Polly Samson - A Theatre for Dreamers

Behind the waterfront a small fire is being lit and, as the brushwood is set crackling, Charmian grasps Shane’s hands and mine and leads us towards it.

‘This one’s very much for the women,’ she’s saying. ‘You see how they’ve all brought their May Day wreaths from their doors? Ours fell to pieces or was plundered, as usual, or we would have brought it and cast it to the flames.’

The women start dancing around the fire, singing and throwing their dried flowers to the pyre. They have coins sewn on to their bodices and ribbons wound through their hair. Children are wetting their hair from a bucket and jumping through the flames and the women spin around faster, holding hands, while the men in their waistcoats slap out time with their palms and boots.

Back at the table, Big Grace is helping George to a refill. ‘Saint John’s fire: it’s a final bugger off to winter and disease,’ he tells her. ‘Oh, brother. I should bloody jump through it myself,’ he says.

Grace lays her beringed hand over his. ‘I’d advise you to do no such thing, my dear. You’ve played with quite enough fire for one lifetime…’ She looks pointedly at Charmian coming back out of breath and laughing, gripping Boo’s hand and shouting to Shane to take off her skirt in case it catches alight.

The town-crier is ringing his bell and everyone starts for the mouth of the harbour to watch the re-enactment. There’s cannon-fire, a megaphone, and Lefteris the baker in patriotic attire with flaming torch is being rowed out to a wooden boat that’s been stuffed to the gunnels with petrol and gunpowder. When Lefteris throws the torch he has to dive into the sea to escape the blast.

The streets become wild with firecrackers, everyone has stories of boys losing fingers and eyes; and men old enough to know better, with every cell of their bodies fizzing with arson, light fuses and run, and the high walls ring with explosions, every one of them making me shriek. Jimmy pulls me into Grafos’s taverna where platters of fried squid and stuffed peppers are already being served to smartly dressed Greek families but there isn’t a table for us.

Outside, beneath the ficus trees, Charmian is in the centre of a group. ‘Hey, what’s all this I’m hearing about George’s drugs being plundered?’ Big Grace is demanding to know.

Charmian stops laughing. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have told you,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t think how else to get some antibiotics into the poor little blighter.’ The way Grace looks at us, we might have been mangy cats ourselves, though her general expression tends to bad smell, except when she’s talking to George about violence and war in the Old Testament.

‘Bloody wasting my medicine…’ George growls at us.

‘Oh, darling, they found the poor thing suffocating in a bag on a rubbish heap.’

‘That’s a terrible thing to do. To just throw a cat away like it’s any old household rubbish,’ Ruth Sriber says. ‘But I swear the cat population doubles every time we come here.’

Chuck and Gordon turn their chairs from the adjoining table where they’ve made claim to a recently arrived Beat professor of poetry, an Italian-American with the wide troubled smile of a clown.

‘ Yia sou , Gregory, it’s good to see you here again,’ Charmian says as he jumps up to greet her. ‘We didn’t get a chance to say goodbye last year. The last I saw of you was just after sunrise, at Palamidas boatyard, and I called out but you seemed to be in some sort of a deep trance…’

I overhear George moan to Grace: ‘As usual my wife’s got more faggots around her feet than Joan of bloody Arc.’

‘Oh my God, but they never stop breeding.’ Gordon is still on about the cats. ‘Do you remember that time Jean-Claude Maurice couldn’t stand the sight of all the starving pussies any longer and he went to the pharmacy and got sleeping pills which he mashed up in food…’

At the mention of Jean-Claude’s name George stops talking and the air starts to crackle around him.

Chuck hasn’t noticed and takes up the story. ‘And then, because I happened to turn up to look at his paintings—’

Gordon interrupts. ‘To look at his paintings , you say?’

‘Mmmmm hmmmm. Obviously that divine body was on display too,’ Chuck replies, fluttering his hands to denote perfection. ‘Anyway, there were all these cats and kittens lying about and Jean-Claude was scooping them up with tears running down his face while he did it. Said he didn’t know if they were dead or sleeping. When he had filled the sack I went with him to the cliff. He put in two big rocks and by the way he was carrying on I thought he might hurl himself off after them.’

‘Bloody should have done.’ George can’t seem to help himself and Big Grace asks in an urgent and audible whisper, ‘What is the situation with the Frenchman this year? I take it he’s not here?’

‘Nature Boy has been and gone, thank Christ…’ George replies.

Charmian hasn’t yet caught on to the change in the weather. She’s too busy leaning down to hear whatever it is this Gregory is telling her.

George points a prosecuting finger straight at his wife. ‘Yes, Nature Boy’s departed but look at her now. Like a fucking great praying mantis…’

I almost choke on a mouthful of wine as Big Grace joins in. ‘She’s barely spoken to me since I got here. I’ve been wondering if I’ve offended her somehow, but I guess it’s always been men who turn her on, and not women like me.’ She throws a suffering glance Charmian’s way.

I can’t let her get away with it. ‘I’m not a man,’ I say. ‘And she always has plenty of time for me, and for my mother before me.’

Charmian seems to have caught the tailwind and snaps to attention.

‘Oh yes, my wife likes playing mother to little Ricky here,’ George announces, swaying and clearing his throat. Charmian flinches. He raises the volume. ‘Yeah, well there’s a bloody special reason for that, isn’t there, Charm?’

Charmian has lost the colour from her face, apart from her eyes which are astonishingly green. She reaches to steady herself on the back of Gregory Corso’s chair.

‘Don’t you dare, George,’ she hisses.

Again he clears his throat and she lurches to silence him, her hand raised to slap his face. Big Grace springs from her seat. Maybe I imagine that she snarls.

Charmian lets her hand fall and turns on her heel.

‘Yeah, off she goes like Lady bloody Macbeth…’ George jeers as she flees with a napkin pressed to her face.

‘Don’t worry, darling. Little Ricky of Bayswater is the only one letting a cat out of a bag today,’ he hollers after her.

There’s something of the exclusive club about the writers’ community and we’re a little nervous the first time we arrive at Chuck and Gordon’s. I’m all dressed up in one of the petticoats that Magda has started to sell behind Lagoudera, the bodice patterned with dye made from beetroots and onions and ruffled with lace she’s dipped in a tub of Indian tea. Jimmy wears his one and only tie loosely knotted, his best poem in the pocket of his trousers.

The rooms of Gordon Merrick’s house are like something from a magazine, with perfectly placed rugs and paintings and exotic objets he and Chuck have collected on their travels. Through an archway lies a tantalising glimpse of warm polished boards and a lamp beside a velvet-canopied day bed, rose-coloured cushions, an entire glowing wall of leather-bound books. We barely linger, lured on by the scent of roasting lamb and rosemary, and in the courtyard Chuck trots over in his colourful shirt, demanding I twirl because he knows Magda made my dress.

Jimmy checks his pocket, yet again, for the dog-eared copy of Ambit with his dystopian poem on page eleven.