Lizzie Allen - PS Olive You

The new arrivals shook various hands as they crossed the restaurant towards the bar, looking for all the world like a couple of local celebrities. Identical gaits and easy smiles meant they were presumably related, like everyone else on the island. My heart caught in my throat as the taller one approached. He was beautiful. Sinewy and high-browed, like one of the javelin throwers on ancient Greek earthenware. He looked at me briefly with deep-set brown eyes before slapping his hand on the bar and ordering a round of drinks from Christos who was practically gurning with happiness. The second man made his way over to Turban Girl and kissed her on the forehead.

‘Yaso,’ he said.

‘Ja,’ she replied, smiling for the first time. ‘Griss dich.’

So she was German.

The din in the restaurant had risen by about ten decibels and, as Javelin Man topped up people’s glasses with raki, it got even louder. Christos was drying glasses next to me. He smiled and nodded towards the two men.

‘Urian and Gregorie. Good boys’.

‘Brothers?’

‘Cousins.’

I tried not to sound too interested. ‘Are they from the island?’

‘Grow up Iraklia,’ he said. ‘But work Athens now’.

To my embarrassment Christos hailed the shorter one over. ‘Gregorie! Come, come!’

Gregorie picked up the bottle of Raki and came to sit next to me.

He was shorter and squarer than Javelin Man. They both looked about my age.

‘Kalimera,’ he said with a friendly smile. ‘Germany?’

‘No,’ I replied, smiling back. ‘English.’

‘Ah. Europe’s Special Member,’ he said, using his fingers as quotation marks to emphasise ‘special’.

I blushed, unsure of what to say.

‘So,’ he said, pouring a raki and pushing it my way. ‘Mrs Thatcher, she was right, no? The single currency was stupido.’

Internally I sighed. Not the frigging credit crunch again. In Andrew’s absence I’d been enjoying some respite from its endless white noise. I looked at the smiling man in front of me. His earnest gaze swept my face looking for signs of where I stood on the issue. Did he want a personal apology for us opting out of the Eurozone?

‘Things bad in Athens at the moment?’ was all I could muster. He shook his head and took a swig of his Raki.

‘People have gone mad. Rioting. Fighting. Burning things.’

‘Why are they rioting?’ I asked.

‘Because Greeks are stupid,’ said a voice behind me.

A warm body reached between us and grasped the bottle with strong brown hands. I made space to my left but Javelin Man slumped into a barstool on the other side of Gregorie.

‘The Greek people, we choosed a bunch of monkeys for a government and now we are angry they no do magic tricks.’

‘My cousin Urian he thinks the world is now come to the end,’ said Gregorie laughing.

Urian muttered something in Greek and downed his drink. ‘Maybe not the world but Greece, of course yes.’

This conversation was not going the way I’d planned.

‘And now we are in the shit up to here,’ he said, raising an elegant hand to his forehead to demonstrate just how deep in the shit he thought they were. ‘Our country is on sale. Foreigners, they come to buy us. The Dutch, the Germans.’

He turned the full beam of his brown eyes directly on to me.

‘The English, they will all come here to buy us,’ he said bitterly. He picked up his helmet and got up to go.

Gregorie sighed theatrically. ‘Another day screwed by politics. On the ferry people throw themselves overboard when Urian start talking.’

He finished his drink and turned to follow his cousin, waving his goodbyes on his way out.

Mr Potatohead came to clear away their glasses.

‘Don’t worry about Urian,’ he said kindly. ‘He’s just pissed they must be to sell his farm. His family there for two hundred years.’

‘Two hundred years,’ I repeated to myself.

‘He will get over it.’

As I heard the angry roar of his bike flaring into the distance I doubted that very much.

After that I felt less inclined to house-hunt. I hung around the villa, took myself on long walks and read my book. On day four, our agent, Theodora, turned up on my doorstep frothing at the mouth. She was an annoying little woman. A five-foot troll with a screeching voice that escalated to a glass-shattering pitch if you tried to talk over her. She wanted to know why I’d not been returning her calls. I lied about being busy, but it was obvious the little enthusiasm I’d previously mustered had evaporated entirely. Our excruciating house-hunting expeditions thus far had amounted to no more than driving round the island in her Opel Corsa and stopping here and there to extort information from locals. She wasn’t even a proper estate agent, but since Ajax was a local politician, it apparently entitled her to stick her fat fingers in every pie.

Part of the problem was the lack of sale stock. The island’s permanent population lived in houses so poor and run-down no one wanted to buy them, and the smattering of plusher holiday homes rarely came on the market. Andrew was convinced that would change as the country slid deeper into recession but the longer I was on the island the less I believed him. The people had an almost familial bond with the place. Generations of families descended there for their annual holidays to homes owned by grandparents and great-grandparents before them. You got the feeling they’d rather starve than give up Iraklia. Me circling like a buzzard waiting to pick at their bones wasn’t going to change that.

Theodora felt differently. The scent of money had morphed her into a truffling pig, digging deeper and deeper into the undergrowth until she excitedly announced she had unearthed a whopper.

I knew before she even told me – Urian’s farm.

Unbeknownst to her I’d stalked it on Google Maps several times already. It wasn’t difficult to find. A few ‘naïve’ comments to Christos about ‘that side of the island’, and within minutes I had him drawing up a full-sized map on a napkin and gleefully marking out Urian’s place with a cross. His eyes twinkled as he did it, so it’s quite possible my ‘naïve’ comments weren’t as disguised as I thought. Anyway, by the time Theadora came grunting in with her two-paged sales pitch, I’d already scanned the place on satellite, hiked past it along the beach front, and driven up the gate on the pretence of being lost.

The property was a picturesque smallholding that straddled two hills and rolled away towards a rocky coastline. The name, presumably charming in Greek, translated clumsily to ‘Goat’s Neck’ in English, which, according to Theodora, was on account of the way the property occupied its own small peninsula and was dotted with goats.

When Theodora heard from Urian’s aunt that the family’s dry-cleaning business on the mainland was struggling she’d called Urian in Athens and persuaded him to sell. As far as she was concerned she’d brokered the deal of the century, so my sudden retreat drove her into a frenzy of indignation and she persisted with her assault like a fly smashing into glass.

The entire thing left me feeling sick and confused. Clearly his family were in dire straights financially, but this was their history for God’s sake! Urian’s legacy. I’d seen the pain in his eyes the first time I’d met him.

‘ Our Country is on Sale’ he said .‘ Foreigners will come to buy us .’

How could I do that? Be the foreigner that capitalised on his loss. The vulture that tore the meat from his bones. I wanted to be toasting the sunset on Goat’s Neck beach with him , not driving him from the place he loved.