Page 15 of Hot Greek Summer

‘Well, we’re here now,’ Frankie said and smiled.

He looked from one to the other of them. ‘Come in, come in. I’ll gather people up to come say hi to our newest locals.’

‘Nowthere’sthat Greek charm and neighbourly hospitality we’d hoped for,’ Stella said, laughing and linking her arms through Frankie and Winnie’s as they followed Panos between the Coca-Cola sunbrellas shading the empty tables outside his bar.

‘Island gin?’ he asked, holding up a bottle of nectarine blush liquid as they each took a stool at the pine-topped bar.

They watched as he made theatre of pouring them each a long drink over ice, the tonic fizzing over the ice cubes to create the same rose-pink G&T cocktail they’d drunk so many of with Ajax a few weeks back.

‘Gin’s clear where I come from,’ Stella said, holding her drink up curiously.

Panos nodded. ‘Ah, but this one is special. Ajax used to make it for us.’

‘He did?’

‘He didn’t tell you?’ Panos frowned as they all looked nonplussed. ‘This is very bad.’ Turning to look over his shoulder, he called out for his mama.

They watched in silence as a small, slight woman dressed in black appeared. Panos let forth a stream of fast Greek smattered with their names, gesticulating across towards Villa Valentina in the distance.

Panos’s mother fired back something equally breakneck fast, speaking with her hands as much as her voice. Panos paused for a moment while he decided how to translate what she’d said.

‘She say that it’s always been brewed at the villa ever since she was a child. If you live in the villa now, you have to do it. It’s the law.’

‘The law?’ Winnie said, alarmed. ‘Are you sure?’

Panos’s mother nodded vigorously, speaking again, and they all waited for Panos to translate.

‘Island law,’ Panos shrugged. ‘The plants only grow in the garden at the villa. You make it, I sell it.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t have a clue,’ Stella said, deciding that she much preferred drinking the gin to making it.

‘Is there even a recipe to follow?’ Frankie asked, unsure if they were being wound up, some kind of odd welcome-to-the-island ritual, sort of similar to how she’d been sent to buy a bubble for a spirit level when she was a fifteen-year-old Saturday girl at the jewellers in the local shopping precinct.

Panos asked his mother Frankie’s question, but it was clear from her facial expressions and shrugging shoulders that they weren’t going to get a clean-cut answer.

Winnie sipped her drink and closed her eyes. God, it was good stuff. ‘It isn’t right that the world should run out of this,’ she said. ‘It’s possibly the best drink ever.’

It was difficult to say what it was about the gin that made it so delicious. It was rhubarb-pink in colour but not in flavour, and aromatic from the stem of rosemary Panos had pushed through the ice cubes exactly as Ajax had.

‘We could try to find out from Ajax?’ she offered, although she wasn’t entirely certain that they even had his details.

‘You must, you must,’ Panos urged, opening a wall cupboard behind the bar. ‘This is all I have left and I’ve never run out yet.’

There looked to be a dozen or more bottles in Panos’s stash, all bearing a handwritten and illustrated label. They looked like magic potions.

‘Well, we’ll look into it,’ Stella said. ‘Maybe we should have another taste just so to be clear.’

Panos looked at her through narrowed eyes, and then started to laugh. ‘You will be the troublesome one. I see these things.’

Frankie and Winnie nodded as Panos obligingly topped up their glasses.

‘So you’re … sisters?’ He gestured between them.

‘No,’ Winnie said. ‘We’re great friends.’

‘And you will all stay here? You won’t just come for a few weeks and then run back home?’

Winnie nodded, Frankie smiled diplomatically and Stella sighed into her glass without comment.

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