Under The Tamarisk Trees

A tale of love and façades

Credit: Jonathan Foster

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Writing The Crow is an enormous pleasure but it also takes a huge amount of time. I’d love it if you’d help me by offering a small donation toward my work.

If you can’t afford to donate then please enjoy my work, no problem at all. If you can afford to then just click on the button below. Thanks :)

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We noticed the couple from our usual place shaded from the mid-morning sun under the tamarisk trees. We watched them walk across the planks that ran over the lava hot sand, their fingers casually laced, a large beach bag over her shoulder, a cool-box over his.

“Italians,” I said.

She nodded, “Italians.”

The Italians contemplated the sun loungers before the women placed her bag on one and he began making camp under the reedy parasol in the expensive first row. They were young, not yet thirty, slender and elegant in bathing suits.

I drank water from a plastic bottle and could hardly take my eyes off them. You could see they’d been at the beach a while already with their nonchalant four-fifths naked bronzed breeziness. She said something as she handed money to the sun lounger guy and they all laughed. Then she adjusted the backrest and lay under her wide brimmed straw hat and oversized sunglasses while her boyfriend took his tanned body and waded into the turquoise sea.

A few young Americans wandered about, flabbergasted by flesh, perturbed by their own, hissing to each other, titties at two o’clock, titties at two o’clock! A sunburnt English couple spouted a perpetual stream of instructions to reluctant grandparents and teenagers trailing after them as if their very survival were dependent on following the rules. A Scandinavian family like a lost hominid species surprised to find themselves amongst the Sapiens communicated with each other in slow motion glances and faraway expressions.

The beach filled up with modern European bodies like gourds wrapped in melting rubber wearing bathing suits designed to hold them together. Faces straight from Minoan vases, from Asterix, from Bruegel, from Vogue. there were theatrically masculine gym bodies, with their huge shoulders, pecs and biceps tottering about on tiny sculpted calves, as if the ego had orchestrated a coup and ousted the natural balance of things. There were old men so tanned they’d turned a deep purple, and toddlers in body suits and bucket hats with creamy hands and feet beside bent backed grandmothers forever sorting out lunches from zipped up plastic bags. Families and groups of families and extended groups of families, and friends of families like buffalo at a waterhole.

It was hot, getting hotter, 32 degrees. 34 degrees. 36 degrees. People perpetually reporting the temperature from apps to others reading paperbacks or schlopping sun lotion on each other then wading chest deep into the turquoise balm to take partial refuge from the relentless rays.

We sipped our water in the shade of the Tamarisk tree and watched the Italian couple under their parasol lounging in perfect self-conscious calm, completely oblivious, it seemed, of the chaos of human intimacy going on around them, as if they were a pop-up art installation performing through a funk of coconut sun lotion and acrid raspberry vape.

2.

Later that evening we sipped ouzos on the taverna terrace and watched the orange sun plummeting toward the horizon. A young Greek couple were ushered past us to the prized corner table overlooking the bay by an obsequious waiter who rolled his hand “Ta Da” and bowed as he handed over two menus. They ordered a carafe of white wine and sat side by side like two chuffed love birds silhouetted in the sunset. He had Poseidon’s beard and shoulders and she seemed to be falling toward his gravity. They clinked their glasses and both pointed at the descending sun.

At out table we sat smiling in silence at each other’s sun kissed faces as it occurred to me, again, that I couldn’t imagine a world without her. After twenty five years I was still giddy with something like, but not quite, reverence. I watched her sip her ouzo, holding the glass with her slender fingers, watching the Greek couple, and then our codfish and garlic sauce as it arrived, and I reached across the table and placed my hand upon hers.

She pointed with her eyes and I looked around and saw them, the young Italian couple, dressed like minor royalty, following the waiter toward the now occupied prized table. We put down our ouzos. Trouble was brewing. A mistake had been made. The waiter leaned in close to the Greek couple and seemed to be washing his hands under an invisible stream of water while the Italians hung back glowing with impatient indifference. The Greek man looked the Italians up and down with a flick of his eye and then turned back to the waiter and said something that made it quite clear this young bearded sea god wasn’t moving anywhere, and then it dawned on the now deflating Italians that they were to be relegated to a secondary table after having hovered in front of the terrace full of diners in full righteous expectation.

The waiter continued washing his hands as he lead them to another table, still in the full rays of the setting sun, still overlooking the bay, but not quite the prized table, not the table they had booked, not the social media table they had wanted.

We sipped our ouzos in unison and glanced at each other. The Italians sat down and the waiter brought them a complimentary tsikoudia with the menus, which she downed directly without a word, staring hard at her partner who kept his eyes firmly on the menu.

Two mouthfuls into the cod and heavily whispered Italian began punctuating the restaurant like machine gun fire as he nodded and sipped his wine and nodded again and then shrugged his shoulders and then nodded some more. Her increasingly furious scolding began to compete with the accordion player who had appeared out of nowhere to sing Beno Mes T'abeli. The hand washing waiter returned and hovered and departed and returned again and the Greek couple steadfastly stared at the sun sinking into the waterline making a great show of their nonchalance.

“Ah the joys,” I said.

“Go and offer them our table,” she said, smiling.

“Yeah, or we could invite them to join us and really ruin their night”.

“Well,” she said,“how about we tell her it doesn’t matter what table you’re at, the only thing that matter’s is who your with.”

“You mean it’s just as good under a tamarisk tree as in the expensive seats,” I said.

She downed her cheap white wine and smiled, “that is exactly what I mean.”

3.

The following day the young Italian man arrived at the sun loungers, alone, carrying both the beach bag and the cool box. The sun lounger guy didn’t laugh because nothing funny was said. Then the young man sat and began rubbing sun lotion on his legs and torso and the top of his back.

“Go and offer to do his lower back,” she said.

“Don’t joke, maybe she’s dead,” I said, “the drop in instagram followers from last night’s selfie disaster forced her to kill herself.”

“But he’s soldiering regardless,” she said, “he’s got responsibilities after all.”

“Do you think they made up?” I said.

“Where is she then?” she said

“Post-coital cigarette in bed,” I said.

“Wow, it’s all sex and violence with you isn’t it,” she said.

“I’m a modern, it’s only sex and violence these days,” I said.

“Never a truer word spoken in jest,” she said.

We both grinned and lay back and stared at the deep blue sky through the spiky tamarisk tree.

“She’ll be along in a minute,” she said, “she’s just punishing him.”

“What, a bit of peace and all the food to himself?” I said.

“You wouldn’t dare,” she was smiling as she spoke. Then she rolled over and rested on her elbows. “Let’s go to that orange place for lunch.”

“Can we afford it?”

“Nope.”

“Hey look,” I said, and there walking along the planks giving a little wave to her boyfriend was the Italian girl, smoking a cigarette under her wide brimmed hat and oversized glasses.

“Well, well, well,” she said.

“Well, she’s alive anyway,” I said.

“Go and ask them to join us for lunch,” she said.

I looked at her and pulled a wide eyed panic face and shook my head.

She pulled a wide eyed panicked face right back and nodded.

“Alright then,” I said and stood up, slid my feet into my broken flip flops and zig zagged through the sun lounger village toward a young Italian couple to invite them to lunch.

4.

“Can you make an actual living doing that, writing stuff?” the young man said, leaning forward, gorgeous, deep brown eyes, calm confidence. It would be so easy to fall for these two people.

“No, god no, it wouldn’t even pay for these starters, no one reads anymore.”

They looked at each other sideways and leant back in their chairs.

“On the plane people were playing games and watching films and sleeping but no one was reading,” the young woman said, nodding.

“He’s exaggerating,” my wife said, “some people read.”

“We saw you last night at the taverna,” the young man said.

“We saw you too.”

“Last night?”

“At the taverna,” she said.

“But weren’t you…”

They both started laughing.

“We’re YouTubers, Che Sfiga!,” they both said in unison.

“It was a stunt,” he said.

“So last night you were making a YouTube video?” my wife said.

“Yep,” they said in unison

“Are you famous?” I said.

“Hell no,” they said like a chorus.

“Can you make an actual living doing that, YouTubing?” my wife asked.

“We’re small fry but it kicks over,” the girl said.

The young man shrugged his shoulders and offered up a number.

We sat in shocked silence, our wine glasses hovering in the air.

4.

I was staring at the deep blue sky through the spiky tamarisk tree.

“I don’t feel part of the world anymore. It’s like I’m just floating about lost, like we’re all just floating about lost,” I said, “the world has become something unrecognisable.”

“Hasn’t it always been like that?” my wife said lying beside me on the black and white fish ground-throw.

“Not like this, don’t you think everything is getting more and more ridiculous, like it’s all just a façade?”

“Two hundred meters behind us are the ruins of a harbour destroyed in an earthquake that raised the ground by six meters. 100 years before that the Romans ransacked the town as punishment for piracy and killed everyone,” she said.

“Yeah, life has always been one disaster after another, but now feels stupider, more brazen, and besides, we’re running out of road here, the Romans had plenty of wriggle room.”

We had watched their YouTube channel Che Sfiga! over breakfast, their Bad Luck Moments, which weren’t bad luck at all but fake enactments of trivial embarrassments, small stuff of paranoid daydreams, vacuous and pointless minor humiliations turned into massively financially rewarding payoffs, like failing to get tables, walking into glass doors, embracing the wrong people, wearing identical outfits as other couples. Utterly mindless baloney.

“I think the curse of our time is meaninglessness,” she said, “everybody’s talking and no one’s listening, everyone is a walking talking selfie locked into idiot behaviours. Those two aren’t any worse, they were nice really, sweet.”

“Isn’t that the problem? That this system has us all doing the stupidest most immoral shit all the time? It makes no difference if your nice, there’s no choice.”

“It’s always better to be kind though,” she said.

5.

On the plane a women sat in the fifth row reading a book, beside her sat a man also reading a book. He leant over and whispered something to her and she laughed and they held hands for a moment, then she pressed the button and a steward wandered down the isle and leant over the pair nodding, returning a little later with two coffees. They exchanged a few words and the steward laughed and nodded again and the couple got back to their books.

The plane landed and the world kept spinning.

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Writing The Crow is an enormous pleasure but it also takes a huge amount of time. I’d love it if you’d help me by offering a donation toward my work.

If you can’t afford to then please enjoy my work, no problem at all. If you can afford to help then just click on the button below. Thanks :)