Page 18 of Take a Chance on Greece

That would do the trick. It was short and to the point. And if I added my phone number at the bottom, instead of me chasing around trying to track down the mythical man, perhaps he would come to me. And yes, I might get a few strange calls, but maybe, just maybe, Awesome Andreas would pick up the phone and reach out to me. And maybe I'd even recognise his voice on the phone. They say that coma patients can still hear and understand people speaking to them. I'm not likening booze-induced amnesia to a coma by any means, but perhaps the same science would prevail. I imagined what kind of voice Awesome Andreas would have. Probably quiet but full of confidence, with a sexy warmth of tone which conveyed a sense of understanding and genuine care for the other person in the conversation. I smiled to myself. I was definitely letting my imagination run away with itself. But a girl could dream.

Before I lost courage, I told the guy behind the kiosk counter I wanted to add a notice to his board.

‘It’s two euros for the week,’ he said, passing across a pen and notecard. ‘If you want it longer, come visit again.’

‘A bargain,’ I replied, happily handing over the coins. Perhaps this would turn out to be the best two euros I’d ever spent.

Chapter Ten

For the next couple of days, I felt like my phone was an incendiary device which could go off at any moment. I was excited at the prospect of it ringing, but at the same time utterly terrified. I tried to reason with myself, reminding myself that the worst thing that could happen would be that I’d get some crank callers who I could immediately block. The notecard ad didn’t give away anything too personal, such as my full name or where I was staying, and any callers certainly wouldn’t get that information by just ringing me up. But I still had a niggling fear that this whole approach was completely hopeless, and that I was perhaps using it as another displacement activity, an excuse not to put myself out there in a tangible way. After all, as long as I had the dream of Awesome Andreas, I couldn’t be let down by disappointing reality.

To distract myself from the terrible fear of an Andreas calling me, or perhaps worse, not calling me, I threw myself into my cleaning job with a vengeance, spending pretty much every hour of daylight working. Kat and Amira teased me on the phone, saying all the hard work was actually procrastination and accusing me of doing it because I was scared of making myself vulnerable and getting hurt in my Andreas search. They had a point, but I told myself there was no point in me trying to find him, if I then lost my means of staying on the island and couldn’t get to know him properly. Alexis was the only other person to reach out to me. After receiving my initial thank you message, he sent me a picture of two Jane Austen collections in different bindings asking for my opinion on which would appeal to English customers more, and the text conversation grew from there. His messages always made me smile, even when I was up to my elbows in toilet scrubbing.

It was going to take a while before I could get up to a cleaning speed which would satisfy Yiota’s demands, but at least she was starting to look almost pleased at the results of my work, or so I hoped. On day four of my stay, I was summoned into her office behind reception. She fixed me with an unblinking stare.

‘How are you?’ she asked, then repeated the question in Greek. Unfortunately, I was so nervous about what this meeting might be about that I couldn’t take the phrase in properly. I’d have to ask her to repeat it later. If she was still talking to me at that stage, of course. I couldn’t decide whether she was genuinely asking about my wellbeing, or whether this was actually a question about how I thought I was doing work-wise.

I decided to go for a neutral answer. ‘I’m fine. Thank you once again for the kindness you’ve shown in letting me stay here.’

She nodded. ‘My brother…’ Her voice tailed off and she seemed to change her mind about what she’d been going to say. ‘Anyway, I needed the help.’

‘And I hope I am being helpful. I’m trying hard, but please do tell me if there’s anything more you’d like me to do.’

‘You are doing OK.’ From Yiota, this felt like the height of praise. She paused for a reality-TV-worthy amount of time, then she nodded again, as if she’d made her mind up about something.

‘These are for you,’ she said, handing over two sets of the distinctive uniform worn by the other members of staff at the Helios Hotel.

‘Does this mean I can stay?’ I asked, the delight evident in my voice.

She pursed her lips. ‘We’ll see. I am extending the probation period.’

She didn’t mention how long for, but I figured the two sets of clothing was a good sign that the new probation period was going to last longer than just a few days. If she was planning to chuck me out, then she’d have only handed over a T-shirt, or maybe not even bothered with that.

I returned to sweeping dust from the hotel’s front porch with a new feeling of satisfaction. Despite initially having the cleaning skills of an Ugly Sister rather than Cinderella, I was making a success of my new profession, and starting to carve out my own place in this world. Now, I only needed Awesome Andreas to appear on the scene, and everything would be perfect. As if on cue, my phone buzzed with a message. I’d turned the volume up to maximum so I wouldn’t miss anything, and the loud ping took me by surprise, causing me to lose grip on my brush momentarily, sending the carefully piled up dust all over the porch again. No matter, I’d sort that out in a minute. But first I needed to check who had messaged me. This could be it, the moment the notice in the kiosk paid off.

With trembling fingers, I took my phone out of my pocket and pressed my thumb against the button to unlock it, but my hands were too grimy and sweaty for the fingerprint recognition to work. I wiped my palm on my overalls and tried again, telling myself to calm down and stop letting my overactive imagination run away with romantic ideas. It would most likely be a text from the girls checking in on me. Or perhaps it was Alexis with a book recommendation or a picture of a dog he thought I’d like to see. But a little voice at the back of my head wondered if it could be an Andreas, maybe eventheAndreas. What would his first message be like? Would I read his words and hear his voice in my head, his features coming into focus at last? Could this message be something we would look back on years later and laugh about together? I told myself to stop getting carried away. It was probably a text from the phone company warning me I was about to go over my spending limit or something equally mundane. But hope still bubbled away.

When I finally succeeded in unlocking the phone, I wished it was one of those routine options. Jim’s name leaped out at me, almost as intrusive in my Greek haven as if he’d walked up to the front door in person. He was still in my phone address book with a heart emoji on either side of ‘Boss Jim’. He’d added those emojis in himself when our relationship had officially changed status from employer and employee to something more, but he hadn’t got rid of the word ‘boss’, which should have rung alarm bells at the time. In those early days, my heart had started beating faster whenever I saw his name pop up on the screen. Now it was beating faster for a very different reason. A message arriving from Jim was the last thing I’d been hoping for. I’d been doing so well in not even thinking about him over the last few days, and now a text was undoing all my good work, sending me into that place of insecurity and frustration all over again. I hated that he could still have that effect on me.

Before I even read the message, I quickly deleted the hearts and the word ‘boss’ from my address book. I told myself I was too mature to delete his text altogether or block him, but perhaps it was really because I wasn’t brave enough. My imagination would probably fill in the gaps in a worse way than the actual reality. I closed my eyes briefly and attempted a few positive yoga-esque affirmations of ‘I am strong’, which sounded pathetic even in my own head. Then I braced myself and looked at the message before I lost courage completely. I was disappointed that I was allowing myself to be so wound up by this.

The text was stark and to the point.

Have you had enough of being dramatic? You know you want me.

There followed a picture file, but whatever it was – and I dreaded to think what it could be – hadn’t downloaded properly so the image didn’t load up on the screen. My nerves turned into something very different. How dare he be so utterly dismissive of my emotions while simultaneously being arrogant enough to think I’d still be pining away for him? The man was deluded. Had he not listened to a word I’d said when I’d walked out on him? Fizzing with anger, I jabbed at the screen until I managed to delete the offensive text and the picture which would probably have proved even more offensive had it downloaded properly. A thousand potential responses swirled around my mind, many of which would have startled my friends with the number of expletives they’d contain. I even started typing out a few different politer versions of the message asking him to leave me alone. But then I decided against even doing that. In behaving the way he had done, Jim had forfeited the right to expect a response from me ever again. I could not have made it clearer to him that he had hurt me too much for our relationship to be repaired. If he was struggling to accept it, then that was his problem, but I was under no obligation to explain it to him all over again. It was time he drew a line under the whole affair and moved on, like I had.

But that annoying nagging voice at the back of my mind questioned whether I really had moved on as much as I was pretending to myself. Yes, I’d packed my bags and headed to Greece, I’d found paid work and a place to stay. But my efforts to find Awesome Andreas had been half-hearted to say the least, idling surfing the internet while knowing there was very little chance of narrowing down the options there, and leaving a tiny notecard pinned up barely in sight on a kiosk. If Jim could see me now, would he really believe that his chances of getting back with me were dead and buried?

I was so buoyed up with indignation mixed with an undercurrent of self-doubt that I decided I needed to take positive action to prove Jim’s assumption wrong. The noticeboard sign was yet to elicit any Andreas callers, so I’d have one last time searching online, then I’d go out in the street and start calling ‘Andreas’ to passers-by if I had to.

This time I used the computer in the guest lounge which was set up for English-speaking visitors. Mindful that I didn’t want to lose my place in Yiota’s good books so soon after getting into them, I made sure no guests were in the vicinity, and I kept my search quick and to the point, focusing on the area where I was staying.

Within minutes, I’d found a man called Andreas who owned a grocery just outside Sami. As it was called ‘Andreas’s Fruit and Veg’ and not ‘Andreas and sons’ or similar, I took a wild punt on him being single, and before I lost courage, I pinged him a quick message explaining that I was searching for a man named Andreas and asking if he wanted to meet up for a coffee. If the poor man had any sense, he’d probably ignore the message from the random English woman asking him on a date purely on the basis of his name, that is if the message didn’t go straight into spam. But as Kat kept urging me, if I didn’t take a chance, I was never going to achieve anything. I pressed send before I could change my mind. The less time I had to think too much about this, the better.

To my complete astonishment and slight horror, the computer pinged with a reply within minutes. Andreas the grocer was happy to have received my message and he would be delighted to meet me tomorrow. What had I got myself into?

I decided to celebrate/distract myself from worrying about my impending first date by making a trip to the bookshop. It was high time I took up Alexis on his offer of providing me with a dictionary. It would be nice to see him in person again. And it would give me another chance to check if the occupant of the tattoo studio had returned to their post yet.

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