by Sara Alexi
The Gypsy’s Dream
Sara Alexi
Chapter 1
The place looks nothing like the picture postcard image Abby had in her mind. The fountain in the middle of the square is broken and empty, skeletal leaves lining the bottom. The houses are low, grubby and crumbling, with sagging tiled roofs. A donkey stands motionless, eyes closed, tethered to a telegraph pole.
It is perfect! Abby grins.
Three people are hunched on a bench under the central palm tree by the dry fountain. In the pre-dawn light they are silhouetted against the whitewashed wall behind.
‘Eight euro,’ the driver says over the top of his muffled radio. He takes a cigarette from a crumpled pack on the dashboard and taps it on the steering wheel.
Abby fumbles for her purse. She clears her throat and fiddles with the coins. There aren’t very many. She feels in the pockets of her shorts but there is only her boat ticket. Her heartbeat quickens. As the taxi drives away she comforts herself with the thought that at least she has enough money left to buy breakfast. She hasn’t eaten since the plane. Abby wasn’t impressed with her first experience of airline cuisine. Yiannis said he would pay her daily, cash in hand, so at most she will have to skip lunch. She turns her attention back to the village.
This is going to work.
She is still grinning. The possibilities! The sun is about to rise over the hill, its warmth promised by a clear sky, the dusty road, the scent of jasmine in the soft morning breeze. She hugs herself and breathes in this new world around her.
Abby searches for a word that will describe her feelings. The square, surrounded by single-storey whitewashed houses, made of stones piled one on top of the other, with blue shutters, feels safe, contained, unthreatening. ‘Home’ is the best word she can come up with. Her reaction surprises her as the place is foreign to her western eyes and her experience of ‘home’ is no longer such a joyful one. Especially since Dad married Sonia.
Her cardigan pulled around her shoulders, she arranges her tangled hair over her ears for warmth. Yawning, she looks towards the sun. She puts one foot on top of the other. Who knew Greece would be cold in the early summer? Trainers would have been warmer. So would jeans.
The flick of a light inside a shop lays a carpet of orange across the road. It is magical, and Abby feels a giggle rise in her throat. A cat runs across the glow into the shadows. The lit window now displays comfy sandals for old people, bottles of vitamins and suntan cream. Abby pulls her cardigan around her more tightly and wills the sun to rise.
There are no signs of café culture around the square, except a tall stack of white plastic chairs by a lamppost opposite. There are no neon lights, in fact hardly any shop signs at all. She swallows hard, she hugs herself tighter. It doesn’t look quite right, although she has only seen rather grainy photos of the bar’s interior on a web site that looked like it was designed in the mid-nineties.
A tractor grumbles its way into the square. The men sitting under the palm tree stand, backs straighten, hands come out of pockets. The tractor stops, the farmer points to one of the men who climbs onto the trailer behind, and stands holding the back of the tractor. The two remaining workers tuck their chins inside their jackets. Three more men wander into the square. Abby judges they are Indian, maybe Pakistani. Migrants, illegals probably. She has seen a program about it, eastern Europe a gateway to the west, how many die each year scrabbling to cross rivers to get into countries more wealthy than their own. The irony of her journey, also for work, in the opposite direction is not lost on her. The remaining men slouch and sit as the tractor rumbles away, hands back in warm pockets.
Abby shifts from foot to foot. The sun’s first rays light up the dusky orange roofs opposite, the colours muted and warm. No wet, cold, greys anywhere. The sky, pale pink at the edges, seems endless. She takes a big breath in through her nose and releases it slowly. It’s going to be a summer to remember.
A door off the square opens, an aisle of artificial light beckoning before the aroma of fresh bread reaches her. She takes a step towards it and rubs her hand across her empty stomach, the beginnings of hunger mixed with thrills of excitement. The aeroplane food feels a lifetime ago but she will wait to feel more settled before she eats. It will be the last of her money anyway, better to keep it until she finds Yiannis.
A cockerel screeches its morning call. A dog barks in return. She wants to stand somewhere high and shout ‘I am here!’ Looking to the blueing sky, she becomes aware of a strange background sound. Abby looks between the houses out towards the orange groves she passed in the taxi. There is a metal pylon, forty feet tall, with a fan on top. She wonders if it is a wind generator. There is no breeze but it turns, whirring. A working village, no pretence for tourists here.
She can hear another fan in the distance somewhere. In the back of her mind is her old physics teacher, so tall his shirt was always pulling out of his trousers. Mr Rogers - Dodgy Roger - always walked with arms stiff by his sides, gliding with knees bent. The girls had decided he had worked out some equations to prove it was more energy-efficient to walk that way. What was the thing he said about fans and ecological farming? Something about ‘heat flux density’. Or not. The thought will not come.
She feels a lump rising in her throat. The short summer will pass, and then what? Will she be able to stay on to do her ‘A’ levels? Sonia getting pregnant is not her problem. If she cannot deal with the baby she shouldn’t be having one. Abby looks at her watch. Dad won’t even be awake yet, so he won’t have read her note. She yawns. Who would have thought travelling could be so tiring. Sleep on the plane was impossible, there was far too much to take in on the boat, now it feels like it is starting to catch up with her. She closes her eyes for a second and Rogers glides across her mind again, talking of mixing high-up warm air with lower cool air to avoid low ground temperatures.
‘Against frost!’ Abby crosses her cardigan over her chin when she realises she spoke aloud. She glances towards the men under the tree but they are silent, and still. They do not look over to her. A van draws up. The men stand stiffly on the edge of the pavement. Some take their hands out of their pockets. The smaller one, Abby notices, stands taller. The taller ones slouch more, relaxed, assured. The driver does not hesitate; the taller ones are waved into the back of the van. As it pulls away the rest droop back onto the little wall.
In the advancing light a skirted woman with a headscarf strolls into the square towards a kiosk, which is dark and shuttered. She unlocks the door at the back of the booth.
The kiosk lights stammer their way to life, the central orange brilliance a sharp contrast with the dawn blues in the square. Metal shutters are unchained from the front of drinks fridges and the tops of ice-cream freezers. They clang as the woman stacks them on end by the wall, lifting them easily with unexpected strength. She returns to split bundles and hang newspapers on the line around the kiosk with clothes pegs. Her headscarf is pulled off to sit on her shoulders halfway through the task. Bottles chink as she pulls crates across her empire. Abby finds that she is smiling. She is in another world and the world feels good. She could not have imagined it just a few hours before at the airport in the English damp evening chill. England is two hours behind, they’ll still be asleep. What will Dad think when he wakes up and finds she is not there? He won’t expect her to get up till late morning; it is the holidays after all. Maybe he won’t even notice and go off to work and not know till the evening. She doesn’t want him to worry. Sonia will presume she is out. But this evening, what then? Maybe she should have left the note on the kitchen table instead of her bedside table. Actually it would have been more grown up to have told him, face to face. Has she over-reacted? She will ring him in an hour or two and face him.
The sun peeks over the hill and the tentacles of light bring heat down into the square. Abby stretches. She still hasn’t moved from where the taxi dropped her. She is physically tired from her travels but she feels so alive.
A bitter aroma drifts from the kiosk. Abby thinks of Dad making his own coffee. Her breath quickens. She will not use the return flight in September unless he agrees she can continue at school. There’s no point.
The coffee smells bad.
Abby takes a deep breath and looks around her. She is here now. Dad and Sonia will have to get on with it; he married her for better or for worse and all that.
She wonders if Rockie is missing her, will Dad think to take him for walks.
She lifts herself tall and sets off to find Yiannis of the emails and his ‘Malibu’ bar. She crosses the square.
Two old men with flat caps and shepherd’s crooks stand outside a glass-fronted, very drab-looking café at the top of the square. So bare, so under-furnished. Abby cannot think why they would be waiting for it to open. No curtains, no tablecloths, bare bulbs. One sports an impressive moustache, the faces deeply lined and sun-scorched.
The sun rises high enough for its rays to touch her skin and the warmth flows through her veins, bringing euphoria. Her breath quickens at the realisation of her achievement. Dad will be waking up now. She bets that his first words will be ‘overreaction’ – that’s what he always says of her. ‘One life, live it!’ she says to herself, and pulling her phrase book from her bag she walks up to the men, momentarily confident in her abilities..
‘Parakalo. Bar. Malibu.’ It does not even sound Greek to her own ears. The two men look at each other and shrug. She points to the words in the book but they seem happier to look at her face, the book does not register. She lifts the book higher, to eye level, but they only give it the briefest of glances.
‘Thank you,’ Abby says in English as she walks away, confused and just a little bit angry at their rudeness. The men call after her, ‘Thank you, thank you.’ Her hair flicks across her face and into her eyes as she turns back to smile at them. One grins toothlessly, his friend waves. Their animated and warm response brings her cheer. She re-evaluates why they did not respond to the book and the shocking possibility that they might be illiterate crosses her mind. She gives them a last sympathetic look, understanding, kind.
A lane leads out of the square, past a corner shop to a church, but there is no sign of a bar. The lane leads out of the village into the orange orchards, dotted with fans, which, one by one, are now slowing to a standstill. She watches them come to rest, the silence they leave soon filled with dogs barking, cockerels crowing. Unsure what else to do she slowly returns to the square and leans against the telegraph pole. The donkey has gone.
The palm tree is more dominant from this angle, the kiosk and the dry fountain crouching in its shade. The smell of bread mixes with the warming air.
It trickles into Abby’s thoughts that if she does not find this bar, this promised job, she will not have enough money to eat for the day. She wonders if she has been really rather foolish. No, not foolish, stupid. Her stomach clenches and the bread smell is overpowering.
With a surge in her chest, and a huge welling of tears ready to fall, it smacks her. She has been absolutely ridiculous. What was she thinking? She has nothing in writing; well, there are the emails at home and the word of her friend Jackie who went out the week before. She pushes away these thoughts. It’s done, she is here, she must focus, find the bar or figure out what she will do, like an equation. She needs logic, not over-emotional reaction. She doesn’t overreact. Dad is wrong about that.
Drawing in a breath, she quells her panic. She thinks. She has the bar’s phone number. She can call. It will cost a fortune to ring on her mobile, and she didn’t remember to top up. She sighs.
Taking out her phone she flicks through her contacts until the number appears, the 0030 code distinguishing it. She should have just calmly done this when the taxi dropped her off instead off all that panicking.
It rings and Abby feels her spine straighten. How childish she has been.
‘Embros?’
‘Yes, hello, this is Abby. I am due to start work today and I cannot find your bar.’
‘Ti? Ti thelis?’
Abby’s heart quickens all over again. It sounds like an old lady at home, certainly not Yiannis.
‘Abby, the job?’
‘Pios einai? O Yiannis den einai edo.’
‘Is Yiannis there? Ermm. There Yiannis?’ Abby tucks the phone under her chin and flicks through the guide book for the word ‘There’.
‘Natos, Yiannis?’
‘Pou?’
‘Sorry!’ The phone clicks off. Searching through the phrase book she find ‘Pou’ means ‘Where’. It doesn’t make sense. She opens the book to the page on telephone conversations and dials again. There is a bleep and a message tells her that her phone will switch off as the battery is dead.
She takes the battery out and shakes it and puts it in again, but there is no life in it.
A vein in her temple begins to throb. She sucks in her lips, chewing a little on the bottom one. Sweat runs down her back. She looks around the square, her eyes darting, unseeing. Her breath quickens. She takes out her purse and counts the change. The tears in her eyes begin to fall, their silence broken by her sucking of air. The sun’s warmth, now full on her, is no longer a tender kiss. It is just heat that makes her sweat. The light is a nuisance in her eyes. The charm of the village turns to desolation. The excitement turns to fear. She can feel herself spiralling into despair and struggles to pull herself out.
Logic. She must use logic. The bar must be here. Abby throws her phone in her bag. Her shoulders are feeling hot, she should put some sunscreen on. But not now.
The woman in the kiosk is counting change.
‘Excuse me, do you speak English?’
‘English. Hello.’ She pauses and then recites ‘El’beeback’ and laughs.
‘Sorry?’
‘El’beeback. Ter-min-a-tor. English. Welcome, welcome!’ The woman laughs and offers a single wrapped chewing gum from her counter.
‘Do you speak English?’ Abby asks again, taking the gift without thought, hope binding her manners.
‘Yes English.’ The woman has a nice smile and, to a degree, it reassures Abby. Her perfect hair transports Abby into civilised salons. Everything will be fine, she breathes again.
‘I have come for a job, at a bar. The Malibu?’ Abby realises the woman’s next words could quell all her panic, wipe out all her thoughts of her own stupidity, or not. She stares. Part of her wonders how much lacquer the woman must spray on to hold her halo so still.
Finally, ‘Job’, the woman says. She is still grinning as she leans out of her little window and points down the road to where the taxi had dropped Abby first thing.
Abby breathes again, exhales deeply, releases the tension from her chest and automatically says ‘Thank you’ in English and walks in the direction indicated, hoping, wishing. The shop the woman pointed to has opened its doors. It is not clear what it is from a distance. But there are no neon lights, no chairs and tables on the street. It is not the bar on the website. But maybe the owner speaks English and knows of The Malibu.
A donkey brays to remind Abby how far in the country she is. Maybe it’s the wrong village. Maybe the right village is just a walk away.
A petite woman sits outside the shop, slid down in a plastic chair like a child, sucking her drink through a straw. She shields her eyes from the sun as Abby approaches.
‘English?’ Abby asks.
‘No, I’m Greek.’ The woman smiles.
‘Ah, you speak English. I am here for a job. The Malibu.’
The woman stands, spilling her drink down the front of her short dress in the process.
‘What is this “The Malibu”?’ Her accent is strong, she speaks slowly, wiping her dress with her hand.
Abby’s hope dissolves. ‘A bar.’
Surely she must know it.
‘Where this bar?’
‘Here, Saros.’
‘Here is no Saros.’
Abby can feel her shoulders droop. Her bag slips off and onto the pavement.
‘Are we near Saros?’ She feels she knows the answer before she hears it.
‘The Saros an island.’ The woman waves her arm, suggesting impossible distances.
‘But the boat said Saros.’ Abby blinks the tears away. She cannot stop her lip quivering.
The woman says kindly, ‘I am thinking it say Soros.’
‘But the taxi driver! He must have known this was not Saros.’
‘Did you ask him? What you say to him?’
‘The Malibu bar. I was told the bar was in a neighbouring village to the port, and everyone knew it.’
‘What else you have said to him?’
‘Well, he looked like he didn’t understand so I said Yiannis’ bar.’
‘Ahhh!’ The woman laughs and Abby feels herself relax a little, she seems to know of it. ‘There is the Yiannis bar.’ She points to the drab-looking kafenio on the square, where the metal-framed glass doors are now wide open and two old men, one with an impressive moustache, are playing an animated game of backgammon, slamming the pieces down, the noise echoing around the village. Abby puts her hand over her mouth and squeezes her nose in the crook of her thumb to stop herself crying. The woman continues, ‘But Yiannis dead. Son Theo now has bar. But not Malibu, never Malibu. This not Saros.’
Abby sinks where she stands, next to her bag, and sits on the kerbside.
Her shoulders are burning.
Dad was right, she has overreacted. She wishes she was at home making his coffee, Rockie there to cuddle, for comfort and to be easily made happy with his marrowbone treats.
Chapter 2
Lighter fuel sprays cross the charcoals. A single match roars the grill into life. It will be hot in twenty minutes or so. The chickens are split and waiting, and a stack of thick sausages ready. By lunch-time the ouzeri will be full of farmers, stuffing down the food dripping in her lemon sauce, swilling it down with large measures of ouzo in glasses clinking with ice. Satisfied that another day has begun Stella mixes herself an iced coffee and strolls outside to watch the world go by. She’ll peel the potatoes later.
