he does!’ I said, feeling like a fisherman must feel when there’s a small but definite tug on his line. ‘He told me so last night. He said he didn’t want you to go, but he didn’t know what to do to stop you.’
‘Did he?’ When I saw the tears in Mum’s eyes, I don’t think I could have felt any worse if I had actually hit her.
‘Yeah, he was really upset.’ I couldn’t look at her as I said the words.
How could I have lied like that to my mum? It’s a question I’ve asked myself a million times and it still makes me cry when I think about it today. It was selfish and, as it turned out, incredibly stupid from my own point of view. Because if I hadn’t said what I said to her as we stood in the airport in Greece that day, we would have gone home, my broken heart would have mended itself in time, and although the rest of my life might not have been particularly happy or exciting, I wouldn’t have had to endure the six years of hell I had just opened the door to.
I could tell that Mum had made a decision – she had that look on her face children have when they’re going to do something naughty. And when she said, ‘Come on then,’ and started striding purposefully back towards the check-in desk, I scuttled along behind her with my heart racing.
‘I’m sorry,’ she told the woman at the desk. ‘But we’ve decided not to go on this flight after all.’
‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said, ‘but it’s too late. Your bags have already gone through.’ She flashed a frosty smile at Mum that said quite clearly, ‘I’m exerting a huge amount of self-control to prevent myself addressing you as “Stupid”.’
‘Please.’ Mum appeared oblivious to the woman’s disdain. ‘Isn’t there anything you can do? My daughter and I need to stay here, just for another week. Please.’
I don’t know what it was that made the woman change her mind. Perhaps she wasn’t really as tough and indifferent as she seemed and she felt sorry for us, huddled there, tearful and pathetic, at her check-in desk. Whatever the reason, she did manage to stop our two large suitcases being loaded on to the plane, and a few minutes later we were standing in the heat outside the airport wondering what to do next.
Mum had spent all the money in her bank account in England, and wouldn’t have any more until her last wages were paid into it. So we couldn’t even afford to get a taxi. In the end, we walked a short distance down the road, hid our suitcases in some bushes – having agreed to work out later how we were going to get them back – and then tried to hitch a lift. It wasn’t much of a plan, but we couldn’t think of a better one. And we were lucky, because someone did stop to pick us up and even agreed to take us back to the town on the coast where we had been staying.
The man dropped us outside a restaurant we had eaten in a few times, which was on the same road as Nikos’s bar. When we got out of his car, Mum straightened her skirt, took a deep breath and said, ‘I feel so nervous. What am I going to say to him?’ I had hardly said anything all the time we had been in the car because I felt so bad about what I had done. Now, I started to cry. ‘I’m sorry,’ I told Mum. ‘I lied. Nikos didn’t actually say he loved you.’ She just stood there for a moment, completely still, as if her whole body had frozen. ‘But I really think he does,’ I added hastily. ‘I could see how upset he was whenever you talked about leaving.’
When she did finally look at me, she had an expression on her face as if she didn’t recognise me. She burst into tears and sat down heavily on a chair outside the restaurant, and still didn’t say anything until she had ordered a drink and swallowed a large mouthful of it. Then she said, ‘Oh Megan, what have you done?’
‘I’m so sorry, Mum. I just panicked at the thought of going back to England. Everything’s been so different – for both of us – since we came here. I’ve had the best time I’ve had for years. And I know you have too. I know Nikos really likes you, and he’s such a nice guy. So why go home to nothing when you’ve got someone like him here? I’m sure it’ll be okay.’ I sounded certain, but in reality the doubts had already crept in and I wasn’t at all sure that things would turn out well for either of us. Fortunately, Mum was too shocked to be angry with me, and after we had finished our drinks, we walked together down the road to Nikos’s bar.
Mum stopped outside the bar and stood for a few seconds, just breathing. Then she made a sort of gulping-sob sound and walked through the beaded curtain that hung in the open doorway. Nikos was setting up the bar ready for the customers who would come that evening. When he heard the rattle of the curtain, he turned towards the door with a bland smile and I think my heart stopped beating. Then suddenly, as he realised it was us, he threw down the cloth he was holding and almost ran towards us, enveloping first my mother and then me in a huge hug.
‘We decided to stay another week,’ Mum said nervously when she could breathe again.
‘I’m so happy,’ Nikos kept saying. ‘I’m working in my bar wishing you hadn’t had to leave and now here you are! Where are you staying?’
‘We haven’t got anywhere yet, but …’ Mum sounded embarrassed.
‘It’s no problem,’ Nikos interrupted her. ‘I will sort it out.’
He poured a drink for Mum, flipped the top off a bottle of coke for me and then made a phone call. Within minutes, everything was arranged. Mum and I would be staying in an apartment that was owned by one of his friends – and which turned out to be large and spacious with a sea view. When Mum told him what we had done with our suitcases, Nikos laughed and then he drove us back to the airport to retrieve them from the bushes. For the next few days, until Mum’s wages were in her bank account in England, he also fed us and paid the rent on our apartment.
Having seen Nikos’s reaction to Mum’s return, I was very nervous, as well as excited, at the prospect of seeing Jak again. I didn’t have to wait long: he came into the bar that evening and was as surprised and happy to see me as I could have hoped.
Over the next few days, Mum’s relationship with Nikos and mine with Jak developed so well that she didn’t book a flight back to England for us the following week, as she had intended. In fact, it was another six weeks before she made any plans for us to go home.
A couple of days after we had hitch-hiked back from the airport, Jak picked me up from the apartment and took me to meet his family, who lived in a small house in the countryside. None of them spoke any English, but as his mother fussed around me, clicking her tongue and poking me with her bony fingers, I learned the Albanian words for ‘too thin’. What I hadn’t understood, however, was that she intended to set about the task of fattening me up immediately.
It had already been agreed that Jak and I would stay for lunch, and we had just sat down at the table when his mother came out of the kitchen carrying a large plate. She stood beside me and held it up close to my face, and as I turned my head to look at it, she pushed her fingers into the mouth of the boiled goat’s head and pulled out its tongue, nodding her own head as she did so and making an appreciative sort of humming noise. I think being in such close proximity to the head of a dead goat would have been repulsive even if I hadn’t been brought up as a vegetarian. Fortunately, I just managed to turn my head away from the plate as I was violently sick.
The embarrassment I already felt at being the object of everyone’s close scrutiny was nothing compared with my mortification at having emptied the contents of my stomach all over the floor. I had desperately wanted Jak’s family to like me. But by the time I had finished vomiting and retching, his sister didn’t even try to hide her irritation as she clicked her tongue impatiently
