Diary of a Lone Twin

by David Loftus

  Normally at the Mews I just plug my music into the system and play through various playlists; a mixture of indie, electronic, choral, classical, abstract Icelandic music and film scores. Today I suggested Pip, our talented young food stylist, pop on one of her playlists as I sat quietly in the corner, mentally making a list of Johnny-related things to do before we leave for Paros in six evenings’ time.

  Just as I was making my promises to John, a song on Pip’s playlist took me immediately back to a summer’s day at The Beeches, sitting on one of John’s bright Greek rugs among his terrariums and yucca plants and design books. John had just bought an album that he insisted was the best of the best, The Affectionate Punch, by a young band from Dundee called The Associates. Their singer Billy MacKenzie, John quite rightly described as ‘having the voice of an angel’. John played me their song ‘Party Fears Two’, a song about two girls his brother had seen gatecrashing a party – he had admired them for trying to kick the door down in stiletto heels. The song ends with three cups smashing and Billy spitting out his chewing gum. He may have sung angelic pop, but he was a punk at heart.

  I can’t think how much I’ve missed those moments of sitting around John’s small turntable, each trying to ‘out-discover’ each other with a new band, each quietly in unspoken agreement but fiercely in denial of the merits of each other’s choices. He’d hit me with The Communards and Jimmy Somerville and I’d hit him back with, ironically, ‘Johnny Come Home’ by the Fine Young Cannibals. If I had a penny for every time I’d walk into his room and find one of my discoveries stuck on his turntable, the needle still quietly scratching away, or vice versa, one of his on my player, I’d be a wealthy chap.

  Tuesday 3 July

  Pascale’s ‘prom’ or graduation tonight, I promise to behave.

  Wednesday 4 July

  Independence Day

  Shooting for MasterChef; two days of short films and stills in the warmest London since the Eighties. (It’s 30°C today.)

  Pascale’s graduation last night. She looked stunning, black lacy dress from a shopping trip with Ange the night before, bright red lips and freshly painted nails. The girls arrived, all gangly and bare-skinned in the warm early-evening light, the boys, nervous and gawky in comparison in black tie, shirt tails sticking out beneath ill-fitting jackets. Parents in their Sunday best, probably, like me, slightly delirious in the realization that somehow they’d managed to scrape together the money, term by term, to pay for their education. It was lovely to witness the overemotional greetings and farewells and promises made, scores settled, champagne quaffed. So bye bye school, you’ve cost me a small fortune, educated my children well and introduced them to some fabulous friends for life.

  Friday 6 July

  First day off in ages and another 30°C in London, hot and sticky and stinky. It’s the last morning before our trip to Paros so there’s much packing and repacking and texting between over-anxious kids and parents. Escaping the Mews, I take a taxi down to Cheam. Poor Mother is wilting in the heat, her arms are bare, as is her neck, and I know how much she hates a bare neck. We spend a little time poring over old photos of John and me with Mr Frank and Uncle Almond in Canada. She talks to me about the notion of dying younger, but with dignity, as opposed to dying old and without. Today would have been the end of her first week of cancer treatment at the hospital and here she sits, talking over old albums, remembering happy times, glamorous years, listening to the blackbirds’ songs, as opposed to lying riddled with tubes and needles in a hospital side room.

  ‘Darling David, I do believe that if I’d gone in, as wished, on Monday, I wouldn’t be alive today.’ She remembers the last time she was rushed to hospital in an ambulance, having been accidentally knocked over by her carelessly driving neighbour and left bleeding in the street with concussion, her neighbour completely oblivious, a geriatric-on-geriatric hit and run. In Accident and Emergency at St Helier Hospital she was cared for by a young orderly who, very carefully, washed her, brushed her hair and cleaned her teeth, much like I used to do for John. Mother believes that this small act of kindness changed her experience of being hospitalized profoundly and should be the norm in the NHS, that gentleness and kindness can be used in a way that will help a patient forget the more awful, traumatic or painful experiences.

  * * *

  Now I’m on an Aegean Airways flight to Athens with Ange and Pascale either side of me, Codie, Pascale’s friend, Timmy, a friend of Paros, and Paros next to him. Such a strange mixture of emotions: fear, sorrow, trepidation, excitement, worry; I’m a human yo-yo of feelings. I posted a lovely photo on my Instagram just before our late-night take-off, a picture of my tanned and multi-ringed hand holding two photos, me and John, as brown as a berry, sitting on the whitewashed wall of the church at Agios Fokas, the other of John with Samantha in the town square in Parikia port. He’s wearing the green-striped pair of shorts converted from a pair of our father’s old cotton pyjamas. There’s another photo I didn’t post, of John, Samantha and I sitting together on a monastery wall near Naousa where we’d met, much to our mutual embarrassment, wearing matching checked cotton shorts, deck shoes and German military vests, which were all the rage then. Even our bracelets were identical.

  Saturday 7 July

  First day in Aliki, Paros

  Early morning in Athens, connecting to Paros

  So it begins, my odyssey back to the island of our youth, our teenage years and our twenties. We start with a pre-dawn take-off in an old Bombardier, the Olympic Airlines logo refreshingly unchanged, landing as the sun rises, big and orange in the Aegean haze to welcome us home from home, tired and weary overnight travellers.

  Our beautiful villa, above the fishing village of Aliki, is utterly gorgeous and perfect, washed white and deep-sea blue, adorned as it should be with pink bougainvillea, a Parosian idyll surrounded by succulents and olive trees and fields of drying thyme and oregano plants. A small marble-edged and aromatic path leads to an azure sea, a colour that only Greece seems to get exactly the right shade of blue, and a pebbly and rocky cove, perfect and empty, welcoming my Ps and their chums to a refreshing early-morning dip. Their excitement has overruled their tiredness and I watch them with teary-eyed delight as they elegantly disappear beneath the surface with a style and ease that John and I never accomplished, however hard we tried.

  The house is beyond expectation, acres of marble surfaces, amphora, ancient Greek doors made into creaky old tables piled high with photography books, old maps of Paros and Naxos and Ios, the walls smooth and curvaceous, as if sculpted from plaster of Paris, so many quiet places to choose from to reflect and to try to assimilate my complex and misty-eyed emotions. I list my aims for our seven-day journey, in some order:

  Find our old landlady, Jane, if she still lives here.

  Watch the sunset from John’s favourite church above the Parikia port.

  Find two new doves for Ange.

  Sit, read, write at Agios Fokas.

  Draw the boatyard at Naousa and visit the monastery by the sea.

  See what’s on at Cine Rex cinema.

  Buy a copy of The Independent and peruse the cricket scores.

  Read My Family and Other Animals while the cicadas creak and the lizards scatter and the carpenter beetles buzz around my tired and confused head.

  ‘Not what we have, but what we enjoy constitutes our abundance.’

  — EPICURUS

  Sunday 8 July

  Parikia, Paros

  I didn’t really have any idea how I would react to visiting Parikia again after so many years, but I wasn’t at all prepared for the emotional intensity as I walked up the narrow, freshly white-washed streets towards ‘Jane’s Rooms’ in the hope of finding John and my lovely landlady. We’d parked beside the ancient Church of a Thousand Doors and walked through the main square, up the path of Lochagou Kourtim. The bakery was still there with the finest spinach pies in Greece, the Cine Rex posters were up and all seemed unchanged, The Independent shop was gone
and most of the old traditional neighbourhood shops had become rather chi-chi linen and pottery boutiques, but just as pretty, and if anything, so chic that it almost didn’t feel touristy and almost distracts me from my mission. Though the Yria pottery with its octopus plates and pottery doves brought me crashing back to earth. Turning right past the Frankish Castle made from ancient Grecian columns laid on their sides, a haven for snow-white doves, the road curling past tiny homes, where the old black-clad widows used to sit, constantly nagging John and I to let them sew up our torn jeans and Siouxsie Sioux t-shirts, though sadly thirty years on they are all no longer, their stone steps empty and silent. The emotions conjured by this street overwhelmed me.

  I tried to point out my window, my balcony, John’s window, but I could barely get the words out. The old sail store where our friend Peter used to sleep with the cockroaches, too tight to pay rent, had a ‘For Sale’ sign on the light green-painted shutters and ‘Jane’s Rooms’, though still with a sign, are shuttered up and look like they’ve been closed for a while. A local lady, probably the daughter of one of the widows in black, chunters in broken English that Jane now lives in Krios and no longer rents the rooms, but on asking for her number she catches me by surprise by yelling the name of Jane’s fisherman husband, ‘Agiris! Agiris!’

  Telling everyone to wait by the church in Agios Konstantinos, which tops the hill of Kastro and was a favourite spot of mine and John’s to watch the sun setting over the Aegean Sea, I tentatively wander into one of the rooms literally built into the 4000BC ruins of the old castle, rooms that Jane used to call, accompanied by a hearty laugh, ‘the honeymoon suite’ as they had their own ‘zesto nero’ (Greek for hot running water, a veritable luxury in the Kastro).

  And there he was, sitting on an old ouzo crate, in the cool and dark, covered head to toe in thick marble dust, hands covered in nicks and cuts and bits of plaster, hair matted and grey. Agiris, the older fisherman, building a new shower unit even though seemingly he could barely stand. In the dark he looked at me, framed and backlit by the doorway in the setting sun.

  ‘I can’t see you, but I know you,’ he said, ‘You are the twin.’ Barely able to hold myself together I stumbled over to him. His thick and gravelly Greek accent and broken English hadn’t changed, but the strong and athletic fisherman and captain was no longer. Hidden under the cloud of dust was an old man, broken and unwell. He told me it was nerves, damaged somehow, I didn’t really understand, but I could tell that he was not a well man. I held him firmly by his shoulder, listening to his broken smoker’s drawl as he remembered the twins who came to visit every summer.

  Promising to tell Jane I was here, he continued his work and I walked up the last few ancient steps to the church, bathed in a deep orange light. Paros, Pascale, Ange and friends were sitting in a line, under the chapel’s arches, unchanged for centuries, much as John and I did every night, every day, for weeks on end, summer after summer. It was a quite extraordinary moment, towards the end of a beautiful but mentally bruising day, memories ganging up at times to embellish and remind me of the beauty of our shared youth.

  And the sun set behind the rocks at Parikia port, as it did every night, and will do for ever more, unchanged, making way for a clear and star-filled sky.

  Evening

  The first full day in the villa is one of leisurely swims in the clear waters of the stony beach below the house, fringed with aloe vera, casuarina trees and flowering thyme bushes, the smells so evocative of precious decades. The Ps and their friends seem instantly at one with the Parosian ways, swimming, sunbathing, reading, drinking and laughing like a pack of hyenas. Paros and Timmy seem particularly keen to explore and have planned trips out to various marble mines, potteries and ouzerias. Dinner is taken at Taverna il Balcone in the tiny fishing port of Aliki; fresh octopus, herrings and swordfish heads hang drying in the setting sun. It’s a sublime evening, perched over the clear water peppered with black sea urchins, family and friends tucking into anchovies, calamari, octopus tentacles, swordfish steaks, feta and rosé, waxy potatoes and gigantes beans.

  Monday 9 July

  Lazy morning absorbing the smells and sounds around the villa with a breakfast of peaches and apricots, yoghurt and honey, fresh coffee and almonds, listening to Paros plan his Parosian adventures. His top destinations include visiting the Valley of the Butterflies, one of the few places on Paros I’d never been. It reminded me of the wonderful ‘donkey man’ as John used to call him. He used to walk all the way from the port of Parakia to our little beach at Agios Fokas, knowing he’d find us, but only us, lying there, to bring us a beautifully chilled watermelon. We called his donkey Kalá – Greek for ‘how are you?’ – and he treated his humble mule more as a pet than a working beast of burden. He was a man of few words, tanned like old leather, and he and Kalá had the habit of turning up anywhere and everywhere – sunset ouzos at the Rendezvous Bar, breakfast spanakopita at the village bakery, he’d always be there with the same one word: ‘butterfliesonmydonkey, butterfliesonmydonkey.’ Years and years of the same, ‘butterfliesonmydonkey’. We never said yes, knowing that The Valley of the Butterflies was at least 10 kilometres from the outskirts of town and a tough and rocky path up. But he never stopped asking. The last time I saw him, twenty-five years ago, he said something else, for the first time ever; he clapped his hand on my shoulder, gave me a rare broad smile and said, ‘Maybe tomorrow.’

  Ange and I tootled off in the morning after a peachy breakfast to find a small bay I remembered to the north of Aliki. John and I had never been to the Caribbean before, but he had insisted that he believed the water to be ‘Bahamian’ in colour. I remembered it being a long rocky stumble heading east from Aliki beach towards Faraggas, and there it was, as remembered, less of a stumble as paths had been built and, rather sadly, dry stone walls had come down, but wild garlic flowers grew everywhere among the sea lavender and huge rocks of fawn marble, the water as crystal clear as in my many dreams and memories. Several Richard Long-esque cairns now dotted the marbled shore, I assume to mark the spot where fellow intrepid cove searchers had also ‘found the spot’, like old-school geotags balanced impossibly against the offshore breeze.

  Upon return to the villa, the girls were snorkelling off their tiny beach, which they had declared their own, scattering the shore with their towels, straw hats, Kafka novels and tomes of Greek poetry. Paros and Timmy disappeared on one of their adventures, walking the Byzantine trail to Lefkes, Timmy slathered in 50+, Paros dressed like an Indian Twenty20 cricketer, and with no sunscreen, looking more like a Greek fisherman by the hour. The multi-coloured and multi-cultured outfit was probably wise, in hindsight, as part of the trail included a climb down into one of the ancient marble quarries with only the torches of their phones to light their path, though I think – quote my son – ‘the finest cold beer ever consumed’ outside the belfry of the church of Agia Triada is probably their own addition to the walk. Paros, the son, did describe Lefkes as one of the ‘most beautiful villages he’d ever been to’, which made me smile contentedly. They even visited the old pottery of Yria, where John and I had bought our doves of blue.

  The evening, Parikia town

  Paros, the boy, so often in his early years called ‘the boy Paros’, I can’t remember why, is laid out beside me, defeated by a Herculean breakfast of apricots, ham, crusty bread, olives and yoghurt.

  I’m trying hard to assimilate long dormant feelings with the pressure to write ‘in the moment’, but finding it increasingly difficult. A great part of me yearns to lie beside the water and to fall asleep, salt drying on my skin, eyelids closed to the glare of sun, following the tiny collagen floaters in the darkness that I find so strangely comforting, knowing that three of the four people I love most in the world are by my side. A long sleep in the land of dreamy dreams.

  Last night I met Jane again, for the first time in twenty-five years, at the port, a port that has grown considerably in those years. There she was, my Shirley Valentine, le
aning against the old windmill that marks the meeting point of road and sea, pedestrian and sailor, a pink flower in her hair in case I didn’t recognize her after a quarter of a century. She needn’t have worried, at just over seventy now she was as gorgeous as ever, her deep black, almost Grecian hair now a mixture of grey and blonde. She was smaller, slimmer and a little unsteady on the feet, but just as wonderfully bonkers, her laugh so hearty and merry that the years passed in a flash and she was still our bold and brassy seaside landlady, though so much more Greek than English now.

  Conversation was easy and Ange and the Ps and their friends all loved her and her gently teasing manner. I’d forgotten how much she ribbed me about being the less perfect twin, the scruffier dresser, the one with the wilder friends and less stable girlfriends. Our friend Peter had been particularly singled out as the butt of her jokery, and he was once again, to much hilarity, from his drachma-stuffed but never opened wallet to his refusal to pay for a room, which meant sleeping in the fishing nets and smelling like an old kipper. Smeragda, her ancient mother-in-law force-feeding him raki and prawn brains and threatening to beat him like she tenderized the octopuses on the rocks. Jane’s memory was as sharp as a steel trap, chatting about John and Samantha, nights at the Rendezvous with John’s favourite barman George and at the Cine Rex watching The Big Blue and Cinema Paradiso. It was so lovely to see her and I felt none of the overwhelming sadness I have had on previous evenings. We returned to our fragrant garden, freshly watered and smelling of rosemary and basil, to watch the Milky Way, the shooting stars and Venus rising.