Escape to Ikaria Page 11

Datsun Jim was not encouraging his brother. Instead he stood behind him and opened a can of Coke before sticking a toothpick into an olive.

  Then suddenly everything became more dramatic. Perhaps Giorgos was frustrated by my not conceding any further advantage to him, but in a careless split second he let out a groan and threw every ounce of his strength at me. I knew that if I could withstand the full onslaught, he would be a spent force. His face started to go through an ever-changing sequence of grotesque contortions, similar to those you see in a hall of mirrors at a funfair.

  Just when I thought he was done, he made a last desperate attempt, his eyes bulging. But he still couldn’t force my hand down, and I could tell he was weakening. With one supreme effort, I flattened his arm against the tabletop and it was over. His head flopped on to his forearm.

  Gregory leapt forward and raised my hand in the air. I could see mixed emotions on Ros’s face, but whatever she was thinking we were better off by five thousand drachma, which Datsun Jim wasted no time in passing to me. Was he really being serious when he whispered in my ear, ‘Could you lend me five hundred?’

  I nearly burst out laughing.

  ‘Only for a few days . . . then I pay you back.’

  I hadn’t a single word for him. What would have been the point? He was not the type of man to reflect on the evening’s events. Tomorrow he would wake up and begin another day’s work on Giorgos’s house, be distracted once more and wonder where the morning had gone. If he remembered, he would move his goats to another spot, take a siesta, and curse himself for leaving the shovel to harden in a pile of cement.

  ‘Now, where were we,’ said Gregory, ‘after that rude interruption? Oh yes, our rousing political debate.’

  When the others had gone I had one last Amstel and Maria came and sat with me, her hair coming undone from the tortoiseshell clip she always wore. In all the time we had been here, I’d never seen her eat or have a drink, but tonight she sipped a glass of cloudy lemonade with me.

  ‘You will remember your time here, I think, yes?’ she said with an ironic smile. I could have talked to Maria then, now that the place was quiet, but Sarah and Julia appeared, returning from their evening out. They seemed happy, giving one another conspiratorial looks, as if something exciting had happened. But whatever it was they weren’t going to tell me tonight.

  I went home and when I got into bed, without waking Ros, I put JJ Cale’s album Naturally into the cassette player and listened to ‘Magnolia’. It’s one of those tracks that you can float away on in the minutes before sleep, gently slipping into a dream.

  9

  A Way of Life

  Three days before, I had posted a long-overdue letter to my mother. It had been a rambling account of our life on Ikaria, with a certain amount of poetic licence, which my mother adored anyway. And then one of those inexplicable coincidences happened, as when after a long silence someone comes into your thoughts and that same day they get in touch. I picked up an embossed Basildon Bond envelope from the Poste Restante in Aghios Kirikos and recognised her handwriting.

  I read my mother’s letter on the harbour wall, where I’d come looking for Stelios. It was full of down-to-earth things that had been keeping her awake at night. She reminded me that I was twenty-nine years old, with a growing family who needed a sense of security and an education to prepare them for their life ahead. And what was I doing exactly, living on a Greek island, but enjoying a long holiday? Did I have any idea when we were coming home, and was I intending to get a proper job? I was disappointed to read this, because I had explained how well the children were doing in the letter now on its way to her, and how serious Ros was about teaching them. But it was written, no doubt, after a bad night’s sleep, and full of the worry that mothers have about wayward sons. I imagined her pacing up and down her sitting room, picturing all sorts of disasters. I’d have to telephone and try to reassure her that everything was under control, and her grandchildren were thriving.

  That’s what was going on in my head when Stelios walked past, close enough for me to put my hand on his shoulder and say, ‘Kali mera. Ti kanis?’

  And after absorbing my mother’s woes I was treated to Stelios’s, presented in a way only a Greek could, with all the passion that probably built the Greek Empire. He said his wife was complaining he was no longer a loving husband.

  ‘So I have a weakness for women, you understand? She is jealous if they want to come out on the boat. But I say yes, they should come.’

  ‘You are taking girls out on your boat?’

  ‘Of course. They come as tourists . . . I tell my wife we make money.’

  What was I meant to say? What could I do other than listen to his troubles?

  ‘Are we still going fishing together?’

  ‘Of course, later this week. I will telephone you at the taverna.’

  I knew Stelios liked to flirt, having seen him that morning with Julia. He was a fisherman out in the Aegean; what was more romantic than that? His way of life would capture the heart of any young girl, especially coming back into Aghios Kirikos under a setting sun. Stelios would no doubt appear a seductive figure and he’d be unable to resist the temptation.

  Walking the coast road back to Lefkada, you were never far from a beach where you could pull off your T-shirt, kick off your sandals and run into the cooling sea to float on your back, looking up into a blue sky. I did it often, ambling along in the heat, past the fig trees and the prickly pears, taking a slow walk home in the sun. Then I’d skim stones across the smooth clear surface of the water, thinking about work, feeling uncertain about all sorts of things. Stelios was unpredictable, Datsun Jim now no more than someone I passed on the road.

  That’s what was occupying me when I saw Sarah and Julia, both in bikinis, down on the beach. I went down to join them and we talked as we swam away from the shore, enjoying the stillness of the morning. Afterwards we sat on the rocks chatting, while Julia combed her hair and then, taking off her bikini top, walked off to look for shells. Sarah and I had fallen into the habit of reminiscing about England and I told her the only things I missed were the month of May, hawthorn blossom and a cottage loaf. ‘Actually, there are four things. I miss cricket too.’

  Then in one sentence she swept me a long way from England.

  ‘I’ve met someone,’ she said. ‘An Ikarian.’

  At first I didn’t know what to say. ‘When?’ I asked finally.

  ‘The other evening, when Julia and I went into Aghios Kirikos.’

  ‘Oh, so that’s why you were giving each other those looks in the taverna?’

  ‘Probably. It’s exciting.’

  ‘Does this mean you might be staying on Ikaria a bit longer?’

  ‘Well, we’ve no plans to leave.’

  When I eventually got back to Lefkada, Vassili’s car was parked below our house, the back seat full of children sitting on one another’s laps and Ros insisting they go on without her, telling them she would hitch a ride.

  ‘You’re not kidnapping our children again?’ I said, it having become a standing joke between us.

  ‘This time we will charge you a ransom,’ shouted Vassili, struggling to be heard above the din coming from behind him.

  ‘Mum, Seth’s too heavy. Can’t Sam have him on his lap?’

  Seth pulled up his T-shirt to inspect his stomach. ‘I’m not fat, Mum.’

  ‘No, you’re not at all,’ said Ros, ‘but it’s probably best you sit on Sam’s lap.’

  And so it went on, as the adults tried to manoeuvre six children to fit comfortably into a sardine tin. Then, just as they had all quietened down, along came Mercedes – a human being, not a car – in his pick-up selling karpuzi (watermelons), blasting out his unintelligible sales pitch through a megaphone. At this time of year it was a daily occurrence: you would hear him some way off, gradually growing louder as he made his way to Lefkada. Maria and Yannis always bought from him, karpuzi so large they could only carry one at a time.

  So w
e asked for a lift and sat up front with him, while every hundred yards he bawled out, ‘Watermelons, come and get your fresh watermelons.’ Or so I guessed. But nobody appeared, probably because everyone was on the beach, or taking a siesta. The lack of customers didn’t deter Mercedes, who, if anything, increased the volume.

  When we pulled up behind Vassili’s car some twenty minutes later, Mercedes threw me a karpuzi as heavy as a medicine ball. Ros gave him fifty drachma and left her hand out, expecting some change.

  ‘Why are you doing this with your hand?’

  ‘Does a karpuzi cost fifty drachma?’

  ‘No, eighty . . . for you it is cheaper.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of your children. They look Greek, yes?’

  ‘Tell me about this game called cricket your son wants to play,’ said Vassili, who always sunbathed with a pair of shorts on his head.

  ‘It’s a very old English game that we have been playing for over two hundred years, but we need a bat and ball.’

  ‘Draw me this bat. I will make one,’ he said, searching for a piece of paper.

  ‘We need three stumps as well.’

  ‘What is this unusual word stump? I’ve never heard it before.’

  ‘I’ll draw one for you, then if you can make them we can play cricket.’

  ‘Of course. I have plenty of time.’

  It started off a conversation about Vassili’s simple philosophy of life. It was what we are all striving for: to make enough money and still have time to do other things.

  ‘To understand an Ikarian you must know his way of life,’ Vassili told me. ‘Time is easily wasted here, and if everyone is doing it there is little choice but to sit and talk and be sociable. No one is in a hurry; the world will go on changing regardless of what we believe in Ikaria. Many of the houses being built are for those who work in America, in Pittsburgh and Detroit. It is they who bring back their dollars. These houses you see are the slowest houses ever built anywhere in the world. They wait for those who will one day return home and be Ikarians again, and live our way of life. Slowly. Siga, siga.’

  He was probably right. Life is easier when the cost of living is cheap and you have long hot summers to enjoy. Ikarians kept everything simple; most of what they ate they had grown or caught themselves. Ros and I understood that way of life, the only difference being that I liked to get out of bed with a bit of enthusiasm. That was one thing a lot of Ikarians did not have first thing in the morning, and so the day took a long time to get started. Most Ikarians would not survive for five minutes on a Welsh hill farm, having to be up at six, carrying a bale of hay on your back in darkest winter, searching for sheep.

  No one found it necessary to show what they had achieved, because no one competed and no one had great material ambitions in the first place. Vassili and Agathi seemed content, both in their late thirties and not short of money. When I asked Vassili what he did for a living, he told me he had a printing business in Athens. For Agathi, there was nothing to do now but enjoy the long school holidays.

  Ros was obviously very happy on Ikaria and it crossed my mind that soon we could be talking about a more permanent life here.

  Gregory the Gregarious had taught Sam how to tell the time and lent him his watch, and ever since then Sam had been asking everyone to guess the time. The novelty was wearing a bit thin.

  ‘Ti ora einai, Dad?’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘What’s the time in Greek. Julia taught it to me.’

  ‘Three minutes later than when you last asked me.’

  ‘Wrong, Dad. Only two minutes later.’

  ‘Well, I always told you time flies.’

  That evening we were going to the panagiri over in Galiskari, on the north side of the island. It was an all-night festival, and most of us at Lefkada were going. I wondered whether we’d see Julia and Sarah over there. I hadn’t seen them for a few days and knew they were keen to go to a panagiri.

  Paulo and Francesca had found some marijuana growing out in the wild, not far from the Toula Hotel building site. It was a couple of kilometres away, set back off the road to Aghios Kirikos, where building had started in the spring. Marijuana didn’t grow in the wild on Ikaria, as far as I knew, so someone must have planted it. They asked us all if we smoked the stuff, and it didn’t surprise me that everyone was up for a night getting stoned. They put some joints together, much longer and fatter than the ones we rolled back in Wales.

  Galiskari was an hour and a half away, and no one had given a thought to how we were going to get there.

  I did, when I saw Datsun Jim stop at the taverna and count out several drachma, obviously settling a debt with Maria. When he saw me he couldn’t restrain himself, and I had to endure a hug that reeked of old goat. He delighted in telling me Giorgos had gone to Mykonos to stay with cousins for over a month.

  ‘Now we can work together again.’

  ‘No we can’t,’ I told him bluntly.

  ‘But I have money, look,’ showing me what must have been ten thousand drachma. There was no subtlety to Jim. ‘It’s from my brother to build the house.’

  ‘Can you get rid of the cement mixer and drive us to Galiskari? We’ll pay for your petrol . . . will you do it?’

  ‘Of course, for you, and then we work together again.’

  That I didn’t answer. I could imagine how Ros would react. Divorce me, probably.

  ‘I come back in half an hour.’

  I knew Datsun Jim’s half-hours, but didn’t react fast enough. He was gone, narrowly missing Mercedes coming the other way, still flogging his karpuzi.

  It had been some time since I’d been alone with Lottie, and I could tell there was something on her mind when she asked if we could go for a walk. She had been sleeping on the beach for a while now and was running out of money, but Maria had offered her a job waitressing for a hundred drachma a night. Yannis had been demoted to dishwashing after the fiasco that had happened a few nights before when a group of businessmen from Athens had come for supper and not one of them had got what he ordered. Earlier Gregory had seen the men rolling out architectural drawings over the bonnet of a parked car, below the Toula Hotel now under construction. In his opinion, they were big city boys with bags of money and, no doubt, commercial ideas on how to exploit the island.

  I didn’t think Lottie wanted to go for a walk just to tell me about her job with Maria. Then she said, as if asking for a reference, ‘What do you think of Gregory?’

  ‘He’s a great guy. One of those people I’ll have a long friendship with, I hope, long after we have all left Ikaria,’ I replied without hesitation.

  ‘You know that already?’

  ‘Yes, I do. Why, is there a problem?’

  ‘I am sleeping with him, that’s all.’

  As we walked on Lottie told me how confused she was, feeling guilty about her past lover, even though he had left her with a broken heart. I didn’t understand why she should feel disloyal to someone who had hurt her so badly and just said, ‘Have a fling with him. What have you got to lose?’

  ‘That’s what Ros said.’

  ‘I agree with her. Have some fun.’

  We all piled into Datsun Jim’s pick-up. Lottie and Ros sat up front, the rest of us in the open at the back. As we were leaving, Maria said in her best broken English, ‘If you let Jim drink, he will kill you all.’

  It was a stark warning, but right on the button. The evening sky was filling with stars, among them the constellations of Orion and the Plough that guided mariners across the ancient Aegean. I knew this because Stelios had pointed them out to me. Dust swirled in ochre clouds and hid the road behind us. The ride was exhilarating as the island darkened into mountainous outlines and the evening around us became burnished with gold in a fading radiance.

  Jim showed no consideration for his passengers. We bounced up and down and swerved round corners until we had to thump on his window.

  ‘Slow down! The children are going t
o be sick!’

  After an hour or so everyone needed a break and so we stopped for a while and Paulo lit a joint. We passed it between us, looking at the lights coming from the isolated houses dotted upon the hills. After a bout of giggling we sat silently, listening to the bells of a herd of goats passing in the night. I think we were all entranced; it was a sound that must have been heard since biblical times. We didn’t offer Datsun Jim a drag on the joint; luckily for us he was happy with his cans of Coke and Karelias.

  By the time we got to Galiskari I was expecting the children to show signs of tiredness, but their adrenalin was flowing as we drove down on to the flat sandy beach with its white waves rolling in, exploding over the rocks. Out on a promontory a small blue and white church shone in the moonlight.

  Amongst the milling crowd, plates of food were being carried to a long line of trestle tables. Fish were neatly arranged in circular displays laid out like mosaics within rings of lemon slices. These works of art were carried by women wearing traditional costumes, with brightly coloured woven head scarves. And then even more food appeared: roasted goat, salads, cheeses and bowls of olives. Everyone queued in a long line that stretched across the sand.

  Fires were lit on the beach and out came the bouzouki players and violinists, while village children in long skirts shook their tambourines. It was a clear night, and under the vaulted heavens, around bonfires that crackled and threw their embers like fireflies into the air, the music began. A single file of dancers emerged out of the crowd, hands on each other’s shoulders, and in amongst them I saw Sarah and Julia. They moved in unison with precise steps, lifting their bended knees, swaying at the hips, turning their faces to and fro, leaving their footprints in the sand. It was poetry in slow motion, and as others started to join them Ros grabbed me, even though I had a plate in one hand and a mouth full of goat.

  ‘You know I can’t dance,’ I choked.

  ‘Come on. Give your plate to Sam.’

  And so, in a completely uncoordinated way and out of step with everybody else, I moved in my own time. Lysta came over to me and summed it up in one sentence. ‘You look silly, Dad.’ She was right, but Ros didn’t care.