Authors: Carol Mason
I realise I’ve been staring at her and her chest appears completely still. A quick and hot panic comes over me. Why isn’t she breathing? I’m just about to spring out of bed, when I see the shallow, almost imperceptible rise and fall. She twitches and makes a tiny sound. I let out a breath of relief and wonder what’s wrong with me.
I’ve just time to throw on the cute denim shorts and gypsy top I bought in Top Shop’s
sale, do a quick splash of face, and pull my newly-blonded hair into a ponytail. Stepping out of the door into my first taste of a Greek morning feels like walking into an oven fit to bake a mean baklava.
‘
Kalimera
!’ says the smiling Greek girl, which I quickly gather means Good Morning. I manage to swipe a couple of slices of appetizing golden bread and a few pats of butter off her as she clears the buffet counter in the lobby, which this morning doubles as the dining area. ‘Breakfast ends at 9:30,’ she tells me, with a friendly scold, but offers me a loaded-up breadbasket when I ask if I can take something upstairs for my mam. ‘Ah! The beautiful English lady in the hat!’ she says. I grimace. When you’re in the shadow of your dazzling sixty-year-old mother, you sometimes have to ask yourself
what’s wrong with this picture?
I sit at a table by myself, among all the couples who have managed to get up—a few puffy-eyed faces I recognise from the bus. It’s a different rep this morning, a hefty girl who rattles off details about car hire, tours, things to do in the area. It feels odd sitting here on my own getting curious looks from all the holidaying couples, so I take my ‘guided tours of the island’ package and step outside into a stark white sunshine that glints and shimmies off the mirror-like surface of the swimming pool. Slipping out of my flip-flops, I root each of my white feet into the hot concrete, enjoying, for moments, the masochistic pain.
~ * * * ~
‘You were sleeping,’ I put the breadbasket and supplies, along with a small glass of orange juice, on her side-table.
‘I wasn’t. I heard you go out.’
I have no idea why my mother always has to deny that she ever sleeps. As though the mere suggestion that she sleeps just like every other human being is somehow offensive. She’s up and dressed now and raring to go.
‘Ah! So that’s why you had your mouth open. I knew it was for a reason.’
She glares at me. ‘I did not have my mouth open!’
‘No, you were just doing this.’ I cock my head to one side, open my mouth and do a very skilled impression of being dead, or daft, or both.
‘You’re a real scream,’ she says to me, tiresomely. ‘Wait while I pick myself off the floor laughing.’
She’s wearing an ankle-length white cotton skirt that skims over her hips and settles into a mermaid’s tail around her calves. This is teamed with a gold and green forest print cotton V-necked T-shirt that dips to show a fetching bit of lightly-freckled cleavage. She looks stunning. ‘Come on Viv, let me take a photo of you,’ I tell her. She hates it when I call her Viv.
I’ve brought Jonathan’s megabucks digital camera that I’ve no idea how to work. I can see him mucking on with it, thumbing buttons, and showing me what it does, and me of course not listening.
She fluffs and preens. ‘I hate having my picture taken!’ Then she stands beside the white stone wall, angles her head ever-so, and gazes off, serenely into the distance. ‘It’s Helen Mirren at the Oscars!’
‘Put some welly into it!’ She grits her teeth behind her frozen smile, as I fiddle on with buttons.
I fire the shutter, then check the picture. ‘Oh, you’ve got no head.’ I show it to her. ‘My God it’s the best picture I’ve ever seen of you!’ I fire again, catching the playful gleam in her eye, before she has a chance to pull that phoney pose of hers again.
We head out before it gets too sweltering. The sun is so intensely white that it’s almost painful. Everything appears sharper—the walls of the buildings more yellow, the flowers more pink, the sky more cyan, like a television that’s had its colour controls tuned up. The main bustling area is about a ten-minute walk up a steep bank, which, frankly, is a major effort in this heat. But the good thing is we’ve quickly got used to the sound of aeroplanes and don’t really hear them anymore. ‘So much for being close to everything Mam! Are you sure you’re all right?’ She looks very hot.
‘Soldiering on.’
‘You don’t have to be sarcastic.’
‘You don’t have to keep asking me if I’m all right, Angela.’ As if to prove how all right she is, she quickens her stride, her dainty feet, with their painted toenails, leaving me behind. ‘You wouldn’t ask a person in a wheelchair if his legs got tired when he went for a walk, would you?’
‘I don’t get the connection.’ I hurry after her.
She stops and glares at me, her face clammy. ‘Don’t mock the afflicted, Angela. It’s not kind.’
We reach the main strip and look both ways up the street. Basically, we have arrived at a busy road, either side of which are rows of unappealing restaurants, cheesy British pubs and fish and chip shops, tacky souvenir shops and the odd seedy-looking car hire place. ‘It’s Blackpool meets the Wild West… Was the brochure photographed in a different country?’
‘Oh stop whining will you! Girl you’re such a joy killer!’
‘It’s dump.’
‘It’s dump-ish.’
‘It’s a goddamn shithole.’
‘I hate it when you sound so North American. You’re British. Never forget where you came from and what made you great. You don’t have to sound like a damned Yank.’
‘Canadians aren’t Yanks.’
She mops her cheek with the back of her hand. ‘They’re tarred with the same brush.’
For her friends, my mother pretends to love Canada. But deep down it’ll always be the place that took me away from her. It’s apparent in the little things. When she comes to visit, she’ll walk into a public loo and if somebody hasn’t flushed, say, loudly, ‘Were Canadians never taught how to flush a toilet?’ In the grocery store: ‘Does NOBODY in Canada know how to grow a proper potato?’ From coming to going, it’s one big rant about all that’s wrong with Canada, and I get sick of it.
An English couple tells us we have to go into the corner store to enquire about the times of buses into Zante town, where we’ll get a far better taste of the real island than we do here, in package holiday hell. ‘I’m not holding out hope,’ I grunt to my mother.
‘Your problem is, you were spoilt with Jonathan.’
I don’t need reminding of the fact that Jonathan and I did have a good life. We had no ties. We didn’t even own a cat. We took foreign holidays twice a year, and a mini-weekend away almost every month. After I had to give up our home, it struck me that maybe this was my punishment. Because I’d become too used to the good life and I’d developed an over-keen sense of entitlement. I thought the rest of the world lived like me. When I saw those TV commercials about the starving kids in Africa, I’d think,
oh that’s so sad
, then change channels.
In the store, the Greek man tells us there’s only one bus a day into Zante.
‘One bus?’ I stare at the top of his head as he thumbs through his newspaper. ‘Well what about coming back?’
‘Don’t expect to come back,’ he talks to his paper.
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with that helpful reply. I wait for him to add something more but he goes on pretending we are not there. I get the urge to pull him across the counter by his collar and tell him, listen buddy, tourists keep your economy going, so be nice to them. Instead I slap a hand on the counter, startling him. ‘But suppose a person, for some quite deluded reason, did get it into their heads that they might like to come back—’
‘Never trust the bus.’ Comes the voice behind us.
I turn to look over my shoulder, and there is a man there: an attractive man. I might be happy that his gaze is steady on my face, then it drops the length of me, in a summarizing, skirt-chasing way. But then it shifts to my mother and does the same thing.
‘Sisters? Yes?’ he says. His eyes roam fast and loose over our hats.
The cheesiness of his line totally appeals to my mother. She bursts into a dirty, tickled-pink, cackle. ‘Oh yes! I’m the younger one of course!’
‘I know,’ he says, and he smiles at her for a long time, the way a man might do with a younger woman he was attracted to. Then he says something in Greek to the man behind the counter, who sniggers.
‘Please, it is not trouble for me to take you into town. I am going there as it is.’ He throws a hand in our direction. ‘The hats… there are two movie stars here.’ His English is excellent.
‘If your vision is that bad I don’t think we should trust you behind a wheel!’ says my mother.
He is not classically handsome. The face is a little too long, the eyebrows too heavy, the C-brackets at either side of his mouth too deep, like the furrows in his brow. And he needs a good shave. Yet there’s something… It’s his eyes. They have a penetrating expression in them that compensates for the lack of it on his face. Soulful eyes. They save him.
I immediately pull my hat off and intend it to have a slow and painful burial at sea. He makes a point of noticing my self-conscious gesture.
‘Well, maybe we should go with the gentleman.’ My mother pumps my arm in encouragement. ‘It’s awfully nice of him to offer.’ Wink. Wink.
‘
Awfully
nice?’ Who is this person?
He looks from my mother to me, then gestures outside. ‘My car is just there. Really, I would be happy to have the company.’ His eyes briefly alight on my mother’s colourful toenails.
She has gone from winking now, to a wide-eyed, besotted stare. I try to keep the smile off my face, and keep her hanging there for moments. Then I say, ‘Thanks all the same but I think we’ll pass.’
‘Who says we’ll pass!’ She’s practically stopping my circulation now. Then she gives me one sharp dig in my ribcage that is embarrassing in its lack of subtlety.
Then to insense me further, this strange man says, ‘Well just because your daughter does not want … you can always come alone.’ How dare he go over my head like that!
‘That’s because she’s a party pooper! An old, old young person. Remind me never to come on holiday with her again!’ Then she fawns and flirts to the point where I want to cripple her. ‘I personally would love to come with you, but unfortunately I think I probably have to go where the old ball and chain goes. It’s a condition of my bail.’
He looks like he might not have understood, but he smiles anyway. Then his eyes meet mine. Is that hostility I see in those raisin-like eyes?
Then he says something that takes me aback. ‘You know, sometimes in this life, Angela, you have to take your chance with people. Not all Greek men are like our reputation you know.’ He bows his head to both of us and then he walks out.
I feel like saying,
Hmm,
I thought they had the reputation for giving it up the bottom
. But, thankfully, I don’t.
My mother is practically legging it after him. I have to restrain her. ‘You called me an old ball and chain?’
‘If the cap fits!’
If the…! I want to kill her. But something suddenly dawns on me, and I feel a strange chill trickle down my spine. ‘Hang on…’ I grab her arm, making her stand still. ‘Did you hear what he said?’ I stare after him as he walks towards a white Jeep parked right out front. ‘He called me Angela.’
‘Well what would you have preferred he call you? Alfred? Or Dancer, the three-legged dog?’
‘But how did he know my name? You didn’t call me by it, I don’t think. And I certainly didn’t introduce myself.’ I watch him climb into the Jeep and glance back at us. He seems to hold my eyes for a few mysterious moments, then he pulls off.
‘Well… I reckon I must’ve. Either that, or he’s psychic. Anyway, one option is to run after him and ask him.’ She pulls a dirty grin. ‘Then maybe we can jump in his car and we can both go for a ride on him.’ She gasps. ‘Vivien! Vivien!’ She slaps her own face hard. ‘You mean,
with
him.
With
him.’
‘Oh, you’re on your own there, pervert,’ I say to her. ‘I hate how all these men see a couple of English women and think we’ve just come on holiday to get laid.’ I watch his car disappear down the road, still thinking how on earth did he know my name?
‘No they don’t! What mother and daughter would come on holiday to—get laid—as you crudely put it? Since you’ve moved to that midden of a country, Angela, you’ve adopted a very Jerry Springer attitude to life… Besides, I would never come on holiday with you if I wanted to get some action. Not with your personality. You’d have ‘em running for the hills, clutching their privates, as fast as they could stumble.’