Australian Love Stories (3 page)

I liked Megalokima beach the best. The only people that went there was us kids. Everyone else went the other way, with the tourists, to the beaches with the restaurants and
tavernas
, where the pebbles are small and the waves don't hit at you. I went to Megalokima every day in the summer when my three big brothers had to look after me. You could fish there, with no old man telling you it was his spot. You could smoke there, and no one would ask who you stole the cigarettes off. You could tell lies and no one cared. You could swim there too, if you didn't mind getting bruises from the pebbles jumping up at you when you were getting in the water.

Spiros was always there. That was when I got to know him. I wanted him to be the father of my children from as long as I can remember.

One winter, I changed. I was more woman than girl, very fast. I had to stay inside, only go out with my mother, her sister, my cousins, big girls with big mouths. Sometimes I saw Spiros, at the
platia
, but he never looked at me, never said one word to me. What for? He was older than me by four years, the same age as my youngest older brother.

Summer came. In Samos the heat never stops, day after day, week after week, the same. From June to July, hot then hotter and then August, too much. This day was the worst. My
ksathelfia
, all my cousins, they went home, lying down like
gria
, the old ladies. Mana too, sleeping with her eyes open, waiting for the
meltemi
, the afternoon wind, to bring the cool from the ocean.

Alone. For the first time for so long. No one saying nothing. It made me light, like a thistle seed. Out, away from the house, from the work, the hot kitchen with the flour and water everywhere from
tiropita
. The batter would get hard, be glue. My job to clean it but I was too young to worry about more work later. I needed to be somewhere different.

There was only me, walking. Everyone was flat on their beds, shutters closed, waiting for the wind. Half an hour to get to Megalokima, a long walk when the sun's hot like a
tapsi
from the oven.

The
platia
, in the middle of the town, it had no one. Empty tables, geraniums looking down from the sun, too dry to show their red, their pink. I stopped to get my breath when there was
a small slice of shade under a big wall. The biggest wall belonged to the bank. It was two stories high, with a marble veranda, every door, window, was closed. Past the school, locked for summer. Dust on the windows, not one cat on the hot concrete where the boys played soccer in the winter.

Past the homes close to the ocean. Big walls there too, where the bosses of the tanneries live, gardens all round, fountains, olive trees more grey than green from the flowers, next to them orange trees, dark green leaves curling from too much sun. Flowers here too, fussy ones, poppies, roses, resting, waiting to be pretty in the afternoon.

Then no houses, only vineyards and tanneries. The sun was like flames coming down. Then the Metropolis tomato farm, the glasshouses from the beach to the road, like my one here, but one after the other, a farm of tomatoes, inside. The tomatoes were cooking, the glass was heating the road like a kitchen. This glasshouse idea was new. Mana, my father, everyone did big laughing at Spiros' family for putting their tomatoes in a house made of glass. Us kids loved them. No one to see us from the road once they got built.

The road turned to the beach. Past the gypsy camp. I was scared, a little bit, but everything was quiet there too, the tents open but nothing moving, no music, not one kid singing or yelling. I walked at the edge of the sea. The pebbles were loud, banging against each other as they got pushed up and back, making noise like doves leaving the church.

The beach was so empty, not one goat, not one person. I walked until I got to the other end, far from the gypsy camp, the cliff end. The camp was just colour, no one could see nothing.
The fishing rock had no one lying on its top. So big, with a flat area wide as a table. The boys always fought over that rock. I went into the open area under it, where it went like half a bridge, a small space before the waves, over the pebbles. Cool shade, almost a cave, almost an umbrella. So many years I'd pretended it was my house, while my brothers smoked and fished and swore and fought. I could hardly fit under it any more, even now, when the tide was right out.

I got off my dress, my sandals, my underwear, ready to put everything back on, quick, if someone came. Then I pushed into the sea, flying into heaven, from the spot where part of the rock went in the water, where the pebbles don't move so much, where they don't hurt. Only I knew that spot.

The sea was so cool, so beautiful; a blue the colour of my
mati
, this one in my necklace, the eye that keeps away the evils. I moved my body with the waves, young again, a small girl, half swimming, half floating on the water. The pebbles were loud, crashing from the waves going in and out, I could hear them even when my feet could only touch water. Not one cloud in the sky. The village a white stain on the green mountain, my house, like all of them, part of the same.

Then I heard the sound of birds. In the middle of the day? They should be resting. But I heard them, past the fishing rock, on the other side, with the cliff and the fallen rocks, where only my brothers and the Metropolis boys would swim. I could never go with them. I couldn't even go on the flat rock. This was how my mother lost her brother. One minute on the rock, next minute gone. On the other side. He never came back.

Two kicks toward the gypsies. Two kicks toward the cliff, the birds. Gypsies. Cliffs. Birds. Then something turned in my chest
and I was doing a long dive, under the shadow of the rock where it stuck out over the water.

I come up for air and I'm on the other side. Nothing dangerous, the waves are gone, I can hear my feet splashing behind me. This is the best spot for swimming, beautiful, the water like a bath. I want to kill my brothers.

Then I hear the birds are not birds. Spiros. His flute. I know its voice like the call of my mother. I look this way, that way, my eyes sharp like a sparrow.

None of his brothers, none of mine, just Spiros, under the shade of another big flat rock, past many sharp ones that have fallen from the cliff, messy, like leaves from a tree before winter. I can see his feet. Big. He's holding a stick between them with the other end stuck into a split in the rock. The stick's stripped to the green, so it smells beautiful, just how the crabs like it. A serenade for the crabs, telling them lies with the birds in his music, telling them night was coming, they could wake up from their daytime sleep, come out from the deep cracks of the rocks.

I stay in the water, listening and watching. His feet, his long toes. His clothes, in a pile on a high rock above him. His body, dark in the shade of the flat rock, bigger than the one I knew. The feet of a grown man. Different, like me, my body now more woman than girl. His toes, moving, like my legs under the water, feeling the music coming from his feet, through the length of the body I could almost see, not so black as the shadow. I want to see his lips, see them breathing his secrets into the mouth of the wooden flute he loved so much. I had watched his lips tell music before.

Then the peering eyes of a big crab, feelers moving, dancing a slow
rebetiko
, then clumsy legs finding the stick and making it a friend. I hate crabs screaming, turning from creature to food in the boil of the water. I suck in air, loud, and just as I do that, Spiros stops playing his flute. Has he heard the sound of my breath? I go under the water, deep. When I come up he's standing, his head higher than the rock, above its shadows. I can see his face, his lips, he's looking at me. I stare back. His eyes are so green.

Everything is still. Maybe only five seconds. It is my whole life.

Then the crab dropped off the stick, ran over his feet, ran up back into its home. Spiros saw it, picked up the stick and tried to get it, but too late. Safe. I laughed and he threw the stick down and took a step out, into the sun. So tall and strong. This is how I see him, even now. Not dead. Never dead. I close my eyes and think of Spiros and this is what I see.

I looked at him, all of him, and he looked at what he could see, under the sea's waters and then he dived in, came up with his body against mine. He joined me.

I melted outside of myself, into him. He melted into my skin, into me.

The wind, it changed.
Meltemi
.

A Literary Love Story

(memoir)

CATHERINE BATESON

When he said to me,
‘Mais Mademoiselle, vous êtes triste! Pourquoi?'
I could ignore the formal
vous
, the thirty-odd years that probably separated our ages and his limp. I could even forget the fact that he was my professor who knew me only as the blonde who always sat at the back, near the window, and could not conjugate her verbs.

I knew him as the dark Rochester of my dreams. I had rescued him night after night from swollen rivers, collapsing towers and wild bushfires. There were two types of girls when I grew up: those who loved
Jane Eyre
and those who loved
Wuthering Heights
. I was a Jane girl myself and it marked me.

From the window, I watched Monsieur's ungainly progress across the Great Court. He was constantly stopped by matureaged female students. They rolled their r's at him and undid the top buttons on their shirts. On those languid days, they fanned French perfume I could not afford in his direction. Plump and steaming as fresh dumplings, they trickled discreet beads of perspiration that smelled of Chanel and Lancôme. When he limped around the room checking our written work, they leant forward to help him decipher their rounded cursives.

I was all acute accents and flat as a tack. I embroidered le Petit Prince on a pair of op shop overalls. He admired my needlework and the dumplings steamed as they undid a second button. I read Colette and wore too much eyeliner. I felt Jane draw Victorian skirts more closely around her, but Claudine pulled hers up
joyfully to reveal rolled stocking tops. Forty-three years separated the birth of Charlotte from that of Sidonie-Gabrielle, my role models. One died too early in her curate's arms and the other had an affair with her step-son.

I received letters each week from the hippy boy I'd fucked all summer. He'd been charged with possession. Each letter was signed off:

May the longtime sun

Shine upon you

And all love surround you

in his loopy writing. I missed his patchouli oil massages but he was lightweight, a scented candle. I wanted a house fire, a conflagration. I could not imagine my limping Professor signing off his letters with anything other than a line from Sartre. In fountain pen, of course, not biro.

What was a Brisbane girl to do? I draped a second-hand silk scarf over my bedside light and read the journals of Anaïs Nin. The scarf scorched. For weeks I carried a journal with me, describing in rigorous detail my new Grecian sandals, the exact shade of lipstick I had bought at the Myer sale, and how it felt to be in love with a man while receiving letters from a boy. The boy's skin, I noted in a sudden fit of sentimentality, was the colour of weak Nescafé.

Despite my new fountain pen, my life remained stubbornly more early Fay Weldon than Anaïs.

But in my dreams I still carried
mon Professeur
from the burning house. Once I woke with a French phrase clinging to my morning mouth, the only language for unrequited love. And
that was the only kind that stayed real. Hippy boys—Davo, Tod, Corki—came and went. They played guitars in batik sarongs and left behind a trail of incense and notes in a minor key. I yearned for Paris and a winter I couldn't imagine. I wore dark tights and black op-shop dresses under a sky the colour of an endless swimming pool.

I invented men who smelt of Gauloise cigarettes, snow and cognac. They were damaged by life. They had frayed hearts and knowing fingers. They waited pensively on my threshold with delicate gifts. I conjured these men from the books that stacked up beside my single bed. I gave them beautiful names that were never shortened—Sebastian, Jean-Luc and Oliver.

These elegant men with their imaginary sorrows do not cause me, years later, to file into a classroom each week with other women—and Bernard—to conjugate verbs and talk about my hobbies in a foreign language. No, it's that girl with the dusty books under the bed. I'm keeping faith with the one wearing that second-hand dress she pretended was French.

Hey you, I'm waving across the years.
Je t'aime
!

Crush

KATHRYN LOMER