Elias had been drenched in sweat when he arrived back at his parents’ home above the cafeneon and he knew it wasn’t simply the thirty-degree temperature, it was the damned situation with Becky and Petra being at the villa and it was… Hestia. Still it always seemed to come back to Hestia. Every stumbling block he hit in his career, every seemingly inconsequential rut in the road, all brought him back to that moment his marriage had ended and the utter humiliation that had come with that. He needed to succeed. He needed to win. But he wasn’t feeling like a winner at the moment. He was feeling like a man who had planned a whole future for himself, based on the actions of someone else, and now he didn’t know where his centre was or what happened next.
His shirt off his body and tied around a rickety fence post, his non-designer jeans hugging the rest of him, Elias hit the hard earth with the largest pick he had found in his father’s temporary home. Amid the mattress, empty coffee cups and remnants of loaves of bread and unwashed clothes, there were still tools in the shed. And, to work out some of his frustrations, he had decided to dig over his father’s allotment. He knew it was completely the wrong time for any kind of planting, but the earth could be turned over, made fresher, prepared. That was what he was telling himself. In truth, he either slammed the pick into the ground or he found a brick wall to demolish. The chickens were squawking at his movement and three of the goats were looking over the fence like gardening was a spectator-sport.
Elias drove the pick into the rock-hard soil and enjoyed the slight pain rolling through his muscles. He drew it up again and then smashed it back down.
‘What are you doing?’
It was his father. He didn’t need to look up to know that. And, as his father hadn’t wanted to talk about anything that was going on with his mother, Elias didn’t see why he should talk about how he was feeling right now.
‘Have you even planted anything this year?’ Elias responded, not stopping in his work.
‘What is the point? Your mother has made other arrangements with vegetables.’
Elias looked up then. ‘What other arrangements?’
‘You will need to ask her,’ Spiros answered.
Elias stopped then, wiping his forehead with his forearm and fixing his dad with a stare. ‘What is wrong with the two of you? I speak to one and they say I should ask the other. I speak to the other and they say the same. No one is telling me anything.’ He was shouting now and he had already seen Areti pottering around in her garden, hanging yet more washing on a line. ‘And why, why are you living in a shed when there is an empty home in the village?’
Spiros had rolled a cigarette and it was hanging out of his lips while he patted down his body – white vest with no pockets, black trousers. He worked his way down to his ankles then pulled out a Zippo from inside his sock. Elias watched his father light the cigarette then blow a thick plume of smoke into the air. ‘Do not tell your mother I am smoking.’
‘You have been smoking every day since you were eleven years old,’ Elias reminded him. ‘You told me – when I was eleven – when you offered me my first cigarette like it was going to somehow make me a man.’
‘I am not meant to be smoking. Since the heart attack…’
Elias froze, had to lean on the worn wooden handle of the garden tool for support. ‘Since the what?’ He had to wet his lips. ‘Did you say “heart attack”?’
Spiros waved a hand in the air, taking another drag on the cigarette before flicking ash onto the soil Elias was cultivating. ‘Last year,’ he answered. ‘Another lifetime ago. When your mother and I were still talking.’
Elias couldn’t believe this was the first he was hearing of this. He was angry and concerned all at once. ‘You had a heart attack and you never told me?!’
‘I was in the hospital for three days. I had to leave in the end because Areti kept sending in parcels of her moussaka,’ Spiros replied. ‘She has started substituting aubergine for turnip. I do not know why. It does not work.’
‘Papa, come on, I was a phone call away. You should have let me know. I could have come back. I could have helped with the cafeneon or… brought you food without turnip.’
‘You would have come?’ Spiros asked, kicking at a bump of soil. ‘With Hestia in the village?’
Elias swallowed. It was the first time either of his parents had mentioned his ex-wife’s name since he had been back. ‘Hestia was in the village?’ Was. He was clinging on to that past tense. Had she stayed in their house? No, it was not hers. It had been a gift from his family. She would not do something like that. Despite everything, despite the anger he felt, Hestia wasn’t a bad person.
Spiros nodded, drawing on his roll-up. ‘She was here for a while. She rented a house with the woman for maybe three months. Until, I think, she decided making a stand was more difficult than she had thought.’
The woman. The woman’s name was Thalia. Still the village was unchanged in its views about what was right and what was not. As much as he had been hurt by what had happened, it was the reaction of the village that had made everything so much worse. People and their opinions…
‘I would have come,’ Elias replied, taking a breath and lifting the pick again. ‘Of course, I would have come.’
‘I do not believe you,’ Spiros said. ‘And, your mother and I, we decided we did not want to put you in that position. You were settling in the UK. You were putting the past behind you.’
Elias dropped the pick again. ‘I am not ashamed of being in Liakada again. Are you?’ he asked. ‘Are you somehow ashamed to have me here? Are you both still governed by what the village president thinks and feels about things?’
‘Elia,’ Spiros stated. ‘No one was ashamed of you. The situation was difficult, that is all.’
‘Why?’ Elias asked. ‘Because Hestia fell in love with a woman instead of another man? Would it have been less of a drama if she had slipped into an affair with Panos from the taverna?’ His temper was rising again, a prickly heat developing across his bare shoulders.
‘Elia, Panos is eighty this year.’
‘That is not the point I am making!’
‘Then what point are you making?’ Spiros demanded to know. ‘Your mother and I might not behave as if we love each other at the moment, but we always have and we always will love you.’
There was a depth of emotion in his father’s voice that cut Elias to the quick. He lifted the pick quickly and smashed it into the ground once more with the loudest of grunts. The chickens leapt up into the air, flapping their wings and washing swayed a little on Areti’s line. Was she behind a double sheet listening? Why did he care? He didn’t live his life by the laws of gossip like this village did. He looked at his father, swallowing a lump in his throat. He should have come back sooner. What good had hiding done?
‘So,’ Spiros continued, waving the cigarette in the air as he gesticulated. ‘While we are on the subject of not knowing things and relieving the stresses of life with the help of soil and tobacco, when are you going to tell us about your real job?’
‘I… don’t know what you mean,’ Elias replied.
‘Elia,’ Spiros said, stroking a hand through his thinning hair, slightly better tamed today. ‘Your mother had to find out from the pages of a glossy magazine belonging to one of the villas she cleans for.’
His mother knew what he really did? When he had lied to her about conveyancing? Could this day get any worse?
‘Lawyer Elias Mardas on modern-day matrimony and going for broke when it comes to divorce and dissolution.’ Spiros sniffed. ‘I memorised it.’
He cringed at his father citing word-for-word an article that had singlehandedly caused his business’s rapid growth. He had been sad and humiliated and oh-so angry when the reporter had caught up with him, but he had also been completely focused on making a success of the worst moments of his life.
‘I did not recognise the man in the photographs,’ Spiros carried on. ‘Sitting confidently on white leather sofas wearing suits that look a size too small. He was handsome and, without a doubt that is something he has inherited from his father. But there was a fierceness about him. He was not the person who smiled and laughed and danced around a lamb on a spit with honey in his hair.’
All the reverie from his childhood hit Elias then. Running through the olive groves, bright wildflowers licking his shins, sunshine all around, crunching over Avlaki beach and diving into the waves…
‘She hurt me.’ It took Elias a second to realise it was him who was speaking. He should stop. He should withdraw. There was safety in withdrawing. But his words came again: ‘She hurt me so much.’
And then there were tears. Tears he thought he had spent long ago at the very beginning of this break-up, pouring out of him in front of his father. He ached to stop, but his emotions simply weren’t complying.
He felt a hand on his back then, a solid and comforting pat from the man who had raised him. The man who had had a heart attack and not told him. The man who was living in a shed…
‘I do not live in your house, Elia, because it is your house. Marriage or no marriage, it was always going to be your house. It is yours to do with what you wish,’ Spiros said, continuing to pat as Elias attempted to recover. ‘And, in life, there is nothing that cannot be reversed. If that is what you want.’
Reversing. No, he did not want a backward step. He only wanted to move forward. Except he still wasn’t exactly sure what that looked like now. It definitely wasn’t going to involve his house in Liakada, but it was quite possible it was going to involve Villa Selino.
‘I suggested reversing to your mother,’ Spiros told him, throwing the cigarette down into the dirt and stomping on it with his shoe. ‘I said it was time for us to change up through the gears and start again. Begin a new journey and add miles to our map of marriage.’ He sighed. ‘After three months of watching her dance with Constantine every chance she got and admiring the produce of Leandros, I told her I thought we should try living together again. And do you know what she said?’
Elias shook his head, sniffing as he looked through damp eyelashes.
‘She said, “Spiro, until you realise the difference between the handbrake and the accelerator then we have no hope of even getting to the nearest petrol station to refuel”,’ Spiros stated, hopelessly. ‘I have no clue what she meant. And I started off with using the car terminology!’
Elias put a hand on his father’s shoulder. ‘Papa, you need to tell me what’s happened since I’ve been gone,’ he ordered. ‘All of it.’ He held Spiros’s shoulder firmly, shaking a little. ‘OK?’
‘OK,’ Spiros agreed with a nod of his head. Then his father turned to face the fluttering double sheet at the end of the garden. ‘Did you get all that, Areti?’ he shouted. ‘My son, Elias is back to see his parents and he does not care what any of the village thinks about that. I love my wife and I do not care who knows that either! And we are now going to drink ouzo in the middle of the day!’
There was no sound until the interruption of the lone cockerel, crowing loudly from the enclosure at the bottom of the plot and then Areti’s voice called:
‘Good! Yammas to you, Spiro!’
Spiros nudged Elias with the point of his elbow and raised his eyes.
‘And,’ Areti continued loudly, ‘just so that you know, there is nothing wrong with turnip in a moussaka!’