Other people

One day we are in Lindos, the nearest town to the resort. It’s beautiful, a maze of lanes which fails to make sense of a jumble of whitewashed houses. We had stopped in the “internet kiosk” on our way down to take in the beach, and a girl comes in. She must be in her early twenties, slim, short blonde hair, almost Scandinavian looking. But then she asks “is the wireless working?” in an English accent, so we know she isn’t.

She sits at one of the terminals and logs on. Kelly takes advantage of briefly being in a tiny bubble of wi-fi to check some things and, because I’ve always been this sort of person, I look over the blonde’s shoulder at her computer screen as she writes an email to her mother. I can’t help myself. Half the time I barely know I’m doing it.

I’m doing okay, she says to her mother, It’s really quiet here right now. It gets busier in late July. That’s when all the Italians arrive for their holidays. Don’t worry about me. I’m working in Ikon, it’s a café bar. I want to move to Antika, which is a cocktail bar, but they won’t let me. It pisses me off, because the tips are better there.

I wonder what this period in her life will come to mean when she looks back on it in ten years, whether there will be a boyfriend who one day becomes a husband who she tells, early on, “I spent this crazy summer in Rhodes. I didn’t know anyone, and I worked in a shitty café and got hit on by all the Italians.” Everybody should have something like that in their past, the sore thumb that looks like it's on the run from somebody else's life. I can say that, safe in the knowledge that I never took a risk like that. I just read about risks, over people’s shoulders when they aren’t looking.

Later on, back from the beach and replete from dinner, we pass her as we walk past Ikon. She is standing outside, having a cigarette and wearing a branded apron. It’s surprisingly flattering. She gives us a smile of recognition, I have no idea whether it’s genuine; you don’t get to know someone that well, not by snooping in an internet kiosk.

The next day I find myself intrigued by the couple that aren’t a couple on the coach heading for Rhodes Town. We are on an excursion, catching a boat to Symi, the next island along. They get on the coach and are clearly doing that excursion too. They sit one behind the other and chat companionably away despite it being seven thirty in the morning, far too early to be sparkling. He has a shaved head, a zipped sports top and shorts in the kind of Burberry check you get if you can only afford to shop in River Island. She has wild red hair and a floaty top. She might be attractive if her nose wasn’t a little bit too snub, her ears a little bit too big, her freckles slightly too numerous. But after a good look I decide she’s probably not.

I wonder what they are to each other, because nobody would go on this sort of excursion alone. Perhaps they used to be more than friends, perhaps one day they will be more than friends, or maybe the timing will never be right for them as sometimes happens with people who ought to get a chance to prove they wouldn‘t be happy with each other. I try to imagine them, years from now, hosting dinner parties together but I can’t see it. Perhaps they will never have much more than a connection with each other than I have with them both right now, as I sit in the row in front of them with nothing better to do than speculate.

At the harbour we board a ship called the Nikolaos X. It’s billed as a cruise ship but it has seen better days and even calling it a ferry might be paying it a charitable compliment. Kelly and I sit in the bar, a hideous colonial mess of wicker, cane and cheap leatherette seating, and continue the latest instalment of the World Series of Cribbage. It started on our second day in Greece and quite closely resembles the Hundred Years War, except that it’s more viciously fought and shows every sign of lasting longer.

The almost-never-nearly-maybe couple comes into the bar, find seats and promptly fall asleep. She is curled up underneath one of the round-edged windows, streaked with dingy amber stains which must predate the “no smoking” signs. He is stretched out on a plastic bench. The early morning sun fills the cabin with a sepia light, makes them look more filmic than they are. Again, I wind up thinking about whether there is any story there at all. If they were Tetris tiles you could piece them perfectly together; except they aren’t, they’re just a man and a woman on opposite sides of the lounge. But they are facing each other.

Further down the cabin two elderly men sit at a table. One is bespectacled with an impressive, full head of hair. He looks almost boyish, and you can see the handsome man he probably used to be. But he looks placid, docile, not quite right in a way I can’t put my finger on. His companion couldn’t be more different; balding, angry and shy. He keeps cringing, as if he’s about to be slapped by an assailant only he can see. I don’t understand his shyness, nothing either of the men is doing makes sense. It makes even less sense that they are both wearing incredibly garish Hawaiian shirts, yellow and blue. They don’t talk to each other, in fact they don’t talk to anybody. But from this distance, from my seat, it looks like they are touching - perhaps armwrestling, perhaps holding hands. I can’t for the life of me work out which would be more incongruous.

It takes Kelly to point out to me that they are both handicapped. And the people at the table next to them, and the table next to them. The boat is full of people I don’t have the vocabulary to describe without sounding as if I am mocking, and I don’t want to mock them. It should make me know that I’m lucky, but it just makes me feel desperately sad that everybody doesn’t have the opportunity to be as ungrateful as me. So we abandon our card game and stand on the deck, surrounded by Germans, photographers, people with an interestingly selective approach to grooming and some individuals who manage to be all three.

Later we pull into the beautiful harbour at Symi and after a delicious lunch we wander the backstreets. The houses facing on to the water are stunning but behind them are the ones which have fallen into disrepair which nobody can afford to buy and renovate. Gorgeous dilapidation, paint in brilliant colours crackled by the sun on padlocked doors which may not have been opened in years. It’s a metaphor for things I would sooner not think about. We weave our way back to the streets just behind the waterfront, lined with shops and cafes for the flagging tourists who are waiting for the last ship off the island.

I look up. There, in the high, cruel space between buildings, a pair of teenage girls sit on a balcony in folding chairs. Both have masses of blonde hair, clearly not their natural colour. Their expressions are impossible to read, their eyes hide behind gigantic sunglasses like twin tinted windscreens. They cradle glasses of Orangina and play lazily at kissing the straws in the punishing heat. I don’t think they are Greek, if anything they look American. I have no idea why they are staying on this remote island, or for how long, or how they will cope. I cannot imagine there is any life in this place once the boat - complete with the couple that never was, the sad buddies in the loud shirts, the Germans and photographers and Kelly and me - is a speck in the distance. I wonder what they are doing up there. It looks to me as if they are planning a murder.

I’m beginning to realise that other people’s stories are almost certainly more interesting than mine.