The Slap (47 page)

Dimitri grunted, coffee dribbled from the edge of his mouth and Georgia went to wipe it. He slapped her hand away and wiped his own mouth and chin.

‘He was a fool. He wanted the big house, the villa, the swimming pool, the new Mercedes Benz, the best televisions and the best furniture. He wanted his kids in private schools, he wanted his wife in jewels, he wanted it all. He got it all and it killed him.’

Georgia started to cry. Of course, of course, such pain would never go away.

‘Stop it, Georgia.’

The old woman brusquely rubbed her eyes and attempted a smile. ‘How’s Koula? How’s Ecttora and Elisavet?’

He could speak now, he knew the words for this conversation. They tumbled out in relief. He spoke about his children, his grandchildren, their successes, and yes, even their failures. Georgia squeezed his hand as she listened to the story of Elisavet’s divorce. Her eyes shone as he described Adam, Melissa, Sava and Angeliki.

‘You should see our grandchildren. Yianni’s children are angels.’ She rose and took framed photographs from a bureau at the back of the room. ‘This is Kostantino. He’s at university.’ There was awe in her voice.

Manolis took the photograph and examined it. He did look a fine lad, about eighteen, in a shirt and tie, a real gentleman, and smiling cheekily in the camera.

‘A handsome lad.’

‘A good lad.’ Dimitri gripped the arms of his wheelchair and breathed deeply. He snorted, and continued. ‘He’s cleverer than his father. I’m proud of him.’ Manolis handed the photograph back to Georgia.

‘We’ve done alright.’ Dimitri coughed, gripped the chair again. His spasm subsided. ‘We did alright, didn’t we, my Manoli?’

He looked at his dying friend. Was there a question in the man’s eyes? No, it was a fact, not a question.

‘We did. We survived.’

‘A cognac?’

Manolis looked out to the garden. Darkness was creeping over the yard.

‘Why not?’

After the drink, he helped settle Dimitri back in bed. He leaned in to kiss him, twice in the Mediterranean manner, and smelled the man’s foetid breath. He was being eaten from the inside.

At the door, he turned to Georgia, ‘He should be in hospital. He needs doctors, nurses to look after him.’

‘A nurse comes twice a week. I can look after him.’ Georgia shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s fate, Manoli, I can’t fight it. Do I want a stranger washing him, cleaning up after him? No. I’m his wife, he’s my responsibility.’

‘I’m going to come again. Soon. And I’ll bring Koula.’

‘Please. I’ll make a dinner. It will be good for Dimitri. He misses his friends.’

Are we friends? ‘You don’t have to make dinner. A coffee, something to drink. That’s all we need.’

‘Of course I’ll make dinner. What do you think, that you’ll come to my house and I won’t feed you?’

His head was beginning to ache. They were losing each other again, trapped in damned politeness and etiquette. Let’s just talk, let’s just spend time together, let’s make up for losing ourselves in the petty distractions and foolish pride that occupied so many decades of our lives. The rituals of being Greek; sometimes he hated it. Sometimes he wished he could be an Aussie.

‘Have you got a pen?’

She squeezed through the corridor and arrived back with a pen. He took his travelcard from his shirt pocket. ‘The phone number?’

‘Nine-four-two-eight.’ She stopped, hesitated. ‘I’m an idiot. It’s been so long since I’ve had to remember it.’ She rushed through the final four digits and Manolis scrawled them across the ticket.

 

The clear night sky had brought a chill to the air. He walked home quickly from the train station, disobeying the objections from his knee.

When he walked through the door, Koula was standing in the hallway, her hands on her hips.

‘Where the devil were you?’

He pushed her aside, walked to the cabinet and poured himself a cognac.

‘Are you drunk?’

‘No.’

‘Ecttora rang. He’s furious with you. You’ve upset the Indian. What did you say to her?’

‘That she should go to Harry’s party.’

‘Good. What did she say?’

‘She’s not going.’ Manolis drank the spirit in one shot. It tasted disgusting, then sweet, and feeling began to return to his limbs. He took off his jacket.

Koula bashed her palms over her head. ‘Why does she want to humiliate us?’

‘She’s young.’

Koula stared at him in astonishment. ‘Are you going to defend her?’

‘No.’ He poured another drink.

Koula eyed the glass warily. ‘Elisavet has rung as well. She’s angry at you too.’

‘What for?’

‘For making that bitch cry.’

He closed his eyes. A fine, cheeky lad in a shirt and tie. Surely there was a limit to misfortune, surely the fates had dealt enough blows to Dimitri and Georgia, surely the next generation would be spared. There must still be some good in God.

Aisha had cried? She had
cried
.

‘I’ll ring Ecttora tomorrow. I’ll deal with it.’

He’d apologise. He’d say the word sorry. He would not mean it but she would latch on to it, appreciate it, forgive him. What the hell? It was one lousy little word.

‘Ring them now. He’s really upset.’

‘Fuck it, Koula, I’m ringing all of them tomorrow. They can be upset for one night. If they think this is trouble, they don’t know how lucky they are. Fuck them. We’ve looked after them, we’ve educated them, we’ve done everything for them. And I’m glad to have done it, to have given them a good life. But for one night I want to act as if I never had children. For one night I want to forget them.’

Koula crossed herself. She looked at him with contempt. ‘What rubbish are you speaking? You should be ashamed.’ She knocked on the frame of the door. ‘Touch wood, may God forgive you.’

‘I visited Dimitri and Georgia.’

The disdain was replaced by a look of pure pity. ‘How are the poor things?’

‘Dimitri has the evil disease. He’s dying.’

Koula sank heavily onto the couch. It was ridiculous how lavish, how grand the objects in their house were. Koula looked like a doll on it.

‘Why do we need such a big couch?’

Koula snorted dismissively and nodded towards the drink cabinet. Manolis poured her a cognac, handed it to her and sat on the armchair opposite.

His wife looked down at her glass. ‘There is no justice in this world, is there, Manoli?’

He swirled the golden spirit around in the glass. He breathed in the harsh, pungent fumes.

‘No.’

The phone rang and they both jumped, shocked out of their reveries.

‘That will be one of them.’

‘Probably,’ he answered.

‘They’ll want to know whether you’ve come home. They’ll want to speak to you.’

‘Probably,’ he said again.

She smiled and sipped at her drink. ‘Why don’t we just let it ring out?’ Her grin was mischievous, she was a young woman again.

‘Yes,’ he smiled at her, ‘why don’t we?’

The phone seemed to ring for minutes, inexhaustible. When the noise finally ceased he realised he’d been holding in his breath. He exhaled.

Koula stood up. ‘I’ll heat your dinner.’

He nodded.

From the kitchen he heard the sound of the buzzer lighting the oven, the clink of cutlery. Koula began to sing, and he leaned forward to hear better. It was an old popular song, a classic; he’d first heard it as a conscript getting drunk in Athens, drinking cheap ouzo with the workers and the soldiers in the square at Kaiseriani.

He mouthed the words, then clasping his hand over his knee, winced, and lifted himself to his feet. He downed the cognac and placed the glass on the coffee table. He walked into the kitchen, and helped his wife set the table.

She
glanced down at her watch again, took a deep breath, and made her calculations. Hector’s plane would have departed from Melbourne an hour ago. Her own plane could possibly be delayed for another two hours, which meant he’d have to wait for her for at least three hours in the airport in Denpasar. He’d be in a bad mood. Should she leave him a message at the airport, send him a text, tell him to meet her at the hotel in Ubud? It was best to not panic—not yet anyway. The idiots should have some information for them all soon. Around her bored, frustrated tourists, most of them young men and women dressed in grimy singlets and shorts, were mutinously watching the information desk, ready to spring into action at an announcement. Aisha got up from her seat and slung her bag over her shoulder. She wanted to escape the whining and the stink of beer and perspiration. She walked back from the gate to the blaze of neon lights and dizzying movement at the end of the corridor. Bangkok airport never closed. She might as well shop.

Not that she needed anything; but that was not, she mused, the purpose of duty-free shopping. Need was banished to outside the walls of Bangkok International Airport. Pure gratuitous desire was what was celebrated here. She walked into a small fashion boutique and a young Thai woman rushed towards her. Aisha bowed but raised her hand and firmly waved her away. The young girl quickly scampered back behind the counter and started to whisper and giggle with the other shopgirl. After a week in Thailand, Aisha was aware that the women here seemed to be giggling and whispering all the time, and that no disrespect or rudeness was meant by it. But she found it bloody irritating. It always seemed that they were laughing at her.

She pulled a skirt off the rack and examined it. The fabric felt fine, soft and pleasing to her touch, but the pattern was a bizarre swirl of clashing rainbow colours. Christ, it was garish. She did prefer India, preferred the cheerful but resentful and sometimes downright obstructive demeanour of the Indian hawkers to the smiling, deferential giddiness of the Thais. Aisha looked down the aisle. The second salesgirl was coming towards her. She turned and walked quickly out of the shop. And the fabrics were certainly much better in India.

The steady stream of bland, bloodless oriental music from the loudspeakers was interrupted by a loud crackle and a burst of Thai. An effeminate, almost vixenish male voice then translated the announcement into English, asking the travellers on the next United Airlines flight to San Francisco to proceed immediately to their gate for a further security check. The announcement finished with an apologetic giggle. Aisha smiled to herself. Was he simply being Thai, or had there been a gloating pleasure detectable in the request? Around her groups of grim-faced but accepting Americans gripped their hand-luggage and proceeded wearily towards their security check.

 

‘It has rather dulled the pleasure of air travel.’

Art had said that to her, at their first dinner in Bangkok. One of the Italian veterinarians had been complaining about the indignity of today’s constant airport security. One of the Americans had replied combatively that if it stopped one terrorist then she was more than happy for the inconvenience of having to wait hours in queues to have her bags searched. The Italian had muttered a response in his own language, something about the Americans interfering in the world, and a rude Neopolitan exclamation that was the equivalent of ‘just desserts’. Unfortunately, a Danish veterinarian, whose Italian was faultless, was also sitting at the table and he denounced the Italian vet’s ‘moral idiocy’. Which only made the Italian more incensed; he looked up and down the table and asked in clear, unaccented English, ‘Is it any wonder that Danish women flock south to the Mediterranean every summer searching for a real man?’ The ensuing outcry was only tempered by the loud guffaws of a Chinese delegate who’d just had the furious exchange translated for him.

Art had been sitting next to Aisha and it was at this point that he had leaned towards her and made his whispered observation. He had then glanced at the feuding veterinarians and in a breathless little boy’s voice asked, ‘Gee whiz, how do the United Nations ever get anything done?’ Aisha had laughed out loud, a laugh so genuine and clear that it had even stopped the insults flying between the Italian and the Dane. But only for a moment.

‘I know,’ Aisha whispered to Art. ‘We’re just the International Veterinary Association and we can’t get along. I don’t think there’s a future for this world.’ He had also laughed then, and in doing so, had lifted his hand and placed his arm across the back of her chair. It had seemed totally unconscious, an innocent gesture. But its intimacy seemed daring. And exciting.

She had noticed him immediately. She assumed every woman at the conference had, for he was almost ridiculously handsome, Eurasian, with a delicate snub nose, a gym-trim body and the most pale-white skin she’d ever seen. At first she had thought he might be Spanish, but the surname on his name tag was unmistakably Chinese, Xing. Art Xing. It sounded like the name of one of the bands that Hector enjoyed listening to.

At the first dinner, after their shared laugh, she had asked him where he was from.

‘I’m Canadian.’

‘Obviously,’ she snapped amiably, rolling her eyes and pointing to the red and white maple-leaf insignia at the end of his tag. ‘But what’s your ethnic background?’

‘I used to think that was a very Canadian question. But I’m discovering you Australians are exactly like us.’ He was smirking, his eyes teasing her. She found she had to force herself to look straight back at him. Her impulse was to look down at her empty plate. She felt absurd, but his beauty did make her swoon. Oh grow up, Aisha scolded herself, you’re not some teenage twit at a Beatles concert, you’re a forty-something mother of two.

‘My father is third-generation Chinese from Toronto. My mother is Czech.’

‘Goodness.’ She had been embarrassed by the inanity of her response, but his explanation had sounded so incongruous.