by Jo Thomas
‘Yannis,’ Georgios says sharply. The rest of the family stop in their tracks.
‘I’m sorry, George, we can’t help. Especially not after . . . what has happened.’ He looks at me with coldness in his eyes. I knew I shouldn’t have come. They won’t want to know! I want to turn and run and run . . . but maybe that’s what I did when I found out I was pregnant. I like to think I was giving Stelios time to think. But maybe I really was running away.
‘Just listen,’ Georgios says, like an older brother telling off a younger sibling, and amazingly, Yannis stops and does as he’s told. The rest of the family too turn back and look at Georgios and then, almost as one, sit back down.
I don’t know how or where to start.
‘Show them a picture,’ Georgios says quietly, his hot breath on my ear and my neck making a shiver run up and down me. Yannis tuts and exaggeratedly swings one leg over the other, showing his tedium.
I reach for my phone with shaking hands and pull up a picture: Demi’s last birthday, when we had cake and cava at the house with Gracie and Angelica. I show it to Georgios. He nods and gives the tiniest of smiles, and I step forward and hold up the screen.
The whole family stares at the picture. There is silence, followed by a collective sharp intake of breath. Then slowly they look up at me. Stelios’s father is the first to speak.
‘What is her name?’ he asks.
I take a moment, lift my chin again and say, ‘Demi.’
‘After the American actress Demi Moore, is it?’ Yannis says, still snippy.
‘After Demetria,’ I say quietly, and Stelios’s grandmother looks at me and her eyes fill with unshed tears.
‘Is this true?’ She finally speaks.
‘How do we know it isn’t some kind of sick joke?’ Yannis is angry now, standing and pointing at my phone. The air is full of emotion being held back but about to burst the flood defences.
‘You only have to look at the picture to know it.’ Georgios steps forward.
They all look again at the phone in my still-shaking hand. I feel so hot, I’m almost cold. My top lip is damp, as is the back of my neck.
‘She is Stelios’s daughter,’ I say finally. ‘I was pregnant when I left here. I told him about it. He needed time to think, how to tell you. I told him I was going back to the UK; that he should come and find me if he wanted me and the baby. I wanted to give him time to tell you. We rowed and I left anyway, hoping he would follow.’ I swallow, and the next words barely come out. ‘But he never did . . .’
‘She is beautiful,’ Stelios’s mother finally says, and she reaches out and takes the phone from me, running a hand across the screen, staring at it as if she is holding a baby in her arms for the first time.
‘Did she sleep as a child? Stelios never slept!’ his father suddenly says, and they all, unexpectedly, laugh; tearful, watery laughs. Even Georgios smiles. ‘And talk . . . once he learned, he never stopped!’
Now I join in the laughter. ‘That’s Demi!’ I tell them.
And now the floodgates burst open, letting the tide of emotion flow freely. Only Yannis is quiet. But he pulls up a chair and sits close to his parents.
‘Do you remember the time Stelios said his first word, just like that? We were up the mountain,’ his father carries on.
‘Melissa!’ his mother grins. ‘Bee,’ she tells me. ‘Buzzz,’ she adds, just in case I don’t understand. ‘The mountain was full of them, buzzing happily. The mountain was a different place then. He dreamed of having a hotel there.’
‘I know, he took me there,’ I tell them, and we all smile as we share Stelios’s dream for the place he loved.
They pull up a chair for me to join them and ask me about Demi: her job in London. Can she speak any Greek? And I shake my head and tell them, ‘Only to order a kebab,’ and we all laugh, and I feel like a huge weight has lifted off my shoulders and I’m breathing freely again. Laughing too, like I haven’t laughed in a long time. I turn round to thank Georgios, but he has slipped away.
Stelios’s sister disappears into the kitchen and reappears with a big pot of coffee and a plate of little cakes – the ones like spun golden thread, soaked in syrup; filo pastry parcels; cherries and quinces made into fruit preserves and served in spoons – then we talk all over again, about the sweet treats Stelios adored as a child and the food he loved to cook at the restaurant, food from the mountain that he was so proud of.
Finally it’s time for me to leave. The family stand up and hug me one by one.
‘We want to hear more,’ Stelios’s mother tells me, wiping the tears that keep falling from her eyes despite her smile.
‘You are part of the family now,’ Stelios’s father says, holding me by the tops of my arms. ‘Please, you will come back and work here? I know there are no customers, but we look after our own. Besides, we want to spend more time with you. Won’t you stay and eat with us?’
‘Thank you, but I have to go now,’ I say. It’s been lovely, but I want to speak to Georgios.
‘Just out of interest, who is the young woman in the photograph with Demi, the one who looks like Britney Spears?’ asks Yannis casually, pointing at Angelica. We all laugh.
When I finally manage to leave, amongst hugs and tears and more laughter, I have a warm glow inside me. I have to find Georgios and thank him. And then of course there’s Demi. She doesn’t know about any of this . . . where on earth am I going to start?
Georgios looks surprised to see me when he opens the door of his little stone house.
‘At least you knocked this time,’ he says with half a smile, but he opens the door wide for me to come in. I smart at the memory of snooping round the day I found the bird scarer.
‘Thank you for doing that, back there,’ I begin. I look around the living room, my eyes drawn to the amazing view from the floor-to-ceiling window at the far end, leading out on to the balcony.
‘It was the right thing to do,’ he nods. ‘Coffee, or something stronger? I have wine or raki.’
‘Wine would be lovely.’ I’m surprised to find myself accepting his offer; wine might actually be just what I need. He takes two glasses from the wooden shelves in the corner where the kitchen runs under the open staircase.
‘The woodwork, it’s the same as Stelios’s shrine on the roadside.’ I find that now I’ve started talking about him, I can’t stop. I watch Georgios as he pours wine from an unmarked green bottle into two tumblers.
‘I made it, from my own trees.’ He nods to the window. ‘Come, let’s sit outside.’
He leads the way to the small terrace looking out over the mountains. Bending down, he picks up a newspaper, scrunches a few pages into balls and takes some kindling from a pile neatly stacked on the decking, then pulls out a lighter and lights the laid-up fire in the fire pit. The wind makes the flames flick and flack.
I take a sip of wine as I watch him feeding the flames. The sun is setting in between two mountain peaks, and I’m mesmerised. It’s not cold, but the wind is whipping round us and the fire is comforting.
‘This is good.’ I nod to my glass as Georgios sits in the chair next to me.
‘My own wine. From my vines.’ He indicates the vines that are growing in straight rows on a tiny triangle of land on a ledge down the mountainside, and another patch below that. Order amongst chaos.
Putting a log on the fire, he sits back, holding his leg out straight in front of him. Filos jumps up on to his lap.
‘Hello, little friend.’ I rub his head and he pants happily, his pink tongue poking out from his wiry whiskers.
‘How are you feeling?’ I ask Georgios.
He looks straight at me and then says evenly, ‘Like I’ve been hit on the head with a rock!’ and breaks into a wide smile, wrinkles appearing at the corners of his eyes.
Any nerves that m
ight still be hanging around disappear as I can’t help but let out a little laugh. Then we both turn, smiles on our lips, and look out towards the setting sun, like a big orange and red ball sliding out of the sky. The smoke billows and curls and around us like a cat, winding itself in between us and all around as we sit for a moment in contented contemplative silence.
Suddenly Filos barks, interrupting our thoughts. I turn, and there behind me is the little fawn-coloured pup from the litter back at the honey farm. It stops in its tracks when it realises it’s been spotted. I must have left the front door open. It’s ventured a long way from the barn. I look back at Filos, who is no doubt going to send it home, his headstrong, independent child straying too far from its mother. But Filos barks again; not in his usual snappy way, telling the pup off, but more encouraging, and this time the pup bundles forwards towards me, nearly tumbling head over heads in its excitement, and I put out my hands to scoop it up, holding it to my face, losing myself in its soft fur and puppy smell. Georgios is smiling and nodding gently, looking out over the mountains as I fuss and cuddle the little dog.
‘Thank you,’ I say to Filos, and put out my hand and pat him. Looks like we’ve finally learned to trust each other. He holds up his head and pants, showing his pink tongue, as though he’s smiling too.
‘Looks like you’ll have to stay around for a while now. You have a Filos too.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t keep her.’ I look at the puppy’s big brown eyes, and the white patch around her dark nose. ‘But . . . well, maybe if I could look after her, just while I’m here. I’ve never had a dog.’
‘Looks like she’s chosen you. And Filos seems to approve.’ Georgios has pulled out his penknife, and with one foot up on the wooden terrace wall is idly whittling a piece of wood from the neatly stacked pile there.
‘I think I’ll call her Angelica, after my best friend back home.’ I settle her in my lap, where she turns three circles and then curls up contentedly and shuts her eyes. ‘Maybe Angel for short,’ I add. I pull out my phone and take a picture of her, and then send it to Angelica. Then I put away the phone and sit back and smile at the pup in my lap.
With peace and harmony in the air all round, and buoyed up by my success as messenger yesterday, I feel the time is right to ask him more about the dittany. I take a sip of wine, then stroke the puppy, which has a hugely soothing effect on me.
‘So, the man I saw you with in the car park that day, when I put two and two together—’
‘And came up with seventy-two?’ Georgios finishes for me with an arched eyebrow, and my toes curl in embarrassment.
‘Yes.’ I manage to smile. ‘You said he was from the office of protected sites?’
Georgios stands and goes inside, returning with the wine bottle, and tops us both up.
‘That’s right. The dittany is on the red list of threatened species. The mountain is a protected site.’
‘And when will it be safe again? When do you think the bees will want to start to move down the mountain?’
He puts the bottle beside his chair and sits, resting his foot on the terrace wall again, making himself comfortable. He shrugs. ‘It’s at its most vulnerable right now, whilst it’s flowering. In a couple of weeks, the poachers won’t be interested. But right now, I have to keep what we have safe. If I can’t show the inspector evidence of freshly picked dittany, the mountain will lose its protected status. If that happens, the developers will move in, put up buildings and construct solar panels all over the slopes.’
‘But surely that’s a good thing? What’s the problem? Stelios always wanted to build a B and B on the mountainside. He said he wanted everyone to come and see how beautiful his home was.’ I’m sitting up straight now, and Angelica, the puppy, has woken at the sound of raised voices.
‘This would be very different. Building an all-inclusive resort would choke the town, suffocate it. They will have everything they need up there – restaurants, bars, cafés; even a medical centre. No one will go into the town at all. It will die. Every single business, including Stelios’s family’s restaurant.’
‘An all-inclusive resort?’ I think of Zeus’s Vista, the resort where we worked down by the coast; no one venturing out of it, every need catered for from drinks to food to souvenirs.
He nods. ‘There’s been some company sniffing around apparently, Henderson’s Holidays? They want to bring tourists, yes, but they want to build a resort, here on the mountain. The guy has an investor lined up, and a lawyer from the city. It will be totally self-contained, even bringing in their own solar energy from the panels that will cover the mountain.’
A slow, sickening feeling is starting to spread over me. ‘Did you say Henderson’s Holidays? How do you know about this?’ I say, with a very dry mouth and a sudden thumping headache.
‘The inspector told me. An offer has been made on the land, a serious one. If they think there is no threat on the mountain, no drugs gangs with guns keeping people at bay, they will start to invade it and seek out the dittany until it’s all gone. Whatever happens, no one must know what’s happening up here.’ He nods his head to the mountain peak. ‘No one must know about the secret valley. If they find it, and the dittany is stripped from it, any chance of saving the mountain and Vounoplagia will be gone.’
He stares at me, looking straight into my soul, and my blood runs cold as I realise what I’ve done.
My head is swimming and I focus on breathing. In, out, in, out, I tell myself firmly, watching my chest rising and falling. I’ve told Harry Henderson exactly how to get his hands on the mountain and carry out his plans. Plans that will ruin the town, including Stelios’s family business, Maria and Kostas’s too. The bees will all die. The honey farm will never happen. How could I have done this?
‘So,’ I say very slowly over the sound of the whooshing in my ears. I struggle to get the words out. ‘If the holiday firm and its developers get to know about the dittany . . .’ My mouth goes dry.
‘This town will die,’ he finishes for me, all hint of his earlier good humour gone.
I look out over the streaks of red, orange and yellow where the sun has left its mark in the sky. Tears prick my eyes. I want to tell Stelios I’m sorry. Georgios too. I have to think of a way to put right the damage I’ve caused.
‘I could help!’ I say suddenly, making Angel jump. ‘Sorry,’ I soothe her.
‘What?’ Georgios frowns.
I start to gabble. He has to agree. I have to put this right before he finds out what I’ve done. ‘You said yourself I did a good job yesterday, delivering the dittany.’ I’m gripping the arm of the chair tightly with one hand, my wine glass in the other held out in front of me.
‘Well, yes, but . . . it’s a lot more than—’
‘I could help you,’ I insist again. I’m on a roll. I can’t let him turn me down. ‘You could concentrate on guarding the secret valley and looking after the dittany, making sure no one comes near it, helping it thrive. I could take over the messenger duties. I go to the crocheting circle and hear about everyone’s ailments, so I’d know exactly who needs it and when.’
Georgios looks at me suspiciously, and then his dark eyebrows lower over his green eyes as his face becomes more thoughtful.
‘You could spend more time up there,’ I point towards the secret valley, ‘and if you see anyone coming up the mountain you could call out to me and I could create a distraction or diversion to stop them. We could work as a team! Just until the flowering is over.’
I’m actually convinced this is the answer. I have to do it. After all, I have spent the last few weeks trying to scupper everything he’s done. I have to make sure that Harry Henderson and his developers stay away from here. I can’t believe I was so gullible. Harry doesn’t want to share the wealth the tourists will bring; he wants it all for himself. How could I have been so stupid? A bit of flattery and
a glass of wine and I thought he was Richard Gere to my Julia Roberts. There I go again, thinking life is some kind of romantic film with a happy-ever-after . . . well it’s not! I’ve made a huge mistake, and I need to put it right.
‘Please, Georgios, let me help . . .’
The silence between us is excruciating. The dogs don’t move a muscle.
‘I’ll think about it . . .’ he says finally, and falls silent again, reaching out and stroking Filos.
‘Please . . . for Stelios. Let me help save the mountain.’ I don’t know what I’m going to do if he says no. How can I leave knowing the damage I may have caused? I’m going to have to tell him, and then any bridges we have built will be well and truly burned. I take a deep breath, trying to work out how to broach the subject.
‘Georgios . . . I’ve done something awful . . .’
‘You made a mistake. You let your head rule your heart.’ My own heart lurches. He knows! ‘You thought you were doing the best thing for Stelios and the baby.’
I realise we’re not talking about the same thing. He doesn’t know, and my shoulders drop in relief. But I did listen to my head instead of my heart. When I met up with Harry, my head was telling me this was a great opportunity, a way to put a stop to Georgios, when my heart should have told me that Georgios would never do anything to hurt the mountain he loved.
‘We have to keep the secret of the mountain safe!’ he says earnestly, and I stop thinking about what I’m about to tell him. He looks like nothing has ever mattered more to him. He’s doing this for Stelios and his family, and I want to do it for them too.