Being Shirley (3 page)

It wasn’t a situation Kas had foreseen arising when she and Spiros enjoyed their comfortable married life together in Athens. But then the talk of austerity measures had begun. It wasn’t long until Spiros had lost his long-held job as a journalist, along with some four thousand other media employees. Kas, at home with Mateo, was pregnant with Nikolos at the time and things had looked bleak for the couple until Mama Bikakis stepped in. She had been running her namesake Eleni’s Hotel singlehandedly since her husband Abram had died and she was tired, she had told them.

Unlike some of the other islands, Crete, with its geographical location, had a tourist trade all year round. It quieted down in winter but the weather was still mild enough to carry it through the cooler months. That she was exhausted and in need of help Mama had announced in her usual dramatic hand-wringing style. Yes, she had stated she was now an old lady and it was time for her oldest son to come home and reclaim his roots. Eleni’s was his birthright and a mother needed her son close by in her old age. The wily old Greek woman had it all worked out. Spiros could write the novel he had been fostering in his mind for as long as any of them could remember, maintain the grounds, take guests out on fishing excursions and for day trips to a nearby island. While Kas—with Alexandros away—could pick up where he’d left off and help with the day-to-day running of Eleni’s, as well as take over the managerial side of the guesthouse. This in turn would free Mama up to spend more time with her longed-for grandchildren. To the old lady’s mind, it was the perfect solution and a foregone conclusion that they come to her, and so they had packed up their life and moved to Crete.

Annie traced a finger round the top of her glass. “Well, the latest is that Alexandros has had enough of swanning around Brazil. He’s on his way home and Kas is not looking forward to being outnumbered.”

“Yes, all that testosterone could be a real leaving the toilet seat up conundrum.” Carl took a sip of his drink and wrinkled his nose. “I think I prefer the Fraiche to the Sauvignon—what about you?”

“Nope, I like the Sav. The Fraiche tastes like baby shampoo to me.”

“Hmm, not a comparison I would have made but each to their own. So the golden boy’s coming home, eh? He must have run out of funds or a female sponsor. That will throw a spanner in the works, won’t it?”

“I hope not, for Kas’s sake. Anyway, Eleni’s sounds like it is busy enough to sustain the pair of them these days because from what she tells me, they’re already fully booked for most of the summer. Of course, Mama is in raptures about the prodigal son’s return. Her two boys and her grandchildren all home to roost! Kas says she keeps clapping her hands and exclaiming that it is all just too wonderful.”

Carl smiled at the mental picture of the ecstatic Greek mama. “Where does Kassia fit into that equation, though?”

“Oh, don’t worry about her. She can hold her ground where Mama is concerned. Besides, if Alexandros is true to form, he will be too busy wooing the guests to do any actual work.” Annie placed her empty glass down and hauled herself off the couch. The concert had ended and as she stretched, she realised she felt drained as she always did after their Yanni session. With a glance at the now empty bottle on the coffee table, she realised she felt a bit light-headed too.

“I don’t think I should drive. I’ll phone Tony and see if he can pick me up, shall I? Oh, hang on, I think he said something about heading around to watch the rugby at his mate Dean’s place tonight. I’ll call a taxi. What company do you use?”

“Why don’t you just stay here tonight? The spare room’s yours, sweetie, you know that. And to be honest, with David gone, I could do with a spot of company tonight.” He pulled his puppy dog face.

The thought of not having to move from the couch was appealing and Carl’s expression was rather pathetic. “Okay but only if you agree to an Indian takeaway.”

“Annie Rivers, think of all those calories. Ugh, all that cream, all those spices—you’ll never fit into
the
dress! Why don’t you act your age for a change, girl, and come out with me for a night on the tiles. I know this great little tapas bar…”

To: Kassia Bikakis

From: Annie Rivers

Subject: Why I am never drinking again.

Hi Kas:

It sounds like you had a wonderful birthday. Being surrounded by your family and friends is exactly what a birthday should be all about. It was a horrid precursor to a winter’s day here when I opened the pics you attached and I was so jealous of you all sitting outdoors under that gorgeous blue sky with the olive trees in the background. It looked like a picture you would see in a travel brochure, you lucky thing. Who was the dark-haired girl next to Alexandros? Don’t tell me he has a girlfriend already? He’s only been home five minutes. I wish I could have been there and raised a glass with you all. Though of course I wouldn’t have been drinking that Retsina you are all so fond of sitting in the sunshine and knocking back because I am a teetotaller these days. As of last Sunday that is, thanks to Carl and those bloody Long Island Iced Teas he’s so partial to.

April 28
th
started off innocently enough with Carl and I meeting at the Botanic Gardens to talk about all the same old Roz stuff that we talk about every year on her birthday. We went back to his place in the late afternoon because it gets cold earlier and earlier at the moment to watch the Yanni concert. It made us both cry like it always does, though Carl did get his knickers in a knot at one point, accusing me of blaspheming Yanni. I didn’t mean to. I just pass remarked that sometimes he looked like he could do with a really good bowel motion. No offence, Kas, because I know the man is a cultural icon over your way but hey after all these years of watching that concert and his various facial expressions, I feel I am entitled to comment. Anyway, you know Carl: he got over it pretty quick and when the concert finished, I suggested we drink a toast to your birthday too as promised in my last email. So, in a way, Kas, now that I think about it, it is actually your fault too because it was downhill from there on in.

I wanted to get Indian for dinner but Carl insisted we go out for tapas, which was actually just another word for cocktails because I don’t remember seeing food until three a.m.-ish when I picked up a mince pie at the petrol station on my way home. It was pretty gross too, full of gelatine. I’m getting off track though, sorry—anyway, we wound up at some dark little bar that Carl insisted was the latest ‘in’ place to be seen at. From what I could see, what ‘in’ meant was that the clientele all looked like they’d sneaked out on a school night. Carl was in form, keeping the drinks coming, which I think was an excuse to keep chatting to the cute bartender. Either way, I’d no sooner finished slurping my way through one concoction and then Carl would be there at the ready with another. He was on a mission to get slaughtered because he is on a break from David at the moment and he never does well when he is on his own. It’s alright for him, though; he didn’t make a holy show of himself.

Oh, Kas, I cringe every time I think about it. I wish us Kiwis were sensible with our alcohol consumption like you Greeks are. Sure, you might like to toss a plate or two over your shoulders when you have had a couple of Ouzos but we, my friend, are a nation of binge drinkers. You would think I’d know better at my age than to drink like that on Roz’s birthday or anybody’s birthday for that matter. Apparently not, though, because I vaguely remember Carl being off on the dance floor while I leaned all over some poor guy in an effort to keep myself upright. I told the lucky chap all about my dream wedding dress, which is just what every single man out on the pull wants to hear about. That wasn’t the worst of it, though. I spotted a girl with a sheet of blonde hair dancing by Carl and there was just something about the way she moved that reminded me of Roz and it all came alcohol induced, flooding back. That poor, poor man had me dribbling and crying on his shoulder.

Annie shuddered as she recalled how she had bent the stranger’s ear and leaned away from the screen for a moment. She shut her eyes at the myriad memories that had assailed her.

If Roz had dabbled in drugs as a young teenager, then the family was unaware of it. Carl maintained it had never been part of their social scene at school but that all changed when she started work. At eighteen, she’d begun work for an advertising firm as their Girl Friday and it was at one of their industry parties that she first encountered and fell in love with methamphetamine. At least that was what her parents had managed to piece together from her friends. It was ironic that Annie, too, had wound up working in an advertising company but nobody could accuse Manning Stockyard, the firm she worked for, of being anything other than staid. They didn’t even do Friday night drinks—mind you, the thought of winding her week down over a casual glass of wine in the company of her boss Adelia Hunnington, or Attila the Hun as she not so fondly liked to call her, was an unappealing one.

With a nine-year-age gap between them, Roz’s life outside of home was a side to her sister that Annie hadn’t been privy to until the day of her eleventh birthday party. After everybody had left and Roz was long gone with her latest boyfriend in a squeal of burning rubber, her parents had no choice but to sit her down and explain as plainly as possible what was wrong with her sister. They’d calmly told her they were trying to help her but she had to want to help herself too. The shouted conversations that had ensued every time Roz had visited over the last year, conversations that were cut short were Annie to walk into the room, suddenly made sense. It was only later, though, after
it
happened, that she really understood the implications of her sister’s addiction. Her affair with the substance was all-encompassing but then Roz had never been the type of girl to do anything by halves.

Annie rubbed her eyes. She knew she was smudging her mascara but she didn’t care because her mind refused to curb the memories of what they had gone through as a family.

The pressure of what was happening to their eldest daughter had nearly torn her parents’ marriage apart as Roz played them off one against the other. Her addiction had driven not only her friends away and lost her her job, but it had the flow-on effect of tainting their own social lives. They became known as the parents of “that girl, you know—the one on drugs.” For her part, Annie stopped having her friends home, preferring to visit their houses for fear of one of her sister’s impromptu quest for cash, out-of-control visits. There was no doubt more, much more that Roz had been driven to do when she had found herself out of a job and still hungering for the meth but she had slowly cut herself off from everybody who knew and loved her. This had spared Annie and her parents from knowing that side of her life further. Instead, they chose to cling to the daughter and sister beneath the horror of her dependency. She was the person they wanted to hold onto, the girl they had once known who had had a life to lead and a dream to chase after. That was the girl they hoped would come back to them.

Their dreams, along with Roz’s, had ended the day she’d stayed up all night partying and had driven her car into a tree on her way home to the latest flat she had been dossing down in.

For Annie and her parents, though, that wasn’t the end. Oh no, she shivered and wished she’d been bothered to light the fire as she thought back, it was just the beginning. Her mum started smoking again and seemed to be in a perpetual fog of non interest after that knock at the door had come cutting herself off from Annie emotionally. As for her father, a big man with an argumentative nature, well, he seemed to simply give up, if the slump in his shoulders and disinterest in what was happening around him was anything to go by. Annie didn’t just lose a sister that day but for a long, long time afterwards she lost her parents, too. They were a physical presence but they weren’t engaged in the day-to-day minutiae of their youngest daughter’s life when she’d needed them most. Both of them were seemingly oblivious of the changes that a young girl goes through because neither had the energy left after the day-to-day, going through the motions of simply living for that. Annie understood that—she really did—but it didn’t make it any easier to take.

At first, her grief was too painful too touch and so the eleven-year-old she had been was unable to talk about it; she bottled it up and hid it away from her friends. She didn’t want to share it because how could any of them possibly understand what she was going through? Not when they got to go home each night to their own safe, happy little houses where nothing bad happened. Suddenly the normal teenage interests they’d once shared seemed trite and she found herself having to bite her tongue when they’d whittle on about the latest boy band or who was wearing what to whoever’s party. What did it matter? She no longer cared and she soon found that people’s sympathy only stretched so far for so long.

She could recall just sitting in her sister’s old bedroom; she stared at that print of Santorini and felt like the world was closing in on her. It was only the knowledge reinforced by that print that it was a big wide world with lots to see that stopped it from doing so. More than anything as she lay curled up on Roz’s bed, she wanted to wake up and get back to a normal life but this void she had found herself thrown into was the new norm and it was up to her to find a way to move through it. The time eventually came for her to sink or swim and somehow she managed to swim.

The first thing she had done the day she decided to tentatively try to dog paddle was to contact her sister’s old pen pal. She didn’t know as she penned that first letter that she herself would form a lasting bond with the girl on the other side of the world. Of course, when Roz and Kassia had been in touch, email didn’t exist and there had been a wodge of handwritten letters still in Roz’s desk. Their lives at opposite ends of the earth had been brought together via a school pen pal program, with a shared birthday their initial common denominator. The two girls’ exchanges had been an innocent recounting of teenage angst and they’d written back and forth regularly throughout high school and beyond. Until, Kassia relayed later, one day her friend who was getting into a new social scene through her job had just stopped writing and she had never known why. She hadn’t known about the drugs, she didn’t know about any of that but through reading their letters, Annie had been provided with an insight into her sister’s life before. That was the way she thought of her now—the Roz before drugs and the Roz after.

The year of the firsts passed with all the usual anticipated emotional upheaval around each and every significant date. Then the second year passed, a muted version of the first and then the third until one day Annie realised that her mother laughed occasionally and no longer smoked like a train. Her father, too, stood a bit straighter and began to state his opinion a tad more forcefully. As for herself, well, she found herself unwittingly beginning to look forward and not backwards. And so life went on, because although Roz would always be there in their thoughts and forever in their hearts, time, as they say, is a great healer. It allowed them not to get over her death—that would never happen—but rather to learn to live with it.

Annie blinked the memories away and the screen came back into focus. The time in the bottom corner of the screen blinked midnight.
Crumbs, it was getting late
. Jazz stretched languidly on her lap, as though sensing his time for snuggling was nearly up. She’d better start winding her letter up if she was going to be fit for work in the morning.

You can picture it, can’t you, and I don’t need to tell you it wasn’t pretty. Even less so the next morning when I woke up with a stonking headache. So now you know why I am never drinking again. It’s gotten late here, Kas, and I have work in the morning, so it’s time I went off to bed. Na-night.

Lots of love and kisses to you and all the Bikakis family

Annie

xox

She clicked Send and waited a moment before going through the motions of closing down her laptop. Her hand stretched over to switch the lamp off on the desktop but hovered there for a moment as her eyes alighted on the photo framed beneath it. In front of their boutique Cretan hotel, Eleni’s stood, its namesake the short, rotund Mama Bikakis. She had insisted on wearing widow black since her husband dropped dead some ten years earlier. With her cheeks puffed out proudly, she was flanked on either side by her handsome sons. On her left was Kas’s husband Spiros and on her right his younger brother Alexandros. The latter was a somewhat clichéd, tall, dark, and handsome with straight white teeth set against the deep olive of his skin. Hence his rip snorting success with the female tourists who came to stay at their family-run accommodation. Spiros was slightly shorter than his brother and although his hooded black eyes gave him a serious look, the smile that twitched at the corners of his mouth belied his good humour. At his side was Kassia.

Annie smiled involuntarily as she always did when she saw her dear friend. Her two sons had rounded her figure out in the last few years but her face was still that of the girl she had first started writing to nearly twenty years ago. Thick, long black hair she insisted on getting her hairdresser to curl framed a strong face. Almond-shaped brown eyes behind which a wicked sense of humour to match that of her husband’s lurked to soften her features. She wasn’t pretty as such but she was arresting in her own unique way and her looks would stand the test of time far better than mere prettiness would.