Authors: Carol Mason
‘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, whose 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.
I was both relieved, and strangely disappointed.
The other episode was a little more puzzling.
Shortly before I got fired, I was working on a Sunday night on a complex billing matter that was due to the client on Monday and I’d asked Jonathan to make our bed up with the sheets and duvet cover I’d just washed. ‘These Goddamn buttons!’ I heard him say, after he’d had a grumpy wrestling match with the king-size duvet, getting it back into the cover. ‘Why does it have to have a million buttons, Ange? What’s wrong with a zip?’ Jonathan’s impatience was legendary. But his constant huffing kept distracting me. ‘Just bloody do it and stop whining!’ I told him, as I jabbed away at computer keys, resenting my job, resenting his complaining about some tiny domestic no-brainer.
‘Excuse me but isn’t this why we pay a cleaner?’ he hurled at me. I was shocked to see that he was genuinely pissed off.
‘Cleaners don’t do everything!’ I could not believe he was seriously annoyed. I’d just asked him to make up the bed, not build a one!
‘Try finding one that does,’ he said. Jonathan could be very high-and-mighty at times. When he did it with other people, it could be embarrassing, but sometimes effective. But I hated it when he did it with me. Or when he’d play the lawyer and try to outsmart me in an argument, or cross-exam me.
‘Oh piss off you self-righteous prick,’ was my last, and not particularly clever, reply. I got up and watched him fiddling on with the buttons. It was the first time in our years together that I’d wondered what I was doing with him. The doubt—and its easy, irrational trigger—saddened and disturbed me.
Weeks after his death, after this incident was long forgotten, I had finally got around to stripping the bed and laundering the sheets. Just as I was about to put the cover back on, I noticed something very peculiar. All the buttons were done up. Obviously I’d had to undo them to take the thing off. And they couldn’t have just done themselves up in the wash. All I could think was that, in my semi-out-of-it state, I must have buttoned them up myself before I threw the thing in the washing machine, without realising what I was doing. There could be no other explanation. However, the next time I washed it I did wonder if something weird like that was going to happen again.