No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories

  “The well,” he said again. “Down inside the cave. But the water, he had, er—like the crabs, you know? You understand the crabs, in the sea?”

  “Of course,” Julie told him. “In England we eat them.”

  He shook his head, looked frustrated. “Here, too,” he said. “But this thing not crab. Very small.” He measured an inch between thumb and forefinger. “And no eat him. Very bad! People were…sick. They died. Men came from the government in Athens. They bring, er, chemicals? They put in well. Poison for the crabs.” Again his shrug. “Now is OK—maybe. But I say, no drink the water.”

  Before we could respond, he got out of the car, unloaded our luggage onto the dusty track. I followed him. “You’re not taking us down?”

  “Going down OK,” he shrugged, this time apologetically. “Come up again—difficult! Too—how you say?” He made an incline with his hand.

  “Too steep?”

  “Is right. My car very nice—also very old! I sorry.” I picked up the cases; Julie joined us and took the travel bags. Nichos made no attempt to help; instead he gave a small, awkward bow, said: “You see my house? Got the problem, come speak. Good morning.” Then he was into his car. He backed off, turned around, stopped, and leaned out his window. “Hey, mister, lady!”

  We looked at him.

  He pointed. “Follow road is long way. Go straight down, very easy. Er, how you say—short-cut? So, I go. See you in two weeks.”

  We watched his tyres kicking up dust and grit until he was out of sight. Then:

  Taking a closer look at the terrain, I could see he was right. The track followed the ridge of the spur down to a sharp right turn, then down a hard-packed dirt ramp to the floor of the valley. It was steep, but a decent car should make it—even Nichos’s taxi, I thought. But if we left the track here and climbed straight down the side of the spur, we’d cut two or three hundred yards off the distance. And actually, even the spur wasn’t all that steep. We made it without any fuss, and I sat down only once when my feet shot out from under me.

  As we got down onto the level, our host for the next fortnight came banging and clattering from the direction of the taverna, bumping over the rough scrub in a Greek three-wheeler with a cart at the back. Dimitrios wore a wide-brimmed hat against the sun, but still he was sweating just as badly as we were. He wiped his brow as he dumped our luggage into his open-ended cart. We hitched ourselves up at the rear and sat with our feet dangling. And he drove us to our chalet.

  We were hot and sticky, all three of us, and maybe it wasn’t so strange we didn’t talk. Or perhaps he could see our discomfort and preferred that we get settled in before turning on the old Greek charm. Anyway, we said nothing as he opened the door for us, gave me the key, helped me carry our bags into the cool interior. I followed him back outside again while Julie got to the ritual unpacking.

  “Hot,” he said then. “Hot, the sun…” Greeks have this capacity for stating the obvious. Then, carrying it to extreme degrees, he waved an arm in the direction of the beach, the sea, and the taverna. “Beach. Sea. Taverna. For swimming. Eating. I have the food, drinks. I also selling the food for you the cooking…” The chalet came with its own self-catering kit.

  “Fine,” I smiled. “See you later.”

  He stared at me a moment, his eyes like dull lights in the dark shadow of his hat, then made a vague sort of motion halfway between a shrug and a nod. He got back aboard his vehicle and started her up, and as his clatter died away, I went back inside and had a look around.

  Julie was filling a pair of drawers with spare clothing, at the same time building a teetering pyramid of reading material on a chair. Where books were concerned, she was voracious. She was like that about me, too. No complaints here.

  Greek island accommodation varies from abominable to half decent. Or, if you’re willing to shell out, you might be lucky enough to get good—but rarely better than that. The Villas Dimitrios chalets were…well, OK. But we’d paid for it, so it was what we expected.

  I checked the plumbing first. Greek island plumbing is never better than basic. The bathroom was tastefully but totally tiled, even the ceiling! No bathtub, but a good shower and, at the other end of the small room, the toilet and washbasin. Enclosed in tiles, you could shower and let the water spray where-the-heck; if it didn’t end up in the shower basin, it would end up on the floor, which sloped gently from all directions to one corner where there was a hole going—where? That’s the other thing about Greek plumbing: I’ve never been able to figure out where everything goes.

  But the bathroom did have its faults: like, there were no plugs for the washbasin and shower drainage, and no grilles in the plugholes. I suppose I’m quirky, but I like to see a grille in there, not just a black hole gurgling away to nowhere. It was the same in the little ‘kitchen’ (an alcove under an arch, really, with a sink and drainer unit, a two-ring gas stove, a cupboard containing the cylinder, and a wall-mounted rack for crockery and cutlery; all very nice and serviceable and equipped with a concealed overhead fan-extractor): no plug in the sink and no grille in the plughole.

  I complained loudly to Julie about it.

  “Don’t put your toe down and you won’t get stuck!” was her advice from the bedroom.

  “Toe down?” I was already miles away, looking for the shaver socket.

  “Down the shower plughole,” she answered. And she came out of the bedroom wearing sandals and the bottom half of her bikini. I made slavering noises, and she turned coyly, tossed back her bra straps for me to fasten. “Do me up.”

  “You were quick off the mark,” I told her.

  “All packed away, too,” she said with some satisfaction. “And the big white hunter’s kit neatly laid out for him. And all performed free of charge—while he examines plugholes!” Then she picked up a towel and tube of lotion and headed for the door. “Last one in the sea’s a pervert!”

  Five minutes later I followed her. She’d picked a spot halfway between the chalet and the most northerly bay arm. Her red towel was like a splash of blood on the white sand two hundred yards north of the taverna. I carried my mask, snorkel, flippers, some strong string, and a tatty old blanket with torn corners; that was all. No spear gun. First I’d take a look-see, and the serious stuff could come later. Julie obviously felt the same as I did about it: no book, just a slim, pale white body on the red towel, green eyes three-quarters shuttered behind huge sunglasses. She was still wet from the sea, but that wouldn’t last long. The sun was a furnace, steaming the water off her body.

  On my way to her, I’d picked up some long, thin, thorny branches from the scrub; when I got there, I broke off the thorns and fixed up a sunshade. The old blanket’s torn corners showed how often we’d done this before. Then I took my kit to the water’s edge and dropped it, and ran gasping, pell-mell into the shallows until I toppled over! My way of getting into the sea quickly. Following which I outfitted myself and finned for the rocks where the spur dipped below the water.

  As I’ve intimated, the Mediterranean around the Greek islands is short on fish. You’ll find red mullet on the bottom, plenty of them, but you need half a dozen to make a decent meal. And grey mullet on top, which move like lightning and cause you to use up more energy than eating them provides; great sport, but you couldn’t live on it. But there’s at least one fish of note in the Med, and that’s the grouper.

  Groupers are territorial; a family will mark out its own patch, usually in deep water where there’s plenty of cover, which is to say rock or weeds. And they love caves. Where there are plenty of rocks and caves, there’ll also be groupers. Here, where the spur crumbled into the sea, this was ideal grouper ground. So I wasn’t surprised to see this one—especially since I didn’t have my gun! Isn’t that always the way of it?

  He was all of twenty-four inches long, maybe seven across his back, mottled red and brown to match his cave. When he saw me, he headed straight for home, and I made a mental note to mark the spot. Next time I came out here, I??
?d have my gun with me, armed with a single flap-nosed spear. The spear goes into the fish, the flap opens, and he’s hooked, can’t slip off. Tridents are fine for small fish, but not for this bloke. And don’t talk to me about cruel; if I’m cruel, so is every fisherman in the world, and at least I eat what I catch. But it was then, while I was thinking these things, that I noticed something was wrong.

  The fish had homed in on his cave all right, but as his initial reaction to my presence wore off, so his spurt of speed diminished. Now he seemed merely to drift toward the dark hole in the rock, lolling from side to side like some strange, crippled sub, actually missing his target to strike against the weedy stone! It was the first time I’d seen a fish collide with something underwater. This was one very sick grouper.

  I went down to have a closer look. He was maybe ten feet down, just lolling against the rock face. His huge gill flaps pulsed open and closed, open and closed. I could have reached out and touched him. Then, as he rolled a little on one side, I saw—

  I backed off, felt a little sick—felt sorry for him. And I wished I had my gun with me, if only to put him out of his misery. Under his great head, wedging his gill slits half open, a nest of fish lice or parasites of some sort were plainly visible. Not lampreys or remora or the like, for they were too small, only as big as my thumbs. Crustaceans, I thought—a good dozen of them—and they were hooked into him, leeching on the raw red flesh under his gills.

  God, I have a loathing of this sort of thing! Once in Crete I’d come out of the sea with a suckerfish in my armpit. I hadn’t noticed it until I was towelling myself dry and it fell off me. It was only three or four inches long but I’d reacted like I was covered with leeches! I had that same feeling now.

  Skin crawling, I drifted up and away from the stricken fish, and for the first time got a good look at his eyes. They were dull, glazed, bubbly as the eyes of a fatally diseased goldfish. And they followed me. And then he followed me!

  As I floated feet first for the surface, that damned grouper finned lethargically from the rocks and began drifting up after me. Several of his parasites had detached themselves from him and floated alongside him, gravitating like small satellites about his greater mass. I pictured one of them with its hooked feet fastened in my groin, or over one of my eyes. I mean, I knew they couldn’t do that—their natural hosts are fish—but the thoughts made me feel vulnerable as hell.

  I took off like Tarzan for the beach twenty-five yards away, climbed shivering out of the water in the shadow of the declining spur. As soon as I was out, the shudders left me. Along the beach my sunshade landmark was still there, flapping a little in a light breeze come up suddenly off the sea; but no red towel, no Julie. She could be swimming. Or maybe she’d felt thirsty and gone for a drink under the vines where the taverna fronted onto the sea.

  Kit in hand, I padded along the sand at the dark rim of the ocean, past the old blanket tied with string to its frame of branches, all the way to the taverna. The area under the vines was maybe fifty feet along the front by thirty deep, a concrete base set out with a dozen small tables and chairs. Dimitrios was being a bit optimistic here, I thought. After all, it was the first season his place had been in the brochures. But…maybe next year there’d be more chalets, and the canny Greek owner was simply thinking well ahead.

  I gave the place the once-over. Julie wasn’t there, but at least I was able to get my first real look at our handful of fellow holiday makers.

  A fat woman in a glaring yellow one-piece splashed in eighteen inches of water a few yards out. She kept calling to her husband, one George, to come on in. George sat half in, half out of the shade; he was a thin, middle-aged, balding man not much browner than myself, wearing specs about an inch thick that made his eyes look like marbles. “No, no, dear,” he called back. “I’m fine watching you.” He looked frail, timid, tired—and I thought: Where the hell are marriages like this made? They were like characters off a seaside postcard, except he didn’t even seem to have the strength to ogle the girls—if there’d been any! His wife was twice his size.

  George was drinking beer from a glass. A bottle, three-quarters empty and beaded with droplets of moisture, stood on his table. I fancied a drink but had no money on me. Then I saw that George was looking at me, and I felt that he’d caught me spying on him or something. “I was wondering,” I said, covering up my rudeness, “if you’d seen my wife? She was on the beach there, and—”

  “Gone back to your chalet,” he said, sitting up a bit in his chair. “The girl with the red towel?” And suddenly he looked just a bit embarrassed. So he was an ogler after all. “Er, while you were in the sea…” He took off his specs and rubbed gingerly at a large red bump on the lid of his right eye. Then he put his glasses on again, blinked at me, held out the beer bottle. “Fancy a mouthful? To wash the sea out of your throat? I’ve had all I want.”

  I took the bottle, drained it, said: “Thanks! Bite?”

  “Eh?” He cocked his head on one side.

  “Your eye,” I said. “Mosquito, was it? Horsefly or something?”

  “Dunno.” He shook his head. “We got here Wednesday, and by Thursday night this was coming up. Yesterday morning it was like this. Doesn’t hurt so much as irritates. There’s another back of my knee, not fully in bloom yet.”

  “Do you have stuff to dab on?”

  He nodded in the direction of his wallowing wife and sighed, “She has gallons of it! Useless stuff! It will just have to take its own time.”

  “Look, I’ll see you later,” I said. “Right now I have to go and see what’s up with Julie.” I excused myself.

  Leaving the place, I nodded to a trio of spinsterish types relaxing in summer frocks at one of the tables further back. They looked like sisters, and the one in the middle might just be a little retarded. She kept lolling first one way, then the other, while her companions propped her up. I caught a few snatches of disjointed, broad Yorkshire conversation:

  “Doctor?…sunstroke, I reckon. Or maybe that melon?…taxi into town will fix her up…bit of shopping…pull her out of it…Kalamari?—yechhh! Don’t know what decent grub is, these foreign folks…” They were so wrapped up in each other, or in complaint of the one in the middle, that they scarcely noticed me at all.

  On the way back to our chalet, at the back of the house/taverna, I looked across low walls and a row of exotic potted plants to see an old Greek (male or female I couldn’t determine, because of the almost obligatory floppy black hat tilted forward, and flowing black peasant clothes) sitting in a cane chair in one corner of the garden. He or she sat dozing in the shade of an olive tree, chin on chest, all oblivious of the world outside the tree’s sun-dappled perimeter. A pure white goat, just a kid, was tethered to the tree; it nuzzled the oldster’s dangling fingers like they were teats. Julie was daft for young animals, and I’d have to tell her about it. As for the figure in the cane chair: he/she had been there when Julie and I went down to the beach. Well, getting old in this climate had to be better than doing it in some climates I could mention…

  I found Julie in bed, shivering for all she was worth! She was patchy red where the sun had caught her, cold to the touch but filmed with perspiration. I took one look, recognized the symptoms, said: “Oh-oh! Last night’s moussaka, eh? You should have had the chicken!” Her tummy always fell prey to moussaka, be it good or bad. But she usually recovered quickly, too.

  “Came on when I was on the beach,” she said. “I left the blanket…”

  “I saw it,” I told her. “I’ll go get it.” I gave her a kiss.

  “Just let me lie here and close my eyes for a minute or two, and I’ll be OK,” she mumbled. “An hour or two, anyway.” And as I was going out the door: “Jim, this isn’t Nichos’s bad water, is it?”

  I turned back. “Did you drink any?”

  She shook her head.

  “Got crabs?”

  She was too poorly to laugh, so merely snorted.

  I pocketed some money. “I’l
l get the blanket, buy some bottled drinks. You’ll have something to sip. And then…will you be OK if I go fishing?”

  She nodded. “Of course. You’ll see; I’ll be on my feet again tonight.”

  “Anyway, you should see the rest of them here,” I told her. “Three old sisters, and one of ’em not all there—a little man and fat woman straight off a postcard! Oh, and I’ve a surprise for you.”

  “Oh?”

  “When you’re up,” I smiled. I was talking about the white kid. Tonight or tomorrow morning I’d show it to her.

  Feeling a bit let down—not by Julie but by circumstances in general, even by the atmosphere of this place, which was somehow odd—I collected the sunscreen blanket and poles, marched resolutely back to the taverna. Dimitrios was serving drinks to the spinsters. The ‘sunstruck’ one had recovered a little, sipped Coke through a straw. George and his burden were nowhere to be seen. I sat down at one of the tables, and in a little while Dimitrios came over. This time I studied him more closely.

  He was youngish, maybe thirty, thirty-five, tall if a little stooped. He was more swarthy peasant Greek than classical or cosmopolitan; his natural darkness, coupled with the shadow of his hat (which he wore even here in the shade), hid his face from any really close inspection. The one very noticeable thing about that face, however, was this: it didn’t smile. That’s something you get to expect in the islands, the flash of teeth. Even badly stained ones. But not Dimitrios’s teeth.

  His hands were burned brown, lean, almost scrawny. Be that as it may, I felt sure they’d be strong hands. As for his eyes: they were the sort that make you look away. I tried to stare at his face a little while, then looked away. I wasn’t afraid, just concerned. But I didn’t know what about.

  “Drink?” he said, making it sound like ‘dring’. “Melon? The melon he is free. I give. I grow plenty. You like him? And water? I bring half-melon and water.”