‘Where are you from, Petra?’ Becky asked her for the second time, sipping at her water. ‘You never said.’
‘Where are you from?’ the girl countered.
‘Wiltshire,’ Becky replied. ‘A village really close to Stonehenge that’s nowhere near as impressive as the ancient circle people come from all over the world to see.’
Petra gave a small sigh. ‘Kent. But I haven’t been back there for ages. Home is wherever I lay my hat now… or my Nobody’s Foo T-shirt,’ Petra answered with a grin. ‘Or my Thai-Kwondo T-shirt. You haven’t seen that one yet!’
‘Does your mum live in Kent?’
Petra’s wineglass suddenly tipped and she leapt up from the table, her short denim shorts now covered in rose wine. ‘Shit! I’ll have to go and clean this off quick. Do you reckon that Australian cleaning stuff will work on stains like this?’
But Petra didn’t wait for Becky to reply. She skipped off into the taverna.
Thirty-Five
Liakada Village
Elias had been drenched in sweat when he arrived back at his parents’ home above the cafeneon and he knew it wasn’t simply the thirty-degree temperature, it was the damned situation with Becky and Petra being at the villa and it was… Hestia. Still it always seemed to come back to Hestia. Every stumbling block he hit in his career, every seemingly inconsequential rut in the road, all brought him back to that moment his marriage had ended and the utter humiliation that had come with that. He needed to succeed. He needed to win. But he wasn’t feeling like a winner at the moment. He was feeling like a man who had planned a whole future for himself, based on the actions of someone else, and now he didn’t know where his centre was or what happened next.
His shirt off his body and tied around a rickety fence post, his non-designer jeans hugging the rest of him, Elias hit the hard earth with the largest pick he had found in his father’s temporary home. Amid the mattress, empty coffee cups and remnants of loaves of bread and unwashed clothes, there were still tools in the shed. And, to work out some of his frustrations, he had decided to dig over his father’s allotment. He knew it was completely the wrong time for any kind of planting, but the earth could be turned over, made fresher, prepared. That was what he was telling himself. In truth, he either slammed the pick into the ground or he found a brick wall to demolish. The chickens were squawking at his movement and three of the goats were looking over the fence like gardening was a spectator-sport.
Elias drove the pick into the rock-hard soil and enjoyed the slight pain rolling through his muscles. He drew it up again and then smashed it back down.
‘What are you doing?’
It was his father. He didn’t need to look up to know that. And, as his father hadn’t wanted to talk about anything that was going on with his mother, Elias didn’t see why he should talk about how he was feeling right now.
‘Have you even planted anything this year?’ Elias responded, not stopping in his work.
‘What is the point? Your mother has made other arrangements with vegetables.’
Elias looked up then. ‘What other arrangements?’
‘You will need to ask her,’ Spiros answered.
Elias stopped then, wiping his forehead with his forearm and fixing his dad with a stare. ‘What is wrong with the two of you? I speak to one and they say I should ask the other. I speak to the other and they say the same. No one is telling me anything.’ He was shouting now and he had already seen Areti pottering around in her garden, hanging yet more washing on a line. ‘And why, why are you living in a shed when there is an empty home in the village?’
Spiros had rolled a cigarette and it was hanging out of his lips while he patted down his body – white vest with no pockets, black trousers. He worked his way down to his ankles then pulled out a Zippo from inside his sock. Elias watched his father light the cigarette then blow a thick plume of smoke into the air. ‘Do not tell your mother I am smoking.’
‘You have been smoking every day since you were eleven years old,’ Elias reminded him. ‘You told me – when I was eleven – when you offered me my first cigarette like it was going to somehow make me a man.’
‘I am not meant to be smoking. Since the heart attack…’
Elias froze, had to lean on the worn wooden handle of the garden tool for support. ‘Since the what?’ He had to wet his lips. ‘Did you say “heart attack”?’
Spiros waved a hand in the air, taking another drag on the cigarette before flicking ash onto the soil Elias was cultivating. ‘Last year,’ he answered. ‘Another lifetime ago. When your mother and I were still talking.’
Elias couldn’t believe this was the first he was hearing of this. He was angry and concerned all at once. ‘You had a heart attack and you never told me?!’
‘I was in the hospital for three days. I had to leave in the end because Areti kept sending in parcels of her moussaka,’ Spiros replied. ‘She has started substituting aubergine for turnip. I do not know why. It does not work.’
‘Papa, come on, I was a phone call away. You should have let me know. I could have come back. I could have helped with the cafeneon or… brought you food without turnip.’
‘You would have come?’ Spiros asked, kicking at a bump of soil. ‘With Hestia in the village?’
Elias swallowed. It was the first time either of his parents had mentioned his ex-wife’s name since he had been back. ‘Hestia was in the village?’ Was. He was clinging on to that past tense. Had she stayed in their house? No, it was not hers. It had been a gift from his family. She would not do something like that. Despite everything, despite the anger he felt, Hestia wasn’t a bad person.
Spiros nodded, drawing on his roll-up. ‘She was here for a while. She rented a house with the woman for maybe three months. Until, I think, she decided making a stand was more difficult than she had thought.’
The woman. The woman’s name was Thalia. Still the village was unchanged in its views about what was right and what was not. As much as he had been hurt by what had happened, it was the reaction of the village that had made everything so much worse. People and their opinions…
‘I would have come,’ Elias replied, taking a breath and lifting the pick again. ‘Of course, I would have come.’
‘I do not believe you,’ Spiros said. ‘And, your mother and I, we decided we did not want to put you in that position. You were settling in the UK. You were putting the past behind you.’
Elias dropped the pick again. ‘I am not ashamed of being in Liakada again. Are you?’ he asked. ‘Are you somehow ashamed to have me here? Are you both still governed by what the village president thinks and feels about things?’
‘Elia,’ Spiros stated. ‘No one was ashamed of you. The situation was difficult, that is all.’
‘Why?’ Elias asked. ‘Because Hestia fell in love with a woman instead of another man? Would it have been less of a drama if she had slipped into an affair with Panos from the taverna?’ His temper was rising again, a prickly heat developing across his bare shoulders.
‘Elia, Panos is eighty this year.’