by Sara Alexi
Dino just looks at her.
‘There is my job. I cannot leave my job, and my house.’
‘Why can you not leave your job?’
‘That’s a bit of a naïve question.’
‘Have you ever tried doing anything else?’
‘No, but ….’
‘So you have no idea if there is something that would make you happier?’
‘I cannot just up and leave my job, especially at my age. What would I do?’
‘What do you want to do?’
‘Oh don’t you start.’
‘What?’
‘Come on, let’s go. I need to walk a little.’
Dino insists on paying, and when he returns to her, he has a bougainvillaea flower between finger and thumb, which he presents to her.
‘Stay,’ he repeats.
‘Dino, how can I?’
‘Sell your house and live here.’
‘And do what?’
‘What did you like to do best when you were six years old?’
‘When I was six? Why six?’
‘They say that is who you really are.’
‘I played house, gave tea parties.’
‘So there you go.’
‘What! I should pack in being a lawyer and stay in Greece to give tea parties?!’
‘Tea parties, bed and breakfast, guest house, what’s the difference?’
‘A lot of work, I imagine.’
‘Oh, and being a lawyer isn’t a lot of work?’
‘Come to England with me.’
Dino stops walking and turns to her, an astonished look, fear in there somewhere.
‘England?’ He leads her up a couple of steps to some flat land by a disused windmill overlooking the sea, the moon now clearing a path of light in the waves, the mainland hills black holes in the mist of stars. Without ceremony, he flops to the floor, legs crossed in front of him, leaning back on rigid arms, head back, looking up at the stars.
It takes him a while to respond.
‘I got up, I went into work, I came home, I cried. I got up, I went to work, back home and cried.’ He exhales and looks at Michelle, who is standing, arms folded across her chest. She squats so she is at the same eye level, and drops her weight sideways to sit, her legs curled under her.
‘I saw the days passing, my life passing, and all I saw ahead of me was more of the same—not for weeks, not for months, not for years, but for decades.’
‘One day I got up, I didn’t go to work, and I didn’t cry. I just couldn’t face going into that non-human environment. Another day of my life would drain away for no purpose, and I just couldn’t force myself to go.’ He interrupts his stargazing to look at her, monitor her response. She cannot break her stare. ‘The next day was even harder to make myself go, so I stayed at home again.’
‘By the end of the week, the phone in the flat was ringing every hour, which I presume was them asking me where I was, so I started to go out all day, trying to form a plan, decide what to do, but mostly I went to museums. Have you seen the size of the Attica-ware collection the British Museum has? More than in Greece. Makes Adonis’ few pots look immaterial.’ He turns his head slightly to look out to sea. Michelle shakes her head. ‘Rooms of it, they’ve got. Rooms and rooms, stolen, not like Adonis’ pots hidden away. Really stolen, like the Parthenon marbles ….’ He sucks his teeth, suddenly very Greek.
Michelle breaks her stare to watch what she thinks must be a bat circling.
‘The days merged one into the other, and I came home to notes from my flatmate, who I sublet my room from, saying my rent was due and I hadn’t done my share of what we agreed to do in the house.’
‘That sounds awkward,’ Michelle says.
‘There were more notes, and then I came back one night, really late, and my key wouldn’t work. There was an envelope sellotaped to the door saying I could “discuss” my stuff if I gave him a call—but I didn’t want to call.’ He sighs, a deep relaxing sound. ‘I became homeless.’
Michelle stops breathing until finally her body takes over with a big gasp.
On her way to work every day, well nearly every day, Michelle has passed a man slumped in what looked like a camouflaged sleeping bag, stained and torn, claiming to be homeless and in need of spare change. She has never quite believed him, thought it was some sort of scam, or that he is a person who … well, she is not quite sure what kind of person he is, but what kind of person would end up homeless anyway? Alcoholic, drug user, mentally challenged? Not a real person that she could talk to. She puts her fingertips over her mouth. Dino turns his head so he faces the stars again, eyes closed.
Michelle wonders if the man near her work is still there. She can’t remember the last time she saw him. It wouldn’t be so bad being homeless in Greece; at least it’s warm. She chastises herself for the frivolous thought.
‘I just wandered, slept where I could, tried to think of something, make sense of life, I suppose, but whichever way I looked at it, the system wants to suck my days away in some pointless pastime, work or army, for which I am meant to be grateful.’
‘Where did you go, what did you do?’ She thinks the last time she saw the man on the street was the day Grace told her about the reshuffle, that someone was going to be laid off. But she was distracted by the news that day. She might be wrong.
‘I watched the Thames float by. I watched the clouds change. I watched the kestrel being flown in Trafalgar Square to keep the pigeons away. Anything to feel close to nature.’
The bat is flying closer, or maybe it is another one. He can’t have been properly homeless, maybe just a night or two on other people’s sofas. He will have had his credit cards on him. She narrows her eyes.
‘So if you were homeless, how did you get back here?’ she asks.
‘Oh, I rang my flatmate last week and got my stuff—passport, bankcard, and some clothes, everything I have in that bag. He had sold my speakers and the rest of my stuff to pay the rent.’
They sit silently side-by-side. Michelle leans her head until it touches Dino’s, and she feels him relax with the contact.
‘All the time I was wandering, I could never concentrate to sort out my life. All I could think about was why my Baba wanted me to feel guilty about my Mama’s death.’ He looks at Michelle out of the corner of his eye for a second, then away again.
‘You know what I realised?’ He can feel Michelle rock her head side-to-side on his shoulder. ‘I realised I feared having a girlfriend lest I kill her, just like Baba implied I had my Mama. I started to hate him then.
‘That was why I became homeless. The weight in my chest, the feelings of guilt. The whole, “Go to an English University and get a good job to look after a good wife” bit. When I found myself in the job, I knew the wife was meant to come next. Why? So I could kill her? That’s how he had made me feel!’ He sits up and breaks physical contact with Michelle.
‘But something didn’t fit, and now I know what it was. It was the lie, the lie of the guilt I should be feeling. I knew it was fennel, I am sure it was fennel, but he condemned me with his silent accusations, so my trust in him—well, there was no trust. And yet I was meant to give up my life to follow the path he had designated. No! So I quit. I didn’t know what to quit, so I quit everything.’
Michelle says nothing. Dino glances at her briefly.
‘I was going to stay homeless, you know.’ He stands and wanders across the grass to the windmill door, which hangs on rusted hinges. There is a clonk of distant goats’ bells, somewhere beyond the town and the olive groves, somewhere in the hills.
‘Until one night.’ His head drops. ‘It was chucking it down and someone else was in my “skipper”, used my boxes and everything ….’
‘A what?’ Michelle interrupts.
‘Skipper? Street talk. It’s a place that suits you to sleep, out of the wind, out of the cold, preferably out of the rain. It becomes like your own, almost like home. So I wandered for a bit, wondering where I
would sleep. I came across someone else homeless who said he knew a dry place to bed down. We walked for ages. He took me to a warehouse squat. I had been to squats before.’ He lifts his head, his voice gains animation. ‘There are some really good ones; clean, a sense of communal living, full of creativity, trying to make arrangements with the building owners that is agreeable to all. Sometimes they do, you know. They arrange a peppercorn rent when they see their properties are being taken care of.’ He exhales and his head drops again.
‘But I wasn’t looking for anything positive; I was drowning in my pit of guilt and despair. I wanted annihilation, blackness. Well, I thought I did.’ He gives a dry laugh. ‘It turned out this was a drug squat. There was no electricity and the guy led me along a corridor with his lighter. I looked in the rooms as I passed. It was like a gallery of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch. Each room lit by candlelight, a different view on how to torture lost souls. Faces and limbs in the flames’ orange glows, the shadows rustling with movement of the unseen. The man I was following stopped by one room and said hello to a girl sitting on the floor. She was rocking and holding her arm. It was cold, but all she had on was a thin t-shirt and shorts. She looked up; her eyes did not focus but she smiled. The man I was with went in and sat on the floor and beckoned me. I sat, and in the flickering light I could see the toes on one of her bare feet were all black—gangrene.’ He turns and leans his back against the windmill wall.
‘Sand, crushed paracetomol, scouring powder, crushed glass … the dealer will cut heroine with anything to increase his profit. Any of it, all of it, will create infections or collapse veins so the blood no longer flows. Then you get gangrene. This girl could not have been any older than me, and as we sat and talked, I knew she would never go to a hospital with her gangrene. It would spread, she would lose her foot, maybe her leg. Maybe she would take no action at all until it consumed her. But you know what frightened me the most?’
He waits for Michelle to look at him and ask, ‘What?’ She only mouths it; no sound comes out and there are tears in her eyes.
‘There was something I saw in this girl—I recognised her pain, I related to her hopelessness, like looking into a mirror. I saw me. I stood. They only half noticed. Her eyes were rolling in her head, the man I arrived with was chopping white powder on a magazine with a Stanley knife blade. How long would it be before I tried to alleviate my internal pain with a quick fix? The path so smooth, a smoke of something weak, the sniff of something stronger, the mainline to freedom ….
‘I ran, Michelle. I ran from the building and headed for lights, anywhere that was bright. I ended up at King’s Cross Station. I walked till dawn. I was exhausted. I sat on the floor and someone who hurried by tossed a coin at me. It was enough to make the phone call to get my life back. And now I am here.’ He stretches and grins at Michelle.
Michelle feels in shock.
Getting his life back with a phone call had been harder than he expected.
The first call was to his flatmate, who refused to even give him back his passport, let alone his belongings.
His second call was to Greece. Adonis had been there for him, as always.
‘Just phone this malaka up and say you want your stuff,’ he had grunted down the phone.
‘I have tried that. He won’t.’
‘OK, give me his number.’
He had slept behind a fancy new clothes shop that night, in amongst the clean new cardboard boxes, under a bright back door light. The next day he reversed the charges to Adonis, who explained that he could go and pick up his things from his old flat anytime he liked.
‘Did he really think you were Greek Mafia?’ Dino gripped the phone. He couldn’t remember ever having laughed so hard since being in England. His sides were aching.
He went round to the flat and knocked on the door. All his stuff was neatly piled like he had taken his time to arrange it and rearrange it. He had begun to laugh again. His ex-flatmate apologised for the stuff that had been sold and promised that he would try to get it back. Even gave him a twenty-pound note by way of apology.
He called Adonis back to thank him for all he had done. The conversation became uncontrollable, and Dino cried with laughter. The woman waiting to use the phone hurried away to find another box. ‘What did you say exactly to put so much fear into him?’
‘I need my secrets,’ laughed Adonis’ voice down the phone, ‘but I did ask him if he had seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding.’
‘What?’ Dino had no idea what he was talking about, but at the time, it seemed funnier than anything he had heard in a long time.
Michelle reaches up and takes his head in her hands and kisses him, trying to transfer all the tenderness she is feeling to heal his old wounds, to right the wrongs, to make him feel safe in the moment.
Dino responds, his arms around her waist, turning his hips to face her.
Her head spins, reality recedes; there is nothing but sensation and touch, love and tenderness. She can no longer focus. Her weak legs give way and they both lightly drop to the floor. The stars above swirl, his words soft in her ears, the smell of the warm earth, the occasional dull clonk of a goat bell, the warmth of his nearness, a shiver down her spine until she is one with him. She looks deep into his eyes. The passion there reflects her own, and again the mists shroud her thoughts, senses heightened until they are rising far above the earth, dancing in the stars. The velvet night wraps around them, lifting them until they can reach no higher, and in that sweetest closeness they cling to each other until they drift back to earth.
They lie still, the trillion stars witnessing their elation. Their hands are still entwined. No words need be said.
They watch the moon travel part of its arc across the sky until, with a shiver, Michelle finally speaks.
‘How can we go back from that?’ She sits up. The deep of the night has cooled the air.
Dino does not answer. She looks over to him. He sits up and moves closer to stroke her hair.
‘Seriously, Dino, what are we going to do?’
Dino still doesn’t speak.
‘In London you will cry. In Greece I … well I have no idea what I would do or how I would survive, but in Greece you have to go into the army.’
‘Thailand. I have always fancied Thailand.’ Dino grins as he speaks.
‘Ha, ha, very funny,’ She cuddles up to him to share his body warmth. ‘Seriously, what are we going to do?’ Dino pulls her to her feet and turns so they can slowly make their way back to Zoe’s.
‘I have absolutely no idea.’ He sounds completely content.
‘Aren’t you worried?’ Michelle feels a wave of panic.
‘In Greece these things always sort themselves out.’
‘Well …’ Michelle looks up to the sky; there are hints of dawn, lighter shades in the east. ‘In a few hours I will ring my clients and make sure they have sorted themselves out for this meeting.’
Chapter 19
‘No, you stay here. You will distract me.’ But Dino insists on accompanying her to the phone booth.
As she looks for change in her pockets, his arms slip around her shoulders.
‘Get off. How can I make a serious call with you all over me?’ She is laughing and spending more effort trying to break free of his clutches than looking for change, and she drops some coins.
He is quicker to squat to pick them up then she is. He holds out the coins but insists on a kiss to release them. She is almost annoyed with him but still laughs. He likes it when she shows just shades of being cross; her sternness feels grounded, firm.
‘Look, go away and do something whilst I make this call. I have to be serious now.’ Dino leans against the wall next to her, smiling. Michelle dials the number and turns her back on him, so he reaches out and smoothes her hair. She whips her hand up and swats his away.
‘Really? Oh, can you tell me why? Yes, I see … no, that’s understandable. I don’t see why it would be. Thank you, yes I will.’ She replaces the receiver.<
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She doesn’t move for a second, deep in thought.
‘Everything OK?’ Dino asks. Her head is down. He puts his hands on her shoulders and bends his knees to try and look her in the eye.
‘I think so. In one way it is great; in another I am not so sure.’
‘Tell me.’
‘They have postponed for another week.’
‘Fantastic!’
‘Yes, but they gave a very lame excuse. They said it was their lawyer’s and his daughter’s nameday next week, and that he would be off on some island.’
‘So?’
‘Well, what is a nameday, and who drops work to go off to an island for their children? This is serious work! I think they are getting cold feet.’
‘Ah, my guess is his daughter is called Eleni. Is he called Costas?’ Michelle’s mouth drops open slightly, eyebrows raised as she nods.
‘In the Greek calendar, every day is a saint’s day and people celebrate when their saint’s name comes round. It’s a big deal here, because instead of one person celebrating, everyone is. Next week is the biggest name day, Costas and Eleni on the same day. Many, many people will celebrate. He will be going to an island with a whole group of people, his colleagues and their wives, anyone with those names. I should know—my full name is Constantinos.’
‘Oh, so Dino is short for Constantinos … so you will be celebrating too! How does any work get done in this country?’
‘It gets done, just not at the same speed as England, where everyone rushes about just to keep warm—or dry.’ He laughs and pulls her towards him.
‘No, stop now, I have to ring the people huddling to keep warm and dry in England who employ me.’ She turns her back again.
Dino watches her spine bend to the side as she leans against the booth. Her elegance is not only in her height, the way she moves, the length of her neck.
She stands straight, Dino can hear a loud voice down the phone.
‘I’ve done all I can. No, no I don’t think they are stalling. Look, it’s different here. It’s the lawyer and his daughter’s nameday, and they’ll be celebrating. No, a bit like a birthday or Christmas for us.’