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After he’d gone, the Meltemi blew in from the north-east and battered the island remorselessly for seven days. My skin withered and shrivelled under its relentless onslaught. I started applying a layer of petroleum jelly as a barrier to lock in whatever moisture remained in my shrunken face. Now I looked like a shiny, white, cadaverous mummy.
Every night I’d scan the mirror for signs of damage. The line between my eyebrows that I’d botoxed before I left (another small triumph for Bridgette) was starting to re-emerge.
Ghastly stuff Botox. My friend Rene assured me it was just a gentle plumping of the skin with a product found in nature, but I Googled it and found out it was a concoction of vile toxins harvested from the Clostridium Botulinum bacteria, in other words Botulism - an illness so dangerous that each case is considered a public health emergency. By that stage my face was becoming a public health emergency, so I decided to go ahead with it anyway. Even though I was totally revolted and morally opposed, by then the line on my forehead was starting to resemble the Bristol Channel, so I had no choice. As I lay on the dentist’s chair – yes, unbelievably Dr Katz my dentist administered the shots – I could picture the poisons seeping towards my neuromuscular junctions and immobilising the acetylcholine chemical messengers. (As usual I had done way too much research). But hey-ho, if botulism was strong enough to paralyse a man, then it was good enough to paralyse my face.
The effects were remarkable, but sadly only lasted a few months. Rene suggested collagen implants, but I went right off that idea after I found out on Google that the Chinese were exporting human collagen extracted from dead convicts. Definitely a step too far.
That was then. After three weeks of Iraklia’s harsh sun I was ready to personally kill the convicts and extract their collagen with my own bare hands.
-Chapter Two - (#uaf1feacd-89e4-54e6-b1e2-c11801fd14f7)
Heavy make-up can make a woman look much older. Especially round the eyes, it’s important to taper eyeliner toward the edges. I read on a beauty web forum, that nothing is more aging than a thick bovine line of colour on the bottom lid.
With Andrew still in Brussels, I faced interminable evenings on my own, so I’d taken to going to a local restaurant for a drink in the evening – and the extra care with my make-up was because someone there had caught my interest.
Kikis was a lively restaurant in the Chora where the locals hung out. I chanced upon it by mistake one night when I snuck into town to buy some fags. Yes, yes – smoking is just about the most aging plague you could set upon your skin – but something about the island just made me want to smoke. Perhaps it was the small village of bohemian travellers camped out on Livadi beach. Perhaps it was because everyone in Greece seemed to smoke. Who knows, but I was feeling reckless, and smoking was the only thing I could think of to stick it to Andrew for abandoning me. He abhorred the habit. In fact it was Andrew who made me give up shortly after we’d met. Another on his list of ‘minor adjustments’ that I spinelessly went along with.
Kikis was rocking when I pulled up outside in my dune buggy. Apparently I’d been living in a different time zone. The Greeks ran a split-shift: up early for fresh bread and chores, back home for lunch and a siesta, out again at night. Two days for the price of one. I’d been sleeping till ten and leaving the house at midday. No wonder the island seemed empty.
That first night as I walked up the stairs to Kikis I felt this overwhelming sense of relief to see so many smiling people. Even the vulgar assault of colour felt welcoming. Blue chairs, yellow table clothes and red candles. Purple bougainvillea draped from the ceiling and green vines hung from the balustrades. There was even a parrot with violently clashing feathers parked plumb in the middle of the room. He shuffled around kicking bits of straw and shit onto the floor with gay abandon and no one seemed to mind. The waiters picked up the shit on their shoes and walked it through the restaurant, stepping over dogs on route. Cats stalked along the railings and forked food off people’s plates when they weren’t looking. It was a health and safety shockfest – but also the first signs of life I’d seen in a while, so I was not going to be put off by a few rabid animals and a bit of parrot poo.
I wandered in unnoticed and came to a standstill in front of a tableau of fresh fish displayed on a bed of ice. In the centre was a large pissed-off-looking Sea Bass with a cigarette hanging from its lips.
‘Ha ha,’ a cheerful voice said behind me. ‘You like my smoking fish?’
I turned round to see a vaguely familiar face. It was Mr Potatohead from my Goddaughter’s Toy Story DVD.
‘Kalispera!’ he said jovially. ‘Welcome to my restaurant!’
He stuck out a massive paw and enveloped my hand in his.
‘You looking like my most beautiful of actress’.
‘Really? Who’s that?’
‘Goldie Horrrn of course!’
He turned and shouted loudly towards the kitchen. ‘Sofia, Sofia!’
A tired woman with dimpled cheeks came out smiling and wiping her hands on a dishtowel.
‘Look, look! Goldie Horrrn, no?’
She laughed warmly and nodded her head. ‘Neh, neh.’
Of course the idea was absurd. I looked nothing like Goldie Hawn, apart from my blonde hair, which was inherited from Scandinavian grandparents. I did have blue eyes though, and apple cheeks which I hated.
The two of them prattled on in Greek for a bit with the word’s ‘Goldie’ and ‘Horrrn’ surfacing every so often as they nodded and smiled and looked me up and down.
‘My husband, he like American movie stars.’
She pointed to the parrot. ‘Barbara Streisand.’
The bird shouted ‘yaso’ and bobbed up and down as if it understood and they both laughed heartily.
‘But our Barbara Streisand is a boy!’
‘Ha ha,’ laughed her husband merrily.
I asked if they sold cigarettes.
‘Of course, of course but you must have a drink first. On the house! ’
Mr Potatohead led me to a bar where a small bow-legged man was spooning out dishes of olives with a smouldering fag hanging from his mouth, not dissimilar to the fish. So much for the EU ban on smoking in the workplace.
‘Christos, give my friend a drink,’ boomed Mr Potatohead, pulling forward a barstool and thumping a bowl of olives down in front of me before retreating back into the restaurant. Christos gave me a cheeky smile and revealed two missing front teeth.
‘My name Christos’ he said offering a plump hairy hand.
‘Hello Christos’ I said responding to his hearty shake by nearly falling off my stool. ‘I’m Faith’.
‘Fat?’
‘Erm…no. Faith’.
‘You no fat!’
‘Oh…no…erm. Thank you. I know I’m not fat. At least, ha ha, I hope I’m not. You can call me by my nickname, Fay.’
‘Nick name?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Your name Nick?’
‘No no. Fay! Oh never mind.
We both knew we’d exhausted that line of conversation and I looked round nervously while he continued to grin at me like a maniac.
‘First time in Iraklia?’ he asked, carefully measuring a double shot of raki into a glass and adding iced water. I smiled and nodded as the clear liquid clouded milky-white.
‘You like?’
‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘But too hot.’
He nodded cheerfully and concurred. ‘Eeez wery wery hot!’
‘And windy,’ I added.
‘No so wendy,’ he replied. ‘Sometimes.’
He loaded up a pile of empty boxes and disappeared down some stone steps into a cellar. I looked around self-consciously and sipped at the raki. It slid down my throat and left a pleasant liquorish taste on my tongue.
Halfway through my second one I started to relax and enjoy my surroundings a bit more. Kikis was at the top of a cobbled road overlooking the steep cliffs of the harbour and the rest of the Chora. In truth it was no more than a wooden terrace with a tiny kitchen attached to one end, but the vined walls gave it a feeling of permanence, as if the ancient bougainvillea was enough of a structure without the annoying complication of bricks and mortar. At the far end stood the family’s living quarters, cordoned off by a row of pot plants.
Tables were occupied by a variety of clientele. Families spanning four generations, romantic couples, old men playing backgammon. In the distance, the twinkling lights of Schoinoussa blinked halting Morse code across the purple sea.
I wasn’t the only loner at the bar. At the other end, a woman in her late twenties was industriously threading beads onto a leather thong by the light of a candle. Her forehead was creased into a frown of concentration and wisps of blonde hair hung from a turban coiled around her head. She stopped to stretch out her neck and examine her handiwork before carefully laying it alongside several others in a wooden display case. As she took a slug from her beer, her wide eyes caught mine, green and moody. I blushed and smiled but she just continued staring over the rim of her beer with a kind of hostile indifference. I popped an olive into my mouth and pretended I didn’t care but it turned out to be a discarded pip and I nearly cracked a tooth before gagging silently into my raki.
A motorbike pulled up outside and there was a commotion as several people shouted in delight and waved to the new arrivals over the railings. Two men appeared in the doorway and Mr Potatohead hurried over to greet them with warm hugs and hearty backslaps. Even the dogs got up to say hello.
The new arrivals shook various hands as they crossed the restaurant towards the bar, looking for all the world like a couple of local celebrities. Identical gaits and easy smiles meant they were presumably related, like everyone else on the island. My heart caught in my throat as the taller one approached. He was beautiful. Sinewy and high-browed, like one of the javelin throwers on ancient Greek earthenware. He looked at me briefly with deep-set brown eyes before slapping his hand on the bar and ordering a round of drinks from Christos who was practically gurning with happiness. The second man made his way over to Turban Girl and kissed her on the forehead.
‘Yaso,’ he said.
‘Ja,’ she replied, smiling for the first time. ‘Griss dich.’
So she was German.
The din in the restaurant had risen by about ten decibels and, as Javelin Man topped up people’s glasses with raki, it got even louder. Christos was drying glasses next to me. He smiled and nodded towards the two men.
‘Urian and Gregorie. Good boys’.
‘Brothers?’
‘Cousins.’
I tried not to sound too interested. ‘Are they from the island?’
‘Grow up Iraklia,’ he said. ‘But work Athens now’.
To my embarrassment Christos hailed the shorter one over. ‘Gregorie! Come, come!’
Gregorie picked up the bottle of Raki and came to sit next to me.
He was shorter and squarer than Javelin Man. They both looked about my age.
‘Kalimera,’ he said with a friendly smile. ‘Germany?’
‘No,’ I replied, smiling back. ‘English.’
‘Ah. Europe’s Special Member,’ he said, using his fingers as quotation marks to emphasise ‘special’.
I blushed, unsure of what to say.
‘So,’ he said, pouring a raki and pushing it my way. ‘Mrs Thatcher, she was right, no? The single currency was stupido.’
Internally I sighed. Not the frigging credit crunch again. In Andrew’s absence I’d been enjoying some respite from its endless white noise. I looked at the smiling man in front of me. His earnest gaze swept my face looking for signs of where I stood on the issue. Did he want a personal apology for us opting out of the Eurozone?
‘Things bad in Athens at the moment?’ was all I could muster. He shook his head and took a swig of his Raki.
‘People have gone mad. Rioting. Fighting. Burning things.’
‘Why are they rioting?’ I asked.
‘Because Greeks are stupid,’ said a voice behind me.
A warm body reached between us and grasped the bottle with strong brown hands. I made space to my left but Javelin Man slumped into a barstool on the other side of Gregorie.
‘The Greek people, we choosed a bunch of monkeys for a government and now we are angry they no do magic tricks.’
‘My cousin Urian he thinks the world is now come to the end,’ said Gregorie laughing.
Urian muttered something in Greek and downed his drink. ‘Maybe not the world but Greece, of course yes.’
This conversation was not going the way I’d planned.
‘And now we are in the shit up to here,’ he said, raising an elegant hand to his forehead to demonstrate just how deep in the shit he thought they were. ‘Our country is on sale. Foreigners, they come to buy us. The Dutch, the Germans.’
He turned the full beam of his brown eyes directly on to me.
‘The English, they will all come here to buy us,’ he said bitterly. He picked up his helmet and got up to go.
Gregorie sighed theatrically. ‘Another day screwed by politics. On the ferry people throw themselves overboard when Urian start talking.’
He finished his drink and turned to follow his cousin, waving his goodbyes on his way out.
Mr Potatohead came to clear away their glasses.
‘Don’t worry about Urian,’ he said kindly. ‘He’s just pissed they must be to sell his farm. His family there for two hundred years.’
‘Two hundred years,’ I repeated to myself.
‘He will get over it.’
As I heard the angry roar of his bike flaring into the distance I doubted that very much.
-Chapter Three- (#uaf1feacd-89e4-54e6-b1e2-c11801fd14f7)
After that I felt less inclined to house-hunt. I hung around the villa, took myself on long walks and read my book. On day four, our agent, Theodora, turned up on my doorstep frothing at the mouth. She was an annoying little woman. A five-foot troll with a screeching voice that escalated to a glass-shattering pitch if you tried to talk over her. She wanted to know why I’d not been returning her calls. I lied about being busy, but it was obvious the little enthusiasm I’d previously mustered had evaporated entirely. Our excruciating house-hunting expeditions thus far had amounted to no more than driving round the island in her Opel Corsa and stopping here and there to extort information from locals. She wasn’t even a proper estate agent, but since Ajax was a local politician, it apparently entitled her to stick her fat fingers in every pie.
Part of the problem was the lack of sale stock. The island’s permanent population lived in houses so poor and run-down no one wanted to buy them, and the smattering of plusher holiday homes rarely came on the market. Andrew was convinced that would change as the country slid deeper into recession but the longer I was on the island the less I believed him. The people had an almost familial bond with the place. Generations of families descended there for their annual holidays to homes owned by grandparents and great-grandparents before them. You got the feeling they’d rather starve than give up Iraklia. Me circling like a buzzard waiting to pick at their bones wasn’t going to change that.
Theodora felt differently. The scent of money had morphed her into a truffling pig, digging deeper and deeper into the undergrowth until she excitedly announced she had unearthed a whopper.
I knew before she even told me – Urian’s farm.
Unbeknownst to her I’d stalked it on Google Maps several times already. It wasn’t difficult to find. A few ‘naïve’ comments to Christos about ‘that side of the island’, and within minutes I had him drawing up a full-sized map on a napkin and gleefully marking out Urian’s place with a cross. His eyes twinkled as he did it, so it’s quite possible my ‘naïve’ comments weren’t as disguised as I thought. Anyway, by the time Theadora came grunting in with her two-paged sales pitch, I’d already scanned the place on satellite, hiked past it along the beach front, and driven up the gate on the pretence of being lost.
