Polly Samson - A Theatre for Dreamers

‘Sss, sss,’ they reply without raising their eyes from their embroidery. The light shines through Edie’s dress. She skips down the steps and the fishermen coming towards us will see straight away that she is naked beneath it.

She and Janey veer off at the clock towards the slaughterhouse on their mission for fancy-dress materials, leaving me asking boatmen for sacks, which isn’t easy without the Greek words.

‘ Efcharistó , Niko!’ Nikos Katsikas takes me to his brother Andonis at the back of the store; there’s a pile of old grain sacks he can let me have. Charmian is at her usual table, waving to me with a hand that’s already occupied with her glass and a cigarette. Leonard raises his cap. He sits so close to Charmian that occasionally the broad brim of her straw hat throws a shadow across his face. The tables are all full of foreigners now. Every day more and more, the day-trippers from Athens but also people like us who can live for a year in the sun on what it’d cost us for a month in a dingy bedsit at home.

There’s a new man in George and Charmian’s group, Scandinavian by the look of him, with sombre eyes and a soft-lipped smile.

‘Meet Göran Tunström,’ Charmian says, waving a hand towards him. She’s in full flow, the others bend to her drift, though she remains erect and so queenly I could almost curtsy. Göran and Leonard are exchanging books with their names on the dust jackets; each tries to outdo the other in self-effacement until Charmian claps her hands at them to stop. Leonard is saying, ‘Whenever I hear that a guy writes poetry I feel close to him. You know, I understand the folly.’

I would join them but Bobby’s words are still jangling. Am I really nothing but an annoying mosquito?

Tomorrow is May Day and Axel Jensen will sail Ikarus into the port with Marianne and their baby. Leonard will be drinking coffee at George and Charmian’s table. The little sloop will cut a dash past the fat-bottomed caiques and Marianne will lower her face to adjust a white shawl and to shield the baby from the sun. Everyone will be watching, but perhaps none so intently as Leonard. ‘What a beautiful Holy Trinity,’ he’ll say. And Charmian will arch her brows at George and say, ‘Let us pray.’

Tonight the stage is set for a more ancient drama, rooted in Greek tradition. All day the girls and young women of the village have been gathering flowers from the hills. They walk past us in pairs in black skirts with swinging baskets, shoes ringing on the cobbles. The young women’s arms are covered, the girls wear black-buttoned smocks, headscarves wound around neat dark faces, their pretty blouses modestly arranged in stark contrast to our casual display of burnt skin and sea-salted hair.

This evening has been born from one of those murmuring sundowns, our bodies molten as the sea and the sky turned to honey. We’ve been dipping and diving and drying off in the sun all afternoon. The night-scented jasmine is soporific as a lullaby.

We drape ourselves around a couple of tables outside Katsikas. Edie and Janey are wrapped in Indian print sarongs tied in a knot at the shoulder, the boys all have unbuttoned shirts. I’m wearing shorts, my gingham swimsuit and ponytail crusty with salt. We’re all barefoot. We can’t even remember whose turn it is to cook, but everyone’s here, gathering at tables, and tonight an entire shoal of red barbounia has met Sofia’s charcoal grill at the back of the store.

There’s a couple of bouzouki players seated beneath the wine barrels, already tucking in. Young fishermen wear clean white shirts.

‘There’ll be dancing later,’ Charmian says and her eyes shine. ‘Watch Panayiotis, he has the grace of Nijinsky when he’s hit the grog,’ she adds, pointing out one of the fishermen, and she waves to Ntoylis Skordaras who sits in the window with an accordion folded at his feet. It’s a public holiday tomorrow and the local women wait indoors as usual. Only the men of the village will have hangovers by morning.

We’re as hungry as toddlers after a good long nap. We eat squid and octopus now like we grew up on it, pick fish from bones, use bread to wipe our plates clean.

Kyria Anastasia from the bakery hurries by with her twin girls. Charmian jumps up, urges me to follow. The girls stare at my salty bare legs. Kyria Anastasia chatters in Greek as she shows Charmian bunches of flowering herbs and branches that they’ve gathered. One of the girls shyly hands Charmian some blue mountain flowers, the other some stalks of pale green oats.

‘You should get on the right side of Kyria Anastasia,’ Charmian says as we head back to the tables. ‘I’ve told her you’re my god-daughter. It’s a blessing if you can get them to pop your dinner in the bakery oven. A bit of meat, even a stringy old hen, and a few vegetables can be made splendid if it gets the slow-cook, a bit of seasoning, a slosh of wine. Just get it there any morning with your name on the tin and ask nicely.’ The lump in my throat is almost unbearable. ‘It’s the best way, simple and tasty,’ she says and I have to swallow hard before thanking her.

George pulls out a chair. She arranges the flowers in the water jug, but looks so sad while she’s doing it she might be tending a grave.

‘These are to celebrate the victory of the summer against winter,’ she says. ‘Tonight’s the night the women and girls will be at home making wreaths because it’s May Day tomorrow when everyone celebrates the blooming of nature and the birth of summer.’

‘Meanwhile all the blokes are out in the taverns getting a bootful,’ George says as he pours the wine. ‘But these are pre-Christian traditions and there’s a day off for the workers.’ He raises his glass, ‘I’m all for workers, so here’s to them,’ and downs it in one gulp.

‘Maios is the goddess of fertility,’ Charmian says, arranging the green stems among the spiky blue flowers.

George refills his glass and raises it once more. ‘And with Maios we celebrate the victory of life over death,’ he says.

Charmian sloshes wine to her own glass, ‘Yes, I’ll drink to that,’ and clinks it to his. ‘And to you, George.’ She pauses a moment with her glass in the air, and their eyes lock. ‘To better times ahead.’ When she turns away her eyes are bright with tears. ‘This winter we didn’t know that he would make it, so I’m all for giving thanks,’ she says and lays a hand across his. He draws her face to his shoulder and rests his cheek on the top of her head.

Jimmy and the others have pulled their chairs up to Göran’s table and I can hear snorts of laughter. ‘ Skål ’, ‘ Yamas ’, ‘Cheers’.

I’m transfixed by Charmian and George, the way her head fits his shoulder, the side of his face her head. I imagine them asleep like this, brain to brain, heart to heart, two souls moulded as one in warm clay.

I must’ve been staring because Charmian returns to our conversation with a blink and a nervous laugh, tells me of the young island girls who will rise before the sun and walk to the wells with their flowers.

‘It’s a slightly different ceremony in other parts of Greece but here they’ll fill the flower vases with the “water of silence” from the sweet wells and return to their homes without uttering a word,’ she says.

For reasons I can’t fathom, Jimmy and Bobby are now doing handstands on the flagstones while the others clap and call out. ‘Someone should fill their vases with the water of silence,’ I say. Jimmy’s walking on his hands, his body bent like a scorpion coming in for the sting, and they cheer him ever closer to the harbour’s edge.

George grimaces. ‘That poet of yours should join the bloody circus.’