by Sara Alexi
She wonders if there is a minimum wage.
‘How much will you pay me?’ she asks in clear English. If she had ended up in the wrong place with no money in England there is no way she would have found work this easily. It feels unreal, but natural to this country somehow. The job offered will do for now anyway, no matter what they are paying. She is confident she will be able to get to her real job tomorrow, or the day after that at the latest.
‘Ti?’ the man answers, but there is no understanding each other. He stands. He gestures for her to stand too and she follows him to a space behind the grill with mirror-lined glass shelves stacked with glasses and plates, a sink full of pots at the end. It is filthy. The man points at a sack of potatoes and hands her the knife. Abby wants to show she is a good worker and looks around for the bin, wondering where to put the peelings. There is none to be seen, and without the language she feels stuck. He points at the sink.
After peeling two potatoes Abby hopes a day or two working here will earn enough. Her real job is in a bar with a crew of young waiters, neon lights, a dance floor, leather chairs, glass doors that open onto the street, all new. She sort of knows Jackie who is already there, it is her second summer at the bar, but then she is older than Abby, she has her own flat back home.
Abby pictures the bar lit up at night. She will learn how to make Margaritas and B52s, serve shots to lines of bronzed university students. It will be great. She will be on the beach all day and work all evening. She is sure they will still take her on if she is a day or two late. She might try to call again once she has a wage in her pocket and can offer to pay for the call. There is a phone on the counter. Or maybe she can find a charger for her mobile.
The peelings drop in the sink. Stavros has been lingering behind her but now he turns to leave.
‘Money? How much?’ She surprises herself at her forthrightness but rubs the pad of her thumb against the pad of her index finger to illustrate her words. Being in a foreign country is giving her confidence, it seems.
‘Perimene,’ he pats the air flat before he begins to turn away. ‘Ah, diavatirio,’ he mimes, opening a book. Abby just stares. He tucks his elbows in and puts his hands out to the side and whistles through his teeth, swaying as he turns away left and right. Abby reaches in her bag and thumbs through the phrase book in the travel ‘at the airport’ section.
‘Diavatirio,’ he says again.
‘Passport!’ Abby momentarily feels she has conquered the language, or at least a very small part of it, before frowning. ‘Why?’ she asks.
‘Work,’ he says in English, rolling the ‘r’. Abby fishes deep into her bag and pulls out her maroon booklet and hands it to him. He looks her in the eyes. Abby turns to continue with the peeling. It is getting hot. It feels amazing to be so warm in just a T-shirt and shorts. If the pay is good she will stay and make enough to get to Saros. If not, she will stay today and use what money she has to take a taxi first thing in the morning to the town and see if she can find work there. She will probably do that anyway. This place is amazing, but it is a pit. She will probably only need two or three days’ work in town to raise the money to get to Soros.
Abby stops peeling. Where will she sleep? She cannot afford a hotel, and doubts the village has one anyway.
Perhaps she can ask to sleep on the floor of the restaurant. She looks at the floor and decides, actually, it is not an option.
‘Don’t be so soft,’ Dad said when they were cleaning out the garage together and she hadn’t wanted to touch things with cobwebs on. Jumbled thoughts of home close in on her. Her bed, cosy, the smell of clean sheets. The hot water in the shower, her lavender soap. Dad’s arguments for her not to go into the sixth form. Of course it would be worth it. She has already started the journey, to work her way through Uni.
Determined to prove him wrong, she considers her options. The floor will be fine if she buys a newspaper to put down first. No, the print will come off on her clothes. She could put the chairs together, but that would be too lumpy. She puts down the potato and goes into the room with the tables on the pretext of clearing up any discarded plates. There is a glass on one of the unoccupied tables.
Picking up the glass, she lifts the corner of the stiff, crackling, plastic tablecloth with its hunt scene running around the edge, of men in faded red jackets, hounds bleached by time and wear, but no sign of a fox. The table-top is a chipboard slab, on which there is a ring of green paint the same colour as the walls. She runs a finger across the chipboard, no dirt comes off. She puts a hand under the table-top and lifts. If it is not attached she could put two or three of them on the floor and sleep on them.
The farmers smile at her as they mop the juices from their plates with hunks of bread. She takes her hand from under the tablecloth and smooths out the creases and hurries back to the sink with the single glass. More likely Stella will find her a bed. The Greeks are meant to be hospitable and she seemed very kind. It does all feel almost too exciting.
Once hidden behind the grill she wipes her hands on the clean teacloth she has tucked into her shorts instead of the dirty apron Stavros had thrown at her. She reaches into her bag which she has slung in the only clean place, across her shoulders, and pulls out her key-ring with the limp teddy dangling from it. She palms the teddy and rubs him a few times against her cheek. The food and the early start and the heat from the back of the grill are making her feel sleepy.
The grill shakes as someone pokes the embers. Abby bundles her key-ring teddy away and picks up a potato but it is slippery. It skids out of her hands and onto the floor behind her.
Stella picks up the potato and tosses it past Abby into the sink. It hits a glass but nothing breaks.
‘What does “per-i-menace” mean?’ Abby asks.
‘Wait.’
‘Oh sorry, are you busy.’
Stella laughs. ‘No, “perimenis” means “wait".’
‘Oh, I thought he was saying I was a menace or something.’ Her voice trails off.
‘Why are you putting the potato coats in the sink?’ Stella asks.
Abby looks into the sink where the peel has mixed with the dirty pots, knives and forks interlaced.
‘I didn’t know how to say, “Where is the bin?”.’ It’s important to make a good first impression. Being sacked, that would be a disaster. The fragility of her situation seems to rush at her from nowhere.
Stella pulls a cardboard box from under the lowest glass shelf.
‘Use this.’
She does not seem as friendly as she was earlier.
‘Are you sure me working here is ok?’ Abby asks, blinking away the beginnings of tears. She wishes she had slept more on the plane.
Stella seems to ignore her, her face is blank.
‘Stella?’
‘Yes, what?’
‘Are you sure it is ok for me to work here?’
Stella looks her in the eye and her face softens; she pats Abby’s arm. ‘Of course, what else can you do?’ But Abby senses Stella’s reserve. She doesn’t want to overreact. Dad is always saying she acts without thinking. Maybe she should take a taxi now and trust she can find work in town. Would that be an action or a reaction? Or an overreaction, perhaps. It can be hard to tell the difference. She wishes she had charged her phone battery. Maybe she could have got Jackie’s number from someone.
The girl seems so young. Stella is sure she was not so young at that age. She manoeuvres past her to get to the sink.
At seventeen she was still at home with her father and mother. She only suffered the occasional taunts in the village by then.
Stella piles the plates on the floor by her feet, picks out the peelings and throws them in the box Abby is peeling into, and runs the water until it comes hot enough to wash the cutlery. Everything is washed under a constant dribble of water.
The days at home with Mama and Baba had been sweet, although to some degree she had been angry at the world, angry that Baba married a gypsy, angry with Mama for being a g
ypsy.
Stella wonders what Abby’s family life is like, what her home is like.
The forks done, she swills them and puts them, handles down, in a glass next to the gin bottle. She starts on the knives.
A home made of blankets, with sticks and branches holding the shape, children running in and out, their bare feet planting white footprints of dust on the colourful blanket floor. Typical. How she had hated those ‘holidays’, as Mama had called them. To Stella, visiting her relatives was torture. The women in long flowing skirts, breasts hanging loose under shapeless blouses, uncombed hair braided into plaits with ribbons floating round, cooking food. The darkness of their skin is the lasting memory.
Before she was six and school started there had never been any such ‘holidays’. Then, with no warning, someone Mama had told her was her uncle picked them up on his moped and they drove away from home and Baba into the country for what seemed like miles, and then on a long straight stretch of road, he had stopped. Two women with hair down to their waists had come out of what looked to Stella like the enclosures that farmers made for goats, although this one looked less permanent. The women had been followed out by two teenagers, also wearing long skirts but instead of flowing tops they had tight T-shirts that didn’t cover their tummies. Stella had thought this was a good way to keep cool so she pulled her top up too, and Mama had pulled it down again. Several children her age, and some younger, had come out after them, looking as if their hair had never been combed. The boys’ hair was in knots and the girls’ in rat tails, and they all had dirty faces, scruffy shorts and no shirts. Stella had wanted her Baba. Her Mama was hugging these people and that didn’t seem right.
With the knives done and swilled Stella starts on the plates. She checks Abby from the corner of her eye. She is still peeling away but she is very slow.
One of the women had picked her up and Stella had struggled. The woman smelt of cooking and wet washing. That was when a man in a suit came from inside the place. He had a baby in his arms, and when he saw Stella he passed the baby to the nearest person, made a joyous sound and took Stella from the woman. He smelt of tobacco and something else. His hair was long down the back of his collar and it looked wet. She didn’t want to touch him. She remembered she had started to cry, louder and louder, until Mama had taken her into her arms.
Everyone seemed so happy. Someone played a guitar and after a while the younger children started to dance and then spin in circles. This looked fun so Stella had spun in circles too, until she fell into a dizzy heap with the other children. There had been spicy food which the children, sitting on the floor, ate with their fingers. A wind had come up and the plastic and blanket walls began to suck in and billow out as if the whole place was breathing. Stella had left her food to sit by her Mama, scared by the living tent. A dog came in and ate everything from the plate she had left on the floor. This also made her cry as she was still hungry.
On the way back Mama had explained that the people were gypsies, people who like to keep moving, without a home. As Stella was trying to make sense of this Mama had told her that the man on the moped and the one with the baby in his arms were her great uncles and everyone else she had met that day was a cousin, or second cousin. That made her, Stella, a gypsy too. It had taken some time to understand that Mama was a gypsy, but Baba wasn’t, even though Mama had been born in the village. It was Stella’s grandmother who had settled there before Mama was born. Mama had never lived the travelling life.
Stella puts the clean plates on their edges, leaning against the sink side; the racks above are full. There is no more room, so she puts some of the drier ones on the glass shelves behind her. The day is a warm one and they are drying quickly. At the height of summer they dry in seconds.
Then school had started for her, at six years old like everyone else, but not like everyone else. It had been clear later that Mama had taken her to meet her relatives so she would understand her classmates’ reactions at school. If she hadn’t known she was a gypsy or what a gypsy was it would have been a confusing as well as a painful time.
Stella rinses the last of the dishes, gives the sink a cursory wipe and turns to the glasses. They are piled on one of the glass shelves, stuck on ouzo rims. Stella hears the sound of one of the big black dozy bugs fly in but it doesn’t venture past the grill. Far away a cockerel is crowing; a car going past drowns its cries. A glance at the potato bucket tells her Abby is far too slow. Stella shakes her hands of the washing-up water and wipes them down her dress. She takes the knife from Abby and uses it to point to the glasses and the sink. Abby begins on the glasses under the permanently trickling hot tap.
Stella deftly peels half a dozen potatoes. The skins that fall in the box are thicker than the skins that Abby had pared but with the amount of potatoes that they need speed is more important.
School had not been fun.
She digs an eye out of the spud with savagery. The potato splits in half.
She felt alone and was bullied. She did discover that she was quicker than the other children of her age. It was a mixed-age class so she often spent her time with older children. This did not help the separation she felt from her peers. Eight years of trying to belong, hating who she was by birth, desperate to fit in, pushed away. Her fourteenth birthday could not come fast enough. With her educational obligations fulfilled she and her peers left the classroom confines. Their energies directed elsewhere, they all went about their work in the villages, son following father so no one went very far, and neither did the prejudice, and to some extent the meanness continued. So Stella stayed at home, stayed indoors, except when she went on her walks.
Filling the bowl again, from the hessian sack under the grill, reminds Stella she must order more potatoes. She shakes out the last dozen or so and sets about peeling them.
Then Stavros came into her life. She had been on a ramble up in the hills and he had just been there with his startling blue eyes, his broad shoulders, his flat stomach; he looked like an athlete. Stella remembers she gasped at the sight of him. He had been so polite and so considerate. They had talked and talked. Well, he had talked, Stella had listened. He knew so much, had seen so much. He was from a village all the way across the orange orchards on the other side of the plain. He had once visited Athens.
After their meeting he had come into the village to ask her Baba if he could take her out, and the entire village quickly heard. That had shut them up. The girls who used to look down on her now looked jealous. The boys who used to tease fell silent. Stavros was not only tall; he was broad across the shoulders. He delivered her from their prejudice, her heritage, and she loved him for it.
Stella lugs the bucket of spuds round to the front of the grill, next to which is a tiny deep-fat fryer and a square foot of counter surface on which to cut the yellowing misshapes into chips.
‘Have you talked to her yet?’ Stavros exhales smoke as he speaks. He stands half in and half out of the shop, his extended stomach a shelf for his hand as it rests between puffs, confident that Abby has no understanding of his Greek tongue.
‘About what?’ Stella says, her mind confusing the Stavros she used to know with this overweight, sweating, out-of-shape man talking to her. His irises are still an intense blue but the whites are mostly red. His face looks flushed and his eyes bulge as if they are about to pop out of his head.
‘Make her stay. I think she wants to know how much we will pay her as she did this.’ He rubs his thumbs and index finger pads together.
‘Well, what are we going to pay her? We don’t have any extra.’
‘Tell her it is a trial.’
‘Where will she sleep?’ Stella asks as she finishes chopping. A child is walking with purpose towards the shop. She wipes her hand on some kitchen roll. She is not going to make this easy for Stavros. The boy comes in and orders two giros for himself and his granny, ‘who is looking after me for the day,’ he tells her. ‘We are going to feed the goats later.’
Stella oils t
wo circular pita breads and puts them on the grill for a moment, the oil sizzling, soaking into them. The meat on the spit turns automatically, all day, in front of a hot wire grid, cooking and turning, the aroma drifting into the street luring young and old alike. Stella takes a hot pita and puts it flat on her hand, a piece of greaseproof paper protecting her from the heat. She slices some meat off the spit and it falls onto the pita bread. She mounds on top some pre-made chips that are a little cold now, yoghurt and garlic sauce, some tomato slices, and asks if he would like onions. He nods his head enthusiastically. Stella piles raw onions on the mound and then with supple twists of her wrists she rolls the whole thing up and tucks the greaseproof paper in at one end to stop any drips and hands it to the boy.
The second giro is without onions as his granny cannot digest them. His little hands can hardly hold the two bulky rolls, open ends uppermost. He walks away smiling, eating a chip he picks out of the top with his teeth.
‘She cannot be paid nothing and sleep on the floor. What exactly are we going to do with her?’ Stella asks.
‘Why are you making this so difficult?’ Stavros’ face is going a livid red, and he throws his cigarette end into the street.
Stella knows that what he is really saying is, ‘You sort out the details’. But this is not her idea. ‘She is not sleeping on the sofa at our house, it wouldn’t be right. And we do need to pay her.’
‘Today can be a trial, but if we make more than normal tomorrow then we will decide what to pay her.’ Stavros has no consideration for the girl. Stella is glad she stayed silent about Abby’s desperate situation.
‘And if we don’t?’ Stella starts to mix some more lemon sauce for the chicken. She pauses to jot down a list on a napkin before she forgets: more tinfoil trays for the take-away, two dozen mini-ouzo bottles and another sack of potatoes.