Paros, Greece
Thursday 19th August
After four hours, we disembark from the ferry; the port of Parikia is awash with straw-hatted tourists with flat feet. Paros is busier than we expected (later we learn Mykonos is fully booked) and around the taxi queue tired children bawl in French, Italian, and Greek; the French are all rich: yacht people, beautiful only at first glance. I tell a hippy with dreadlocks to fuck off. He does a V sign in my face, saying “Peace and Love.” Manu Chao lives on an island nearby, the same one that Tom Hanks lives on, where he’s been dining with Jeff Bezos and the Greek PM.
It takes an hour to find a cab: twenty euros for a ten-minute trip. Am I being punished by the gods for telling the hippy to fuck off? An old friend once told me nine times out of ten you cut a hippy and they bleed venture capitalist. What do venture capitalists bleed when you cut them?
Neesha brags that she can’t get sunburnt. She’s a lizard. The wind makes the thirty-degree heat tolerable, for which I am relieved. After we have deposited our bags, Neesha and I jump around in the crashing waves of Parasporos beach. We’re staying in a comfortable shed in the garden of an old Greek lady who brings us plates of figs and cake for our morning coffee. The first night we are exhausted. We jostle under the cold comfort of the AC unit, clashing in quiet rage, Neesha too cold and I too hot.
Friday 20th August
I wake early (well, 9am) for a lift from a man to a moped hire spot in the town. The man is quiet and surly, and he does not tell me his name. I imagine he has killed someone. My knees grip his hairy back, a masculine overture of strange proximity.
Two hours later I’m crying into a stack of pancakes covered with orange syrup and chocolate after accelerating a moped over a flower bed. “You’ve ridden a moped before right?”the woman at the hire centre asked me at every stage of the handover. “Yes, of course,” I reassured her. But when I got on the thing it was clear I had no clue what I was doing. She made me give it bike back, having already signed the papers. I can’t remember the last time I felt so humiliated. It was like being a teenager again, incapable of doing anything properly, reduced to a stupid corpus. Perhaps it is customary for holidays to start on the wrong foot.
Because taxis cost stupid cash, we walk everywhere. Neesha doesn’t mind, but still recovering from the plague, I tire easily. But we go to the beach and suddenly everything is fine; I am no longer a moped-less failure. We pay for sun loungers, we play a lot of Shithead, there are more rich French people everywhere. In the hot stupor of touristic complacency, I sleep like a baby. Then I float on top of the sea. The world is big enough to spread into. I piss myself in the Aegean, a hot jet across my thighs.
Saturday 21st August
In the morning we go to another beach where we pay too much for sun loungers. This is satisfying. There are even more rich French people everywhere, old women in tiny bikinis who look like melting candles are accompanied by their anxious daughters. Neesha and I play more Shithead, we drink wine at lunch. Whenever I read my book, I feel listless.
Thank god our friends are here! Well, new friends. Neesha’s London flatmate Marianthi spent her childhood in the Parian summers. She’s garrulous, chatting to everyone with her devilishly excessive smile. She seems to know the whole island. Her boyfriend, Christopher, is a Swedish painter based in Athens. He is measured and calm. Highly reassuring, I would trust him with my life.
The four of us eat dinner at an incredible Taverna owned by a Greek man who grew up in The Bronx. He speaks English like Harley Flanagan. His fava is delectable. The sunset glows a hot orange that veers into red. The sky has split and crumbled like a yellow pea. Marianthi invites us to a beach rave. My body tells me no and I feel like a party pooper.
Monday 23rd August
We hire a car. Christopher is a fantastic driver. Marianthi’s videos of the beach rave are beautiful: bodies gyrate to techno under the nearly full moon by the stillness of the night sea. I am saddened by the heavy hollow of my post-viral body.
We start at a bakery in Parikia, stuffing ourselves with these sweet cheese biscuits before taking the road south. We’re all tanked up on iced coffee. We bounce and rage to Dreamer by Livin’ Joy then laugh about David Guetta ending racism. I guess that’s how we spent our days in lockdown, just sending each other stupid videos back and forth.
Arriving at the first beach without sun loungers, we promptly get naked, then snorkel around the rock pools. No one is self-conscious about this. It just happens. The little lizard is extremely happy under the heat of a distant burning star. We kiss in the sea and everything is great.
After dodging sea urchins and sunburn, we drive for dinner in the mountains, passing through an extensive stretch of scorched gorse from last year’s fires. The stretches of ashen ground bring a silence to the car. But in the mountain village everything is sweet and serene. Cooled by the altitude, we eat slow cooked goat, savouring the wine. It tastes of the full heat of the sun splitting the grape, a tart fullness. Neesha pays for my dinner. She says I can pay her back in poems. She’s not even joking.
We stop at a potter’s studio. He has made the most incredible bowls and vases. A small old dog struts around. The man is so absorbed in his work he seemingly refuses to talk to any of the visitors. I wonder if this is eudaimonia: to be absorbed in the potter’s wheel in the hills of a Greek island at 11pm. But a bend in his neck and some pained mutterings suggest a need for physio.
Back in the car the full moon is red: a blood moon over the scorched crest of the hill. It is the kind of terrible beauty you want from the end of days.
We drive round to the north east of the island, stopping for a drink at Naussau, where everyone is dressed up like it’s Capri or Monaco. We go to Marianthi’s friend’s brother’s bar. We sit by the shore under sprinkles of electric light. Play by Moby thumps in the background. All of the men wear white shirts, have huge arm muscles, and look like Matt Berry. The faces of the women who accompany them indicate a questioning of their life decisions, but everyone looks too bored to want to change anything about their lives. We get sent a complimentary drink. It makes us feel important.
On the drive home, Neesha and I hum a nineties Spanish tinged pop song. We can’t remember if it’s Madonna or Gloria Estefan. We sleep deeply under the blood moon.
Tuesday 24th August
Marianthi and Christopher take us to Antiparos, the small island where Tom Hanks and Manu Chao live. On the ferry boat, it is extremely hot. Even Neesha complains. We watch two hunky, uniformed men waiting on a speed boat. Later, a portly man, his wife and two brats board. The mega rich are so disappointing, we all say. I don’t know what we expected? Ten-foot Bill Gates in an exo-skeleton?
For an hour, we traipse through the shops selling small décor items for yachts. In the eighties it was a hippy paradise, but Antiparos has been slapped with the millionaire minimalism of smooth white plaster and design simplicity. Later, the locals complain about all the rich people.
We go to an extremely remote beach. The rocky surface is alien and moonlike, the jagged ends of a beautiful world. I write Neesha a poem about the blood moon:
Blood Moon
The breeze kicks in all giddy
like where the fuck is my Greek salad?
And that’s at least one definition of Eros.
The bitching heat has beaten down the gorse,
no more birds in the bush
but plenty of dogs howling under a blood moon.
The lights by the roadside are heaven’s tinkering,
selling dreams to whoever wants to believe
in an endlessly expanding concept of infinity
and these days what else is there to believe in?
Except cum and knowing all bluster of rhetoric is empty,
except kisses and kissing again
under the full lipped red of the blood moon,
a sky full of ash
and a ground twitching to disappear.
Naked, I swim for over half an hour to a ridge of rock that creates the bay. A strong current tries to drag me out. I am fixed on how if I were to stop swimming, I would die; to swim in the sea is to consent to an unknowable terror. After, we spend hours in the baking sun, playing Shithead again, until we are disturbed late in the day by a swarm of Spanish tourists. We put on seaweed facemasks and turn our music up, hoping they will go away. Some children laugh at our genitals.
In the evening we drink beer and do tequila shots at The Doors, an old rockers bar. Old men spin out in a stoner haze of classic rock, embracing in the joy of reunion. Everyone knows everyone and no one gives a fuck about anything. Mick from Belfast tells me about his dead wife. He apologises for flirting with Neesha. We grin through it. I could die here.
Marianthi tries to take us to a tiny dance club called La Luna, but it has been temporarily closed for breaking restrictions (people were dancing). Earlier that morning, a really fucking nice guy who works in a café near our Airbnb told me he has to pay weekly for his work covid tests. He thinks the virus is not a big deal. He just wants to dance. In Greece, all of the restrictions control the local workers while sanctioning tourists’ relative freedom. But no one can dance.
Last night I dreamt of San Pedro—on the ferry back to Paros, I play La Isla Bonita through my phone and we all sing along, a Parian lullaby. Marianthi finds a bar open at 2am. We befriend the waitress. Josefine is a French Jew in exile from doing too many drugs in London. She wants to find salvation in Israel. I, too, dream of a life free from stress. We do shots with Josefine and drink margaritas before slamming to bed in the soporific darkness of single bedsheets and a post-cocktail sugar crash.