Pack Your Things Veronica

Apart from picking his guests up at the airport and depositing them back there intact after two weeks, Sid's job was to make sure his clients stayed out of trouble while they were guests on the island. They weren't aware that the Greek police had no qualms about bashing them around to make them behave. On torrid alcohol-fueled nights, tempers frayed. The English and Italians threw boulders at each other across the square. Stepping over drunk young men who could no longer walk was commonplace. Sid would give them a quick glance to see if they were his clients and whether they were breathing or not.

At the local tourist agency, his company was assigned a desk where the reps were expected to put in daily office hours to sell excursions to visitors who didn't plan on spending their entire holiday at the beach. There were day trips to the valley of the butterflies and to the Island of Symi. He had heard of clients attending the mountain festival barbecue in Embona and making the bus driver stop partway down the winding road home so they could vomit up their dentures, then ask the tour rep to walk back and find them.

On top of a month-long heatwave that had broken records, an incessant Meltemi had been blowing for the last week. A client had stormed into the office the previous day complaining about the exaggerated temperatures and brandishing the front page of The Daily Mail, which read "Brits Sizzle On Blaze Isle," like Sid could turn off the sun. Nobody had actually sizzled, but there were small fires here and there as there was every summer. At the far side of the delta of dry riverbeds, a fire had been burning for the last couple of days but was so far blocked by roads and the whitewashed buildings of a nearby village. The Meltemi carried the smoke toward Kalathos where Sid lived, but only when the wind veered in the right direction. He asked his neighbour, a big-bosomed grandmother with small children at her feet, if she thought there was any danger. "If the fire comes close, the monks at St. John's, they will ring the bell," she said. For a few nights Sid went to sleep expecting to be woken by the clanging bells of the monastery but so far, all had been quiet.

He was not worried about himself, but about the two sets of clients who had rented houses in his home village of Kalathos for a week. Sid had grown up in California so he had experience with forest fires because he had worked a few summers on a forestry crew. Although his parents were English and he was born in England, the family had pulled up stakes when he was a baby and went to live on a commune, where he had been raised until he left at the age of sixteen. His parents were horrified when he went to work for the government, but they could partly accept it because it was in forestry, which had a tenuous connection to saving God's trees. When he started his working life, he told people his name was Sid, instead of his real name of Siddhartha, the name of the Buddha. Siddhartha was a burden, but there were Sids everywhere.

The tour company Sid worked for had taken on three small houses in Kalathos, a village that was a ten minute drive from the main tourist town where most of the tour accommodation was contracted. Kalathos was smaller and quieter than the resort with its multiple bars and restaurants, so it suited more traditional visitors. A rental car was a necessity because the only businesses within walking distance were a petrol station and a bare-bones cafe that closed at ten. There was a long straight dusty road from Kalathos down to the beach but in summer there was no shelter so it was best travelled quickly by motorbike or car.

Sid had lived in Kalathos long enough to know that the church bells rang early on Sundays, in the afternoons for weddings, and any time of the day for the single toll that announces a death. One of the three houses in Kalathos the tour company had rented was Sid's accommodation. It was on a narrow street on the way to the monastery so he could see the brides and grooms passing, and if he dared to look, the sad funeral processions. If the church bells were rung in alarm, he would have to track down his clients and tell them to get out of the village. They were aware of the distant fire because they had complained to him about the smell of smoke.