Page 3 of Never Tear Us Apart

Chapter Three

Three Days After the Crash

‘You mustn’t keep blaming yourself,’ Kathryn tells me. Her voice is soft in the quiet of the early morning.

When I was discharged from hospital after a serious concussion but somehow with no other injuries, she was adamant that I would stay with her.

She whisked me off to her harbourside apartment in Birgu, just across the blue water from Valletta, and embedded me in her guest room as if I were an infant niece and not a fully grown cousin.

Kathryn has surrounded me with every comfort she can think of, and I love her for it.

It has been a long time since anyone mothered me.

I hardly even remember what being truly cared for felt like.

It has been a long time since I have rested feeling completely safe.

Kathryn has given me that gift, and it feels like respite, even from myself.

Dad is still in hospital – his tibia is broken, but a clean break, thank God, but they’re worried about his heart. A high-impact crash isn’t good for an elderly man, even one who seems determined to live forever.

‘It’s hard not to feel guilty,’ I say, rueful. ‘The accident was my fault. Only I could go on a trip with my estranged father and end up almost killing him.’

‘Nobody’s perfect,’ Kathryn says with a wink, and I find myself laughing as she flashes me a mischievous smile.

‘Anyway, let’s just focus on the fact that it wasn’t worse,’ she continues.

‘You are up and about after a few days; your father is as strong as an ox. All of you, including the other driver, will live to see another day.’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Dad is eighty-eight. A head-on collision can’t be good at that age.’

‘Meh – my mum says that if living in New York in the 1960s didn’t kill your father, then likely nothing can. She insists he will outlive us all, simply to spite her.’

‘Were they ever close?’ I ask. I know my father cut off what was left of his Maltese family a long time ago. Nevertheless, his little sister, Kathryn’s mother, came to see him at the hospital the day after the accident, even if she did leave within twenty minutes.

‘There’s a photo,’ Kathryn says. ‘Mum keeps it tucked in the back of a photo frame – her as a baby sitting in this huge pram, and David holding the handle, smiling at her. He looked after her a lot when they were children during the war, though he was very young himself, only five. Perhaps they were close once, but they were separated young. After the war, David was sent to be educated in England, he was the son, so it was up to him to gain an education. My mum stayed in Malta, raised by neighbours. David rarely came home and when he did, it was clear he didn’t want to be there.

Mum says it was as if he’d decided never to look back.

Perhaps it’s understandable. The war was a terrible time for the people of Malta.

For our parents particularly, they lost everything. David even lost his home.’

I know very little about what the Siege of Malta in the Second World War was like, but it wasn’t so long ago that I myself was hiding in a hospital basement in Mariupol as the ground was pounded with heavy artillery.

There was fear and exhaustion in the darkened room, desperation and anger – but so much love between fathers and daughters, brothers, sisters, cousins and neighbours, too. It was palpable.

It was love that held together a universe on fire, fuelling courage and determination – love that would never surrender and love that would rage in bottomless grief when all was lost, because not even love can protect the weak and abandoned in the end.

To walk away from family. To walk away from love, and all the pain that comes with it. That’s hard for me to understand. Then again, I suppose I am one of the people he walked away from.

‘Look, you will go to visit him later. He will make you mad. I will take you for dinner and feed you wine. Until then, just be here, on this day, in this hour. Just be now. It’s a magical experience, I promise you.’

It’s almost dawn, and we are standing outside the ancient temple of ? a ? ar Qim, perched on a hilltop almost above the edge of a cliff on the southern coast of the island.

This is one of the ancient island temple sites that my cousin focuses her research on.

She told me last night she had a gift for me: the gift of travelling back in time to when Malta was a temple culture that knew the sun and stars as gods.

I’m about to find out what she meant by that.

The morning is perfectly still. Even the constant Maltese breeze has paused, as if holding its breath.

The restless sea marks time like a clock that has yet to wind down, a constant distant movement.

The sky bleeds from violet to a pale lilac.

The promise of the sun is inked in coppery pinks on the far horizon.

I take in the remains of the temple, trying to imagine it as it would have been five thousand years ago, standing silent and stoic at the heart of change.

‘It pleases me to think that our ancestors may have been led by women,’ Kathryn tells me. ‘These temples were filled with statues and sculptures of “fat ladies”: beautifully corpulent women who held the power of creation in their big bellies and breasts.’

‘Wow, these really are my people,’ I say with a small smile.

Kathryn grins and leads me on.

A modern, open-sided canopy has been erected over the whole of the temple to try to shield it from the worst of the wind and sea spray, but I still get a sense of how impressive it must have looked, standing on the edge of the world.

‘We should go in – sunrise is only a few minutes away,’ Kathryn says.

I follow her into the heart of the temple.

‘The people who built this temple were some of the first farmers, adapting from a life of hunter-gatherers to live off the land,’ Kathryn tells me.

‘And no land was harder to cultivate than this rocky island. The sun, the moon and the stars were their constant guides and must have been a huge comfort to them. Come what may, the North Star will always appear, the moon will always return to full bloom, and the sun will herald the beginning of summer by dawning on the longest day of the year. It’s been that way for as long has human memories can reach. ’

There is a small group of other people already waiting in the temple room, who greet Kathryn with smiles and warm hugs. Kathryn directs me to stand against one side of the chamber, and we fall into silence, waiting.

‘Watch,’ Kathryn murmurs, directing me with a gesture to the near-perfect circular hole in the south side of the main temple.

Around us, the sky lightens almost imperceptibly, and within a few seconds, the bright beams of the dawning sun are focused through the aperture so that they flow through the temple to the leaf-shaped room where we are waiting.

A carefully placed standing stone means that when the light hits the back of the temple wall, it shows us the glowing image of a crescent moon.

And as it rises through the sky, its beams travelling down the wall, it will move through the phases of the moon until the display is complete with a bright golden disc of light on the temple floor.

One of the two most important celestial bodies in the universe is honoured and twinned with the moon in a ritual of singular simplicity and meaning.

As it is now, so it was then.

So it will always be.

‘Magical.’ I breathe the word on a long sigh as the sun begins her hours-long journey. ‘It’s almost as if you can feel the temple women here with us.’

‘Oh, I’m sure they are here.’ Kathryn puts her arms around me in a little hug, her dark eyes twinkling with pleasure at sharing her joy.

‘When a ritual has been honoured for so many millennia, it connects us straight to the heart of our ancestors, don’t you think?

We are each only one link in the chain, after all.

I work in many of these sites, sometimes quite alone.

And there have been more times than I can count when I have felt . . . something is with me.’

‘All these years, and I had no idea about the temples,’ I say, pausing to stand still and looking around at the perfect morning. ‘No idea about anything to do with Malta at all, and now I’m here, it . . .’

‘Feels like home,’ Kathryn finishes.

‘How did you know I was going to say that?’ I ask.

‘I recognise that expression, and besides, home is a two-way street. You may love a place, but it can never be home unless the place loves you back. And you are born of this earth. Even before she met you, Malta has always loved you like a mother, waiting for you to remember her. Just as all of your Maltese family have been waiting to meet you.’

‘Dad never talked about Malta or even being Maltese. It always felt as if it had nothing to do with me.’

‘Ah, but it always has. No matter where you have been in the world, what you have done, Malta has always been with you; she has always had you in her heart.’

It’s a romantic notion, but I like it. Not like me at all.

‘Now, let me take you to my favourite of all Malta’s temples: Mnajdra. It’s smaller but somehow still so alive with ancient voices.’

‘I’m sorry it’s taken me all my life to get here,’ I say as she leads me down the hillside towards the glittering sea. ‘I’m sorry I’ve missed years and years of knowing you.’

‘You don’t need to apologise, Maia Borg,’ she tells me, pronouncing it with a soft ‘g’.

‘Did you know that Borg is the most common surname on the island? There are dozens and dozens of us, and we will all claim to be your relative, you know. Our cousin Maia, the famous journalist from the BBC news.’

‘Hardly famous,’ I say, smiling anyway. ‘I was on the BBC once, and that was just because I was in the right place at the right time. Anyway, thank you so much for bringing me here today to see the sunrise. I feel so lucky.’

‘Not at all. Now, I must leave you to the ancestors for a while. I have a meeting at the visitor centre with the curator, it’s the one time of year when we are both on site so early we can get all the week’s work done before breakfast!

Enjoy the peace of the temple in the early morning. Come and find me when you are ready.’

I thank her, smiling to myself as I begin the short descent down a white stone path towards the second, smaller temple that sits right on the cliff edge. Made of honey-coloured stone, it follows the same clover-leaf construction of ? a ? ar Qim: five leafed chambers that come off a central stem.

Here, Kathryn has told me, it isn’t the summer solstice that the positioning of the temple seems to echo but the spring equinox and the winter solstice, and, crucially for me, the constellation of the Pleiades or the Seven Sisters – one of which was named Maia.

Maybe here, in the dust and destiny of this almost forgotten place, is where my name was born – where, for perhaps even just a few minutes, my father imagined me as his daughter, a beloved child.