The Gypsy's Dream

by Sara Alexi

  Perhaps this will change things with this foreign girl. He recalls her face. The child looks frightened, out of her depth. Stavros will take care of her, make her feel welcome, such a fresh young face ... He shuffles in his chair. She will be grateful for his consideration, and he will pay her a little something on busy days.

  And she is all alone, with no family to consider. Yes, he will make her feel very welcome. No need for her to stay at Vasso’s, when there is plenty of space in the house. She reminds him of the girl in his village before he married Stella. The talk was not good. Stella was a pass to respectability then, to silence the gossipers. Did he overreact? Too late now, he is saddled, and with this business, slaving away over a hot grill for unappreciative orange farmers.

  He takes the final sip from the cup and puts it back in its saucer, and grinds out his cigarette.

  The men he owes are likely asleep now in the afternoon, and those who don’t live locally will not come to the village in the heat of the day. He should never have got mixed up with them. He chucks a couple of coins on the table.

  He takes the back way home, just in case.

  Chapter 6

  The shop is all but empty as the heat of the day increases. There is not much to do so Abby asks if it would be ok to take a look around the village, walk up the hill. Stella says it is hot for walking, but as the girl insists on going she gives her a baseball cap someone has left behind to keep the heat off her head. It smells of goats.

  As Abby leaves Stella sees Mitsos making his way across the square towards her. For a moment she is confused, she has seen him already today, but then recalls he left without eating, the noise of the farmers being more than he wanted. It is better he comes at this time, she can give him her full attention. A tractor obscures him from view as it rumbles to a stop. The farmer leaves the engine running as he jumps down and goes to Vasso’s kiosk for cigarettes.

  The tractor leaves, and as its noise diminishes it is replaced by the clonk and clang of goat bells. Mitsos looks up from his steady pace and Stella turns to see the mottled herd enter the village. The lead goat has some fine horns. There are one or two sheep mixed in with the brown and white ocean. If the shepherd is taking them in from the heat of the day, he’s a little late.

  Mitsos hurries his step as the goats come streaming across the square.

  ‘Hello again,’ Stella says over the unorchestrated bleating and bells.

  ‘That lot gone now?’ He nods to the shop to show he means the farmers, not the goats.

  ‘Everyone has gone,’ Stella says. She watches the dog bring up the rear of the herd, running this way and that across the tail end of them, in a very relaxed unhurried way, clearly in control and enjoying himself. The goat herder has stopped at the edge of the village to talk to someone and is completely unconcerned that this event is continuing without him.

  ‘The girl?’ Mitsos asks.

  ‘Up the hill, having a look around.’

  Mitsos steps inside the shop and shuffles to the table at the back.

  ‘The usual?’ Stella asks, but does not wait for an answer. There is half a chicken on the grill and two sausages. There are actually three but the third caught fire and has a charcoal coat on. Stella feels the chips with the back of her fingers. They are warm but not hot. She pours them into a stainless-steel dish and puts this over the grill. The cooking bars are black with the burnt juices and the undersides have small pieces of charcoal adhered to them. The coals are still hot but Stavros did not bank more on before he left. Another job she mustn’t forget to do.

  In the time it takes to arrange the meat on the plate the chips have started to stick to the steel pan but they feel hotter.

  ‘Lemon sauce?’ she calls and unscrews the bottle top.

  ‘But of course!’ he calls back.

  The square table is so small their knees touch as she sits at right angles to him. He smells of fresh air and stored linen. She is glad he does not wear aftershave. Some of the farmers try to mask the smell of their animals with it and it gives her a headache. Mind you, she is not sure if Mitsos even herds his own goats these days; it can’t be easy.

  ‘How are you doing?’ he asks. Stella knows there is not much she can say. Often the time spent companionably with Mitsos is in silence. The quiet says more than all the words she could think of.

  ‘Managing.’ Stella cuts the sausages up and starts on the chicken, which is trickier; it tends to slide on the plate in the sauce.

  ‘Is she staying, do you want her to stay?’ Mitsos watches her cutting the food, the sun through the window falling on one half of her face, her cheekbones defined.

  Stella exhales loudly. ‘I don’t know. I suppose if the takings go up … She seems nice but …’

  She pushes the plate across to him.

  ‘I think I see trouble if she stays.’

  They fall back into a comfortable silence.

  ‘How are the chickens?’ Stella asks after a pause. Mitsos had mentioned one of his hens has stopped laying in the hutch. A broody hen. She is laying elsewhere and trying to sit on the eggs. Stella cares about Mitsos’ chickens because he cares, but what she would like to say is she wishes he was fifteen years younger, although she wouldn’t really. She likes the creases in his face, particularly the ones around his eyes. But she has not ever dwelt on the subject more than that, pushing such thoughts away, forcing Mitsos into a father-figure role which he doesn’t quite fit.

  There is Stavros, and Mitsos has shown only kindness. She is just lonely and enjoys his attention.

  Abby turns right, out of the square. There is a stone wall painted white snaking up the hill. The whitewash is so thick the wall appears iced, all edges rounded, gentle curves replacing sharp corners. Grass grows along the bottom but it is trimmed back, presumably by the passing of cars. Abby climbs the slope, the sun beating down on her white skin. She forgot to put sun cream on and already her shoulders are pink. There is a line of dust up the centre of the road. She has never seen a road like this in England: they always have puddles.

  Maybe Stella has a phone charger; there are so many things to take pictures of. The whitewashed wall. The donkey in the field over the other side. The back yard of someone’s house that has a line hung with huge white knickers side by side. The buckets and tins that have been painted and spotted blue and white and planted with geraniums, with shocking red blooms. Everywhere a postcard, but actually better than a postcard as none of it is staged, it is all real. Another back yard and a man is … Abby turns away. So revolting, how could he do that? Ok, so he has to eat, but to skin a goat in public, there should be laws.

  Coming up from the square floats a clanking and clanging of bells. It must be a herd of goats. She turns to see but the lane has twisted and the view is blocked. Puffing up a track to the right she passes a gate with a home-made letter box, but it looks old and disused. It has a drawer front as a lid and there is a lizard sunbathing on the brass handle. But Abby is determined to see the herd of goats and jogs as fast as she can bear in the heat up the track until, before she reaches a tiny cottage, there is a break in the bushes and she can see the village laid out before her, including the goats in the square, so many of them, a heaving sea, ears flicking, white tails bobbing.

  The lady from the kiosk is wafting a newspaper at them to stop them eating her wares and she is talking in a high-pitched voice to a man who does not look at all bothered. The animals begin to leave but the herder doesn’t follow the goats or his dog. Abby waits until all the goats have turned out of sight and Vasso has finished wagging her finger at the goat herder, who is now buying a bottle of water from her. Abby turns from the scene to continue to climb the hill.

  She decides to go past the cottage, which looks deserted, and along the outside of the wall that surrounds the grove of some sort of trees. The branches are black against the deep blue sky. There is not a cloud anywhere. Abby puts her hand up to shade her eyes. Her forehead is hot; so is her hair. She pulls the cap Stella gave her
from her shorts pocket. It smells but somehow seems like a better option than the heat. She waves it about a bit to de-scent it and balances it on her head rather than pulling it on. She walks stiffly so it won’t fall off.

  Abby has been here less than a day and she is amazed by, well, just about everything she has seen. The people are so funny. One minute they shout and it seems like they will kill each other. In England, if two people in the street argued with the same vehemence, then it would definitely conclude in a physical fight, or worse, a knife being drawn. But actually no one would dare to shout like that unless they were really drunk, or married. But here they shout like it is life and death, other people join in, and then they act like nothing has happened. Abby finds it unsettling. How can she know when anyone is really angry? She quite likes the idea of being able to shout at the top of her voice without it really meaning anything more than her letting off steam. She would love to have shouted at the top of her voice at Dad when he said she couldn’t go back to school to do her A levels. A levels are the gateway to University, University the gateway to a career, how can he not realise how important that is? It will define her life.

  She supposes she should really let him know she is ok. The idea of being here isn’t to worry him. When she gets paid tomorrow she will ask Stella if she can use the phone. Maybe they have call-boxes in town. She doesn’t feel she can ask to use the ouzeri phone yet as she has no money to pay for the call, and it’s not clear what her position there is. She certainly wouldn’t ask the man, and Stella seems nice, but reserved. Like she hasn’t quite made up her mind.

  She passes what must be a chicken hut with little ramps up to a small entrance. She looks around her and sees one or two chickens crouched in the shade of bushes and the back wall of the orchard. A cockerel crows but none of the chickens takes any notice.

  Abby makes her way towards a clump of pines that crowns the top of the hill. As she steps under them the relief from the sun surprises her. The ground feels springy and there is a hushed silence. It is a place Rockie would love, digging in the soft ground, finding sticks.

  She turns, and her mouth falls open before forming into a wide grin. The village and the whole plain are laid out before her. Little whitewashed houses with tiny yards and regimented kitchen gardens huddle at her feet, squadrons of orange groves range across the flat plain, in the distance are dotted villages and even the nearby town hugging the coast of the bay to her left. The sea itself glistens in the sunlight, a living jewel.

  The view looks, to Abby, computer-generated, unreal, as if a child has included all the elements that give joy: a white church atop a hill in the foreground, another further away in the mid distance, the sides of the hills they are mounted on chiselled to make terraces for more olive trees. The mountains in the far distance fade to purple and the wide open sky is an endless dark blue. Abby wants to say it is awesome, but it doesn’t feel to be a big enough word. But she is in awe, she feels sure, in the real sense of the word.

  ‘And I am here,’ she whispers into the breeze, and the tops of the pines sigh in answer.

  Although Stella has finished cutting Mitsos’ food she remains sitting there as he eats. She looks idly out of the dusty window in the paint-sealed door to the restaurant part. If she unjammed the door and got nicer tablecloths they would probably get more families; they could even get some more tables and put them on the pavement. She knows that when there are one or two farmers being raucous inside it frightens the women and children away; the outside tables could be for them. But Stavros will not unjam the door, or agree to the buying of more tables. In fact the money they make does not seem to go very far unless …

  ‘Can you cut this bit, please?’ Mitsos asks.

  ‘Oh, sorry.’ Stella beaks from her daydreams.

  ‘I am asking you to cut my food because I was a fool twenty-odd years ago and got my arm blown off and you are saying sorry to me?’ His eyes smile before the laughter that follows.

  Stella smiles back and watches him eat for a moment. What would happen if there was no one to cut his food for him? What would happen if there was no one to cook for him? Life seems very cruel to elderly people, not that he is very elderly, he is only sixty-something, but people that are really elderly have afflictions that mean they cannot use their arms or, even worse, their legs. It seems wrong that people put in effort all their life and then when they get old, as if life has not thrown enough at them, they suffer afflictions.

  Stella recalls Vasso had gone to see an old aunt in Athens once who had been put into a state-run old people’s home. She had said it was an old building but more like a warehouse, the room was so big. People in pyjamas or in a state of half-dress were wandering around not really knowing what they were doing, and she said no fewer than three people claimed that she had come to see them as they were desperate that she should go into their cubicles so they would have someone to talk to.

  She said that rooms had been built in the huge space with flimsy walls, enough to give each person something of a sense of their own space, each room with a bed and a chair. But none of the rooms had ceilings.

  Her aunt’s was better than most because she had taken with her a small chest of drawers and her own bed linen. She had framed pictures of her family on the chest and on the chair and a little rug by the bed. But she did not seem happy or well. People had wandered in and out of the room while she was there as if they were lost. She didn’t venture to even ask about the bathrooms.

  But that was in Athens. What happens here? What would happen to Mitsos if he fell up at his cottage on the side of the hill? Who would know? Well she would, because she would go and check if he hadn’t been seen for a day or two.

  And what will happen to her?

  ‘What? What is it?’ Mitsos ask.

  ‘What?’ Stella replies.

  ‘You just made the most weird sound and then you ask me ‘What?’ He chuckles and continues eating.

  When Stella had asked herself what would happen when she got old she very clearly saw herself without Stavros, and the thought frightened her, made her gasp out loud. But not only was there fear. She also felt – she tried to pin the word down – ‘spacious’, which she thought was a silly word, even though it fitted somehow.

  ‘And now you are smiling.’ Mitsos chuckles.

  Abby finds it almost unbelievable that she is alone in Greece. Dad had never even been abroad until he met Sonia. But lots of her friends have been all over the place. She is probably the least travelled among them.

  A dog barks down in the village and Abby tries to spot which yard it is in. It is answered by another dog and a little flurry of barking spreads across the village before dying down again.

  Her friend Jackie, who is probably working at this very moment at the Malibu, took a gap year before university. She said there were only two problems in life, deciding what you want to do and finding the money to do it. Abby had thought at the time that deciding what you want to do was the easy bit but now, just a year later, it seems so much harder.

  If Dad does not let her carry on in school then there is a whole world of choice. Travelling is obviously not so hard, maybe she could travel the world for a bit. Getting a job seems easy enough. There is lots of charity work abroad. In fact there seems little point in staying in England when there is a whole world to choose from. But there is the snag! The whole world to choose from. That’s a lot of choice.

  But the one choice she wants, to stay at school, go to University, seems to be denied her.

  Stella stops smiling at the thought of being old without Stavros. She has no right. Stavros saved her from a very unpleasant situation which was destined to last a lifetime if he hadn’t stepped in.

  School memories rush at her and she pulls her skirt over her knees and folds her arms across her chest.

  ‘Are you ok?’ asks the ever attentive Mitsos.

  ‘Fine.’ Stella jumps up and goes through and behind the grill to get the ouzo, the good stuff, and two glasse
s.

  She sits down again and pours and quickly takes a gulp.

  ‘Come on, what is it?’ Mitsos sits back, his belly extended, ready to talk.

  ‘I just had a memory, I have it quite often.’ She glances at him. His eyes are kind, as always. She is brave and says, ‘Once, on my way back from school some kids followed me. Called me ‘Gypsy’, told me I was dirty. We were all about seven, I think. Well, they had stones in their pockets and they began to throw them.’ Stella can remember the fear she had experienced, her little bare legs running up the road and the children chasing her. The first stone hit her thigh and she ran faster; the second hit her head. The taunts of ‘gypsy’ and ‘dirty’ bringing tears to her eyes, the rejection, the isolation, the being different. Even now, just remembering, she can feel tears trying to build, but her eyes stay dry, the emotion stuck somewhere below her throat. It was the premeditated act that hurt more than anything. The children already had the stones in their pockets, it was not on impulse. They had planned it.

  Mitsos leans forward and takes a toothpick from the holder in front of the napkins.

  ‘People can be very cruel.’ He pauses with the toothpick. ‘Children even more so.’ He bites on the toothpick and, as discretely as he can, cleans his teeth. Stella looks out of the window in the door until he finishes. He says, ‘I too have been considering my life recently, for what it is worth, and I have reached the conclusion that the only way to be content is to have absolute integrity. To fulfil all you believe to be true no matter what the cost.’ He sips some ouzo and sucks his teeth. ‘Then when people give you looks, say false or unkind things, you know that the fault lies with them. You have been all you can be and no one can ask for more.’ He looks at her and she at him. ‘Decide what you believe in, Stella, and the rest will follow. I just wish I had thought this when I was younger.’