Lisa Dempster
She rolls dark kalamatas in her mouth, sucking the salty flesh and quietly spitting the pips into a napkin.
It’s late, but there’s no hurry. She can keep eating, for hours, if she wants. She knows this. The people here take their time over dinner, talking, sharing plates, pouring wine. Laughing. The Greeks, they know how to eat. How to live.
She doesn’t need the menu. She knows what’s on it, the same list as at any half-decent pension. Thick-crusted white bread, no more than a few hours old. Greek salad. Fresh calamari, lightly crumbed and grilled over an open flame. She tastes hints of olive oil, lemon, a touch of oregano; she didn’t expect it to be so good this far from the coast.
Souvlakia on a silver tray, doughy bread with onions cut thick and garlic sauce, chunks of succulent lamb dripping oil from plate to mouth. Yes. Hot golden chips, yes, yes, yes. She will eat it all and more.
Rocking back on her chair, she stops to breathe, looking around the patio. Grapevines entwine wooden beams overhead. The night sky is clear and bright in this part of the world. Meteora. The word is magic to her now.
She’d arrived the night before. Drooping with exhaustion, she’d unfolded herself out of the taxi that had driven her for forty minutes from the station the next town over. Before that, a crowded six-hour train ride from Athens. She’d been overwhelmed before she even started, suffocated by the dirty heat of the city, stymied by the ticket men who kept sending her to different counters in the station, shaking their heads with miscomprehension when she spelt out where she wanted to go. Meteora. Meteora. Meteora. Come on.
Beyond the patio, karst and limestone cliffs plunge dramatically upwards, reaching up into the darkness. Perched on their tops, though she can’t see them in the dark, sit ancient stone monasteries, thousands of years old, hidden in the scrub. She’ll hike up there. Soon.
The waiter approaches, clears some plates.
Red wine? Mythos?
She shakes her head, waves the boy away. She can’t drink anymore.
It had caught up with her, the Greek summer. She was tired, bone tired from the weeks and weeks and weeks on the islands. Mykonos. Behind the bar in the club all night, doing promos during the day, catching the sunrise party at Super Paradise Beach, the afternoon party at Paradise Beach and chasing romance in between. It was all cocktails on the islands. Cocktails, coffee and coke: racking up lines and getting thinner, thinner, thinner every day.
But she wasn’t there anymore. She was here, on this patio, on this balmy night.
Grilled green peppers, skins black and blistered. Moussaka, eggplant baked the colour of mince, thick layers of potato shiny with béchamel. She needs it. It all comes, it keeps coming, out of the kitchen, off the grill. Onto her plate, into her belly.
A child squeals and laughter breaks out. She glances up again from the white plastic table. There are other people here. Two big families, with little kids running about. A few couples. A clutch of old men, clinking glasses and clicking pieces around a backgammon board. But still, the patio is less than a quarter full. It’s the end of the season.
Not quite the end, on the islands, but the end for her. She’d had enough, had checked out in the middle of a shift, in a flurry of rage that seemed less dramatic now. Packed her suitcase at 3.00 am, caught the early morning ferry, texted her guy; a few angry words and she was gone. Wide-eyed and strung out, she’d watched the port disappear in the distance. She’d miss her last pay. It didn’t matter; she’d made enough. She’d had enough.
She asks for saganaki, wonderfully firm and salty, the centre oozing gently under her fork. She eats, pushing green garnishes to the side of the ceramic plate. Cheese drips. She wipes her chin and keeps on eating. It doesn’t matter. It’s been so long since she sat down to eat. Since she ate.
She had chosen her destination on a whim, guided by her Lonely Planet, which advised it was a remote and quiet area. Inland. Perfect. She needed to get away from the brilliant sparkle of the coast. Meteora beckoned.
At the pension—a caravan park of sorts—the old caretaker had thrown open the door to her room with a flourish. Like it wasn’t after midnight, like she was an expected guest. It was a shoebox, the room barely bigger than the size of the bed, the toilet less than a metre from her pillow. But it felt like a palace. A room of her own, at last, no sharing. On the islands it was the usual story: five girls, two beds, but who cared when there was never a moment to sleep?
In that palace of a room, in the pension in Meteora, she’d slept for sixteen hours straight.
Things are winding down on the patio. She asks the boy for coffee. It arrives, strong and steaming, a million miles from the frothy iced coffees the Greeks drink in summer, a million miles from the islands. She adds heaped spoonfuls of sugar, stirs away the bitterness.
And here’s a plate of watermelon, on the house, two pieces of juicy fruit to balance out the meal. She thanks the boy with a smile.
She notices a guy is watching her, from behind his own coffee three tables away. He might have been watching for hours, she doesn’t know. A young guy, like her: white hair, tanned skin, trendy t-shirt, thongs. He’s been on the islands, for sure. She avoids his gaze. In a few days she might throw him a smile, when she’s had enough of the solitude and the sleep and the eating through the menu. When it’s time to smile again.
She sips her coffee and sparks up a Marlboro Light, blowing smoke up into the still night sky. The air is different here. Fresh. In Meteora.