by Carol Mason
As I walk past the former train station, my mind goes back over old boyfriends. I honestly think I did date the best-looking guys in Sunderland. Even if they were uncouth, they were always good-looking-vulgar. Yet I was never going to marry any of them. I just somehow knew it. I blew up with pride those few times I brought my Canadian home. When his accent would get the sales girls in M&S falling over him to find him the polo shirt he liked in a forty-two-inch chest. Or when the single mothers on the train would gawp at us, as though they thought I’d bagged somebody famous.
It’s funny, Jonathan only ever came with me to England twice, yet I can’t even walk around Sunderland without seeing him here somewhere.
I’m just wondering what the advertising industry is like up North, and whether I could move back here and start up some cracking agency, when I see it. The ad in the travel agent’s window. The photo of an azure ocean, cherry-pink bougainvillea and a whitewashed bell tower perched on a hill. ‘Zante,’ it reads. ‘The third largest island in the Ionian Sea; ‘the green island, of poetry, of song and love…’
I remember how, several years ago, I told Jonathan I was going to take my mother to Greece when I went back to the UK for my yearly visit. He thought it a great idea. But in the end we never ended up going. It was really Jonathan I wanted to go on holiday with, not my mother.
The price is a steal. What did Richard say, about how a holiday might recharge me?
~ * * * ~
‘Greece?’ My mam glares at me. ‘Why didn’t you book somewhere like Lake Garda, if you were going to drag me somewhere?’
‘Do you even know where Lake Garda is?’
‘It’s not in Greece! It’s in …’ I see the wheels of her brain turning. ‘Italy,’ she says.
‘Good guess. What have you got against Greece, anyway?’
‘Well, for starters, it’s full of Greeks.’
‘Weird how that works.’
‘Plus, you haven’t read about it in the Sunday People! The hoi poloi and what they get up to in, in Fal-lal-al-a-Fella-Falla—’
‘We’re not going to Falariki, Mam. We’re going to some quiet scenic island, untouched by the grubby hand of tourism. A gentle place for mothers and daughters to commune in a state of mother-daughterly grace.’ I slide the brochure across the kitchen table and she pretends not to look. ‘The guidebook says it’s the most romantic place, and has the largest proportion of good-looking Greek men over the age of forty-five in the entire nation.’ I lie.
She shoots a look at me out of the corner of her eye.
Although what I’m doing going to a romantic Greek island with my sixty-year-old mother, is, admittedly, a good question.
She snatches the brochure off me. ‘How much did they hose you for this?’
‘Not a lot. Or we’d not be going, trust me. Don’t you remember we were going to go there a few years ago?’
‘Only you felt silly going on holiday with your old mother.’
‘No I didn’t!’
Yes I did.
I point out the asymmetrical white villa amid silvery olive groves with cerise bougainvillea climbing the wall. ‘This is our hotel.’
She scrutinizes the photograph. ‘It’ll have its own potty, won’t it? I hate having to do a Barry in a shared—’
‘A what?’
She looks at me, frowns. ‘A Barry White.’
I think about this for a moment or two. ‘Mam, that’s disgusting!’
She cocks her head, innocently. ‘What do you mean it’s disgusting? It just the name of a singer.’
I never know how my mother can be so naïve. ‘It’s Cockney rhyming slang, Mam. What rhymes with white?’
She looks puzzled, then it dawns on her. She slaps a hand over her mouth. ‘Good heavens! I thought it was because Barry White was, you know, so big and noisy. Not because… Oh dear!’ She hides her face in a hand. ‘I’ve been saying it all the time. I even said it to the doctor…!’
‘What was life like, Mam, on that planet where you were born and raised?’
She pretends to be unamused. ‘It’s not going to be too hot is it?’ She flaps a hand in front of her face. ‘I’m always in a lather lately.’
‘The girl said it should only be mid-twenties…’ I realise I’m getting excited because she is coming round to the idea. ‘Imagine a week on a beautiful island. We get room and breakfast—‘
‘And drinks?’
‘Not drinks.’
She pushes the brochure away in disgust, crosses her arms over those big, unfairly high boobs of hers. ‘It’s getting more appealing by the minute.’
‘You know Zante is known as “the perfumed isle”. Poets have lived there.’
Her right eye slides in my direction. ‘The perfumed isle, hm?’
I know what she’s thinking. It’ll be A Room With A View all over again. She’s Maggie Smith, and I’m Helena Bonham Carter, and we’re taking turns about the shoreline with our lace parasols.
‘Well, I have to admit it does look nice,’ she says, which means she’s wooed like a charm. ‘Far more refined than I would have thought.’
‘Refined. It’s going to be very refined, Mam. I promise you that.’
~ * * * ~
The departure lounge reminds me what I hate about the North East. Next to us is a row of foul-mouthed teeny-boppers clad in tiny denim shorts and matching turquoise T-shirts that have Geordie Girls Do Zante printed on the front. Geordie being the name given to people who come from a certain part of the North East. When they turn around, each girl has a different name on her back: Lil Miss Chatty, Lil Miss Saucy, Lil Miss Anybody’s for an Alcopop.
Welcome to the departure lounge, gate 8 boarding to Zante, at the ridiculous, and most unusual hour of 11:20 p.m. on Sunday night.
‘I wouldn’t spit on them if they were on fire,’ my mam says to me, as she sits there looking like a movie star in a big floppy white picture hat.
Doing a quick scan of the three-hundred or so people waiting in the ‘loading dock’ as my mother calls it, my mother is the oldest by about forty years—and I, being her daughter, am joined in standing out like a sore thumb. A teenage hooligan points to my mam’s hat and does a piss-taking caterwaul while my mother stares beyond him in a queenly state of dignity.
‘It’ll be fine when we get there and part company with them,’ I tell her—hoping I’m right.
‘A cheap package deal to Greece. I should have known. Pigs will fly before I will ever come on holiday with you again.’
~ * * * ~
The flight would have been all right if we didn’t have to sit on the runway for an hour because the airline was denying boarding to three drunken teenage boys who were making inappropriate remarks about being terrorists. The vast arrivals hall in Zante is sterile and white like a Greek temple; which makes me feel optimistic. Until I see there’s only one baggage carousel which doesn’t seem to work properly, and despite all the signs saying, in plain English No Smoking, all the Brits, trembling at the lighter, light up, and very soon you can’t see a luggage tag before you and I am wheezing like a grim kitten. ‘It says NO SMOKING,’ I tell one man, but he comes right up to my face and garbles something at me in angry Geordie hieroglyphics. Come back polite Canadians, all’s forgiven!
Having nabbed my mother one of the rare seats, I then wait—for fifty minutes—for our baggage, while she tries to put on a brave face. Sleep-deprived, my mother’s face is vampire white, except for a splash of pink lip-gloss. By the time we’re shipped out to the awaiting buses, it’s about seven in the morning and the sun looks like it’s trying to break out behind a dusty gauze over a hilly, barren landscape. The island feels still and promising.
After mucking around with a faulty microphone, the perky Scottish rep announces that those holidaymakers booked into Pedallo Sands hotel—that’s us—are now being moved somewhere else—to an entirely different resort. Apparently, though, we’re being upgraded to a better hotel.
‘If we live to see the place,�
�� my mam adds, because the manic bus driver hurtles off the motorway onto a dirt road full of chickens, sending wings and feathers airborne, much to the entertainment of the bus. As though this isn’t enough to wake us all up, he brakes heavily, giving the distinct impression he might not know where he’s going, then there’s a good grind of the gears, and then we suddenly find ourselves doing the same speed backwards.
‘Now Select Travel is pleased to welcome you to the delightful island of Zakynthos, or Zante, as we call it,’ the rep chirps. ‘Just one thing to warn you about though, we’ve been having some unusually scorching weather on Zante these last couple of weeks. Temperatures in the high forties—’
Forties? The travel agent said twenties!
‘—Whoo!’ goes the bus. Geordies love their suntans.
‘Yes well, sunstroke happens a lot. It’s not unusual even for Greeks to fall like olives off the tree when it gets this scorching. So please avoid the sun during the hottest hours of the day, and when you do go out, take lots of bottled water.’
‘What’s forty in farenheit?’ my mam peers at me.
‘I’m not sure, Mam.’
‘Well if it’s twice twenty, then beam me up Scottie!’
I have an overwhelming urge to go back to Sunderland and commit heinous atrocities on that travel agent.
The hotel—this supposed upgrade—looks like something that might be put in an ad for a recruitment drive for the army. The whole area is more like glorified barracks—perfectly ordered rows of flat-roofed, two-storey, square, yellow-stuccoed buildings with swimming pools. ‘Everybody off for Athena!’ the rep sings.
‘But this isn’t what we booked!’ I tug on her sleeve as she passes. I’m half expecting to see a bunch of skin-headed cadets marching past, singing I Want To Be Your Drill Instructor. ‘There’s supposed to be an ocean view! And I thought you said we were getting upgraded!’
‘You are.’
‘From what?’ my mam asks. ‘A mud hut?’
‘The ocean’s just right there,’ the rep points. ‘About five minutes beyond those bushes.’
We peer over. ‘Yes, but who died and made me Robinson Crusoe?’ my mam mutters as the bus driver admires her legs as she climbs off the bus, in her white platforms with her bright red toe-nails, making her stalwart grand English entrance onto Greek soil.
Four
‘It’s really not that bad.’ My mother has an enviable ability to know which battles to pick. And she’s right. Our room isn’t.
I dump our suitcase on a bed and look around me. It’s not the lap of luxury either though. More like Motel Five, only with bright ocre wood panelling on the walls, a high wood-beamed ceiling and stone floor. ‘It’s cheerful in its own way…’ I chirp, then open the balcony doors, pushing away thoughts of how surreal it is to be holidaying with my mother and not Jonathan. ‘Well, on second thoughts…’ I am confronted with the concrete jungle outside of our window. ‘I suppose requesting “a view” was too open-ended.’
‘That aeroplane sounds mighty low overhead,’ my mam looks up at the ceiling and whistles. ‘Good heavens! Somebody needs to give that its walking papers, don’t they?’
‘Apparently it doesn’t go on all night. I was reading that they shut the airport down between midnight and five a.m. on account of not disturbing the sea turtles. They’re an endangered species.’
‘Well hoorah for an endangered species.’
At that point, we lie on top of our beds, fully clothed, and fall asleep.
~ * * * ~
I wake up and it’s nearly ten a.m. I’m groggy from dreaming I was in World War II and my job was to shoot down enemy planes. I think I’m still in the war, then I realise I’m on holiday, in my not-very-quiet-but-otherwise-not-bad hotel room, in Greece, and we have an orientation with the rep in about two minutes, which feels like bad planning given that we really only just got to bed. Looking across and seeing my mother, when I’m not used to seeing her when I wake up, is a bit like finding your favourite jumper in your cupboard years after you forgot you had it. I lie there and watch her for a while, feeling oddly comforted. She sleeps with her mouth open, her face is slack and missing the winsomeness of her usual, awake self. I take in the curve of her cheekbone and the rounded end of her nose, her ghostly pallor in the sunlight that streams in the window.
For some reason I think of the time when I broke my arm when I was eleven and I had to have it put in a sling. How she accompanied me to school, taking the bus and then walking the twenty minutes or so to drop me off, then repeating the whole thing at lunch, and then again at four o’clock. Six trips a day, she made—there and back. Six times on buses, in the middle of gruelling winter. All to make sure no little kid ran into me and hurt me.
I realise I’ve been staring at her and her chest appears completely still. A quick and hot panic comes over me. Why isn’t she breathing? I’m just about to spring out of bed, when I see the shallow, almost imperceptible rise and fall. She twitches and makes a tiny sound. I let out a breath of relief and wonder what’s wrong with me.
I’ve just time to throw on the cute denim shorts and gypsy top I bought in Top Shop’s sale, do a quick splash of face, and pull my newly-blonded hair into a ponytail. Stepping out of the door into my first taste of a Greek morning feels like walking into an oven fit to bake a mean baklava.
‘Kalimera!’ says the smiling Greek girl, which I quickly gather means Good Morning. I manage to swipe a couple of slices of appetizing golden bread and a few pats of butter off her as she clears the buffet counter in the lobby, which this morning doubles as the dining area. ‘Breakfast ends at 9:30,’ she tells me, with a friendly scold, but offers me a loaded-up breadbasket when I ask if I can take something upstairs for my mam. ‘Ah! The beautiful English lady in the hat!’ she says. I grimace. When you’re in the shadow of your dazzling sixty-year-old mother, you sometimes have to ask yourself what’s wrong with this picture?
I sit at a table by myself, among all the couples who have managed to get up—a few puffy-eyed faces I recognise from the bus. It’s a different rep this morning, a hefty girl who rattles off details about car hire, tours, things to do in the area. It feels odd sitting here on my own getting curious looks from all the holidaying couples, so I take my ‘guided tours of the island’ package and step outside into a stark white sunshine that glints and shimmies off the mirror-like surface of the swimming pool. Slipping out of my flip-flops, I root each of my white feet into the hot concrete, enjoying, for moments, the masochistic pain.
~ * * * ~
‘You were sleeping,’ I put the breadbasket and supplies, along with a small glass of orange juice, on her side-table.
‘I wasn’t. I heard you go out.’
I have no idea why my mother always has to deny that she ever sleeps. As though the mere suggestion that she sleeps just like every other human being is somehow offensive. She’s up and dressed now and raring to go.
‘Ah! So that’s why you had your mouth open. I knew it was for a reason.’
She glares at me. ‘I did not have my mouth open!’
‘No, you were just doing this.’ I cock my head to one side, open my mouth and do a very skilled impression of being dead, or daft, or both.
‘You’re a real scream,’ she says to me, tiresomely. ‘Wait while I pick myself off the floor laughing.’
She’s wearing an ankle-length white cotton skirt that skims over her hips and settles into a mermaid’s tail around her calves. This is teamed with a gold and green forest print cotton V-necked T-shirt that dips to show a fetching bit of lightly-freckled cleavage. She looks stunning. ‘Come on Viv, let me take a photo of you,’ I tell her. She hates it when I call her Viv.
I’ve brought Jonathan’s megabucks digital camera that I’ve no idea how to work. I can see him mucking on with it, thumbing buttons, and showing me what it does, and me of course not listening.
She fluffs and preens. ‘I hate having my picture taken!’ Then she stands beside the white stone wal
l, angles her head ever-so, and gazes off, serenely into the distance. ‘It’s Helen Mirren at the Oscars!’
‘Put some welly into it!’ She grits her teeth behind her frozen smile, as I fiddle on with buttons.
I fire the shutter, then check the picture. ‘Oh, you’ve got no head.’ I show it to her. ‘My God it’s the best picture I’ve ever seen of you!’ I fire again, catching the playful gleam in her eye, before she has a chance to pull that phoney pose of hers again.
We head out before it gets too sweltering. The sun is so intensely white that it’s almost painful. Everything appears sharper—the walls of the buildings more yellow, the flowers more pink, the sky more cyan, like a television that’s had its colour controls tuned up. The main bustling area is about a ten-minute walk up a steep bank, which, frankly, is a major effort in this heat. But the good thing is we’ve quickly got used to the sound of aeroplanes and don’t really hear them anymore. ‘So much for being close to everything Mam! Are you sure you’re all right?’ She looks very hot.
‘Soldiering on.’
‘You don’t have to be sarcastic.’
‘You don’t have to keep asking me if I’m all right, Angela.’ As if to prove how all right she is, she quickens her stride, her dainty feet, with their painted toenails, leaving me behind. ‘You wouldn’t ask a person in a wheelchair if his legs got tired when he went for a walk, would you?’
‘I don’t get the connection.’ I hurry after her.
She stops and glares at me, her face clammy. ‘Don’t mock the afflicted, Angela. It’s not kind.’
We reach the main strip and look both ways up the street. Basically, we have arrived at a busy road, either side of which are rows of unappealing restaurants, cheesy British pubs and fish and chip shops, tacky souvenir shops and the odd seedy-looking car hire place. ‘It’s Blackpool meets the Wild West… Was the brochure photographed in a different country?’