Page 16 of Take a Chance on Greece

Yiota didn’t look convinced. ‘The guests will be back from their excursion before you have finished. I would prefer they do not see you in your swimwear, it does not give a good impression of the hotel staff. But I understand that the overalls might be too hot, so once you have done your washing, you can wear your own clothes for the time being. If you complete your trial successfully, then we will see what can be arranged.’

Chapter Nine

By the time I’d finished work – several hours after the shift should have ended due to my painfully slow cleaning process – I wanted nothing more than to curl up in bed and sleep for a century. I knew it was bad when I was lugging the equipment back to the storage room and started eyeing up flat surfaces like the floor and the dining room tables and thinking that they looked like comfortable places for a nap. But if I went to sleep now, I would snooze straight through until the alarm went off for me to go to work again, and I wouldn’t achieve anything, which would rather defeat the point of me coming out here. My lofty ambition to find the Andreas of my dreams wouldn’t happen if I did nothing but work and sleep. So, after quickly texting Alexis to say I’d survived my first day and to thank him once again for finding me the job, I put my washing into the machine, pulled the ‘I love Greece’ T-shirt back on with a pair of shorts, and decided to start my Awesome Andreas search in earnest.

Unfortunately my bright idea to look for him on social media turned out to be not so bright after all. This was due to a combination of user error and technology, user error being my inability to work out how to narrow down my search by location, and technology being my phone's failure to translate the Greek script into something that I could understand. After several frustrating attempts to overcome the challenges by first turning the phone off and on again, and then flinging it across the room, I gave up trying and decided to channel my energy in another direction instead.

My next approach involved asking Yiota if I could use a computer.

‘Do not go on any strange sites if you are searching for your Andreas,’ she said, wagging her finger at me as she reluctantly led me to the office behind reception. ‘A virus would be a very bad thing.’ I couldn’t decide whether she was referring to me or the computer getting the virus. ‘If you ask me, this whole situation is very silly. And it is a mess in here,’ she added, quickly swooping past me to gather up a collection of picture frames from the desk and move them out of the way.

I wondered whether I should offer to clean so I could get some brownie points, but then decided that I’d be running the risk of offending my host as the room really wasn’t that messy at all. She was probably moving the pictures because she didn’t want her new temporary employee seeing snaps of her during her free time. I settled down at the computer and pretended to fiddle with the mouse while I waited patiently for Yiota to give me some space. Now I was about to start it, the whole social media search thing felt a little soulless, as if picking a man out online was the same as browsing for furniture on a virtual marketplace. Doing it in front of an audience of Yiota, who was deeply sceptical about my whole Andreas quest, was even less appealing. She would probably have strong opinions about the men on screen and I didn’t want to be influenced by someone else’s view. Thankfully though, she was soon summoned to help direct some tourists to a nearby beach, so I could begin my exploration in private.

I’d thought it would be easier to instigate my Andreas hunt on a computer rather than on my phone so I could examine any images on a bigger screen. But I realised my mistake as soon as I looked down at the keyboard, which of course was set out in the Greek alphabet. My rudimentary knowledge of the different script from maths lessons was not going to help me get very far in typing out actual words. I stared at the jumble of shapes and tried to remember if the letter that looked like a ‘v’ was actually a ‘v’, or whether it was something else altogether. Sadly, staring at the squiggles didn’t help them appear any more comprehensible, but it did give me another idea. I looked at the screen instead, and placed my hands on the keyboard as if I was going to touch type in English, and tapped what I hoped would spell the name Andreas into the search engine.

Several million results pinged up which at least let me know that I’d managed to input an actual word. Unfortunately, it rather dashed my hope that tracking downtheAndreas would be a simple operation. Until I worked out how to translate the results into English, or got hold of the dictionary Alexis had promised me, they were pretty meaningless, so I clicked on the image tab instead. I was confronted with page after page of potential Andreases: smiley, sad, grumpy, serious, all manners of emotions expressed by all manner of people whose only common feature was that they had the same name. Some pictures looked like they’d been taken in a professional setting, others were holiday snaps, and a few looked worryingly like mug shots. I instantly dismissed those ones. They were probably still behind bars, and if they weren’t, I liked to think that even Drunk Me would have had more sense than to have used them as tattoo inspiration.

I looked carefully through the results of the first few pages in the hope that one of the pictures would spark some recognition, but none of them leapt out at me. There were some good-looking men named Andreas out there, but I couldn’t risk just going on physical appearance. I suppose one of the reasons I was beguiled by Jim for such a long time was that I’d always secretly felt that he was out of my league appearance-wise, and that I was lucky he had chosen me, which I guess was partly why it had taken so long for me to recognise and acknowledge the flaws in the way he treated me. I didn’t want to fall into the same trap again.

I was on page six of the search results when my eyes started swimming and I decided enough was enough. Did I honestly think that I would be able to do a Google search and instantly find Awesome Andreas? Or was I doing this because it felt like the safe option to be tucked away in the hotel, browsing the internet, building up an imaginary picture of the man and not having to interact with anyone, rather than having to go out into the real world and speak to actual people? Because the latter option would involve me being brave, and since it had peaked with my dramatic walk out on Jim, my courage had been gradually slipping away from me.

I added the name Andreas written in the Greek alphabet to my notebook of vocabulary and decided to temporarily abandon my online search and ring my friends for a pep talk. Whatever their opinions on my recent behaviour, I knew they would cheer me up and help me find a way to move forward. Fortunately, Kat was around at Amira’s place and they answered on speakerphone on the first ring. If I wasn’t very much mistaken, they’d been staring at the phone willing me to call, the sixth sense of our long-established friendship making them know when I was in need of them.

‘Babe, you’re alive,’ was Amira’s opening gambit, which didn’t suggest much faith in my solo survival skills. There was genuine relief in her voice. Amira was like me in having a tendency to catastrophise, so she’d probably been imagining that I was locked up in a Greek jail or something.

Kat meanwhile went for the equally subtle approach of, ‘Tell us where we need to rescue you from.’

Such faith in me. My friends’ reactions helped bolster my dwindling spirit.

‘I don’t need rescuing, thank you very much. I’m an independent woman who is more than capable of standing on her own two feet,’ I said indignantly.

‘And once more, with feeling,’ said Kat. ‘No, seriously hon, how are you getting on? We’ve been dead worried about you. Ouch.’

There was a slight kerfuffle at the other end of the line and I smiled as I imagined Amira nudging Kat and telling her to back off and be more subtle in her approach.

‘What she meant to say is that we’ve been thinking about you, and hoping that you’re having a good time,’ said Amira. ‘First things first, have you got somewhere to stay?’

‘And have you shagged Andreas yet?’ butted in Kat, a question which was quickly followed by a yelp as Amira undoubtedly administered another dose of pinching.

‘I’ve barely been here twenty-four hours, and for a lot of that, I’ve been scrubbing toilets. If I had tracked down Andreas in that time, it would have been a miracle,’ I said. ‘And never mind anything as energetic as a roll in the sack, I’m so tired, I’d just want to cuddle up and go to sleep.’

‘You’re not going to give the poor guy much of a chance to earn his Awesome title with an attitude like that,’ said Kat, throwing in a dirty laugh for good measure.

‘Hold on a minute, what’s this about cleaning toilets?’ asked Amira.

I quickly explained how I’d managed to find both a temporary job and accommodation thanks to my bookselling guardian angel.

‘This bookshop guy sounds lovely. Shame he’s not called Andreas,’ said Amira. ‘Is he going to help you track him down though?’

‘I fear I’ve imposed on him enough, but it’s good to feel there’s someone nearby I can turn to when I need a friend. The reason I rang, apart from to hear your lovely voices of course, was to see if you have any ideas about how I can find Andreas. Things have been happening so quickly I’ve not really had the time or the energy to come up with a game plan, and the technology route doesn’t seem to be working.’

‘Oh, Lydia, you’re never going to find him by sitting behind a screen,’ said Kat. ‘You need to put yourself out there. Put your glad rags on, head to the nearest bar and have a few drinks. After all, that’s how you found him in the first place.’

‘It’s not the full picture of how I found him though, is it? Because it didn’t happen in the bar with you guys. It must have been somewhere between the hotel and the tattoo parlour. Perhaps I should walk the streets there as a starting point. In a non-prostitute way,’ I added hastily.

Once again, I racked my brains to see if any more flashes of memory came to light, but all I could picture was Alexis’s bookshop and that was only because I’d visited it yesterday.

‘Maybe getting drunk isn’t the way forward, but I agree with Kat, you should put yourself out there,’ said Amira. ‘You’re never going to meet anyone sitting in the hotel. And more importantly, you’re not going to have much fun doing that either. You’ve done nothing but work and follow Jim’s lead for the last couple of years. This is your chance to do what you want to do. To have a proper break and enjoy yourself. Go out there and do just that. Explore your surroundings and make the most of being in paradise. Only please remember that you shouldn’t go swimming for at least two weeks, and keep a loose T-shirt on over the tattoo so it can heal properly without exposing it to the sun. Oh, and now you’re not having to keep it hidden, try not to cover it up with a bandage. You want to let the air get to it.’

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