Faye’s eyes went to Saffron in the pool. She was talking to one of the guests in the water now – a girl her age.
‘Just wait,’ she said to Kostas. ‘Just let me tell Saffron where I’m going.’
‘Where are you going?’ he asked.
‘With you. To Kerasia. To make sure you don’t crash that motorbike.’ She swallowed. ‘I wouldn’t want any blowback on the hotel if the island’s basketball saint got injured again.’
33
KERASIA
It could be nothing. It probably was nothing. But, then again, it could be everything. Kostas’s head was a ball of electrical wires all scrambled and pulsing at different speeds, hot and debilitating, and he was doing his best not to let any of this show.
‘Does she not have a phone number?’ Faye asked as they left the motorbike and the tourists lounging on the beach behind and walked into the trees at the end of the beach.
‘What?’
‘I mean, I know we’re here now but, if she is alive and you just turn up, it might, you know…’ She stopped talking.
‘Shock her into having a heart attack and dropping dead right when we’re about to catch up after all these years?’ He carried on, the path not as clear as it used to be, needing to trample overgrown branches.
‘Well, I wasn’t thinking anything quite that traumatic but, you know, if she is alive, then seeing you again, if it has been years, it will be a shock for her too, won’t it?’
He stopped trampling and turned to look at her. ‘How? Because she doesn’t think that I am dead!’
‘OK,’ Faye said. ‘That is a very good point. But if you knew her phone number and she’s supposed to be dead then the number will be the same and you can?—’
He laughed but, even to him, the sound was hollow. ‘Well, at least I now know you’ve never met myyiayia. She does not have a phone number. Just like she never had electricity or running water.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah,’ Kostas said, nodding. ‘She lived in a tree.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, coming up alongside him, side-stepping a thicker branch.
‘I mean exactly what I say and in a few hundred metres you will see too.’
He powered on, vegetation in his face, scratching at his legs, the afternoon sun still beating down. It was like he was five years old again, rushing back to hisyiayia’s home late from practising basketball. He had been filled with enthusiasm for the future then, fixed on his career trajectory, unfettered by his father’s problems. And then, there it still was, looking almost exactly the same as it had looked back then. A wooden house built into the tree. A breath left him as his eyes roamed over the exterior. The planks were more worn in places, the thick ropes fraying a bit, and there were vines covering the wood in some areas but not so much you would think the place was uninhabited. But it had to be, right? Because his grandmother had passed away…
‘Are you OK?’ Faye asked.
‘Yeah,’ he lied.
‘She really does live in a tree.’
He swallowed.Does. Present tense. It couldn’t be. Except he could smell that scent in the air. Not the sharp, clean, fresh fragrance of the eucalyptus leaves on the branches, but the aroma of home-cooking. Onion, garlic, tomato, cinnamon.Gigantes plaki. Giant beans. One of his grandmother’s specialities. Before he could think any more about it Kostas was moving towards the set of wooden steps that wound around the tree heading up.
‘Can you smell it?’ he asked Faye. ‘It is not my imagination.’
‘Food?’ Faye asked. ‘Yes. But when I’m hungry I have been known to hallucinatesouvlakiinto being.’
‘Kalamaki,’ he corrected. ‘But that is not what it is.’ He got to the top of the steps, stood in front of the door, noted the small pair of worn boots at the doormat as Faye arrived beside him. He took a deep breath.
‘No,’ Faye agreed. ‘It smells like?—’
She didn’t get to finish her sentence because suddenly the door flew open like a tornado had just blown through the branches and there was hisyiayia. Very much alive. That same tiny little woman wearing her trademark tight headscarf over her head. And then she finished Faye’s sentence for her.
‘It isgigantes plaki. Hands up!’
