Look at our calm resting!
Listen to the way we do not shout!
Observe the way we all know our place!
Look at how my wife manages our needs!
My view on his family is required to be his view on his family. He would prefer me not to see them from any other point of view.
I do not see things from my father’s point of view.
Point of view is becoming my subject.
All my potency is in my head, but my head is not supposed to be the most attractive thing about me. Will my new sister make her father less uncomfortable than I do? She and I have a secret game. Every time I stroke her earlobe, she shuts her eyes. When I tickle the sole of her tiny foot she opens her eyes and gazes at me from her point of view. My father is always keen for them to all shut their eyes.
‘Time for some shut-eye’ is his favourite sentence.
I left them napping on the soft, blue sofa and walked in the direction of the Acropolis. After a while, I could not continue walking in the heat, so I bought a peach and sat on a bench in the shade. A policeman on a motorbike was chasing a dark-skinned, middle-aged man who was wheeling a supermarket trolley full of scrap metal to trade in at the end of the day. It was not like a high-speed chase in a film, because the man was walking slowly and sometimes he stopped and just stood while the motorbike circled him, but it was still a chase. In the end, he dumped the trolley and walked away. He looked like my teacher at junior school, except he did not have two pens poking out of his shirt pocket.
When I arrived back at the apartment in Kolonaki, Alexandra and Christos were sitting at the table eating white beans in tomato sauce. Alexandra told me they came out of a tin but that my papa had added some dill to the dish. He was partial to dill. I know nothing about him so was pleased to learn he liked dill. That will become a memory. In the future, I would say, yes, my father liked dill, especially on white beans.
Alexandra pointed to a parcel on the table. ‘It’s from your mother,’ she said. It was addressed to Christos Papastergiadis.
Christos was obviously nervous, because he was shovelling the beans into his mouth and pretending the parcel wasn’t there.
‘Open it, Papa. It’s not a severed head or anything.’ As soon as I said that, I didn’t quite believe it. Maybe the diving-school dog hadn’t drowned after all and Rose had cut off its head and sent it by registered post to Athens.
My father picked up a knife and slid it into the brown paper with all its stamps and abundant sticky tape. ‘It’s something square,’ he said. ‘It’s a box.’
The box had a picture of the Yorkshire Dales on it. Rolling green hills, low stone walls, a stone cottage with a red front door. He turned it over and gazed at the illustration of a tractor parked in a field next to three grazing sheep. ‘Teabags. A box of Yorkshire teabags.’ And a note. He read it out loud. ‘With solidarity in these times of austerity to the family in Kolonaki from the family in East London via our temporary residence in Almería.’ Christos glanced at Alexandra.
‘He doesn’t like tea,’ she said.
My father’s lips were covered in tomato sauce and dill.
Alexandra passed him a paper napkin. There were several of them neatly folded into a triangle and placed in a glass on the table. ‘I always keep napkins on the table because your father likes to make flowers from them. It helps him think.’
I never knew that.
‘So,’ he said, wiping his mouth on the napkin. ‘On your last night, I will take you out for Greek coffee.’
Alexandra was reading the box of Yorkshire teabags, her spectacles perched in her short black hair. ‘Sofia, where is Yorkshire?’
‘Yorkshire is in northern England. That is where my mother was born. Her maiden name was Booth. Rose Kathleen Booth.’ When I said that, I felt like I belonged somewhere that Alexandra did not. To my mother and to her Yorkshire family.
My father threw the napkin down on the table. ‘Yorkshire is famous for a beer called bitter.’
On my last day, he took me for the promised Greek coffee in a café called Rosebud. I wondered if this was an unconscious bonding with his first wife. He did after all marry her when she was just a bud, but I didn’t feel like asking him in case he started to talk about her thorns. A name like Rose encourages that kind of thing. All the same, it would not be true to say that he was the invisible worm that had destroyed her life. Even I knew that. We sat next to each other and sipped the sweet, muddy coffee from its tiny cup.
‘I am very pleased you have met your sister,’ he said.
We both watched an old woman begging at various tables. She held a white plastic cup in her hands. She was dignified in her skirt and blouse, her clothes were ironed and darned, a cardigan was draped over her shoulders, just like my mother. Most people dropped a few coins into the cup.
‘I am pleased to have met Evangeline, too.’
I noticed that he never smiled. ‘To be happy, she must open her heart to our Lord.’
‘She will have her own point of view, Papa.’
He waved at some men playing cards nearby. After a while, he told me how much it meant to him that I had gone to the expense of paying for an air ticket to Athens. And of course for driving the hire car all the way from Almería to the airport at Granada.
‘Before you leave tomorrow, I would like to give you some spending money.’
I wasn’t sure why he wanted to give me spending money the night before I was leaving, but I was touched all the same. He had not given me spending money, as he called it, since I was fourteen, so perhaps that’s why it sounded so childish. He took out his wallet, laid it on the table and then prodded the worn, brown leather with his thumb. He seemed surprised when it didn’t react.
His two fingers started to search inside it. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I forgot to go to the bank.’ He dipped his fingers into the wallet again and rummaged around for a long time, finally scooping out a single ten-euro note. He held it up to his eyes. Then he placed it on the table, smoothed it down with the palm of his hand and handed it to me with a flourish.
I finished my coffee and when the woman begging came to my table I slipped the ten-euro note into her plastic cup. She said something in Greek and then she limped nearer to me and kissed my hand. It was the first time anyone had shown me any affection in Athens. It was hard to accept that the first man in my life would do things that were to my disadvantage if they were to his advantage. Yet it was a revelation that somehow set me free.
Christos Papastergiadis seemed to be praying. His eyes were half shut and his lips were moving. At the same time, his fingers hovered above the paper napkins. He pulled the thin tissue out of the stainless-steel box and started to fold it, first in two, then into a square which became a circle, and then, miraculously, a flower with three dense layers of paper petals.
He held it in his hand as if it were an offering, perhaps a votive offering made to gain favour or to be cast into a fountain to make a wish.
I pointed to the flower in his hand and he looked vague, as if he was surprised it was there at all.
I had become bolder. ‘I think you have made that flower for me.’
At last he looked at me. ‘Yes, I have made it for you, Sofia. You like wearing flowers in your hair.’ He gave it to me and I thanked him for the thought, which he had not wanted to claim. He was happy to have given me something after all, and even happier that I had not given it away.
I have no plan B to replace my father because I am not sure that I want a husband who is like a father, though I can see this is part of the mix in kinship structures. A wife can be a mother to her husband and a son can be a husband or a mother to his mother and a daughter can be a sister or a mother to her mother who can be a father and a mother to her daughter, which is probably why we are all lurking in each other’s sign. It’s my bad luck that my father never showed up for me, but I had not changed my surname to Booth, even though it was tempting to have a name that people could spell. He had given me his name and I had not given it away. I had found something to do with it. The name of my father had placed me in a bigger world of names that cannot be easily said or spelt.