Chapter 33
KERASIA
It could be nothing. It probably was nothing. But, then again, it could be everything. Kostas’s head was a ball of electrical wires all scrambled and pulsing at different speeds, hot and debilitating, and he was doing his best not to let any of this show.
‘Does she not have a phone number?’ Faye asked as they left the motorbike and the tourists lounging on the beach behind and walked into the trees at the end of the beach.
‘What?’
‘I mean, I know we’re here now but, if she is alive and you just turn up, it might, you know…’ She stopped talking.
‘Shock her into having a heart attack and dropping dead right when we’re about to catch up after all these years?’ He carried on, the path not as clear as it used to be, needing to trample overgrown branches.
‘Well, I wasn’t thinking anything quite that traumatic but, you know, if she is alive, then seeing you again, if it has been years, it will be a shock for her too, won’t it?’
He stopped trampling and turned to look at her. ‘How? Because she doesn’t think that I am dead!’
‘OK,’ Faye said. ‘That is a very good point. But if you knew her phone number and she’s supposed to be dead then the number will be the same and you can—’
He laughed but, even to him, the sound was hollow. ‘Well, at least I now know you’ve never met my yiayia. She does not have a phone number. Just like she never had electricity or running water.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah,’ Kostas said, nodding. ‘She lived in a tree.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, coming up alongside him, side-stepping a thicker branch.
‘I mean exactly what I say and in a few hundred metres you will see too.’
He powered on, vegetation in his face, scratching at his legs, the afternoon sun still beating down.
It was like he was five years old again, rushing back to his yiayia’s home late from practising basketball.
He had been filled with enthusiasm for the future then, fixed on his career trajectory, unfettered by his father’s problems. And then, there it still was, looking almost exactly the same as it had looked back then.
A wooden house built into the tree. A breath left him as his eyes roamed over the exterior.
The planks were more worn in places, the thick ropes fraying a bit, and there were vines covering the wood in some areas but not so much you would think the place was uninhabited.
But it had to be, right? Because his grandmother had passed away…
‘Are you OK?’ Faye asked.
‘Yeah,’ he lied.
‘She really does live in a tree.’
He swallowed. Does. Present tense. It couldn’t be.
Except he could smell that scent in the air.
Not the sharp, clean, fresh fragrance of the eucalyptus leaves on the branches, but the aroma of home-cooking.
Onion, garlic, tomato, cinnamon. Gigantes plaki.
Giant beans. One of his grandmother’s specialities.
Before he could think any more about it Kostas was moving towards the set of wooden steps that wound around the tree heading up.
‘Can you smell it?’ he asked Faye. ‘It is not my imagination.’
‘Food?’ Faye asked. ‘Yes. But when I’m hungry I have been known to hallucinate souvlaki into being.’
‘Kalamaki,’ he corrected. ‘But that is not what it is.’ He got to the top of the steps, stood in front of the door, noted the small pair of worn boots at the doormat as Faye arrived beside him. He took a deep breath.
‘No,’ Faye agreed. ‘It smells like—’
She didn’t get to finish her sentence because suddenly the door flew open like a tornado had just blown through the branches and there was his yiayia. Very much alive. That same tiny little woman wearing her trademark tight headscarf over her head. And then she finished Faye’s sentence for her.
‘It is gigantes plaki. Hands up!’
It was then that Kostas noticed the loaded catapult in his grandmother’s hands. At the very same moment, she seemed to realise who he was.
‘Konstantino.’
His name was like a harsh whisper of disbelief and, for him, hearing his grandmother’s voice, a voice he never thought he would hear again, squeezed his heart like someone had put it in a vice.
He didn’t know what to think, let alone know what to say.
His brain was busy trying to connect dots that weren’t matching, weren’t making the right pattern or conceivable solution.
Sense didn’t have a place in this moment and he didn’t know what to do except stare, establish the physical facts before him.
His yiayia. Her big marble-like blue eyes too large for her other petite facial features, a face now a little more lined with age, black dress that stopped at her knees, floral apron over the top marked with spatters of long-ago cooking or painting or who-knew-what.
And then the catapult was put down and her thin, branch-like arms were around his middle, her head resting just above his navel such was their height difference, squeezing, hugging.
‘You may have thought I was dead, Konstantino. But, really, now you have forgotten how to hug?’
He rubbed her shoulders, patted a hand on top of her headscarf.
‘Oh, so I am a dog now?’ She took a step back, out of the circle of embrace she had made, and held his hands tight. ‘And you have lost your tongue?’
He shook his head but still, apparently, the words weren’t coming.
‘If you do not speak, how are you going to be able to introduce me to your wife?’ she asked.
‘Gosh!’ Faye exclaimed. ‘No, hello, hello, Mrs… Kostas’s grandmother. I am Faye Lawson. I work at the Hotel Margaritári and—’
‘I am Kyriaki. You will come in now. Sometimes I get hikers and I only have so much ammunition for my catapult. I will make coffee and then Konstantinos might have recovered the power of speech.’
He watched his grandmother reach out and squeeze Faye’s arm. She was alive. This was real.
‘Konstantino,’ his grandmother said loud.
‘Ne.’
‘éla. Come.’