Chapter 8 The Recycling Explanation
By the fourth week of June I had become, if not competent, then at least consistent in a way that could be built upon.
Lex had begun trusting me with slightly more specific tasks — not the things that required years of kitchen experience, but the things that required a reliable person and a reasonable quantity of common sense.
Explaining daily specials. Managing the outdoor tables when the afternoon regulars arrived.
Answering questions about the island from tourists who wanted more than Derek's map and rather less than the regional history document I had read in full on my third night here out of what I can only describe as thoroughness.
I was, I realised, good at explaining things.
I had always been good at this. Greenpath's whole pitch had been built on my ability to translate complex supply chain data into language that made boards nod and reach for their chequebooks, and while I was not going to think about Greenpath (I was doing quite well at not thinking about Greenpath, thank you, ten days of morning harbour walks and the specific mindfulness of not breaking any more plates had been very helpful in this regard) — the explaining skill had transferred.
My job, I had concluded, was to be the person who translated between tourists and island.
I was good at this. I had an accent that British tourists found reassuring and European tourists found unthreatening, I knew when to add context and when to give a straight answer, and I had read Derek's folder on island logistics cover to cover, which put me ahead of most people who'd been coming here for a decade.
I explained the island recycling system to a total of seven tourists in my first two weeks, which I mention only because this is how the incident happened.
* * *
The couple arrived on a Tuesday — German, mid-fifties, good walking shoes, the organised holiday type with a laminated itinerary I spotted when they opened their bag.
They had questions. This was fine; I liked questions.
Their English was excellent and they were interested and I was by this point quite well-briefed on the island's recycling arrangements (Derek had a folder), the seasonal fishing schedules, and the ferry timetable.
We covered all of these things. We were getting on well.
And then the woman asked about the plastic recycling codes.
Here is what I knew: Kaliroi had a four-bin system, which was more sophisticated than many tourist destinations and which the island was rightly proud of.
I had, in my first days, read the information leaflet, which was available at The Blue Door and also at Elena's counter.
I had deployed this information to three prior tourist couples without incident.
What I had apparently not done was read the fine print note at the bottom of the leaflet, in slightly smaller type, about plastics codes 3 and 6.
"Code 3 and 6 plastics go in the general waste here," the woman said, very pleasantly, reading back to me what I had just told her with the specific tone of a person double-checking something that doesn't quite match their research.
"That's right," I said, with confidence. "Same as most island systems."
I was wrong. I know that now. I was wrong in a specific and quite small way — codes 3 and 6 on Kaliroi did go in a fifth collection point that had been installed the previous spring and which was not yet on the main leaflet — but I said it with such confidence and such professional familiarity that the woman wrote it in her itinerary notebook and they thanked me and went back to their calamari.
I cleared the table adjacent to theirs.
"Plastics codes," said a voice from the taverna doorway.
I turned. Lex was leaning against the frame — not in a casual way, Lex did not do things in casual ways, but in the way of a man who has been standing in a doorway watching something unfold and has arrived at a conclusion.
"The recycling explanation," I said.
"Yes."
"Was I wrong?"
"Not entirely." He said this the way someone says not entirely when they mean specifically, yes, in one place. "Codes 3 and 6. There's a fifth collection point. The post office alley. It was added last spring."
I looked at the couple, who were eating their calamari with the undisturbed happiness of people who had received correctly sourced information and were moving on with their holiday.
"How many people," I said, "have I told the wrong thing to."
"Three." He said it without hesitation. He'd been counting. "This week."
"I'll write a correction note," I said. "For the outdoor tables."
"I already did," he said.
He produced, from his apron pocket, a small laminated card.
New laminated card. Blue, not the white of the recycling one, so I would know which was which.
PLASTICS CODES 3 & 6: Fifth collection point, post office alley.
Plus a small map I recognised as having been drawn with the same decisiveness as everything else he did, which was to say: confident line, no fussing.
He had made this before I asked.
Before I knew I'd got it wrong. Before I'd had a chance to ask what I'd got wrong, he had already identified the gap, made the correction, and produced a physical artefact.
I took it from him. Our fingers didn't touch. The card was warm from his pocket.
"Thank you," I said.
He went back inside.
I put the card in my apron pocket, next to the recycling one and the herb list. My apron pocket was becoming an archive of every thing he'd noticed before I had.
* * *
I counted the cards on the ferry dock wall that evening, spread out beside me like evidence at a hearing I was conducting into my own behaviour.
The laminated white recycling card. The herb list (technically not laminated, but precise — dendrolivano, thymari, rigani, each spelled out in his handwriting, which was the handwriting of someone who had made his letters do exactly what he wanted and saw no reason to negotiate with them further).
The blue plastics-codes card with its small confident map.
A fourth thing I'd added myself — a hand-written note on a serviette with the morning delivery schedule that Elena had given me in rapid Greek and I'd written out in English on whatever came to hand — which I shouldn't group with the others because I'd made that one myself, but it was in the same pocket, and standing among them felt somewhat like a collaborative document at this point.
Four items. I'd been here twenty-two days.
(Approximately one corrective informational object every five and a half days. I was, professionally speaking, a person who noticed patterns. This one was very clear.)
What I was trying not to make it into was a thing.
It was not a thing. A man who cared about the taverna's reputation was keeping his staff accurately informed by the most efficient method available.
The most efficient method available was apparently laminated cards.
This was practical. It was also, incidentally, exactly the kind of system I would have designed for Greenpath's onboarding materials, had Greenpath's onboarding materials been a priority to anyone, which they hadn't been, which was partly why the junior consultants had been sent out to boards with subtly incorrect data frameworks and nobody had caught it early enough to —
I put that thought very firmly back where it had come from, because it was a thought that contained a spiral, and the spiral was: the data we were submitting was wrong, and I didn't catch it, and I should have caught it, and I'd been not-following that spiral for six weeks, and tonight I was sitting on a dock in the Aegean with four pieces of information in my apron pocket, and I was going to stay here.
The point was: he kept information accurate.
He did it quietly, before anyone had to ask, and in a form that could be referenced.
This was the behaviour of a person who thought about systems. Who anticipated gaps before they became problems. Who was, in the language of my former professional life, proactive in a way that almost no one actually was, despite what everyone's LinkedIn profiles claimed.
I had, at Greenpath, spent considerable energy creating systems that were supposed to catch exactly this kind of error. The systems had been good. The systems had not been the problem. What I was still working out — quietly, on dock walls, in the evenings — was where my part in it had been.
This was not the moment for that. This was a moment for: four cards in a pocket, twenty-two days on an island, the lights coming on at the harbour one by one.
The card was warm from his apron pocket. It was cool now. I couldn't feel the warmth anymore.
I held it for another moment.
I put it back in my pocket.
"This is not softening," I told the dock. The dock had no opinions. This was what I liked about the dock.