Free The Gypsy's Dream by Sara Alexi Page A

when anyone is really angry? She quite likes the idea of being able to shout at the top of her voice without it really meaning anything more than her letting off steam. She would love to have shouted at the top of her voice at Dad when he said she couldn’t go back to school to do her A levels. A levels are the gateway to University, University the gateway to a career, how can he not realise how important that is? It will define her life.
    She supposes she should really let him know she is ok. The idea of being here isn ’t to worry him. When she gets paid tomorrow she will ask Stella if she can use the phone. Maybe they have call-boxes in town. She doesn’t feel she can ask to use the ouzeri phone yet as she has no money to pay for the call, and it’s not clear what her position there is. She certainly wouldn’t ask the man, and Stella seems nice, but reserved. Like she hasn’t quite made up her mind.
    She passes what must be a chi cken hut with little ramps up to a small entrance. She looks around her and sees one or two chickens crouched in the shade of bushes and the back wall of the orchard. A cockerel crows but none of the chickens takes any notice.
    Abby makes her way towards a clump of pines that crowns the top of the hill. As she steps under them the relief from the sun surprises her. The ground feels springy and there is a hushed silence. It is a place Rockie would love, digging in the soft ground, finding sticks.
    She turns, and her mouth falls open before forming into a wide grin. The village and the whole plain are laid out before her. Little whitewashed houses with tiny yards and regimented kitchen gardens huddle at her feet, squadrons of orange groves range across the flat plain, in the distance are dotted villages and even the nearby town hugging the coast of the bay to her left. The sea itself glistens in the sunlight, a living jewel.
    The view looks, to Abby, computer-generated, unreal, as if a child has included all the elements that give joy: a white church atop a hill in the foreground, another further away in the mid distance, the sides of the hills they are mounted on chiselled to make terraces for more olive trees. The mountains in the far distance fade to purple and the wide open sky is an endless dark blue. Abby wants to say it is awesome, but it doesn’t feel to be a big enough word. But she is in awe, she feels sure, in the real sense of the word.
    ‘ And I am here,’ she whispers into the breeze, and the tops of the pines sigh in answer.

    Although Stella has finished cutting Mitsos’ food she remains sitting there as he eats. She looks idly out of the dusty window in the paint-sealed door to the restaurant part. If she unjammed the door and got nicer tablecloths they would probably get more families; they could even get some more tables and put them on the pavement. She knows that when there are one or two farmers being raucous inside it frightens the women and children away; the outside tables could be for them. But Stavros will not unjam the door, or agree to the buying of more tables. In fact the money they make does not seem to go very far unless …
    ‘ Can you cut this bit, please?’ Mitsos asks.
    ‘ Oh, sorry.’ Stella beaks from her daydreams.
    ‘ I am asking you to cut my food because I was a fool twenty-odd years ago and got my arm blown off and you are saying sorry to me?’ His eyes smile before the laughter that follows.
    Stella smiles back and watches him eat for a moment. What would happen if there was no one to cut his food for him? What would happen if there was no one to cook for him? Life seems very cruel to elderly people, not that he is very elderly, he is only sixty-something, but people that are really elderly have afflictions that mean they cannot use their arms or, even worse, their legs. It seems wrong that people put in effort all their life and then when they get old, as if life has not thrown enough at them, they suffer afflictions.
    Stella recalls Vasso