by Carol Mason
‘What did the doctor say? Your doctor?’ Obviously it wasn’t because of the heat of Sunderland.
‘I never went.’
‘For God’s sake, why not?’
She sits up a bit groggily, swings her legs over the edge of the bed, but just stays there instead of getting up, lowers her chin to her chest. ‘I didn’t want to find out anything bad about myself. I didn’t want to have to tell you.’
She looks over her shoulder at me, sadly.
~ * * * ~
The restaurant is certainly more cheerful than we are. The waiter is cross-eyed and he brings us the wrong order. Then he grovels around the patio bemusedly trying to find the table that ordered the Greek prawns. Then he gives up, and bequeaths them to us.
‘He’s not exactly the face that launched a thousand ships, is he,’ Mam gawps at him.
‘He’s really annoying. He’s a bloody Greek Basil Fawlty.’
‘Greek prawns,’ she prods them with a fork. ‘You’d think they could have come up with a slightly more original name than that. Even if they’d called them Prawns A La Grec.’
She’s slurring a bit, because we’ve seen off a litre of wine and the food has just arrived. Every time my mam takes a sip, the buzzard appears and tops up her glass. ‘I’m not sure you should be drinking,’ I tell her.
‘I gathered as much from the other ten times you’ve told me that.’ She takes another glug of her wine, a big one, looking deviously at me out of the corner of her eye. And hey presto, here he comes again. ‘Scram,’ she tells him, before I have to.
She prods another prawn. ‘They’re rubbery. Like toes off a corpse. I think they want to give the chef his walking papers don’t you?’ She pushes the plate at me. ‘Don’t say I never give you anything.’
I stare at food, feeling too off-kilter to have an appetite.
‘Smile,’ she says, after a while of peering at me.
‘I’m still too mad.’
‘At me? Tell me about Sean,’ she says.
‘There’s nothing to tell. Tell me about Georgios.’
‘There’s nothing to tell there either. Nothing happened. I wasn’t feeling well. Just my luck.’
I rang Georgios and told him my mam had fainted. I suspected she’d never admit that to him, and I was right. All she’d told him was that she was tired and would see him tomorrow—our last full day. She’d kill me if she knew this of course.
‘Are you going to spend tomorrow night with him?’ I ask her. Meaning, sleep with him.
‘Are you going to see Sean when he moves to Seattle?’
‘This conversation’s going nowhere.’
I feel a perverse mood coming on so instead, trying to fight it, I pick up my digital camera and find the picture of Sean that I took on the Bohali terrace. I zoom in right on him then hold the camera out to her. ‘He’s not moving to Seattle.’
‘How can you be so sure?’ She takes it and studies him.
‘There was no excitement in him to come. I’m sure he’ll leave her, that would be my guess. But he’ll stay in England.’
‘He is a bit of all right,’ she says, scrutinizing at the picture of him.
I miss his face. ‘Give it back,’ I hold out my hand. She passes it to me. I muck on with the zoom some more, then look up and see her observing me. There’s something about her private, sentimental expression, the Audrey Hepburn-ness of the hat, the dainty, effortless poise of her hand by her glass… I take a quick picture of her. The camera tells me the card is full. I press the back button to find pictures to delete to clear up some space. The waiter creeps up on me, asking if we want dessert. I’m startled, click the ‘off’ button, but accidentally press ‘delete’ instead. Sean’s picture vanishes.
‘Oh shit! He’s gone!’ I glare at the waiter, pick up a bread bun and pelt it at him.
‘Girl!’ my mam says, as we become the focus of the entire restaurant. Then she hides a chuckle. ‘Do you have another one of those? I think I have a better aim than you.’
When she sees I’m not laughing, she says, ‘Angela, maybe it’s for the best. Sean comes with a lot of luggage. The circumstances weren’t right.’
Moments tick over, then I feel my annoyance come down. ‘No,’ I say, staring glumly at my camera. ‘He wasn’t right.’
~ * * * ~
She links me and we walk back to the hotel. ‘Are you still moping?’ she asks.
‘I’m still mad. At you. For not telling me.’
‘Oh, we’re not back to that old chestnut?’ She lets go of my arm, and I feel her wobble into me slightly. ‘I don’t have to tell you anything. You don’t own me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I’m sure it’s nothing. But if it’s not nothing, we have to accept it. If I croaked tomorrow, Angela, you should have no regrets for me. You should celebrate my life because my life gave me you. You are the main and the best part of me that I leave behind.’
A raw pain cuts through me. ‘Who’s talking about anybody dying, anyway?’ Does she know something she’s not telling me?
‘Nobody is, daftie! You’re the one that’s fixated on everybody dying.’
I stop walking, lay the backs of my arms over my eyes, hiding my face. It’s very odd behaviour for the middle of the street. ‘I don’t want you to leave me,’ I tell her. ‘Not ever.’ Tears burn, and I feel her intense gaze on me, so I have to do a sudden dive to make on I’m scratching my foot so she won’t see me cry.
I’m down there, scratching, for quite a ridiculous amount of time, and when I look up again, her eyes are full; they pour forth with an ardour that only a mother could feel and a daughter could understand. ‘And I don’t want to leave you!’ Her voice shakes again and whatever colour she gained back over dinner has left her and she’s turned quite pale again. ‘If anything happened to me it would be awful. I’d not get to see how your life turned out. Whether you marry again, have children, whether you’re happy, that you’ll stay healthy… I feel I have a right to be with you every step of the way because I brought you into this world and I should be with you until you go out of it. I don’t want to go anywhere if it means leaving you.’
‘Then go see a doctor. Start taking your health seriously.’
Those eyes that were moments ago soft and teary suddenly harden. ‘I’ll be the one to decide what I do and do not do. All my life I’ve made decisions for other people Angela. If it wasn’t your dad, it was you… Now I’m fifty and I’m going to make decisions for myself.’
She says it so convincingly, I have to smile. ‘Mam… you’re sixty. Are you a bit tipsy?’
‘I know I am. What are you? My parrot?’
‘You said you were fifty.’
‘People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, Angela.’
She’s getting mad now. ‘What’s that mean?’ I ask her.
‘It means I think you’re clearly the one that’s tipsy, not me.’
The traffic is loud all of a sudden. Cars fly past us sending up clouds of dust. As we venture across the road, I feel her warm small hand loop itself through my arm again. Just as we step out, a truck comes flying past, and we step back together for the safety of the curb.
Now that we’ve just nearly got ourselves run over, I fill with the need to make everything right with her. ‘Oh Mam, can we be friends again!’ I say, thinking please don’t shun my small and pathetic olive branch. ‘I’m sorry for always spoiling everything.’
‘It’s all right,’ she says. ‘It’s part of your charm.’ She glances at me out the corner of her eye. Then she squeezes my arm with her warm hand. ‘Girl!’ she says, as we trot quickly across the street, breaking into a short but breathless run. ‘Of course we’re friends. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.’ She stumbles into me and I grip her to steady her, fearing for a moment that she might be fainting again, but I quickly realise it’s only because she’s half cut. ‘And you know what? When we get around this corner I’m going to plop a great big wet kiss on you!’
‘E
rgh!’ I say. ‘You female pervert.’ And she chuckles.
Sixteen
Georgios picks her up in the morning. I take myself out for breakfast, to a little ‘off the beaten track’ galatadiko—a traditional milk and pastry shop—in old Zante town, with ceiling fans, graffiti walls, wooden tables, Greek men smoking and drinking black coffee, and the tastiest Greek yoghurt, and loukamades—fried dough with honey—that I’ve ever had.
Back at the room, I start throwing stuff into the suitcase, but that doesn’t take too long, then I’m restless again. I plonk down on the bed. Maybe I’ll try having a nap.
When I wake up, the clock says it’s after six. No wonder my stomach is growling; I’ve slept about three hours, and I’m starved. I pull on my shorts and a fresh T-shirt out of the suitcase and wander up to the main strip, to the little restaurant where I came with Mam on our first day—where there’s never anybody in but a friendly-faced Greek man. I order a pork gyros, obviously thinking of Sean as I do. And then as I pass the grocery store where we met Georgios for the first time, I pick up two cans of twenty-five percent more Heineken.
Back in the room I finish the gyros and one can, take the second out onto the balcony and sit on the only sun chair that doesn’t have a pair of Mam’s knickers drying on it. There’s a couple occupying the room next door now. Their balcony door is open and I can hear their good-natured patter.
I try to forget that is hotel is so close. I pick up Mam’s book and start reading. But it’s no good. I can’t just sit here and do nothing.
~ * * * ~
His hotel has giant palm trees outside of it that send fingers of green shooting towards a cerulean sky. Palm trees and bright cherry flowers in giant pots. Hotel Ana Suza. Nerves stir up in my stomach like a flock of tiny birds startled into flight. It crosses my mind that his room might be on this side, so he could easily look out of his window and see me.
I keep going towards the beach then park myself on a chair and sit there for a good long while, digging my toes into the cool sand, and lifting them out, feeling sand trickle between them. Everybody’s out—families, couples enjoying the romantic sunset. I wonder if my mother and Georgios are having sex right now...
I get up when I’ve had enough of sitting, then I walk the shoreline, my feet getting gently lapped by the water. I walk for ages. The sky and water become so dark that I can’t see where one ends and the other begins. I don’t know where Angela the Widow ends and Angela the Available begins either, but there’s a definite horizon where there wasn’t one before.
More than one hotel has music bleaching out of it. A peculiar medley of cheesiness—Lionel Ritchie’s Hello meets Lady in Red. Couples music. Jonathan would have run a mile from it. There’s something plucky though, about the sounds and smells of package tour Greece. In one bar, a red-faced, beer-bellied Brit is doing a wince-making karaoke version of Robbie Williams’ Angels, seriously wobbly and off-key when he hits all and water-fall.
When I walk back the way I came and near the Ana Suza Hotel, it looks like there’s a pool party going on. The chairs where Mam and I sat that day when I came back from Kefalonia are occupied by a group of single girls in smock tops, and baby doll dresses, drinking orange-coloured cocktails bedecked with fruit. They’re chatting and laughing, while, behind them, a handful of couples boogie to Toploader’s Dancing in the Moonlight that blares out from a sound system behind a lively, colourful bar.
My eyes fasten onto a woman who looks vaguely familiar. Something about the jet-black lustrous hair, and her strikingly lovely body. Yes. The girl in the swimming pool who was floating on the red air mattress the day mam and I sat here. Her tan is bronze, and now she’s wearing a white Marilyn Monroe dress with a halter neck and glittery flip-flops. She’s laughing and talking, and smoking, clearly wasted, and just as she reaches out to accept a drink from one of the men, somebody, who I can’t see, pulls her into an embrace. For seconds she disappears from sight. But then she emerges again and I freeze. Her hands are knotted around Sean’s neck. While I take stock, my mind tries to work out what else this could possibly mean. But it seems to mean only one thing. They’re not dancing in time to the music, but rather, to their own music, slow and sensual, bodies fitted together, not even room for air. She rests her chin on his chest and gazes up into his face.
~ * * * ~
Georgios drives us to the airport.
I sit quietly in the back seat, staring across vast, parched hills, saying goodbye to Greece.
I don’t know if I’m ever going to see Georgios again. I listen to my mother and him talking, look at the back of his neck, the way the black hair burrows into it, his hand on the wheel that looks a little more healed now. There, in the gut, I know that Georgios is not the man for me. And it’s got nothing to do with the fact that he’s crazy about my ma.
I don’t know if they have made love. I suppose I don’t have the right to ask her, any more than she would, if it were I. And she’s certainly not letting on. My guess, though, from the way she languidly moves her gaze from his eyes to his mouth as he talks, and she no longer looks like something’s being held back, that it would be a thumbs-up.
When we reach the airport I recognize the Scottish rep who greeted us at the start of the holiday, and a couple who arrived with us, standing in a long line outside. The other rep told us this morning that Zante airport is too small to accommodate the packaged mob, therefore we have to get there about four hours early. It seemed to make sense to everybody else, but not to me. Nonetheless, I feel impervious to the strains of Zante airport as though somebody’s just slathered me in a special not-give-a-damn cream. Estee Lauder could package it and make a small fortune. I’m just too busy thinking Thank God I’m going home. Home to Vancouver.
Despite the reps trying to be organised, the line-up outside the airport has got total chaos written all over it. Georgios stops the car a good distance away, so we can say out good-byes in peace. He turns to look at me in the back seat.
‘I have a small problem Angelina that I would like to take your advice on,’ he says. His eyes have a twinkle in them.
‘I think I’ve heard this song before.’ I wag a finger at him, instantly cheered by something in our exchange, experiencing a fresh flush of fondness for him. I think of our night out in that restaurant, and can honestly say that it could have been one of the nicest evenings of my life.
‘The thing is, I’ve been asking Vivien to extend her holiday, to stay one more week with me—but she doesn’t think she can do that. She wants to go back with you, to spend time with you before you go back to Canada.’
I can’t read my mother’s face, or guess what it is I’m supposed to say. So I just say the truth. ‘Mam, I fly back to Vancouver the day after tomorrow. I don’t need you to be with me for one day.’
She looks stressed because she’s being called upon to make a decision.
‘Stay,’ I tell her.
‘Stay,’ Georgios says.
She looks even more flustered now. ‘But I have my ticket… I have my luggage all packed! Angela, I should go back like I’m supposed to go back.’ She turns to Georgios now. ‘We’re only going to find ourselves in this position in a week’s time and it won’t be easier, only harder.’
I can’t read her. Doesn’t she want to be with him?
‘But, Vivien, we’ll have had a week together. That has to be better than just a day, no?’
Vivien looks caught between a rock and a hard place. Then he turns to her and takes both her hands in his. ‘Stay, Vivien. I ask you one more time.’
She stands on her tiptoes and sensually reaches her arms behind his neck. When she looks over her shoulder to smile at me, I feel like I shouldn’t be watching.
‘One more week,’ she says. ‘I’ll stay.’ And Georgios lifts her ever so slightly off her feet, and she gives a giddy chuckle.
I start backing away.
‘Wait, Angelina,’ he says, and lets my mother go. I see him just as I did that day in the groc
ery store. There’s something interesting about his face. You wouldn’t call him handsome. Not in the classical sense. The face is a bit too long, the eyebrows too heavy and dark, the C-brackets at either side of his mouth too deep, like the furrows in his brow. And he looks like he needs a good shave. Yet there’s something in that face. There is something about him that holds me.
‘I almost forgot that I have something for you.’
He ducks into the trunk of the car and then he pulls out a small brown paper bag and hands it to me.
I take it off him, puzzled.
Inside the bag is the little book I bought.
I bring a hand to my mouth, holding his eyes though a softening focus of disbelief, a pain welling in my head.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I have a friend who works for the ferry. I ask her to go look on the seat near ferry and she find it…’ He smiles at me. ‘I had her bring it to me.’
Georgios has saved me again. I’m too welled up to speak. So I just nod my head, a nod that, hopefully, says everything.
Seventeen
Vancouver is like a vibrant colour wheel exploding before my eyes. As the airport bus rolls down Granville Street, past the boulevards of expensive residential Shaughnessy with their canopies of trees, the inky blue-green of the North Shore mountains punches out against a cloudless, duck egg sky. The ocean twinkles a light steel blue, fringed, in part, by the dense, healthy green valance of Stanley Park. Late-blooming firey pink rhododendrons show off behind the walls of stately gardens. I live in probably the most beautiful city in the world.
My mobile rings just as we pull up to a red light.
‘Hey! Where are you?’
Hearing Sherrie’s voice, I instantly drop anchor again, and smile. ‘What d’you mean where am I? I’m here, aren’t I? I’m home.’
‘Where’s here?’
‘Vancouver of course! I’m on the airport bus at Granville and twentieth street. Why, where are you?’