by Sara Alexi
Mitsos had flattered himself that she needed him, that she needed an outlet, someone to confide in. Whether she did or not, that privilege was now gone.
Cross with himself, he decided to make amends by putting even more energy into helping Manolis do whatever he was doing to make it a success for Marina and her child. If this scheme succeeded, she would surely forgive him his hasty words. Consequently Manolis and Mitsos spent weeks of concentrated energy working on the old boat. Occasionally they laughed and it was like old times, but mostly Manolis was silent, intense. After gutting the boat the two of them spent a week fitting knee-high boxes to line the inside. They used pallets and orange crates that they mostly found washed up on the shore, and a few Manolis produced from other dubious sources which met with disapproving glances from Mitsos, but no words.
The sun beat down on them as they laboured, the heat causing them to sweat more than the effort of flexing muscles. They drank gallons of water, and several times a day Manolis sent Mitsos to refill their bottles.
Towards the end of the week a rather nervous, plump girl came with huge padded cushions that she shyly told Mitsos she had made. Manolis told her she was a good girl and slapped her on her behind. She blushed, and then she smiled and began to arrange them for him on top of the wooden boxes, with more of an eye for Manolis than for what she was doing.
The radio from Manolis’ truck was taken out and installed in the boat along with two huge speakers from his house which he said he had won from a young bar owner in town.
The trial of the system brought the first curious children from the village. By the time it worked properly they had a good-sized crowd of youngsters hanging round the pier. Still Manolis divulged the details of his plan to no one. Slowly the villagers came in ones and twos. They declared Manolis and Mitsos had gone mad and began to come on a regular basis to see the work in progress, and to poke fun.
‘Are you planning on wooing the fish into the boat with music from the speakers?’ the butcher asked.
‘Or do you expect the fish to die laughing?’ the taxi driver called.
‘Do you think the padded seats will be comfortable enough to gut fish whilst you’re sitting up, or will you be lying down to do that?’ asked Yorgos, who owned a little land behind Mitsos’ house and struggled to feed his seven children.
‘Or are they only after catching mermaids?’ his eldest son retorted, which set all the assembled crowd laughing.
At one point Manolis pulled the hull out of the water and made a half-hearted job of caulking her, which was the only work he did that made any sense to the locals. They had plenty of advice and observations to share at that point and there seemed to be someone from the village present to give an opinion at all times, which did not please either of them.
Once the hull was sealed to Manolis’ standards he set off for a nearby town where he had heard the hardware shop owner was very fond of poker. He did not invite Mitsos, and returned a day later with gallons and gallons of paint in a colour Mitsos would not have chosen.
On the second day of painting Manolis paused, and between bouts of laughter he said, ‘When I got home last night I had paint all over me. Marina took one look and asked if it was the colour we were painting the boat. When I told her it was she said she felt she might never leave the house again, lest she die of shame.’ He crumpled into laughter and dipped his brush back in the pot of bright pink paint. Mitsos understood her point of view; he too found it difficult to look people in the eye any more. He could not share Manolis’ mirth.
Finally, Manolis declared the boat was finished. Mitsos thought the inside looked more like a bedroom you would see in the films. Manolis took this as a compliment. However, there were no words to describe what he thought of the pink exterior. Manolis replied that he should get with the times, this was the swinging seventies, and added that he should let his hair grow a bit more and that his side parting looked stiff. Mitsos had not received such a comment on his appearance since his mother died and was quite taken aback by the observation. He had presumed Manolis just couldn't be bothered to go to the barber’s, and it surprised him to learn that his shoulder-length hair was a conscious choice.
When the two of them manhandled the barge into the water – Manolis pulling with a complaining donkey at the front, and Mitsos pushing, using poles for leverage, at the back – the whole village turned out to watch it sink. In the bright sun there was much calling and cheering as they rolled up their sleeves and helped to launch it, but it stayed afloat, its colour against the blue ocean like a profanity in church.
They slowly towed it through a calm sea behind a rowing boat, the pink monster’s engine being the last thing on the list that Manolis intended to spend his time on. The village children ran along the shore shouting and jeering, accompanied by barking, frisking dogs excited by all the commotion. The village elders leaned wisely on shepherd’s crooks, removed their caps and scratched their heads, declaring they had never seen such a thing, and the women, in housecoats, giggled behind their hands before returning to their cooking, the name ‘Marina’ caught on the wind of gossip before they returned indoors.
Once they had reached the town, it was not long before a new crowd had gathered around them. Taverna and bar owners came down to see the spectacle, shop owners took a break from smoking in their doorways to get a closer look, tourists took pictures and the priest asked if they would like it blessed. Mitsos stood sentry whilst Manolis disappeared. He returned with a truck full of boxes. Manolis and Mitsos unpacked the boxes, stocked the shelves inside with glasses and bottles. Mitsos did not ask where they had come from, Manolis did not say; the writing on the boxes looked perhaps Egyptian.
Finally, Manolis put up a board on the harbour’s edge, leaning against a bollard. With a brush loaded with the same lurid pink paint they had used on the hull he wrote, in big letters:
‘The Love Boat Bar’
Mitsos, and everyone else, finally understood.
Chapter 14
The villagers stopped laughing when, on the first night, young tourists and curious locals filled the padded, music-drenched interior until the bar reached capacity and people spilled out onto the harbour side. It was an oasis of colour and light and joy in the night dome of stars.
Mitsos was diligently on the look-out to keep Marina's husband out of trouble, and he worried enough for all three of them. He knew that nothing was successful in Greece without some illegalities, the law being so complex that if you fulfilled your obligation in one area you broke it in another. He was also aware that every man on the boat was one customer fewer for the bars in town, and if the impact was significant enough the owners would make trouble.
But Manolis had bragged that this was the very thing that gave him the idea; the laws of the land did not apply to them. He said he had got the idea from a boat that sat in the harbour and sold vegetables. Their ‘shop’ was on the water, at sea; they were outside the laws of the land, and they needed no licence. With some superficial investigation this appeared to be true, and Mitsos would have loved to believe it, but he knew that, in Greece, things could never be that simple.
The ‘Love Bar’ bobbed gently in the bay; the black water of the night danced with light from the windows, pink and red, laughter echoing off the liquid surface. The success of the first evening was not a one-off, and the next night, and the night after that, tourists and locals filled the boat to capacity. Mitsos was delighted and wondered whether he should have joined Manolis as a partner after all.
After ten days, Manolis’ pockets were full and he handed out money to Mitsos with the air of a millionaire tipping the hired help. Mitsos, now almost sure he had been overly hasty in rejecting the offer of a partnership, wanted no free money, nor was he a hired help, and he kept his fists clenched shut. But Manolis stuffed the notes in his pockets at unexpected moments, laughing at Mitsos’ sour expression.
Mitsos declared that he was being a friend, and he tried to give the money back, but Manolis
said it was fair pay. Mitsos could no longer reach Manolis, whose mind was now occupied only by the pink boat’s earnings. He would no longer look Mitsos squarely in the face; his eyes were like black glass, expressing no feelings, reflecting only money – and the girls that surrounded him. He seemed ugly.
After deliberating over the unwanted pay, and following an argument with Manolis about the girls in the bar in relation to his marriage vows, Mitsos began to justify taking the cash by sticking it in envelopes which he then, as regularly as money was given to him, slipped under Marina's door as he passed on his way home each night.
Manolis, by now, rarely went home. He was at the bar from dawn till dawn, sleeping in amongst the empty bottles, living on peanuts and beer.
Marina was no longer talking to either of them. Eight months pregnant, and alone, she walked with her head held high, trying to weather the storm. There was no mention of any envelopes when she passed Mitsos in the street: she just looked straight ahead. He presumed she did not know who they were from, and he was hopeful that she might even believe they were from Manolis – although he knew this was probably fantasy. At least she had money. He wondered what more he could do.
‘Hey, Mitsos, stop your thinking.’ Manolis slammed six shot glasses down on the bar and poured from one to the next, leaving a sticky residue between them on the bar top. The four Scandinavian girls laughed and each took a glass, but Mitsos hesitated. The girls giggled and cajoled him until he picked up his glass and they all drank, throwing their heads back. Some local boys joined them, always ready for a free shot.
Manolis lined up extra shot glasses, changed the bottle to something cheaper, and poured again. The crowd slammed their glasses back on the bar; the girls tossed their heads back, laughing, no longer caring what their hair looked like or if their lipstick was smudged. The local lads moved in and made contact, a hand on a shoulder, an arm casually swung around a neck in a brotherly fashion. One of them picked up one of the girl’s hands to admire a ring. The local lads called for another shot. Manolis leaned in and whispered the price in Greek, and one of the boys nodded, his hand slipping more firmly around the blonde girl’s waist. Another shot was poured.
‘Skoll!’ they shouted, and the arm around the waist became a claim of possession, the brotherly arm around the shoulder a right.
‘Hey, boys, you should buy these girls a real drink! What'll it be, girls?’
Once they started, Mitsos knew the group would be ordering eight drinks at a time until the bar closed or the boys ran out of money, and he admired Manolis’ tactics as much as he despised them.
At three in the morning, after two weeks of unimaginable success, Manolis was behind the bar looking pensive.
‘What’s up?’ Mitsos was laughing at the tail end of a joke the town baker had been telling.
‘It's this time every night.’
‘What is?’
‘People leave.’
‘Maybe they want to leave with some money in their pockets, or they just need to get some sleep. It is three in the morning.’
But Manolis would not be pacified.
He was the same the next night.
Mitsos worried that trouble was brewing, and he took a walk along the pier to clear his head in the warm air. The stars seemed so bright and close that he felt he could touch them. There were various groups of people on the harbour’s edge, drinking and laughing, and he wondered if, in some way, that was breaking the law. He sat on a bollard, shined by the seats of a thousand pairs of trousers before him, and wondered if Manolis had thought about Marina recently, dropped in to say hello, given her some house-keeping money even. How did he imagine she was surviving? As far as he knew, Manolis had no idea that he was dropping off envelopes of money.
He kicked a cork-edged net at his feet and looked about him. The harbour seemed a strange place to see people dressed up in their finery, instead of the be-vested fishermen mending their nets, stretching them between their toes and hands, weaving their shuttles across the broken lines. Now the toes were in platformed shoes or delicate sandals, and not even the local boys had bare feet. He finished his drink, and the world shifted slowly out of focus and he stopped thinking.
Two men in black trousers and white shirts marched towards him. Mitsos wondered if he was seeing double, and this feeling was accompanied by a strong feeling of déjà-vu.
‘Who’s the owner?’ asked the shorter of the pair. Mitsos told them to wait, and ducking on board he whispered to Manolis. Manolis took all the money from the cash register and stuffed it into Mitsos’ pockets before going ashore, a drink in either hand for the men in white shirts. They declined, and two delighted tourists received the free drinks as Manolis stuck his hands in his pockets.
‘We have had many complaints about the noise.’
Mitsos, who had followed Manolis out, thought he recognised the tall speaker.
Manolis laughed, the relief on his face obvious. Mitsos wondered what law he thought he had broken if a noise complaint was a relief.
‘I can't help the noise. The people are having a good time,’ Manolis said.
‘The noise must stop or we will close you down,’ the shorter, white-shirted, man replied, and Mitsos remembered where he knew him from. It was the same man who had come to the beach bar all those years ago. Older, fatter, but the same.
‘But all the bars are noisy?’ Manolis swung his arm to indicate a string of bars along the harbour front.
‘But not all night. They have licensing laws, they have to close at a certain time. This allows people to sleep. Your noise goes on all night and there is a law that says we can close you down unless you stop making noise.’ The shorter one lingered on each word with his power.
‘I remember you,’ Mitsos interjected, but he was ignored.
‘Presumably I can make noise until the bars close. You cannot stop that?’ Manolis was still smiling, as if they were good friends of his.
The white shirts considered. One took out a pack of cigarettes and offered them around; only Manolis accepted.
‘No, I suppose we cannot stop that.’ The man in the white shirt blew out smoke as he reluctantly conceded. ‘So you have one hour from now, but if there is any noise after that we will close you down … again,’ he added, with a certain menace.
‘Power-crazy nobodies,’ Manolis spat after them, through clenched teeth. He sat on the bollard Mitsos had vacated, his head bowed to finish his cigarette, unreachable.
‘Hey, who’s serving down here? We’re parched, and these girls really need a shot of ouzo,’ a local lad, barely able to stand, shouted from the doorway of the boat.
Mitsos went in to serve and left Manolis on the pier, thinking. This worried Mitsos more than the men in white shirts. He watched through one of the boat’s portholes, as he lined up the shots. Manolis’ head jerked up quickly and he leapt to his feet.
‘All aboard the Love Boat!’ he shouted. Mitsos finished pouring the drinks, took the money and dashed up on deck.
‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.
Manolis ignored him. ‘Tonight, a special event, only for the lucky few – a free moonlight cruise. All aboard the Love Boat bar.’ With this, he started releasing the mooring lines.
‘Tell me you are joking, you are not going to sail this thing?’ Mitsos could hear the panic in his own voice.
‘What’s happening, man?’ a local boy asked.
‘A free cruise, my friend. Take your girl on board and you are assured of her company till dawn.’ The boy grinned.
‘Lads,’ he called, ‘I think we’ve scored here …’ The boys on the pier quickly manoeuvred their new tourist friends back inside.
‘You can’t sail her, Manolis, she is not seaworthy.’
‘We will go out to the island.’
A little island sat in the bay, five hundred metres from the harbour, with a tiny whitewashed church like an iced topping, blue in the moonlight, at its summit. ‘Go round it once and anchor till dawn. Then if the
damn thing sinks at least there is the island.’ Manolis was laughing. ‘Those guys did me a favour. Move the noise out to sea and stop anyone leaving till dawn. Ha!’
‘No, Manolis, it feels like a bad idea.’ Mitsos was not even aware whether the engine worked and if it did who had carried out the work.
But Manolis had cast off all the ropes and was aboard. Mitsos hung back on shore and watched the departure with trepidation. The engine coughed a few times and then started, and the people on board cheered, raising their glasses to the skies. As the boat began to edge away from the pier, ‘What the hell!’ muttered Mitsos, and at the last moment he jumped across the widening gap and landed with a heavy thud on board. He grabbed at the cabin roof to steady himself before going inside. Manolis grinned at him; they were boys again with carrots in their pockets.
The heat of the evening sank into a heavy warmth of night, the sky expanded out in the bay and the stars grew sharp against the darker corners of the sky, dimming only around the orange moon. The pink cabin shone as the light caught it, from a distance looking like nothing more than a child’s toy.
Inside three Germans had drunk themselves into a stupor and were hauled, a limb at a time, into a corner to sleep it off. Some English girls insisted on going on deck, and when they anchored by the tiny island they stripped to their underwear and jumped in the water. Some of the Greek boys followed, wearing nothing but a smile. One of the local lads insisted the music should be Greek and became self-appointed DJ.
As the traditional music filled the cabin the boys seemed to grow in stature in the familiar musical territory. One stood to dance and the others clapped in encouragement. In the tiny space, with his arms outstretched, his head thrown back, his chest full of pride, he kicked and strutted to the familiar tune. The music picked up speed and the boy increased his flamboyancy, slapping his ankle behind him, stomping the ground in front. He slid to his knees and slapped the board behind him, first one side, then the other. The girls cheered and he leapt to his feet. Someone put a full shot glass on the floor and he danced around it, then dropped flat to the floor, suspended above the rough wooden boards only by toes and finger tips. His head above the glass, his mouth encompassed the whole, leaving only the base showing, he bounded to his feet, his head back; the contents disappeared and he took the glass from his mouth, his arms outstretched in triumph. The boat’s company cheered even more loudly, the girls’ eyes shining, the boys emboldened. Manolis served drink after drink. Mitsos, intoxicated more by the music than the drink, forgot himself and clapped encouragement to the dancers who followed.
