A Stranger in the Village

by Sara Alexi

  ‘Don’t call me naive,’ Miltos barks, and he slams the door shut. ‘If I have to look at that little halfwit rolling his herbs after what he did to me, I might go across there and do something to him I would regret.’

  ‘Er, I wouldn’t do that, man,’ says Josh, looking Miltos up and down. The inference is clear: Skinner is tall and muscular, and, although Miltos is also well built, Josh does not fancy his chances in a fight between the two of them.

  ‘Surely you knew he was up to something when he asked you to come with us?’ Josh asks.

  This hurts. As he waits for the anger to subside, Miltos watches Josh take off his boots and pour trapped sand from them into a wastepaper bin in the corner of the room. The bin is made of wicker basketwork and the sand spills out through the holes to form small hills on the tiled floor. Miltos studies the expression on Josh’s face. The tanned young Australian is intent on draining the desert from his boots and it is very clear he is not joking.

  For Miltos, the offence lingers; in his heart he is wounded. A pain goes across his chest and, just for the briefest of moments, his bottom lip quivers. He has always prided himself on letting other people’s behaviour, no matter how personally directed, or how hurtful, slide past him like water off a duck’s back, and this reaction takes him by surprise. He quickly controls himself and his upper lip curls into a sneer. He could be back at camp, taking a day’s rest, in the peace of the empty compound. Instead, he is sharing a room with this arrogant stranger, on a lumpy bed with cheap ruched cotton sheets, with a day in the blazing heat to look forward to, as well as the uncomfortable and prolonged return journey. And all for what? Because his ego got a little boost from being asked by the young and oh-so-effortlessly-trendy Skinner to go with them?

  What an old fool he is.

  He is not sure whom he is angrier with, Skinner or himself. But more than that, he wants to know why Skinner chose him? Why not Grace, Virginia – or even Josh? He swings his legs off the bed and flings the door open, digging the handle into the wall behind it, indenting the hollow that is already there a little deeper. The aroma of the weed fills the windowless corridor but there is no one around to mind, except him. Their door is half-closed now, and with a nudge of his toe it swings open. The window is open and the evening air brings with it the smell of spices cooking. This does not mix well with the remaining stale herbal fug.

  ‘So why me?’ he demands. ‘Why the hell did you choose me as your possible sacrifice, me to be your drugs mule!’ Miltos can see no reason not to be straight.

  Skinner, Bryce and James are lying on their beds, all with their ankles crossed, Bryce with his hands interlocked on his chest, James with his hanging over the edge of the bed and Skinner with his behind his head. They look up and blink like tortoises at Miltos’s sudden entrance, slowly, and with no comprehension showing in the depths of their pupils.

  Miltos steps to the end of Skinner’s bed. ‘Eh?’ He does not bother to ask the question again. Skinner is grinning as if what he is saying is funny and this infuriates him. James is the weakest link, so he turns on him, kicks the leg of his bed to rattle the frame. James’s eyes open a little wider at the unexpected movement.

  ‘What?’ he asks, sounding as if he genuinely didn’t hear the question the first time, or he has already forgotten it.

  ‘Why me? The pouch?’ Miltos demands.

  Skinner sniggers.

  ‘No one was going to look at you?’ James slurs.

  ‘What?’ Miltos frowns.

  ‘It’s true, the risk was minimal, no one was going to check you out,’ Skinner drawls.

  ‘What?’ Miltos turns to Skinner.

  ‘You were great,’ Bryce adds. ‘The harmless old man routine.’

  ‘Don’t worry, bro, I’ll skin one up for you. Take a chill pill, man,’ says Skinner, struggling to sit up, and reaching for the pouch on the bedside table.

  ‘Better not make it too strong, man,’ James drawls. Bryce seems to find this very funny, and starts to laugh uncontrollably.

  Skinner says something more, but Miltos has not yet got past the description of him as a harmless old man. He looks from Bryce to James to Skinner, all sniggering. Their lithe bodies are taut under tight-fitting T-shirts, their sagging jeans with designer tears held up by expensive, cheap-looking, worn leather belts, and he suddenly feels a world away, and bile rises in his throat.

  ‘I would never have done such a dreadful thing …’ He is about to add ‘in my day’, but already the beginning of his sentence has James muffling a giggle and the gulf between them opens into a chasm, and in that divide arises a pride. Pride that he is himself, that he is not one of them, that he is not of their generation. Pride that his generation at least has a smattering of integrity. His lower lip pushes up into his curled upper lip and he narrows his eyes and looks at each of them in turn, condemning them for being who they are, and cursing them for playing with his life with such flippancy and disregard. His disdain churns acid in his stomach and when he can no longer bear to look at them he turns on his heel and walks out and along the corridors, eager to get away from the boys and Josh.

  Downstairs, through a doorway opposite the unmanned reception desk, is a small room with a dark wooden bar at one end. It looks distinctly out of place in Jordan, more like something that he might have found in London thirty years ago, or maybe even in one of the smaller bars in Astoria a while back: all brown wood, and dingy. But, of course, what is most surprising is that it exists at all in a Muslim country.

  Khaled is behind the bar, smiling, one hand resting on a beer pump and the other on a bottle of something as he talks to his only customer – Virginia, in her white blouse. Miltos stops in his tracks. A drink would be nice, but he is not in the mood to flirt or even converse with a woman.

  ‘Sir, what can I get you?’ Khaled flashes a grin, showing a mouthful of teeth. Virginia turns and smiles, and this helps his dented ego a little, but he would still be better off alone right now.

  ‘Let me buy you a drink. A real alcoholic drink,’ she says, and she pats the bar stool next to hers.

  If he could think of an excuse, he would. He stands without moving, racking his brain, but nothing will come.

  ‘You are Greek, right, so how about a metaxa? Do you have any metaxa, Khaled?’

  ‘Ah, such a shame, no metaxa, but we have beer.’ He nods his head vigorously.

  ‘What happened to the law of Islam?’ Miltos strikes out. ‘Has no one any integrity around here?’

  ‘It is not such a strong beer, but very refreshing.’ Khaled’s smile remains intact and from under the counter he produces a can with Arabic words printed on its shiny metal surface. Miltos steps forward to look at this anomaly more closely, and sure enough it has been produced and canned in Jordan. He shakes his head in disbelief and scorn, but he cracks it open anyway and takes a long hard pull of the cold and slightly fizzy liquid.

  ‘Horrible, isn’t it?’ Virginia says. Hers is in a glass with ice cubes.

  ‘It’s not the best,’ he admits, but he drains the can. Before he has replaced it on the bar top Khaled has produced another, and without a thought Miltos snaps the ring pull and drinks again. The beer has the desired effect and Skinner and his little boy cronies no longer have the impact they did ten minutes ago.

  ‘So, are you tempting fate, or did you run out of clean T-shirts?’ He allows his finger to touch the hem of the short sleeve of her white embroidered shirt, inviting her to recall their last conversation.

  ‘Well, it did occur to me that I could do with a bit of wisdom in my life.’ She lets her eyelids flutter a little. The obviousness of the gesture highlights just how young she is.

  Chapter 29

  It is tempting to flirt back, and it would be familiar ground, somewhere that feels safe. Her youth would make it so easy to impress her. He had guessed at mid-thirties, but now he is talking to her, looking at her up close, he sees she could be even younger than that. She is a good twenty years his junior. A to
uch of guilt flits through Miltos’s heart. Would releasing his well-practised charm on her make him any different to Skinner and his gang, who took advantage of his naivety, his stupidity, his own subconscious need to be accepted, for their own ends? Not really. Both their actions and his, if he chooses to flirt with Virginia, are a form of manipulation of another person for personal gain.

  ‘Well, that depends on what you call wisdom.’ He answers her seriously but does not meet her proffered gaze. Instead he looks at the bottle in his hand.

  The beer might taste better cold, in a glass with ice cubes, but Khaled has left the bar area and is arranging the room keys on the board behind the reception desk. The hotel owner is whistling a Western song and seems to be in a world of his own. Miltos chooses not to disturb him.

  ‘Oh, I think wisdom comes from experience – maybe we call people wise when they have knowledge others don’t possess? Something that can only be gained with time and age.’ She uncrosses her legs and crosses them the other way. Miltos is reminded of a film he once saw, in which the protagonist used this same movement to distract the policemen who were questioning her. It does not distract him. If anything, he feels a twinge of boredom. Her finger traces the rim of her glass and Miltos tries to remember the last time he saw someone behave towards him with such cheap clichéd moves. He wants to laugh, but her actions seem sad, and it would offend her, so he just smiles as if he is interested in what she is saying. Then the words she just used make their impact.

  ‘What do you mean, “age”?’ He tries to keep any edge out of his voice.

  ‘Well, there’s the thing, isn’t it? My pop was about my age when he left home. Just walked out, never came back. He had the wisdom, even at that age, to realise what a loser my mom was. Yeah, wisdom.’

  She gazes out of the window into the darkening night. ‘It took me twenty years to catch up with him and realise that there was no saving that woman, and I was damned if I was going to go down with her. I tried to help. Oh, believe me, I tried. From my last year at school until the day I left her, I had a job, I earned the money to pay the rent – but in the early days I gave the money straight to her.’

  She laughs – a dry, harsh, lifeless sound. ‘Course, the rent never got paid. She just drank it away and we moved from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. So then I wised up, and I paid the rent direct. I bought the food direct and I tried to get her to rehab. That was my life, aged sixteen. Keeping life together and getting her to rehab.’

  Virginia drinks her beer and looks around. ‘Khaled?’ she calls, and he scuttles around the reception counter, across the mop-streaked brown-tiled floor and, with a theatrical flourish, pulls two cans of beer from below the counter. Miltos waves his back underneath. The stuff is not nice and he has no desire to get drunk. What for?

  Virginia doesn’t seem to notice that she is drinking alone. Khaled leaves and she continues her story. ‘I wish I had been wise enough to leave sooner, but wisdom comes with age, this is my point.’

  Her words are slightly slurred and the hand that she had been using to fiddle with her room key on the bar top – number twenty-two, he notices – comes to rest on his knee.

  ‘So …’ She leans towards him, her chin down so she is looking up at him, all fluttering eyelashes. ‘A little age and wisdom in my life would not go amiss.’

  And there she is, half drunk, with tanned skin and shiny hair, her chin now lifted and her lips pursed ready for the old man to kiss her. He is being lured into being her lover, but what she really wants him to be is her protector and wise father. Is the offer for a night, a week, until she leaves the scuba camp? Or is she looking for more of a commitment? There is no doubting her beauty, her clear eyes and glowing, youthful skin. But where is the mystery, the experiences that have moulded her as a person, the interesting angles to her personality?

  Back in that Greek village, the woman in the kiosk had a majesty about her that told of the struggles she had overcome and the depth of her character. The other woman, the one in the blue dress in the shop, had a twinkle in her eyes that told him she had learnt to be resilient in life, that she could take a tough situation and find the humour in it to keep herself buoyant. She would never be reliant on anyone. How much more attractive those attributes appear compared to a superficial beauty and a sad story.

  Virginia isn’t just a blank canvas. She has struggled, as she has just told him, with her mama, and no doubt with her baba. To walk out and leave her to survive and cope with a drunk mother! What a swine. But Virginia’s struggles manifest themselves in her as a needy quality. She gives off the aura of someone waiting to be rescued. That was what was so intriguing about those Greek village women. They did not want rescuing; instead, they gave the impression that they wanted to play, to have a bit of fun. And thinking about it now, isn’t that what has been the problem with his more recent relationships? None of them worked on a level that allowed fun! Nearly all of them were with younger women, and they all wanted to be rescued, one way or another.

  Take Lana from Iceland, whom he had met on a plane some ten, maybe fifteen years ago now. The plane was delayed five hours so it was natural that they talked to each other, and she had given all the appearance of being independent: she owned a business that involved international travel and was financially independent. But she was an only child and it was not long into the relationship before it became apparent that she wanted to be rescued from her loneliness and a future in which she imagined herself left on the shelf, a carer to her elderly parents. Kim from England, on the other hand, was really searching for financial rescue. Her credit cards were maxed out, and she was on the run from rent she owed. How was it possible to run up so much debt on credit cards? That’s right – hadn’t she been using new ones to pay off old ones? What she originally owed had tripled, she said, from the interest that she could not pay. He had done what he could, but he could not change her exuberant nature. Kim would likely always be in debt, and he left her, knowing it was pointless to stay – he could not change her.

  But those village women! The more he thinks of them, the more he wishes he was there with them now, flirting with one, then the other. Who knows, maybe one of them could be “the one”. With this thought, he is taken back over thirty years to Saros, to his first love. How sure his emotions had been, intensified by the threat of military service looming in the near future. It makes him sigh, and his sigh becomes a yawn.

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what is missing in my life right now,’ Miltos says, easing off the bar stool, slowly enough for her to retract her hand without embarrassment. She looks at him with eager anticipation. ‘Sleep,’ he concludes, and with a touch of his finger under her chin he walks out of the bar.

  ‘Oh sir, sir, your name for the bar bill?’ Khaled is quick to ask as he passes the reception.

  ‘Skinner,’ says Miltos without hesitation. ‘Room fourteen. And put the girl’s beers on my tab too.’

  Chapter 30

  The sun shines through the flimsy, coarse weave of the hotel’s curtains and Miltos rolls over to see that Josh’s bed is empty. He levers himself over the edge of his own mattress, letting his spine straighten as his feet hit the cold tiles. With a yawn and a stretch, it occurs to him that if they are to see all of Petra they should have set off before the sun was even over the horizon. Immediately after this conscious thought comes a heaviness that he recognises as boredom. It is a sensation that was not there the last time he visited this part of the world and it catches him by surprise.

  He blinks and rubs the palm of his hand across his face. The nearest bathroom is down the hall, by the girls’ room. After pulling on his trousers and shirt, he steps out of the natural light in his room into the dimly lit, windowless corridor and pads to the open door. Just as he reaches the bathroom and the smell of chlorine hits him he sees Josh come out of another door, along the corridor, closing it gently behind him. Room twenty-two.

  He sighs. He is not so much disheartened by her fickle nature, but, rath
er, experiencing a general disappointment, not only for Virginia but also for Josh, Skinner and his buddies, for all of the younger generation who are so busy grabbing at the thrills and spills close at hand that there is no discrimination. They will take whatever is offered, whatever is available. Surely there is no pride in that?

  As he releases the cheap beer of the previous evening and then swills his face in tepid tap water, he is almost at the point of just walking away, leaving this group to itself. The boredom has grown into a disillusionment, and everything he is doing, the whole reason for his journey here, seems shallow and futile. But despite the urge to abandon this path, his own sense of decency dictates that he must complete this trip, at least – ensure that everyone gets back to camp safely. He must play the part he has agreed to, even if he has no respect for the others.

  Back in their room, Josh is spraying aftershave into his unwashed armpits. He is grinning to himself and casts a sly glance at Miltos, obviously waiting for his roommate to ask where he was the night before so he can spill out the details of his conquest. Miltos is not sure who he feels more pity for – Virginia or Josh.

  ‘We should have set out earlier,’ he says. ‘It will be past midday by the time we reach the Temple of Dushares, and it’s a hard uphill walk to the monastery. It will be too hot.’

  Josh is stuffing things into his bag, his grin gone now as the reality of his role for the day is brought into focus.

  It’s another hour before they set off, and as soon as they reach the visitors centre their pace slows and they lose first one and then another of the group into the shops there. Burdened with cheap keepsakes, they finally enter the canyon, but here, even in this late hour of the morning, they are in shade. The canyon walls are so high and they are like ants following the trail.

  Miltos breathes a sigh at the sense of freedom that the huge rock walls on either side give him. It is the boldness and magnitude of nature that has this effect on him, like the sea, and like the plain of orange groves outside Saros, around that little village in Greece. The canyon echoes the childish calls and shouts of Skinner and his friends. They catch up with and overtake other groups of tourists who are walking the same way, some of whom are stopping to photograph every rock, others just struggling to walk in the heat, rolling from foot to foot and wiping sweat from dripping brows. They are easy prey for the local men who are leading their camels and offering rides. Miltos anticipates the first glimpse of the Treasury, the first and most impressive of the facades that have been dug out of the rose-coloured sandstone. So large, so grand, it took his breath away when he first saw it.