“That’s bloody ridiculous, Georgie! You can’t go through life pretending to be straight, having girlfriends, getting married even, just to keep your family happy! Jesus, this place is so backwards! Hasn’t anyone here read The Iliad? The Greeks fucking invented homosexuality! That life wouldn’t be fair on you or on whichever woman you decided to try to marry.”

  “They also invented the word ‘homophobia’, too, Max. I’m not saying my family or the people of Aegina are especially homophobic, but they are very old-fashioned, and it’s just…well… it’s just how it is. I can’t change it.”

  He presses into me, willing me to understand. “This is the life I live, Max, whatever you say. Here, on Aegina. I can’t jump on a plane and swan off to another country when I don’t like something. This island is my home, that will be my restaurant one day, and they will always be my family, for better or worse.” He shrugs. “It won’t be so bad, I’ve had plenty of girlfriends, it’s not so terrible. I won’t be the first bloke who’s pretended to be completely straight, nor the last.”

  I stroke his hair. “But that’s not the life you deserve, Georgie! You deserve happiness; you deserve to be with someone you love. Whether that someone is me or someone else. But I’d like it to be me, obviously.”

  He sighs. “Well, you bloody tell me how I can sort it all out, then, as I sure as hell can’t see a way through.”

  And that’s the challenge, laid down right there. If I want my man, then I’ve got to work for it. Waltzing in and expecting to have it all my own way isn’t going to work.

  “Okay. Give me some time then, Georgios, and I will. You and me together, here, on Aegina. Permanently. Family and restaurant included.”

  *

  We take a meandering route through the pine trees back down to the beach and join the others. No more kisses, but no more fists curled in frustration either. Georgios is friendly with Agnes, but there are no more cuddles on the lounger. I try not to appear smug, but I don’t think anyone notices anything anyway; they’re too sleepy from the sun and the beer.

  Something changed up there alone on the mountaintop, and not just Georgios telling me he loved me, although that was pretty fucking special. And I don’t think he meant as a friend or as family either. I’ve always had that kind of love from him; he never needed to declare it. And the kisses, well, they were pretty special, too, though I’m not going to push for more. The physical side of things needs to come from him, and when it does, I’ll be waiting. But in not so many words, he came out to me up there, whether he realises it or not. And more importantly, he came out to himself as well. The next step for me is to make sure we do something about it.

  Vagia, February 15th, 1942

  Mama has warned us both to have as little to do with the German soldiers as possible, as has Melia’s mama, and Lydia’s too. We are not to ‘engage them in conversation’, which is a posh way of saying not to talk to them. Neither should we ‘look them in the eye’, apparently, nor ‘draw attention to ourselves’. Mama and Dimitris will deal with them. If and when they come to the door, us girls are to make ourselves scarce. And actually, I’m really cross about this as every time they come into the village, she deliberately finds me jobs to do! ‘Artemis, come and help me fold the sheets,’ or ‘Artemis, see if Mr Kleftis wants our spare pickling jars’, or worse, ‘Artemis, go and clean out the henhouse—it’s filthy in there.’

  It’s not fair because when she asks Maria to do stuff, Maria starts arguing back, and then they are both shouting, so Mama doesn’t ask her too often. And if Dimitris tries to get Maria to help, then there is no way she will do as he asks. As Maria is always fond of telling me, she is no longer a child. Dimitris is just her brother—not her papa—and he can’t boss her about.

  *

  I don’t particularly mind going to see Mr Kleftis as he is so nice, even though he is very old and has a weird lump on his neck and smells of fish. But it’s okay once you get used to the smell, and he’s got lots of books that he lets me look at. My favourite is a massive black atlas with maps of all the countries in the world. It looks like a witch’s spell book on the outside, but inside, you can see all the volcanoes and all the mountains and everything! Mr Kleftis likes the rivers, too, and the seas especially, but that’s because he’s a fisherman. He says he dreams of having a really big boat, instead of just the caique, a boat big enough so that he could sail all the way to America. We worked out how many miles that was, but I’ve forgotten.

  On the atlas, Aegina is a tiny, tiny dot next to Greece, and even Greece isn’t very impressive, not if you imagine it next to a country like America. He showed me Germany, which is also quite big. Nowhere near the size of America, but much, much bigger than Greece, so I don’t understand why the Germans all want to come over here when they have got a perfectly good enough country of their own to live in. Maybe it isn’t as nice.

  Vagia, March 13th, 1942

  The exciting news from one of Dimitris’s funny trips into town is that the German soldiers will be staying at Tourlos for the ‘foreseeable future’, however long that means. It sounds like a long time to me though. Mama doesn’t know, and I don’t think Dimitris does either, although he pretends he knows everything. They have taken over the old sponge factory in Aegina town and are using it as their main headquarters. According to Dimitris, our little island of Aegina is ‘a very important strategic military outpost’! He explains this in a silly sort of voice and sneers every time he says it. Whether it is true or not I don’t know, but I do know that they have started building lots of lookout sheds at the tops of all the high hills—apparently, they are even building one right at the top of Moni Mountain! Which is ridiculous. Who is going to need to fight a war all the way up there? By the time the soldiers had all climbed it, they would be too tired to do any fighting. Lydia says I’m stupid, and it isn’t to fight a war up there but to be able to see if any enemy ships are sneaking into Piraeus in the middle of the night to kill all the Germans and give Greece back to us. She’s cleverer than me, so she’s probably right.

  The soldiers come to the village almost every day now. We have ignored our mother’s pleas to hide, and we wait for their arrival. We know some of their names now. The fat ugly one is called Hauptmann Ernst. Ernst is his surname, and I don’t know what his first name is, because nobody ever uses it, but Mr Kleftis says the Hauptmann part means that he is very important. The blond one that Maria fancies is called Jürgen, and his pale thin friend is called Hans. Hauptmann Ernst always calls them Lieutenant Bergmann and Kadett Schmidt, but when he wasn’t there one time, they introduced themselves as Jürgen Bergmann and Hans Schmidt. Funny names, especially the rhyming Jürgen Bergmann, which sounds like it should be the beginning to a tongue-twister. I’m not the only one who must find it funny—Maria rhymes his name over and over to herself, too, when she doesn’t think I’m listening.

  It’s much better when Hauptmann Ernst doesn’t come and the others visit us by themselves. They bring us sweet biscuits almost every time now and, once, some long spicy, meaty things called würst, which tasted delicious. Mama must have listened to Dimitris as now she swaps our milk and kefalotiri cheese for some tins of meat instead of for lepta. Soon, I’m going to ask Jürgen Bergmann if he has any spare buttons. I will have to show him one of my plain ones to get him to understand what I’m asking for as I don’t think he knows the Greek word for button. Lydia will be so jealous if I get one.

  Sometimes, when the Hauptmann isn’t there, Jürgen Bergmann stays behind a bit longer to stroke my favourite hen—the fat red one—before catching up with the others. His Greek isn’t very good, but I think he is trying to explain that he keeps hens at home in Germany. I’m going to teach him the word for goat, too, because he likes petting ours. She is very friendly. Maybe he lives in the countryside and not in a big town. He has very white teeth, the whitest I’ve ever seen. They ask about the fruit trees, and Lydia and I have tried to explain that in a couple of months, we will have some lemons and olives growing. I don’t know if they understand everything, even though we speak slowly, and Lydia is a good mime, though miming a lemon is quite hard. I don’t know what rubbish they fill their heads with at German schools because Lydia and I are convinced they don’t even know what an olive looks like, and I know he tried to smell one. I think we are still a long way off from explaining pistachios.

  Georgios

  The entire house in which I have lived since my father died is about the size of the living room in Max’s holiday house. My family shares a shaded courtyard garden with two other stone houses halfway along one of the Aegina town side streets. The big red brick building opposite us used to be a smart hotel back in the sixties but now runs as a cheap hostel and, as rumour has it, a brothel for those in the know. Next to it stands an orthodox church, and the bell tolls every quarter hour, perhaps reminding the randy visitors to the hostel of the presence of God. Our red setter, Hector, is chained up for most of the day in the garden, as is the terrier belonging to the old hag who lives next door, and the two dogs have a love-hate relationship—more hate than love.

  Our stone house is built on three floors, bits of each floor added in a higgledy-piggledy fashion at varying times over the last two hundred years to accommodate the growing family, although the tiny attic space is still way too small to share with the human lump that is my brother Dion. The current permanent residents, in order of apparent importance are: My great-grandmother Noni; my uncle, Papa Marcos, and his browbeaten wife Cynta, who slavishly cares for Noni; and my own, downtrodden gentle mother Simone. Then, there is my spiteful cousin Nico (although he sometimes lives with his girlfriend and their child until she periodically gets fed up with his laziness and throws him out); Dion; then me and my younger sister Ava, who is still in nappies. Which in itself warrants a mention given that my father died of a heart attack eight years ago, and my mum has never remarried. Or had a boyfriend. And I don’t recall my slender mother ever looking pregnant or giving birth, and I’d like to think it’s something I’d notice.

  Ranking my kind, sweet mother higher than Dion and Nico is an error. The only reason she and I are tolerated under this roof is because a couple of years ago, Papa Marcos’s sixteen-year-old daughter Agatha began to look fairly tubby before taking an extended trip with her mother Cynta to visit some other relatives (we literally seem to have hundreds of them) in the Peloponnese and never returned. Aunt Cynta eventually did, carrying a babe in arms, towards which she appeared to be totally ambivalent. But we don’t talk about that, just like we don’t talk about Agatha. Papa Marcos and my mother came to some sort of arrangement—I don’t know the details because, guess what? We don’t talk about it. So, to a disinterested, more modern outside world, baby Ava is, to all intents and purposes, my younger sister, and the only people under this roof who pay her the slightest bit of attention are my mother and myself. Family may be of utmost importance, but in Papa Marcos’s warped reasoning, the members have to be legitimate.

  None of us has the luxury of a bedroom to ourselves. Sometimes, I think I’d be more comfortable outside in the yard with Hector than squashed next to my farting, smelly older brother.

  So, as you can imagine, the courtyard dining area is a bit cramped at the best of times, and even more so when my relative giant of a blond second cousin is also squeezed around the table. For all the metaphorical spitting in disgust that goes on whenever the Bergmann branch of the family is mentioned, Max receives a polite welcome, and a place setting next to me is prepared for him. My mother extends him a warm greeting, and he makes a fuss of Ava. Papa Marcos refuses to address him directly, which is both odd and amusing. He has sworn never to speak to anyone with the name Bergmann, not ever, and I am annoyed on Max’s behalf. But Papa Marcos and the rest of them can never quite bring themselves to forget the past, even if none of that past is Max’s fault, so it’s no use me trying to change things. All families have their idiosyncrasies, and I guess this is just one of ours.

  Naturally, Max is charm personified and has arrived bearing gifts—several bottles of expensive red wine, to get on Papa Marcos’s good side, are received with a quick nod. Posh Swiss chocolates for the ladies, and some sweets for Ava. Funnily enough, the small baggy of weed that he picked up on his way through Piraeus port, his well-received gift to Dion and Nico, wasn’t presented at the dinner table.

  And his gift to me? Well, I received that at the top of Moni Mountain a few hours ago and will, no doubt, re-examine it carefully later in bed tonight, with my hand on my swollen dick.

  After those kisses, every kiss from anyone else ever, every sexual encounter I have ever experienced, in fact, fades into insignificance. Agnes who? And when he held me as I desperately tried to hold it together in his arms afterwards (like a hormonal bloody teenager—where did that rush of self-pity come from?), if he’d made a move on me, if he’d pushed for more, I’d have taken it. All of it.

  I’ve finally admitted it to myself and to Max. I’m gay, I’m gay, I’m gay. I’m in love with another man. I’ve always been gay; I’ve always been in love with Max. Just saying it in my head to myself feels marvellous. And not nearly enough. I want to announce my epiphany to the world, to my family, right this minute. I imagine the look on their faces as I casually drop it into the dinner table conversation: We had a great afternoon at Moni everyone, thanks for asking. We climbed the mountain and, oh, then I kissed Max in the German lookout shelter. I’m gay by the way—could you pass the pita please, Papa Marcos?

  I say nothing of the sort, of course, and even though I feel insanely, ridiculously happy, as though a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders, I know that absolutely nothing has changed. Instead of this feeling of euphoria, I should be scared witless because I can’t tell my family—not if I want to keep my place in it—and I will lose the restaurant if I do.

  The food under this humble roof is some of the best on the island, and homemade tzatziki, taramasalata, and pita are the traditional first course. I squeeze Max’s knee under the table to get his attention and surreptitiously pass him an indigestion tablet. He shows his gratitude by returning the squeeze and then leaves his hand resting gently on my upper thigh. Blood rushes to my dick and stays there. It’s going to be a long, uncomfortable night.

  Max struggles to digest cucumber, which is tricky when it accompanies just about every Greek dish ever invented. Years ago, he gave us some bullshit story about him lacking the enzyme necessary to metabolise it easily, along with an unfortunate small percentage of the population, and we all fell about laughing. But I googled it recently, and it’s bloody true! Which may explain Dion’s bad wind, necessitating our bedroom window permanently wide open. I’d rather be covered in mosquito bites than sleep with that disgusting fug. Oh, the joy of one day having enough money for a bedroom to myself.

  More courses follow—a platter of deep-fried octopus, fresh whitebait (my favourite food ever), heaps of dolmadakia, a tonne of feta salad dripping in local honey, and we haven’t even got to the moussaka main course. Max is being surprisingly abstemious on the alcohol front, whereas I am necking the red wine like water, and when we’re sent inside together to get the aforementioned trays of moussaka, I feel decidedly tiddly.

  “Bloody hell, Georgios, are you pissed?” asks Max, amused as I sway slightly into him. Everyone else is still around the table, Papa Marcos holding court and recounting a dreary story I’ve heard way too many times before.

  “So what if I am?” I answer, leaning against the sink, smiling up at him. “I’ve had a hell of a day.”

  Max is so handsome tonight. Time spent in the sun this afternoon has brought out a few freckles across his nose, and his blond hair is a shaggy sun-bleached mess that I have an urge to run my hands through.

  “Maybe I should kiss you, Max, right here in front of them all, get it out in the open.”

  His face takes on an anxious look. “Whoa, Georgios, slow down, my sweet. You’ve had a few drinks and think you can solve all the world’s problems in one night. Trust me, I’ve had that feeling myself, and falling out with everyone now will solve nothing and only make your life a hell of a lot worse.”

  He ruffles my hair and, glancing over my shoulder to make sure no one is about, gives me a quick peck on the lips. “Mmm, lovely. Believe me, my love; I said I’ll sort everything for you, and I will, but I need time so we can do it right. So I’m going to need you to be patient and to trust me.”

  Turning back to the oven, he takes the tea towel from off my shoulder and carefully removes the two trays of bubbling moussaka. They smell divine, and I know they will taste even better. After all, they were both cooked by me. I could put together a moussaka in my sleep.

  Max is grumbling under his breath, a familiar refrain. “Why do you Greeks always insist on ruining a perfectly decent lasagne by sticking a bloody aubergine in the middle of it?”

  I gather another tea towel, and we carry them both out. “It’s your turn to trust me, Maximillian Bergmann, and if you stop moaning, I’ll come with you when you are summoned to pay a visit to Noni later.”

  With the careful precision of a man who is trying to conceal he has downed the best part of a bottle of wine, I dish out the steaming moussaka. My assorted family members receive it with an appropriate amount of appreciation, but the most comes from Max when he realises his special corner helping is devoid of the dreaded aubergine. A grateful hand returns to my thigh and stays there, warm and wanting.

  Towards the end of the meal, a tinkling but insistent bell rings from inside the house, and I groan inwardly. I swear that woman can smell visitors. Either that or she has hidden CCTV installed.

  “Go and say hello to Noni, Maxi,” says my mother, giving him a tired smile. “She’s been looking forward to your visit.”