The Second Wish and Other Exhalations Read online

  Less than three miles long, a mile wide — that was it. Makelos. There was a ‘town’, also called Makelos, at one end of the island where twin spurs formed some­thing of a harbour; and the rest of the place around the central plateau was rock and scrub and tiny bays, olive groves galore, almonds and some walnuts, prickly pears and a few lonely lemons. Oh, and lots of wildflowers, so that the air seemed scented.

  The year before, there’d been a few apartments avail­able in Makelos town. But towns weren’t our scene. This time, however, the island had something new to offer: a lone taverna catering for just three detached, cabin-style apartments, or ‘villas’, all nestling in a valley two miles down the coast from Makelos town itself. Only one or two taxis on the entire island (the coastal road was little more than a track), no fast-food stands, and no packed shingle beaches where the tideless sea would be one-third sun oil and two-thirds tourist pee!

  We came down gentle as a feather, taxied up to a wind­blown shack that turned out to be the airport, deplaned and passed in front of the shack and out the back, and boarded our transport. There were other holiday makers; but we were too excited to pay them much attention; also a handful of dour-faced island Greeks — Makelosians, we guessed. Dour, yes. Maybe that should have told us something about their island.

  Our passports had been stamped over the Athens stamp with a local variety as we passed through the airport shack, and the official doing the job turned out to be our driver. A busy man, he also introduced himself as the mayor of Makelos! The traction end of our ‘transport’ was a three-wheeler: literally a converted tractor, hauling a four- wheeled trolley with bucket seats bolted to its sides. On the way down from the plateau, I remember thinking we’d never make it; Julie kept her eyes closed for most of the trip; I gave everyone aboard As for nerve. And the driver-mayor sang a doleful Greek number all the way down.

  The town was very old, with nowhere the whitewashed walls you become accustomed to in the islands. Instead, there was an air of desolation about the place. Throw in a few tumbleweeds, and you could shoot a Western there. But fishing boats bobbed in the harbour, leathery Greeks mended nets along the quayside; old men drank muddy coffee at wooden tables outside the tavernas, and bottles of Metaxa and ouzo were very much in evidence. Crumbling fortified walls of massive thickness proclaimed, however inarticulately, a one-time Crusader occupation.

  Once we’d trundled to a halt in the town’s square, the rest of the passengers were home and dry; Julie and I still had a mile and a half to go. Our taxi driver (transfer charges both ways, six pounds sterling: I’d wondered why it was so cheap!) collected our luggage from the tractor’s trolley, stowed it away, waited for us while we dusted ourselves down and stretched our legs. Then we got into his ‘taxi’.

  I won’t impugn anyone’s reputation by remarking on the make of that old bus; come to think of it, I could possibly make someone’s name, for anywhere else in the world this beauty would have been off the road in the late sixties! Inside — it was a shrine, of course. The Greek sort, with good-luck charms, pictures of the saints, photos of Mum and Dad, and icon-like miniatures in silver frames, hanging and jangling everywhere. And even enough room for the driver to see through his windscreen.

  “Nichos,” he introduced himself, grave-faced, trying to loosen my arm in its socket with his handshake where he reached back from the driver’s seat. And to Julie, seated beside him up front: “Nick!” and he took her hand and bowed his head to kiss it. Fine, except we were already mobile and leaving the town, and holiday makers and villagers alike scattering like clucking hens in all directions in our heavy blue exhaust smoke.

  Nichos was maybe fifty, hard to tell: bright brown eyes, hair greying, upward-turned moustache, skin brown as old leather. His nicotine-stained teeth and ouzo breath were pretty standard. “A fine old car,” I opined, as he jarred us mercilessly on non-existent suspension down the patchy, pot-holed tarmacadam street.

  “Eh?” He raised an eyebrow.

  “The car,” I answered. “She goes, er, well!”

  “Very well, thank you. The car,” he apparently agreed.

  “Maybe he doesn’t speak it too well, darling.” Julie was straight-faced.

  “Speaks it,” Nichos agreed with a nod. Then, registering understanding: “Ah — speak it! I am speaking it, yes, and slowly. Very slooowly! Then is understanding. Good morning, good evening, welcome to my house — exactly! I am in Athens. Three years. Speaks it much, in Athens.”

  “Great!” I enthused, without malice. After all, I couldn’t speak any Greek.

  “You stay at Villas Dimitrios, yes?” He was just passing the time; of course we were staying there; he’d been paid to take us there, hadn’t he? And yet at the same time, I’d picked up a note of genuine enquiry, even something of concern in his voice, as if our choice surprised or dismayed him.

  “Is it a nice place?” Julie asked.

  “Nice?” he repeated her. “Beautiful!” He blew a kiss. “Beautiful sea — for swim, beautiful! Then he shrugged, said: “All Makelos same. But Dimitrios water — water for drink — him not so good. You drinking? OK — you drink Coke. You drink beer. Drinking water in bottle. Drinking wine — very cheap! Not drinking water. Is big hole in Dimitrios. Deep, er — well? Yes? Water in well bad. All around Dimitrios bad. Good for olives, lemons, no good for the people.”

  We just about made sense of everything he said, which wasn’t quite as easy as I’ve made it sound here. As for the water situation: that was standard, too. We never drank the local water anyway. “So it’s a beautiful place,” I said. “Good.”

  Again he glanced at me over his shoulder, offered another shrug. “Er, beautiful, yes.” He didn’t seem very sure about it now. The Greeks are notoriously vague.

  We were out of Makelos, heading south round the cen­tral plateau, kicking up the dust of a narrow road where it had been cut through steep, seaward-sloping strata of yellow-banded, dazzling white rock to run parallel with the sea on our left. We were maybe thirty or forty feet above sea level, and down there through bights in the shal­low sea cliffs, we were allowed tantalizing glimpses of white pebble beaches scalloping an ocean flat as a mill-pond. The fishing would be good. Nothing like the south coast of England (no Dover sole basking on a muddy bottom here), but that made it more of a challenge. You had to be good to shoot fish here!

  I took out a small paper parcel from my pocket and unwrapped it: a pair of gleaming trident spearheads pur­chased in Athens. With luck these heads should fit my spears. Nichos turned his head. “You like to fish? I catch plenty! Big fisherman!” Then that look was back on his face. “You fish in Dimitrios? No eat. You like the fishing — good! Chase him, the fish — shoot, maybe kill — but no eat. OK?”

  I began to feel worried. Julie, too. She turned to stare at me. I leaned forward, said: “Nichos, what do you mean? Why shouldn’t we eat what I catch?”

  “My house!” he answered as we turned a bend through a stand of stunted trees. He grinned, pointed.

  Above us, the compacted scree slope was green with shrubs and Mediterranean pines. There was a garden set back in ancient, gnarled olives, behind which a row of white-framed windows reflected the late-morning sunlight. The house matched the slope rising around and beyond it, its ochre-tiled roof seeming to melt into the hillside. Higher up there were walled, terraced enclosures; higher still, where the mountain’s spur met the sky, goats made gravity-defying silhouettes against the dazzle.

  “I show you!” said Nichos, turning right onto a track that wound dizzily through a series of hairpins to the house. We hung on as he drove with practised ease almost to the front door, parking his taxi in the shade of an olive tree heavy with fruit. Then he was opening doors for us, calling out to his wife: “Katrin — hey, Katrin!”

  We stayed an hour. We drank cold beer, ate a de­licious sandwich of salami, sliced tomatoes, and goat’s milk cheese. We admired the kids, the goats and chickens, the little house. It had been an effective way of changin
g the subject. And we didn’t give Nichos’s reticence (was that what it had been, or just poor communications?) another thought until he dropped us off at Villas Dimitrios.

  The place was only another mile down the road, as the crow flies. But that coastal road knew how to wind. Still, we could probably have walked it while Katrin made us our sandwiches. And yet the island’s natural contours kept it hidden from sight until the last moment.

  We’d climbed up from the sea by then, maybe a hun­dred feet, and the road had petered out to little more than a track as we crested the final rise and Nichos ap­plied his brakes. And there we sat in that oven of a car, looking down through its dusty, flyspecked windows on Villas Dimitrios. It was … idyllic!

  Across the spur where we were parked, the ground dipped fairly steeply to a bay maybe a third of a mile point to point. The bay arms were rocky, formed of the tips of spurs sloping into the sea, but the beach between them was sand. White sand, Julie’s favourite sort. Give her a book, a white beach, and a little shade, and I could swim all day. The taverna stood almost at the water’s edge: a long, low house with a red-tiled roof, fronted by a wooden framework supporting heavy grapevines and masses of bougainvillea. Hazy blue wood smoke curled up from its chimney, and there was a garden to its rear. Behind the house, separate from it and each other and made private by screening groves of olives, three blobs of shimmering white stone were almost painful to look at. The chalets or ‘villas’.

  Nichos merely glanced at it; nothing new to him. He pointed across the tiny valley to its far side. Over there, the scree base went up brown and yellow to the foot of sheer cliffs, where beneath a jutting overhang the shad­ows were so dark as to be black. It had to be a cave. Something of a track had been worn into the scree, lead­ing to the place under the cliff.

  “In there,” said Nichos with one of his customary shrugs, “the well. Water, him no good …” His face was very grave.

  “The water was poisoned?” Julie prompted him.

  “Eh?” he cocked his head, then gave a nod. “Now is poison!”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What is it—” I indicated the dark blot under the cliff “—over there?”

  “The well,” he said again. “Down inside the cave. But the water, he had, er — like the crabs, you know? You understand the crabs, in the sea?”

  “Of course,” Julie told him. “In England we eat them.”

  He shook his head, looked frustrated. “Here, too,” he said. “But this thing not crab. Very small.” He measured an inch between thumb and forefinger. “And no eat him. Very bad! People were … sick. They died. Men came from the government in Athens. They bring, er, chemicals? They put in well. Poison for the crabs.” Again his shrug. “Now is OK — maybe. But I say, no drink the water.”

  Before we could respond, he got out of the car, un­loaded our luggage onto the dusty track. I followed him. “You’re not taking us down?”

  “Going down OK,” he shrugged, this time apologetically. “Come up again — difficult! Too — how you say?” He made an incline with his hand.

  “Too steep?”

  “Is right. My car very nice — also very old! I sorry.” I picked up the cases; Julie joined us and took the travel bags. Nichos made no attempt to help; instead he gave a small, awkward bow, said: “You see my house? Got the problem, come speak. Good morning.” Then he was into his car. He backed off, turned around, stopped, and leaned out his window. “Hey, mister, lady!”

  We looked at him.

  He pointed. “Follow road is long way. Go straight down, very easy. Er, how you say — short-cut? So, I go. See you in two weeks.”

  We watched his tyres kicking up dust and grit until he was out of sight. Then:

  Taking a closer look at the terrain, I could see he was right. The track followed the ridge of the spur down to a sharp right turn, then down a hard-packed dirt ramp to the floor of the valley. It was steep, but a decent car should make it — even Nichos’s taxi, I thought. But if we left the track here and climbed straight down the side of the spur, we’d cut two or three hundred yards off the distance. And actually, even the spur wasn’t all that steep. We made it without any fuss, and I sat down only once when my feet shot out from under me.

  As we got down onto the level, our host for the next fortnight came banging and clattering from the direction of the taverna, bumping over the rough scrub in a Greek three-wheeler with a cart at the back. Dimitrios wore a wide-brimmed hat against the sun, but still he was sweat­ing just as badly as we were. He wiped his brow as he dumped our luggage into his open-ended cart. We hitched ourselves up at the rear and sat with our feet dangling. And he drove us to our chalet.

  We were hot and sticky, all three of us, and maybe it wasn’t so strange we didn’t talk. Or perhaps he could see our discomfort and preferred that we get settled in before turning on the old Greek charm. Anyway, we said nothing as he opened the door for us, gave me the key, helped me carry our bags into the cool interior. I followed him back outside again while Julie got to the ritual unpacking.

  “Hot,” he said then. “Hot, the sun …” Greeks have this capacity for stating the obvious. Then, carrying it to extreme degrees, he waved an arm in the direction of the beach, the sea, and the taverna. “Beach. Sea. Taverna. For swimming. Eating. I have the food, drinks. I also selling the food for you the cooking …” The chalet came with its own self-catering kit.

  “Fine,” I smiled. “See you later.”

  He stared at me a moment, his eyes like dull lights in the dark shadow of his hat, then made a vague sort of motion halfway between a shrug and a nod. He got back aboard his vehicle and started her up, and as his clatter died away, I went back inside and had a look around.

  Julie was filling a pair of drawers with spare clothing, at the same time building a teetering pyramid of reading material on a chair. Where books were concerned, she was voracious. She was like that about me, too. No complaints here.

  Greek island accommodation varies from abominable to half decent. Or, if you’re willing to shell out, you might be lucky enough to get good — but rarely better than that. The Villas Dimitrios chalets were … well, OK. But we’d paid for it, so it was what we expected.

  I checked the plumbing first. Greek island plumbing is never better than basic. The bathroom was tastefully but totally tiled, even the ceiling! No bathtub, but a good shower and, at the other end of the small room, the toilet and washbasin. Enclosed in tiles, you could shower and let the water spray where-the-heck; if it didn’t end up in the shower basin, it would end up on the floor, which sloped gently from all directions to one corner where there was a hole going — where? That’s the other thing about Greek plumbing: I’ve never been able to figure out where everything goes.

  But the bathroom did have its faults: like, there were no plugs for the washbasin and shower drainage, and no grilles in the plugholes. I suppose I’m quirky, but I like to see a grille in there, not just a black hole gurgling away to nowhere. It was the same in the little ‘kitchen’ (an alcove under an arch, really, with a sink and drainer unit, a two-ring gas stove, a cupboard containing the cylinder, and a wall-mounted rack for crockery and cutlery; all very nice and serviceable and equipped with a concealed overhead fan-extractor): no plug in the sink and no grille in the plughole.

  I complained loudly to Julie about it.

  “Don’t put your toe down and you won’t get stuck!” was her advice from the bedroom.

  “Toe down?” I was already miles away, looking for the shaver socket.

  “Down the shower plughole,” she answered. And she came out of the bedroom wearing sandals and the bottom half of her bikini. I made slavering noises, and she turned coyly, tossed back her bra straps for me to fasten. “Do me up.”

  “You were quick off the mark,” I told her.

  “All packed away, too,” she said with some satisfaction. “And the big white hunter’s kit neatly laid out for him. And all performed free of charge — while he examines plughole
s!” Then she picked up a towel and tube of lotion and headed for the door. “Last one in the sea’s a pervert!”

  Five minutes later I followed her. She’d picked a spot halfway between the chalet and the most northerly bay arm. Her red towel was like a splash of blood on the white sand two hundred yards north of the taverna. I carried my mask, snorkel, flippers, some strong string, and a tatty old blanket with torn corners; that was all. No spear gun. First I’d take a look-see, and the serious stuff could come later. Julie obviously felt the same as I did about it: no book, just a slim, pale white body on the red towel, green eyes three-quarters shuttered behind huge sunglasses. She was still wet from the sea, but that wouldn’t last long. The sun was a furnace, steaming the water off her body.

  On my way to her, I’d picked up some long, thin, thorny branches from the scrub; when I got there, I broke off the thorns and fixed up a sunshade. The old blanket’s torn corners showed how often we’d done this before. Then I took my kit to the water’s edge and dropped it, and ran gasping, pell-mell into the shallows until I toppled over! My way of getting into the sea quickly. Following which I outfitted myself and finned for the rocks where the spur dipped below the water.

  As I’ve intimated, the Mediterranean around the Greek islands is short on fish. You’ll find red mullet on the bottom, plenty of them, but you need half a dozen to make a decent meal. And grey mullet on top, which move like lightning and cause you to use up more energy than eating them provides; great sport, but you couldn’t live on it. But there’s at least one fish of note in the Med, and that’s the grouper.

  Groupers are territorial; a family will mark out its own patch, usually in deep water where there’s plenty of cover, which is to say rock or weeds. And they love caves. Where there are plenty of rocks and caves, there’ll also be group­ers. Here, where the spur crumbled into the sea, this was ideal grouper ground. So I wasn’t surprised to see this one — especially since I didn’t have my gun! Isn’t that always the way of it?