By Lane Ashfeldt

All day long he was full of talk: how big the ferry was and how fast it went. Not like the rusty boats in Greece. Lisa thought the khaki sea looked wrong. So impossibly solid and soupy.

When she fell for Panos she had also fallen for his country: the siestas, the sunshine, and the sparkling silver-blue Aegean — she wanted it all. And he wanted her just as he found her: the pale freckled skin that never took a tan, the bluey-green eyes that changed whenever he looked at them.

‘You have the strangest eyes, little Lisa, my Lisaki,’ he would tell her. ‘Like the woman who fell to earth. My alien girl.’

Had she been alone, Lisa might have killed time on the ferry by chatting someone up. People on a sea crossing would tell you anything and everything about themselves, liberated by the fact you’d never meet again. She loved that, she loved the urgent necessity of cramming a lifetime into a single evening.

‘Ela, tell me a story from when you were little, Lisaki,’ Panos said.

Panos came from a world that respected talk. He himself could talk like an angel — this she knew, for he had talked her into skipping her return flight, talked her out of one life and into another. But right now Lisa itched to read a new book. As her fortnight in Corfu stretched into months in Athens she had read ‘Giovanni’s Room’ five times. Once Panos found it open on the kitchen table and stuffed it away in the saucepan cupboard. ‘I hate books,’ he said. ‘They’re so messy’. His apartment sheltered a different kind of mess: a jukebox, a wooden pinball machine, a drum-kit, an ancient radio that he coaxed back to life by replacing the valves under its curved bakelite casing.

Now Panos jabbed her arm. ‘The girl selling the coffees. Look at her, Lisaki, look!’

Lisa saw a woman maybe a year or two younger than herself, mousey hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, a bored expression on her face. Beside the till, slowly going stale under a row of spot-lights was a plate of Danish pastries. This time last year all you could have bought on this boat was a cup of tea and an apple turnover. Lisa wondered if the woman disapproved of the complicated range of lattes, espressos and cappuccinos she had to sell now.

Panos watched, expectant.

‘What about her?’

‘Don’t you see? It’s amazing, she has the exact same eyes as you.’

Lisa borrowed her dad’s car for the day and they spent the morning in town. They walked across the Ha’penny Bridge and continued under a little arch that led to Temple Bar and the insideout bank. Panos came to a halt beneath the Why-Go-Bald man and stood watching his red neon hair vanish, then grow again; vanish, then grow again. Each time his hair returned the man was haloed with neon rays of happiness. Lisa set the timer of her camera to take a photo of them standing under the sign, but the clouds softened into a single grey mass and drizzled down on top of them, so they ducked in at the side entrance to a cafe.

Panos tousled her damp hair as if she were a puppy, ‘My Lisaki, you are so sweet, you are so special to me…’ She felt odd hearing these words here, where at any moment Eithne or Conleth or Janey might stroll in. Only of course they all had jobs now, and weren’t about to breeze into Bewley’s on a wet Tuesday and call out ‘Lisaki, how’s it goin?’

‘You are the most precious little alien in all the world,’ Panos said, ‘but tell me Lisaki, my sweet one, how is it all the other little Irish girls have eyes just like yours?’

She could have hurled a plate of buns in his face. She pulled a new book from an Eason’s bag and opened it, but the letters swam out of focus. In the Ladies she splashed her face with cold water, then looked in the mirror, first at her own eyes, then at the eyes of the women all around her who were busy repairing their make-up or combing their long hair. To her each pair of eyes looked different.

In Athens, Panos was the one who drove them everywhere, in his scruffy 1950s convertible or, more often, on the Vespa. It made a change now to be up front choosing the road. Without consulting him she passed the turnoff for the suburb where her parents lived and drove on towards Donabate, aiming for the rocky Portrane coast. The new townhouses by the train station confused her and for a moment Lisa thought she had taken a wrong turn, but she recognised the Martello tower and kept going. She parked in the place where Dad always used to park and, without waiting, ran down the steps and along the shore. Ten years old again, eager to escape her squabbling younger brothers.

The coast was every inch as wild as she remembered. Black and red rocks tumbled down to the water’s edge, an arrested landslide that grumbled pliobarnach, pliobarnach when the waves thundered through it. Out on the shoreline the tang of seaweed was strong, the ground jagged with shell fragments part way through their slow mutation to grains of sand. A boy tap-tapped the rocks, collecting shellfish. Stealthily he slipped them from their rocky home and plopped them one by one into a bucket of seawater.

Her brother Dónal had shown Lisa how once. ‘Pick one on the waterline as the tide’s going out,’ he’d told her. ‘Tap its shell so it thinks a wave has come, then pull.’ Sure enough, the limpet relaxed its grip. Cupped in her palm, its pale orange flesh shone soft and wet. She tried replacing it on the rock, but it seemed not to know its own spot anymore. Gently she slid it into a rock-pool, hoping the sea might find it a new home. In spite of her pleas, when the time came to leave her brothers refused to tip their catch in the sea.

‘I want to show Mammy,’ Rory had insisted. Mam, predictably, had shown no real interest other than to ban the creatures from indoors. After a count to determine who had collected the most, Dónal and Rory had tipped their buckets on the waste ground at the far end of the garden where the smell of rotting shellfish wouldn’t reach the house.

Lisa stepped over the curly brackets of seaweed that marked the tide line and picked her way to the top of the beach. She lay on the smooth grey sand of a cove protected from the wind by rock formations to either side, and hugged herself for warmth. A cloud opened, briefly letting a faint milky sunshine spill over her. She closed her eyes, imagining herself far away on a beach in Greece with Panos. Just the two of them.

‘Lisa! Lisaki? There you are. Are you hiding?’ She snuggled into the sudden warm shape of him next to her, wanting the heat of his country to change her for good.

He never said the thing about the eyes again. He didn’t have to. Even while she wished things could go back to how they had been before, Lisa knew that was not an option. And at times she would catch herself thinking, you’re not so special to me any more, either. You’re like my brothers, searching for a weak spot, pulling and poking at me until you have me in the palm of your hand.

She returned with Panos once more to his country with its sparkling silver-blue sea, but the tide had turned between them; she was just treading water awhile, catching her breath, waiting for the next big wave to help her on her way.