with us?’
Meroula still lived in the house where her husband had died not long after Theo’s birth. But in the winter, when there were no guests and tourists to keep her away, she spent plenty of time with her son and his family. She inclined her head now, her expression managing to convey that this would be a duty rather than a pleasure, but still a duty that she intended to perform.
‘That’s good,’ Olivia said.
From the window over the sink she could see a corner of the square and the Taverna Irini. The owners had retreated to Rhodes for the winter; the windows of the bar were lined on the inside with newspaper, already yellowing, and the door was padlocked. The islanders preferred to use the place on the harbour.
The only light showing was in a blue wooden kiosk next to the taverna. Inside his square metre of shelter, stacked with cigarettes and chewing gum and lottery tickets, Manolis was dozing with his cheek on his folded arms on top of a pile of photo magazines. Manolis had a tiny head and a huge body, invariably encased in the same pair of greasy trousers that revealed a slice of woollen underclothing through the fly opening. Georgi said that his head wasn’t big enough to hold a proper brain and it was true that Manolis was simple. But he was able to sell cigarettes and calculate the right change from a thousand-drachma note, and he kept the kiosk open all hours of the day and half of the night, summer and winter, because the only other place he had to go was a curtained alcove in his mother’s tiny house right over the harbour. Sometimes Manolis sat in the sun on a bench near his kiosk, but the approach of a customer sent him rolling back into the blue box. As Olivia watched now, his head bobbed up.
The customer was Xan. He pointed to something, pocketed what Manolis gave him, handed over money in exchange.
Olivia was smiling, her hands unfurling under the dirty sink water.
‘Pappy’s coming.’
Theo sprang out of Meroula’s arms and Georgi threw his crayon aside.
‘Pappy!’
Meroula sat upright and smoothed her grey skirt across her lap, as if she was about to see her lover. Olivia had noticed this often enough before and it both irritated and touched her. Xan was everything to his mother; there was no corner of her life that he did not irradiate.
Xan said when she tried to talk to him about it, ‘It’s the way it is, it’s not unusual. But you are the one I am married to.’
She would put her hands on either side of his face and kiss him on the mouth.
‘Don’t you forget it.’
He came in, bulky and smelling of smoke and bar. His arms were held stiffly in front of him with the fists clenched so he marched like a robot. The boys ran at him and battered themselves against his legs.
‘Left or right?’ Xan demanded.
‘Left,’ Theo yelled and Georgi countered, ‘Right.’
Theo amended his choice at once. ‘Right!’
Ignoring their responses, Xan dropped a plastic bubble into each pair of cupped hands. Inside were a block of bright pink bubblegum and a plastic toy that demanded construction from four puzzle pieces. The boys stuck the gum into their mouths and dropped to their knees to put the toys together. Georgi’s was a yellow car, Theo’s a red man.
The first time she saw him, Olivia remembered, Xan had been handing out sweets to Bangkok street children with just the same robot movements. The children were milling around his knees, pushing and shouting for his attention, and his arms were outstretched above a thicket of grasping fingers. It was the end of the monsoon and the swollen, khaki-coloured river behind them carried a mat of floating weeds and branches. Olivia lifted her old Leica to frame the shot and Xan turned to look straight into the lens, through the tunnel of her eye and into her head. He emptied his bag of sweets into the waiting hands and came to her.
‘It’s a straight trade,’ he said and took an Instamatic out of the pocket in his shirt. He held it horizontally and made as if to take the picture.
‘If I were you,’ Olivia pointed out, I’d frame it vertically.’ He did as she suggested and clicked the shutter. They were standing in a sea of children now, all clamouring for more presents.
‘Nice. Thanks. You know about photography, do you?’
‘It’s my job. I sell my photographs.’
‘Is that so? You want to come for a beer?’
That was how she lived, in those days. She took flights, she drifted through foreign cities and rode buses up remote mountain passes. She took pictures in Soweto and Havana and Bogotá, and on Caribbean beaches and in the canyons of midtown Manhattan. Some of these she sold, to picture libraries and agencies and magazines. She owned little more than she could carry, and the tide of travellers and backpackers that flowed around the world was the current she swam in. She had drunk beer with hundreds of strangers and some of them had become friends. Some, even lovers.
‘Yes, a quick one.’
When they were sitting under an awning beside the river Olivia began with the question that always followed the exchange of names. ‘Where are you heading?’
Xan said, ‘Home.’
The intense pleasure in the way he said it, the way he anticipated the prospect as if he was starving and about to be fed, filled her with a wash of melancholy. It wasn’t homesickness – England and her parents’ present house in the country, where she had never even lived, was hardly home any more. Yet she could feel the pull of home through Xan Georgiadis, the idea and significance and safety of a place rather than her own reality, like a thread passing straight through her innards. She felt a longing to be connected to a place again after so many years of wandering.
Over the rim of her glass she watched him, thinking how good-looking he was. There was an unfamiliar knocking in her chest. Don’t get too excited, she tried to warn herself. But already it was too late for warnings. ‘Where’s that?’
‘Greece.’
Xan had lived for five years in Melbourne. He had been working in his second cousin’s building company, putting up cheap houses for immigrant communities on the city outskirts, and he was brawny from carrying and deeply suntanned, and an Australian twang overlaid his Greek pronunciations. But now, he said, his parents needed him at home. His father was getting old and his mother missed him.
‘It’s one of the islands, in the Dodecanese. You should just see it. It’s paradise.’
Olivia had been to most of the world’s paradise destinations, but she could easily believe that with Xan Georgiadis in it this one would outstrip them all.
‘You are going up to bed right now. You can bring the toys with you,’ Xan said.
The boys kissed Meroula and Olivia, and padded after their father. They always did as he told them.
‘See, they are their father’s children,’ Meroula said with a broad smile of satisfaction. Olivia tucked the last of the stuffing into the last of the squid and slid the dish into the oven before her mother-in-law could tell her that Xan really preferred meat to fish. She could hear the thuds and scuffles of the boys romping with Xan overhead. Meroula nodded and smiled.
When
