1001 Nights Cast

‘Two days, one night, that’s all I’m asking. Will you come?’ Joyce in pyjamas, stood in the kitchen stirring sugar into her coffee. Her own reflection in the window was surprising to her. Sepia-toned and soft. Strange, that the sunlight made laugh lines across her face, despite the fact that she couldn’t recall the last time she laughed.

‘A two-day trip in your clapped-out Mazda? In the hottest week of the year? To some Greek cleaning lady-neighbour-friend from like, twenty years ago that probably won’t even remember your name?’

‘She used to babysit you.’ Joyce said, ‘Come on Tam, it’ll be great. We’ll go on a road trip.’ She turned around and passed her daughter a clean plate.

Tam leaned over the table without looking up at her mother and grabbed a hot croissant. She held it up and considered its shape, frowning. ‘Well, we’ve never really been on holiday together before…I don’t know. It sounds a bit weird to me.’ She dropped the croissant onto her plate.

‘I was extremely fond of Toula,’ Joyce said, offering her daughter the blue ceramic teapot and a pale smile, ‘she used to mind you every Wednesday afternoon. She made the most fabulous pastries. You used to adore her honey cake. Don’t you remember?’

Tam stood up and walked over to the pantry. ‘I can’t remember any honey cake. Where’s the good jam gone?’ Her voice disappeared among old cereal boxes and stacks of empty glass jars without lids.

‘It’ll be great,’ Joyce said again, quieter this time. But in her words lay a slender matchstick of doubt that threatened to ignite her cheerful resolve and bring it down like a house of cards. Her daughter heard the whisper of doubt louder than the spoken words and called out from within the pantry, ‘Hey didn’t your Frank move up around there somewhere?’

‘Come and eat your croissant before it gets cold,’ Joyce replied.

Tam’s head reappeared, eyeing her mother as closely as though she were a faded photograph from a bygone era.

Joyce had planned to book them into a room at the local pub for the night. ‘She might ask us to stay,’ Joyce had reasoned to her daughter as they drove, ‘but I prefer to be independent.’ Tam saw her mother touch her hair often and check her reflection in the rear-view mirror.

After two hours they stopped and Joyce consulted the map.

‘So are you going to visit Frank?’ Tam asked.

‘I think I know where we are now,’ her mother said, slamming the book shut, fumbling with the ignition.

‘It’s okay mum,’ Tam said. ‘You don’t have to decide yet.’

They pulled into a rest stop and Joyce unpacked cold sausages and hard-boiled eggs from silver foil. Tam lay down under a gum tree that gave only an illusion of shade. ‘Have you even told this Toula chick that we’re coming?’ Tam asked her mother as she peeled an egg.

‘I think I boiled them for too long,’ Joyce said, biting into a grey yolk.

‘She probably won’t remember us you know,’ Tam said.

‘Well. It’s a nice trip anyway, stopping where we like and doing this, isn’t it lovely…’ said Joyce, waving her hand around at the small park by the highway as though it were an unrivalled paradise. Tam saw the yellow brick toilet block, the peeling see-saw and the expanse of thin yellow grass that hadn’t seen rain in months.

‘It’s great Mum,’ she said.

They arrived at Toula’s cake shop in the afternoon. At this time of the day every table was full. There were more people crammed inside its tiled walls than on the streets of the entire town. Inside, the place was a din of teaspoons on saucers and the crank and shuttle of the old coffee machine as two Greek women manipulated the heavy levers and switches. The smell was overwhelming—sweet buttery pastries being baked somewhere behind the scenes, filled and rolled with custard, pistachios, honey, berries and cream.

Joyce glanced nervously around and kept catching strange angles of her own profile in the mirrors that lined the walls. She thought she recognised a man sitting on the last table in the corner, taking lunging bites at his tiropita.

Tam pushed forward into the queue and started pointing at cakes. Behind the glass counter the two women sang out ‘hello-how-are-you’, ‘nice to see you honey’ and ‘kalispera, kala?’ to every customer without pausing from their apron-clad shuffle as they moved around each other like a pair of barrels, slicing up the cheese and spinach spanakopita and flicking switches on the coffee machine, setting off the grinder again and again.

Joyce sat down near the front window and turned to look towards the table in the back corner. On closer inspection, she saw a nose that was thicker and a jaw that was definitely not the one she had admired. It wasn’t him. She turned to face the window again.

Tam arrived with a plate of cakes and two strong coffees. ‘I think the Toula sisters look pretty busy, don’t you?’ she said, sitting down. ‘Shall we just have our afternoon tea and come back later?’

Joyce nodded, taking a sip of coffee.

‘Wow, that coffee’s good. Worth the drive just to come here.’

‘You know,’ Tam said leaning forward, ‘I never knew you could get to Greece in three hours in a clapped-out Mazda!’

Beneath the rattle and clang in the kitchen, the murmur and crunch of the patrons, the shrill ring of the cash register and bouncing song of the Greek greeting calls, was the sound of two women laughing.