An Octopus in My Ouzo

by Jennifer Barclay

  Summer is beginning again. I take Lisa to the beach daily. When it's warm, she races into the sea and sits in the water. If it's really warm, she'll swim, and the halfdrowned look of her, a seal-like thing with floppy ears hanging over the water, makes me giggle hysterically. She gets out and shakes herself all over me. I take the precaution of zipping my shoes and clothes into my bag so she doesn't steal them or eat them while I'm in the sea. If I lie on the beach, she has a habit of coming up to me and standing on my chest to say that I may rub the fur on her throat now. She also makes it clear when she doesn't want to leave the beach, standing and looking at me with her tongue hanging out, and glancing back over at the water. She never wants to leave – she's even more of a beach bum than me.

  Before kantina season recommences, I make myself go away for a few days' holiday. It's always hard to leave, but breaks are good, especially after a difficult time, and I need to explore more islands for writing assignments that are coming up with greater regularity now.

  Where do you go on holiday when you live on a tiny island? Perhaps an even tinier island, Pserimos: with a population of only twenty, a few kilometres long by a few kilometres wide, one of the smallest inhabited islands in Greece. It's halfway between Kalymnos and Kos, close to the shores of Turkey. Searching for information online, I find an obscure reference to someone called George who helps travellers to Pserimos, and an email address. He responds at once saying Tilos is nice, but Pserimos is a different experience – bold words! Because I'm thinking I'll have to bring Lisa, he says I'm welcome to set up my tent in the scout camp he runs. At the last minute, though, Stelios says he can look after Lisa.

  I set off on the Diagoras at night, pass Nisyros and Kos, and reach Kalymnos in the early hours. Camping on the little town beach is forbidden, but I hope no one will notice if I lie on a sunbed in my sleeping bag and leave early. I sleep for a few hours, buy treats at a good bakery, and soon it's time to board the Maniai, the little ferry. The view on arrival is tantalisingly lovely: a horseshoeshaped harbour with white sand and shallow, clear water, surrounded by smooth, low hills.

  The bay is both a natural blessing and a sad curse, because it draws day-tripper boats and there are stalls of trinkets. An old lady beckons me over in a friendly way, then tries to sell me some herbs. When I set off walking to a quieter cove, it is sullied by debris brought in by the sea and dominated by views of a Turkish resort. But taking another path, I notice gardens of fig and prickly pear and grape vines, goats with long, twisted horns and farms with dry stone walls reinforced with old furniture to keep them out. A farmer lies snoozing with his dog under a tree, and waves to me as I pass.

  Gradually, the little island grows on me. The few vehicles on the island include a truck with a ram's huge horns on its fender, and a scooter with a trailer that has a goat riding inside. I arrive back at the harbour when the day-trippers have left, and I have the soft pale sands to myself. I eat a good meal at Sevasti Pikou's taverna: vine leaves, which they call fylla, stuffed with rice, meat and tomato – the best I've ever eaten. Under the tall, aromatic pine trees of the scout camp, I fall asleep listening to the wind blowing through thousands of olive trees, kept company by wandering chickens.

  The next morning, I have the bay to myself for a swim, watch the boats bringing in octopus and sponges and fish; when tour boats arrive, I take George's directions to an empty stretch of pale sand backed by low cliffs, with one half of a white chapel perched picturesquely on the edge – the other half having fallen into the blue sea. Locals stop to talk when they see I'm still there. I follow another path over the hills in the other direction – when I ask an old man the way, he warns me 'Tha berdepseis poli', You'll get very confused – to another stretch of beach I have to myself. I grow to love the sound of the wind in the olive trees during the night, and remember how good camping is – as well as the freedom of having nothing to do but walk and read and notice all these things. I am very happy I came to Pserimos for a few days, and resolve to return sometime.

  On Sunday, I decide to work and get a head start on the week. After a couple of hours' emailing, I have to drive to Livadia to take some photos of the apartments Eleftheria runs. While I'm there, I run into various people I know, go for a quick walk down the seafront and a swim in the sea. Back home, before getting back to work I remember I have to gather sage. Just as I am going to get down to work, my Albanian friend Bubuque, our neighbour at the horafi, arrives and asks if she can use our internet connection to call her family. Afterwards, I drop her and her son back home, since I have to go and feed the chickens and water the trees. Lisa naughtily gets into the chickens' food box while I dig up some of the enormous evil thorn weeds that are taking over our field. Back home, I clear up the mess of bits of wood and rope that Lisa's been chewing on, then I water the garden, make a salad… Finally, I admit that work will have to wait until tomorrow after all. I open a bottle of cheap bubbly from Rhodes, my latest treat, and sit and watch the lights come on in Megalo Horio. There certainly hasn't been a dull moment since I arrived here.

  Sometimes, nature red in tooth and claw gets a little too much when my office is part of my home, especially living with the two forces of nature that are Stelios and Lisa. In one day, Stelios explains to me how an octopus sucks the flesh out of a lobster, and I find Lisa with a rat's tail in her mouth, and a dead hedgehog in the nets over the vegetables; there's a massive meat cleaver in the sink, and a whole freshly slaughtered piglet in the fridge, thinly masked by the plastic bag it's in. I've always wanted an unconventional life, and now I've most certainly got one. The past couple of years have been an adventure in themselves, a very different experience full of wild beauty and immersion in rural Greek island life.

  Although all the gardening and cooking and dog-walking can be distracting, getting away from my desk can give me a different kind of space for thinking. One day, an opportunity to write a story for a major newspaper comes up, as long as I can find a good idea. It's as I'm feeding the chickens that I come up with one. I email them on my return and get the commission.

  It isn't a travel story, but about the pregnancy struggles. There's often a stigma about 'leaving it too late', but for me and other people I know, it wasn't a choice. I finished the long-term relationship of my thirties when I decided it wasn't stable enough to bring a child into; I was also still focused on building a long-term career because that's necessary for a good life, too. My next partner ended our two-year relationship unexpectedly around my fortieth birthday. Then there was Matt. Matt knew that the most important thing in my life then was to try for a child; that discussion led to our getting together. When I didn't conceive, he dragged his heels about getting test results – until I found out that he couldn't have children, at the same time as he dropped a few other bombshells. I finally realise that I am angry that he took those crucial years from me, and it's good to be able to write about it.

  With Stelios, I don't seem to have any problems getting pregnant – but I have a problem keeping it alive. What has become apparent from my reading is that no one really knows what causes this kind of miscarriage. There is much disagreement among the specialists: some people claim success in one field of treatment, others in another. Now that I've experienced being pregnant, it is hard to let go.

  Maybe I was never able to have children. Or maybe I still could. Not knowing is hard – and, I suppose, part of the great mystery of life. I just have to decide whether to continue trying, how much more I should put myself through. I usually try to judge if I'm doing the right thing by asking myself: if you knew you only had a year to live, is this how you'd spend it? It works for jobs and relationships, but most people wouldn't spend their last year trying to bring a child into the world and I wouldn't spend it having treatments, seeing more doctors and perhaps going through the torture of miscarriage again. It only gets harder each time, because three unexplained miscarriages is more hopeless than two.

  Each time I've been pregnant, it's drained me of energy for
a couple of months and I've had to be careful and put things on hold rather than live life to the full, and all for a painful ending – though I try to make up for lost time afterwards. It's tempting to keep trying: who knows whether next time we'll be lucky? It's also tempting to give up and enjoy my life and my freedom. But what if I wish later that I'd kept trying?

  We have, of course, discussed the adoption question several times. I've always liked the idea, but our lifestyle would be a major obstacle. Stelios says it's extremely difficult to adopt in Greece. We're not the model couple adoption agencies are looking for. We can't even have a complex conversation without a dictionary. So that's just not on the cards for now.

  Although we love one another, I still have doubts about how good we are as a couple. Yet everyday life is good, and that's important. I remember one time he taught me the expression, 'Ouden monimotera apto prosorino' – There's nothing more permanent than the temporary. It was only supposed to be a night on Eristos beach, and here we are with our chickens and lemon trees, and our dog.

  Chapter 29

  Investing in Freedom

  One of the first customers at the kantina this summer is a man from Athens, who tells me over his morning coffee that in early June he wasn't just enjoying the sound of the sea and the stars above, but from his little tent was involved in trying to keep alive the signal of ERT, the Greek national television station.

  A former computer programmer, he was always politically active but decided to do more about it when the work dried up during the economic crisis; he started taking photos of what he saw happening on the streets, recording the frustrations people were experiencing and their fatigue at being hit from every direction under austerity measures. When the government suddenly announced it was shutting down public television, 'the only unbiased medium' as he puts it, a group of journalists protested and tried to maintain the signal online, hoping eventually to set up a website with reliable information about what's happening in Greece.

  'For young people it was very important,' he says.

  The coming years in Greece will be hard, he continues, but most people in the cities think there is nothing left to lose. People with no work have to rely on the pensions of older relatives to survive. Properties are empty, shops closed. The Dromografos or street reporter tells me he finds his new way of life incredibly rewarding, though he's surviving on minimal income.

  'I've learned many things I didn't expect,' he says; there is still stress but he feels great about his work – it's tiring but fulfilling.

  His words resound in my head, because after taking the first two weeks of June off work, I realised I wasn't happy to be back at my job: after almost nine years with the company, it's time to ask for more responsibility, a bigger role, if I'm going to continue. It seems like insanity to keep doing the same thing, not growing and learning. I have inspired people with my story of moving to a Greek island; people have written to me saying they've been encouraged to change their lives. I've said that life is too short not to reach out for what makes you happy – and that's the ethos I should live by. It's time to speak up. The relationship isn't healthy if I don't say what's on my mind. A phone meeting is set up between me and the head of the company.

  The conversation doesn't go quite as I'd hoped, and suddenly, I'm working out a month's notice. My income has been reduced by two-thirds.

  It's both exhilarating and terrifying.

  But as soon as the shock of becoming completely freelance is over, it's liberating. This is it. I am now completely free either to make a mess of things or make them better. It's in my hands. I can work when and where I want. I've always been scared of losing a regular income, but after all I've achieved since coming here, I should be able to fend for myself. I've cut the lifeline that I needed at first, making a firmer commitment to a new way of life.

  Someone I worked with tells me that a shake-up of life is always good for opportunities. Almost immediately after going entirely freelance, I reach out to a potential client and am hired to complete a project later in the year that will stretch me more than I am used to. My judgement is being sought and valued and it feels like a good sign.

  What I came here to do also, I suddenly wake up and remember, was not only to spend more time outdoors but to be more creative, to get away from the endless cycle of work and have more time for writing. It's not going to be easy – there are going to be dry periods between paid work, when I worry that I'll have to go back to England and get a job. But here I can get by spending little, in order to invest in creativity. With a lower cost of living, I can also live life more. When I want a break from work, I can step outside and be walking and swimming, being fitter and healthier for more of the year and with time and space and freedom for thinking. I can close the computer and walk away into the wild beauty I have found here. This, for me, is real life. It is time to grasp life by its goatish horns.

  Here in the South Aegean in the height of summer, the habit of taking a sleep in the middle of the day is almost a necessity, and certainly a pleasure not to be taken for granted. As the heat intensifies, sleep begins to call. A midday meal and something to drink help you sink into slumber. And now, if I want to take a siesta during the hottest hours of summer and work later in the day, I can.

  I can take my time to enjoy the rest of the summer, have a break while I adjust. I can rush around less, do things more thoroughly, spend more time with people. In the middle of July, we have a lively evening at the kantina with a good crowd: an English couple who are hoping to spend more of their time on the island when they retire; our Austrian friends from last year; a Greek couple, he a musician and she a model-like beauty who adores playing with Lisa; a muscular Greek interested in books of esoterica and philosophy. I have a late swim and a cold glass of wine, put on some good music. Lisa loves all the attention. When she's not meeting new people, she's doing important work digging holes. It's funny to think that when she first saw people at Eristos she barked at them – she'd spent the first few months of her life thinking the whole vast beach was ours alone and she must defend it against intruders.

  As happens pretty much every year, there is controversy about the free camping. Some island residents see it as a waste of a good beach. Our mayor, Maria Kamma-Aliferis, writes in a Greek newspaper that the campers contribute to the island, bring business to local shops and restaurants, respect the place and clean up after themselves, and have become friends of the island.

  Again this year, kantina customers include locals who use it like a kafeneion, a place to sit and drink coffee, talk and play backgammon. People staying at the hotels nearby, or arriving on a yacht or on the bus for the day also frequent the kantina; the atmosphere is different from the more mainstream beach at Livadia, which has its own appeal. We have a couple of French authors who are working on their latest books – Philippe writes about alternative communities and is fascinated by how things work on Tilos in general and Eristos in particular – brushing shoulders with young Greek men with tattoos and girls with dreadlocks. It's a fantastic mix of nationalities, families and couples and groups of friends. For many, making new friends or meeting up with old ones at the kantina really makes their summer complete. And although mostly when I go to the beach I prefer to be alone, to read and appreciate the natural beauty, it provides a welcome opportunity to meet new people.

  For example, there are Kostas and Stavroula. Kostas used to have a wine shop in Exarchia, a hip, alternative neighbourhood of Athens, but recently had to close it down because the restaurants he supplied weren't able to pay their bills. Stavroula is a junior school teacher who hates having to explain to her kids why the school is now providing their lunches (because their homes can't). They've come here for the free camping with a budget of just €15 a day, and will stay until their money runs out. They gather thyme and walk to peaceful, secluded beaches. 'It's psychologically good just to feel ground under our feet here,' Stavroula says.

  There's another Kostas and his partner Koula.
He spends his days snorkelling, observing the sea life, while she creates clever jewellery out of recycled tin cans, and mouth-watering desserts, and has been hand-painting a sign for a women's co-operative shop to sell local products at the entrance to Megalo Horio.

  And there's Nikos, a clean-cut and now out-of-work mechanical engineer, who is on his second visit to the island and who enjoys the nature and tranquillity (stop barking, Lisa!). He sits reading a book in the shade, apologises that the English he learned doing post-graduate study in Canada is rusty, then expounds eloquently on such diverse topics as the Antikythera Mechanism – a computer-like navigation device from a hundred years BC, found in a shipwreck – and Plato's dialogue on etymology. Then he introduces me to the modern Greek poet Odysseas Elytis, writing down a few lines for me from the famous work 'To Axion Esti', where in 'The Genesis', God creates the sea and in it the 'small worlds' of the islands, looking like the curved backs of dolphins.