‘No, Papa,’ I said. ‘No, do not come into my room without knocking first.’
‘Are you hurt, Sofia?’
I lay in silence among the broken furniture and continued to cycle my legs.
The table was set with three of their not-best plates and a jug of water. My father recited a prayer that started with ‘The poor shall eat and shall be filled’ and then he chanted the rest of the prayer in Greek. After that, he sat in silence while Alexandra ladled pasta on to his plate. Alexandra told me it was an Italian regional dish with anchovies and raisins. She had made it herself because she liked the sweet and salty tastes in one dish. My father did not say a single word after he said the prayer, so she had to speak for him. She asked me where I was staying in Spain and if I’d seen a bullfight and if I liked Spanish food and she enquired about the weather, but no one mentioned the turmoil in Athens or asked about my mother. If Rose is the elephant in the room, I can see that Donald Duck is not going to chase her out. He might take a ride on her back or flick a stone at her head with his catapult, but she is too massive a beast for him to see off with his orange, webbed feet.
My father suddenly spoke. ‘I unveiled my shame to our Lord, and he has shown himself to me in all his mercy.’ He was looking at his plate but I think he was speaking to me.
The Plot
Things got worse. It turns out that Alexandra is a minor mainstream economist. This was useful, because I have come to Athens to call in a debt my father owes me for never being around. Perhaps in his own mind he has absolved himself by putting all his late paternal energy into my sister, Evangeline.
I think he understands that I am his confused and shabby creditor. I should smarten up, stiffen my jaw, put on a jacket and skirt and walk him into an airless room with strobe lighting and a translator to broker a deal, but my body is still thrumming with kisses and caresses in the hot desert nights. It would be easier for him to have me crash out of his life altogether, yet for some reason he wants me to sign off Alexandra. She is his most valuable collateral. He is proud of her and I can see why. She is attentive to her child and to her husband. This makes him gentle and calm.
But his debts go back a long way. As a result of his first default, my mother has a mortgage on my life.
Here I am in the birthplace of Medusa, who left the scars of her venom and rage on my body. I am sitting on a giant, soft, blue sofa next to Alexandra, who is adjusting her glinting braces. The windows are all closed and the air conditioner is on. Her daughter is sleeping on her breast, the cleaner is mopping the floors, and she is sucking a yellow jellied candy sprinkled with sugar.
Is the sting of being a creditor the sort of power that makes me feel happy? Are creditors happier than debtors?
Actually, I’m not sure what the rules are any more and what I want to achieve. It’s a total unknown.
What is money?
Money is a medium of exchange. Jade, oxen, rice, eggs, beads, nails, pigs and amber have all been used for making payments and recording debts and credits. And so have children. I have been traded off for Alexandra and Evangeline, but I am supposed to pretend not to notice.
Pretending not to notice and pretending to forget are my special skills. If I were to pluck out my eyes, it would please my father, but memory is like a bar code. I am the human scanner.
Alexandra has sugar stuck to her lips. ‘Sofia, I can tell you are anti-austerity. I am a conservative, so I prefer to take the medicine of reforms. We cannot come off our medication if we want to stay in the eurozone. Your papa has taken most of his money out of the bank and put it in a British bank. We don’t know what is going to happen.’
It sounds like she’s about to give me a lecture, so I stop her to check out her credentials. I blatantly ask her about her qualifications.
It turns out that she went to school in Rome and to university in Athens. Before she met my father she was research assistant to the former chief economist at somewhere important and then research assistant to the director of economic policy at the World Bank and then research assistant to the vice-president of somewhere less important but still massive.
Alexandra invites me to take one of the jellied candies she keeps in a glass bowl on the table. ‘If we do not meet our obligations and miss our payments, our creditors will want the clothes off our backs.’ She talked of the economic crisis as a serious illness that is contagious and contaminating. Debt is an epidemic raging through Europe, an outbreak that is infectious and needs a vaccine. It had been her job to monitor the behaviour and movements of this infection.
It is agony listening to her while I suck a jellied candy.
The sun is shining outside.
Sunshine is sexy.
It turns out that before she had Evangeline she was working in a bank in Brussels. The offices closed on Friday so she could fly home to my ‘papa’.
This time she unwraps a green jelly candy and pops it into her mouth. ‘Sofia, we all have to wake up from this nightmare and take our pills.’
I thought about Gómez deleting the pills on my mother’s menu of medication, but I did not discuss this with my new stepmother.
Alexandra peers anxiously at me with her smaller brown eye. ‘For some years, it was my job to make sure that finance ministers convinced the markets that everything was under control and to insist that the euro would survive.’ She is rubbing my new baby sister’s back. Now and again, she sort of sticks out her tongue, which is green from the green jelly. I don’t know why she does that. Perhaps it’s something to do with her braces.
She’s four years older than I am and she’s making sure the euro survives.
Alexandra has two spots on her chin. Perhaps my father is lying about her age and Evangeline was the result of a teenage pregnancy. I’m starting to get the impression Alexandra hasn’t spoken to anyone apart from Christos Papastergiadis for about a year.
‘Don’t think that a disorderly exit from the eurozone will not affect America, Sofia.’
Actually, I am thinking about Ingrid, and the night she put honey on my cracked lips and how I felt as if I had been embalmed. I am thinking about lying on the beach with Juan after midnight and how when I bought six bottles of agua sin gas at the village Spar I had yearned to buy a particular summer glossy magazine with its free gift of Jackie Kennedy sunglasses which was on sale by the tills. The bug-eyed shades attached to the magazine were an approximate copy, it has to be said, the white frames inlaid with her signature Greek-key detail, but all the same I wanted to tear them out of their wrapping and wear them to stroll among the cacti in my very own Camelot of Lust with Ingrid and Juan at my side. The word Beloved embroidered into the silk of my sun-top has changed my life more than the word euro. Beloved is like a spotlight in the centre of a stage. I have peered at this circle of light from behind the curtains, but it’s never occurred to me that I could be a major player.
I am not sure how much desire I am entitled to possess.
Alexandra’s left eye is definitely smaller than her right eye.
‘I was talking about the USA, Sofia.’
I have always wanted to visit America. Dan from Denver is my closest friend at the Coffee House. I liked to feel his big energy close to me while I ground the coffee beans and labelled the cakes. I even missed doing star jumps with him in between making the flat whites and listening to him talk about his lack of health insurance all over again. Last time we did the jumps he was wondering if he should work in Saudi Arabia to make fast bucks, but he said he’d have to take Prozac to come to terms with the fact that women couldn’t drive there. When I thought about him saying that, it occurred to me for the first time that he might have been flirting with me.