Chapter 7 #2
Vicky tried to keep her face neutral. She wasn’t even keen on the kidneys in steak and kidney pie, let alone pieces of intestine. The soup had a thoroughly unappealing look, dotted with little bits of green.
Angeliki ladled some into a bowl and placed it in front of her along with a large chunk of bread.
‘Tuck in. As our special guest, you must try it first.’
Must I? was Vicky’s first thought, but all eyes were on her. She understood now why Suzie had been giving her a funny look. Crafty mare. She could have warned her.
Vicky put a spoonful of the soup in her mouth, and was hard-pressed not to spit out the bitter, metallic mixture. She crunched down on something chewy and unyielding and tried desperately to banish the word lung from her mind. The concoction was truly vile, but she couldn’t disappoint her hostess.
‘Mmmm, interesting. Very … distinct taste.’
She didn’t want to praise the soup to high heaven in case they gave her even more of the disgusting stuff.
Vicky couldn’t catch Suzie’s eye, as she’d give herself away. They already knew each other pretty well, even after a few weeks, and she wouldn’t be able to fake it. The bread helped take away the worst of it, followed by large gulps of wine.
When she looked up again, all three of them were laughing.
‘It’s OK, you don’t have to persevere.’ Angeliki moved the bowl onto her own placemat, and Vicky breathed a sigh of relief.
‘Although I’ve slaved over a hot stove, I understand that magiritsa is a real Marmite experience, which was coincidentally something I couldn’t bear when I lived in Britain. Do you remember, Vick?’
Vicky smiled and nodded.
‘You lived on the stuff smothered on toast between nursing shifts, while I thought I’d vomit the first time I tasted it. I never changed my opinion in all the years we lived together. So, you’re excused. Here, have some more bread.’
Vicky tucked into the excellent bread while Angeliki helped herself and Nick to enormous portions of the soup.
A glance to the side showed her that Suzie only had a small piece of bread on her plate.
‘Isn’t she having any soup?’ Vicky pointed in her friend’s direction.
‘Oh no, she hates it.’
Vicky gave Suzie her fiercest stare, and her new friend had the grace to look shamefaced.
‘Thanks for letting me know that I might hate it too.’
‘I didn’t want to influence you either way. You might have loved it.’
‘Mmmmm.’
She’d have to get Suzie back for that one.
With the soup hoovered up, and a couple of glasses of wine in, Angeliki was ready to explain the egg game with her usual enthusiasm and handed each of them a brightly coloured oval from the bowl.
‘We call this tsoúgrisma, and it symbolises the resurrection of Jesus, with the hard shell representing the sealed tomb, the red dye his blood, and the cracking of the eggs the emergence from the tomb.’
Vicky picked up her egg and turned it over in her hand.
‘It all sounds pretty serious.’
Angeliki smiled.
‘The message may be, but the game’s simple. We take it in turns to tap each other’s eggs, and whoever ends up with an unbroken egg at the end is the winner and will receive good luck for the whole year.’
To her astonishment, Vicky was the one left with the complete egg, after much squealing and laughter.
‘Yes! I’ve never won anything in my life. And I could do with some luck right now.’
Why had she said that out loud? It was true, but fortunately the others were too busy talking to notice.
After eating the hard-boiled egg with yet more bread and wine, a yawn eventually escaped her that she couldn’t hold in any longer.
Angeliki stood up and gestured towards the empty plates.
‘Right, everyone’s tired. And we need to prepare. This is nothing, just the warm-up. Remember, there’ll be twenty of us here tomorrow.’
Vicky glanced at her phone. It was already two o’clock in the morning. She’d been up for nearly twenty hours. Luckily, she’d agreed to stay at Suzie’s tonight, which meant a short walk into town, rather than going all the way back to the sanctuary.
Maeve and Seamus had insisted they would stay with the animals over the main Easter celebrations, and they’d asked for a couple of volunteers to stay too.
Vicky had been prepared to do it and forgo her meal at Angeliki and Nick’s, but she was relieved she didn’t have to.
Aoife, the young woman in the neighbouring room, and the guy she’d arrived with, Jordan, had stepped forward.
She’d noticed him coming out of the bathroom on their floor a couple of times, even though Aoife had described him as just a mate.
From the amount of giggling coming from Aoife’s room late at night, things had obviously moved on.
Young love was cute, and she was sure the two of them would relish some time alone, so she was guilt-free and ready to party.
Feeling guilty about one thing or another had been part of her DNA for so long, it was hard to shake off.
Guilt that she wasn’t enough wife for Ian, enough mother for Tasha and enough daughter for her parents.
It was easy to look back now and see exactly how her husband had manipulated her emotions and toyed with her self-confidence, but hindsight was a wonderful thing.
Ian had been all too ready to blame her for every little thing that went wrong in his life.
Sometimes she’d felt like just putting her hands up the moment he walked in the door in a foul mood and saying, ‘Whatever it is, it’s my fault,’ to shorten the inevitable sequence of events.
It was something she didn’t have to worry about anymore, but in her experience men never seemed to be overly troubled by guilt; it was very much a female condition.
Angeliki and Nick stood with their arms round each other at the door to wave them off. Not so young love could also be very cute. She wasn’t looking at it for herself, but still.
Angeliki shouted after them into the night.
‘Don’t forget, back here at eleven sharp, for coffee and koulourákia, my special Easter biscuits. Spitikó of course! And then the feast!’
She and Suzie smiled and waved in Angeliki’s direction. Vicky wasn’t sure her stomach could take any more nasty surprises.