Chapter Forty-Three
The Boss
Dimitris is at the top of a ladder, propped against the spa building, whistling between his teeth as he examines the damage caused by last night’s thunderstorm. When Jasmine and Lucia, the beauticians, arrived for work this morning, it was to find water dripping from the ceiling in the main treatment room after hours of torrential rain. Since then, he’s helped them move all their kit into an empty two-bedroom suite nearby, where they have now set up for today’s bookings. There’s always something when you run a hotel, he has discovered over the years here. No day is ever the same– but then again, he wouldn’t have it any other way.
Still, he could have done without this happening on the rare occasion that both his groundsman and
the head of maintenance are off the same weekend. Not least because Danilo and Antoni, two other members of their maintenance team, have called in sick today. Dimitris could have left this particular job until tomorrow in the hope that they’ll be back then, but the forecast is for a further storm tonight, and he doesn’t want to chance the damage getting even worse. Plus, although they were far too professional to complain to him, he could tell Jasmine and Lucia weren’t happy about having to leave the cosy treatment rooms of the sanctuary shed for the makeshift space of a couple of impersonal hotel bedrooms. The sooner they can return here, the happier they and their customers will be– and therefore the happier Dimitris himself too. Staff welfare is paramount if you’re going to run a successful business: something else he has learned.
So it’s down to him, then, to put this right, but that’s okay. He’s not one to forget his tradesman roots, and hopes he’ll never be too proud to climb a ladder and take care of a job himself if need be. It’s not too onerous a task either– a couple of the wooden shingles have come away that need replacing– but now that he’s up here, he can see that a few other roof shingles are split, and one looks a bit rotten, so perhaps it will take longer than he anticipated. Ahh well. It’s a lovely day. He’s got his hammer and flatbar, there’s a box of nails jingling in his pocket, and he’s found a stack of spare shingles in the maintenance shed, so he’s all set. What’s more, it’s good to be out of the office, away from phone calls and emails for a change.
Unknown to Claudia, he’s been keeping an eye on the general email inbox, ever since she became upset by that malaka ’s aggressive email. The reply that Dimitris sent was, in hindsight, pretty fierce, threatening to forward their correspondence to the police with a note of the IP address, should there be any more abuse forthcoming. He’d hoped that would be the end of it, but when he had a look this morning he’d seen that a new message had arrived from the self-styled Ares. ‘Icurse you’ was all it said, and Dimitris rolled his eyes, blocked the sender and moved the email into a folder where Claudia wouldn’t have to see it. He’ll deal with it properly later, follow through with his threats, he thinks, tutting under his breath. Honestly, some people are lunatics, simple as that.
His phone is propped up on the shelf of the guttering, the radio playing from it, and a song comes on that takes him straight back to when Andreas was a small baby. Dimitris was only twenty-four himself, full of energy, and liked to sing his infant son this particular song, whirling around the small apartment with him in his arms. ‘Be careful with him,’ Elena would snap, or ‘You’re getting him overexcited,’ but the baby’s eyes would always be wide and gleeful, and he would chortle at the thrill of being held by his big singing papa, and the way the world was spinning around them so. Oh, how Dimitris adores his children! Andreas, the greatest son, and Lili, his wonderful, talented daughter. His heart bursts with pride for them every time he thinks about them; he never knew a man could be capable of so much love!
‘Eh, Papa,’ Lili scolded him last time he dropped in at the bakery and said something along those lines. ‘You need a woman in your life that isn’t your daughter, you know. My staff are teasing me, calling me Daddy’s Girl, because you come in here so often with all this love of yours.’
‘Another woman? Ahh, no,’ he told her. ‘Ihave no time for that sort of thing now.’
She’d raised a disbelieving eyebrow at him. Even with flour on her cheek, Lili is a force to be reckoned with. After school, she took an apprenticeship at one of the most famous bakeries in Argostoli (and aced it, let this proud father tell you) before setting up her own business selling Greek pastries and bread from a stall in the central market there. Since then she has expanded from her stall to an actual shop just off the high street, and has hired several apprentice bakers as well as shop assistants who serve at the counter. ‘Papa, you do have time,’ she’d told him firmly. ‘You’re just scared, yes? Iunderstand. But you’re a handsome man, you know. You’ve got a lot to offer. Let me sign you up to internet dating, Ican do you a really good profile.’
Absolutely not, he’d told her, but all the same, her words nag away at him. He doesn’t think of himself as the type to be scared of anything– spiders, sharks, snakes; none of those things faze him. Nor do macho arseholes, as a rule. When you’re his size, with his muscles, he’d always back himself if it came to a fight. But love. . . Well, being married to Elena left its mark, put it that way. It knocked the stuffing out of him when she left him and the kids for a Portuguese musician, fifteen years ago; a man who drifted into town with his band, and left again with someone else’s wife. He had done his best to wrap himself and the children in bombproof cladding, round and round and round, to protect them all through the fallout. From that day on, he has devoted himself to fatherhood and work, in that order. Nothing else has had a look-in.
He fits a new shingle into place, first trimming its width, then bashing it up into the felt with the hammer. He tacks a nail either side, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap , enjoying the satisfaction that comes from repair, making good. These dating sites that Lili keeps threatening to sign him up with– mother of God, he looked at one of them the other evening and found it a disheartening prospect. The thought of having to package himself up like that– tap-tap-tap– a photograph, a description, aimed at attracting other people, scrolling through a list. . . no, thank you. Who wants to feel like an item on a supermarket shelf, to be examined, checked for bruises, rejected?
The other thing that kept coming back to him was that, following a cursory glance, he couldn’t see that any of the women there were even half as good-looking or engaging or interesting or funny as– tap-tap-tap– well, in truth, as Claudia.
Okay, he allowed himself to go there. It’s bad, isn’t it, for him to have these feelings for someone who works for him? Yes, he tells himself miserably. Yes, it is. He prides himself on being a good man, an honourable man. He does not want to be that no-good boss who uses his power and position for his own gains. And yet, earlier this week when Claudia started to cry in fright because of the email that she thought was from her bad husband. . . well, something powerful had happened inside Dimitris, a bursting up of protective feelings, so strong he felt like killing this man for scaring her. In the same breath,he felt like putting his arms round her and making sure that nothing bad could ever happen to her again.
This, to put it mildly, was very disturbing to him. Obviously he has done nothing in response, nor will he. She is his employee, damn it, she is out of bounds! Isn’t she?
Using the flatbar to start prying up a split shingle, he finds himself thinking about that email he saw this morning– Icurse you – and rolls his eyes at the ridiculous melodrama of the sender. Then again, maybe it is something of a curse, to find himself with these feelings that he forbids himself to act upon. To find himself still so enmeshed with his self-constructed bombproof cladding that the notion of removing it and stepping out into the open unarmed is daunting.
‘Screw you and screw your stupid curse,’ he mutters under his breath, as the shingle refuses to budge. He works away at it with renewed energy– too much energy, as it turns out. Because as he leans back a little to get some extra purchase on the flatbar, his centre of gravity shifts, his foot skids an inch forward on the rung, and then he loses his balance entirely and falls backwards from the ladder with a yell. His body hits the ground with a horrible crack, the flatbar and hammer are sent whirling into the undergrowth, and everything goes black.