The Gypsy's Dream (4 page)

‘
What are you doing sitting out here when I am in there busting a gut for the two of us?’ On silent feet Stavros is beside her. Still seated, his belly is at her eye-level. His T-shirt is rucked over his stomach and she notices that he has black fluff in his navel. In the seven years they have had the ouzeri he has become so fat, and, with each kilo gained, less fun. He could be carrying twins he is so round. ‘We have an opportunity and you just sit here!’ he grumbles.

Stella
’s chest sinks and she exhales with his callous view of Abby. She is not an opportunity; she is a person, a child.

‘
I thought you were quite happy in there by yourself.’ Stella stands, Stavros steps back but does not let her past into the shop.

‘
If you showed a bit of friendliness she might decide to stay. God knows we need some tourists to bring this place to life, put some money in the till. Get in there and be civil.’ He puts his hand behind her arm and gives a push. Stella staggers forwards, finds her balance and, shocked, turns on him, but his face holds such malevolence she backs away and goes into the shop.

The farmers are quiet. Stavros must have served them as they are all busy eating and as a consequence they say little. The radio has been turned down.

Stella checks the sausages and spreads another split chicken on the bars over the embers, takes the cooked chips from the fryer and puts more in. The grill has been set up behind the counter with just enough room for one person to cook and serve. Behind the free-standing grill with a hood over it there is a narrow mirror-tiled corridor of space with glass shelves for glasses, misty from the grease in the air. Here she finds Abby, at the far end, peeling potatoes in the old marble sink which is already full of dirty pots. There is a line of filth where the sink meets the wall, darker than the greying white of the marble. Perched by the tap are a bottle of ouzo, and a bottle of gin with no cap. The whole area is in semi-gloom. With Stella’s appearance Abby drops a potato on the floor. She bends to pick it up but hesitates. The floor is grimy around the edges, the central foot-width where Stella has walked it smooth is lighter, her path en-route from grill to sink, grill to ouzo, grill to gin, grill to sink.

Stella picks up the po
tato and tosses it past Abby into the sink. It hits a glass but nothing breaks.

‘
What does “
plenis ta piata
” mean?’ Abby asks.

She looks so young.

After a while the farmers begin to leave. Abby shifts in her seat. There is a toilet in the corner of the room divided off by a thin hardboard wall. During the course of the afternoon the farmers have demonstrated that it is not soundproofed. Will there be toilet paper? She crosses her legs.

She studies the picture of a donkey in a straw hat hanging on
the pale green shiny wall. It must be gloss paint. The glass in front of the picture is greasy and smeared. There is a thin shelf around the room, high up, on which there are several ceramic swans and various other pottery objects. The room is hard and stark. Can she take a picture on her phone without offending the man? Back home friends will not believe this place. She will share it on Facebook. Fumbling in her bag she remembers the phone’s battery is dead. While her hand is still inside she quickly feels for the fur of the tiny teddy on her key-ring, just for a second.

Stavros, his knees almost touching hers, shifts towards her. Abby
makes a show of picking her bag up from the floor, pushes her chair away from him and hangs the bag on the back of it without actually leaving her seat. He keeps babbling at her in Greek, with the occasional ill-pronounced word in English. She cannot guess what the Greek words mean, like she could, sometimes, guess the meaning of words in Spanish or French class at school.

Se
eing these Greek men dancing, being part of it all, a private impromptu affair, not for tourists, is thrilling. Real Greek life. She will keep a diary. What an experience! She mops her forehead with a paper napkin. She cannot imagine anyone back at home getting onto a table in the pub and doing a back flip, certainly none of the grey-haired men anyway. One of the boys high on something might, but he would probably break his neck. Besides, someone would start bleating about health and safety if anyone even tried to stand on a chair. No wonder there is no life, no spontaneity left around where she lives. No wonder everyone over thirty has no joy; they are all beaten with the stick of conforming to health and safety legislation. She decides she will write in her notebook until she can afford a diary. She decides she is not on holiday, she is ‘on life’. She takes her pen from her bag and writes that line on a napkin. It can be the title of the diary. Stavros leans over but when he sees it is in English he loses interest.

She wonders if the
re is a minimum wage.

‘
How much will you pay me?’ she asks in clear English. If she had ended up in the wrong place with no money in England there is no way she would have found work this easily. It feels unreal, but natural to this country somehow. The job offered will do for now anyway, no matter what they are paying. She is confident she will be able to get to her real job tomorrow, or the day after that at the latest.

‘
Ti?’ the man answers, but there is no understanding each other. He stands. He gestures for her to stand too and she follows him to a space behind the grill with mirror-lined glass shelves stacked with glasses and plates, a sink full of pots at the end. It is filthy. The man points at a sack of potatoes and hands her the knife. Abby wants to show she is a good worker and looks around for the bin, wondering where to put the peelings. There is none to be seen, and without the language she feels stuck. He points at the sink.

After peeling two potatoes Abby hopes a
day or two working here will earn enough. Her real job is in a bar with a crew of young waiters, neon lights, a dance floor, leather chairs, glass doors that open onto the street, all new. She sort of knows Jackie who is already there, it is her second summer at the bar, but then she is older than Abby, she has her own flat back home.

Abby pictures the bar lit up at night. She will learn how to make Margaritas and B52s, serve shots to lines of bronzed university students. It will be great. She will be on
the beach all day and work all evening. She is sure they will still take her on if she is a day or two late. She might try to call again once she has a wage in her pocket and can offer to pay for the call. There is a phone on the counter. Or maybe she can find a charger for her mobile.

The peelings drop in the sink. Stavros has been lingering behind her but now he turns to leave.

‘Money? How much?’ She surprises herself at her forthrightness but rubs the pad of her thumb against the pad of her index finger to illustrate her words. Being in a foreign country is giving her confidence, it seems.

‘
Perimene
,’ he pats the air flat before he begins to turn away. ‘Ah,
diavatirio
,’ he mimes, opening a book. Abby just stares. He tucks his elbows in and puts his hands out to the side and whistles through his teeth, swaying as he turns away left and right. Abby reaches in her bag and thumbs through the phrase book in the travel ‘at the airport’ section.

‘
Diavatirio
,’ he says again.

‘
Passport!’ Abby momentarily feels she has conquered the language, or at least a very small part of it, before frowning. ‘Why?’ she asks.

‘
Work,’ he says in English, rolling the ‘r’. Abby fishes deep into her bag and pulls out her maroon booklet and hands it to him. He looks her in the eyes. Abby turns to continue with the peeling. It is getting hot. It feels amazing to be so warm in just a T-shirt and shorts. If the pay is good she will stay and make enough to get to Saros. If not, she will stay today and use what money she has to take a taxi first thing in the morning to the town and see if she can find work there. She will probably do that anyway. This place is amazing, but it is a pit. She will probably only need two or three days’ work in town to raise the money to get to Soros.

Abby
stops peeling. Where will she sleep? She cannot afford a hotel, and doubts the village has one anyway.

Perhaps she can ask to sleep on the floor of the restaurant. She looks at the floor and decides, actually, it is not an option.

‘Don’t be so soft,’ Dad said when they were cleaning out the garage together and she hadn’t wanted to touch things with cobwebs on. Jumbled thoughts of home close in on her. Her bed, cosy, the smell of clean sheets. The hot water in the shower, her lavender soap. Dad’s arguments for her not to go into the sixth form. Of course it would be worth it. She has already started the journey, to work her way through Uni.

Determined to prove him wrong, she considers her options. The floor will be fine if she buys a newspaper to put down
first. No, the print will come off on her clothes. She could put the chairs together, but that would be too lumpy. She puts down the potato and goes into the room with the tables on the pretext of clearing up any discarded plates. There is a glass on one of the unoccupied tables.

Picking up the glass, she lifts the corner of the stiff, crackling, plastic tablecloth with its hunt scene running around the edge, of men in faded red jackets, hounds bleached by time and wear, but no sign of a fox. The table
-top is a chipboard slab, on which there is a ring of green paint the same colour as the walls. She runs a finger across the chipboard, no dirt comes off. She puts a hand under the table-top and lifts. If it is not attached she could put two or three of them on the floor and sleep on them.

The farmers smile at her as they mop the juices from their plates with hunks of bread. She takes her hand from under the tablecloth and smooths out the creases and hurries back to the sink with the single
glass. More likely Stella will find her a bed. The Greeks are meant to be hospitable and she seemed very kind. It does all feel almost too exciting.

Once hidden behind the grill she wipes her hands on the clean teacloth she has tucked into her shorts instead of the dirty apro
n Stavros had thrown at her. She reaches into her bag which she has slung in the only clean place, across her shoulders, and pulls out her key-ring with the limp teddy dangling from it. She palms the teddy and rubs him a few times against her cheek. The food and the early start and the heat from the back of the grill are making her feel sleepy.

The grill shakes as someone pokes the embers. Abby bundles her key-ring teddy away and picks up a potato but it is slippery. It skids out of her hands and onto the f
loor behind her.

Stella picks up the potato and tosses it past Abby into the sink. It hits a glass but nothing breaks.

‘What does “per-i-menace” mean?’ Abby asks.

‘
Wait.’

‘
Oh sorry, are you busy.’

Stella laughs.
‘No, “
perimenis
” means “wait".’

‘
Oh, I thought he was saying I was a menace or something.’ Her voice trails off.

‘
Why are you putting the potato coats in the sink?’ Stella asks.

Abby looks into the sink where the peel has mixed with the dirty pots, knives and forks interlaced.

‘I didn’t know how to say, “Where is the bin?”.’ It’s important to make a good first impression. Being sacked, that would be a disaster. The fragility of her situation seems to rush at her from nowhere.

Stella pulls a cardboard box from under the lowest glass shelf.

‘Use this.’

She does not seem as friendly as she was earlier.

‘Are you sure me working here is ok?’ Abby asks, blinking away the beginnings of tears. She wishes she had slept more on the plane.

Stella seems to ignore her, her face is blank.

‘Stella?’

‘
Yes, what?’

‘
Are you sure it is ok for me to work here?’

Stella looks her in the eye and her face softens; she pats Abby
’s arm. ‘Of course, what else can you do?’ But Abby senses Stella’s reserve. She doesn’t want to overreact. Dad is always saying she acts without thinking. Maybe she should take a taxi now and trust she can find work in town. Would that be an action or a reaction? Or an overreaction, perhaps. It can be hard to tell the difference. She wishes she had charged her phone battery. Maybe she could have got Jackie’s number from someone.

The girl seems so young. Stella is sure she was not so young at that age. She manoeuvres past her to get to the sink.

At seventeen she was still at home with her father and mother. She only suffered the occasional taunts in
the village by then.

Stella piles the plates on the floor by her feet, picks out the peelings and throws them in the box Abby is peeling into, and runs the water until it comes hot enough to wash the cutlery. Everything is washed under a constant dribble
of water.

The days at home with Mama and Baba had been sweet, although to some degree she had been angry at the world, angry that Baba married a gypsy, angry with Mama for being a gypsy.

Stella wonders what Abby’s family life is like, what her home is like.

The forks done, she swills them and puts them, handles down, in a glass next to the gin bottle. She starts on the knives.

A home made of blankets, with sticks and branches holding the shape, children running in and out, their bare feet planting white footprints of dust on the colourful blanket floor. Typical. How she had hated those ‘holidays’, as Mama had called them. To Stella, visiting her relatives was torture. The women in long flowing skirts, breasts hanging loose under shapeless blouses, uncombed hair braided into plaits with ribbons floating round, cooking food. The darkness of their skin is the lasting memory.

Before she was six and school started there had never been any such
‘holidays’. Then, with no warning, someone Mama had told her was her uncle picked them up on his moped and they drove away from home and Baba into the country for what seemed like miles, and then on a long straight stretch of road, he had stopped. Two women with hair down to their waists had come out of what looked to Stella like the enclosures that farmers made for goats, although this one looked less permanent. The women had been followed out by two teenagers, also wearing long skirts but instead of flowing tops they had tight T-shirts that didn’t cover their tummies. Stella had thought this was a good way to keep cool so she pulled her top up too, and Mama had pulled it down again. Several children her age, and some younger, had come out after them, looking as if their hair had never been combed. The boys’ hair was in knots and the girls’ in rat tails, and they all had dirty faces, scruffy shorts and no shirts. Stella had wanted her Baba. Her Mama was hugging these people and that didn’t seem right.

With the knives done and swilled Stella starts on the plates. She checks Abb
y from the corner of her eye. She is still peeling away but she is very slow.

One of the women had picked her up and Stella had struggled. The woman smelt of cooking and wet washing. That was when a man in a suit came from inside the place. He had a baby
in his arms, and when he saw Stella he passed the baby to the nearest person, made a joyous sound and took Stella from the woman. He smelt of tobacco and something else. His hair was long down the back of his collar and it looked wet. She didn’t want to touch him. She remembered she had started to cry, louder and louder, until Mama had taken her into her arms.

Everyone seemed so happy. Someone played a guitar and after a while the younger children started to dance and then spin in circles. This looked fun s
o Stella had spun in circles too, until she fell into a dizzy heap with the other children. There had been spicy food which the children, sitting on the floor, ate with their fingers. A wind had come up and the plastic and blanket walls began to suck in and billow out as if the whole place was breathing. Stella had left her food to sit by her Mama, scared by the living tent. A dog came in and ate everything from the plate she had left on the floor. This also made her cry as she was still hungry.