Malta Yok

MAURA

    As the second child, I had an older brother who wasn’t happy with me from the start because he wanted another brother and that’s not what he got.  As soon as I could walk he bullied me into playing pirates, soldiers, Robin Hood, any game that I was sure to lose so he could be the champion.  I was two years younger, smaller, and hampered by the clothes our mum made me wear.  When I was four, she told me "trousers aren’t for young ladies," and that was that.   I was supposed to stay off the ground and be careful about how I sat down.  If I came home with skinned knees or if the back of my dress was dirty, she’d smack the bejesus out of me.  Dad wasn’t home often or he’d have knocked me just as silly like he did when he got home after a night out with his knackers.  When I was a teenager I hung around the docks a lot, I guess thinking if my dad spent most of his time at sea, there must be something to it.  I met a boy who worked on a ship, and without meaning to, I fell pregnant.  I was barely 16 and too young to marry in England, so we took the train to Gretna Green and tied the knot.  Neither of our families would put us up so we stayed in a bedsit until our money ran out.  It was then he told me he was too young to be a father.  I had no intention of raising a little one on my own, and abortion wasn’t legal, but the mother of my runaway husband came up with an old lady who did the deed.  Afterwards I had cramps and bleeding, but those got better in a couple of days.  I remember staying for hours curled up in a ball to help the pain and the empty feeling in my belly.   
    Mum and dad argued about whether I could stay with them, but dad won the fight so I was out on my tod.  Mum found me a place to stay with her widowed sister over in Poole while I went to school.  It wasn’t long after that our mum and dad separated and he went up to his people in Liverpool.  Mum was inclined to give me my room back but when my brother told her the baby’s real father might have been a black boy, she changed her mind.  My brother left for a good-paying job up in London so we weren’t in touch, except for the odd birthday card he sent me that he thought was funny.  If I asked him for money there was always an excuse why not.  Staying at my aunt’s house in Poole while I did my O-Levels, I held back on going out with friends in the evening because I was studying for my boat-master's license.  The day I got it was one of my most proud, but there wasn’t any family at the presentation to congratulate me.  The license gave me permission to operate a boat with less than 12 passengers.   Instead of getting a job on the stormy English coast, I found an advert for a job in a place called Benidorm in Spain. I had no intention of being a Spanish version of a Butlin’s Redcoats, but the ad was for a captain to run day cruises to Peacock Island.  The tour company would take care of my room.  I hoped that Spain’s was as cheap as I’d heard, because I was skinned.  Until I got my first pay, I'd be eating at the Sally Ann if they had such a thing.
    Spain wasn't the paradise I expected. First they put me in a hot-box of a room where some angry former tenant had punched holes in the walls.  I got them to move me to a room on the ground floor with a patio so I could breathe.  The next day when I showed up for work, the captain told me I should make sure the tourists who bought tickets were the only ones who got onto the boat.  When we were underway, I found him at the wheel and told him I had a boat-master's license so I would like some time with him to learn about the boat. “An English license is no good here,“ he said.  I showed him my license and logbook but he wouldn’t  even look at them.  “Make sure they don’t all go starboard when we dock,” he said, and that’s the last time the subject of me taking the wheel came up.  When I complained to the company, they told me my job was to give every assistance to the passengers and captain of the boat.  I may as well have been an airline stewardess; not what I had in mind when I took the job.  It was August when things really started to go wrong.  The caretaker of the apartment block where the tour company put me, told me I had too many cats and the neighbours were complaining.  Then I had a fight with a Scottish guy I brought home for a nightcap.  He ripped the sink off the bathroom wall so I had to call the caretaker at three in the morning.  Nobody passed on the message that I wouldn’t make it to work that day, and when the tour company eventually got hold of me they were not happy. How was I supposed to know the guy was a maniac?  
    For a few days the apartment was too damp to do anything but sleep there.  The cats had to sleep on top of the wardrobe until the place dried out.  I spent most of my free time at the restaurants and bars along the strip where I knew most of the owners and staff.  They’d tease me if I walked by without stopping, “Oiga Señorita Maura!   Quien sera esta noche?”  They obviously thought I slept around more than I did.  
    The boat captain had turned nasty on me and wouldn't let me anywhere near the wheelhouse. Maybe it was because one night in a bar I called his son an “hijo de puta” and threw a perfectly good whisky at him when he grabbed at me like I was anyone’s property.  Then in September a miracle happened.  I met Tony, an English guy who was on holiday for a couple of weeks.  We got on like we had known each other forever.  He wasn’t averse to the odd pint, but I guess when I tried to keep up with him drink for drink, I took more on board than I should have.  While he was there I slept late and missed work another couple of times.  On the third absence they fired me.  I wasn’t too upset because the job had been a big disappointment, and Tony had asked me to come to see him when I got back to England.  I didn’t make it to the end of the season because a couple of days after Tony left, a bar that I went to down the coast called the police and ambulance because I fell asleep after a really hot day at the beach, and they didn’t know who I was. The tour company stopped paying my room so I had to put the cats back out on the street, and catch a flight the company booked for me back to Gatwick.  My plan was to go up to Tony’s in Leeds, but first I went to my aunt’s house in Poole so I could ring him to make sure the invitation still stood.  I was surprised it took me a few days to get through, and when my call was finally answered, it was by a woman.    
    “Who are you?” she asked, like I had no business ringing that number.  
    “He invited me,” I said.
    “Invited you to what?” she asked.  Bold as brass.
    “To come and see him,” I told her. “I’ve only now got back from Spain.”
    “Oooh. Spain is it?” she said, like I had been to the other side of the world.
    “And who might you be?” I asked, since she had been so forward.
    “I’m his secretary,” she said. “But I’m afraid Mr. Clacton, Tony, is out of the country at this time.”
Tony had told me he travelled for business and we hadn’t made a specific appointment to meet.  “And when will he be back?” I asked.
    “Oooh pet, I don’t rightly know,” she said. “It's all down to how business goes.  Maybe a week, maybe a month.”
    I couldn't wait a month and I couldn’t stay in Poole with my aunt any longer.  Since I was last there she had found herself a man who visited her secretly and I was in the way.  
    “If you’re his secretary, ring him in New York and tell him I’m back in England,” I told the woman in Tony's flat.  There had clearly been an oversight. My tone must have worked because Tony rang me the next day at 4am to tell me he was sorry he wasn’t at home. His secretary was right that he might be away for a week or a month, but that I was welcome to stay at his place until he got back.
    “Is she going to be there?”  I asked him.
    “Who?”
    “The woman on the phone,” I said, like it wasn’t obvious.
    “Oh her.  She’s my secretary.  She doesn’t live there.  Just pops in to pick up the post every couple of days. If you let me know your train times, I’ll get her to meet you with a key.” That was more like it. He sounded like he missed me.
    Tony came home after two weeks but he didn’t stay long.  If it wasn’t London, it was Barcelona or Miami.  I asked him if I could get a dog to keep me company, and he told me I could so the next time he was home, we went to choose a dog together and he picked out an Airedale.  I wasn’t crazy about it because Airedales are like overgrown terriers, and ours chewed up his share of expensive shoes.  Apart from that, he was a sweet dog who needed a lot of exercise.  
    Taking the dog for his twice daily walks filled in the time while I waited for Tony.  I avoided going to parks because the dog got too excited by children and bicycles.  He had a compulsion to jump into any body of water that crossed his path, from puddles, to streams, to park lagoons, which sent the ducks flapping away and old ladies glaring at me like I was an animal abuser.  To avoid parks, we often found ourselves at some nearby gravel pits where there were pools at the bottom of the diggings and the water looked clean enough.  When it wasn’t raining, I found myself sitting beside the water for hours, throwing sticks for the dog who never got tired of swimming out to fetch them.  Something in his genes wouldn’t let him stop as long as there was something to chase after.
    When Tony was home and I asked him about what he did while he was away, he was so vague I began to suspect he had a different woman in every port.  Strong as my anger and sadness was about his probable infidelity, I realized that I had never felt at home in Leeds.  What drew me to the gravel pits was not the dog but the water.  I was born near the sea and if I was away from it something was missing, like the moon had failed to rise.  A landlocked city like Leeds was the last place I wanted to be.
    It wasn’t too difficult to find another advert for a tourist representative, this time in Malta.  The job had nothing to do with boats, but I would be near the sea and in the sun.  When I told Tony that I had accepted the job and was leaving, he wasn’t too bothered, and asked right away if he could visit me there.  He had to fly to Rome sometimes for work so it would be easy to carry on to Malta and see me.  He was sure that in my new position I could find him a place to stay there.
Gozo was dry and dusty by the time of year I got there, but the island was small enough that the salty sea air wafting by at unexpected moments made me feel at home.  My clients were lodged in hotels down on the coast but I didn’t have to stay with them.  The tour company had contracted for a few studio rooms in the city, rooms that were so hot and airless they couldn't possibly charge a package tourist to rent, but were supposedly fine for staff.  To get to my clients at the coast hotels, I had to learn to drive the company moped.  Going down to the coast to see my clients in the sweet morning air was easy, but in the evenings, especially if I had a couple of drinks at the welcome meeting, things didn’t always go so well.      
    It was on one of these trips home that I met Chuck.  His real name was Cikku but he called himself Chuck because it was easier for foreigners to remember.  My scooter had broken down, a couple of passing taxis wouldn’t take me because they had no place for my moped.  If I abandoned it and walked home, it wouldn’t be there in the morning.  The evening was hot and humid, my guests had been on at me about heat, flies, and sunburn remedies and I had a headache from the prickly pear cactus liqueur I had sampled.  When Chuck stopped with his painter’s van to pick up me and the bike, he was a gift from heaven.  I offered him a drink to say thank you and went home with him that night.  
    When the season was over, I took my assigned flight back to England and went up to Leeds right away to see Tony.  After staying with him for a few nights, I was more convinced than ever that his mind was on someone else.  There were calls he hid from me, or he waited until I left the room before he started talking.  Then he announced he had to go to New York again, and more or less implied that it wouldn’t be convenient for me to stay at his house any longer as he didn’t know how long he might be gone.  He might even sell up.  
    “I could help you with that,” I suggested, but he wouldn’t hear of it because he wasn’t sure of his plans.  I was so fed up with his evasiveness, that right in front of him I packed my bags and left.  I was surprised he didn’t try to stop me, but I had my dignity, so held my tongue.  His silence told me everything.  Before I knew it I was on the train heading south and wondering if I would be welcome back in Malta.  I called Chuck from London and he was surprised to hear from me, but told me I could come back and stay with him.
    “I’ll teach you to cook Maltese,” he said.
    “And I’ll convert you to beans on toast.”
    That winter was like a holiday but there was work to do.  Chuck had neglected his house and property since his wife left a few years before. It took a month of hard graft to get the place into a condition that met my standards.  I couldn’t change everything because it was his house, but I tried to make it a welcoming place for him to come home to.   My first try at making rabbit stew wasn’t an unqualified success, because I didn’t cut the meat properly, but Chuck appreciated me trying. All I could think of when I stared at the rabbit corpse he had given me to skin and cut up, was how much it looked like Bugs Bunny.  I tried to learn Maltese, which looked and sounded like Italian mixed with Arabic, a language I couldn't get my tongue around.  After the summer tourists left the island the place returned to its traditional self, family oriented, reserved, closed on Sundays.   When Chuck wasn’t painting, he would disappear early to go hunting with his friends, just like his father had done, and his grandfather.  He would bring home sparrows for me to cook in a pie.  Until I met Chuck I thought that four and twenty blackbirds must mean something else.  To his credit Chuck ate what I cooked, and so I said I liked it too, pretending I enjoyed chewing on sparrow breasts.  For a local house-painter, Chuck was more sophisticated than I first thought.  He had gone to university and started his working life as an engineer in Valletta, until his mother got ill, so he and his city wife came back to Gozo to look after her.  When his mother died his wife went straight back to Valletta, but he had no intention of returning to office life in the big city. We had that in common.  Because Chuck was an only child, he inherited the family property in the outskirts of Victoria, the main city on Gozo. The place didn’t earn money to support him, so he went out to work as a painter, a job that didn’t interest him but it paid well.  Our living arrangement went well and I progressed from being his house-guest to his sidekick to his bedmate.  There was no kissing in public as it was too soon for him to admit we were an item, but privately we were as passionate as lovebirds could be.
    While living with Chuck, I put in one more summer as a tour rep, but at the end of that second season I quit. I had a place to live and I could find some work locally if I wanted. Chuck didn’t want me earning my own money because women didn’t do that.  I told him I had no intention of putting my hand out like a beggar every time I wanted to buy a drink.
    Chuck’s family house came with a good bit of land, but I didn’t know anything about growing grapes, olives, figs, and orange trees.  I hadn’t taken much notice of plants until then, but Chuck and his old dad who lived in an apartment in town, taught me about gardening in a hot dry climate. The drought of summer was the biggest challenge, but in the cooler seasons, a farmer could poke a stick into the ground and if he left it there, it grew.  After some days of hard graft in the winter, I looked forward to relaxing with a drink in the evening, but partway through the winter, there was suddenly a padlock on the wine cupboard. 
    “It’s going too fast.  Papa thinks I’m drinking it, and he wants to have some left for Ferragosto.”
    “I think I’ve earned a drink at the end of the day.”  It wasn’t much to ask.
    “Have a Kinnie like a normal person,” he said.  “Or a glass of water.”
    A lot of good that would do me.  If he was in a mood, Chuck would refuse to take me out, and wouldn’t let me go out on my own. It was like being back under my father’s thumb.
    I had stopped working for the tour company a couple of years before, so at the start of the season I helped Chuck with his painting, found a few cleaning jobs, and even got some part time work in a bar in the evening, something to which Chuck strenuously objected.  We needed the money.  I had been contributing what I could to the household but I still had no real money of my own.  The bar work paid well so it was a good solution.
    One evening we had a knock-down drag-out fight after one of my clients gave me a ride home from work.  I probably had a few too many shots that night but Chuck was entirely sober.  He told me that he didn’t want me around anymore, that I was an embarrassment who brought shame on him and his family.  I was a putana and a brilla. I remembered a few customers in the bar calling me Brilla, and I thought it might be after the Italian actress Nancy Brilli who was a blonde like me, or it was an abbreviation for brilliant.  I preferred the latter interpretation, but Chuck laughed in my face when I told him.
    “You stupid cow,” he said.  “Don’t you know that brilla means drunk?  They’re calling you a drunk because that’s what you are.”
    After that night he was cold with me, and physically pushed me away if I tried to hug him or give him a kiss.  It was like I disgusted him even though I hadn’t changed.
    I had heard tales of Maltese history, that when the Sultan of Turkey tried to capture the island, his admirals came back to him and said ‘Malta Yok, effendi.’ Malta isn’t there, your grace.  There was no point in sticking around to cry about what had happened with Chuck.  He didn’t want me. It would be better if I erased Malta from my mind.
    I still knew some of the girls who worked for tour companies in Malta, and one of them suggested I might be able to find work in Greece.  A few of the islands were booming and needed English staff.   Anywhere that wasn’t Malta was fine.  There was nothing for me in England.  Mum had been poorly, but after the way she treated me, I had no intention of being the dutiful daughter and seeing her through her last days.  We would have come to blows in no time and been back where we started. I didn’t have a duty of care to her as she hadn’t for me when I needed it most.  I had a life to live that had nothing to do with her.  
    The job in Greece was the type of work I had resisted when I had first gone to Spain, meeting groups of holidaymakers at the airport, accompanying them to their hotels, dealing with their problems while they stayed, and herding them back to the airport for departure.  If there were no evening arrivals, a few of us tourist reps would meet for a few drinks at a cafe where none of our clients would find us.  We usually steered clear of clients outside of business hours because they’d be full of questions as if we were their personal tour guides.  These encounters would often result in them buying us a round of drinks.  My work pay was so low that after I’d eaten and done pharmacy shopping, I rarely had money left, so the free drinks didn’t go amiss.  Sometimes there was a backlash if I had too many drinks and my big mouth ran away with itself.  I’d have to track the guests down the next day and apologize because if their stories got back to headquarters they could cost me my job.  
    I didn’t think they’d find somebody so close to the end of the season to replace me, but that’s what happened.   My Greek landlady’s attitude toward my cat might have figured into it, but in September I got a letter from the UK saying due to ‘complaints’ and ‘reports’ they found it best if we parted ways. I could think of a few people who might have told tales out of class and they weren’t all clients.  The sooner I stopped working with the poison pen brigade the better.  
    The landlady didn’t waste any time pushing me out of her stinking rented room.  I was left homeless on the street of a Greek city with the cat meowing in her carrier, and two suitcases containing everything I owned.  To gather my thoughts, I dragged my bags to the cafe where my ex-colleagues and I had our usual evening drinks.  One of the two brothers who owned the place was chatting up an English girl with a boy’s haircut who looked too young to be out on her own.  I must have looked down in the dumps and my cat wouldn’t be quiet,  because one of the brothers stopped by my table to ask if anything was wrong.
    “I got fired,” I told him.  “Now I’m like a teenager who got kicked out of the house,”
    “Why don’t you go back to England?” he asked.
    “I’ve asked myself the same question,” I said. “There’s nothing and nobody there for me.”
    “No family?” He asked, like it was an impossibility.
    “Nobody that matters,” I said.  I nodded toward the girl with the short hair.  “She’s English. She’s as much my family as anyone.”
    “What’s this one’s problem?” The man said in Greek to his brother. He didn’t know I understood him.  It wasn’t my fault my family was less helpful than his.  To me, family meant harsh words and misunderstandings. Just then I was overcome by a wave of childhood resentment and must have started to cry because the other brother handed me a fistful of paper napkins.  The cat started playing up again, and while I was bent over trying to shush her, I felt a hand on my back.  When I sat up, I saw it was the young woman with short hair.  
    “Are you okay?” she asked.
    “Not really.” There was no point in lying.  I was a mess.  The last of my money had gone on cat-food and I couldn’t stay in the cafe all night.  She stood by my table, reluctant to leave until she knew I was not going to start crying again.  She offered me a coffee and I took the liberty of asking if I could have a drop of brandy in it to steady my nerves.  
    After I had given her a brief rundown on what had happened in Malta, and with Tony, and how I ended up in Greece, she told me that her parents ran a bar in another village, and that they needed help for the end of the season because some of their English staff had gone back to school.  She told me that her parent's closed their bar in winter, but we agreed it was something I could worry about later.   She may have even got a laugh out of me when she told me what she thought of package tourists.
True to her word,  I did have paid work for the last month of the season and another few weeks beyond that to pack up the bar. At the very last minute, the girl’s parents decided to let me stay in my room around the back of the bar for the winter if I would keep an eye on the place. The pub was at the beach and there was nobody around to make sure it resisted the heavy rains and crashing waves of winter.  It was not paid work, but it meant I had a place to live, and my cat finally had somewhere to get her feet on the ground.
    In early spring when I was down to the last money I could borrow, things began to open and I was hired by an American guy named Jake to clean holiday homes for his stable of wealthy Italians, Germans, and la-di-da English. I hoped one of them might have a yacht I could really go to sea on.

JAKE

    The lowest point was probably when I hit her on the head with a dead rat.   I had caught in my faithful have-a-heart traps, but instead of letting it go and leaving it to run around the neighborhood with previous knowledge of my house, I treated it like I do all of them and drowned it in a bucket of warm water.  I forgot about the rat for a few days, so when I found it again, I dumped its soggy body onto the paving stones and picked it up gingerly by the tail to throw over the courtyard wall into the waste ground below the house.  I was not prepared for the skin on the rat's tail to slough off when I tossed it over the wall so it didn't get the speed and height I intended. I hardly got back to the kitchen when the courtyard door banged open and Maura stood there holding the wet brown rat by its bald pink tail.  “It hit me right here,” she said, and pointed to a dent in her brassy blonde hairdo. She seemed more surprised than injured.
    “Sorry,” I said.  “Didn’t do it on purpose.”  I may as well have done, because my patience with Maura had run out.  I had hired her to clean houses so our connection was always meant to be professional not personal, but she was soon dependent on me for more than a wage.  
I wasn’t her first saviour.  When she showed me the photos, there were so many men I couldn't tell one from the next, but she was still waiting for Mr. Perfect, who certainly wasn’t me.  Sometimes in the evening I’d spot her out in one of her floating cotton dresses, hair teased and makeup on, wobbling between bars on crazy heels, a change from her regular work boots or flip-flops. She was a cougar with an appetite, and probably scored more than I thought, depending on how much she and her new boyfriends had to drink.     
    Maura had been around for the winter but I didn’t know who she was or what she was doing there until an English expatriate introduced us.  When Maura told me some of her story over a Nescafe in the taverna, I figured she was someone who could use a break.  She was a strong, willing, and capable woman, who had worked with tourists in the past.  She turned out to be a good hand on the team and more than carried her weight.  Fiddly jobs like sewing cushions weren't in her skill set, but I soon found out that she took to gardening like it was in her blood.  I needed someone who understood plants to take the burden off me.  She could also cook after a fashion.  In her forty years, she had learned to throw ingredients together to make a meal, but she was not a chef and went for quantity over quality. If she had a few glasses of wine before dinner, the food came out in a jumble, like a burnt potato omelette scraped off the bottom of an ungreased frying pan.
    In summer, Maura spent most of her evenings after work out eating and drinking with her newest friends and regular colleagues.  When winter set in there were hardly any tourists and a lot less hours of work, so when she got bored playing with her expanding tribe of cats, she got into the habit of stopping by my place for morning coffee.  If my friends had also stopped by, she took over and played the hostess, happy to be part of a group.  Everything would be fine until her demons started to whisper that the good times would be even better if she had a drink to celebrate, a little something to help her relax and bask in the warmth of a group of friends.  If nobody stopped by and she was still at my kitchen table by lunchtime, she would hustle out to buy a bottle of wine as payment for her meal.  The midday wine would turn into afternoon wine until Maura was ready to party away the night on something stronger.  She was a  drinker who couldn’t stop once she got started.  If I had plans to go on an excursion with friends in the afternoon she would invite herself along, but as we were gathering our things to leave, she would pour the last of the lunch wine into her glass, as much as a third of a bottle, and gulp it down like she was going to be marooned in the desert for two weeks.  As we made our way up the street to the village parking lot, Maura would try to act sober but her glazed-over eyes and the upside-down smile on her mouth said otherwise.  She would stumble through the village behind us, hoping nobody would see how drunk she was, and then excuse herself to run home for something she wanted to bring along.  When she didn’t show up at the parking lot, someone would be sent to get her and would find her snoring on her unmade bed with hungry cats meowing and nudging her.  She might wake up when the sun went down and in the wrinkled clothes she had gone to bed in, duck out to buy some souvlaki for herself and the cats.  If she got waylaid by someone she knew, it would be for just one drink or maybe two, and then she wasn’t hungry anymore.  By the time the bar closed, she had forgotten about her hungry cats and would stagger home with her arms outstretched to steady herself against the walls of the narrow streets as she ping-ponged between them.   
    Fed up with Maura’s morning visits, one day I told her clearly over coffee, that I lived alone because I liked to be on my own, that I was happy in my own company. “I don’t want another wife or a mother,” I said.  Maura agreed with me, even though she had no idea that my ex-wife would have intellectually eaten her for dinner, and my mother was already dead.  She nodded and I thought she understood, but when she showed up for coffee the next morning, it was obvious she had taken my need for time alone as a quirk of my character that had nothing to do with her.  
    I came up with a plan to reclaim a few daylight hours for myself that didn’t have my succubus in it.  After one of our wine lunches, I told her I was starting a new schedule to catch up on office work and I couldn’t concentrate on my books if there were unannounced interruptions.  
    “I can help you,” Maura said.  “In case you forget something.”
    “I don’t need help,” I said.  “Thanks for offering.”
    “Is there something I can bring you?” she tried, hoping there was a way to re-insert herself.
    “No.  I just need some time alone to work.”
    The exchange was friendly and I hoped she got the message without being upset. Like a kid, she might need reminding from time to time, but I could live with that.   
    My sister visited that winter and I had found her a comfortable house on the sunny side of the village.  She dropped by my place sometimes but she had her own circle of friends from previous visits so she didn’t need entertaining.  On the second day of my new schedule, I was in my kitchen office, when I heard raised voices at the courtyard door.  I stepped out to see what was going on and saw my sister stomping up the steps toward me and shaking a finger at Maura, who hung back by the open courtyard door.  
    “Can you believe her?” my sister said.  “She wouldn’t let me in.”
    I looked down at a defiant Maura and waved at her to say everything was all right, before turning my back on her and escorting my sister into the house.
    “What got into her?” she asked.
    “I told her I don’t want to be disturbed in the afternoon.  I guess she took me literally.”
    “I had to fly ten hours to get here, and I’m not going to let some bossy palace guard stop me from seeing my brother.”
    “As it should be,” I said.  “Of course you’re welcome any time.”  This seemed to calm her.  “Do you want a coffee?” I added. “I’ve got Instant.”
    “Any ouzo?” she asked.  “I’m still shaking.  She really pissed me off.”
    “Sorry, no ouzo,” I said.  “I can’t keep booze in the house for more than a few hours.  A certain person has a nose for it.”
    “She needs help,” my sister said.  
    “Probably.  But I’m not her psychiatrist, or her father, her mother, or her brother.  I gave her a job so she could feed herself, but if that falls apart, I can’t help her.”
    “How can she do her job if she’s drunk?”
    “She can't.  When she’s at work she doesn’t drink because if she does both at once it’s a disaster.  If she messes up something she tries to make up for it by doing an extra-good job of something else that didn’t really need doing.”
    “You don’t owe her anything.  You need to get rid of her.”
    “Could be, but she never does anything bad enough for me to fire her on the spot.  When she’s functioning right she does good work.”
    “It’s your business and your life you have to consider, not hers.  She’s no different than one of her stray cats.”
    Maura loved animals.  When I had to go to Athens for a week because a visiting nephew fell down a rock face and cracked his skull open, I came back to find that Maura had bought a chocolate Labrador puppy from a pet store in the city.  As I predicted, the dog gave Maura problems, not because it was a bad dog, but because it would chew up everything in her room if she left it at home alone. Maybe she thought the dog would be a more reliable companion than her snooty cats and her drinking friends who led her astray so often.
    In spite of a large piece of her wages going on veterinary bills for injections and checkups, the dog made it through six months before he caught a strain of parvovirus that is endemic to the island.  The disease affected mostly imported dogs who weren't born with natural immunity.  No matter how much Maura cried, or how many pills she pushed down her dog’s throat, he died within a couple of days of getting sick.  When he had breathed his last, Maura brought him in a soft blanket that I recognized from one of my client’s houses, down to my place and laid him out on the kitchen floor. 
    “What am I supposed to do with him?” I asked.
    “I don’t know.  I thought you might have an idea.”
    “We can take him to the dump before he starts to smell,” I suggested.
    She wouldn’t hear of it.  “He was a good dog.  He should have a decent burial.”
    “Where?” I asked.  “We’re all stone courtyards and paved streets here.”
    “I thought about the top level of the Countess’s garden.  She never goes up there.”
Maura had spent a lot of time the previous winter building a dry-stone stairway up to the 6th level of the garden, and the Countess was impressed by it, crowing to everyone about how it had been built by a woman.  After her first wave of enthusiasm, the Countess rarely went up there. The top level of the garden was narrow and hemmed in by a high stone wall at the back with no exit, so it didn’t attract much traffic.  It was a practical place for a dog’s grave that wouldn’t be dug up.
    “If you don’t fold his legs in,” I said, “He won’t fit into a garbage bag let alone a hole in the ground.”
Maura was beside herself and wanted nothing more than her good boy brought back to life though she knew it was impossible. I had told her from the start that getting a dog was a bad idea, especially a foreign dog as I had seen galloping sickness before.  She scooped up her stiffening baby and carried him gently back to her house, his long legs poking out of the blanket.  People stepped aside to let her pass.
    The next day, I was invited to the funeral.  She had badgered our company maintenance man into digging a hole at the top of the Countess’ garden, but he hadn’t been able to make it as deep as he liked because he hit bedrock.  With a couple of her cat-lady friends behind her, Maura held the wrapped up dog across her forearms like she was carrying a high priest's robe, and proceeded up through the olive-tree terraces as the leader of a royal procession on its way to the top of a pyramid.  When she got closer I could see that her makeup was already smudged for so early in the day, and I could smell licorice from the ouzo she had been drinking. Because it was summer, the Countess was in residence but that afternoon she had gone to the beach.    
    Maura laid the dog in his prepared hole, but as predicted, his legs stuck straight out from his body.  
    “I thought you were going to fold them,” I said.  Her bottom lip quivered like this latest news was just too much.  Her handmaidens held her arms to steady her.   
    “I’ll take care of it,” the maintenance man said, “but it’s better if you guys go back down before the Countess comes home.”
    Maura gave us the chocolate lab’s favourite squeaky toy, a carrot, to take with him to doggie heaven. I gave the nod to the gravedigger when Maura and her entourage were far enough away they wouldn’t hear the dog’s knees snapping.  Even with the legs broken, the hole wasn’t deep enough so the mounded earth over the dog had to be tamped down.  As we put the weight of our heels onto the burial site to hide it as much as possible from the Countess, Maura looked up a couple of times when she thought she heard her baby's toy carrot squeak.
     Living in a tourist resort gave Maura every opportunity to give in to her vices.  She couldn’t get into books. “My eyes water if I try to read for more than an hour,” she would say as she waved around her smudged glasses that were held together by packing tape. She lived alone, and even if she had a television, there weren’t any channels in languages she could understand.  There was nothing else to do but get out of the house to see what everyone else was up to.  In the summer when the village was full of tourists, she could always track down company to share a glass of wine or a few more serious drinks.  If she was on her fifth stop of the night and had trouble navigating between restaurant tables without banging into them, she probably didn’t notice that some of her sometime friends had already found their way to the exit.       
    Along with the other houses I looked after, I had taken on the garden of an Italian banker on the next island over from ours.  After I had gone there several times alone, I eventually brought Maura to help carry plants from the ferry, to pick-axe holes in the dry hillside for the new climate-appropriate trees, and prune back the mess of bougainvillea that covered the front of the house.  It seemed to do Maura good to get away from her usual hangouts for a few days though she worried about whether her cats were getting enough to eat.  And was anyone petting them?  We had only been there a day when she had to use the Italian’s phone to call home to make sure that the person who was checking on her cats was actually doing it.  When our work on the island was done, she went back to her regular duties in the tourist village, where she found it more painful every morning to drag her aching back and abused kidneys out of bed.  
    The next time I told her I had to go to the Italian house, she said “I’d love to go too,”  so I took her with me.  On yet another trip after that, she met the mayor of the village who was responsible for the upkeep of the Italian house.  He patiently listened to her stories about Malta, which to him could just as well have been Mars.  He thought Maura was entertaining as well as being a good worker, so he suggested there was enough to do on the Italian property to keep her busy for the winter. I had lost a worker and she had taken away my need to take the ferry from one island to another every month, but I was happy to be unshackled from Maura for a while.     
    The peace lasted until Christmas when she unexpectedly showed up at my door. I hoped it was for a holiday break, but it didn’t take long for her to admit that one night she had taken the mayor home to bed.  He had apparently flirted with her, and she thought maybe some of the wine she drank was bad, because she didn't remember much.  Somehow the mayor’s wife found out and blackmailed her husband into declaring Maura an undesirable and got her kicked off the island.   My contract with the Italian was now on a shaky footing, and realizing how calm and problem-free the last few months in the village had been without her, I had to tell her the truth.   
    “I don’t have any work here to offer you,” I said, thinking she would pack her bags, farm out her cats, and fly off somewhere else to start again.  Instead, she hung around for the winter and spring, living on favours from friends and any cleaning jobs she could pick up.  It was usually women who took pity on her, believing that she only needed a helping hand to put her life in order, but after she turned an antique Bukhara embroidery pink by forgetting she had left it soaking in a tub, had whitewashed over a 15th century frieze in another house, and let a house-owner’s dog escape to be hit by a motorbike and incur massive veterinary bills, Maura had run out of people inclined to hire her.  There was a collective sigh when she disappeared from the village but word had it she hadn’t gone far.  I spotted her at the airport once when she stepped off a tour company bus ahead of a clump of sunburnt tourists.  She had the same brassy birds-nest  blonde hair showing its brown roots, a wrinkled blouse, a long skirt that she kept twisting to straighten, and worn-down shoes that had seen too many rough village streets.  Her face was flushed and her makeup had mostly run off except for her raccoon eyeliner, and her watery blue eyes had their usual wounded yet hopeful innocence, a sign of the interior battle to convince herself that everything would be all right.  As the season wound down there were no more sightings of her, but nobody was particularly curious about whether she had hopped over to another island or had gone home to England to get her life together.  
    Eventually I heard from a daughter of the couple who ran the beach bar, that Maura did indeed go back to England, lured there by a job as an artist’s assistant.  She was hired to help finish a theatre lobby installation and when that was done the artist asked her to stick around to take on a more personal role.  Maura made breakfast according to detailed instructions, walked the two wolfhounds and pug three times a day, cleaned up after the resident cats and a bad tempered cockatoo.  She was handed a daily list of her duties with the artist’s emphatic capital letters at the top, saying “No Deviations.”  The artist had met Maura in Greece and knew her history, so let her drink only at dinner and on social occasions, and kept a sharp eye on how much alcohol was going down.  If the artist thought Maura was drinking too fast, her glass would be snatched out of her hand and the contents poured down the sink. If her eyes were glazed over she was sent to bed like a sweet-tooth child who has been sneaking candies out of a dish when the grown-ups' backs were turned.  Things got worse, when after a health scare, the artist took lying in bed all day and dictating orders by waving around an ebony cane.  The cane caught Maura in the side of the head a few times if she wasn’t quick enough and once gave her a black eye.  The artist insisted Maura got the injury from falling down drunk.
    Claiming abuse, Maura quit her job, and with nowhere else to go, decided to give Malta another try. It was sunnier than England and nobody was shouting orders at her. Chuck was still there and she was surprised to find out he was still single.  He let her stay with him, but told her if there was ever any hope of getting back what they once had, she wasn’t allowed to drink.  She gave her word and after a few months started to believe that they could find the intimacy they once had, until he came home from work one day and announced he was going to marry a woman from Valletta.