PS Olive You

-Chapter Four-

Theodora’s man-sized hands clutched onto the steering wheel with military purpose. They were attached to short stubby arms that disappeared into the armholes of a shockingly yellow sundress. Flabby puckerings of flesh gathered at the armpits and her batwings wobbled alarmingly over every hump.

As we thundered along the dirt track towards Urian’s farm at maximum speed, an undeniable sense of smugness filled the air. Theodora had worked out the pecking order in my marriage:

Andrew – Head Honcho

Fay – Minion.

Her toadying days, such as they were, were over.

A plastic strawberry bobbed from her rear-view mirror, seeping sickly sweet vapours of rotting watermelon into the airless car.

‘That’s a nice smell,’ I said insincerely, flicking at it with my forefinger.

‘Smells exact of strawberry, isn’t it?’ she said pleased.

‘Yes,’ I lied, wiping my fingers down the side of the chair.

A herd of goats appeared further down the track. Theodora slammed on the brakes and hooted at the young boy minding them. He didn’t look too fussed. The more Theodora cursed and bellowed, the slower he went. The deadly strawberry vapours ebbed and flowed through the afternoon heat as we waited for the bedlam to subside.

‘You haf nice name,’ she said, trying to be charming.

‘Thanks.’

‘What this mean, Fay?’

‘Actually it’s not Fay. That’s just what everyone calls me. It’s Faith.’

‘Ah, Fayeth. Eeez like – to haf belief, no?’

‘Yes,’ said I, who believed in nothing. ‘My father chose it.’

‘Verrry verrry good man your father. He live London?’

‘No, actually he died a few years ago’.

She made a ‘tch, tch’ sound with her tongue. Silence filled the car again.

‘Have you lived on Iraklia long?’ I probed, wondering how well she knew Urian’s family.

‘Since I retire.’

‘You seem too young to be retired’ I lied.

She was pleased with the pseudo compliment. ‘I hav fifhafty two years,’ she said proudly.

Her sausage fingers gesticulated with large rings glinting in the sun.

‘In Greece government say OK, you retire fifhafty if you haf dangeros job.’

I looked at her with interest.

‘Really? What did you do for a living?’

‘Hairdresser.’

‘Hairdresser?’

‘Neh. I was making hairs thirhaty years.’

‘And that was dangerous?’

‘Of course!’ she replied seriously. ‘Fumes verrry bad’. She shook her head gravely from side to side and dropped her double chin to her chest to emphasise the severity of her situation. ‘Chemicals verrry dangeros.’

‘And the government gives you a full pension from fifty?’

This made her click her tongue in annoyance.

‘No full.’

She pointed indignantly into the air with her chubby forefinger.

‘Ninety per-ha-cent only.’

I digested this news in silence. Andrew would not be pleased to hear his angel Theodora was one of the scroungers he admonished for bleeding the state dry with phony disability claims while working on the QT as an estate agent.

I couldn’t wait to tell him.

Ahead the young lad started pushing the goats with his bare hands off the road. As soon as he pushed one, another would return.

‘Do you have any other family on the island?’ I asked, changing the subject.

‘Sister,’ she said, hooting pointlessly. ‘She also retired.’

I couldn’t help myself. ‘She have a dangerous job too?’

‘Yes. Baker.’

I nearly guffawed out loud.

‘What’s dangerous about baking?’

‘She breevist in that flour,’ she said, getting out the car. ‘Verrryy dangeros.’

I watched her trundle over to the terrified boy like Shrek and begin haranguing him and the goats off the road. She was the least disabled person I had ever seen. Her flour-inhaling sister was probably equally as robust and running some other scam across the island.

Five minutes later we were back on the move. We skidded into Urian’s place as if we were competing in a dirt road derby and screeched to a halt at the front door. Fortunately there were no other cars and no sign of Urian’s motorbike.

As the dust settled I could already see the house occupied a spectacular position in relation to the rest of the island. It looked out towards Schoinoussa in the east and Paros in the west. The sun hovered over the horizon, suspended in the sky like a giant lantern ready to splash the world with colour before it dipped below the water.

The house itself was a single-storey dwelling consisting of no more than a series of interlinking white boxes, each with its own wooden veranda attached. Below, the land rolled away in gentle undulations to a small beach, and to the rear of the house the strong masculine shape of Papas Mountain could be seen rising in the distance.

But it was the inside of the place that transfixed me. I was used to the bland sameishness of English interiors that replicated each other within a degree of colour.

Artwork: elegant, non-descript.

Furniture: ditto.

Light Fittings: John Lewis.

Bathrooms: Fired Earth.

Kitchen: Smallbone of Devizes.

Such was the manner in which we regulated our army of clones. We made a huge pretence of shunning catalogues and designing our own ‘colour stories’ – but each time Farrow & Ball added a new tone to its range, a veritable stampede ensued in the race to become fully homogenised.

The same applied to clothing. I was once frogmarched out of a coffee shop in Putney because I was wearing last year’s boot-cut trousers. My friends were so anxious not to be seen with me looking yesterday that that they took it upon themselves to dragoon me into purchasing trousers from the boutique next door that were more of-the-moment. Despite my agitation I went along with it like the spineless amoeba I was.

Urian’s house could not have been more different from the flavourless middle-class world I had become accustomed to. It was filled with amazing artefacts from all over the world, presumably collected on globe-trotting expeditions and adventures.

An ornate camel saddle with rows of plaited tassels.

A bronze cooking pot, precariously balancing on three legs.

The ancient skull of some horned animal.

No house was more revealing of its occupant. Stacks of ragged VHS tapes next to an aging VCR machine showed an eclectic taste in film, Westerns to Woody Allen, Lars Von Trier to Lasse Hallström.

I was surprised to see he had a sense of humour after all. An ebony carved black woman stared out through aviator goggles and a furry football mascot sported pink Asteras Tripoli underpants.

Some of it looked expensive, like the luxurious duck egg silk carpet that ran the length of the sitting room, but the majority of the stuff seemed to have been salvaged from the island. Bits of bleached driftwood, shells and feathers. On the veranda a quaint mobile of glass and copper tubing tinkled in the breeze and a neat row of potted herbs gave off a minty green smell.

There were more delights outside. What looked like a rickety old shed turned out to be a fully equipped potter’s studio complete with wheel and kiln.

Urian a potter. Who would have thought? I could picture us together in this room, his Patrick Swayze to my Demi Moore, our thighs straddling the wheel, our intertwined hands rising and falling gently across the expanding ball of clay. The Righteous Brothers would be playing softly in the background and he’d spin me off my feet, clenching rhythmically at my buttocks and nuzzling gently into my neck.

‘Ah ha, ahem hem.’ Theodora cleared her throat from the doorway.

‘You must really like pottering?’ she asked, suspiciously peering at the sweat beading on my top lip.

I quickly withdrew my hand from the wheel where I’d been caressing its silky surface.

‘Erm, yes, yes, I absolutely adore pottery, in all its forms, and all the…creative arts.’

My voice trailed off as I examined the rows of finished work lining the walls. Bowls, cups, vases. His style was extraordinary. Everything was glazed white, except the edges, which were serrated and ragged. The result was that all the vessels lining the shelves looked like the delicate shards of prehistoric hatched eggs. It was exquisitely worked, paper-thin to the touch.

The studio walls were lined with a collage of photos. Family members and friends smiled out at Urian as he worked.

One girl appeared more frequently than the others. A mischievous brown-eyed imp whose life story from flat-chested tomboy to arcane temptress was played out in a pictorial narrative across the walls, more telling than any verbal account could be. Disturbingly, the girl also featured in a strange little shrine on the windowsill – a statue of the Virgin Mary surrounded by red candles. The statue’s open hands fell to her sides in supplication and seemed to point to photos of the girl, aged about eighteen, framed by rosary beads.

It all seemed so intensely personal that I suddenly became aware of how I must look in Theodora’s eyes, snooping through all Urian’s things with voyeuristic fascination, indulging myself in that peculiar freedom to intrude that the act of house-hunting affords potential buyers. I’d looked in his fridge, poked through his bathroom cupboard, smelled his aftershave and even lain on his bed.

The earlier transgressions I committed while Theodora was on the phone, but now that she was in the room watching me I felt like a right grubby old stalker. The only saving grace was that Urian wasn’t home to witness my shameful intrusion into his privacy.

No sooner had I thought this when I heard the distinctive buzz of his motorbike coming over the hill in the distance.

‘Right, thank you Theodora, I think I’ve seen enough,’ I said, hastily pushing past her to the sunshine outside.

‘But you haf see the bitch,’ she said authoritatively.

‘Bitch?’

‘Beeeeeeeeech.’

‘No, that’s quite all right, thanks, although I’m sure it’s lovely.’

I hurried through the glass doors leading into the sitting room where I’d left my bag. The distant buzz had already turned into a throaty roar and soon I could hear the bike idling to a standstill outside.

‘Fuck,’ I muttered as the contents of my bag clattered across the floor.

Seconds later Urian stooped through the front door and stood over me. Without looking up I hurriedly crawled about the floor picking up eyeliner, hair clips and a stray tampon.

‘Yaso’ came his gravelly voice.

‘Yasus,’ I mumbled in return.

Where the hell was Theodora? Alone in his house, I looked like some kind of deranged stalker. Not that crawling around through the dust balls on all fours was helping. It couldn’t get any worse!

A pair of large feet in dusty mules appeared in my peripheral vision. Long and sinewy like the rest of him. Toes not too hairy. How could feet be so sexy? I wrenched my eyes away and made a hopeless pretence of peering under a dresser for a lost lipstick. The feet came closer until I was virtually bowing to them in supplication. This was getting embarrassing. Slowly I rose to full height until we were eye to eye. Well, eye to collarbone really – he was so bloody tall. A breathless sigh escaped my lips.

We were standing about a foot apart. I could smell him. Musky sweat and pheromones with a hint of fabric conditioner. Up close he was even more gorgeous than I realised. His burning charcoal eyes were softer than I thought, more chocolate than volcanic rock. My friend Kate back home would have said they were too close (never trust a man with close eyes), but his full black eyebrows drew them upwards and outwards and gave him a permanently quizzical look, which I found charming.

Straight cheekbones and nose.

Strong jaw.

Rounded velvet lips.

Despite my blushing shame, my eyes caressed his olive skin, unable to pull away. He stared back at me with equal intensity although his emotions were unreadable. Was he angry to find me in his home? Did he know we were even coming?

For once I felt relieved to hear Theodora’s enormous high heels clattering in from the patio door.

‘Urian!’ she shouted in her high-pitched voice, shattering the tension between us.

She prattled away at him in Greek and he replied in monosyllabic grunts, eyeing me derisively every so often. In an effort to broker the deal, she soon reverted to her pidgin English.

‘Urian, this eeez Missus Fay. I tell you on phone. She like buy your house maybe’.

He’s dark eyes fused onto my face, their expression broody and filled with emotion. A kind of hostile longing.

After a while he sighed and said flatly: ‘Lemonade?’

‘Pardon,’ I blushed.

‘It is hot. Do you like drink lemonade?’

‘Yes, yes. Very good,’ replied Theodora, slapping her huge hands together. For good measure she turned to me and added: ‘Made in the home with Greek lemons and honey. Also Greek.’

Urian went to the kitchen and returned with two tall cool glasses of smoky liquid.

‘Sit down,’ he said, indicating towards the sitting room.

We obediently took our drinks and sat down amongst the treasure trove of possessions I’d just nosed my way through. Urian sat in front of us looking strained and uncomfortable, his big brown eyes meeting mine from time to time with an imploring look. Bizarrely he didn’t pour himself a drink. Just sat there watching us drink ours.

Theodora drained her glass first and said: ‘Bravo, bravo. Verrrry verrry good.’

I downed mine, shuddering at the brain freeze that followed, and then hastily added my own stuttered string of compliments lest I seemed rude.

‘Oh yes. Delightful. Citrusy. Um, fresh.’

After that strange little ceremony was over, we were permitted to leave. Urian escorted us to the car and I shook hands clumsily before descending into the strawberry fog of the sauna-like vehicle. Theodora fired off a few sentences in Greek before revving the engine and scudding out across the rutted road with the same bolt-rattling haste we arrived in.

In the rear-view mirror, the tall lonely shape of Urian shrank into the distance.

-Chapter Five-

Being in Urian’s house had a profound effect on me. Up until then my crush on him had been no more than an indulgent teenage fantasy to fill the time, but after I’d entered his personal sanctum, something about the way he treasured things, valued memories and people, made me fall in love with him amongst the polished bric-a-brac and tenderly weeded herb pots.

I thought about our sterile flat back home. The plumped-cushions and tasteful uplighters. The ammonite greys and lime whites. When Andrew and I first married, I used to love colour. Orange and amber, turquoise and sage. But now my life had been bleached into neutrals. Under Andrew’s patronage I was slowly fading away. I’d always worried about how I would survive if Andrew left me, but now, for the first time, I starting worrying that maybe in order to survive, I should be leaving him.

Theodora automatically assumed my fascination with Urian’s property would amount to a sale, but on the contrary it became imperative to me that we did not buy Urian’s home. There was something magical about the place, something almost sacred, and I wasn’t going to let Andrew make us the villains who drove him out of it.

We’d barely spoken a word since that bizarre incident in the kitchen when I’d behaved like a porn-star with the rolling pin. The rest of the weekend had been an exercise in strained politeness and I may have seemed a bit over zealous in my keenness to pack his bag the following Monday for his usual weeklong commute to Brussels. I began preparing myself for a stand-off and went through endless discourses in my mind about what I would say. Fortunately I was spared when Andrew rang to say he was having some crisis in the office and couldn’t come back on the weekend. It was a relief not to have to see his smug face or listen to another sermon about the EU or the subprime crash for a whole eight days. And it would give me time to come up with a reason not to take him to Goat’s Neck. The thought of him picking his way through Urian’s stuff with cold objectivity filled me with resentment. He wouldn’t find Urian’s treasures special – just a collection of old tat. The two men were almost diametrically opposite. Andrew, prim, conventional, starchy. Urian, eccentric, original, fluid.

The following week I spent just about every free moment at Kikis in the hope of catching a glimpse of those dark eyes shrouded in shadow. I wondered if Urian suspected my transformation into a barfly was on account of my crush on him or just as a consequence of me being a budding alcoholic. Evangelos and Sofia certainly seemed pleased to have me round. Their cheerful work-worn faces would break into vast smiles whenever I arrived and they’d ply me with treats – a bowl of nuts or a freshly baked bougatsa.

I liked the table at the far end of the veranda where the dappled bougainvillea framed the little harbour below like a Sisley painting. I could sit for hours watching the busy fishing boats and ferries chugging in and out of the tiny bay at random times, their booming horns prompting a flurry of activity as scooters, cars and vans buzzed down to the quay to collect their cargoes of fruit, meat, tourists.

My favourite scene was the arrival of the water boat, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The rusty old behemoth took up the entire bay and looked comically out of place in the tiny harbour. As it turned to dock sideways, it came within inches of taking out the desalination turbine and you could hear the hysterical shouts of the port officials all the way up at Kikis as they frantically waved fishermen out of the way and tried to catch the carbuncled old ropes thrown over the side.

Iraklia’s one natural spring was not enough to sustain the whole island’s needs, which is why the water boat was so crucial. After a thirsty weekend you could almost feel the island licking its dry lips and looking out to sea. The whole operation took a couple of hours and while the water boat rehydrated the parched pipes and rose to full height above the quay, its crew would descend upon Iraklia. To be fair there were only six of them, but they were a lively bunch and you certainly knew when they were in town because laughter would rise in the taverns. The captain was married to Christos’ cousin and usually popped into Kikis for some gossip. He was a jovial Naxian who treated his ragtag crew like family members, although in truth they were probably all related anyway.

It lifted me to see them all hugging and slapping each other on the back even though it had only been two days since they last met. Lots of things lifted me on Iraklia: bread being delivered on the back of a scooter, fresh herbs soaking in buckets, stripped squid drying in the sun.

I started recognising regulars at Kikis. The little fat man who raided the kitchen twice a week was Albercio, Evangelos’ cousin, who did a bad job running the restaurant at Hotel Villa Zouganelli. Stamatis was the island’s postman, a hoary baobab of a man, with a thick stumpy torso and steel wool hair. There was a long-running private joke surrounding Stamatis - whenever he came in Evangelos would lay an empty place next to him with a bowl of olives and a glass of water in front of it. As various punters arrived they’d wander over to greet Stamatis and then respectfully doff their caps and say a few words to the empty chair which would make everyone laugh jovially, including Stamatis himself. I never quite got the gist of the joke but found myself enjoying everyone’s mirth none the less. It made me smile to see Stamatis’ stocky little shoulders bouncing up and down with laughter.

Turban Girl was a regular feature at the corner of the bar too, her jewellery kit spread out in front of her, her face screwed in concentration as she plaited her delicate strips of leather. She usually chatted to Christos as she worked.

‘Ze Germans want to come here and run your country, Christos.’

‘Germanies? Here?’

‘Zat’s true, ja! Zey want to take over. Like World War Two again.’

He’d shake his head and cackle loudly. ‘Germanies here on Iraklia?’

‘Not Iraklia. Athens’.

At that point Christos would usually tsk loudly with his tongue and disappear into the cellar still laughing.

‘You don’t believe me? Read ze papers!’ Turban Girl would shout after him.

I was envious of the imperial way she commandeered the end of the bar as if it were her own private domain. She’d skulk in at random times, set out her jewellery-making kit and work in quiet concentration for hours. If another punter was sitting on her stool she’d squash in to next to him until he finally gave way and moved somewhere else. Evangelos and Sofia didn’t seem to mind her using their restaurant as a workshop and glowering at their customers. She repaid them with jewellery and gifts for the restaurant – a dreamcatcher above the till, leather and silk bunting across the bar. If I were to engage her attention by admiring her jewellery, she’d just brush me off with monosyllabic grunts. There wasn’t much to say by way of conversation:

Pee on the beach today?

Do you use the restaurant toilets, or do you just pee in the car park?

Every so often, a battered pickup pulled up outside and the dogs would go ballistic. That signalled the arrival of Zosimo, the swarthy shepherd who delivered goat and lamb carcasses to the back door and then came round the front for a complementary raki while the dogs circled and growled.