by Carol Mason
‘Oh stop whining will you! Girl you’re such a joy killer!’
‘It’s dump.’
‘It’s dump-ish.’
‘It’s a goddamn shithole.’
‘I hate it when you sound so North American. You’re British. Never forget where you came from and what made you great. You don’t have to sound like a damned Yank.’
‘Canadians aren’t Yanks.’
She mops her cheek with the back of her hand. ‘They’re tarred with the same brush.’
For her friends, my mother pretends to love Canada. But deep down it’ll always be the place that took me away from her. It’s apparent in the little things. When she comes to visit, she’ll walk into a public loo and if somebody hasn’t flushed, say, loudly, ‘Were Canadians never taught how to flush a toilet?’ In the grocery store: ‘Does NOBODY in Canada know how to grow a proper potato?’ From coming to going, it’s one big rant about all that’s wrong with Canada, and I get sick of it.
An English couple tells us we have to go into the corner store to enquire about the times of buses into Zante town, where we’ll get a far better taste of the real island than we do here, in package holiday hell. ‘I’m not holding out hope,’ I grunt to my mother.
‘Your problem is, you were spoilt with Jonathan.’
I don’t need reminding of the fact that Jonathan and I did have a good life. We had no ties. We didn’t even own a cat. We took foreign holidays twice a year, and a mini-weekend away almost every month. After I had to give up our home, it struck me that maybe this was my punishment. Because I’d become too used to the good life and I’d developed an over-keen sense of entitlement. I thought the rest of the world lived like me. When I saw those TV commercials about the starving kids in Africa, I’d think, oh that’s so sad, then change channels.
In the store, the Greek man tells us there’s only one bus a day into Zante.
‘One bus?’ I stare at the top of his head as he thumbs through his newspaper. ‘Well what about coming back?’
‘Don’t expect to come back,’ he talks to his paper.
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with that helpful reply. I wait for him to add something more but he goes on pretending we are not there. I get the urge to pull him across the counter by his collar and tell him, listen buddy, tourists keep your economy going, so be nice to them. Instead I slap a hand on the counter, startling him. ‘But suppose a person, for some quite deluded reason, did get it into their heads that they might like to come back—’
‘Never trust the bus.’ Comes the voice behind us.
I turn to look over my shoulder, and there is a man there: an attractive man. I might be happy that his gaze is steady on my face, then it drops the length of me, in a summarizing, skirt-chasing way. But then it shifts to my mother and does the same thing.
‘Sisters? Yes?’ he says. His eyes roam fast and loose over our hats.
The cheesiness of his line totally appeals to my mother. She bursts into a dirty, tickled-pink, cackle. ‘Oh yes! I’m the younger one of course!’
‘I know,’ he says, and he smiles at her for a long time, the way a man might do with a younger woman he was attracted to. Then he says something in Greek to the man behind the counter, who sniggers.
‘Please, it is not trouble for me to take you into town. I am going there as it is.’ He throws a hand in our direction. ‘The hats… there are two movie stars here.’ His English is excellent.
‘If your vision is that bad I don’t think we should trust you behind a wheel!’ says my mother.
He is not classically handsome. The face is a little too long, the eyebrows too heavy, the C-brackets at either side of his mouth too deep, like the furrows in his brow. And he needs a good shave. Yet there’s something… It’s his eyes. They have a penetrating expression in them that compensates for the lack of it on his face. Soulful eyes. They save him.
I immediately pull my hat off and intend it to have a slow and painful burial at sea. He makes a point of noticing my self-conscious gesture.
‘Well, maybe we should go with the gentleman.’ My mother pumps my arm in encouragement. ‘It’s awfully nice of him to offer.’ Wink. Wink.
‘Awfully nice?’ Who is this person?
He looks from my mother to me, then gestures outside. ‘My car is just there. Really, I would be happy to have the company.’ His eyes briefly alight on my mother’s colourful toenails.
She has gone from winking now, to a wide-eyed, besotted stare. I try to keep the smile off my face, and keep her hanging there for moments. Then I say, ‘Thanks all the same but I think we’ll pass.’
‘Who says we’ll pass!’ She’s practically stopping my circulation now. Then she gives me one sharp dig in my ribcage that is embarrassing in its lack of subtlety.
Then to insense me further, this strange man says, ‘Well just because your daughter does not want … you can always come alone.’ How dare he go over my head like that!
‘That’s because she’s a party pooper! An old, old young person. Remind me never to come on holiday with her again!’ Then she fawns and flirts to the point where I want to cripple her. ‘I personally would love to come with you, but unfortunately I think I probably have to go where the old ball and chain goes. It’s a condition of my bail.’
He looks like he might not have understood, but he smiles anyway. Then his eyes meet mine. Is that hostility I see in those raisin-like eyes?
Then he says something that takes me aback. ‘You know, sometimes in this life, Angela, you have to take your chance with people. Not all Greek men are like our reputation you know.’ He bows his head to both of us and then he walks out.
I feel like saying, Hmm, I thought they had the reputation for giving it up the bottom. But, thankfully, I don’t.
My mother is practically legging it after him. I have to restrain her. ‘You called me an old ball and chain?’
‘If the cap fits!’
If the…! I want to kill her. But something suddenly dawns on me, and I feel a strange chill trickle down my spine. ‘Hang on…’ I grab her arm, making her stand still. ‘Did you hear what he said?’ I stare after him as he walks towards a white Jeep parked right out front. ‘He called me Angela.’
‘Well what would you have preferred he call you? Alfred? Or Dancer, the three-legged dog?’
‘But how did he know my name? You didn’t call me by it, I don’t think. And I certainly didn’t introduce myself.’ I watch him climb into the Jeep and glance back at us. He seems to hold my eyes for a few mysterious moments, then he pulls off.
‘Well… I reckon I must’ve. Either that, or he’s psychic. Anyway, one option is to run after him and ask him.’ She pulls a dirty grin. ‘Then maybe we can jump in his car and we can both go for a ride on him.’ She gasps. ‘Vivien! Vivien!’ She slaps her own face hard. ‘You mean, with him. With him.’
‘Oh, you’re on your own there, pervert,’ I say to her. ‘I hate how all these men see a couple of English women and think we’ve just come on holiday to get laid.’ I watch his car disappear down the road, still thinking how on earth did he know my name?
‘No they don’t! What mother and daughter would come on holiday to—get laid—as you crudely put it? Since you’ve moved to that midden of a country, Angela, you’ve adopted a very Jerry Springer attitude to life… Besides, I would never come on holiday with you if I wanted to get some action. Not with your personality. You’d have ‘em running for the hills, clutching their privates, as fast as they could stumble.’
As usual, she leaves me speechless.
‘Anyway, I’m sure he didn’t think I was fair game. Not at my age. More’s the pity mind you. I could probably have given him a good run for his money. And if he thought you were, well, you quickly put him right on that score.’ She scrutinizes me. ‘You’re nothing like your mother are you?’
‘Gee, that’s a relief!’ I tease her.
‘I’m talking about charm. There was nothing wrong with that era when
women weren’t afraid to be women and men weren’t ashamed to be men. There were a lot fewer cross-dressers and homosapians because of it.’ She lets out a slow whistle, ‘if I were young again, I wouldn’t let a man like that cross my path without doing something about it.’
‘Come on,’ I say. We truck off to the only restaurant that looks open. An affable-face Greek man sits outside and welcomes us with friendly desperation. We order two Greek salads. ‘Oh God…’ I groan when he goes inside, to the fridge. ‘When the chef doubles as the waiter and he’s only got one customer at lunchtime, and your Greek salad only costs two euros, I don’t hold out much hope. Notice how he’s not washed his hands. And I’d like to bet he didn’t wash them after he went to the loo either. Hepatitis here we come!’
‘Angela,’ my mam glares at me. ‘Are you going to be in a perverse mood all week or are you just having a perverse day just to get it out of your system in one dose? Because the latter I can handle, but the alternative, I can’t.’
‘I’m getting it over in one fell swoop,’ I tell her. ‘To do you a favour. Bear with me, I’m coming round to being in a good mood again.’ I smile at her exasperation.
The salads arrive, along with half a litre of white wine. The vegetables are sweet. The feta is creamy rather than salty. And the olives worth moving to Greece for. For eight euros we’re full, satisfied and ever so slightly pissed. The Greek man goes back to sitting outside again, from time to time watching the non-events of the street, and occasionally watching us.
‘You know, we’ve never gone on holiday together, have we? Not since you were a little girl.’
‘When did we ever go on holiday when I was little? I only remember tedious trips to South Shields beach!’
‘Don’t call them tedious! There were us as a family having a good time!’
‘Well they were tedious! Don’t you remember? We had to take three buses to get there because unlike everybody else, we never owned a car, because Dad drank all the money he should have spent on driving lessons.’ Or smoked it. I vividly remember him rolling his Old Holborn cigarettes. The cough before breakfast. ‘And as soon as we got there he’d make a beeline for the first pub, and we’d have to sit there while he got wasted… It was always what he wanted to do, never us.’ Yet he wasn’t a bad man or a bad father. ‘Yeah, it was one of life’s real joys.’
‘Don’t say that!’ she berates me with a guilty chuckle. This tells me she thinks she somehow let me down as a parent because I’ve only got memories of tedious holidays instead of good ones. ‘Anyway, he only did it because, like all men, he was selfish. He didn’t actually mean any harm by it, Angela.’
Jonathan wasn’t selfish. But she’s right about my dad; he never did mean any harm to anybody. He was just easily entertained and he assumed everybody else was.
The Greek man watches us closely, as though we’ve perked up his day. ‘Don’t you remember Blackpool? When your dad bought you those yellow sunglasses that you never had off your face, and he took you up in the Ferris Wheel? And I wore my coral sundress...’ She smiles coquettishly, remembering herself. ‘And I had shoulder-length dark blonde hair back then—like yours—and I used to keep it in soft roller curls, and it was windy and the wind blew my dress up. And there was a man with his wife and little girl… And he couldn’t take his eyes off my legs. He was just fascinated with them. He was walking away and looking over his shoulder at me as though he had his head on backwards.’
‘Oh! That time! Of course. Your legs, and that man with his head on backwards! How could I forget.’
‘You remember!’ she says, thinking I’m being serious. Then she growls, realising that I’m not. ‘Angela! Don’t mock the afflicted!’
I shake my head at her and try very hard not to love her so much that it breaks out of my every pore.
‘Mock me all you want, but back then there really wasn’t much excitement in my life. I was married to a man who couldn’t even give the pub a miss the night I brought our new baby home from the hospital.’
‘Why did you stay, Mam?’ It’s something I’ve always wanted to ask her.
‘Where was I going to go? I had you. You loved him. He was your dad.’
It saddens me now to think that my mother never had what Jonathan and I did. And that she stayed with my dad because of me, when she wasn’t happy.
‘Why didn’t you have an affair?’
‘I had lots of them.’
‘Huh?’ I just about swallow my tongue.
‘In my mind.’ She taps her temples. ‘They’d have different faces on different days. Or they’d be so-and-so’s body with so-and-so’s face. Your dad’s friend, Alan. Or Bill the policeman across the street. Bill with the chunky thighs in his jeans… ‘
‘Too much detail!’
‘It’s my fantasy world we’re talking about here!’
‘I think I’ve heard enough!’ But in some ways I am curious; I’ve never heard her talk like this. ‘Really though, why didn’t you find somebody else? You could have.’ I remember the Rington’s Tea delivery man, the catalogue delivery man, the window cleaner… always how they’d look at her every time they came to the door. Visiting our house was clearly the highlight of their day.
‘I was too kind. And I worried about what would happen if I’d got found out.’ She screws up her nose. ‘Mud sticks, Angela. I didn’t want people knowing that sort of thing about me.’ Her face turns quite serious again. ‘Now though…I’d take my chances.’
I feel sad for her. I don’t want her to feel she’s missed out.
She polishes off the last of the wine now. A tiny lizard walks along the railing past our table, its little bright eyes seem to look right at me. ‘It’s funny how you can lie in bed next to the same person for years and he’ll never know you’re longing for somebody else, or that you don’t long for him. That you’ve never longed for him,’ she says.
‘But you didn’t long for somebody else, did you?’
‘No one in particular. Just something else I suppose…’ She looks at me matter-of-factly. ‘I was in love with somebody who didn’t exist. Maybe I even still am.’
‘This is depressing.’
‘Not really. Life’s only depressing if you let it be.’
‘Let’s go,’ I say. We pay up and leave. The Greek man says a polite, ‘Thank you,’ on our way out.
‘Perhaps we’ll go back there for dinner,’ my mam links me and hiccups—a slightly tipsy hiccup—as we cross the road to go back to our hotel.
‘You’re wasted.’
She bumps into me a bit. ‘Don’t talk out of your bottom.’
We pass that corner shop again, where we met the man who knew my name. We both look in, as though secretly hoping we might see him again. ‘I wonder what he does for a living.’
‘Who?’
‘Santa Claus.’
She stops and looks at me, knowing damned well who I’m talking about. ‘He’s a chimney sweep. He dusts the flue with his big bottom as he slides down it.’ Then she beams a devilish smile. ‘Oh! You mean him! The full-blood! ‘Shag grannies, with a bit of luck. Now I could ensure he’s never in the unemployment line.’
She links me and we start walking again, and she sighs a slightly tipsy sigh.
~ * * * ~
The beach, as the rep said, is closer than it looks. I venture down there on my own. I’m pleased to see long stretches of pebble-free sand and gently shelving emerald water. I claim an empty lounge chair under an umbrella, take a few photos, then strip down to my white string bikini. I bought this when Jonathan and I went to Barbados. It’s even still got sand in it, because it would never wash out properly, making it look grubby. He wanted to see if you could see through it when it was wet. ‘Christ!’ he said, when I came out of the swimming pool. ‘It’s indecent!’
‘No!’ I cried, and slapped both hands over my groin. He beamed. He was only teasing me.
The heat feels like a spa day for my body. Behind my sunglasses I watch a young couple w
rapped around each other in the water. He keeps slowly glancing around with a look that’s both gratified and shifty. Jonathan wanted to screw in the sea, but I wouldn’t be persuaded. I watched him go in on his own—his casual strength as he dove in—watched him for ages then eventually lost sight of him. Never for a moment did I worry about him not coming back, because it was unthinkable that anything bad would ever happen to Jonathan. Jonathan was so vibrant and thoroughly able to take care of himself. Nonetheless, my eyes studied every head in that sea, worrying what if he does disappear? A freak wave? Then I saw him, and a smile broke out inside of me. I watched him swim all the way to shore, watched his lovely body as he walked up the sand, and then threw himself down on the towel beside me. He was dripping wet and kissed me with cool, salty lips.
Jonathan sometimes had a way of looking at me, right into my eyes, deeper than you would think a gaze could go, as though he was thinking things that were too intense for him to communicate any other way. I noticed it the first time we made love. I’d had good sex before. But not quite this good. And I’d never had this feeling. As a kid I used to look at the parents of my best friend, Heather, who seemed to be in a permanent state of heat for each other. I wanted that. I wanted a marriage where the passion wouldn’t fizzle out. Maybe it was rare. It was non-existent in my own family. But I’d seen it wasn’t impossible. Was I on to something here with this guy?
‘My heart’s pounding,’ I remember telling him. ‘Here,’ I pointed to the jumping pulse just above my clavicle. He extracted his eyes from mine then stared at the spot with genuine fascination. He brought his head down, and instead of kissing it, just lay his lips there, as though his lips were feeling the beating of my heart.
That day on the beach, when he came out of the water, he threw himself down on the sand and latched onto my eyes in that same way, gave me that same intense look that I could never quite read. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ I said.
