Chapter 27
CARRIE
‘Nana. You weren’t lying when you said Dafni’s rescue centre was “farther up the hillside”,’ said Carrie as the two of them caught their breath. She flapped her arms up and down, only making herself warmer. She pulled a water bottle out of her rucksack and took a swig as cicadas chirped.
‘Sorry, my doll. My moped has broken down. Normally my dad would fix it quickly as I do deliveries. But schools will start to close in Europe soon – tourists will be everywhere. He is baking madly and filling up our big freezer out the back of Boosalis with his delicious pastries.’
They’d left Carrie’s villa twenty minutes ago, on foot, and stopped under a plane tree, grateful for the shade.
Carrie wore a cap with a wide visor and didn’t know how Nana managed simply with one of her colourful head scarves.
Her red lipstick hadn’t even smudged with the perspiration.
Nana’s hooped gold earrings shook as she teased.
‘But oh dear, Carrie, life in Manchester has not kept you very fit. This is not exactly a marathon.’
‘How’s your breathing now?’ asked Carrie innocently as her friend puffed. ‘Perhaps we should sit down for a moment.’
Nana’s eyes crinkled with laughter and they both sat on top of a grassy mound.
‘Seriously, how do you cope with this heat? It’s overpowering and only eleven in the morning.’
‘The sun is our friend, my sweet. It gives us vitamins, cheers us up, makes us sleep better and brings in visitors and their wallets.’
It also contributed to climate change and caused sunburn, but Carrie didn’t say that, and it wasn’t as if either of those things were strictly the sun’s fault. Nana was right. Somehow waking up to blue skies made everything better. Ariana and Rae would love it here.
God, she missed the besties she’d spent so many rainy days with.
‘You are deep in thought,’ said Nana.
Carrie paused. ‘Yes. My friends, back in Manchester…’
Nana tilted her head. ‘This Ariana?’ she asked. ‘The reason you didn’t want to call me that?’
Carrie nodded. ‘There’s Rae too. The three of us have been inseparable… but I’ve been a complete idiot and they don’t want anything else to do with me. I don’t blame them.’
Nana patted Carrie on the knee. ‘The sun has often reminded me of arguments – and I’ve had plenty of those over the years, believe me.
’ She gave a wry smile. ‘As the sun rises, that’s like a disagreement brewing.
If it’s a bad one that can’t be resolved, it reaches a peak, like midday, and blazes away, blinding everyone involved to reason.
But then the rawness, the heat, taper away and slowly the sun sets into a calmer phase of civil discussion, of resolve.
’ She shrugged. ‘If your argument with your friends is still blazing, hang in there, that can’t last forever.
Then, when the temperature of words, of emotions, lowers, like the sun, that will be your time to really make amends. ’
They got up and carried on walking. On the way up the hillside they talked about their younger lives.
Must have been the heat, must have been the openness of the Greek way of life, but Carrie told her that it had always been her and her mum, and that Mum had died last year.
She normally skimmed over that with people she didn’t know well, afraid they’d probe and want to dig into the detail.
But somehow Carrie had picked up a vibe that proved to be right and Nana didn’t pry.
Instead she gave Carrie a hug and then opened up about her family business.
Her background was very different to Carrie’s, with two sisters and twin brothers, along with ten cousins, most of whom also lived in Paros.
One of her sisters was on the mainland, selling property, but the other was a local chef.
Her brothers lived in Tolmiros, one helping her and her parents to run the café, his twin working for the Paros tourist office in Parikia.
‘Must be great having so much family around,’ said Carrie who’d fallen behind.
Nana didn’t speak.
‘But it’s okay too if not,’ Carrie added quickly. ‘My mum’s parents were messed up. Much as I dream of a perfect family life, I know it doesn’t exist for everyone.’
Nana turned around, took Carrie’s hand and pulled her along. ‘I’m not perfect. Neither is my family. We jostle along as best we can. All I know is, if any of them had an emergency, I’d be there quicker than our island’s falcons going in for the kill.’
They trudged on and soon a rectangular building came into view.
It lacked the prettiness of the buildings in the village, with their flowerpots and ivy growing up the white stonewash.
There was chain-link fencing all around.
But the surrounding nature painted a beautiful picture, with the mix of evergreen and deciduous trees, the geese that flew overhead, the sky more blue than the wild lupins standing proud amongst the long grass.
Nana opened the gate and they headed up the right-hand side and towards a small detached building with the word Grafeio written above the door.
Nana explained that Grafeio meant office.
They stepped to one side as a man in jeans and a tight black T-shirt with a designer label on it came out.
Around their age, he wore statement black-rimmed glasses, and a smile twitched at the corners of his mouth.
‘Yassas,’ he said to them both as he reached them, and he beamed at Carrie.
He headed towards the larger building, the cattery.
Nana didn’t reply like Carrie did. Strange, she’d always been so polite.
Now they were closer, Carrie spotted individual pens along the front of the cattery, with glass fronts and shutters.
Yet all of them were empty. They went into the office and were met by a desk on which lay scattered paperwork.
Box files were jumbled on shelves. Dafni looked up from her desk and brushed loose strands of rainbow-coloured hair from a side plait out of her eyes. A fan blew in the corner.
‘Nana! Carrie! Lovely to see you. Hoping a new volunteer means I’ll have more time to keep on top of the paperwork.’ She took a mouthful of coffee and groaned as the postman arrived, handing over a pile of envelopes.
‘Would you like me to show Carrie what we do?’ asked Nana gently.
‘My little star, parakalo, yes, please, please.’
They went out of the building and along the dusty ground, in the direction the man had gone, right to the end, and they turned and entered through a large door.
‘Why are the pens empty?’ asked Carrie as they stood in a corridor and Nana put their small rucksacks in one of the lockers.
‘They are too hot during the day,’ she said and put the locker key in her pocket.
‘To keep it shady, we often close the shutters and the cats wouldn’t have a view.
So we have a large communal room, with air conditioning, that looks onto the back garden – and small pens within that space for the shyer cats to retire into.
Also a linked outdoor area they access via a cat flap, with fencing all around.
If it gets too hot, they come back in.’ She jerked her head and opened another door. ‘See for yourself.’
Once past that first door, Nana put in the code to go through another one, making sure that the first behind them was firmly closed.
Oh, how wonderful. Carrie walked into a room alive with the meowing of about…
twenty cats dotted around, on climbing structures, playing with toys, or simply asleep in comfortable beds, relaxed with their eyes closed.
The man with the glasses was filling up water bowls.
Nana was about to speak when her phone rang. She took it out of her back pocket.
‘I’ll take this – outside. Will you be okay for a minute?’
Carrie nodded and bent down to stroke a curious white and tabby cat, its coat a little fluffy. Carefully she stroked its head. ‘You must be hot,’ she said and ran her hand down its back.
‘That’s an Aegean cat,’ said the man, whose English only had a slight Greek accent.
He was accompanied by the smell of a potent aftershave that, if pushed, she’d have to say had notes of bleach!
‘They are semi-longhaired. We have several here.’ He pointed to a ginger one.
‘Linus there goes outside all day usually, even at midday. He must have known we had a visitor.’
‘I’m volunteering, as it happens,’ said Carrie, and she was about to introduce herself when two cats hissed at each other. The man hurried over and lifted up a rod with a feather on the end. He waved the feathery toy in the air between them and both settled down.
‘Mostly the cats get on,’ he said. ‘Many like socialising but some don’t, and find a private corner where they are perfectly happy watching the action. Whereas these two…’ He pointed to the two white cats. ‘They are siblings. We won’t be re-homing them together.’
‘Does Dafni have much success with finding them homes?’ she asked.
The man rocked his head from side to side.
‘I have to say I take a lot of the credit – Dafni is great at the practical side, ordering in food, doing the cleaning. However, she gets easily distracted. Now and then I’ve had to help her manage difficult administration tasks and I’m much more of a business person than Dafni, doing deals, getting people to sign up, getting donations. ’
Wow. Talk about straight-talking. Maybe that confidence wasn’t so appealing.
‘You work here full-time?’
He belly-laughed. ‘No, no… I have a proper job as an IT consultant for the government. Can’t say more than that.’ He tapped his nose, wrapped up in an air of importance.
If Rae were here, she’d have been making gagging gestures.
‘My name is—’
Another loud hiss interrupted him and he stopped to make sure a pair of striped cats were only play-fighting. ‘I volunteer,’ he continued. ‘Like you. Because that’s the kind of people we are, right?’