Free One Way Ticket by Evie Evans Page A

she’d come here, leaving everyone
behind in England. I’d just assumed she’d been attracted by the good climate
but perhaps she’d been running away from something like me?
    I opened my mouth to ask her but it was
too late, the moment had passed and she’d already moved on.
    “Kostas’ll be round in a bit.”
    It was great that my aunt went out so
much, other women her age would be in bed by eight o’clock with their knitting,
instead she was in bed by eight o’clock with… yes, well, I didn’t need to go
there.
    “We’re going over to Frank’s house. He’s
got satellite,” Aunt June continued.
    No Greek blockbuster television for her,
then.
    “You can come too,” my aunt said quickly
as if she felt a bit guilty, leaving me with the crap telly programmes.
    What - miss an evening with ‘Eleni’ the
beautiful young leprosy sufferer? (Possibly that television masterpiece hasn’t
hit where you are yet.) “Okay, thanks,” I replied, surprising both of us.
    “We’ll take your car,” my aunt told me, putting
her knife and fork down on her now empty plate.
    Twenty minutes later, kitchen tidied, I
was in the hallway wearing a fresh t-shirt over my jeans, waiting for my aunt
to choose which scarf to wear with her outfit. She’d already given my clothes a
surreptitious glance and I had a feeling they had been found wanting, although
she was too polite to tell me so. By the time Kostas arrived, she had an
impressive pastoral scene tied around her neck. If we got bored with the telly,
we could always use it to spot local wildlife with.
     
    Frank O’Neill and his wife Kate
were in their fifties and lived in a well kept house a mile away. I could
understand why my aunt always met them at their house when I saw the show home
standard of tidiness they maintained there. A visit to Aunt June’s villa would
probably send them into convulsions. Whilst my arrival had improved things at her
place, there was a limit on what I could do now I was working, which is what I
kept telling myself as I looked at their shiny surfaces.
    “Jennifer! How lovely to see you,” Kate
welcomed me, coming out of the kitchen from which delicious smells were
emanating.
    “I hope I’m not intruding.”
    “Not at all, Katie’s just arrived for a
visit. I’m sure she’d love to meet you.”
    Katie, their imaginatively named daughter,
was a rather plump woman a few years younger than me who had squeezed herself
into an alarmingly yellow t-shirt. I asked her about news from England whilst desperately trying not to think of honeydew melons. My aunt and a few others
quickly fell to discussing Tina Lloyd’s murder. At least they didn’t try to
drag me into it.
    “I come over a few times each year,” Katie
was telling me. “It’s so easy with mum and dad living here. It’s a really cheap
holiday.”
    “And you can get time off work okay?”
    “Yeah, I temp in offices so I can usually
just take whatever time I need.”
    I’ve never had that knack of making my
life sound so completely wonderful that people like Katie have, but it doesn’t
stop me from trying.
    “I’ve just moved here myself, thought it
would be great to live in the sun.” As I said this I could hear the rain, which
had been threatening all day, start lashing across the windows. “I got a job at
the police station, typing up stolen dog cases, things like that.”
    Fortunately, Katie’s mother interrupted
everyone at this point, before I could make my life sound any worse.
    “We thought we’d make a bit of a party of it
tonight because Katie’s here,” she announced, bringing a plate of something
pastry based from the kitchen. “Instead of just watching television, Frank’s
gotten out the karaoke machine!”
    I slid my aunt a look of pure hatred as
Katie grabbed my arm and squealed.
    “Oh, don’t you love karaoke?”
    Was it possible to say no and still be a
good guest?
    A sheet of song titles appeared and was
passed to my aunt and Kostas who didn’t