Perhaps it marked the extent to which she was being restored to herself. Her hair had taken its time growing back, as if nervous to be seen out in public, but now it brushed her shoulders. Turning slightly away from them, Kate tucked her hair behind her ears to examine what she had found, feeling an unexpected simple pleasure in the act. She’d watched them striding purposefully up the hill from the Pomegranate Gate, their poles clacking on the stones, as if they were making their way to Everest Base Camp instead of a sunlit garden in Andalusia. No one appeared to have noticed, not even the group of tourists she’d come in with, who were now standing in a knot, poring over a guidebook, then staring across the gorge to the summer palace, their sun visors glinting in the low afternoon light and their Nordic walking poles tucked under their arms.
She managed to fiddle the object into her palm and sat back, trying to look innocent. To get thrown out would be like getting expelled from Eden. The Alhambra palaces, constructed by the medieval Moorish kings of Granada and wrapped around by their majestic gardens, represented to her a sort of perfection: a paradise on earth. She glanced around, hoping no one had seen.
Winkling it out, she’d triggered a little cascade of debris.
Intrigued by a plant that resembled a familiar English weed she knew of as the Mother of Thousands or Kenilworth ivy, she had been taking a closer look, and glimpsed something that shouldn’t have been there. She had never wilfully damaged anything in her life (apart from herself), let alone a World Heritage Site.
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