Footprints in the Sand

But I didn’t expect it to be this far away from it all.

Lexos was really off the beaten track. We flew to a larger island first – Kos. And then we had to travel on by ferry. Dad said I’d love Greece. It was the furthest I’d ever been from England. He said it was the first place where you actually felt the influence of the East. Dad was really into the East. He’d gone overland all the way to India and back when he was young, and he’d kept a ratty kind of embroidered Afghan coat in the loft. I used to dress up in it when I was little. It smelt like a dead goat.

But he was right about Greece. It did have a sense of the East. As soon as I got off the plane I could feel it in the warm dry heat of the sun, soaking into me.

We hired a taxi to take us from the airport to the ferry port, and the driver played this kind of clattering Eastern music on his radio. We drove past little whitewashed churches with strange round domes, and all the old women were dressed like witches in long fluttering black dresses. They held scarves up to their faces to keep out the dust. And the air smelt different. Hot and perfumed with herbs and pine and something sweet and kind of musky. And now and then there was just the odd whiff of dead goat smell. Maybe that was what made it feel Eastern to me – by association with the coat.

The boat trip took hours. We had to queue to board with all these backpackers who looked as if they’d been in Greece all their lives. I couldn’t help noticing that some of the guys were gorgeous. Their skins were a deep bronze and their hair and clothes bleached as if they’d been left out in the sun for months. I felt really self-conscious with my white skin and my brand new jeans and T-shirt – and I was with my mother too. Pretty humiliating.

Mum said we should go up on the outer deck in case it got rough. By the time we got up there, there were no seats left, so we had to sit on the deck and lean on our suitcases. But she was right. It did get pretty rough.

Apparently, there’d been this massive storm the night before. The wind had died down but the sea was still recovering from its effects. After about an hour of being tossed around I started to feel really sick and my head ached. I must have looked sick too, because this old Greek lady leant over and handed me half a lemon. I didn’t know what I was meant to do with it. But she held it to her nose and sniffed and nodded. And I did the same and I felt a bit better. Mum said it was a traditional Greek cure for sea-sickness. So I nodded and sniffed and smiled at the old woman and she laughed and nodded back. We kept up this nodding and sniffing and smiling routine for the rest of the trip.

I’ll never forget my first view of Lexos. Some paradise! But, quite frankly, in the state I was in – any bit of dry land was as good as any other. As we drew nearer, the truly dire condition of the port came into focus. Boy, was it run-down. The buildings were mostly rough squareish boxes of concrete and grey breeze block. Most of them had odd bent ribs of rusty iron sticking out from their flat roofs as if they’d meant to build another storey on top and changed their minds. I think my first impression must’ve registered on my face because Mum was desperately trying to stay positive.

‘Oh look Lucy, there’s a palm tree,’ she said, as her eye lit on the sole acceptable item in the panorama. I was beyond a reply.

I wasn’t actually sick until I got on shore. And then I was, dramatically, behind a cactus. Cheers! Welcome to Lexos, I thought to myself as I took sips from the bottle of water Mum sympathetically handed to me.

After we’d sat at a café for a while and I’d drunk a lemonade, I started to feel a bit better.

‘Well, I hope you don’t think we’re going to stay here,’ I said as I recovered the faculty of speech.

‘Oh, it’s not that bad,’ said Mum, looking fixedly in the direction of the palm tree.

‘Mum – it’s ghastly and you know it.’

‘Let’s get back on the boat then,’ she threatened, pointing to where the last boxes of freight were being loaded into the hold. ‘It’ll be leaving in a minute.’

‘Ha ha, very funny,’ I said. ‘I’d have to be anaesthetized before you’d get me back on that.’

‘Feeling any better?’

‘Mmm… the lemonade helped.’

‘Well, if you’re up to it, I reckon we ought to find the Tourist Office and see if they can suggest somewhere to stay.’

We trekked miles in search of it. Mum kept spotting all these little signs with Ts for Information on them which seemed designed to take us on a scenic tour of the town. I’d never been anywhere so Third World. The roads were cracked and pot-holed and smelt of donkeys, and the few bars or restaurants we came across just had men sitting outside who stared at us. The whole place felt vaguely threatening.

‘I don’t like it here,’ I said.

‘Oh don’t be silly, Lucy. Ports are always like this. It’ll be fine when we get out into the country – you’ll see.’

We must have been walking round in circles because when we eventually found the Tourist Office, it was located more or less where we’d disembarked from the ferry. It was in a forbidding grey concrete block next door to the Customs Office. It had bars over the windows and looked like a prison. But there was a sign outside with the same jolly tourist picture showing the pot of geraniums that we’d seen on the front of Mum’s brochure. I cracked up when I spotted the slogan written underneath: You’ll learn to love Lexos.

‘What’s so funny?’ demanded Mum. I think she was losing her cool by this time.

But when she caught sight of the poster she started giggling as well. ‘Do you think they give indoctrination sessions?’

‘Vee haf vays of making you luf us…’ I said.

The people in the Tourist Office brought out a plastic folder full of pictures of hotels and guest houses. I could see Mum getting hot and bothered trying to calculate how much the prices quoted in drachmas worked out at. She was never any good with noughts. I helped her with the maths and made a few acid comments about the pictures.

They all looked incredibly dreary. I’d wanted to go somewhere like Corfu or Skiathos, somewhere with a bit of life. Clubs maybe. The places they had on offer looked as if they were all in the back of beyond – and I couldn’t make out any guests under the age of about fifty in the photos.

I kept giving Mum meaningful glances and turning the page.

‘Well, if you’re going to be like this, Lucy,’ whispered Mum, ‘we’ll never find anywhere to stay.’

I felt hot and my head ached.

‘How can you possibly tell what a place is like from a photo in a book?’ I whispered crossly. ‘Think of what that poster does for this island.’

Mum glanced at the poster with a sigh and then turned to the girl behind the desk, saying apologetically: ‘I’m sorry. I think we’d better come back later.’ She raised an eyebrow in my direction. I loathed it when she did that.

We trailed back to the café where I’d had the lemonade and Mum ordered two more.

‘Look,’ she said when we’d both cooled down. ‘Let’s hire a taxi and get away from the port. Ports are always dreary. I bet we’ll find a gorgeous beach with a taverna just along the coast. All we’ve got to do is look around a bit, that’s what Dad and I used to do when we came to the islands in the seventies…’

She paused for a moment, and just a shadow of that thin-lipped look came back on her face. I remembered photos in our album of Mum and Dad, young and tanned and carefree on hired mopeds, bumming round the islands. Mum in a ridiculous daisy-printed mini dress and Dad with long hair and John Lennon sunglasses, both totally relaxed and happy together. Looking at the pictures, you’d think that feeling would last forever. Weird how things can change like that.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ I said, picking up my backpack before she could get all emotional and embarrassing. I suddenly felt guilty about being such a pain.

‘I know I’m right,’ said Mum, sounding more like her old self.

‘You’re always right,’ I teased.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s make a move then. We’re bound to find somewhere you’ll love.’

We bought cheese pies and honey cakes from the bakery for our lunch, and once I’d eaten I felt loads better. Then we tracked down what seemed to be the one and only taxi on the island.

I think Manos, the driver, must have come from a very large family. At any rate, he had an awful lot of cousins, and we must have visited most of them that afternoon. We started at a five-star hotel. It was a great big pink stone barracks of a place which smelt like a hospital. It did have a pool… but it was empty. Mum turned that down with the excuse that it was too expensive. So Manos must’ve come to the conclusion that we were flat broke, and he took us to his poorer cousins. One had a flat to let that reeked of calor gas and drains. Another had a room with a large decaying double bed and a fridge standing in the middle of the bedroom. And worse still, when Mum said we wanted a place on our own, he took us to what he called ‘a bungalow’ which was a kind of prefab with a compost heap for a garden and a goat tethered outside.

As the sun dipped towards the horizon I was fast losing faith. I hadn’t seen a single decent beach yet.

‘What we really want is a taverna,’ said Mum. ‘A nice, clean, cheap taverna, near a beach.’

‘Oh, taverna!’ said Manos – and he sucked through his teeth as if the very concept of a taverna, was new to him. Then he swung back into the driving seat and shifted noisily into gear. ‘OK, if you want taverna, I take you.’

It was a long drive along a winding cliff road to the other side of the island to find this taverna. I don’t think Manos was in a very good mood. He obviously didn’t have a cousin who owned a taverna, so he wasn’t going to get his cut, or free drinks, or whatever it was he usually received as commission.

Mum had her eyes closed for most of the journey which was a waste because she was on the cliff-side and the views must have been staggering. The sun was going down and it was the most magical sunset. All gold and blue and mauve with puffy little clouds turning candy-floss pink.

It was almost dark when we crunched to a halt in a cobbled square. We climbed out of the taxi. Manos beckoned to us and led us up over a rise.

We were on top of a headland, looking out over the most amazing view of the sea, which had turned a livid copper colour in the low sunlight. We could see for miles, right over to the misty shapes of the neighbouring islands.

Some kind of building was outlined against the sky. It had a corrugated iron roof which looked on the point of caving in and a battered sign surrounded by coloured light-bulbs, most of which didn’t work, which read: TAVERNA PARADISOS.