Chapter 11 Meltemi
Derek told me about the meltemi on my third day on the island, back in June when everything was still quite warm and still and I had not yet fully absorbed that I was going to stay.
"It comes in July," he said, the way people say rain is coming in England — with the resigned competence of someone who has made their peace with a large and inevitable thing.
"Strong wind off the north. Can last a week.
Can last three. Everything rattles. The ferry gets temperamental.
The guests get..." He considered. "Philosophical. "
"Philosophical," I said.
"Or they complain about the shutters. Either way, you can't stop it."
I filed this away alongside learn the table numbers and don't take the outdoor section on a full cruise day and do not under any circumstances ask Barba-Nikos what he recommends, and then I did not think about it again for five weeks because the weather was, frankly, glorious in a way that felt personally directed at me, as though the Aegean had read my file and decided I deserved some compensatory sunshine.
Then it was the second week of July and the meltemi arrived.
* * *
It arrived at half past nine on a Tuesday morning.
I know this because I had just finished setting the outdoor section — napkins tucked under the ceramic salt and pepper sets, menus positioned at each table at the angle Elena preferred (not flat on the table, not propped vertically; diagonal, which I had only managed to ask about by pointing at it and making a questioning face at Theria, who had demonstrated twice and then patted my shoulder in a way that conveyed you'll get there eventually) — and I was walking back to the service station when the first proper gust came through.
It went straight through the outdoor section like it had a specific grievance with the outdoor section.
Three napkins went immediately. A menu went sideways and was caught by the adjacent table's chair leg. Someone's plastic folder of takeaway menus for the August specials, which Elena had been assembling on the service station, launched off the counter and came directly at my face at high velocity.
I caught it.
I caught most of it. Some individual menus escaped into the harbour.
This was the beginning.
* * *
The meltemi, I learned over the following days, was not a dramatic weather event in the way of storms. It was not lightning or torrential rain or the kind of weather that cancels things and lets you stay inside feeling cosy about it.
It was simply: wind. Persistent, muscular, opinionated wind that rattled the shutters at night and turned the sea into small white peaks and made the cats hunker down in doorways looking as though they'd been personally affronted.
The Aegean Overlord spent three days on Derek's front step with an expression that suggested he was composing a formal letter of complaint.
The taverna adapted. We stopped using the lightweight table settings.
Elena produced sets of ceramic condiment holders that were substantially more aerodynamic.
The outdoor section stayed open because it always stayed open through the meltemi — closing it was, apparently, not done, and Elena said ochi at the mere suggestion in a way that settled the matter — but we added a wind protocol, which mainly involved checking on the menus approximately every fifteen minutes and accepting that some things would migrate during service.
I found it, unexpectedly, quite satisfying.
There was something to manage. The ordinary management problems of the shift now had a weather variable, and this meant I was properly occupied for the first time since my brain had catalogued the supply chain, and my background analysis had something to run on, which meant I was not — as I had been for the previous week and a half — running it on things that were not useful to run analysis on.
I was being productive. I was managing the meltemi.
I was absolutely not thinking about the napkin in Lex's pocket.
I was being very sensible, actually.
* * *
It was the third day of the meltemi and we were at lunch service.
The ferry had been delayed — one of its temperamental episodes Derek had warned me about — which meant a later lunch rush and a more compressed high-season capacity window, and I was managing the outdoor section with the particular focused energy of someone who has a genuine operational problem to solve and finds this a tremendous relief.
I was also managing the menus.
This was the thing about the meltemi and the outdoor menus: you could weight them down with the condiment sets for most of service, but there were these particular gust cycles, these peaks inside the sustained wind, where a table getting their menus at the wrong moment would have them taken.
I had, by day three, developed a reasonably accurate intuitive read on the cycle.
I'd worked out that there was roughly a ninety-second window between major gusts.
I was explaining this to a table of four when I heard the particular rattle that meant: incoming.
The plastic folder was on the service station again.
Elena had been adding new menus to it — the folder migrated to the service station during service because it was closer to the section — and either someone had left it unsealed or the last gust had unsealed it, because the moment I turned around, Lex was already at the service station.
He had reached for the folder. I had reached for the folder.
We had reached for the folder at the same moment, from slightly different angles, and now we were both holding it closed against the wind, our hands overlapping, approximately eight inches apart from each other, with the meltemi doing something unspeakable to my hair.
The gust died.
We stood there for approximately three seconds.
The folder was, at this point, quite secure.
He didn't step back.
He had come from behind me, which meant — when I became aware of the geometry of this — he was very close, and looking at the side of my face, and I was looking at the folder because the folder was the appropriate place to look, and the three seconds were not a long time by any objective measurement but they had a quality to them that was unlike the other seconds I had spent standing at the service station.
Then the meltemi, which had no interest whatsoever in the quality of my three seconds, produced a second gust from a slightly different direction.
The folder held. The individual menus inside it did not.
They went in a fan, directly into my face, at a velocity I would prefer not to estimate. Several escaped into the outdoor section. One achieved the harbour.
I stood at the service station with a menu stuck to my cheek and the distinct sensation of being in a slapstick scene where the universe had identified the appropriate resolution.
I peeled the menu off my face.
Lex had stepped back.
"Table nine wanted these," I said, with whatever dignity remained available. (Table nine had asked for the takeaway menus for the August specials. This was a completely coherent reason for me to have been at the service station.)
He looked at me. His expression was the expression he used operationally — assessing, contained, the professional face — but his eyes had held on me for half a second too long to file cleanly under professional, and I was not going to examine this because examining it would require me to acknowledge the three seconds in a way I was not prepared to do.
"Table nine is inside," he said.
"Yes." I looked at the remaining menus. "I know that now."
There was a pause.
"I'll take it out to them," I said, and went inside.
* * *
For the rest of service, he was very careful about maintaining professional distance.
I noticed this. I noticed it in the way I noticed when the order timing was slightly off — not dramatically, not in a way anyone else would see, but I'd been watching the patterns long enough that the absence of a particular kind of proximity (at the pass-through, at the service station, walking past with two plates when the section was busy enough to require it) was observable.
He was being careful.
Which meant the three seconds had been — not just on my side.
I put this observation in the category of things I am not going to do anything with right now and continued managing the outdoor section.
* * *
After service, while I was doing the end-of-section reset, Elena came out with two coffees and sat at her table in the slightly pointed way she had when she expected company. I had learned this. I sat.
She looked at the harbour for a moment. The meltemi was doing its thing with the moored boats — a gentle irregular rocking, the ropes going taut and slack.
"The folder," she said.
"Table nine wanted the August specials," I said.
"Mm."
She said nothing else for a moment. The harbourside light was doing the late-afternoon thing — everything going warm and a bit gilded, the white buildings catching it, the bougainvillea looking almost orange.
"He hasn't left the island," Elena said, "in four years."
I looked at her.
She was looking at the harbour. Her expression was the particular version she used when she was saying something she was choosing her words around carefully, the version that always made me feel like I was getting a carefully edited summary of a longer and more significant original text.
"I know," I said. Nikos had told me, back in June. "His father."
"Among other reasons," Elena said.
I thought about that. The way the phrase had the shape of a door left deliberately ajar — enough to show there was something behind it, not enough to show you what.
"Elena," I said, because I was going to ask this and then she was going to tell me as much or as little as she decided I should know, and that was going to have to be sufficient. "Is he all right?"
She looked at me then. The assessment she gave me was very different from the one she gave most things.
"He's the same as he has been for four years," she said. "But he is not, I think, in exactly the same situation as he was last week."
I had no particular response to this. There was no neutral response to this. My face was doing something that was not the neutral response.
Elena drank her coffee.
I drank mine.
"The invoices," I said eventually, because I was going to recover this conversation by talking about supply chains and that was absolutely what was happening. "I started sketching the adjusted schedule. I could have something draft by tomorrow if—"
"The invoices are in the office," Elena said. "Lex will show you."
I considered pointing out that Lex could also simply leave them at the service station for me and I could collect them at my convenience. I did not point this out.
"All right," I said.
Elena finished her coffee and went inside.
I sat with the harbour for another five minutes. The Aegean Overlord materialised from somewhere and arranged himself on the adjacent chair with the energy of someone who had been watching and had opinions but was prepared to keep them to himself for now.
"I know," I said.
He cleaned his paw.
* * *
Priya sent a voice note that evening.
This was the third one she'd sent since she'd left to file her piece for the magazine, and the voice notes were getting progressively more pointed in the way Priya's voice notes always did when she had formed a theory and was waiting for corroborating evidence.
"Okay," she said. "I have been very restrained.
I would like you to know that. I have sent approximately zero follow-up questions about the chef since leaving the island which, if you know me, and you do, you know is a significant act of emotional self-regulation.
" A pause. "This voice note is the follow-up questions. "
I listened to it while sitting on the Blue Door terrace watching the meltemi do things to the olive trees on the hill.
"I'm coming back next week," Priya said.
"I've had to talk the magazine into the second instalment piece — 'returning to the island in peak meltemi season, the wind that changes everything, something atmospheric' — so you're not to go doing anything dramatic before I get there.
I have a very particular role in this narrative and that role requires me to be present. "
There was a brief pause.
"Please tell me something is happening."
I thought about the three seconds at the service station. The folder, held shut between us, and the wind dying, and him not stepping back.
I typed back: Nothing is happening.
"I am very worried about what I'm going to miss," she replied. In text, which meant she had seen through me and was now conserving voice-note energy for maximum later impact.