Escape to Ikaria Read online

  What the children didn’t know was that we were going to be eating goat, which was cheaper than lamb and the Ikarians loved. Ros thought they wouldn’t eat it, because they had made friends with many of the wild goats, who were easy to approach, and had even given some of them names. I was sure Ros was right, so we pretended we were having lamb; it had never seemed to worry them to be eating what had been running around in the fields back in North Wales.

  Luckily, just as Maria was serving us, Sam had something on his mind. He was deep in thought, searching for the right words.

  ‘Dad,’ he eventually said, ‘how long does it take someone to grow up?’

  One of those questions a developing boy likes to hurl at you out of the blue. He preferred it if I didn’t answer straight away; that I had to think about it.

  ‘Hmm, well, that’s a tricky one. For some people it can take a lifetime, for others it can happen much faster. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because I feel I have grown up.’

  ‘But you’re only eight.’

  ‘Yes, but I feel much older.’

  ‘How much older?’

  ‘Well, probably at least twelve.’

  ‘So what is the point you are trying to make?’

  ‘That I’m ready, Dad . . . I’m ready to go shopping on my own in Aghios Kirikos.’

  ‘Wow. That’s a big thing you’re asking.’

  ‘Please, Dad. It’s only a half-hour walk, and I understand Greek money.’

  I didn’t know what to say, and waited for Ros to respond.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ she said. ‘No harm is going to come to him.’

  So Ros and I agreed it was a natural step for him to take. We had finished our meal, neither Sam nor Lysta having noticed we’d been eating a slightly different meat. I thought we had got away with it, until Maria came to clear the table. ‘The goat, yes, you like?’

  A look of horror came over their faces.

  ‘Goat! We’ve eaten goat . . . no we haven’t!’ cried Lysta.

  ‘Mum, it’s not true, is it?’

  If only Maria hadn’t said anything. We had fallen into a pit and one not worth trying to dig ourselves out of. Lysta was particularly upset and Ros and I spent over fifteen minutes trying to console her. We promised them they would never have to eat goat again and ordered their favourite, spoons of vanilla paste in glasses of water, hoping that would cheer them up.

  Sitting in the taverna, no matter who you were talking to, you were always drawn to the sea and the individual stars that appeared one by one in the darkening twilight. The expansive sunsets dispersed on the horizon while behind us the mountain peaks darkened. Eventually the dramatic afterglow faded as night came down upon us. Only then did your eye follow the distant lights of a ferry going back to Athens. No wonder it was so easy to drift away from the here and now. The sea seemed to lure you back into ancient myth, stirred the imagination; perhaps that’s why Datsun Jim was always gazing into the distance. I realised I felt some sympathy for him. The past was so very much alive here that no one on the island was quite in the present day. I thought I’d found the answer to what was going on in Ikaria; it was all rather peculiar.

  Involved in my own reverie, I hadn’t noticed the man pulling a chair up next to me until he introduced himself.

  ‘I am Spyros,’ he said in a soft voice, shaking my hand with a relaxed, confident smile. I could tell by the smoothness of his palm that he did not work the land. He was handsome, with the distinguished look of a well-educated man, his hair whitening. ‘Could I speak to you? I am fluent in English.’

  ‘Yes, of course. But first, this is my wife Ros, and my children.’

  ‘Lovely to meet you,’ said Ros. ‘I like your name.’

  ‘Thank you. It was my father’s name and my grandfather’s,’ he said. ‘But please, forgive me, I am here to make you a proposition if you are interested.’

  ‘I’ll leave you two to talk,’ Ros said, and took the children off to bed. Lysta was still upset, vowing that she would never eat meat again.

  I didn’t get a goodnight kiss from her, while I seemed to have been forgiven by Sam who gave me a hug.

  Over a beer and a bowl of olives, Spyros told me about Sister Ulita, who lived alone in the monastery at Evaggelismos, just a kilometre away, above the road to Xylosirtis. On and off for the past two years he had been studying ancient religious scripts there, but was now returning to Athens. Although she was not old, the nun suffered from arthritic hands and was unable to milk her goats. She also needed someone to work the vegetable garden and look after the orchard. There were many old fruit trees that needed tending.

  ‘Why is she all alone at the monastery?’ I asked. ‘What happened to the monks?’

  ‘It is a long story, so I will shorten it for you. The monks over the years gradually died, and to keep the monastery open nuns were sent from Mykonos and they too died one by one until only Sister Ulita and the Mother Superior were left. The Mother Superior returned to Mykonos, and that is why Sister Ulita is alone. It is difficult for her to find anyone reliable, and as you know, goats have to be milked twice a day.’

  ‘But I am not a religious man,’ I told him.

  ‘That is not important.’

  ‘Will she pay me?’

  ‘There is no money, but she will pay you with food and fruit. She makes goat’s cheese and yoghurt. You can feed your whole family on what the monastery provides. Remember, it is cheap to live here.’

  ‘I’d like to meet her. I’m used to that kind of work.’

  ‘Good, then let’s go tomorrow. Is eight in the morning OK for you?’

  ‘Will that be eight or eight thirty?’ I asked him.

  ‘Ha! You’re getting to know the Ikarians already. It will be at eight, I promise you.’

  As Maria brought Spyros another beer, she told me Stelios was on the telephone, wanting to speak to me.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘we go night fishing under the stars. The weather is good, but you bring warm clothes, you understand.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘At six. Don’t be late.’

  It was eleven by the time I got into bed, waking Ros despite tiptoeing as quietly as I could. She told me Lysta had left a note beside the bed written in block capitals. I WILL NOT EAT MEAT AGAIN.

  ‘So our daughter’s become a vegetarian. What did Sam say about it?’

  ‘He said if Dad stops eating meat then so will he.’

  As we were dropping off to sleep, Ros whispered to me, ‘Are you glad we came?’

  I didn’t need to think about it. ‘Yes, I am. Are you?’

  ‘I love it. I feel at home on Ikaria.’

  ‘So you want to stay?’

  ‘For as long as we can. Maybe we could buy a house here.’

  The next morning Spyros was waiting for me, sitting at the same table drinking coffee and smoking a Camel cigarette.

  ‘You did not smoke last night,’ I said to him as Maria brought me a black Nescafé, placing her hand gently on my head. She liked to pat me at least once a day. It was her little way of showing her affection for me.

  ‘No, I have my own smoking habit. I smoke only three cigarettes a day, one in the morning, then again with my lunch, and the last at six o’clock. I have done this for over twenty years.’

  ‘But why have one so early in the morning?’ I asked.

  ‘Because a habit will always come looking for you, and after I have conceded to it, I can get on with my day.’ He laughed. ‘Then it can wait for me.’

  ‘That is unusual.’

  ‘I enjoy each one, and I’m always looking forward to the next,’ he said, turning his gaze to the sea. Clearly a thoughtful man, he went on, ‘Did you know the Aegean has the same four temperaments as man? Look at her: today she is phlegmatic . . . but tomorrow, who knows?’

  We finished our coffee and made our way to the monastery, a twenty-five-minute walk in the warming sunshine. I had left my jacket at home; I’d felt it first thin
g, the bite no longer in the wind. Spyros had his shirt half undone, showing a mass of grey hairs, and soon sweat started to appear on his brow as the sun climbed. I noticed a lizard running across the path in front of us, the first one I had seen since we’d arrived. Its tail left a pattern in the dust as it scurried past. The air was full of the smell of dried herbs, little bushes of them that rattled in the wind. Small yellow and purple flowers had appeared, spring pushing up from the undergrowth, delicate buds forming on the fig trees.

  The solid, dark green gates of the monastery were closed, tall and forbidding, cast into the high stone wall, giving an overriding sense of exclusion. No doubt the monks had needed protection from the world outside and the pirates who used to invade Ikaria, but I could only imagine what a desperate and weary traveller must have felt coming to seek refuge here. Spyros pulled on the chain and the jangle of a bell could be heard some way off, fading away into silence. We looked at each other and waited.

  At least two minutes passed before the gate slowly opened and a nun appeared. Spyros introduced me in Greek as she put her small hand in mine.

  ‘Sister Ulita, kali mera,’ I said with my best Greek pronunciation.

  There was little to see of her, enveloped as she was in her black habit; only the olive skin of her cheeks and her perfect teeth, revealed by a bright smile. She was wearing sunglasses. It was hard to get any idea of her age, with so much of her hidden; even her forehead was covered. She beckoned us into a courtyard and sat us at a slate table in the shade of some cypress trees.

  I noticed her swollen hands as she poured the coffee and pushed a bowl of sugar cubes towards me. A smile seemed to be her permanent expression. Spyros asked me to forgive him but he had to speak in Greek to explain things to her. ‘I want to tell her all about you. It is important.’

  She sat listening, stroking a well-fed cat, unlike all the others I’d seen, purring on her lap. There was a ring on her finger that surely she could not remove over the swollen joint. They talked at length without my understanding a word, but from time to time she acknowledged me with a smile and a brief touch of her hand on mine. She seemed intriguing and mysterious, because there was so little of her on show. She spoke to me in Greek, not knowing a word of English, Spyros telling me she wanted to know if I was happy to work for food.

  ‘Ochi khrimata,’ she said, waving her finger.

  ‘No money,’ I said back to her. Words I’d heard from Datsun Jim.

  ‘Tell her,’ I said to Spyros, ‘we have to learn each other’s language.’

  We walked around the grounds of the monastery, along a path edged with rose bushes, buds unfolding into pink petals. There was a stepped vegetable garden, through which a zigzagging water course traversed each row of plants. There were trays of seedlings in raised square beds under glass panes. We walked on into an old orchard of peach trees, plums and pears, amongst them a few brightly coloured beehives.

  ‘You can eat whatever you want: figs, bananas, pomegranates as well.’

  I met the goats she wanted me to milk, a breed I did not recognise, mottled and grey, tethered by a rope and eating hay. Spyros told me that they needed to be moved as well as milked twice daily.

  ‘They eat a circle of grass; we do not have fields as you do in England.’

  At this point the nun put her hands together.

  ‘Mr Neeko,’ she said.

  ‘What is wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘She is praying you will come and save her life,’ said Spyros.

  ‘Save her life! What does she mean?’

  ‘That you will come and work at the monastery.’

  ‘Tell her I don’t know yet. I must talk to my wife.’

  It would have been easy to say yes without a second thought. But there was another side to me now, one who lived on the land, and the other who wanted to go to sea and be a fisherman. I would have to split my life between the two. There was an answer, and it lay with Ros, for she could milk two goats just as well as me. And so I replied as an Ikarian would.

  ‘Avrio. I will let you know tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, of course, and you are to bring your wife and children for lunch,’ Spyros translated.

  On the walk back to Lefkada I asked him whether the nun had ever taken off her sunglasses in all the time he had worked with her.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Never once, not even on a cloudy winter’s day. She always wears them.’

  When I got home, Ros was hanging washing on the line, an old rope strung between two pine trees in front of the house. She told me Sam had left at nine o’clock that morning to walk to Aghios Kirikos carrying a shopping bag. That was three hours ago.

  ‘Don’t you think you should go and look for him?’

  Neither of us felt there was anything really to worry about, but I went in search of him anyway. We both thought I’d find him in a taverna with a family who had taken him under their wing, feasting on a large lunch. I’d only been on the road ten minutes when Datsun Jim pulled up beside me, his pick-up stacked high with crates of chickens. I managed to squeeze in next to an elderly lady, dressed in black robes, with a cockerel on her lap. She said nothing, calmly stroking its feathers, not even turning her head to give me a look as I tried to manoeuvre myself into a comfortable position beside her. A cheap plastic crucifix swung from the rear-view mirror. Along the dashboard was an assortment of religious figures and glued to the car radio a small golden statue of the Virgin Mary. Beneath me, several girlie magazines slipped out from under the seat. On the front cover of one a girl with large breasts was holding what looked like a medieval ball and chain. I wondered whether the solemn woman beside me, her harsh features clearly not given to smiling, was Datsun Jim’s grandmother. What an enigmatic lot these Ikarians were. Words were not bandied about; on the whole journey Datsun Jim only uttered a single syllable, pointing at the bird.

  ‘Cock.’

  ‘Yes, cock,’ I said, trying to push back with my heel the incriminating material that slid out from under the seat every time he put his foot on the brake.

  We arrived at Aghios Kirikos without another word being spoken. Not a look from the old lady as I thanked them for the lift into town; maybe she was deaf rather than antisocial.

  Now I had to find Sam, and headed to the main square where most of the cafés and tavernas were. I walked past tables full of unshaven men playing tavli with raised voices and dramatic gestures, drinking ouzo or coffee. They must have been talking politics; football doesn’t drive you that crazy, or maybe it did out here. Bare-footed children were throwing stones at cats, and to complete the cacophony teenage boys circled the square on whining mopeds showing off to their girlfriends.

  At the kiosk I looked at the newspaper headlines; the only information I could glean was the trouble still existing between Greece and Turkey. I’d lost touch with the world since we’d been here, and without a radio, newspapers or television had no idea what was going on back home. I missed none of it. There was one weekly newspaper in English, the Athens News, which condensed international politics into a few pages. I only ever flicked through it in the kiosk, looking for the football results, hoping Spurs had won, and I always tried to put it back as neatly as possible. If I was spotted I would go to the counter and buy a packet of chewing gum. It was the cheapest thing on sale and buying it eased my guilt.

  I couldn’t find Sam anywhere. I could see Ikaria’s entire police force, according to Stelios – the two policemen playing tavli – but I saw no point in disturbing them. Just as I was about to make my way back to Ros, I heard Stamati shouting my name, running from his kitchen in vest and apron.

  ‘I wait for you at the weekend, and you do not come.’

  I apologised. Had he really been expecting me?

  ‘Your boy, he came this morning and I asked him, where is your father? And he says you have gone to the monastery.’

  ‘It’s true, I did go to the monastery, but can you tell me where Sam is now?’

  ‘You go there searching for
God?’

  ‘No, for work. Do you know where my boy is?’

  Stamati hadn’t seen him since the morning, walking with Christos, the son of a local schoolteacher.

  ‘They are a good family. Do not worry, they will bring him to your house.’

  I decided to go home, and it wasn’t long before I was reunited with Sam. A couple of kilometres from Aghios Kirikos I heard behind me the repetitive sound of a beeping horn and loud cheering. I turned round and saw an old red Fiat coming towards me, hands waving extravagantly from the car windows. As they pulled up I could see Sam sitting amongst three other children on the back seat, clutching his bag of shopping. The husband and wife greeted me like a long-lost friend.

  ‘He’s a beautiful boy,’ the woman said, as I lifted Sam from the back seat. I ignored her and was waiting instead for an apology for stealing a child for nearly seven hours. But none was offered and before I’d said a word they had driven off, leaving us in a cloud of dust. You could have said it was a case of kidnapping, but here it was part of everyday life. The islanders loved children, and seemed to think they belonged to everyone. It was something we were going to have to get used to. In England half the police force would have been out looking for him.

  As we walked back to Lefkada, Sam said he realised how worried Mum would be.

  ‘I just couldn’t get away, Dad, and then we went and played football on the beach.’

  ‘That must have been fun.’

  ‘It was. He kept calling me Bobby Charlton.’

  ‘Has it put you off going shopping on your own?’

  ‘Well, maybe I’m not that grown up after all.’

  ‘You mean you’re not twelve?’

  ‘More like ten.’

  5

  Night Fishing

  Ros was nervous again. No matter how much I reassured her, she had a feeling of foreboding about my going night fishing with Stelios. It was my spatial awareness that concerned her; apparently, I didn’t have any. She had dreamt last night that I had fallen overboard, but I brushed it aside, telling her dreams didn’t come true and I knew how to look after myself. She pleaded with me to wear a life jacket and I promised I would; I didn’t mention that I hadn’t worn one on the last trip.