Hung out to dry

Hung out to dry – Iva fiction


Tension in our little town started when the fisherman missed their caviar harvest. Giannis had been in the fields but returned before the men. We knew something was wrong then I suppose. Harvesting caviar is illegal, in terms of the law, but it had been our way for years. The river always produced and we respected her, until recently. The tourists stopped making the journey up the hill and the smaller cafes closed down last summer. Piles of rubbish are left rotting and attract the dogs at night, not to mention the mosquitoes and their incessant buzzing. Young girls no longer walk the coast laden with fabrics and shells searching for an easy meal. Farmers still pass though, bringing us the news of crime as it spreads over the mountains.
The roads are narrow in this town, not like in the big city, the dog’s whines ricochet up the buildings throughout the night. Our wooden shutters do nothing to blanket the foul noises and our festering bodies draw the mosquitoes out above the town, through our shutters and into our beds. Only a few businesses remain open and their tenders are owed more in favours than they can earn from the residents. The Lambros restaurant remains strong though. I saw big black cars arrive there, once, not long after Giannis had gone last summer.

In the early evening the sun is hottest where it seizes beneath the oriental planes that don’t fully enclose the square. The buildings seem to slow down and settle in the heat beaten to a standstill, white like the coals of a long burnt fire. A group of young men used to fool about down in the square with their music and smoking, taking every opportunity to woo girls as they passed. They plotted out their stake on the corner furthest from my building. I used to watch them from our kitchen window. Their riotous behaviour amused my daughter, Isaura, she said they were like cockerels when a lady walked by. I wondered when my boy would grow out of cigarettes and wolf whistles. There has been talk of riots in the capital for longer than I care to remember. Our news is delivered by the farmers, there are few telephones in the town and the Lambros family have the only internet connection. The farmers go to the city for market, I meet them by the well on the east side of town. The tourist groups provide us with old magazines sometimes. They have distorted our views of the clothes that are in fashion in the cities, at least I can not make sense of the way my daughter wears her trousers these days. We were naïve in our oasis, cooler than the city, we thought our natural balance and sustainable humour was enough to see us through. Now we are wounded.

The young who had a chance have packed up. Perhaps it is not right to revel in our town’s decline how we used too, but I long to hear the ramblings from the square. Housewives would gossip about who was the worst off in tight times, mock one another for their bad parenting of wayward teenage boys and slap the insolence out of girls who were older than their days. I didn’t think I might need their chatter one day. I consoled myself with reasoning, I needed to mourn and it was cheaper to do my washing at home away from prying tongues. I remember marching through the slumbering square one afternoon, about a month after the shooting, staring in, with wide eyes. I relished in their shock as I passed.

Some of the Lambros boys used to do a spot of labour in the farms near by. My boy used to join them for the harvest. From the age of seven he would walk towards the sunrise for two weeks solid. They would clamour past the square, golden boys to the rescue, carrying their gallantry to the fields. Satisfied that their mothers would be home, their stomachs would be full and their fathers would be proud. I would stay back with Mrs Lambros and the other women. The younger girls would plait the small children’s hair while we washed up. I remember howling with laughter, as loud as the largest woman in the town. I know the farmers are suffering and can only help their own, but this empty square stares at me now, weighing down any chance of healing. Our harbour’s mouth has been sealed, there will be no flow of joy through our streets this summer. Its youth leave, before they break their twenties, in packs. Herded to the city like a cackle of hyenas, scavengers wound up by stories of politics they don’t understand. The old have stopped moaning about their children and the mothers have nothing to share. Each one of us yearns for a piece of justice, a voice and even politics to show our government who we are. I sit now in the square, longing for a bird to settle the day with me, but nothing stirs.
Giannis used to stomp up our stairs swinging round the banisters, clearing three steps at a time. In that moment he regressed beautifully to a child ascending the stairs as he did when he was four. In our stairwell he was free to be careless. No pressure, just the rush and satisfaction of his legs carrying him up above the heat of our town. We could hear him coming, our little flat animated, his father would order the food to be prepared and Isaura would help me in the kitchenette. Giannis and his father would huff at each other and then we would settle for our meal. I feel a glimmer and my face feels tight, a smile tries to attach on my drooping mouth. I can see Giannis. I hear his footsteps and see his face at our door. My small humble family shattered when he left us. His sister keeps his t shirt under her pillow, I haven’t washed it. She doesn’t know I found it. I saw it there a few nights after he was gone. In a cleaning frenzy I overturned all the beds our small home. I remember feeling him following me around then too. I could smell the wax from his hair and the lingering smell of tobacco from the cigarettes he smoked. The only trace now is to be found under my daughter’s pillow on a faded old top.

He left us so suddenly. I had been blind to the trouble he was in. Sorrow crept into our stairwell long before the town started to fray. Most young men become anxious like teenage girls at some point, it was part of growing up. The Lambros boys stopped calling round, but I had thought that a blessing, it didn’t occur to me that a break in their alliance was cause for alarm. I convinced myself now that I had been second guessing my instincts. That I had been too tired to take on what was around me. He had been different; Giannis had become listless and vacant. It couldn’t be drugs, I’d heard they had all dried up like the caviar. He brewed and scowled. I had been so sure that it was a phase.

He arrived later and later then. One night I looked out and his friends were there, but my little boy was not. He came in, late again, footsteps dragging up the tiled stairway. I scold myself now. Looking back how could I not see that he had been ostracised. No words were uttered around the table when Giannis arrived that last night, his cloud settled above the table, seizing us beneath it. I had heard that the youngest Lambros boy had been arrested; they were talking about it in the square. Poor Mrs Lambros was beside herself with not knowing what he got involved in. I tried to ask Giannis if he had heard anything. He cursed and smashed his plate across the room claiming we didn’t understand him. His father showed him the belt and sent him to his room. Those last few weeks melt into one long evening around that table. As though our life was balanced on its spindly legs and she couldn’t take any more weight.
Isaura came to our bed and got me up the next night. Giannis was not home. She was tearful and frantic. She shook me.
‘It wasn’t Giannis’s fault, the police are all crooks, his friends will kill him’ she wailed. I soothed her and told her it was ok, that we get angry sometimes and fall out with our friends as we grow up. She told me I was blind and that all the kids spoke of thievery as though Robin Hood had moved across waters to inspire us all. She was not a child, the world was cruel and I, as her mother, needed to open my eyes. I recoiled from her, she was alien to me in that moment. She spoke of burglaries, guns and trips to the city. Isaura was only thirteen years old then. Giannis would never have spoken to me like that in his childhood.
‘Who else is going to help us?’ She pleaded with me to hear her. Through her sobbing and wailing I felt as though I were the child. There was no just sense in any of what she said. She stared at me for the longest time, boring her eyes into me. I clawed at the edges of sense, still waking and seeing it darkness outside the window I almost convinced myself I was dreaming. My daughter did not need soothing, not like they both used to as children. My motherly words were of no use and still she held her eyes on me. I floundered, looking for an answer that might calm her. Eventually I agreed to speak with Giannis. I preyed he would help me find sense in these past few weeks.
‘We can’t let them persecute Giannis.’ She was so defiant. But the shot was deafening. Silence exploded. My insides fell to the floor seized. My humble bedroom hung motionless around me, I tried to make sense of what I was hearing. Perhaps I did close my eyes. My daughter was no longer sat in front of me when I came back to the room, sitting up in bed and my husband was no longer next to me either. The square sighs, enveloping me within her.

The funeral was small, we walked the coffin up the track out of the town. The priest, my daughter and my husband, we all carried Giannis to the ground. I looked back towards the square before we said our prayers, but the square was empty. I bought a slot not far from my fathers, along the river bank by the olive trees. Close friends stopped by after, with their excuses, as if any other funeral could ever be ignored. I caught the twitters in the market, hushed tones and hands waved in my direction. I smiled to the man who packed the peppers and onions for me; he busied himself with some paper bags.
‘It wasn’t him you blind fools.’ It was more of a screech than the voice of reason. My chest tightened and I shuffled out of the market, dejected.
Now the only person who lurks on that corner is a crumpled soul. I bring flowers down and have a smoke, just as my son did. He tried to stand up for himself, now I stand and stare at that restaurant. My little girl screams in her sleep. Her father was unable to protect her from her dreams and left long ago. He cursed as he descended the stairs.
‘Giannis is gone and we are the ones persecuted. Who will hire me here now?’ as if asking our stairwell to answer. I didn’t have the strength to ask him to stay.
There was no trial. The Lambros boy came home before it started. The trial was cancelled not long after due to ‘falsified statements’. Their family is richer than ours. The riots continue and I sit with drying flowers on the corner where the stain of my son’s blood used to lie. I spit on the pavement and scuttle towards my stairwell. I notice a towel hanging from our window, not billowing in the breeze, but stiff from the sun. Hung out to dry.