Escape to Ikaria Page 4

  ‘Ochi,’ I said. No.

  ‘No sea legs yet, heh?’ he said with a little self-contained laugh. He told me it reminded him of how the previous year six tourists had hired him for the day to take them to a hidden beach.

  ‘Nudists,’ he said, ‘from Frankfurt. The Germans, they like to take off their clothes, and play silly games. Ha! you should watch them having fun, playing what they call naked volley ball, all their stuff, you know, swinging around, and then they drink, yes, and are sick all over the boat.’

  He laughed again, offering me the bottle. ‘I tell no one if you are sick.’ But I still declined and left him to finish it.

  Then he turned on a transistor, putting it on the cabin roof, and tuning in to a music station. Whether because of the retsina or just for his love of the song, he sang extravagantly, ‘Pende pano, pende cato,’ strumming an imaginary bouzouki.

  ‘Now you sing!’ So I did, the easy bit, Pende pano, pende cato.

  He slapped me on the back. ‘Bravo. You can sing, my friend!’

  The water was becoming choppy. For the first time in what had been a calm clear day, cloud formations were appearing from the horizon, rolling upwards and claiming the whole sky, subduing the light to an overcast greyness. Things can happen quickly at sea, when the weather suddenly changes, and you realise how vulnerable you are to the power of nature.

  Stelios showed a different side of himself; instantly the song-and-dance man had disappeared. We set off rapidly, the engine straining, going full throttle into a headwind. The waves broke over the bow, soaking me, ahead of us nothing but the great swell of the sea. The boat thumped as it rose and fell.

  It amused me to see that somehow he had lit a cigarette in the howling wind. Surely he couldn’t inhale a single drag of it. He shouted to me to put on my oilskin, no easy task when you’re being thrown about the place. There was no rhythm to it, just a continual battering of the senses, as if I was being beaten up by the elements. It made me feel alive in a way I had never felt before.

  When I saw the white polystyrene floats ahead, I shouted to Stelios several times, but my voice didn’t reach him so I waved instead, throwing my arms around to show him I could see them. In acknowledgement, he raised his head slightly and dropped the revs, until we were close enough to hook the nets. He seemed to have forgotten I was English and spoke to me in Greek, moving about the boat in a hurry. Maybe he thought I was Theo.

  Then he turned on the hydraulic spool and began hauling in the nets, hand over hand, pulling them on board and dropping them on to the deck. I leant over the bow watching the catch coming up from the deep, hearing the continual sound of water slapping the side of the boat as fish of all sizes passed beside me. And then as quickly as it had blown up the wind eased, and in the distance I could see blue sky breaking through the cloud.

  Stelios handed me two plastic buckets, one for squid, the other for octopus. That was where the money was, the fisherman’s prize. I was to yell at him when I saw one; I was so involved in what I was doing I suddenly realised I hadn’t felt seasick at all.

  It was an eerie sight, my first octopus with its two staring eyes, like something dragged up from a dark dream. I knew I had to pull the slimy creature from the net; it would slip through my fingers if I was squeamish. I shivered at the thought that it would cling to my skin, its tentacles entwined around my arm. I shouted to Stelios and he came quickly to show me what had to be done. He grabbed it aggressively with one hand as it clung to the other, putting up a fight, refusing to be pulled free. Then he hurled it on to the deck, not once but twice, to make sure it was dead, and dropped it into the bucket.

  ‘They can fool you, pretending to be dead,’ Stelios said. ‘Kill them quickly, otherwise they will slip away and jump back into the sea. They are worth many drachma, you understand.’

  For the next few minutes we worked in silence, me watching every fold of the net, moving forward to pull out the fish, throwing them unsorted into plastic boxes that slid around behind me. Amongst the many that were hauled up from the deep I recognised red mullet – which Stelios called barbunia – mackerel and sardines. Stelios worked at a furious rate, never tiring, sea spray dripping from his forehead. It was the longest I’d seen him without a cigarette in his mouth.

  Suddenly he pushed me aside with both hands as I was about to grab a particularly ugly fish with a large spiny head and a huge mouth.

  ‘Not this one! You understand? Poisonous!’ And with a knife he raised up the spines along its back. ‘You see this? Here is the poison, in the tips.’

  He told me it was a scorpion fish and could put you in hospital, indeed had killed many people. He carefully picked it up by its tail fin and hurled it back into the sea, shouting, ‘Ai sto dialo!’ Go to the devil.

  ‘You remember this fish, my friend. It could take your life.’

  There was no time to dwell upon my own mortality as the nets continued to come up and more octopus appeared. Luckily Stelios didn’t see the one that climbed out of the bucket and slipped away to escape over the side. A part of me was glad that it had made it back into the darkness below. We had also caught several squid, and some rather strange-looking crabs that crawled around the deck until I threw them back into the water. I could only think that the reason Stelios showed no interest in them was because they were inedible and therefore not worth anything.

  On the journey back, he gave me one of Theo’s pullovers; he could see I was freezing. For a while I lost control of my jaw, my teeth literally chattering. I wanted to be back with Ros and the children. It felt as if we’d been out at sea for a long time. The sun was low in the sky when we finally reached Aghios Kirikos.

  After securing either end of the boat to the bollards, we lifted the catch on to the harbour side. I was exhausted with a fatigue I hadn’t experienced before. Still swaying with the rhythm of the sea, I sat with my back against the wall, staring blankly. I asked Stelios if he was happy with the day; what I really wanted to hear was that he was happy with me. He smiled, giving me a bag of fish.

  ‘Here you are, my friend,’ he said, patting me on the back.

  ‘We survived the storm, Stelios . . . on my first day at sea.’

  ‘My friend, that was no storm . . . it was what you English I think call a squall.’

  Then his roaring laugh followed me as I made my way around the harbour wall, walking like a drunkard, my legs operating under a law of their own. It took a lot longer than usual to get back to Lefkada and by the time I returned home the day was dispersing its last colours, the mountain ridges alight with all the hues of twilight.

  Through the night with Ros by my side I was still at sea, rising and falling with the waves, pulling octopus from a dripping net.

  There were taxis in Aghios Kirikos, which were only ever on the move when a ferry docked, and there were a few buses, all of them parked up for the winter, covered in bird droppings. So if you wanted to get around, you had to stand out in the road and whoever was passing would stop and give you a lift. The children were definitely an asset; no one ever drove past us. Once a builder in his pick-up carried his mother from the cab and dumped her in the back with a goat and a bale of hay so that Ros and the children could travel up front. Ros was not happy at all to see the old woman manhandled from her seat, but she cheerfully waved our objections away.

  It was a social occasion to go into a shop and buy the most trivial of things, like pencils for the children. The whole family would suddenly emerge from the back and we would be stuck there for twenty minutes while they caressed the children and patted their heads. I think they just loved being in our company.

  The islanders never ceased to surprise us. Sometimes in the mornings we would find food left on the doorstep; loaves of bread, yoghurt and vegetables. Our neighbours must have tiptoed up during the night to leave these anonymous gifts, not seeking recognition for their kind acts. One day at the taverna we told Maria about it, but she shrugged her shoulders, obviously thinking it wasn’t worth me
ntioning. Clearly, this generous hospitality was in their nature and didn’t need to be talked about. She was more interested in showing Ros how to make spinach and feta pies, while Yannis hung a swing from a eucalyptus tree and played with the children.

  It gave me a chance to go and get out my portable tape player and lie on the bed and listen to Goats Head Soup by the Rolling Stones. I had brought all my favourite tapes with me: Bob Marley, Pink Floyd, Cat Stevens, Neil Young. As I jumped from track to track, each song reminded me of Dyffryn. It seemed so long ago, but it had been only a few weeks since we’d left. When Lysta came and lay down next to me, she whispered in my ear that she only felt it once a day now, when she was going to sleep.

  ‘Felt what?’ I asked.

  ‘That I want to go home.’

  ‘So you like Ikaria now, do you?’

  ‘I miss my friends and having a bicycle.’

  ‘I have an idea,’ I said. ‘Do you have Eleri’s phone number?’

  ‘I think Mum’s got it in her address book.’

  ‘Well, we’ll book a phone call to her. That will make you happy, won’t it?’

  We couldn’t really afford it; we were getting low on money. I was determined not to ring my brother Jack, who had banked all the money from the sale of Dyffryn. It was going to have to buy us a house somewhere, some day; all I knew was that it was tied up in a deposit account, for how long I had no idea.

  4

  Datsun Jim and Sister Ulita

  Datsun Jim skidded to a dusty halt outside the taverna with a cement mixer in the back of his battered pick-up. He was half an hour late, but he didn’t care about being on time. No one did, come to that. Maybe there wasn’t a Greek word for punctuality. Or was it just on Ikaria that you turned up when it suited you? Being on time was unimportant, so what was the point of making an arrangement to meet anyone? Everything was avrio, tomorrow, which explained why there was no urgency about getting anything done. In England, the whole country would grind to a standstill, while here everything gradually ground to a start. Having to live with this total disregard for time put me in a bad mood. Ros said I would be better off just coming to terms with it, but she wasn’t the one sitting around waiting.

  It was probably why dotted about the landscape were half-finished breeze-block houses that hadn’t had a day’s work done on them since we’d arrived. Which was six weeks ago now, and I needed to be earning more money. Although I was still fishing with Stelios, we were down to our last two hundred pounds. So the offer of work from Datsun Jim (whose real name was Dimitrios; Sam had come up with the nickname, and it had stuck) had been good timing.

  ‘Kali mera,’ was all he said now, clearing empty cans of Coke and packets of cigarettes from the front seat. He was building a house for his brother, who lived in Detroit and was coming back to Ikaria in the summer. I knew it would never be finished by then. He only worked in the mornings, laying bricks while I mixed the cement. I asked him if he knew exactly when his brother was arriving and he gave me the Greek response that I now knew well: eyebrows raised and eyes half closed, he threw his head back and muttered, ‘Ochi.’

  Whenever it was going to be, he carried on as always, stopping every twenty minutes to stare out across the sea, lost in some distant dream-world, until he broke this trancelike state by reaching for another can of Coke. He frequently wiped his face with a dirty handkerchief, into which he then blew his nose.

  He was not old, no more than early forties, with thick dark hair up front and a bald patch behind. He carried around a bloated belly from all the Coke he drank, and was accompanied by a mongrel dog that he tied to a fig tree and sprayed every half an hour with insect repellent, because it was forever scratching itself. On my first day working with him, he showed me a girlie magazine.

  ‘Yes, you like too?’

  Sometimes he put a portable radio on the bonnet of the pick-up and, like Stelios, tuned it until he found some traditional Greek music, then lit a cigarette and started dancing, beckoning me to join him, which I felt I had to. With our hands on each other’s shoulders, bending our knees, we danced around the pile of cement as it hardened in front of us. Often when he was bricklaying he would stop and talk about his brother Giorgos, his hero figure. One day he’d just been boasting about the big bucks Giorgos made working on the Cadillac assembly line when a friend of his turned up, walking beside a grey donkey loaded with six bags of cement which the two of them set about unloading. The mixer was still half full and if they didn’t hurry up the contents would harden in no time. But neither of them moved with any urgency, lost in deep conversation, until I tapped Jim on the shoulder to make him aware of what was happening.

  So he tipped the lot out of the mixer on to the ground, not bothered at all, and continued talking. That was when I knew the house would never be finished. After ten minutes he signalled to me to get into the back of the pick-up. His friend, an old timer, tied his donkey to an olive tree and got into the front seat, and we drove off. Was that it for the day? Where were we going and when were we coming back? I could see them laughing in the cab, Jim’s friend looking at the girlie magazine, holding it up so I could see too.

  They dropped me at the beach near Lefkada. Jim leant out of the window, shouted, ‘No money. Avrio,’ and drove off.

  I hadn’t even worked half a day and Ros would still be teaching the children. I was at a loose end, so I walked into the sea fully clothed with my sandals on, ghostly grey in my covering of cement powder, and floated on my back, my arms and legs outstretched like a starfish.

  Datsun Jim had said he would pay me three hundred drachma a day. I should have asked for at least four hundred, but had thought that if he saw how hard I worked I could ask for more in a couple of weeks. But I realised now that that would never happen and I didn’t know how much longer I could work with him. His lack of purpose or interest in getting the job done was frustrating. I liked to set myself a target and feel that sense of achievement one gets from a good day’s work. And I was determined to survive out here and not resort to getting money wired over from England.

  I’d sent my first letter home to my mother, telling her we were paying our way, and we were, thanks to the gifts people gave us. We still found bags of food on our doorstep two or three times a week. Fruit and vegetables, with sweets for the children, which Ros hid from them.

  The families in the few houses around Lefkada frequently invited us to their homes for supper. Sometimes they did not eat until as late as ten o’clock, by which time the children, who had been constantly spoilt by our hosts from the moment we arrived, were no longer hungry and had fallen asleep. At midnight they wanted to wake up the children so we could all dance together to traditional Greek music. Maybe the islanders saw us as a family struggling to get by; the word was certainly out that I was looking for work.

  I was already aware there was a simple economy on the island: to acquire no more than you needed with as little effort as possible. There was no sign of affluence, not in the housing, nor in the way anyone dressed, and very few people owned a car. It seemed that for many, to feed yourself and have a roof over your head was enough. And why not, if it freed you up to sit in the taverna and play tavli or fiddle with your komboloi (worry beads)? It was the women you saw working every day, taking pride in things, sweeping the steps or washing clothes. A man’s life was to drink ouzo, talk politics and watch football on the communal televisions in the cafés.

  In Maria’s cramped little kitchen, amongst the pots and pans and the herbs hanging from the ceiling, was the only telephone for miles.

  ‘Dad, how much longer?’ asked Lysta, impatiently waiting to speak to Eleri.

  ‘Any moment now.’

  I had already told her she could have no more than five minutes, and suggested she write down all the things she wanted to say, which she had, the first being to tell Eleri that Ros was now her schoolteacher. But when the call came through she spoke so nervously I told her she would have to shout if Eleri was going to hear a s
ingle word she was saying.

  She was embarrassed and told me to go away.

  So I went and helped Maria to break up a block of frozen squid, which she then put into the sink and poured boiling water over. Once we’d finished, I told Lysta it was time to say goodbye.

  As she put the phone down I asked, ‘Do you feel better now?’

  All she said was that Mrs Hughes, the PE teacher, had knocked herself out in the gym, Eleri’s hamster had escaped, and the school bus had broken down taking them swimming in Caernarfon.

  It was early spring and I’d noticed a softness in the breeze, a warmth that came and went depending on the direction of the wind. Honey bees, who did not share the Ikarian work ethic, were already busy in the yellow broom flowers.

  I watched a single-sheared plough being pulled by a donkey, turning over the dry soil as the sun climbed over the small fields. I imagined this scene had probably not changed for a thousand years, the wife following her husband, throwing loose stones into a straw basket slung over the donkey’s back.

  There was no sign of life in the vineyards, just the bare vines all in neat straight lines stretching down the slopes, waiting for that surge of growth to unfurl their leaves. I thought there would probably be work for me here in the autumn, if we survived until then. I could see myself treading grapes, singing Greek songs with the old folk as the light faded over the Aegean.

  Maria had asked me to tenderise a dozen octopus for a birthday party. It takes some energy to prepare them for cooking. They have to be thrown down repeatedly on a rocky surface, plunged into a bucket of sea water, then cleaned carefully without removing the suckers. It has to be done when they are fresh. By way of thanking me, she invited us for a free supper at the taverna.