The Cast

Amenah is a Lesvos girl, raised barely an hour’s walk from the beach at Skala Eressos, with a scholarship-bright mind, a village surname and one good school skirt. At school she was as loyal as a harbour wall to her best friend, Jac. When we first meet her, she has a life everyone approves of: the family taverna, her mum’s kitchen before dawn, a cousin’s wedding three days away, and steady, kind Marco, her boyfriend, away in Athens. “I was straight. I was spoken for.” She distrusts other people’s labels, chats when she’s nervous, and has dark curls and a figure she’s never thought twice about. Then, at one of Louisa’s solstice bonfires, something in her goes quiet, and then wide awake. Years later she teaches geography in Mytilene and comes home every summer. She’s still the loyal friend, and the one who tells Jac it’s time to come home.

Bea washed up on Lesvos the way so many do, meaning to stay a fortnight and somehow never booking the ferry home. She lives out of a tent at the campsite behind the beach, and earns her keep pruning olives, crewing day-boats and mending what other people break. On the night of the summer solstice she walks up to Louisa’s bonfire, unhurried, with her friend Digo beside her, and half the fire goes quiet without knowing why. It isn’t swagger. Bea has the opposite: the unbothered ease of someone who stopped performing for anyone long ago. She is blonde and, at first glance, androgynous, and if you want labels she’ll hand them over cheerfully: cis female, lesbian, non-vegan, keeps in shape. Her hands are brown and capable, with a thin white scar across one knuckle. She skips small talk, asks what you wanted to be at nine, and really listens.

Spice, Terry Cox on paper, is a Londoner who has just sold the international spice-trading business she spent six years building. Asked what she does now, she says, “Nothing, currently.” Approaching forty and very pale (her neighbour says she has the complexion of an unbaked baguette), she is more comfortable in a frock than in boots. She lives in a spartan top-floor flat beside the Thames, has no real friends in London, and doesn’t even have a cat. She thinks in ledgers and audits, but her true gift is listening; at twenty she could hear what a crowd would love before the crowd did. Her one constant is Jacko, the friend who caught her in an Ibiza nightclub nineteen years ago and has video-called every week since. With nothing left to run, Spice finally accepts Jacko’s standing invitation and arrives in Skala Eressos in October, on an open-ended ticket, alone.

Jacko is Greek, and has made her home at the top of the Kampos above Eressos, in a stone house with an open fire, a courtyard, a wall of vinyl, and a workshop behind two locks, the only locks she uses. There she does what she is among the world’s best at: she repairs stringed instruments, the kind of craftswoman a Russian count trusts with his Stradivari. “I don’t play,” she says. “I mend.” Tanned all year, with dark curls, deep brown eyes, laughter lines and a crooked smile, she wears jeans, a tight white T-shirt and cowboy boots, and has artisan hands. She gardens, feeds half the cats in Eressos, walks other people’s dogs and owns the dance floor. She doesn’t chase. She waits. And she is phobic about flying, which is why, for nineteen years, she has always been the one inviting her best friend to the island.

Becks was born in Perth, Australia, and raised in Yorkshire, and she is very definitely not English. Four years ago she came to Lesvos for a fortnight, and stayed. She introduces herself the way she does most things: directly. “The name is Rebecca. Most people call me Becks.” Compact and athletic, with a peroxide-blonde undercut, aqua-blue eyes and a dimple in each cheek, she has learned that a good smile gets there before the silence does. She is a photographer and a proper film girl, with her own darkroom and a grandfather who taught her that with thirty-six frames you have to decide what matters. Her phone lives in a drawer half the week. She rides a red-and-blue scooter like a bee in a biscuit tin, knows the island’s secret places, and always asks where your sense of adventure went. She comes on like a firework, but she sees people.

Louisa comes from a Lesvos family; her younger sister Nico was born and bred on the island. She has run a bar for twenty years, and today it is the Chelonian, the beach café where every woman in Skala Eressos washes up sooner or later. She is a big woman with a big voice, short black hair that flops stubbornly back into place, large calloused hands and a straw bag that has carried everything, including, once, a goat. She has a gift for collecting people. Newcomers are hugged and fed, helpers are paid in dinner and gossip, and stray dogs get water in an old ice-cream tub. She knows everyone’s order and most of their secrets, and does not hand out approval as a door prize. Decisive, fair and fiercely loyal, she captains the quiz ferociously, runs fundraisers for the rescue dogs, and shares her life with her partner, Valerie.

Valerie is a musician who busked her way south through Europe, reached Skala Eressos and stayed. The village has its own theory about why, and the theory is usually standing behind the bar at the Chelonian: Valerie is Louisa’s partner. She is a woman of very few words, about a dozen a day by local reckoning, and eleven of those are for Louisa. When she does speak, everyone listens closely, and nobody argues with Valerie. Put her on a stage, though, and something else happens. Her Karen Carpenter numbers are soulful and surprisingly husky, and when she plays a fundraiser, the crowd turns out. She defends the Carpenters loyally against Louisa’s lobbying for anything from this century. Thin and fair, fond of a rose-coloured cheesecloth sundress, she is practical, protective of her friends and strict about drinking her water. Valerie keeps a slow smile for Louisa and for nobody else.

Nico is a born-and-bred Lesvos local and Louisa’s younger sister, and she talks about woodgrain the way other people talk about wine. She is the village’s builder of nearly everything: the bar at the Chelonian, the pallet couches hinged with old door hinges and chains, the animal pens at Robin’s rescue. If it’s made of reclaimed wood in Skala Eressos, Nico’s hands have probably been on it. She works the bar too, in her own style, pouring in twos for company, putting the limes on the wrong side and, as Louisa says, able to count but not keen to. She saunters rather than walks, long fine dark plaits over bare shoulders, soft-featured and stocky, one of the most androgynous-looking people her friends know. Ask, and she’ll say she’s a woman, “just without the baggage.” She helps without being asked, kisses kittens, and goes bright red the moment anyone teases her.

Méli has lived in Skala Eressos all her life, which makes her the village’s memory. Nothing happens that doesn’t reach her by lunchtime, and her little freckled face makes people tell her things. Small and slight, with a thick, dark, curly mop and piercing dark eyes, she half-claims Brazilian roots for the hair, though nobody, Méli included, knows if it’s true. She is best friend and reluctant partner in crime to Robin, who runs the animal rescue at the barn, and works alongside her minding the donkey and sweet-talking the hospital in Mytilene out of an operating table. Home is a quirky little house she and her sister built from a one-room ruin and salvaged scrap. Méli talks when she’s nervous and feeds people when she’s stressed. At a party, she’s the one on a chair whistling for quiet. With bad news, she’s always gentle when it’s going to hurt.

Angeliki is Greek, and she came to Skala Eressos for one summer, eleven years ago, to get over a girl in Athens. She never left. Now thirty-five, she runs the bar at the Chelonian, opens at six in the morning, keeps the keys, does the float and knows everybody’s order. Nobody knows hers, and that suits her fine. She lives in two rooms over the bakery up the hill and rides a scooter down to the beach. According to Louisa, she has more rules than the Greek tax office. The lime goes in after the ice. Everything gets cleaned twice. After closing she drinks one cheap retsina, alone, and at dawn, when nobody’s listening, she hums her late grandmother’s rebetiko song about a boat that never comes. Tall, with an ice-pick scar on her thumb and a face that has never kept a secret, she does not do summer women.

Kit Merrow is Cornish, and came to Lesvos three summers ago for a diving job, a wreck survey off Sigri, only to step off the ferry and find the contractor had gone bust. With a rucksack, no job and a return ticket for September, she took work driving the van for the ice plant in Eressos, because they needed a driver who would actually turn up. On an island where almost nothing runs on time, the ice reaches the Chelonian at exactly six every single morning. That’s Kit. Louisa calls her “the Cornish one”. She is tall and rangy, with short sandy hair, a kind, slightly weathered face and a man’s canvas jacket that has clearly been through a war and lost. She carries the ice two ten-kilo bags at a time and puts it exactly where she was told, once. She says little, notices plenty, and still says kalimera.

Dino is a local man and the village taxi driver. If you need to get from Skala up the hill to Eressos, or on to Sigri, or down to the ferry, you need him. His taxi is the usual bridge between the two sister villages, and it has needed mending since Greece joined the euro. Between fares he sits over an espresso in the café opposite the taxi rank, waiting for Ben behind the counter to wave him over when somebody needs a lift. He has a big, brown, coffee-stained grin and the good manners to ask his passengers whether they mind the dog, because Free, the village dog, considers the front seat hers. When Louisa wants someone checked on, she sends Dino up the hill. In winter, when the square empties of everyone but the locals and Sappho’s statue, he drops to one run a day, in a jumper.

Sally lives in a flat in Skala Eressos, and she has been going through a rough time lately. Free, the village dog, has noticed. That’s why, most nights recently, Free has chosen Sally’s flat over every holidaymaker in the village. Sally puts a towel down on the cool tiles for her, and there are always cuddles, a treat and a warm blanket. Sally doesn’t go out much these days. She sits on her balcony, a few feet from the whole world and miles away from it, staring out to sea. The wine bottles have been piling up, and her friend Niki is worried about her. There is more to Sally than a bad patch, though. She is a strong swimmer, and every morning, however the night before went, she swims out to the rock and back. What she needs, in Free’s considered opinion, is someone to make her laugh again.