You Then, Me Now

by Nick Alexander

  ‘I wouldn’t do it again,’ was Mum’s verdict when we finally stepped back outside. ‘But I’m glad we came.’

  ‘I just can’t get my head around how old it all is,’ I said. ‘I’m still struggling with the fact that people made those beautiful pots more than three thousand years ago. I mean, they were really pretty. People were making art three thousand seven hundred years ago!’

  ‘I suppose it’s because our calendar begins at the birth of Christ,’ Mum said. ‘So we tend to think that’s when everything started. But it didn’t at all, did it?’

  ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘No, it’s weird.’

  ‘Does everyone use the same, you know, start date as us? I mean, what about Muslims and Buddhists and what have you?’ Mum asked. ‘They don’t count their years from the birth of Christ, do they?’

  ‘No, there are others. I read a thing about it,’ I told her. ‘There’s a Sanskrit one that begins three thousand years before Christ. And I think the Islamic one actually starts later.’

  ‘Gosh,’ Mum said. ‘You’re a clever little sausage, aren’t you?’

  ‘Not really,’ I laughed. ‘I just read a thing about it online.’

  We ate a couple of rather average salads in Akrotiri whilst being harassed by a group of beautiful but hungry kittens, then, unable to think of any other way to survive the heat, we decided to head for the sea. A quick glance at the map revealed there was a famous red beach just ten minutes away and, as this was impressive enough that Mum remembered it from twenty-odd years earlier, we decided that’s where we would go.

  Riding at midday was like pointing a massive hairdryer at your body, and the car park, when we got there, was a shimmering mirage of pure heat. We parked up the bike and, sweating profusely, clambered across some rocks until the beach came into view.

  I could understand why Mum remembered it. The sand was a crazy red ochre colour and the sea crystal-clear and tinted with turquoise. The contrast between the two colours side by side seemed almost unreasonable. We paid for a parasol, but because even in the shade the day felt parching, we changed and ran into the sea.

  Other than asking if I’d had a nice time, Mum had been pretty discreet about Baruch. We’d never really had much vocabulary for talking about anything that was intimate, so that didn’t really surprise me. But I’d been hoping she would ask because I’d worked out a way that I could use it to lead to discussing my father.

  Eventually, sitting at the water’s edge with our feet in the sea, her curiosity got the better of her. ‘So how was yesterday?’ she asked. ‘You haven’t said much about it.’

  ‘Like I said,’ I told her. ‘It was nice.’

  ‘And that’s it, is it?’ she asked, picking up a pebble and tossing it. ‘Nice?’

  I proceeded to tell her, pretty much verbatim, everything that had happened. There wasn’t really anything to hide, after all.

  I told her who had been there and the things we had talked about. We debated, for a bit, how low the Greek minimum wage might be. And as we were reaching the logical end of the conversation, I added, ‘You know, Baruch said his uncle used to be a real Romeo character. Seducing all the ladies. The holidaymakers, I mean.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ Mum said.

  ‘Meaning?’ I asked.

  ‘I just mean that if he looked anything like your Baruch, that wouldn’t have been too difficult.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘Well, he isn’t my Baruch.’

  ‘Isn’t he?’

  ‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Anyway, that left me wondering . . . was my father Greek?’ The question had been on the tip of my tongue all afternoon but I’d been too scared to ask it. Now I had done so, I felt as if I had lobbed a grenade along the beach. I wanted to cover my head with my hands in case it exploded.

  Mum frowned deeply and sighed. She pushed her toes into the wet sand. ‘Why would you ask that?’ she said.

  I shrugged. ‘It’s not that unusual a thing to want to know, is it? What nationality your father is. Was.’

  ‘It’s just that it’s never interested you before,’ Mum said.

  ‘Never interested me?’ I repeated, a sense of outrage swelling within me.

  ‘I mean, you’ve never asked me anything like that before,’ Mum said.

  ‘The fact that I’ve never dared ask it hardly means it doesn’t interest me,’ I told her. ‘Like I said, it’s not exactly an unusual thing to want to know.’

  ‘Well, maybe . . .’ Mum said, starting to sound angry, ‘I don’t want to talk about it. Maybe that isn’t such an unusual thing to happen either.’

  I realised in that instant that this was what she had always done. She had trained me from the earliest age that it was not OK to talk about this. And by teaching me that mentioning my father would cause a spike of discomfort, she had effectively stopped me from doing so.

  ‘So was he Greek?’ I now asked, clenching my fists at the effort required to resist dropping the subject as I had every other time in the face of Mum’s malaise. ‘Could my father have been Baruch’s uncle, for example?’

  ‘What?’ Mum whistled, suddenly angry. ‘What a ridiculous thing to ask! You know full well he died.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘So how could he be Baruch’s uncle?’

  I shrugged. ‘Baruch’s uncle might be dead,’ I lied. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask.’

  ‘You didn’t ask . . .’ Mum repeated mockingly.

  ‘But why not just answer the question?’ I said, thinking that seeing as we had got this far, it would be a shame to give in now. ‘Why not just tell me where he came from? What could possibly be so complicated about that?’

  Mum stood. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have brought you with me,’ she said meanly, avoiding eye contact. And without another word, she strutted off along the shoreline.

  The day was ruined, of course. And I was in no doubt this was all my fault. I understood perfectly that this was my punishment for having asked directly about my father.

  She walked to the end of the beach and sat upon a rock looking out to sea. It was more than an hour before she returned and dived straight into her book.

  I was pretending to read mine as well, but I couldn’t really concentrate. I was too busy feeling angry. I was too busy thinking about the fact that she had said she wished she hadn’t brought me here, running the phrase over and over, rubbing salt into the wound. And I was too busy wondering how such a simple thing could be so damned complicated that she would prefer all this drama rather than simply answering the question.

  We barely exchanged a word for the rest of the afternoon, so as soon as we got home I phoned Baruch to tell him I could meet him earlier than planned.

  He told me to be at the minimart at eight and I wondered how I was going to survive another hour in the company of my petulant, sulking mother. But by the time I had finished my phone call, she was gone.

  Mum did not return, and when the time came for me to lock up the room, she wasn’t answering her phone either. Though we’d had far worse arguments in the past (especially when I was in my teens), I felt surprisingly upset about this one as I climbed the stairs to meet Baruch.

  But call me shallow, because one look at his tanned face was enough to cheer me up considerably. He was wearing an open-necked denim shirt with rolled-up sleeves and a pair of bum-hugging jeans. I suddenly remembered that I was spending the evening with him. I’d been so distracted by my argument with Mum that I’d forgotten that gorgeous fact.

  He locked up the shop and asked me if I was hungry, so I told him the truth, that I was starving, and thinking about the money issue again, I offered to buy him dinner.

  I don’t think Baruch’s pride could even consider such a concept. ‘There’s a special restaurant,’ he said. ‘Not expensive at all. I’d be happy to take you if you like the idea?’

  ‘Why is it special?’ I asked. I was imagining the horror of a McDonald’s lurking somewhere on the island.

  ‘Only Gre
ek people go there,’ he said.

  ‘But they’ll let me in?’

  Baruch laughed. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘You’re with me.’

  Virtually glowing at the thought that I was with him, I climbed onto the back of his bike and we roared off along the main road to Fira. Just before we reached the edge of town, he turned down a winding dirt road.

  Baruch’s special restaurant turned out to be in someone’s house. It was a most peculiar set-up. The house was at the end of the dirt track and until you arrived in front of it, there were no indications that it was even there. From the front, other than the fact that there were ten cars parked along the side of the road, plus four or five scooters, there was nothing to show that this was anything other than a normal family home. But when you rounded the corner of the building, the rear terrace, which had been turned into a makeshift dining area, came into view. There were a dozen or so plastic tables and seating for thirty or forty people. Half of the tables were already occupied, as Baruch had predicted, by an exclusively Greek crowd, many of whom were about our age.

  The ‘restaurant’ appeared to be run by a white-haired couple who both looked too old to be working.

  ‘Can I speak?’ I whispered once the husband had seated us.

  Baruch laughed. ‘Why do you think you can’t speak?’ he asked.

  ‘Because they’ll realise I’m not Greek,’ I said.

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ Baruch told me. ‘They know already, believe me. And it’s fine. You’re here with me.’ I wondered if I’d asked the question just to hear him say those words again.

  ‘How come this place is so secret?’ I asked. ‘Why don’t they want tourists?’

  ‘Well, it’s not, you know, very legal,’ Baruch explained. ‘With the crisis, everyone is a bit poor, yes?’

  ‘Even here? Even in Santorini?’

  Baruch nodded.

  ‘It doesn’t look poor. The place looks awash with tourist cash.’

  ‘Well, these people,’ Baruch said, nodding towards the house, ‘are retired. And the money they get from the state . . . How do you call this?’

  ‘Their pension?’

  ‘Yes, their pension. It has gone down by half. More than half. And the bills, the electricity, the taxes, these have all gone up. So . . .’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘So they’ve opened a secret restaurant.’

  Baruch nodded. ‘Their children are in Athens, too. So this way they can send them some money, I expect.’

  ‘It’s a great idea,’ I said. ‘But surely they’d make more money running a restaurant for tourists?’

  ‘Yeah, but this is cash, you know?’ Baruch said, raising an eyebrow. ‘So no taxes. If they were taking business from the other places, people would complain. But those people have to eat somewhere too. The people in the hotels. The cleaners. The policemen . . . So this is a special place for them. Greek food at Greek prices.’

  ‘For Greek people,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I feel very honoured to be able to come here then, so thank you.’

  ‘You are welcome,’ Baruch told me with a wink.

  The restaurant had no menu and no set prices. There was a fixed three-course meal and a choice of red or white wine but that was it. On leaving, you left what you wanted to leave, a tax-free gift to the owners, but Baruch said that everyone knew the correct amount was ten euros a head. It was an absolute bargain.

  Tentatively, not wanting to embarrass him, I asked Baruch how much the Greek minimum wage was. I needn’t have worried because he chatted about it quite freely, explaining that it was about six hundred euros a month, while most people’s pensions were less than five hundred. Because his uncle let him stay free of charge, Baruch was earning even less. His uncle paid him four hundred a month, he said.

  I didn’t dare try to work out what the miserly hourly rate might be, because as far as I could see Baruch was doing twelve-hour days, six days a week. But I certainly understood a little better why a fifteen-euro pina colada might seem out of reach.

  Our first course arrived: two dishes, one of tzatziki and another of garlicky aubergine salad, served with little triangles of some kind of flatbread.

  ‘So how was Akrotiri?’ Baruch asked as he dished up. ‘Did you go?’

  I told him all about our trip to the museum. Trying to sound clever, I think, I explained about the other more ancient calendars too, but he seemed to know all about them already, and went on to tell me about various Greek philosophers who had been writing lengthy discourses on philosophy in around 400 BC.

  ‘And your mother?’ Baruch asked, once we had reached the logical end of that conversation. ‘Where is she tonight?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘and I don’t care that much.’

  Baruch pulled a face and I became aware that to a Greek guy who clearly loved his family, that might have sounded particularly unattractive. So I reassured him that I loved my mother but admitted we had argued. ‘It happens from time to time,’ I said.

  ‘Do you want to talk about this, or not?’ he asked.

  I nodded. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yes, I think so.’ And I proceeded, between occasional mouthfuls of our second course (a weird but delicious dish of spaghetti and aubergine, beans and feta cheese) to tell him the whole story.

  When I reached the end, he was staring at me strangely. He had finished his dish long since and had his hands pressed together.

  ‘What?’ I asked, realising I was behind on the eating front and shovelling food into my mouth.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t know what?’ I asked through a full mouth.

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  I frowned and, when I could politely speak again, said, ‘About what?’

  Baruch cleared his throat. ‘Look . . . you know I took my grandmother to the doctor yesterday, right?’

  ‘Oh God, I’m sorry. Is she OK?’ I asked, blushing at my own selfishness for not even having asked.

  ‘Oh yes, she’s fine. She just likes to go sometimes. It reassures her, you know? Old people . . .’

  ‘Well, good. I . . . I’m glad she’s OK.’

  ‘But we had a long wait – it is always like this at the doctor – so I told her your story. And she remembers an accident. I’m thinking it might be the same one.’

  ‘She does?’ I ran my tongue across my teeth and leaned in closer. ‘But that was years ago!’

  ‘I know,’ Baruch told me. ‘I was surprised too. But Santorini’s not such a big place. Not so much happens. And my mother was pregnant with me. It happened a few weeks before I was born. So that helped her remember too.’

  My mouth had fallen open in shock. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. ‘So, when was this? When is your birthday?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s in two weeks, actually,’ Baruch said. ‘The fifteenth.’

  ‘And what year?’ I asked.

  ‘Ninety-four,’ Baruch said. ‘Fifteenth of September, 1994.’

  ‘God, that’s incredible,’ I said. ‘The timing fits. I was born in 1995.’

  Baruch counted on his fingers, then said, ‘May?’

  ‘Twenty-first of April,’ I corrected. ‘I was a bit early.’

  ‘So, you see,’ Baruch said. ‘Who needs Google when you have a nosey grandmother?’

  ‘Did she remember anything else?’ I asked. I could feel the blood draining from my face. ‘His name? His nationality? What exactly happened?’

  Baruch shook his head slowly. ‘It was just a story on the island. A gossip. But he was English, she said. He went off the cliff up near Oia.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘That’s amazing.’

  ‘She said . . .’ Baruch started. But then he visibly interrupted himself. ‘No. That’s about all, really.’

  ‘Please,’ I insisted. ‘You were going to say something else. What were you going to say?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Baruch said, looking uncomfortable.

  ‘Ple
ase,’ I said again. ‘I’ve been waiting twenty-three years for this and my mother won’t tell me anything.’

  Baruch pulled a pained expression and scratched his ear. ‘Well, it may not be the same guy, of course.’

  ‘The dates tally.’

  The husband appeared from the house at that moment. He glanced at my plate and spoke to Baruch in Greek before returning indoors. I thought he sounded a bit annoyed.

  ‘You need to eat,’ Baruch told me. ‘He thinks you don’t like the food.’

  While I wolfed down the rest of my pasta, Baruch told me what he knew, which was basically that my father had apparently been a bit of a lairy bastard. And that it had taken five people to remove him from a local taverna when he had got into a fight. He said no one had been surprised that he had crashed the car. He had been drunk most of the time and all the locals had thought he was trouble. And as he told me all of this, I thought back to Mum’s comments on alcoholism, and once again, she suddenly seemed to make a little more sense to me.

  But my father’s sudden demotion from astronaut to drunken bar brawler had also left me feeling distinctly queasy.

  Once the meal was over, Baruch insisted on paying. We walked back around to the front of the house where the bike was parked. It was almost dark and the only light came from a streetlamp whose feeble glow was partially obscured by the thousands of insects it had attracted.

  ‘Do I get a kiss?’ Baruch asked, as a bat swooped overhead, presumably to feast on the insects. ‘For dinner?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, stepping towards him. But though the kiss felt perfectly nice, the truth was that my mind was elsewhere. I was trying to think how to broach the subject of my father once again with my mother. I was trying, and failing, to come up with any kind of strategy that would not automatically lead to a fight.

  Baruch had hooked one arm around me and was forcing his tongue into my mouth, and to my surprise I wasn’t particularly keen on the sensation. When he slipped one hand up my T-shirt, my reflexes kicked in. ‘Oi!’ I said sharply, causing our ‘moment’ to judder to a halt.