Escape to Ikaria Read online

  ‘Petros has conceded,’ Angelos shouted into my ear, giving me a hug robust enough to break a couple of ribs. So it had all been worth it. ‘He’s agreed to everything, including the extra thirty drachma an hour.’ They were the words I wanted to hear.

  Maria was living every moment of this success, dancing with the others. In amongst them I could see Ros and the children, carried along in the euphoria. The one person I could not see was Datsun Jim, and I was sorry he wasn’t there to share the excitement.

  When I sat down with Angelos and Dinos and we opened a bottle of retsina they told me that it had been made clear to Petros that the agreement would only last if Zenas stopped his bullying and treated everyone with respect.

  ‘So you’ve done it. Now we can celebrate long into the night and work with a hangover tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘There was just one condition,’ said Angelos, looking away, which usually meant something of a sensitive nature was coming. ‘You must understand that we had to agree for everyone’s sake.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But what?’

  They both looked embarrassed, hesitating, each waiting to see if the other was going to tell me.

  ‘Say it, will you,’ I said impatiently.

  ‘You have been sacked,’ Dinos told me at last.

  ‘Is that all? Was I the only one?’

  ‘Petros said the Englishman was a troublemaker,’ continued Angelos, as if I would take the news badly, which I didn’t. ‘And your friend Datsun Jim, he also must go, because he is so often late. And the two of you must not set foot on the site again.’

  Angelos handed me an envelope that contained three hundred and forty drachma. At least Petros had paid what he owed me. Angelos got up and put an arm round my shoulder, but I didn’t need comforting. I was glad for them, and it closed an episode. Once again, I knew it was time to move on.

  I’d given up expecting a call from Stelios, so it was a surprise when Maria came over and said he was on the phone.

  ‘We go fishing tomorrow morning, my friend? Yes?’ It restored my faith in him.

  I left them then to go on celebrating into the night. Ros and the children had already gone home, and I was feeling a bit queasy after a few glasses of retsina on an empty stomach. I sat on the patio watching the trees sway when there was not a breath of wind. Ros came out to sit with me.

  ‘You must feel you’ve achieved something,’ she said. ‘I never thought you’d get the better of Petros.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know if I did. I’ve been sacked.’

  Ros gave me a resigned look. ‘I take it you are the only casualty?’

  ‘No, Datsun Jim as well.’

  ‘Well, that’s not surprising, is it?’

  ‘Ros, we must talk about what we’re going to do. I think I’ve made up my mind.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but let me just have one more conversation with Agathi.’

  Seth appeared from his bedroom carrying a shoe box, with what looked like air holes punched into the top of it.

  ‘Dad, I have a surprise for you.’

  ‘A dead one, no doubt.’

  ‘No, a live one. It’s a lizard. I caught it in my butterfly net. I don’t like dead insects any more.’

  I was pleased to hear it.

  ‘Can I keep it as a pet?’

  ‘It’s not really the sort of creature you can keep as a pet. You’ll have to feed it flies all day.’

  ‘Oh, let him keep it,’ said Ros. ‘He’ll look after it, you know he will.’

  ‘I’m going to call it Liz.’

  ‘That’s a very good name for a lizard.’

  Then he opened the box and held the lizard in his hand. ‘Do you want to stroke it, Dad?’

  I did, very gently, and then I said, ‘I’m going to bed.’

  On the way through the kitchen I saw the tape Paulo had given me lying on the table. I slipped it into the cassette player and fell asleep listening to Eric Clapton’s beautiful ‘Peaches and Diesel’.

  Three days had passed and there was still no sign of Datsun Jim. Maria said I worried too much about the man, when I’d asked her again if she had seen him.

  ‘I’ve known him since he was a boy. He’ll turn up when he needs to eat.’

  Maybe he would, but he was back on his own, probably drowning his sorrows in that goat hut.

  Agathi had told Ros that there was no money to pay her for teaching English at the primary school in Aghios Kirikos. It was obvious how disappointed she felt. I thought she was clinging to it as a last chance to enable us to stay; for me it reinforced my decision that we should be heading home. I decided to give her the letter from my mother that had been crumpled up in my pocket for over a week.

  In it Dinah talked about the new school term that would be starting soon, reminded me we were in fact homeless, and asked where on earth we were planning to live, which I didn’t have an answer to. She offered to wire money over to get us back to England. At the end of the letter she wrote in block capitals PLEASE LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER with a few hurried kisses underneath, and a final sentence: Jack’s going to be a father soon.

  After Ros read it she said nothing about the points my mother had raised and was just annoyed with me for not telling her Jack was going to be a father. But what we had been avoiding was staring us in the face. It was September now and twice in the past week I’d left the taverna to fetch our pullovers; the weather was changing. Most of the tourists had gone; the beaches were thinning out.

  ‘She’s right of course,’ she said at last. ‘Yes, OK, let’s go home.’

  18

  Decisions

  The monastery was still full of nuns and despite Sister Ulita’s fears no one had come to divert the water, nor had Petros had the audacity to send the JCB to start digging a trench or lay a pipe to the Toula Hotel.

  The altar cloth, which was meant to be ready for Saint Adrianos’s day, was only half finished. Artemis said it wouldn’t be completed for another year.

  ‘That’s a lot of avrios,’ I said, which she didn’t find the slightest bit amusing. All she wanted to tell me was that the rats were taking over and the nuns were going to poison them. She was leaving at the weekend and would not return until the spring. She told me this in a dismissive way, as if I was no longer of any importance to her; maybe the novelty had worn off.

  Now summer was coming to an end the sun was losing its intensity, but Sister Ulita still wore her sunglasses, gazing into her shaded world. How can you know someone if you’ve never seen their eyes? I always felt shut out, even excluded, because of those glasses. We certainly had a friendship and were even fond of each other. I saw it in her attempts to speak English, which had become more frequent since she’d been having lessons from the young sister from Samos. Her confidence had grown; she usually practised when I was leaving at the end of my working day.

  ‘Hello. I think it will rain today,’ even though there was no sign of a change in the weather.

  To which I replied, ‘Yes, I agree, it looks like rain.’ I always had to suppress a smile, but these little conversations touched me.

  Soon I would have to tell her our plans. That wasn’t going to be easy, and it would be a sad day. I felt she had become dependent on me. In all my time working there, no islanders had come to offer help. After I’d gone, who would milk the goats?

  That morning Ros was buying the ferry tickets and soon I would know the date of our departure. We really should have been on our way a month earlier, in time for the new school term. It seemed obvious we’d have to stay with my mother, who lived in Westbourne, near Poole, where I had spent my childhood.

  I’d booked a call with Jack and hoped the line would be clear enough to be able to talk about other possibilities. As I waited for it to come through, Sarah and I had the taverna to ourselves, sitting over one of Maria’s Greek coffees. It was one of the few things I hadn’t really taken to, after three sips my lips meeting a dry, gritty sludge. I couldn’t understand how the Greeks had allowed
it into their culture, these small cups of coffee, served with a glass of water. I would have preferred an instant Nescafe, but they were never that instant, not the way Maria made them, stirring the powder into a paste for many minutes, just as she did the Greek coffee.

  Things were much quieter now without the incessant background noise of the cicadas, that great whining tinnitus fizzing in your eardrums.

  It was not just Ros and I who were finding it hard to pull ourselves away from the place. I knew Sarah had to return to England to take up her place at Exeter, but no doubt she was wrestling with her heart, not something anyone can help you with. She had never mentioned when she was leaving, and it wasn’t a subject I wanted to bring up with her. She and Julia were the only ones left now from the friends we had made during the summer.

  How Julia and Stelios had kept seeing each other and sustained a passionate relationship was to be admired, if only for its planning: all their secret rendezvous; Julia’s having to swim to shore from the boat.

  ‘What was it you were shouting from the back of the truck when you all came back from the Toula the other day? It sounded something like korastika,’ said Sarah. ‘Is that right? What does it mean?’

  ‘Knackered. I think it first came into my head when I was unloading the potato boat from Samos and now it’s just part of my vocabulary. Even Datsun Jim said it the other day.

  ‘You know, I’ve worked all over the south side of Ikaria and what we had to do at the Toula was hard graft, but there was nothing more exhausting than unloading those sacks of potatoes.’

  I heard the phone ring then and Maria called me into her kitchen. For once I could hear Jack loud and clear. My brother had a lot to tell me, not surprisingly as we hadn’t spoken for months. He was still working as a shepherd in North Cerney.

  ‘Congratulations. I hear you’re going to be a father,’ I said. ‘And from Ros as well, to the both of you.’

  I knew Jack wouldn’t want to talk about it, and he didn’t, just managing to say, ‘Thanks.’

  ‘There are houses to rent here, and Gloucestershire is beautiful. You could get a job on the farm as a stockman.’

  ‘I don’t really want to go back to farming.’

  ‘Well, whatever you decide, there’s plenty of work, and there’s a good primary school in the village.’

  ‘Let me talk to Ros,’ I said. ‘Any other news?’

  ‘We got married a couple of months ago, in a register office. We didn’t invite anyone.’

  ‘And how is Moss?’ My border collie, whom Jack had rescued from a brutal man out in the wilds of Capel Curig.

  ‘She’s thriving. She’s working every day and sleeping behind the sofa, just like at Dyffryn.’

  That was as far as we got, because then the phone went dead as usual, but I’d heard enough to put a plan to Ros: that we should take up Jack’s suggestion and join him in Gloucestershire. What was the alternative? Living with my mother? Ros and I had always been close to Jack, and although we didn’t really know Corinna, the few times we had met her in Wales we had got on well.

  When Ros got back from Aghios, she told me she’d got the tickets and we would be leaving for Piraeus in ten days.

  I was thinking about the plans we’d made when Datsun Jim pulled up outside the taverna. His appearance had changed dramatically again. There he stood in a clean T-shirt, his hair swept back in a new style, his chin shaved, wearing jeans that looked as if they had never been worn before. He undeniably knew how to reinvent himself, I thought, as he embraced me with one of those awful bear hugs. This time I knew what was coming, and managed to breathe in before he clamped me to his chest. Maybe that was another reason Thekla had dumped him, because he squeezed the life out of her. Even Maria was astonished by his appearance and teased him about it, but she was glad to see him. Despite what she’d said, it seemed she too had been worried about him.

  ‘Jim, my friend,’ I said, and as soon as the words were out of my mouth I recalled that day of anger when I had shouted at him not to call me his friend. How my feelings about the man had changed. ‘What’s new in your life? What’s happened to you?’

  ‘I am free now of all my troubles,’ he said, a gentleness in his voice as if a great burden had been lifted. ‘I know the secret of myself.’ He leant forward with a sober clarity in his eyes, squeezing my thigh with his bricklayer’s hands.

  ‘My friend . . . I can tell you I have found God.’ Not a response I was expecting, although I could see Jim was extremely clean, and they say cleanliness is next to godliness.

  ‘Are you certain?’ I asked, somewhat flabbergasted. ‘How did he come to you? Tell me about it.’

  He asked Maria for a Coca-Cola, and after taking a long swig from the can he began the story of the great visitation. My word, not his – he called it a visiting.

  He had been in the goat hut one evening as the sky was darkening and the goat had nudged him several times towards the door. It would have been tempting to say ‘Maybe the goat was trying to tell you something’, but I could see how serious he was. Jim had eventually got to his feet and walked out into the twilight, that special glow just before the night has swallowed up the day.

  The actual conversion, from what I could understand, occurred when three shooting stars mysteriously passed overhead within seconds of each other. This cosmic event so overwhelmed him he fell to his knees, and for some reason he read into it an indication that he should follow God. At the same moment, he knew he was over Thekla and no longer needed a woman. He showed all the symptoms of the recently converted, unfortunately including the need to convert everyone around them too. In fact he went on about it for far too long. As he drew breath, I at last managed to get a word in about the victory over Petros and tell him that the two of us had been sacked.

  Then I told him that we were leaving Ikaria in ten days. He was so shocked that he fell into a morose silence, eventually saying, ‘You cannot leave. This is your home now.’

  He launched into a sentimental ramble about the time we had spent together. It was a pity that Ros had little sympathy for him and just thought he had taken advantage of me, which probably he had, but only because of his own incompetence.

  ‘Now I will have to go back and build my brother’s house without you to mix the cement.’

  ‘Come on, Jim, you don’t need me. You have God now, and that should keep you occupied for a while.’

  ‘Yes, God and a goat. What else does a man need?’

  I almost said a woman, but it wouldn’t have been appropriate. It was hard to imagine Datsun Jim surviving such a self-inflicted discipline. Maybe Sister Ulita could help him. She didn’t yet know she would be needing someone to work at the monastery and milk the goats.

  I woke early, before the sun had cleared the haze. The air cooler now, one could walk without a sweated brow. I passed the Toula Hotel; the nearly completed ground floor must have stretched for fifty yards, a long line of bedroom windows without their frames. The arched main entrance was taking shape, the swimming pool now dug out beside the building.

  When I got to the boat, Stelios was drinking coffee and smoking a Karelia, his shirt sleeves rolled up.

  ‘Look, for you today,’ he said, ‘she is a fishing boat again,’ pointing to the piles of nets and polystyrene boxes across the deck.

  ‘And you will take her out and be my skipper. Are you happy with this?’

  ‘I am,’ I said. ‘So, we are going fishing together for the last time.’

  ‘Ochi. There is no last time for Ikarians.’

  He was in the upswing of a boisterous mood, when life could be laughed at, and whatever confronted him was brushed aside. Throughout the morning his high spirits never waned, and he got more excited as he suggested singing ‘Pende pano, pende cato’. So we did, although I still only knew the chorus. All this exuberance without a drop of alcohol. It was after we had put the nets down and he opened a bottle of retsina that he became contemplative. Lighting yet another cigarette, he finally stopped
humming, picked a strand of tobacco from his teeth and spat into the sea.

  ‘I knew a man once,’ he said, but didn’t finish the sentence, looking away into the distance.

  ‘You knew a man once?’

  ‘I knew a man once,’ he continued, ‘who had seven children, and after the last child was born he never slept with his wife again.’

  ‘Why not?’ But he didn’t answer me.

  ‘All of his life he fished the Aegean. They bring up these children, and he looked after his mother and father. This he did for over thirty years.’

  ‘A hard-working man who supported his family,’ I said.

  ‘I cannot do it,’ he said, pouring himself another retsina.

  ‘This man, he is my father.’

  ‘What are you saying, Stelios?’

  ‘I’m a man who should never have married. I have what you call a weakness for women.’

  ‘Are you telling me your father is an unhappy man?’

  He drew in a deep breath, flicking his cigarette butt into the sea.

  ‘Nem pirasi.’ Never mind. ‘Come on,’ he said, shaking himself out of his despondency. ‘It is the same for all men.’ And then he changed the subject.

  ‘You know,’ he said, laughing. ‘This is me, what you English call “in a nutshell”.’

  I didn’t ask him about Julia, and he didn’t mention her once. As we brought in the nets, working together, it all came back to me, the satisfaction of being on a kayiki, a small vessel in a vast sea, doing what people have done for thousands of years.

  The two of us pulled fish from the nets, throwing the catch into the buckets and polystyrene boxes. This was how I wanted to remember him, out at sea, or when we went night fishing, talking in front of a fire as we cooked barbunia. Or that wild night when I went overboard, and then clung to that engine made in Derby all the way back to Aghios Kirikos.