April 2019 

Grandpa died in April. He was very old. Life was hell, that’s what he used to say. A fire burned for  good. The funeral tomorrow, so soon, as was the way for Jews. I had to get home fast. Still in Greece,  in Ithaca, at the birthday party of an aunt on my mother’s side. Konstantinos, a friend of my cousin  Eli, with the stout boat that had a bright orange underbelly and a large wooden steering wheel,  volunteered to take me to Kefalonia in time for the evening flight. At that wheel now, there he was,  just in view of where I sat at the stern in the open air. We hadn’t spoken since he helped me on board  fifteen minutes ago, and asked if I had all my things. A small suitcase that I found ugly, which he had  already tucked away in the cabin. My bag over my shoulder. Yes, thank you so much. Again. Sorry. I  said.  

I had decided to sit on the plastic bench that wrapped around the back of the boat. To see the port  disappear. Would I come back later in the year, after graduation? At the party all anyone could talk  about was the summer: when it would come, how hot it would be, if the vines would survive, how  many tourists would bother to make the ferry crossing. If Ithaca’s quieter beaches, it’s plentiful fish,  its promise of myths and long-held love, would keep them coming. Konstantinos had been worried. I  had watched him at the party, sat quietly at the garden table, thumbing the rim of his beer, only  opening his mouth when one of the older men said something he found truly ridiculous. His family  grew kotsilia vines in Perachori and made the most delicious white wine. They were always at the  centre of the festival there in July. They would get there late, cruising up to the square on the hill, the  potential of a good time in the air. When they arrived, crates rattling away in the bed of the old  pickup, everyone stood up from their little white tables and cheered. Last year, beneath the big purple  setting sun, we had kissed against the cool stone wall, under the bougainvillea tree. Call me Dino, he  had muttered, the words tingling down my neck and arms, before we slipped around the corner to  refill everyone’s glasses. I hung back, gasping slightly, from the wet-soft newness of his lips on mine,  held still for a moment by the terror that I expected, but never came. Later, my sister had to pick little  pink flowers out of my hair, as I lay on my stomach, smiling into the pillows.  

That was last year. Things had been different this time. Less joyful. The vines were in trouble, that’s  what everyone said. The rain had stopped already. No more than a shower or two since mid-March!  Unheard of in the Ionians, the green islands, full of flowers and creeping vines and forested  mountains. Everyone was haunted by the idea of August, of dry, brown hills that whistled in the  afternoon winds and a beating sun that wouldn’t break. A few days ago, I had opened my shutters in the morning, anticipating the thick smell of coffee boiling in the briki, only to be met instead by  hushed conversation in the courtyard. A woman muttering my aunt’s name between protracted  sentences I couldn’t fully understand. I still only knew a tiny amount of Greek, but there were words I  could pick out, because the voice was so familiar. Alexandra was speaking, I was sure. Dino’s  mother. Nekrá, dead. Stafýli, grape. The words I knew punctuating the floods that I didn’t. The sense I  got was of a nightmare – one in which all the plants of the island had withered and died, leaving  behind a landscape, unrecognisable, drained of its life and the quotidian way we experienced it – slices  of watermelon after dinner, wasp stings in the fields, heavy figs that fall from the trees and burst with  a warm date smell on the ground. I couldn’t see them talking from my window, but I could imagine it.  Sitting at the metal table, painted blue but chipped, the one that got so hot in the summer that we gave  it a wide berth; holding hands like they tended to do while they spoke. My aunt Clare in her soft white  nightgown, blondish hair swept back with a barrette, leaning in to comfort her friend, who wept; for  her livelihood, for the grapes, hanging sweetly right now all across the island in plump bunches, on  course to die. When I came downstairs a while later, I found them laughing in the kitchen, the coffee  pot frothing away on the stove, no evidence of nightmares on their faces. A sight I had been met with  a hundred times. But the grief was still somewhere in the air, inescapable, like the woody sage taste  that hangs over town, or the citrus that zings through from December to May.  

I hadn’t asked Dino about any of it. I hadn’t even really spoken to him at all, until today, when my  dad called from London to give me the news. I had been walking back from the cove around the  headland where I always swam early in the morning when it came. I had the strongest sense that he  would just go on forever. That was the force of him. A life that had stretched and withered like the  century, whose eyes had shone blue and sharp the last time I had visited. Sat up straight with crossed  legs in the yellow arm chair. Overlooking the garden with the apple tree. Greeting me with a wry tone  and a stiff kiss to the cheek, asking me about Cambridge all afternoon with indulgence in his eyes and  a voice thick with memory. He was only one of two men to touch my face in years. I found fear and  comfort in the weakness of his body. Hanging up the phone, I rushed back home, up the dust path,  along the seafront, round the houses. Thinking about London. How I would get there. I hadn’t said  more than hello to him all week, but Dino offered to take me to Sami. His friend Marcos worked the  bar by the port, he would drive me to Argostoli airport that afternoon. It would work out fine. We  were in the courtyard when this was all planned, as we always tended to be when things were  happening. Dino leaning over the table, scribbling down timings on a scrap of paper. Speaking fast  into his phone, clutched between his shoulder and his ear, while I pulled clothes from the washing line  to stuff them into my suitcase. Clare stood just inside the kitchen, carefully adding fresh tomatoes to a  sandwich for my lunch, chopped thin and neat on the board and sprinkled with salt. Where had I  thrown my coat when I arrived, desperate for the sunshine? The bag I took to the beach on Thursday.  Where was that? My house keys were probably in it, we had needed the shiny blue bottle opener

shaped like a shark that my sister Ida had brought me back from Mexico. My new water bottle which  was big and red- 

“Solly.” 

Warm hands turning me around, pressing a sandwich wrapped in paper into my hands.  “Time to go. Eli found your bag upstairs. Darling. Get home safe.” 

Hands in my hair now, behind my ears.  

“You send your Dad all our love.”  

Dino lifted my bag into the back of his truck in the corner of my eye. Strong hands checking  everything was secure. Ready to go. Making things better and worse and everything was happening  too soon. Eli saying goodbye.  

“I put your beach bag in the suitcase but here are your keys. Do you have your passport in there  anyway?” 

Pushing and shoving shoulders. Tears in my eyes. In the car, pulling out of the backstreets, my little  circle of family, Clare, Eli, his sister Sofia, Alexandra, disappearing into the dust.  

Then there was the drive to the port I had done a hundred times. The quiet boat waiting. Then the engine roared and the waves smashed against the hull, and we didn’t speak. The spray was serious  today, it stung my arms and wet the ends of my hair. Unkindly, I thought, Dino might be doing it on  purpose. Driving into the waves in such a way to soak me. The thin white dress I wore becoming  heavy and stuck to my skin. Licking my salty lips. For a while I thought about moving inside the  cabin, but didn’t. That was his castle. Carefully guarded by his back to me. When he turned his head  this way and that I could see he had sunglasses on. The ones that he kept in one of the cupboards on  the boat, bought a couple of years ago in Fiskardo. We had all sailed up the coast of Ithaca, stopping  only to jump and pull each other into the sea, before crossing over the strait to eat grilled sardines and  riganada, my favourite, toasted bread and crushed tomatoes and feta cheese. In the walled garden, with salt in the air and oily fingers, we all cracked open cold beers and leaned back into mismatched  chairs. There was laughter and plates of olives that we threw at each other to see who was best at  catching them in their mouths. Dino had failed spectacularly and complained it was because the sun  was in his eyes. We dragged him around the tourist shops, trying on sunglasses until we found the perfect pair, bright pink and plastic and divine! I saw a picture from that day last week. Eli must have  had it developed. It was stuck above the wooden desk in Dino’s room when we had all gone over to  his parent’s house for lunch. It was just a flash, of dark curly hair, a big blue sky, the smallest smudge  of pink, but I knew what it was: a remainder, a vestige, of a bigger, simpler season, one made of touch  and broad smiles. I hadn’t seen him actually wear the sunglasses often, but he was now. Annoyingly,  they did suit him. The mellow pink looked lovely with the faded green shirt he wore, one I recognised  from the small hole on the right-sleeve, just big enough that I could slip my pinkie finger inside. It  was the shirt he wore when he was at the vineyard because the material was light and cool, but it kept  the sun off his arms. I wondered if that meant he was meant to be there today, if I had pulled him  away from something important. At the festival he had worn it because he had come straight from  work. When he kissed me, I rested my hands on his arms, feeling the softness of the material, and the  almost imperceptible little hole that let me know, thank god, it wasn’t a dream.  

The night of the kiss had been perfect. We had drawn away from each other, blushing, but it hadn’t  been awkward. We laughed, and he pulled my hand as we exited our hideaway, only letting go as we  approached our friends and family, to pull the crate of fresh wine bottles we had fetched from the car  more securely into his grip, as I reached for their waiting glasses. After an hour or two, his mother  produced bowls of different sizes, filled with peppery bean soup, okra, wild greens, tomato salad,  tzatziki that smacked of garlic, alongside fresh bread that was yellowy with corn and a pie, carefully  wrapped in foil to keep the warmth in, its pastry crackling at the edges, the smells of bay and  marjoram and rich meat releasing into the air as it was cut into. Amidst the chaos of scrambling  hands, the pushing and passing of bowls, a paper plate was passed to me wordlessly, filled with all the  things I liked the most, no okra in sight, topped with a healthy crack of salt. When I looked up, Dino  was already in the fray, arguing with Eli over who got the last corner piece of pie, gesticulating wildly  to match my cousin, but there was a smile hiding in the corners of his mouth, and, just for a moment,  he met my eye. When it was time to go, everyone hugged and kissed as we normally did, forcing  leftovers back and forth into each other’s hands, and yelling about having coffee in the morning. As I  hugged Dino, the last thing I did before clambering into Clare’s car, Ida shouting at me to hurry up from the passenger seat, he held the back of my head and, so gently that I couldn’t be sure it was  definitely happening, ran his fingers through the ends of my hair. The car was already starting to  move when I jumped into it, giddy, swatting at my sister who poked me for taking so long. The last  thing I saw as we tore out of town was Dino, getting onto his moped, under the dim light of a  streetlamp.  

Of course, I had to destroy everything. In those in-between hours where things renew and become  possible, I made sure to shake things up before they could settle into anything real. When I fell asleep  that night, skin slightly damp from the shower, tangled up in fresh white sheets, the pink bougainvillea flowers Ida had pulled from my hair lined up in a row on my bedside table, said sister  snoring soundly from her matching bed, pushed against the opposite wall of the guest room, my smile  had faded. For hours I had been restless and wriggly, face as red as my hair, eyes shining like the  street lamps, until Ida got annoyed and pushed me down to the corridor to the bathroom. I had washed  up, filling the little bathroom with the blue and white tiles with steam and the broadness of my heart  and wideness of my hips. Afterwards, in the mirror, I couldn’t quite believe that I looked the same as  always. Pale, strange, shifty. I’m not sure what I had expected to see, but something about it blew me  out all of a sudden, like a candle. I watched her while I brushed my teeth, moving as I moved, looking  as I looked, wishing that she would just do whatever weird, furtive thing she was clearly wanting to.  We turned to the side and met each other again that way, as we always did when a reflective surface  came between us. I pushed her shoulders back, trying to imagine someone else seeing us like this, for  the first time. Soft and white, like cheap bread, all wrapped up in barriers. Barriers that Dino had  tentatively crossed tonight, with all the gentleness of a child approaching an animal it doesn’t want to  scare away. Barriers that had stood strong since their construction, that dark night in the greeny valley  when he lay over me on the hill. A strong tongue pressing into my mouth. The voices and licking  flames of the campfire just too far away to make it stop. When the girl in the mirror was born, and all  she wanted to do was bite.  

In bed again, I thought about the kiss from every angle. I imagined what we might have looked like  from above, uncertainly pressed against each other, the wall separating us off, holding us close and  away from the crowds stretching out across the square in their little golden pools. I thought about his mouth, soft against mine, joined slowly by his tongue like I had seen so many times on TV. I thought  about all the songs that should play in the background. For so long I had listened to music on the bus  or walking down the street or on my bike at night and wished and wished for a memory of my own to fill up my head. But, until that night, I had never experienced anything like a great song. Though I  have been sad, even that had never felt particularly momentous. More a lack, an absence, a knowledge  that everyone I knew was out doing things that I couldn’t seem to do. Then for a long while I thought  about Pink Moon. The way the riffs in it had always made me feel. How bright and sparkly they were,  even though Nick Drake had been depressed. About the hope in it, in the moon just over the horizon,  that was going to come, that is coming, we would all see. Then, Drake dead on his bedroom floor in  Far Leys, full of amitriptyline. His parents spoke about the way he tended to compartmentalise his  life, that many of his friends met each other for the first time at his funeral, in a church in  Warwickshire. I imagined my own. The pity-whispers of virginity that would gather in the corners. None of them would know about the kiss behind the wall in the square on the night of the wine  festival. About the tangle of his fingers in my hair. No one except Dino, anyway. And, listening to  them talk, he would find out what I was. He would be scared to kiss me again after that. At least none of them would know about the kiss that came first, nor the hands that pushed me down into grass that tasted like absinthe.  

After that night, I hadn’t been able to talk to him at all. Sitting around the table in the courtyard, the  place where everything happened, the earth-sweet smell of coffee sitting in the air right under my  nose, I felt his eyes on me as well as the light touch of his hand on the back of my calf. I excused  myself without even meaning to, going inside to drizzle honey over the loukoumades waiting on the  counter inside. I didn’t feel his touch again until the day that my grandpa died, fleeting, as I stumbled  while exiting the boat. Dino sprung up from checking the cleats, to grab at my waist instinctively. The  moment it happened my body, which had been bending away from men’s hands for years, began to  spin backwards in time. It was a child: picking olives and grapes in dwindling September sun, diving  from taller and taller rocks at the goading of the boys from town into balmy sea, wrestling in the hills  until its skin smelled like pine and amaranth. A possibility unfurled, that it wasn’t ruined for touch  forever, that the calm pressure of Dino’s fingertips on its hips, settling it onto the sun-fried concrete of  the dock, would come to vanquish those sweat-slick valley hands that had been welded to it like cold  brass. Dino only held me there for a second or two, before clambering back into the cabin for my  suitcase. Once it was in front of me, still and looming against the pure white gleam of the port, there  was nothing left to do but say goodbye. I knew where Marcos worked, had sat and played cards and  drunk beers under the red awning in the late afternoon. There was no excuse to keep him with me  even a moment longer. I turned to start the flat walk to shore, fat tears begging to roll down my  cheeks. My legs were shaking just slightly. I ran my hands down my skirt as if to smooth out the  creases, but really it was to steady myself. To seal up that fissure that Dino tried to wrench open last  year. That he had now left, cracked and bare, to the lemon-salt air. The very thing I had taken to  Greece to bury that summer, now lying between us on the floor in the receding April day as I crossed  the street. 

climate fiction crossing desire drought family Greece grief Ithaca literary fiction memory trauma