In the Shade of the Monkey Puzzle Tree (11 page)

‘
Oi friend.’ The boy with his full beer pushes Dimitri to one side and leans right over the counter. ‘A hot girl just asked me to give you this.’ He winks at Theo and disappears into the crowd with his drink. Theo holds the paper and then, as he will probably get the sack anyway, he unfolds the sheet in front of Dimitri.

Scribbled words read
‘vodka/orange’.

Theo refolds the slip of paper, tucks it in his pocket and looks straight at Dimitri.
‘Sorry. Girls just dig the hair.’ He half smiles. ‘One screwdriver coming up. Ice?’

Dimitri drains the drink.
‘You are either smart or tricky,’ he says, looking Theo straight on. ‘What have you made on this bar so far today?’

Theo made a rough tally just before the boy with the beer made his last purchase. But since he came to work this evening, he has learnt a few important things. Drinks are measured haphazardly, so there is no way of tracing how much has been sold. He has also been told that this little bar does not normally do good business and lastly, and probably most importantly, Jimmy is on the take from the till on the main bar and Dimitri cannot have noticed, or he would have been sacked.

‘I haven’t really kept track, around …’ He names a figure well under the real take.

‘
Wow, really. That much?’ Dimitri turns his head to look at the girl who is normally on the little bar and who is working as a runner tonight. She is sweating and looks far from her usual attractive self. He slides from his stool and cruises over to her.

‘
Give me your glass,’ Theo shouts at the boy who has all but finished his beer. He fills it and hands it back. The boy winks again and drinks.

‘
He tries to make people think he is in the Mafia,’ the boy says, nodding at Dimitri, who is talking animatedly to the bargirl. Her chin has sunk to her chest. Theo watches, recognises her determination to not react, but he does not think she is strong enough. He judges that her investment is not big enough, and he is right. She tolerates a few more words and then she picks up the drink nearest to her and throws it in Dimitri’s face before storming out. Theo looks away quickly.

He has cleaned everything, but there is still a bad smell behind the bar.

The rest of the evening is uneventful and when the last customers sway their way out, Theo realises he has a dilemma. Shall he be honest and leave nearly double what he told Dimitri was in the till, or does take enough to pay back his baba with money that won’t be missed?

It is not as if anyone will know; it is not like anyone will be unhappy.

He no longer feels like Theo from the village.

That man left last night.

As Theo says goodnight Jimmy, who has a glass in his hand, gives him the slightest of bows and a colluding smile. Theo straightens his back and walks out with his head held high, disinclined to be a part of Jimmy
’s world.

It is late when he gets home, but the old lady downstairs has her lights on in all her rooms with the curtains drawn back, meaning Theo can see inside. She has a room on either side of the front door: the bedroom on the left, kitchen with a door, presumably to the bathroom, on the right. It is half the depth of his own flat. It goes as far back as his arched door and the five steps that lead to his kitchen. If there are any rooms on the ground floor at the back, they will be low storage rooms.

A dog is barking, and through one of the windows, Theo can see something white jumping up and the old lady cooing and fussing, trying to calm it. But the excited dog just keeps leaping around, its long spiral-haired coat flopping around it. It looks more like an animated mop than a dog, and it amuses Theo who starts the climb to his room. His legs are tired from standing for eight hours. At least in the
kafeneio
, there is an opportunity to sit when no one wants coffee. The bar was just nonstop tonight.

He slumps onto his sofa on the balcony. Lifting up the cushion he is not sitting on, he looks around into the darkness, then takes the roll of cash from his pocket. Flattening out the notes, he lays them on the sofa, counts them carefully, and places the cushion on top.

One more day and he could go home if he wanted, pay his baba off in full and then some, but Theo is beginning to see a way he could go home in style. He will stay a little longer than a couple of days and see where he is by then.

If he stays, maybe he could even have his own bar. Maybe Tasia will work with him.

The trees rustle in the breeze. Whistling through the night, a black Mercedes pulls up outside the house, the paintwork glinting between the branches. A man with a chauffeur
’s cap climbs from behind the wheel, walks stiffly to open the passenger door, and stands erect, waiting. Theo jumps to his feet, trots down and slides into the car, inhaling the smells of new leather and carpet cleaner. The chauffeur bows slightly and Theo recognises him as the boy drinking beer from the Diamond Rock Cafe. The boy grins and closes Theo’s door, then drives silently and sedately through the suburban streets.

They turn in to pass the Diamond Rock Cafe. Jimmy and the other staff line the pavement, waving drinks, cheering. The girl who does not speak Greek stands next to Tasia, both of them mopping their eyes, sad to see Theo go. Theo winds down his window and calls to Tasia who runs over and climbs in the car beside him.

‘Hey Theo, you are the man!’ Jimmy calls. The others cheer in agreement.

When the car turns at the end of the street and hits the main road, it builds up speed. The city lights become a blur outside the windows as they race past building after building, driving like the wind. Tasia
’s hand finds his and their fingers intermingle. The air rushes all around them and they are lifted from the tarmac and take to the skies to fly through the inky night, dodging stars, marvelling at the earth below and curving an arch to the village, where the car descends to land just on the outskirts, and then drives slowly into the square.

The old men are all sitting inside, waiting for his return to take their chairs onto the square for the summer.

‘Ah, you are here!’ Stathis calls, and it seems to be all the permission he needs to carry his chair into the square. The other men follow his lead, gathering around Theo, patting his back.

‘
We have missed you, Theo,’ says one.

‘
The coffee has been undrinkable since you left,’ says another.

‘
The meze so small, and no olives.’

His baba runs from the back of the
kafeneio out to him, smiling, hugging him, an arm around his shoulders, refusing to let go as he tells everyone of the success he has become in Athens.

‘
He ate Athens for his breakfast and spat it out for lunch,’ his baba brags to his peers. ‘Look at his car. Look at his suit. My boy!’ he exclaims.

His mama comes running, with her apron still on, to kiss him.

‘I have a leg of lamb in the oven, crispy on the outside, with potatoes and salad. We can eat whenever you are ready, son.’ Her hand comes up to stroke his hair on either side of his face to make a parting so she can see him, a gesture she has made ever since he can remember, and one he feels he has outgrown. But this time, she stops. Her eyes drop to the floor.

‘
Sorry,’ she mutters, and Theo takes her hand to bring a smile back to her face. Tasia is handed a round bouquet of flowers which she takes with both hands like a bride and confetti is falling from the heavens and the whole village comes out to celebrate, to cheer Theo as he announces screwdrivers all round and they marvel at his knowledge, his city ways.

Theo rolls off the sofa and lands badly on his funny bone. He leaps up holding it with his other hand, hopping about and trying not to moan. The sofa and balcony and his clothes are covered with some sort of confetti of pollen, yellow in the moonlight. It will be from the pine trees.

He pushes the sofa back into the room with his knees and closes the windows, trying to take his mind from the pain in his elbow. By the time he is in bed, he has forgotten his funny bone. The promise of sleep is delicious. He closes his eyes and listens to the sounds outside his open window. The trees still rustling, and it is possible the old lady downstairs has let the dog out as he hears the sound of unclipped nails pattering on flagstones.

Then a new noise, a murmur and a tapping that sounds like it is coming from below his bedroom. Maybe a cat has been locked in the storage rooms, if that is what they are. He listens, the murmur is not regular, the noises not ones of panic, and soon his eyes close.

Age 40 Years, 5 Months, 17 Days

The cockerel crows and Theo spreads his wings. The sun streaks through his window, cutting the room and his bed diagonally. If he turns his head one way, he is in the shade, the other in the sun. He turns his head back and forth slowly until the muscles around his eyes release and open his lids. The dog downstairs is barking.

Stretching and pulling on his trousers, Theo makes his way to the balcony. The man in the pin-striped suit is there again, mowing the lawn. Theo watches him as he pauses in his work to fill a bowl from a tap for the dog,
the droplets ringing in the metal dish. Then he resumes his mowing.

A breeze picks up.

Across the road, balloons have been tied to the railings of the first floor balcony of a new house and they bob in the breeze, with ribbons that flutter and spiral. Behind the sheet glass windows, a child wearing a pink dress with a big bow at the back is running around. Her mama grabs at her arm as she passes to slow her down, to avoid collision with the table laid with sandwiches and buns. The breeze drops and the branch of the monkey-puzzle tree relaxes, blocking Theo’s view into the party house.

The gardener below is now tending the roses.

Theo’s stomach grumbles. He has no food in the house, and it is about time he had a better look around the neighbourhood. Pulling on his shirt, he trots down the stairs and into the glare of the sun. The heat warrants him rolling his sleeves up. The man in the suit is nowhere to be seen, and neither is the dog.

Letting himself out of the gate, he pauses to watch a BMW pull up to the lamp post opposite, which also has balloons tied to it. A little girl jumps out and runs up to the house. Her mama, in high heels and pencil skirt, her hair piled to a perfect bouffant, saunters leisurely behind her carrying a gaily wrapped box. The sun reflects on her numerous gold rings; her face remains hidden behind large dark glasses.

Theo raises his eyebrows and slows his pace. There are no wealthy people in the village, nor Saros really, not like this woman. Here in Athens, there seem to be pockets of them everywhere. The shiny door is opened to a squeal of delighted children. The ladies kiss on both cheeks but don’t smile, and the door closes.

Theo walks to the end of the road, where he finds there is a small square, paved in concrete slabs and shaded by trees. There is a green grocer
’s, a bakery, and a
kafeneio
, which is closed.

Theo returns laden with
fresh bread, olives, feta, and yoghurt and before reaching his own place, he pauses, squinting in the sun, outside the house next door with the flat roof. It is so like the houses in his village. The window at the front is boarded up from the inside, there is no sill, and the stones are exposed, the wall itself over half a metre thick. The depth would have kept the place warm in winter and cool in the summer.

The warmth of the bread fresh from the bakery oven tempts him. He pinches off a mouthful as he stands looking at the crumbling old house.
The front door hangs open, down an overgrown alley to one side, the opening obscured by a torn, faded curtain. A thin wash of white lime paint has at one time covered all the outside walls, but the elements have taken their toll and damp has turned them black nearly halfway up.

The bread is slightly salted. He pulls off another mouthful. This hovel would have been a small house even in its day, and its position, sandwiched between taller, more modern houses makes it seem out of place, lost in an era when life was lived more outside, a time when people gathered together for entertainment rather than sitting isolated in their houses in front of their televisions. In the village, this house would have been maintained for some purpose. If the owner built a new house, then this would be full of sheep, or straw. It seems wrong to Theo, and sad, that no one seems to care, and it sums up the difference between the village and the city. He wishes suddenly for the sound of a sheep bleating, the clonk of a goat bell. He pulls off another hunk of bread and wraps the paper firmly over the end of the loaf.

He pushes open the gate to his own place and the dog bounds up to him, jumping up and licking him, its woolly coat bouncing all over the place.

‘
Down, you naughty thing.’ But Theo laughs, his good mood revived. His hands are full of his purchases and he has no defence against the animal’s onslaught. The dog bounds away and back again to repeat his performance, front paws on Theo’s chest, his nose reaching to his face, eager to lick. ‘Hey, hey. Down, you scoundrel.’ Theo turns his face away from the jumping animal and its eager tongue, holding the bread and feta above his head.

‘
Hey, dog. Down.’ The man in the pin-striped suit comes from around the side of the building and commands the animal. The dog takes no notice, and the man grabs it by its collar.

‘
Sorry, sir. Sorry,’ the man says, holding the dog, establishing the boundaries with his words, granting Theo seniority.

‘
It’s okay.’ Theo laughs and makes his way to the steps. The man has a very strong country accent and, close up, the suit, made of wool, shows itself to be well used and poorly fitting.

In his kitchen, Theo opens the window just as the cockerel crows. The fresh bread smell is overlaid with the smell of someone cooking tomatoes and herbs. He looks through the trees to see if he can spot the cockerel. Neatly cut lawns here and there are partially visible, but not much else. The branches of the trees over the wall behind the house are dense, but at least it is green, not the blank wall of another building. Theo smiles.
‘Job and house. How hard was that?’ he asks himself.

With a plate of food in hand, he opens the balcony windows and pushes the sofa outside to sit and eat.

It’s another glorious morning with wide skies and crisp air. The sun is gaining strength every day, the bright warmth settling into a heavy heat. This summer could be a hot one. A gentle hissing sigh draws his attention to some pine trees on the other side of the flat-roofed house, the wind just enough to cause two branches to rub together, a slow creaking. The monkey puzzle against the blue of the sky is something he could look at forever.

Theo has made a sandwich of tomatoes and feta and he lifts it to take a bite, but his mouth doesn
’t close upon it. It stays open, the sandwich suspended in mid-air as he stares at the young woman who has just appeared on the flat roof of the abandoned house next door. She has presumably come up a staircase on the far side of the building, and she has a basket of washing. Two small children cling around her skirts. Her long, straight hair is tied at the back of her neck, but that doesn’t stop the ends from blowing across her face. Her blouse has a low neck and her skirt is long and full. A Gypsy, but a fine looking Gypsy.

Theo bites and chews as he watches her stretch out a line from a metal pole, her long fingers running along its length, her grip loosening to let knots unravel as she walks it to the branch of a tree that overhangs the back edge of the building. With deft hands, she confidently ties a knot and pulls the rope tight. The two children chase around her, and she gently chastises them as she hangs her washing, folding it over the line, no clothes pegs.

With a jerk of her head, she looks straight at him. The distance between them closes, and Theo chokes on his mouthful.

‘
Hello,’ he finally manages to say, but she does not reply. The two children stop running. ‘I am the new tenant here.’ He brushes away the bread crumbs from his lips and his shirt.

She looks past him into the empty room behind as if expecting someone else. When no one joins them, she looks back at him.

‘Hello neighbour,’ she replies, looking him directly in the eyes.

‘
You live around here?’ Theo asks.

She snorts and her forehead furrows.

‘Well, you are hanging washing there and the other day, there was a blanket being aired, which I also presume is yours, so I guess you live close enough?’ He looks at the building on the other side of the flat-roofed hovel and wonders how a Gypsy could afford such a rent. His place is relatively cheap, but he doubts they all are.

‘
I live here.’ She laughs and stamps her foot, but it is a defensive snigger of a laugh, an aggressive stomp. ‘Come, children.’ She picks up the empty basket and the three of them trudge down the spiral staircase out of view.

Theo groans at his tactlessness. He could see she was a Gypsy; if he had thought it through, it is obvious. Few Athenians, if any, would rent any decent property to a Gypsy.

He closes his eyes. He was about twenty when he first saw Stella. She had the same hard time too. No one had seen much of her until school started; she lived in a house behind the square, up the hill a little, with her Greek father and her Gypsy mother. Theo had already left school and was working in the
kafeneio
by then, but he remembers her walking to school that first day. She was full of bounce and joy, eager to be there, her eyes darting around and fixing on the other children, an eager smile, the long, straight dark hair. It was only a few weeks later that the same girl walked to school with her eyes to the ground, her mouth closed, the energy in her step gone. Theo worried for her, recalled his own hard time at school with the likes of Manolis, imagined only too well the bullying the Gypsy girl must have received.

In his concern for her, he took to being around when school was dismissed. He never really made a conscious decision, it just happened. One day, he was outside the gates and there she was, head bowed, books in hand, steps long enough to get her home quickly, short enough not to be noticed, and he recognised the fear. He found himself at the school gates the next day, just casually passing, keeping watch over her from a distance. If the children were going to be mean, they would wait until no teacher was around.

He kept up this spontaneous vigil for a while, but no one seemed to bother her. He found out her name was Stella, but he never talked to her. Then he missed a day, but went the day after, then he missed a few more days, and the days turned to weeks until he found himself outside the school once again at closing time just by chance, and there she was.

He saw at once that things had changed. Her head was bent lower, her books gripped tighter, her weight, with each step, on her front leg as if ready to run. Theo followed. A group gathered around her, keeping a distance, on both sides of the road. She turned up a side street, a shortcut to her house up a grass lane between the backs of some of the houses. The distance between her and the group closed, and then one of the children threw a stone. It caught Stella on the back of her leg, drawing blood, and she ran.

Theo exploded into action, running up behind the children, knocking stones out of hands, grabbing them by the scruffs of their necks, only to let them go as he chased children closer to Stella. The child nearest her put in a few well-aimed shots. She had one hand holding her head and both her exposed calves were bleeding, but she never looked back. If she had, she would have seen him and stopped. The other children would have stopped, too, but she just kept running and Theo picked off the group one by one, until Stella ran into her house and slammed the door behind her.

Theo
’s chest heaved, his hands on his knees to catch his breath for a second before retracing his steps down the grassy, stone-walled lane, gathering the children as he went. When he had the majority of them in a group, he let out years of pent-up anger, he watched their eyes grow wide with fear and their little feet step away from him as his
briki
of rage began to boil. He stamped off, away from the group before he was finished, afraid of the strength of his own emotions.

He was outside the school the next day, and he saw the children and they saw him. They did not follow Stella. He was there the next day, too, and after a week, he relaxed and only watched her go to school in the morning. He could tell from her walk, the way she carried her head that, although probably friendless, she was not frightened now. Since then, she has grown into a woman, probably gone twenty now. But he has rarely seen her out, occasionally going to the kiosk for her baba or down to the man with the vegetable cart for her mama.

Theo looks back over to the washing drying on the roof next door, cursing himself for his tactless behaviour toward the young Gypsy woman.

He finishes his meal feeling uncomfortable.

He looks around and realises there is nothing he needs to do till the evening, when he will go to work again. It’s an odd feeling, and unfamiliar. He surprises himself by finding that he does not feel in the least bit guilty about this, and instead enjoys the luxury of being beholden to no one: his own master.

He keeps an eye out for the Gypsy girl, waiting for her to return
to take in the day’s washing, so he can make amends. He spends some time washing his own shirt and having a shower, but when he returns to his lookout, the Gypsy’s laundry has gone.

The dog downstairs barks happily throughout the day and at one point is brave enough to come all the way up the side steps and look into Theo
’s still-unfurnished room, only to flee when Theo welcomes him.

Day turns to evening and the world takes on a pink light, but the heat continues. The man in his striped suit is in the garden again and the dog is still barking. Theo begins to see why the place was given to him cheaply. With a Gypsy living next door and a barking dog beneath, better places can be found unless the price is right. But still, it is cheap, even taking those factors into account. Something else that he is not yet aware of may be lowering the price. He recalls the noises in the night, tries to replay them in his head, but they make no sense. It
’s not rats or cats; they do not murmur. He shivers, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end.