Authors: Carol Mason
We stay in the water until the glare of the sun starts to bother me. I swim after my bikini top, which hasn’t drifted far, and secure the wet strings around my neck and my back again. It takes ages to chug back up the cliff but I feel, peculiarly, as though time is small now, in the grand scheme of things. At more than one point the Orvetto strains and I’m convinced I’m going to end up stranded here, and I half hope I will be: stranded here with Jonathan. What did Georgios say about Zeus? Maybe this will be him changing the course of fate.
At the top I buy bread and feta off a street vendor, and find a shady spot among trees to sit and eat it. The bread is warm and smells like it’s just been pulled from a stone oven. The cheese is marinated in oil and herbs and is an intriguing combination of soft and sharp, sweet and tangy. There’s a single shaft of sunlight that cuts through the trees, and Jonathan sits in it, chewing and looking far off into the distance, all the muscles working hard in his jaw. Jonathan always had a way of eating, absently, as though his mind was on something else. He looks thoroughly content though. I wonder what he’s thinking about. Then he looks at me. And that peaceful, good-humoured expression makes me think he might have been thinking about … well … just, precisely, this.
In the afternoon I park the bike in Agostoli and sit for half an hour in the sunshine on a patio, satisfying my addiction to really good coffee, beside a small square where a festival is going on. After it, I walk around for a while then let a woman selling jewellery flatter me inside her store.
‘Too flashy.’ ‘Too big.’ ‘Too wide.’ Too plain.’ I tell her, as she presents me with one ring after the other, telling me how her brother designs them. Then one does catch my eye. It’s white and yellow gold, with a band of what looks to be interlocking Ss. A motif I’ve seen before. ‘I like this,’ I tell her. ‘What is it?’
‘It is man’s ring,’ she says. ‘No good for you. Only for man.’
I try it on my thumb. ‘That’s fine. I have a man.’ I smile at her. ‘He’s outside actually.’ We both look out of the window. When I look back at her, she is watching me curiously.
My eyes go back to the ring. There’s something about it, even though I normally don’t care for jewellery. ‘It
is
lovely,’ I tell her, holding my hand away and admiring it. ‘Does this pattern mean anything?’
She takes my hand in hers and rubs her thumb over the ring. ‘It is the
meander.
The Greek symbol for long life.’
‘The meander,’ I repeat, feeling an unusual bond with the ring. When I look at her again she is smiling. ‘I can’t afford it, unfortunately,’ I tell her.
She reaches into a drawer and pulls out a calculator, starts fiddling with buttons. ‘I have a good feeling about you. I am going to give you a discount… Twenty percent off.’ She wags a finger at me. ‘But you must not tell my brother.’
She’d sold me even before the discount.
~ * * * ~
When I come out of the store, something has gone from me. I feel the change flatly.
It’s the day. It’s Jonathan. I look around for him but I can’t see him any more. I want to tell him that I have bought a ring for him, a ring that will ensure that he has the one thing we all value the most, even though we might take the idea of it for granted.
I cross the square again, suddenly adrift, rubbing the ring on my thumb with my index finger. Amidst the street performers eating fire, and people dancing with the Greek flag, I see a small stall selling books. I don’t know why it draws me, but I wander over and my attention is instantly pulled to a thin and somewhat dog-eared book. I pick it up and it looks like some kind of jotter. Each of the rough pages has something written on it in Greek. Then there are a few blank ones near the back. But on the last page, is a verse, in English. Somebody has handwritten it. I read…
I search to find you, so I will be found.
I follow footsteps for their sound is yours;
All the places you would walk with me.
I stalk shadows that are but empty impressions of you.
They lead me back to myself.
For you have gone.
I have lost myself.
Underneath the verse, is written
Rebetika. Untitled by Ioannis Mariatos.
For moments I turn quite still, the world seems to become toneless. Nothing happens except for a tear that seems to take a long time forming. Then it lands onto the page beside my thumb. I don’t bother bartering with the Greek lady when she tells me that my strange little find is ten Euros. I walk away quickly, as though someone might take it off me if I don’t.
When I get back down to the dock, after returning the bike, I’m early for the crossing, so I sit on a bench in the shade and open my book at that page again.
‘I love you, Jonathan,’ I whisper, after reading it again. Just whisper the words out there; there’s really nobody around to hear. I suddenly feel tired, as though all the events of the day have just taken a run at me and made me buckle. I put the book down, rest my head back and close my eyes. Jonathan won’t be coming back with me on the ferry, to Zante. As Georgios said, I have to leave him here. But in my mind’s eye, he’s here with me just for a few more moments. He’s got his arms around me so I can rest against his chest.
And when you are gone from me, you will never be gone from me. Even when I let you go—if I ever let you go—you will never be gone from me.
I just think the words without saying them, hoping somehow that they’ll be carried to him, through our clothes, through our skin, and he’ll take them with him.
When I open my eyes, that wonderful feeling of Jonathan’s beating heart at my back has left me, and I realize I must have nodded of, because I have a dull sensation in my head, the kind you get when you’ve lain down to nap but fallen into a fully-fledged sleep instead.
The line-up for the ferry is huge now. There’s a commotion going on between a small Greek child and his parents—the boy doesn’t seem to want to go on the ferry, and keeps attempting to run off as his dad tries to grab hold of his arm. His scream cuts through my fuggy head and I wonder why he wants to stay so badly. I stand up to join the line, not convinced we’re all going to get on, looking around one more time for Jonathan, but knowing he won’t be here. Jonathan always hated goodbyes. As I tag onto the end, I become aware, very strongly, of a strange vibe coming from the front of the queue. I look ahead to see what it can be. Somebody is watching me.
It’s the handsome Englishman from the tour to Olympia.
Somebody pushes in front of me, blocking my view: the father of the Greek boy, joining the line again, with his son firmly in his grip this time. When he moves out of my way, and I look for the Englishman again, but he’s gone. I scan every head in the crowd for his, but it’s as though he too was never really there in the first place.
The aluminium gangplank springs under the weight of the many feet that clatter up it. I grip the railing to steady myself, and it’s wet and shiny from sea-spray. I hesitate there, thinking, maybe I won’t board the ferry. Maybe I will try to recreate this day. Over and over.
I have to board the ferry.
People are moving around me; I’m obstructing them. As I walk on, I’m aware of the unpleasant off-kilter sensation under my feet. I don’t go up on deck, just hang back at stern, until everybody is on board, then I still don’t go anywhere, just watch as the ferry pulls away from the dock. My hands smell salty and metallic from holding the railing. I can still feel the imprint of Jonathan at my back, gradually fading as we slip away from the shore. I look at the ring on my thumb, the Greek symbol for long life; the white and yellow gold sparkles on my tanned hand. I bought this thinking of Jonathan but Jonathan died and this is my ring now. He would want me to have it.
I will have a long life, and a good life. The life that Jonathan would have wanted for me. I will live it for both of us.
I breathe in deeply feeling the salty spray on my skin. The breeze kicks up in my face, sending my hair up behind me into the air. My T-shirt slaps against my body like small sails. Goose-pimples break out on my arms, as I watch the wake of water swiftly elongating, taking me farther and farther away from Kefalonia. Eventually, the island becomes a faint and indistinguishable blur.
When there’s nothing more to stare at, and I feel quite stark and wind-burned, I go up onto the main deck. It’s then that I remember the Englishman again.
He’s not up here, where most of the passengers seem to be sitting—I look up and down each seat aisle for him—nor is he inside the main cabin. I check the bar, keep a look-out at the men’s toilets... Where can he have gone? I saw him get on, didn’t I? Or at least waiting to. I think of his fixed, but distant, gaze of me, as though he’d been watching me for a while. Had he seen me sleeping on the bench? I buy a drink, take it up top and find a seat. But I can’t finish it; my stomach feels too queasy.
I manage to put my head on a railing and sleep most of the way home. It’s only when I disembark, and my feet touch Zante soil, that I realise I’m missing something.
The book.
I make a quick dive back up the gangplank, pushing through the crowd of people coming down it. It’s not where I was sitting. I check the toilets and the bar—all the places I went—but it’s not there either. I ask the man standing on the dock as we all get off what happens with lost and found property, where I might go to find it. He just looks at me, disinterestedly, and shrugs.
~ * * * ~
‘I wasn’t expecting you’d be back so soon,’ Mam grills me, as we have an early evening beer on a patio by another hotel’s pool, the entire day now feeling surreal, yet the dim feeling of Jonathan being still there with me, the dim feeling of his touch, the recent bright reminder of his face…
We’ve ditched our hotel, for a smarter orange-roofed one a little way down the road, towards the beach. The beer is sharp and ice-cold, and, as those first few long sips go down, they cool me and steady me again.
My mam looks striking, her brilliant white T-shirt bringing out the blue of her eyes. That and the grey-blonde of her hair under the wide brim of her white picture hat, and the flush of pink across the low apples of her cheeks, makes her look less like a mother and more like a 1950’s screen goddess.
‘You missed me.’ She angles her head, coquettishly. She knows there’s more to it than that, but she’s not going there without some clearer signal from me that she can. Which is good, because I don’t feel like telling her that I spent the day imagining I was with Jonathan and he felt so real to me that I thought he hadn’t died.
‘I did,’ I tell her. ‘What did you get up to?’
‘I wasn’t feeling all that chirpy this morning, so I’ve enjoyed just doing nothing.’ She takes a paper napkin, dips it in a glass of iced water, squeezes it out, then presses it to the spot of pink skin at the base of her V neck; a gesture that’s lavishly feminine and very ‘her’. My mother is the kind of person who never lets you hear her on the toilet, who can be joyous but never over-excited, peeved but never fit to be tied. Sometimes I wonder, is she the real McCoy, or a living creation of her own imagined self? But then I’ll see tiny alternating glimpses of her, by turns vibrant and then despairing, and somehow the answer is clear.
‘Why weren’t you feeling great?’ I ask her.
‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask myself the question. But I feel much better now.’
‘Was it the heat?’
‘I don’t know. Could be. But we needn’t dissect it to death.’
‘I shouldn’t have left you.’
‘I’m not a baby. I don’t need my diapers changing.’ She studies me for a while with a secretive smile that’s trying to communicate something.
‘What’s that face for?’
She grins now, broadly. ‘Georgios came by.’
‘Georgios?’
‘Well he came to see you, obviously, but when I told him you’d gone off on your own to commit suicide on a moped, he offered to take me to lunch.’
‘You went to lunch with him?’
‘I wasn’t hungry. But we went for a little ride-out and we had an iced fruit drink. And then he had to work so he brought me back.’
‘So you missed me, my ass! Seems you were quite busy…’