Polly Samson - A Theatre for Dreamers

‘Oh, poor Marianne.’

Charmian fills me in while I take over with the cheese. ‘Marianne is Axel’s wife, possibly the sweetest young woman who ever lived. She and Axel came here from Norway, oh, more than two years ago now. They’re the only foreigners other than us to have bought our houses; he’s flush with readers in several languages though a bit Kerouac for my taste—’

Nancy interrupts Charmian’s lit-crit to hurry things along. ‘Marianne’s been in Oslo to give birth to their baby but she’s due back on Hydra any day now… Anyway there he was with his boat on the joists and me shouting at him. The girl didn’t turn around, she still had the paintbrush in her hand. I stood my ground. I said, “Axel. Are you getting the boat ready in time for your wife’s return with your son?” The girl was flinching. “Stop mauling me, Axel,” she said. Axel was cold with me. I said something else about Marianne, asked about the baby’s cough. He spun the girl around by the shoulders, the front of her shirt was streaked with red paint. She hid her face in her hands while he introduced her. “This is Patricia,” he said. “We are in love. What do you suggest, Nancy?”’

Charmian shakes her head. ‘I don’t think the island can cope with any more drama,’ she says.

After Nancy, in comes the young widow Zoe with Booli at her heels. Zoe is given onions to chop and an old hen to gut while the little boy follows Charmian to the courtyard to pick herbs. Zoe and I manage only a few words but do a lot of smiling at each other. She has about as much English as I do Greek.

‘ Kartopoulo ,’ Booli cries, licking his lips when he sees what’s for supper.

‘Chicken,’ I correct him, stooping to collect a fistful of oregano. ‘Thank you, good boy, Boo,’ and I get him to repeat ‘chicken’ as Charmian takes her sharpest knife to the shining globes of my aubergines, palest gold beneath their regal skins.

Martin bumbles in from school with a dead grasshopper in his pocket. Martin’s legs are ridiculously too long for his shorts, thin and prominently jointed so he looks like an insect himself. He hides his clever eyes behind a mop of streaky hair, stops only long enough to dump his books and tear a hunk from the loaf. He shares his father’s habits of sudden bursts of conversation and self-absorbed silences.

While Charmian cooks the meat sauce, she tells the sad story of Costas, who was drowned off the coast of Benghazi while sponge fishing. At her husband’s name Zoe crosses her hands at the bib of her apron.

‘Ugh, they had to cut his line because they couldn’t pull him out of the sludge. He wasn’t much older than your brother. And two other crew members crippled with the bends in the same season – that captain won’t be setting sail again…’

‘Bugger, bugger, bugger!’ George comes crashing down the ladder, rolling his sleeve to his elbow. ‘Bugger, missed my shot; why didn’t you remind me, Charm?’ He takes her pack of cigarettes from the table while she sets a pan of water to boil on a Primus, still talking to me.

‘Sponge was the main industry here, a tough one but dying out.’

George is scratching at his arms. Charmian takes a glass syringe from a tin, fits it with a needle and drops it into the water. He lights a cigarette.

‘Sponge. You can’t get away from it. The death of it all,’ he says, narrowing his eyes at me through the smoke. ‘You smell it here in the street, from the factory. No bleach can wash away the stench, and I take it you’ve noticed how many crippled men we have?’

Charmian grasps his arm, grimaces. ‘Oh George, it’s like a pepper pot. I think this one had better be in your arse.’ I don’t know where to look. Surely I shouldn’t be here? Is George some sort of addict?

Booli and the dog are racing around with a paper kite Charmian has made from some string and a paper bag.

‘Hey, it’s like a bloody circus ground,’ George complains and Zoe claps her hands for Boo to play in the street.

‘And here’s our lovely Zoe, widowed at twenty-two, childless and without much hope of another match with half the blokes away at sea. A sailor boy sending money home is the way most of these families survive now,’ George tells me. ‘You larrikins who come for the sun have no idea how bloody hard it is for the people who live here. That daily grind of finding food and carrying water is not a bloody lifestyle choice for them,’ he says, helping himself to Charmian’s glass and draining it in one gulp.

‘Stop it, George,’ she says, lifting the hypodermic from the battered pan of boiling water with tongs. ‘Leave the poor girl alone.’

He’s still going on so it’s a relief when Martin comes bounding in. ‘Hey, what’s up, professor?’ George says and Charmian hisses, ‘Will you stop calling him that,’ as Martin urges us all to his room to view the grasshopper’s eye under his microscope.

Charmian is taking a small bottle from the icebox. ‘When I’ve done Dad’s shot,’ she says, filling the syringe.

George is still booming at me. ‘I, for one, thank the yachts and the film people! You’ll see if you stay: it gets hellish all summer long. But it’s a bloody good job people have started to come because the island will need to do something now synthetic sponges are taking over the entire industry…’ He’s unbuckling his belt. ‘I say hurrah for Sophia Loren!’ he cries as he drops his trousers, and I yelp.

‘Oh crikey, Erica! You must be wondering what the hell’s going on.’ I suspect Charmian of enjoying my confusion. ‘Streptomycin for his TB.’ She flashes the syringe. ‘I’ve become rather expert at doing this since he got back from the hospital in Athens.’

George leans over with his hands to the table. His shirt-tails are mercifully long enough to spare my blushes. His legs are gangly as a schoolboy’s – exactly like Martin’s, in fact. ‘Yes, better here than in Athens,’ he growls as Charmian approaches. ‘I need to be on the island to keep an eye on my wife.’

She raises her eyebrows and makes herself wicked in a sexy sort of a way, taps the syringe. ‘Darling, you may find this hurts.’

Martin rolls his eyes at me as she starts to recount Nancy’s story about Axel and the American girl. ‘Come on,’ he says, tugging my shirt. ‘It’s got compound eyes.’

By the time I head home the day is dissolving. The black sea is squiggled from mast lights, silvered with stars, spangled green and red from the harbour beacons. A bright gibbous moon rises from the mountains; the cicadas pour their love songs from the trees. The climb up Voulgaris Street from the port no longer makes me out of breath; the moussaka is still hot from Charmian’s oven when I arrive home.

No one has lit the kerosene lamps though I can hear voices and people moving about upstairs. I plonk the dish on the table, call out, light a lamp. The room is exactly as I left it. Shadows leap from flowers that Jimmy and I picked on the mountain: yellow daisies and poppies in a green glazed jar. The table is laid with earthenware plates and half a ring of bread on a board, a dish of oil, two jugs of Kokineli and our copper beakers washed and ready to receive it.

Jimmy sneaks up on me while I’m filling a jug with water from the Qupi. He’s shirtless, smooth-chested, smelling of bed. The frenetic comings and goings at Charmian’s fall into a fold in time as, grabbing my lamp, he leads me back to the still-warm sheets.

The problem of what to do about Marianne rumbles on for days among the foreign community. Fresh sightings of Axel and Patricia are brought to Katsikas to be picked over. Friends come and pour their concern into glasses at Charmian’s table, douse their forebodings with ouzo. Nancy wants to write to her in Oslo, Charmian favours staying well away.