by Sonia Paige
‘“At home in England,” I replied, and he translated.
‘“And she lets you come here alone?” she asked.
‘I couldn’t tell her what really happened, so I gave the easy answer: “Yes.”
‘“Lefteris is a good boy” she said, and he squirmed as he translated. His face had such a liquid beauty: soft brown features, sharp restless eyes and his hair reminded me of when the goddess Athena makes Odysseus’ locks curl like a hyacinth.’
‘Odysseus? Who’s he when he’s at home?’ says Debs.
‘A hero in a Greek myth.’ I pause. ‘He never was much at home, he went to fight in the Trojan War and got back twenty years later.’
‘Can’t have been in much of a hurry,’ says Mandy.
I can’t help smiling. ‘Adventures on the way.’
‘I know the type.’ Mandy pulls her feet out from under the bedclothes and rubs them. ‘What’s with all this Greek myths stuff?’
‘It comes from reading a lot as a kid.’
‘What’s the matter with you? What sort of weirdo reads Greek myths?’ says Debs.
‘We didn’t have a telly,’ I say. ‘Not when I was little.’ No way I could start to explain how weird my childhood was.
‘Takes all sorts,’ says Mandy. ‘Go on, then.’
‘At one point they sent Lefteris to fetch another bottle of wine from the store room in the yard. His mother suddenly lent over, grasped my arm with a grip of iron and said something urgently in Greek. I couldn’t understand, so she said it again. Then again, louder. As if repeating it would eventually make it understandable. I kept smiling and tried to listen to the intonation, but I couldn’t work out what she was saying. When Lefteris came back she insisted he translate. He was embarrassed:
‘“My mother wants you to marry me.”
‘“But she doesn’t know me,” I said.
‘His mother answered, “You are English. That is good.” The reply reached me round the table. She said, “We Greeks like to make cocktail.” Then she touched me again and added “You can come to live with us.” While Lefteris was translating, the aunt in black sneezed. That made everyone go quiet. Lefteris looked at the ground. The grandmother crossed herself three times. Then everyone started talking at once, I couldn’t understand what was going on.
‘Afterwards he walked me back to my digs and tried to explain: “The sneeze, it is a tradition. They say it means, that the thing somebody says at that moment, it will happen. The older people here believe such things. Teehi. Chance. Fate. My mother is from the traditional culture, she believes it. Not me. I believe that each person, he makes his fate. Perhaps I marry here, perhaps I go to England. I like that. The island is very quiet…” he searched for a word “…far away from Athens. You understand me?” I understood. He wanted sex and adventure, his mother wanted marriage. He was parched for tourist flesh. His mother wanted to breed English blood into the family. And she thought a sneeze could make it happen. I was an exotic delicacy. I could be caught and tamed. And for me their Greekness – their generosity, their directness, their roots in the herb-scented rock of the island – that was exotic too. It was strange and seductive, a delightful garden I could escape into. But I’d never have belonged. We each yearned for difference. But even then I knew you can’t escape your own life that easily.’
‘The way you talk…’ says Mandy. ‘Did you get lessons?’ She gets out of bed and wanders across the room to stare out of the window. ‘I’d have stayed there. Work in the shop. Sun every day. Down the beach with the kids. Give up all your bad habits. Fresh start. Happy ending.’
‘I don’t do happy endings.’ I look at her across the room, ‘A few days later I kissed him goodbye. I was not for him. I was no use to him.’
‘All that for nothing,’ says Debs. ‘I thought you was going to tell us about these two guys sleeping on the beach?’ She gags, gets up and goes to the toilet behind the wall next to my bed. We can hear her throwing up.
There’s still a faint banging coming from down the corridor: ‘Nurse! I want a nurse! Fuck you!’
‘Poor cow,’ says Mandy. ‘She don’t realize they never go when you bang like that. Point of principle. To make you suffer. Go on, babes. The two guys on the beach.’ She comes to sit on my bed.
I move my foot out of the way and make a last-ditch attempt to get out of carrying on. This story is going to get really personal. ‘It’s not that interesting,’ I say.
‘Yeah, it is,’ says Debs, coming out of the toilet. ‘You tell a story good. You should be a writer.’
‘I can’t write,’ I say. ‘If only.’
The stories and poems I used to write when I was a kid. I hid them in the hollow of the oak tree in our garden. So she wouldn’t find them. Then one day I went down there and they were gone. Thinking the tree didn’t like my stories and I shouldn’t write any more. I didn’t write again for years. I never understood what happened to those stories.
I put my hands over my mouth. ‘I can’t write,’ I say again. ‘Not a word.’ Why torture myself about my failures?
‘You can talk, can’t yer?’ says Mandy. ‘That’s writing out loud.’
I take my hands from my mouth and stare at my palms. People use them to tell fortunes, but mine seem to give me no answer. All I can see are criss-crossed lines, paths merging, colliding, intercepting and some remnants of ingrained mud. I’m used to that from the gardening. What day of the week is it? I think I was meant to be pruning Mrs Downes’ apple trees today. Like hell. I look at the silver ring on my little finger. From her bed opposite, Debs hasn’t noticed. I repeat, ‘Writing out loud? Is it?’
No-one says anything for a while. Then I shrug and give in. ‘OK, if you say so…’ I take a deep breath.
‘It was because of Lefteris that I met the two guys on the beach.
‘After I stopped seeing him, for a few days I stayed in my room reading. Every so often I heard explosions. The Greeks were preparing home-made fireworks for Easter. Once I saw a man running down the street outside my window clutching his hand and yelling to the heavens. Later that day in the taverna an old man did a mime show explaining to me about the man’s accident with the gunpowder. All week you couldn’t get meat in the taverna. It was Holy Week: no meat, no eggs, no oil, no butter, no fish. I’ve never eaten so much squid. That was allowed because it doesn’t have blood. It gives you weird dreams. The owner of the taverna gestured and pointed at the clock to tell me not to miss midnight on Easter Saturday at the church.
‘So on Saturday evening I was watching out for when it would start, and I saw crowds going down the streets to the harbour in their best clothes. I waited ’till they’d all gone past, then I slipped out of my digs and followed them. I didn’t want to go too near, not being a believer, I felt out of place. I found a spot at the top of some steps where I could see over a couple of roofs down into the church courtyard. It was full of people standing in the dark. From inside the white chapel the mumbled chanting of the priest came like an endless thread of sound winding its way around the houses. Beyond the church, fishing boats bobbed on the black water of the harbour. I watched it all from outside. The only person I belonged with was at the other end of Europe. I wondered if I would ever rejoin the community of the living, or if I would always be an outsider. If I would ever belong to anyone or anything.
‘It must have been nearly midnight when the chanting stopped. The crowd seemed to be waiting for something… a dark throng of humans, stirring in the shadows. Then from out of the church, a candle flame appeared. It became two, three, four… Each person had brought a candle and the lights spread through the crowd until the courtyard sparkled with tiny shining dots like the sky above us. Then the church bell started to ring. And the fireworks started – like all the bangers of bonfire night crackling around the village and the hills beyond.
‘People started leaving the churchyard, and sounds came up to me, a dull murmur as they spoke to each other with the ritual greeting. They say, “Cristos
annesti,” and the other person replies, “Alleethos annesti.” I learnt later that it means “Christ is risen,” “Truly he has risen.” The same syllables over and over, spreading across the village as the crowd dispersed through the streets into the night… a low hubbub rising through the air as if the houses themselves were breathing. I tried to make my way back to my digs without meeting anyone. I felt ashamed because I didn’t have a candle.
‘Then when I reached the door, my landlady saw me and invited me in downstairs. “Ella, ella, ella!” she kept saying, beckoning me in. She was with her son and a neighbour, who was also in black. She was a widow too. They were having a special soup. Egg and lemon. They showed me in mime how it was made. It was delicious: creamy and sweet, with an edge. They pressed second helpings onto me. You really appreciate kindness when you are alone.
‘The next day, Easter Day, the whole village had an aroma of roast lamb. People were cooking on spits in the street. Tempting me out to taste life.’
There’s a rattle of keys in the lock: ‘Breakfast!’
‘Here’s something to tempt you, all right,’ says Mandy.
I can’t even look at the food. After the trolley’s gone, I’m still struggling not to gag. The others wander back to their beds carrying their paper plates without enthusiasm.
‘You ain’t missing nothing, mate,’ says Mandy. ‘Get on with it, then. Take our minds off this crap we’ve got to eat.’
I try to remember where I was. I can still smell the prison food.
‘Good way to spend Easter,’ says Mandy.
I pick up my thread. ‘Yeah. After all that I felt less like being a hermit.
‘The next day I decided to go back to the beach, but to avoid bumping into Lefteris I had to walk even further away from the village. You could walk so far that the houses were like specks. I kept going until I had left all signs of human life behind, sinking into the hot sand with every step, barefoot, following the long sweep of the sea.
‘I don’t know why I kept going. It was almost as if I knew what I was going to find.
‘At a certain point I began to see a coloured spot on the sand ahead. It turned into two spots. I thought it was a mirage in the heat. When I got closer I made out two low orange tents. I was a bit nervous, but when I got right up I found there were two figures lying between them. They were stretched out in black swimming trunks. Like a vision. They had ash blond hair to their shoulders, and they were seriously sun-tanned. A few feet away there was a small campfire burning in a hollow in the sand lined with stones. At first I thought they were twins, but one of them was older than the other and his hair was thicker and a bit more reddish.’
‘Good looking?’ asks Mandy.
‘Are you making this up?’ asks Debs.
‘At the time I didn’t believe it myself,’ I tell them. ‘Since we were all in the middle of nowhere, I said “Hello” and they invited me to join them for a cup of tea. The driftwood was crackling. Over it they had a billy-can of water starting to steam. We chatted a bit. They were from Holland: Joris (that was the older one) and Sigurd. They had a little English, with a strong accent. When the water was nearly boiling they asked me if I wanted “thee” or “speciale thee”. It turned out that the “speciale” was hash tea and that suited me fine.’
‘You were doing that stuff even then?’ Debs comes over to sit on the bottom of my bed.
‘A bit.’
‘I didn’t know they had it then.’
‘I think they had that stuff before the ark,’ I say. ‘How do you think the Old Testament prophets did their stuff? All those visions? They were probably as high as kites.’
‘Hold it, babes,’ says Debs, and lurches towards the toilet again.
‘So if them old prophets were doing drugs,’ says Mandy while we wait for her, ‘do you reckon they went through this n’all? They got stuff in the Bible about throwing up in the bog?’
‘I haven’t read it that carefully,’ I say. We look at each other and nearly giggle, if we didn’t feel so ill.
After a bit Debs staggers back, pale-faced. ‘What did I miss?’
I carry on: ‘We drank the tea out of tin mugs, then they shared some bread and honey with me. Then they lay down. They shut their eyes and fell silent as if I wasn’t there. Sunbathing seemed to absorb all their attention. They disappeared into the sand like chameleons and seemed to expect me to join them. Eventually I spread out my towel, took off my dress, and lay down too, in my bikini. The sun bored down on us all. I can’t remember what we did that first day except lie there. I got out my book, but the words started to move around the page and I put it down. The hash made pictures in my brain. I let them come and go. I didn’t want to think about anything. It was a kind of peace.
‘Later in the day they offered me a meal. I watched them prepare vegetable stew. Joris’s hands were skilled and careful. Sigurd was more skittish, but he was swift and neat, and followed Joris’s lead. They collaborated without speaking. They shared the food with me generously. “Eet zoveel als je wilt”. Sometimes I could understand what they said when I let the sounds wash over me. They never asked me anything about myself. Sometimes they smiled at each other. We ate in silence, then I went back to my room.
‘The next day I walked down the beach again, bought some tomatoes on the way to contribute, and again we had hash tea and lay and dreamed on the sand all day.’
‘Leave it out,’ says Debs. ‘Going on about that when we’re stuck in here.’
‘It wasn’t all nice,’ I tell her. ‘I kept getting stung by memories like sandflies. Memories I’d rather forget.’
When I shut my eyes I used to see Hayden. I saw his long sad face. The Dorset rain on the small cottage windows and his sad hard face and his thin figure hunched around a spliff in front of the wood fire.
And her. The real pearls round her neck and the fake smile on her face. And the faint glaze of disappointment in her perfectly mascara-ed eyes.
‘What memories?’ asks Debs.
‘That man I told you about. Hayden. And my mother. She used to say, “I gave you every opportunity and you chose to throw your life away.”’
Suddenly I can’t speak any more and I feel my eyes filling with tears. More humiliation. Get a grip.
‘So why did ya, then?’ asks Mandy.
‘What?’
‘What she said. You was brought up to be a nice one, not a scrubber. What went wrong? Why d’ya chuck it all away?’
How to describe my mother? Life as an expensive recipe book. Controlled ingredients, mix carefully, glamorous presentation. All that ‘Goddess in the Kitchen’ stuff. She loved the bright lights. Put on a good enough show and you can convince people things are OK. Except your own daughter. Shaming you in her scruffy clothes. Letting the holes in the façade show. Letting the air in.
I try to explain. ‘I felt suffocated in her cushioned world. Cosmetics and designer clothes and dinner parties and knowing the right people. How can you feel safe when the person protecting you is terrified? All you can do is face the terror and walk naked with it. I wanted to meet the wrong people. And I did.’
‘Bet ya still think you’re better than us lot, though, init?’ says Debs, pointing her long nose straight at me.
‘Do I act like that?’ I ask her.
‘To be honest with ya,’ Debs continues, ‘I’m not being funny, but you chose to chuck it all away. We never had nothing in the first place.’
She’s right. I had choices. If I could have done what was expected of me: smiled at the right people, jumped the right hurdles… I have only myself to blame. Shooting myself in the foot again and again.
‘Don’t take no notice of her,’ says Mandy. ‘You didn’t choose what you was born into. We’re all in the same boat now, ain’t we? Go on, mate.’
So I carry on. ‘I lay there on the beach and the pictures danced in front of my closed eyelids. Until gradually the sunshine made them go still. I seemed to realize some important things, but they were thos
e slippery thoughts you get on hash which slide away. Like sand through your fingers. Gone almost before you’ve thought them. From time to time we swam. The cold of the water was a shock which turned your body inside out until the shock of the heat worked its way back in again. In the evening they cooked a meal again and I ate with them. Then I walked back along the beach in the dusk to my room.’
‘Wait a minute,’ says Debs. ‘The water. That cold? Even in summer?’
I nod. ‘That cold.’ The woman has an eagle eye for detail. I wait but she seems satisfied so I carry on:
‘On the third day when I arrived, Sigurd had clothes on – a pair of tan slacks and a T-shirt. He was going into town for supplies. He set off with an empty rucksack. Joris put the water on, and we lay in the sun waiting for the tea as usual.
‘“Today are we alone,” he said very deliberately.
‘After the tea we swam and spread out our towels on the beach. My skin was tingling from the ice-cold water. I shut my eyes and slept or day-dreamed, I’m not sure which. When I opened them, I noticed that Joris had moved his towel and was lying next to me.’
There’s a jangling of keys outside the door and I hear it swing open.
‘Exercise, put your shoes on, hurry up,’ says a plump officer, breezing in with a big smile. ‘You too, McPhearson.’ Beverly groans from her bed, ‘I ain’t going nowhere.’ The officer shrugs, ‘Your loss, love.’
The yard is concrete, broken up by brick-built flower beds. Last summer’s flowers, if there ever were any, are long gone, and only a few wintry leaves stick to the barren earth of the beds. The rain has stopped but it’s wet underfoot. My old boots slurp along without their laces. The yard is surrounded on three sides by high brick walls, and on the fourth by a two-storey wing of the prison building. On the ground underneath the windows are piles of things thrown out of the cells: dirty clothes, apple cores, vomit. Underneath one is a collection of hamburgers and chips from last night’s supper, with paper plates and lettuce leaves scattered around.
