stare at her.