Escape to Ikaria Page 7

  At that moment I decided to tell her everything. The only reason I ever held back from telling Ros the brutal truth about our finances was because of the anxiety I knew it would cause her. When we were farming and I thought we were heading for bankruptcy I kept it to myself. But what was the point now? It was hardly a dire situation that was going to ruin us. It was annoying, but if things ever got desperate Jack would help us out.

  ‘Two and a half thousand drachma,’ I told her.

  ‘That would keep us going for ten days.’

  ‘I know, but I’ve given him one more week.’

  But the week was already three days old, and Ros was doubtful we would see a penny of it.

  After one of those sleepless nights when something you should have dealt with gets magnified out of all proportion, I decided I could put it off no longer. I would have to ring Jack and get him to wire some money over. Those night fears had got hold of me: what if one of us suddenly needed urgent hospital treatment? What did our insurance cover? Would we have to pay up front and put in a claim later? This was all triggered, of course, by Datsun Jim. So I was up early.

  It was our ninth anniversary, Lysta had told me yesterday. Nine years, not of total bliss, but on a scale of one to ten I’d give it nine, which is good.

  I didn’t know how Ros would score it; probably far less, as I had always had an eye on the next venture, although she had never actually told me she’d rather I worked a nine-to-five job.

  I was sure there wasn’t a florist on Ikaria so I wanted to cut her some flowers myself and crept out of the house while she slept. I didn’t know the time, but it must have been before seven o’clock because Maria wasn’t about and her kitchen door was still closed. I could easily open it because it was never locked, although she pulled a bolt across it on windy nights, only in case a storm blew up, not to keep anyone out, except maybe the goats. There was hardly any crime on the island and I’d never seen the two policemen out investigating anything. I found a pair of scissors and went in search of some of the wild flowers that grew around Lefkada. There were lots, including lupins, which I knew Ros liked. Apparently, when the Ikarians were starving during the Second World War, they ate lupin seeds, which must have been a risky business because they could be extremely poisonous if they weren’t cooked properly.

  When I got back to the taverna with my bouquet of flowers, Maria was up. I gave her back the scissors and told her Ros and I had been married nine years, a long time. Then I said it in Greek, ‘ennea chronia’, which brought a smile to her face.

  I said it again, ‘Ennea chronia, Maria,’ and that made her laugh.

  ‘Me and Yannis,’ she said, ‘saranta dyo chronia,’ which I later found out was forty-two years. I went and acknowledged it to her that evening, because I knew no one else who had been married that long.

  When I gave Ros the flowers and said happy anniversary, she was genuinely touched that I had remembered and we went for an early morning swim. Ros reminded me of the first time we spent a night together, when I had to help her pull off her knee-length boots.

  ‘How could I forget? It was in that flat you rented in Redcliffe Gardens.’

  ‘And now here we are, swimming in the Aegean.’

  The children were up when we returned, Lysta and Maria boiling eggs together. The taverna was empty. We usually had breakfast at home, but today was a special day. Maria brought us some slices of cake and sat with us, and we all had to hold hands while she muttered something in Greek.

  ‘What did you say, Maria?’

  ‘My mother, she taught me this, to bring you continued happiness.’

  That evening I went back to the taverna to book a telephone call to Jack. On my own, I sat and drank retsina, a taste I had now become accustomed to. Maria would put a bottle on the table without my having to order it, together with some olives and a little dish of meze: a cube of feta and a mouthful of salt fish, both on small chunks of bread. I had become completely used to this generous and civilised Greek custom of providing tasty morsels with drinks. It suited me well; I much preferred not to drink on an empty stomach.

  I searched in my pocket for some loose change to pay her, but she brushed me aside and gave me a hundred and fifty drachma for the octopus and squid that I’d brought back from my last fishing trip with Stelios. She hadn’t told me that she’d added them to her menu because she needed the space in the fridge. It was totally unexpected and couldn’t have come at a better time; it quite lifted my spirits. I could have hugged her.

  It was impossible to get into bed quietly, because the springs beneath our thin mattress possessed a life of their own; they moved up and down the musical scale like an orchestra tuning up. Fidgeting about before finally getting comfortable only disturbed the other person, as the disjointed overture twanged beneath us. Also I was too long for the bed, my feet sticking out six inches. We had put up with the mattress and the dripping tap for three months, and for some reason tonight Ros said she’d had enough.

  ‘We could do better for ourselves,’ she said, looking around our very basic bare room. No electricity, not a picture on the walls. We were living in a box. ‘We need to find somewhere else. Somewhere that feels like a home.’

  That was going to cost money, but Ros was right: it was time to move on. I told her that I’d booked a call to Jack, to ask him to transfer some money.

  ‘Has Datsun Jim paid up yet?’ she asked.

  ‘No, he hasn’t. I’ll sort it out with him tomorrow.’ That’s if we bumped into each other.

  As we dropped off to sleep, with the odd twang still sounding beneath us, I whispered in Ros’s ear, ‘Was it Bach who wrote “Air on a bed spring”?’

  6

  The Potato Boat

  June on Ikaria, and it felt as if we were making a new beginning. We were moving, no more than a hundred yards down the road; to be precise, from one side of the taverna to the other. Into a single-storey house that stood above an unkempt garden, with rusting, cast-iron steps that led onto a veranda covered in dry eucalyptus leaves. Hanging precariously above this was rotting wooden lattice-work that had once supported a vine. It swayed in the breeze like an old hammock. There’s something melancholic about things that have seen better days. The flaky, blue shutters needed to be opened so new life could be breathed into the dusty interior: four large rooms with peeling walls that had faded to a sullen yellow.

  There was no electricity, but who needed it; the days were long and hot. It had a lavatory of sorts, at the back of the house, which you flushed with a bucket of water, and it was owned by a cousin of Maria’s, who said we could have it rent free if we painted it. We didn’t hesitate, after living in what now seemed like a cell for several months. Maria said the house had been empty for over two years, which explained why it was an insects’ graveyard. Other forms of wildlife had perished in here too; the skeletal remains of a goat lay on the floor of one room, and when Lysta saw it she let it be known she would definitely not be sleeping in there.

  Obese spiders quivered in their webs, with trapped prey they couldn’t be bothered to feast upon. Bodies crunched beneath us as we made our way from room to room, and while for the rest of us this was not the most pleasant experience, Seth was fascinated by these flattened corpses. Picking them up, he inspected their delicate remains between his fingers. I’d noticed this in him before in Wales. He seemed to have a natural interest in little dead things. He definitely didn’t get that from my genes.

  ‘Well,’ said Ros, hands on hips, looking around the room, weighing up exactly what we were taking on, ‘we’re going to need gallons of paint, turps, rollers, ladders. Who’s going to paint the ceilings?’ Obviously me, by the look on her face.

  ‘I can do that by fixing a roller to a broom handle,’ I said, having behind me the experience of painting every ceiling in our farmhouse.

  ‘We can paint, Mum,’ said Sam and Lysta.

  ‘Well, they could do the skirting boards,’ I suggested, ‘and some of the walls, as fa
r as they can reach.’

  ‘I could stand on a chair, Dad,’ Sam said, at his helpful best.

  I pointed out that we didn’t have a chair, or any furniture . . . we had nothing apart from our clothes and a couple of sleeping bags.

  ‘Well, let’s get on with it,’ said Ros. ‘Lysta, in your neatest handwriting let’s make a list of everything we’re going to need.’

  We estimated it would take three weeks to make the place habitable. There was no hurry, we could move in bit by bit. Or as the Ikarians would say, siga siga (slowly slowly).

  At least we had some money again. I’d had my phone call with Jack. Such was the delay on the line, it was as if we were speaking to one another from different planets. I kept hearing my own words coming back to me, just as Jack was beginning his reply. It was hopeless and both of us lost patience. In the end I bawled down the phone, ‘Be quiet for a moment. Just don’t say anything.’ And he didn’t, like a good brother, and I told him we needed some money. So he wired it over and a week later I picked it up from the only bank in Aghios Kirikos.

  The first thing we bought was a mattress that I ordered from Tassos, an unusual young man in that he obviously took great care of his appearance. Clean and tidy with a neat haircut and smelling of aftershave, he was unlike any other Ikarian we had seen.

  His furniture shop was also unusual, because there was no furniture in it. In fact, he had nothing in his shop, only the chair he sat on, and a little book for writing orders in duplicate. He liked using the word duplicate, randomly dropping it into any conversation. When I asked him why he had no items on show, he said he couldn’t afford them. I ordered our mattress from a catalogue, and Tassos said it would take a couple of weeks for it to come from Athens. He charged us one thousand eight hundred drachma, which was about thirty pounds.

  Ros was pleased, but thought we ought to have tried it first. I told her not to worry, that any mattress after the spongy old thing we’d been sleeping on for months would be an improvement.

  Three weeks later, when it still hadn’t arrived, I went back to the shop and saw it leaning up against the back wall and asked Tassos when he was going to deliver it. He just raised his shoulders the way Italians do when they say ‘No comprendi’, and looked at me vacantly.

  ‘We never talked about delivery,’ he said. ‘My price was for the mattress.’

  It was another one of those frustrating Ikarian moments when I had to weigh up whether it was worth the effort of trying to resolve a misunderstanding. I could tell immediately that Tassos didn’t care about customer relations, so there the mattress stayed.

  Early the next morning I was sitting with a coffee at the taverna when Datsun Jim turned up. He hadn’t paid me a single drachma, and I had told him again, nearly two weeks ago, that I wouldn’t work for him any more, but he still wasn’t taking no for an answer. You’d have thought by his reaction I was the guilty party. He broke down, giving a performance an actor in a Greek tragedy would have been proud of.

  ‘One more week, please, one more week, then my brother will be here to pay you.’

  I didn’t think I could bear to hear him say that again.

  In the back of the pick-up he had a bath and a lavatory. They were brand new, still wrapped in cellophane.

  ‘How can I lift these into the house without you to help me?’ he pleaded.

  He pulled out the lining of his trouser pockets.

  ‘Look, no money, my dear friend. Yesterday I sell a goat to put petrol in the pick-up.’

  I couldn’t walk away from him; I told him I would come and help, but only to unload the bath and lavatory and put them in place.

  ‘That’s it. No more! And then you will come to Aghios Kirikos and pick up my mattress for me.’

  When I told Ros what I was going to do and that I’d be back in a couple of hours, I could see in her eyes that she doubted it.

  As we were driving to the house, I asked Datsun Jim why his brother hadn’t sent him the money he had always promised.

  ‘He has much money in America, but the banks he says are thieves. He does not like this, so he is bringing it himself in a suitcase, to pay everyone.’

  Maybe it was the truth. When Jack wired over five hundred pounds, they had taken thirty-five in bank charges.

  ‘And this brother . . . what is his name again?’

  ‘Giorgos.’

  ‘Will he be angry with you for not finishing the house?’

  ‘Yes, he will go crazy, and there will be a big fight.’

  In the June sunshine, either end of a spanking new bath, we shuffled along a dusty path through the olive trees. I looked up at the house Jim was building: no roof, each room visible in the open façade. Why install a bath now? It made no sense whatsoever. An image came to mind of Jim’s brother sitting in the bath wearing a plastic cap, on full show to everyone, scrubbing his back, shouting out ‘Kali mera’ to anyone who passed. Worse still would be him sitting on the lavatory. That’s how it was on Ikaria; nothing seemed to be thought through. I wished Ros could understand that Jim was completely out of his depth.

  The bathroom was on the first floor. Halfway up the stairs, struggling with the bath that we had somehow managed to inch through the empty doorways, we heard somebody shouting up from the garden. ‘Kali mera, Jim. Ti kanis?’ What are you up to?

  Fairly obvious, I would have thought. But Jim had to stop and chat, while I held on to the bath, and another ten minutes had been taken out of the morning before at last we reached our goal.

  ‘Are you sure this is the bathroom?’ I asked.

  It looked unlikely.

  ‘Where is the plumbing?’

  ‘Yes, plumbing? What is this word? I do not understand it.’

  ‘Where are the pipes, Jim?’

  ‘I am not fitting the pipes.’

  I asked him again. ‘Are you sure this is the bathroom?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I am sure. The room with a little round window.’

  After we had put the lavatory in place, probably an hour later, Jim gave me one of his awful embraces. Fortunately he didn’t smell so bad that day.

  ‘You are like a brother to me,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t feel like one,’ I replied. Fool came to mind.

  ‘We go for a drink now.’

  ‘No, not for a drink. Now you are going to do something for me.’

  So Datsun Jim and I drove to Tassos’s shop and picked up the mattress. We had to lean it up against the cement mixer, and it bounced around in the back of the pick-up along the stony road out of Aghios Kirikos. In a way, I considered it to be a free delivery, but in reality it had cost me a small fortune.

  As we carried the mattress to the house, Jim said, ‘You want a bed for this? I bring you one from my grandmother.’

  It was after midnight and I sat on the quayside waiting for the potato boat from Samos to dock. Stelios had rung me at the taverna telling me a man called Manos would pay me five hundred drachma if I could unload it in four hours. All I had to do was chuck all the sacks onto the back of a lorry and the job was done. Whenever anyone told me a job was going to be simple and I could make easy money, it always put me on edge.

  Manos was late, and there was no sign of a boat coming into the harbour. I didn’t doubt that Manos would eventually arrive; he was, after all, behaving like an Ikarian. And apparently he was Stelios’s cousin, although everybody seemed to be everyone’s cousin, further entangling the branches on the Ikarian ancestral tree. Such things go on in your mind when you’re sitting around waiting for someone.

  I wasn’t only up for the job because of the money: I liked working through the night when no one was around. I felt closer to the natural world after all the noise had subsided. Which it would eventually, though I could still hear music coming from the cafés in the market place. For the Ikarians the night was young, families still parading around under the sycamore trees.

  Manos was of heavy stock, with muscular arms and large thighs that bulged against his tight
-fitting jeans. He walked at ten to two, I believe is the expression, his feet sticking out at an angle. He had broad shoulders and was wearing a T-shirt that didn’t quite reach his trousers, exposing a belly button that reminded me of a front door bell. He knew who I was, of course, and greeted me with a handshake that nearly dislocated my elbow.

  As he was explaining to me in reasonable English what he wanted me to do, a lorry reversed up behind us, and at the same time the boat, a little larger than Stelios’s, spluttered its way into the harbour. It was weighed down with sacks of potatoes, piled high all over the deck. As I had feared, I could see my five hundred drachma would be hard earned. These were not twenty-five kilo bags. They looked more like fifty.

  The lorry driver, a man of considerable years with only a few remaining strands of grey wispy hair, was going to help me with the sacks and then drive them to a warehouse somewhere.

  After giving his instructions, Manos was gone and the bearded skipper, who obviously had only one thing on his mind, opened a bottle of ouzo, leant back against the cabin and slowly got drunk.

  The lorry driver, Adonis, who sadly no longer lived up to his name, then gave me a full description of the tactics to be employed. He was clearly a man of vast experience in all things to do with unloading potatoes. He knew only individual words of English, not sentences, but they were words packed with essential meaning, like ballbreaker, heart attack and bloody heavy. He illustrated perfectly with a series of graceful hand movements that the rise and fall of the vessel made timing the delivery of each sack critical. I had to have it over my shoulder as the boat rose up, enabling me to slide it on to the quayside. Adonis would then shove a trolley under it and run it up a ramp to tip it neatly into the back of the lorry.

  So began a night of working as a co-ordinated duo, rhythmically rising and falling with the movement of the sea. At times it was almost balletic, and we only occasionally got out of step with each other, and no doubt Torvill and Dean did too. We worked hard on our timing and soon corrected ourselves, Adonis being in exactly the right place as I came up with another sack. I thought we could speed everything up if Adonis put the trolley closer to the harbour edge, then I could throw a sack straight on to it, but it was hardly the time to change the system now. Adonis might have thought I was a bit of a know-all.