by Carol Mason
‘I love you, Jonathan,’ I whisper, after reading it again. Just whisper the words out there; there’s really nobody around to hear. I suddenly feel tired, as though all the events of the day have just taken a run at me and made me buckle. I put the book down, rest my head back and close my eyes. Jonathan won’t be coming back with me on the ferry, to Zante. As Georgios said, I have to leave him here. But in my mind’s eye, he’s here with me just for a few more moments. He’s got his arms around me so I can rest against his chest.
And when you are gone from me, you will never be gone from me. Even when I let you go—if I ever let you go—you will never be gone from me.
I just think the words without saying them, hoping somehow that they’ll be carried to him, through our clothes, through our skin, and he’ll take them with him.
When I open my eyes, that wonderful feeling of Jonathan’s beating heart at my back has left me, and I realize I must have nodded of, because I have a dull sensation in my head, the kind you get when you’ve lain down to nap but fallen into a fully-fledged sleep instead.
The line-up for the ferry is huge now. There’s a commotion going on between a small Greek child and his parents—the boy doesn’t seem to want to go on the ferry, and keeps attempting to run off as his dad tries to grab hold of his arm. His scream cuts through my fuggy head and I wonder why he wants to stay so badly. I stand up to join the line, not convinced we’re all going to get on, looking around one more time for Jonathan, but knowing he won’t be here. Jonathan always hated goodbyes. As I tag onto the end, I become aware, very strongly, of a strange vibe coming from the front of the queue. I look ahead to see what it can be. Somebody is watching me.
It’s the handsome Englishman from the tour to Olympia.
Nine
Somebody pushes in front of me, blocking my view: the father of the Greek boy, joining the line again, with his son firmly in his grip this time. When he moves out of my way, and I look for the Englishman again, but he’s gone. I scan every head in the crowd for his, but it’s as though he too was never really there in the first place.
The aluminium gangplank springs under the weight of the many feet that clatter up it. I grip the railing to steady myself, and it’s wet and shiny from sea-spray. I hesitate there, thinking, maybe I won’t board the ferry. Maybe I will try to recreate this day. Over and over.
I have to board the ferry.
People are moving around me; I’m obstructing them. As I walk on, I’m aware of the unpleasant off-kilter sensation under my feet. I don’t go up on deck, just hang back at stern, until everybody is on board, then I still don’t go anywhere, just watch as the ferry pulls away from the dock. My hands smell salty and metallic from holding the railing. I can still feel the imprint of Jonathan at my back, gradually fading as we slip away from the shore. I look at the ring on my thumb, the Greek symbol for long life; the white and yellow gold sparkles on my tanned hand. I bought this thinking of Jonathan but Jonathan died and this is my ring now. He would want me to have it.
I will have a long life, and a good life. The life that Jonathan would have wanted for me. I will live it for both of us.
I breathe in deeply feeling the salty spray on my skin. The breeze kicks up in my face, sending my hair up behind me into the air. My T-shirt slaps against my body like small sails. Goose-pimples break out on my arms, as I watch the wake of water swiftly elongating, taking me farther and farther away from Kefalonia. Eventually, the island becomes a faint and indistinguishable blur.
When there’s nothing more to stare at, and I feel quite stark and wind-burned, I go up onto the main deck. It’s then that I remember the Englishman again.
He’s not up here, where most of the passengers seem to be sitting—I look up and down each seat aisle for him—nor is he inside the main cabin. I check the bar, keep a look-out at the men’s toilets... Where can he have gone? I saw him get on, didn’t I? Or at least waiting to. I think of his fixed, but distant, gaze of me, as though he’d been watching me for a while. Had he seen me sleeping on the bench? I buy a drink, take it up top and find a seat. But I can’t finish it; my stomach feels too queasy.
I manage to put my head on a railing and sleep most of the way home. It’s only when I disembark, and my feet touch Zante soil, that I realise I’m missing something.
The book.
I make a quick dive back up the gangplank, pushing through the crowd of people coming down it. It’s not where I was sitting. I check the toilets and the bar—all the places I went—but it’s not there either. I ask the man standing on the dock as we all get off what happens with lost and found property, where I might go to find it. He just looks at me, disinterestedly, and shrugs.
~ * * * ~
‘I wasn’t expecting you’d be back so soon,’ Mam grills me, as we have an early evening beer on a patio by another hotel’s pool, the entire day now feeling surreal, yet the dim feeling of Jonathan being still there with me, the dim feeling of his touch, the recent bright reminder of his face…
We’ve ditched our hotel, for a smarter orange-roofed one a little way down the road, towards the beach. The beer is sharp and ice-cold, and, as those first few long sips go down, they cool me and steady me again.
My mam looks striking, her brilliant white T-shirt bringing out the blue of her eyes. That and the grey-blonde of her hair under the wide brim of her white picture hat, and the flush of pink across the low apples of her cheeks, makes her look less like a mother and more like a 1950’s screen goddess.
‘You missed me.’ She angles her head, coquettishly. She knows there’s more to it than that, but she’s not going there without some clearer signal from me that she can. Which is good, because I don’t feel like telling her that I spent the day imagining I was with Jonathan and he felt so real to me that I thought he hadn’t died.
‘I did,’ I tell her. ‘What did you get up to?’
‘I wasn’t feeling all that chirpy this morning, so I’ve enjoyed just doing nothing.’ She takes a paper napkin, dips it in a glass of iced water, squeezes it out, then presses it to the spot of pink skin at the base of her V neck; a gesture that’s lavishly feminine and very ‘her’. My mother is the kind of person who never lets you hear her on the toilet, who can be joyous but never over-excited, peeved but never fit to be tied. Sometimes I wonder, is she the real McCoy, or a living creation of her own imagined self? But then I’ll see tiny alternating glimpses of her, by turns vibrant and then despairing, and somehow the answer is clear.
‘Why weren’t you feeling great?’ I ask her.
‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask myself the question. But I feel much better now.’
‘Was it the heat?’
‘I don’t know. Could be. But we needn’t dissect it to death.’
‘I shouldn’t have left you.’
‘I’m not a baby. I don’t need my diapers changing.’ She studies me for a while with a secretive smile that’s trying to communicate something.
‘What’s that face for?’
She grins now, broadly. ‘Georgios came by.’
‘Georgios?’
‘Well he came to see you, obviously, but when I told him you’d gone off on your own to commit suicide on a moped, he offered to take me to lunch.’
‘You went to lunch with him?’
‘I wasn’t hungry. But we went for a little ride-out and we had an iced fruit drink. And then he had to work so he brought me back.’
‘So you missed me, my ass! Seems you were quite busy…’
‘I never said I missed you. I said you missed me.’
‘Oh yeah! Right. You did.’ We laugh.
‘You could have stayed as long as you liked if you were having a good time. But, admittedly,’ she looks at me like I’m her unspoken passion, ‘I’m glad you’re back now. Because, between you and me, forget Georgios: there’s nobody I’d rather spend time with than my daughter.’
‘I’ll tell her that, if I ever meet her.’ I sneak a look at her. My mother, whos
e company makes everything right.
‘Something odd happened,’ I say, as we split another beer. ‘There’s a guy… an Englishman. He was on my trip to Olympia on Tuesday. An attractive guy.’ I decide against telling her he’s married. ‘He was with two other guy friends. Anyway, I saw him again today.’
She seems to bloom, as she always does when we do the girl-talk. I see it in her quiet absorption of me, in the sheen that suddenly comes to her eyes. A man, I can imagine her thinking. Progress at last. ‘Spill your guts. What happened?’
‘Nothing happened. He was on the ferry. Or at least, I think he was… I saw him as we were about to board. Then when I looked again, he was gone.’ Did I invent him like I invented my day with Jonathan?
‘What is he like?’
‘He’s nice. Nice to look at.’ I reflect on his face. ‘Handsome. Wholesome. Like the guy next-door. He’d have got your vote.’ How can I not remember all the times she would ‘vet’ my boyfriends? ‘Too big-mouthed.’ ‘Too mute.’ ‘Too common.’ ‘That laugh’s too loopy.’ ‘His chin will arrive around the corner before the rest of his body.’
‘Did you talk to him?’
‘No. Like I say, he was waiting to get on the ferry, but I never actually saw him once I boarded.’
I stare off across the swimming pool. The dim feeling of Jonathan and me frolicking in the sea still lives inside me. My gaze lingers for moments on a busty, topless young woman with jet-black shiny hair floating on a red air mattress; how perfectly glamorous she looks.
Mam pretends to snore. ‘That’s so exciting, Angela, my chest is collapsing. Whoosh! I’ve not had this much excitement since I found out I didn’t win the lottery again.’
I narrow my eyes at her. ‘Are you being sarcastic by any chance?’
‘Me? Never.’ She drags a long-sleeved blouse across her shoulders and covers her arms from the last spot of sun.
‘I bought a ring.’ I show her.
She pulls a face. ‘It’s ugly.’
‘It’s not. I think it’s lovely.’
She picks up my hand and examines it. ‘What is it? The pattern?’
‘I don’t know. Nothing. It’s just a ring.’
~ * * * ~
‘What’s rebetika?’ I ask Georgios, feeling sad about my little book. There was a phone message for us when we got back to the hotel, inviting us to dinner. So now we’re sitting on the white-tiled patio of a tiny ouzeri which is perched on a razor-sharp cliff-edge overlooking a flawless bay. This place is, again, more like somebody’s house than a restaurant. Georgios has brought us here to see the island’s finest sunset. I quickly changed into a floaty black halter-neck dress from H&M that I teamed with a pair of white flip-flops to tone down the dressiness. My skin is sun-kissed and soft, my hair silky and un-styled. Georgios seems to appreciate the dress, which makes me feel good. We drink ice-cold retsina, and eat bekri meze—‘drunkard’s tidbits’ Georgios tells us—strips of pork marinated in wine and topped with hot salted cheese. A thin grey cat slinks over to our table, and weaves the letter S around my calves.
‘Rebetika?’ he wipes his hands on a napkin. ‘It was a style of music popular between the wars, something like your American blues. The people who made the music came from the hashish dens of the Greek underworld. But it caught on in many of the nightclubs of Athens...’ He shrugs. ‘Rebetika is not happy music. The words are shocking and passionate. There is always a sad story, a sad theme of romance and bitterness, grief and fate…’
I stare, unblinking, at the two inches of wine twinkling in my glass. If it weren’t for the ring on my finger, I’d think finding that poem—in fact, the entire trip to Kefalonia—had been a dream. I can’t remember all the words of my verse. I want to read it again.
‘Are you all right, Angela?’ I hear my mother’s distant voice. ‘You seem on another planet.’ The sky is subtly changing from flame red, to copper, turning the water to petrol blue. The air smells heavy with flowers, and kitchen aromas, and the scent of the rustling ocean. ‘No. I’m okay.’ I don’t want to start turning things wacky. Talking about flitting around an island with my dead husband, and finding poems that feel like they might be a message from him is just turning things, as Sherrie would say, too kooky. Maybe my friend was right. Maybe I really am losing it.
‘Why do you ask?’ Georgios says. ‘About Rebetika?’
When I conspicuously don’t reply, Mam says, ‘Angela went to go around Kefalonia on a moped today and came back a different person.’
‘You did?’
He looks very dark against the shifting palette of night, except for the dazzling white linen of his shirt. There’s something about his intense physical presence that suddenly besieges me. It’s more than his manliness, or his gritty accent, or the keen eyes. It’s more, and yet… what is it? Suddenly, the case of the disappearing Englishman, and the day with my dead husband cease to be upmost in my mind.
I almost forget he has just asked me a question. ‘I did go on a moped,’ I tell him. ‘It was fun. I survived to tell the tale. But I didn’t come back a different person.’
‘That is good,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t want you to. I like you as you are.’ He lays a foot on his opposite knee, angles himself so his back is no longer fully to the sunset, and gazes far out across the water. He must know I’m staring at him, because his eyes come back to mine. Are we flirting? We could be. If I had vanish dust, I’d sprinkle it on my mother just about now.
The reds of the sun drop away swiftly, replaced with transient saffron, ochre and marmalade, all commingling like silent fireworks. ‘It’s beautiful,’ my mam says. Then Georgios picks up his fork and stabs a few times at the huge salad of rocket, sesame chicken and shaved parmesan glistening with green olive oil, that a young waiter sets down before us. I like how he fills his mouth. Not a thought to his table manners. It’s odd how he’s never mentioned going out with my mother this morning.
‘Rebetika, if you want to know, was very unpopular for a long time. Very often the lyrics were about drugs, and ideas of rebellion, so the music became illegal. Some people believe it died. But others say that no song that is still sung today can be dead.’
I can’t see his eyes any more as we’re eating in the dark now, but I feel his gaze and it disturbs me. My mam starts saying something about the early music of Johnny Cash, her favourite singer. ‘And then there’s my two least favourite songs of all time.’ I hear her say. ‘You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby, and I’m Hairy. He laughs, genuinely entertained, when she sings some of the lyrics to the last one.
The chicken is warm and flavourful, and pairs well with the olive oil, which is unexpectedly fruity and flowery. It feels oddly nice to sit in darkness. But when the maitre d’ walks around the low stone wall lighting a series of tiny white candles, there is something ethereal about the mood that’s nice too. Food. Wine. The salty, spectral darkness of the ocean. Being her with my mother. Her smile is long, and warm and motherly, and intermingles with a feeling of sudden, surprising contentment in me. Georgios reaches out to pour some more wine.
‘I bought a little book on the island. It had a verse written in it. I think I left it on a bench before I got on the ferry.’
‘Oh?’ he says.
‘Have you heard of the poet… Ioannis… Ioannis somebody? His last name begins with an M, I think.’ My day is already fading, like sand slipping thorough an hourglass. ‘He wrote a rebetika verse in English. He just called it Untitled. Maybe you’ve heard of him?’ I am not giving him much to go on.
The cat slinks around my foot and I take my flip-flop off and stroke her back with my toes, surprised at how coarse her coat is.
He catches my eye across the candlelight as the wine glugs into my glass. ‘No, Angelina. I can’t say that I have.’
‘What is Ioannis in English?’ I ask.
He smiles at me. ‘It’s John.’
~ * * * ~
Soon after Jonathan died, two very strange things happened. I had gone to
bed convinced that I might finally manage some proper sleep. Just as I was dozing off, I heard something that made me open my eyes and stop breathing. It was the picked out piano notes of a classical melody tinkling into the air—the first track on a CD I’d brought Jonathan back from England that I’d got free with the Daily Mail. At first I thought I was dreaming. But no. The music trespassed surefootedly through the stillness of the darkened house, like a ghostly soundtrack in a movie where the heroine is under siege from something. It was coming from downstairs. Jonathan was here again. He had to be. Hadn’t I been convinced that if I wanted it enough, and I willed it strongly, I’d magic him back somehow? But I didn’t expect he’d come back as a ghost. I didn’t want a ghost. I was scared of ghosts, and he knew it. So why would he play this game with me? I quaked my way out of bed and down our stairs toward the source of the music, chanting a series of expletives, furious to think I was Jonathan’s prey, or his pawn. Even more furious that he wasn’t here with me, he was dead and he’d had the nerve to leave me when I had expected to be with him all of my life. When I saw what I saw, I experienced that quick and awful feeling where you can’t fathom why the walls are moving in a different direction to the floor. In the dark of our family room, our sound system was all lit up, its green and red lights moving like alien code. When I could finally move, I reached out for the off button. And then I saw it. The little red ‘alarm’ light was on. Of course! There’d been a power surge during the day; we were always getting them because, with the slightest gust of wind, the massive fir trees in the neighbourhood would drop branches onto the power lines. That’s what had happened. I’d had to reset the clock on the stereo in the afternoon, because four red numerals kept blinking at me, like some confusing, annoying traffic light that was prompting some reaction out of me, when all I wanted to do was to sit in that chair, undisturbed, in a void of memories and sadness. So I’d stabbed at buttons. I’d obviously accidentally turned on the alarm. The stereo had been programmed to wake me up at 2 a.m with whatever CD we had on it. I looked at the clock. That’s what time it was.