Wine bottles clinking in my bag as I amble along the footpath home, I pick a couple of ripe, sun-warm figs from the tree as I walk past, breaking open their soft green skin to check they are moist inside. They ripen only in August, a short season; the trees must belong to someone but if no one else is picking them, I assume no one will mind. Prickly pear fruit, fragosika, are also ripening now and delicious, but require more care when removing the skin with its fine, hair-like spines.
Starting up the hill, I see the red splash of Pavlos' T-shirt as he bends down over the goat. My heart sinks.
Then the goat comes tearing down the track and leaps away up the hill and out of sight.
'I freed it,' says Pavlos.
My bet is that he asked Maria for a knife and she said no.
There's another Koupa in the village just after the late August festival of Panayia Kamariani. It would be a perfect opportunity for me to get together with my new English friend Anna. I met her at the Greek dance class, and we said we must get together for a drink sometime. We don our best dresses and fancy shoes, she arrives on the bus from Livadia and we head up the steps of the whitewashed alley to the kafeneion – only to find out we've got the wrong night.
Amid jibes from Sofia, the not-to-be-messed-with proprietress, we grab a bottle of retsina anyway and a table on the terrace, and we exchange stories of our Greek adventures.
Slim with boyishly short hair, Anna fell in love with Greece and the backwater charms of Tilos twenty years ago. She works as a legal assistant in London, though a few years ago after a serious health scare she decided to spend as much time here as possible. She'd love to find a sufficiently progressive employer in order to work from home. This year she's here for the whole summer before she has to go back and find a contract.
It's soon clear that we've had so many similar experiences we're almost finishing one another's sentences, and find much to laugh about. For both of us, too, sitting on the kafeneion terrace on a summer's evening beside locals discussing the issues of their day is something special. Every now and then we're interrupted by someone who asks if we really thought it was the Koupa tonight. Who cares? It's an excuse for another night out; I love having a friend to gossip with.
'Jennifer!' barks Sofia in her deep voice as I delicately descend the steps from the terrace to ask for another bottle of retsina. 'You'd better not wear those shoes tomorrow. You won't be able to dance in them!' Her joke sets her off laughing. My shoes are high wedge heels held on by black ribbons, bought in Rhodes on my way back from England for not very much money; I love them, even though they're a little small for me, and I'm sure I can dance in them if I want to badly enough. 'And you'd better not drink too much either!'
Grinning, I grab a can of soda water to splash into the retsina, making the simple resinated wine bubbly – Greek champagne.
Next to us is a table of village men including Pantelis. He walks with a stick and has a weathered, lined face which always lights up when he sees me, and invariably asks about my mother and her friend Hermi who came to visit a few months ago. He rather enjoyed a surprise shoulder massage Hermi gave him over the stuffed goat lunch Maria cooked for us all. Sitting with him, in dress trousers and a shirt, is Nikitas, thin as a rake, leaning back in his chair with a cigarette held casually between his fingers, his eyes half-closed by droopy lids. He insists on handing us a plate of salted tuna from their meze.
It's a wonderful evening with my new friend. Sometimes it pays to get the day wrong.
Next night is a little like déjà vu; I'm wearing my favourite outfit all over again. It's not as if I have a vast array to choose from, and this sparkly, figure-hugging number is actually the easiest thing to throw on. I bought it at a vastly reduced price, even though at the time it was two sizes too small, figuring I might lose weight during a summer of walking, swimming and sunshine in Tilos. I did. I'm not sure the same will happen with the shoes.
Anna arrives on the bus and we find a table overlooking the square, where older ladies, having bagged the best spots, sit in a row – arms crossed, not drinking, not talking, just waiting. Meanwhile, the older men and the young musicians are warming up with a few drinks in the kafeneion. It sounds like they might have been warming up for a while. The sky is a darkening blue. Above us on the wild, steep hillside, a delicate string of lights leads up to the honey-coloured walls of the ruined castle, lit up at night throughout the summer.
The singing gets louder and the ladies down below remain stoically in their seats, biding their time, in the light from the open church windows. Then there's a stirring inside the kafeneion, and suddenly the procession is on.
'I'm not sure if they'll actually make it down the steps,' says Anna.
The men are merrily swaying, singing in deep voices, shoulder to shoulder as they emerge through the archway, down the steps and into the square, where they finish the song standing in a tight circle, arms around one another. There's some back-slapping and everyone disperses to the tables, the musicians taking their place on the bench by the church.
We snag a table that appears to be free – a white plastic table, of course – though we worry it was reserved for someone important, like the priest. Never mind – we'll be up dancing for most of the night, I hope.
I spot the fisherman, Stelios, dressed in black jeans and T-shirt, and ask if he wants to join us.
He sits down and announces, 'I have souma. Nectar!'
The priest, Papa Manolis, with his long grey beard and black robes, dances alongside holidaymakers and toddlers. Local men in their twenties and thirties show off some frenetic footwork. Villagers in their sixties and seventies with creaky legs are some of the most enthusiastic dancers; for them, this is still, I imagine, one of the highlights of their social calendar. We join in a few dances, and watch the others with admiration. The musicians are tireless, playing the traditional instruments of lute and lyra long into the night.
By the early hours, the old folks are still going strong, but we're beginning to flag. Anna looks around for someone who might be driving to Livadia, and it doesn't take long to be offered a lift.
I'm about to walk home when Stelios suggests taking a spin to Eristos for a quiet drink at the makeshift bar of driftwood and bamboo that is set up on the sand every summer. He doesn't have his own place in Tilos as he usually works in Athens or Rhodes during the winter and, as is the traditional way, his home is with his parents in the village; but in the summer, he mostly camps on Eristos beach among friends he's known for years. He persuades me to get on the back of his motorbike. I try not to worry as we vroom off down the dark road.
As we arrive, I hear a message come through on my phone – it's from Anna: 'I think he likes you!' I smile – she is wicked. I don't believe for a minute that this lovely young man would be interested in me that way; he's just enjoying the company. But it feels like another good Greek island night, and I kick off my shoes as we walk down the cool sand under the stars, the waves sweeping in to shore.
Chapter 5
Dancing Through Doorways
It's early morning. The sun has crept up the hillsides on both sides of the wide bay, highlighting the reds and blues and yellows of the rock. The sea is calm and blue, the long stretch of beach deserted. Back among the feathery trees at the top of the beach there are scraps of bright colour: tents, the occasional hammock, wraps tied on branches for shade. Inside the tents, everyone seems to be sleeping. A zip opens, and two figures crawl out and on to the sand, scamper down to the end of the beach, and dive into the sea.
When they emerge, the woman pulls her tight, sparkly dress back on rather sheepishly, considering how inappropriate it looks in the early morning on a hippie beach, hoping no one will see.
It went like this. We were sitting at the wooden beach bar with glasses of souma. We started chatting and I asked him where he lived in the village. It turned out his mother was Vicky the museum curator, and his father Nikos the barber. I laughed, saying I knew his parents. Then he suddenly
grabbed me with those strong fisherman arms and silenced my laugh with a passionate kiss. It was all a bit of a shock, but I was hardly going to say no to the gorgeous young man with huge dark eyes, long eyelashes, Dennis the Menace hair, broad shoulders and caramel skin. And then, well, there was the choice of riding the motorbike back to the village, or sleeping in the tent.
He drives me home in the morning after our wake-up swim. When he calls me on the phone later in the day, I can't understand a word – it's easier to talk apo konda – 'from close', or face to face. He comes by the house in the early afternoon and says, with Greek bluntness, 'Make me a coffee.' We laugh and hold one another a lot. He scratches me with his stubble and I learn the Greek word for hedgehog. Leaving for work, he kisses me goodbye and lifts me off my feet; he's used to hauling in nets full of fish. I watch him drive off down the dirt track on his motorbike, his eyes squinting, a roll-up in his mouth.
There is a language barrier, since Stelios' English and my Greek are both limited. But actions speak louder than words to me, since my last boyfriend lied to me spectacularly. This feels simple and genuine. I'm fairly sure it isn't serious, especially given that he's younger than me, not even thirty; but every day Stelios comes to my house, or I meet him at Eristos.
Someone once asked me, rather rudely I thought, whether I shouldn't try staying single. I've tried, believe me, and I like spending time on my own, but love is just too nice to give up. (Didn't Robert Palmer write a song about that?) If at first you don't succeed, try, try again: this maxim I apply avidly, it seems, to relationships. It used to be embarrassing when friends – happy couples with bouncy children – would ask, 'And are you still with… what's his name again?' And very often, I wasn't. I've had a lot of relationships and must have been responsible for the break-up of at least half of them. People sometimes say I've been unlucky with men, but another way of looking at it is that men have been unlucky with me. I decide to go dancing through an unexpected doorway, to see what I find (to paraphrase Dire Straits).
It's closing in on the end of August and the people who set up elaborate camp for the summer are beginning to dismantle it all for another year. One week all the spaces under the trees are taken, the nearby restaurants full, and the next week there's no one. Stelios takes me along to meet a group of his friends who've been coming here every summer for twenty years. They're packing up to take the ferry back to Athens and he's thinking of taking the weekend ferry to see a rock concert with them.
'Why don't you come to Athens?' he asks.
I laugh it off. Then I wonder: why not? I can take a long weekend off. He may have to leave the island to find work soon; why shouldn't we enjoy ourselves first? When he adds that he really wants to see the new Acropolis Museum, I decide to go. Since I studied Ancient Greek at school, the ancient history holds a fascination for me.
The year I finished university, I lived in Athens in the neighbourhood of Galatsi and taught English in a language school or frontistirio. From the top of my apartment building I had hazy views across the dirty-white city, then covered in clouds of smog, to the surrounding mountains and the gleaming silver sea. I loved wandering the streets, lingering over statues in museums. I spent Sunday afternoons at a cafe in Monastiraki, the old market area, where they played rembetika, an Eastern style of blues music that originated in the urban 'underground' in the early twentieth century; and many an evening at a hard-to-find backstreet taverna run by the parents of a friend, a favourite haunt of actors which only got going after the theatres closed; or wandering the streets of Exarchia looking for somewhere to dance. Although the city was polished up a few years ago for the Olympics and the air no longer gives you nosebleeds, at heart it still feels a 'dirty old town' to me, full of history and memories and a lingering grittiness that's part of its appeal.
On the long journey to Athens, I pass time by reading and I sneak glances at Stelios with his nose buried in a book. Promising, I think. On paper, it may seem a ridiculous relationship: so many years between us, and only the basics of language in common. Yet we were both born in cities (he in Athens, I in Manchester) and grew up in villages surrounded by hills before going away to further our education. We have similar outlooks on life: cheerful, optimistic, hard-working, determined; we're both people who want to find our own routes to happiness, not necessarily via the standard model. I've had just as much success with apparently unsuitable relationships as with apparently suitable ones.
The closest we get to the Acropolis on the first day is a distant view of it as we sit for 2 hours with his best friend Stratos drinking coffee in Thissio. I'd forgotten that Athens with Greek friends would mean spending many hours at a time drinking coffee with parea, company, and the rest of the time waiting for other friends or finding a good place to eat.
That evening, we drive on motorbikes for miles across the outer suburbs of the city to the concert venue in Petroupoli where the singer friend they came to see is performing as warm-up act for legendary Greek rocker Vassilis Papakonstantinou. So much time is spent eating souvlaki – sticks of grilled meat – while chatting and waiting outside the gates for the rest of the parea that we actually miss their friend's performance.
Next day, Stelios wants to go shopping; Tilos has just one clothes shop, for women only, and he needs new jeans and T-shirts. I find some new gear for myself and am rewarded by being called a koukla, a doll. We have coffee in Monastiraki and discuss going to the Acropolis Museum.
'But first we should eat,' says Stratos, and a debate ensues about where.
We set off on the motorbikes down Piraeus Street, the wide road that stretches from Omonia Square down to the port, and I am enthralled by the colourful, large-scale street art that covers the grimy buildings. We drive a fair way and then, because I've been looking carefully at the art, I notice we've circled back again.
'Isn't this the street we drove down before?' I ask after twenty minutes.
It turns out no one remembers exactly how to get to the restaurant. But just as I am wondering how important it is to find this particular restaurant, we take an unpromising side street and find ourselves in Gazi, a cool neighbourhood of understated little eateries. In a shady courtyard we eat a very good meal of fried anchovies, fried cheese, falafel with tahini and boiled beetroot, its stems and leaves glistening with olive oil. The nearby walls are covered in clever, beautifully drawn street art. Opposite us is a wall painted with lines and lines of ornate writing, phrases running into phrases that take some deciphering, and some English words catch my eye and strike me: '… one hope one quest enjoy every minute unstoppable open your eyes and you will see have as much fun as possible…'
We drink ouzo, and afterwards no one is really in the mood for the museum. In the evening, there is a plan for the parea to drive across the city again to a park where the singer friend will perform privately for her friends who missed the concert. After another motorbike ride into the suburbs, which leaves me feeling somewhat cheated of an evening in the Athens I love, by 1 a.m. I am sitting in the dark next to a shopping mall and cinema complex, by a duck pond, while half the friends go off to buy souvlaki. No wonder everyone smokes – to pass the time. I am not exactly thrilled with this. The waiting around feels pointless and, somewhat disenchanted by the whole idea of the singer and wanting to be awake enough to enjoy my last day, I ask Stelios if we can leave. He agrees.
On the last day, after stopping for food and coffee, we do finally make it to the Acropolis Museum. The upper floor is dedicated to all the marble frescoes that were 'violently plundered', according to the signage, by Lord Elgin and are in the British Museum, leaving only replicas here. I fall in love again with a kore statue, a young female probably dedicated to the goddess Athena. I used to visit museums on weekends here and was entranced by kore and kouros statues, ancient marble figures of women and men. In archaic times they had been stylised and resembled Egyptian statues, but they became more Greek as the centuries passed, each one unique. This kore, an enigmatic half-smile on h
er face, one of those semi-destroyed during ancient raids on the temple, is perhaps the same one whose photograph – torn out of the guidebook – I had pinned on my bedroom wall.
On motorbikes, Stelios and Stratos take me to the port. I have to leave to meet my friend Claire in Kos, then in two days we'll join Stelios on the next ferry back to Tilos.
'Take care of each other,' I say.
'We always do,' they reply. It tugs at my heart.
They wait and wave goodbye as the big boat pulls away.
Claire and I used to go to classes at the gym together before I moved here, and now she's coming to Tilos for a holiday, flying to the larger Dodecanese island of Kos. I meet her in Kos town and take her to spend a day swimming at the hot springs of Therma. We catch up on the news of our lives over some good Greek food before we meet up with Stelios on the Diagoras ferry for the few hours' journey to Tilos. I offer her my bedroom in the house for a couple of weeks while she explores the island – I'm happy to sleep downstairs on the couch or outside on the terrace, as I'm up early in the mornings at my desk.
An Octopus in My Ouzo Page 4