by Polly Samson
‘I curse the way it happened. The stupid self-fulfilling prophesy of it all. Now we’re stuck with it; George’s medical treatment doesn’t come cheap so we couldn’t pay back the publisher even if we wanted to. George can rattle off plotlines, that’s his speciality; he could so easily have replaced the Jean-Claude thread of his novel with something less troublesome, but Big Grace was there, buoying him up, and he refused to change a word when he was given the chance.
‘Meanwhile he’s lumbered with five mouths to feed while we pray for remission, and another two novels on the go, neither quite what he came to a Greek island to write but write them he must if we’re to have soup in the pot and a fire to boil it with. He can’t seem to break the habit of having me there to prompt and temper, even when it’s only his name on the book. He bashes out the words but he finds it hard to get beneath the skin, to present the things his characters don’t say as well as the things they do. He can give you the look and the smell, the taste and the sound of an experience, usually an exotic experience because he collects exotic experiences like luggage labels, but he can’t or won’t tell you how it feels. Emotional reactions, nuance, atmosphere: you know, the stuff that goes on between the lines.
‘It was the year before last he started writing Closer to the Sun. His weight had dropped to the bone; we didn’t know then that it was TB and curable. I was helping any way I could but it was a nightmare, the baby with measles, and Shane and Martin being kept off school.
‘I told him he was free to help himself to any snippets I’d jotted in my journal, which I knew would be useful as it was the first time he was setting a novel on Hydra. I had my own book to write, I wasn’t paying him as much attention as he was used to, maybe he found it callous that I could lose myself in the faraway world of my own novel and push away thoughts of his impending death …
‘The summer whirled on without him and his accusations grew crazier by the day. Something happened, I don’t know what, maybe he caught me coming back from a moonlight swim and jealously assumed Jean-Claude had been with me. I’m sorry to say it ended up with his hands around my neck.’
Charmian crosses her hands at her throat and stifles a sob.
‘But before you think too badly of him, that’s not what George does. It was our worst of times. The savagery of his night sweats meant we’d stopped sleeping together. Still, I’d never felt in danger of my life around him before and I lashed out with my tongue, as though all the kindness had been wrung out of me. He stopped choking me and stared at his hands as though someone else’s had been sewn there in place of his own.
‘My rage was uncoiling. I spat at him about his impotence, I mocked his self-pity, thanked him coldly for the way he robbed me of the time to do my own work. He went on about my decadence around that “pissant”. The more he shouted over me the more venomous my words, until I said that yes, I had often been stirred by the sight of that muscled young body. At last he heard me. He urged me to go on, blocking the exit. In the past, as I told you, our rows always ended in bed – you know how it is. But since the TB we can’t rid ourselves of fury that way.
‘Instead, he marched me to the table, rolled a new sheet of paper into the machine and told me to write out this fantasy of making love to Jean-Claude.
‘I did it. I imagined a seduction and was spurred on by my rage as I wrote Jean-Claude as Dionysus, gleaming, bronzed and almost naked.’ She starts to laugh and buries her head in her arms.
‘I wrote myself in, like a sex-crazed maenad following him up the lava-hot rocks. My furious fingers flew over the keys. The crescent moons of his buttocks beneath the wisp of paisley loincloth, the smell of the sun bottled in the abandoned windmill he led me to, the soft powdery hay that I lay in while he asked if I’d like him to make love to me. I think I even had a butterfly opening and closing its wings. And on and on it goes. It was done out of cruelty, all of it. But now it’s in George’s book, word for word, and everyone will know that it is me and Jean-Claude. It comes down to a choice between my dignity and food in the bellies of my children. No, really. We live hand to mouth. George threatens to sell the house but where would we go? I’ll simply have to weather the jeering and rotten fruit when the blasted book comes out, I suppose.’
She shudders and stares across the black gulf to the sleeping mainland, its charcoal burners a scattering of garnets before the distant dreams of its mountains.
Only Cato is waiting up for me when I stagger home, exhausted from half-carrying, half-cajoling Charmian back to her house. He winds himself around my legs while I light the lamp and fumble in the icebox for something that might please him. I go through to the terrace expecting to find Jimmy sleeping but he isn’t there and I wonder if someone has offered him a chance to go fishing. The others are all in a mound at the far end. Cato follows me. Just the five bodies tonight, sprawled across the mats. I can see by the flare of her hair that it’s Trudy who lies in Bobby’s arms, a little apart from Edie, Janey and Marty.
I curl up alone on the mattress that Jimmy and I have positioned, for reasonable modesty, behind the almond trees. I have a single candle in a jar, enough to read by. I think that a few pages of Peel Me a Lotus will be a comfort after all she has told me but find in its pages an existential angst that I hadn’t noticed before. I read Charmian’s words and this passage, again and again, while through the branches Jimmy’s absence echoes beneath the sky.
‘My face is cold turned up to the cold stars. Inexorable and orderly they move across heaven, star beyond star, nebula beyond nebula, universe beyond universe, wheeling through a loneliness that is inconceivable. Almost I can feel this planet wheeling too, spinning through its own sphere of loneliness with the deliberation of a process endlessly repeated, a tiny speck of astral dust whirling on into the incomprehensibility of eternity. How queer to cling to the speck of dust, whirling on and on, perhaps at this moment even upside down. There’s no comfort in the stars. Only darkness beyond darkness, mystery beyond mystery, loneliness beyond loneliness.’
Twenty-Three
Axel has returned with the hot breath of the meltemi. Not one of us has caught sight of him yet, not even Marianne, but it’s rumoured he’s holed up at Fidel’s house; at least that’s what Dionysus the dustman told Charmian this morning.
The scorching winds lick at the already sweltering island. Sun flares from every white wall, our ears buzz with insects, the cicadas sizzle incessantly, everything stinging and biting and not even the jasmines can sweeten the stench of the litter-strewn streets. Our hair has grown tangled and our eyes sore from grit. Shutters bang, things get broken. Gusts whip away our covers and sweep spiteful dust into our dreams. Tempers fray in the hairdryer heat, the harbour is whisked to a frothing custard-coloured scum and our cistern has run dry. Bobby seems to spend half his life queuing at the wells where Elias the waterman has positioned a dozen crones to monopolise the town supply which he brings down by donkey and distributes door to door at an inflated price. Each day we haul buckets of seawater up the steps to slosh through the privy and I have to be up extra early every morning for the scrum at the ice-factory doors.
The ferry hasn’t made it through the churning gulf for the last three days but still we gather – ‘like bloody paupers waiting for alms on Maundy Thursday,’ George grumbles – but the air makes us so listless, what is there to do other than huddle around these few tables and peck at each other?
George and Charmian are drinking cold beer at their usual spot beside the grocery door. Patrick Greer brings a fresh scandal to the table with the swagger of a gun dog with a duck hanging from its mouth. Last Saturday a German girl was raped by three sailors outside the slaughterhouse toilets but Police Chief Manolis has talked her out of pressing charges.
Charmian points at Leonard sloping towards us along the agora.
‘Look, no Marianne. I hope this means that Axel’s turned up and she’s busy giving him his marching orders,’ she says as he approaches, flicking his komboloi back and forth betwee
n finger and thumb.
Leonard stoops to kiss her on both cheeks. ‘Christ, you look crapulous,’ George says, and it’s true he’s not at his best. Last night the wind snuck in through a window and whipped away the only carbons of his novel and his face hangs heavy with loss. Bim calls him to join a feverish debate about marital fidelity and, with Kalimeras all round, he scrapes up a chair and Demetri shouts to Nikos to bring this filos a sketo and a Metaxa. As well as no Marianne, there’s no sign of Robyn or Carolyn. It’s often this way. I squeeze Jimmy’s hand under the table.
The foreign colony has fallen into two distinct camps. There is the ancient court of George and Charmian and then there’s Bim, who gathers new people around him like a debauched Regency prince. Demetri is usually to be found at his side, slyly clicking away at girls with the Rolleiflex he keeps propped on the table.
Leonard’s an increasingly rare sight these days, his work ethic more resistant to loafing than most. He’s noticeably thinner than earlier in the summer, almost jumpy, distracted, his body stooped as though he’s stuck in the typing position.
I’m melting on the cobbles in the hinterland between the two camps, next to Trudy, her face puffy from crying. The pale blue shirt she so often wears appears to have shrunk. She hasn’t been able to do up all of the buttons and her breasts look bulging and marbled in the cruel light.
Leonard and Bim are laughing at something Demetri is saying. I swivel from Trudy to catch the tail end of their ribaldry, and with one turn of my head replace tragedy with comedy.
Demetri has removed his sunglasses. He might still be wearing them, so dark are the shadows beneath his heavy brow.
‘So, Bim, how old are you?’
‘Twenty-seven last birthday.’
‘And Leonard, you?’
‘Twenty-five.’
Demetri uses the glasses to point at his friends. ‘Well, I’ve got a year on Bim and three on you.’
‘Time’s running out for you, old boy,’ Bim snickers. ‘Do you think these chicks at Lagoudera are going to let some old man of thirty stick his hand up their skirts?’
Demetri replaces his glasses and leans back in his chair. He speaks with a groan, his hands resting over his stomach.
‘Here’s what I think. It’s exhausting! Every night I have to fuck Carolyn. I can come crawling home, drunk and longing for sleep, but there she is in the bed beside me and fuck her I do! I tell you, this compulsion is so tiring.’ He looks into his lap and shakes his head. ‘I can’t wait to be older and for the rampant beast to be tamed.’
Leonard looks across at him and laughs. He takes a pencil from his pocket and scribbles a few words on a corner of the paper tablecloth, tears it off and pockets it.
The lack of mail is making us stagnant. A four-day-old Athens Daily is still being passed around, starving eyes scan the horizon for boats, there’s some desultory talk about the literature of maroonings.
Jimmy and Göran are bickering about Thoreau and Walden, which of course I’ve never read, and Charmian chips in: ‘I believe it was Robert Louis Stevenson who wrote that it was somehow unmanly that he should live and write in such solitude. Do you think he meant that it was feminising to be doing so without a slave?’
George grins at her. ‘Every Prospero needs his Caliban, darling.’
Even if the ferry does make it through today and there’s mail, there’ll be nothing for me. The light burns my eyes, my legs are itchy with flea bites. The first anniversary of our mother’s death has passed without word from our father; Bobby’s birthday too, my letters all unanswered. A gust of wind brings with it a sulphurous taint, a clatter and a yowl. The bell of the monastery tolls inconsolably. The burning speck of dust whirls on while the conversation is batted to and fro, largely over my head, until at last Jimmy catches my eye and smiles at me and I have a sudden urge to throw my arms around him and hang on to him for dear life.
Sofia brings out a few plates of greasy cheese pies and fried green peppers, cucumbers, bread and oil. Edie and Janey float by in dresses they’ve made from old silk and lace from the flea market. Demetri calls them over, toying with the strap of his camera.
‘Hey! We need to fix a date for you chicks to come to my studio,’ he says as they flutter towards him. How easily Edie settles herself on Leonard’s knee, Janey on Bim’s. How complicit the smiles of the men.
Bobby is talking to me, tugging my ponytail to get my attention.
‘So will you do it? Will you find a moment when no one else is about to ask Charmian if there’s anyone can help fix this in Athens?’ He’s gripping Trudy’s hand, speaking into my ear.
‘Carolyn said she thinks there’s a doctor in Monastiraki who sorted Charmian out last year.’ And he touches his nose at me in a way that suggests some knowledge that he’s party to and I don’t need.
He turns and kisses Trudy’s brow, tells her he’ll do whatever he can to help her, sell the car if she needs the dough, and she cries softly and says, ‘You’d do that for me? Oh, Bobby.’
I don’t tell Charmian that Jean-Claude is most likely the father when I go to her later on Trudy’s behalf. I don’t need to.
‘My goodness, four missed periods and the silly creature does nothing? What was she thinking of? All one has to do is stand next to Jean-Claude when he sneezes to fall pregnant,’ she says with a bitter laugh as she leafs through her red address book. She scribbles a name and some details on a scrap of paper, drops it in my basket and ushers me away because George is already shouting for her.
I trudge back along the waterfront, a leaden-heeled messenger with my casket of doom. Rotten melons bob in the harbour like skulls. Boats jostle, bashing fender to fender, heave at their moorings; the fishing caiques creak with boredom while the yachts are affronted by scum and detritus that drifts from the slaughterhouse rubbish chute. The cats gather snarling around a rat that has been washed on to the cobbles; gulls fight in a pool of fish guts. The café awnings flap and complain. Stranded tourists wander listlessly among the tables, getting in everyone’s way. Quite a number of my crowd haven’t moved all day and are still haranguing each other outside Katsikas. I can’t face Trudy yet. Charmian was insistent I should warn her that she may have left things too late. It was silly to think that praying might deal with it, or believing she could rely on someone like Jean-Claude to pull out. This last bit she said looking at me like I was the one who was pregnant, and so sternly I blushed.
All my chores are already done for the day, my many dealings with insects. I’ve sent whole regiments of ants marching in an outside direction, found the weevils hiding in the lentil jar and thrown the whole lot down the privy, filled the wasp traps with honey, and picked fleas from Cato which I took a vengeful pleasure in watching drown in a glass of water.
Jimmy has already gone back to work. I have left him some bread and cheese and, weighed down by a jug of sweet foulis, a note to say I’ll see him at the cinema later.
I’ve a couple more hours to keep myself scarce. The wind makes me too restless for a siesta. There’s nowhere safe to swim on a day like this, unless you hike across the island through the sickening heat to Limnioniza, and even then you can’t be sure that Boreas won’t find a way to stir things up. I think vaguely of the notebook in my bag, of finding some shade to write in and the energy to do so.
I wander up the alley and past Apostolis the butcher’s latest display, rather meagre as befits a marooning. A lone bullock’s head on a slippery bed of gore has been crowned with a twisted arrangement of tripe that when I squint looks like a turban. Through the door Apostolis thanks a customer, wiping his hands on his streaked apron, taking a handful of coins. The customer fills the doorway and I see it’s Axel, a bloodstained bag and a look that says he might not wait to cook whatever is inside before eating it. His eyes are cold and dead as two stones, his face patchy with parched-looking tufts of straggly yellow beard, skin scorched and scabby across the bridge of his nose, his shirt torn from one shoulder like he’s been in a brawl. He
gives me a furious scowl before striding off.
I turn on my heel. It feels urgent I let Marianne know that Axel’s presence on the island is now a fact. The meltemi works itself up into one of its hot gritty tantrums as I climb.
I find her tangled in sheets, attempting to unpeg her washing from the line, but the wind has other ideas. She’s more like a girl than a woman, high-stepping and laughing with her hair blowing around. She whirls, chasing errant T-shirts and vests. I untangle Leonard’s khaki shirt from a thorn bush and hand it to her.
Marianne gleams in the sun, makes light, shrugs when I mention what I heard about Leonard’s carbon copies blowing away.
‘Pfft. It is not too much trouble for me to type the whole thing out for him when he’s ready to send it off,’ she says. ‘I told him already I have a certificate for typing so he doesn’t need to be so stressed.’ She doesn’t seem to mind about anything too much. Still laughing, she conquers the last of the billowing sheets and stuffs them into a big basket where the baby is rocking back and forth, clapping his hands at the dancing sails and his mother with her gold hair flying.
‘I just saw Axel,’ I say reluctantly, not wanting to pierce the bubble of happiness all around them. ‘He was coming out of Apostolis’s. He looked awfully ill.’
She stoops for the baby and the basket and looks up at me with a sad smile. ‘I know, he’s already been here,’ she says and I follow her inside to where Leonard’s guitar now hangs from the nail at the foot of the ladder, and on up the steps. She puts the baby on a rug and parts the bed curtains, pulls out the tortured remains of her diaphanous orange dress. Someone’s really gone for it with the scissors. Some pieces are only streamers and she looks almost gay with them fluttering from her fingers, her pretty smile at odds with her words.