10
An irritating, tinny, buzzing woke me. At first I wondered what on earth it was until I realised it was Greece, and the noise came from the infamous flight of the mosquito. I pulled the sheet over my head with just a tunnel for breathing and counted the number each time he stabbed it. The morning had arrived, bright and even. I thought I might as well get up and take my time before the ferry, so after gathering my stuff, I slipped some money under the door where I'd found Kostas and stepped out to find the times of the ferry. The weather was like silk.
Early morning at the quayside and it was an ants' nest of confusion and expectation. People and children everywhere; some laughing, some arguing, some chastising children - some chastising parents. People being people. A two-tiered truck packed high with horned goats inched past other parked trucks and wagons, some drivers snoring in their cabs. Kids tormented animals, naughty and short-tempered in the gathering heat, waiting for the next ferry that would take them to the southern sister island of Kissafari or on to the largest island of Crete. But after that, my princess would sail me to the mountains and cool me with her breeze.
I had time to kill. I wandered round the lanes at the back of the town, losing count of all the drowsy flowers blazing up ahead. They tumbled from old oil drums, petrol cans and from anything that could hold a growing plant. Bougainvillea, morning glory, hollyhocks, dusty white acanthus, all waving and grinning from everyday, ordinary tins brightened with casual splashes of paint - they just wouldn't look the same in Britain.
It took a little time to realise it was still quite early with about three hours before we set sail and with nothing to do but drift until they rang the bell for boarding so what about something to eat? In the corner of a kafeneion, I stashed my backpack under a wide round table and flopped into a chair. Behind the corner bar, a young guy sat engrossed in the football on TV until I ordered some lemonade. He took a frosted glass tankard straight from the freezer, a can from the chiller, part-filled the glass and placed it on my table, all without taking his eyes from the screen and forgetting about the money till I snapped it on the zinc. I settled in my seat and sipped my drink; so cold, it almost hurt and tried to follow the game but had about as much chance as I did at home. The game came to an end and, just as I was relishing the vision of me sipping an ice cold drink overlooking a beautiful bay in a foreign country, a voice came to me from the TV,
'but nothing will replace the missing artefacts. As you know, the Mediterranean, Africa, Russia, in fact the whole world is a treasure trove of artefacts but now they are being plundered by tomb-raiders, who operate with virtual impunity. The trafficking networks - like the ones running drugs - are flourishing. In fact, so far the 21st century has been boom-time for the so-called Tomb-Raiders. It's just like mail-order.'
There was no doubt. The voice belonged to Daphne, my ex-wife. She was an admired TV art historian, something of a celebrity now. I was amazed how confident and poised she seemed, but that patronising tone was unmistakable and brought back sour memories of a mad time in our lives. My sky grew cloudy.
Daphne was at Art College when we married, a control freak with mood swings and the rampant egotism that generally goes with low self-esteem. Our marriage lasted just long enough for her to fail her final assessment. She went berserk, refusing to accept the opinions of “a bunch of sycophantic hypocrites”. She blamed everyone but herself for failing, and those who disagreed with her were the enemy. Marriage was too restrictive for such an ego and so I walked away and left her to it. Later, I heard she was in the antiques business and quite a success, but I never saw her after our split. To hear her voice like that, out of the blue and on such a pure sweet day, shot me straight back to a time I'd rather forget.
But at least I was in Greece and I'd read somewhere that 'Greece always gives more than it takes', so with two weeks of immeasurable contrasts stretching out before me on my very own quest with nothing to guide me but sweet ignorance and a ferry, I drained my glass and moved out under a parasol.
'The water's beautiful. Like a milk pond. You see right to the bottom. Lots of fishes big and small,' said the barman wiping my table.
I smiled to myself at his words. 'It looks nice and calm. Do you think it's warm enough yet?'
'Well, if you drive a modern car you go swimming any time you like. But you need a modern car,' he said.
'I don't get it. Why do you need a modern car to go swimming?'
'Well, the water temperature is always about the same but if you come out wet into the morning chill, it's not so nice. With a modern car, you just jump inside and put the heater on. My grandfather told me this.'
After shaking hands and getting permission to leave my stuff in the bar, I moved off round the bay towards the distant beach.
I liked Stephanos town; houses and shops all mixed in together. A large village. It was just like traditional Sundays at home used to be with every shop closed at this early hour and every house dozing. Behind the busiest street, I walked romantic corridors between dilapidated wood and mud houses with charming little kitchens, fire-places, wood storage rooms, and some with courtyards and even pebble mosaic designs laid in the ground beneath knotty gnarled old trees that still flowered bright crimson and pale blue. Being distracted like that, it was then that I surprised a mystical pomegranate tree, her bold round fruit already ripening amongst long, glossy leaves and she actually tried to trip me amongst her roots, lying like stiffened serpents around her base. In future, must remember to watch where I tread when enchanted. Standing to one side was a sort of orange fig, giving off a fragrance that would guide anyone to safety even with their eyes closed. I was in a very special place indeed.
High above the town on a scrubby hill overlooking the crazy blue Aegean I came across a fallen tree trunk and there I sat, just to sit and listen. I found myself remembering my holidays from boarding school and how Uncle Pantelis would rattle on, telling tales, pointing things out and singing some moody love song or other, mixing Greek and English in the same sentence. I was forced to pay attention, just to keep up, and with careful imagination I began to string together phrases of my own. Eventually, things Greek became a sort of unspoken family thing, something that was ours, something special, so I suppose that once I went to boarding school it was inevitable I'd take advantage of the subject dearest to my heart, something uncle called my 'second skin'. So while the other boys were deep into The Hobbit or Bruce Chatwin, I was reading the Iliad and the Odyssey over and over again, and gradually it became my obsession. From Homer I gathered a huge range of heroes and myths about monsters and magic that I'd tell to my dormitory mates after lights out. In fact, I became so obsessed that whenever I appeared for Classics studies, the other boys would chant, 'Here he comes - The Idiot and the Oddity', punning Homer's title. But I didn't mind, and anyway, they were closer to the truth than they realised and so by the time I left college, I felt a real affinity with Greece and not just from my studies but also from the long summers spent with my uncle, and as I grew and continued my interest, a new dimension developed with a cherished awareness of a different culture.
Trails of giant ants, cockroaches and fright-filled cats, ducks and chickens and a cockerel, all sharing the heat there with a new-born kitten, lying dead in that graveyard of dead houses. But down around the port, came a more thriving version of life in shiny, tiled kitchens, and white lace curtains flapping a gentle hint of an incoming breeze that would help to keep the flies at bay. And from inside I caught the smell of cleaning fluids, lunch and the sound of gentle, delicate music.
But best of all was in a shop across the road. The whole window display was unnerving and over-excited in delicious bad taste. Centre stage, overlooking the street sat a huge white ceramic lattice-work basket filled to the brim with plump ceramic fruit - china cherries, apples, pomegranates and pears. Porcelain fruit leaves scattered in the basket with careless abandon served to highlight the rich and vulgar colours. It was flanked by two huge ice buckets, if indeed that's what they were. One fashioned and fired in the image of a bunch of succulent purple grapes and the other modelled after a bright shiny-red, seductive clay apple. Figurines of geisha girls in delicate kimonos stood with soldiers and angels waiting for the carriage-and-four to take them to heaven. Two-tiered cake-stands towered over baskets of frigid flowers in limp, pastel shades and even more baskets of lifeless fruit. Pottery vases and dishes trailing ribbons and silken cord stood before effigies of tulips and lilies in pink, white and turquoise behind rows of ornate glassware balanced on the shelves. Everything on display was multi-coloured crockery, a ceramic graveyard of the most weird and wonderful kitsch I'd ever seen.
It was hot. I kept to the shadows. Cats dozed full stretch alongside dogs like you see in silent Mexican villages; shadowless, few people, the occasional donkey, mountains behind the bay, no trees, and anything that moved, moved in slow motion, even time itself. Further down the street was a camera shop showing old sepia images of proud men with curled moustaches, straight backs in straight suits and self-assurance. There were pictures of ladies wearing extraordinary wildlife creations adorning wide brimmed hats and tight buttoned bodices with full dresses or skirts over bustles so elegant and no-nonsense that I wondered if they had ever sauntered down this street towards the harbour dressed like that and in this heat.
The Aegean offering a breathtaking chance of an irresistible morning swim, laying calm down between an old brown tailor's shop with its bizarre array of postcards, newspapers and magazines, and a similarly modest one-story taverna - the perfect local. Not that I was a regular swimmer but here was such an idyllic stretch of unblemished sand, and the sea was such a peaceful blue that it seemed to draw me towards it. And yet, before surrendering myself to the unknown, I wanted to walk along the sand with half-closed eyes and let the cooling waves wash my tired feet, to fill my palms and contain some of that wrinkled and wizened sea, and leave my footprints there with no others in sight. I was totally captivated.
I was alone, all except for one sun-worshipper and a polite little sign on a wall at the beach that told me, The Nudism Is Forbidding. It might have been a beach Uncle Pantelis came to for some peace and quiet. There was one he had told me about sometimes when he phoned. He might have walked along this very stretch and sat on this very spot. Then I remembered a long-forgotten memory of when he once came to visit me in Trevean, I think I was about eight years old at the time, and we had gone down to our local beach to gaze at the murky sea and get some stones for my collection. I remember the late summer clouds and us sitting on the shoreline picking out the best ones when he drew my attention to the water, 'See how the light from the sky colours the sea? The clouds are making the water grey, like slate. It's the light that controls all the colours that we see. And you see those pointy rocks out there, half hidden by the waves? They're The Manacles. For centuries those vicious teeth have ripped apart hundreds of ships and drowned over a thousand people.'
'Why does that happen?'
'Because men become blind and careless when they try to walk on water.'
And so to show him I was now grown up I had to go and dip my feet in the water. At first, I splashed about and kicked at the foam and the coldness till I was shaking fists at the waves and pretending to be brave. Then up came a swell that almost had me over, but he came and lifted me out, making me laugh, and when he'd settled me down he said, 'If you stop shivering Godfrey, I'll tell you a secret. Now listen, you must always have respect for the sea because there's an old saying, “She makes widows out of women and slaves out of men” - always remember this.'
And I had forgotten.
This Greek sea was where the Nereids played, maidens of great beauty, who combed their flowing hair and sang songs of such sweetness that no man who heard them could resist their spells. That day they beckoned to me to come and taste the joys of the ocean. So how could I, mere mortal that I am, resist? I was seized with an overwhelming need to float and drift. It was irresistible. That sparkling delicious wetness held the key. With my clothes discarded on the sand, I threw myself forward in a flash of temporary insanity, and to my amazement I wasn't afraid. I ran into the water; shouting, laughing, carefree, splashing forward till the bank sloped away and felled me like a tree into deeper water, happy with the shock of it all. And what a shock! Much colder than I expected but it didn't take long for the spirits to come and charm me away to mythical lands and peoples. The Argonauts were ready to cast off and as usual I was in the sea. Well, they'd have to wait till I was ready. The captain is the captain after all. And it was all true and real and I was mad again. The more I pulled myself down the more accustomed I became; the more I explored with open eyes, the more I was astonished by the unbelievable mad blueness of the sea. My mind began to clear. I started to play. I found that by filling my lungs each time I surfaced I was able to claw myself back down, probing the stones and strange shaped sea-shells until I was about to burst.
I crawled back up the beach on all fours, gasping, triumphant - cold belly, warm back, and for some reason, laughing out hot tears. But I'd done it! I'd faced my fear of water head on and, with the help of the Nereids, I'd conquered it. At the water's edge I found tiny bits of waving, organic fluff clinging to the pebbles just where the bubbles melt away; curious purple pieces of seaweed no bigger than a crumb lying on the beach and spiky bits of crab shell attached to the occasional limb. Snot came streaming from my nose just as the sun worshipper went jogging by so I leaned forward snorting it into my hand as though that's what all us well-mannered divers did. He looked away, disgusted. My feet were burning and my clothes were a thousand miles away. I didn't care anymore. I felt something new but I wasn't sure what. Naked, I tried to look confident but plodding along the shoreline sinking into sand was like waddling along a tight rope without any sense of balance. I tried to cool my feet by walking in the water but they just sank there too, leaving whirlpools of water in my struggle to get back. Yet my world was full of colour. I dragged myself back to my scattered clothes and flopped down. Within minutes the Aegean had dried on my body. Salt crystals dried on my forehead causing atoms of magnification like pricks from burning spikes. Already, I was sun struck. My body was on fire and my face was a sun-dried tomato. Back home I'd often wondered why surfers and swimmers once back on the shore would empty a bottle of water over their heads - and now I knew why.
There seemed to be a cafe near some rocks at the far end of the bay so with that as my turning point and the town some way behind me now, I staggered along the tide line. The sun was climbing and it wasn't long before I had to shield my eyes from the glare and rest in the shadow of a huge old boulder. The air was heavy with the scent of resin. There was the buzz of flying insects and rustling in dark parts of the undergrowth but apart from that, everything was still. My breathing was heavy. I was glad of the rest.
I was sure I could hear the crinkling and crackling of dry foliage as though the sun was toasting everything trying to grow. Without water I thought I'd better munch on the biscuits I had and keep my exploration short. If I scrambled up the hillock on my left that would satisfy my curiosity and from there I could look back at the town and get a dizzy idea of the distance I'd walked in the glowing sunshine. Lush feathery pines and poplars spread around me in the surrounding woodlands, their gullies bright with gorse and broom in the summer morning. A whole new early world was opening up my senses.
The cafe was closed and it was time to head back anyway, but before I did, I wanted to go a little further down to where I could just see a swamp of what looked like complete desolation; dried-up marsh and cracked puddles and decomposing vegetation like the ones that used to scare me as a child. Who knew what lurked there? What demons and monsters waited to pounce? Every step was a challenge. I squelched through swarms of midges and climbed through tall grasses and even jumped a surprising brook all without confrontation. And then, just as I was about to retrace my steps, I came upon something looking like a derelict shepherd's hut.
All my options were cut off by a broken down fence that stretched between me and the almost hidden shack. I stood utterly still and listened to the silence. I imagined the life there, far from towns, with the faintest strain of music floating in the air and the echo of modest family voices. Something came with an overwhelming sense of inclusion, or familiarity, something like an increased awareness of the cycle of life. I was part of a natural process and as long as there is nature we don't die. Had I cut the rope? Was I now free? Perhaps I'd gone mad at last, but how would I know?
I think it was the stillness that brought me to my senses. Stephanos town looked distant and small. I hadn't realised I'd walked so far. I felt I was being watched. I looked about. From the shadows of some old packing cases and stacks of stones three inquisitive bearded goats watched my every step whilst just above their heads I was surprised to see the harbour, and curling across the bay the ferry that would take me to Dorini. My smile was growing. I was happy, or maybe just delirious. Perhaps it was the heat, or lack of proper sleep, but one thing was certain. I was delighted to be there, then, at that time and in that space.