The Old Town

The Old Town

T HE THRILL OF

being somewhere else. Somewhere that is not my home or the charity shop or Pigeon Park, but somewhere completely new. It has enlivened my bones.

That is how I feel as we drive along the winding and steep Corfu roads. Emmeline’s yellow Beetle has one of those scented things hanging from the rear-view mirror that makes the whole car smell like bubblegum.

It is odd being driven by Emmeline, a person so fanciful and loud. She’s very quiet when she’s driving, and I’m glad of it because the road twists and turns, taking dives down steep hillsides and then chugging back up again. The air con is blasting and it feels like we are pootling along in a little yellow fridge.

‘I’m sorry I can’t spend the day with you today,’ Emmeline says as we stop at a set of traffic lights. ‘My editor likes to go through his notes over Zoom, and he is a fantastic editor but incredibly thorough. He says he has some issues with the lore around the squid king, so I think it will be a long one.’

From my position in the middle of the back seat, I spot Bella pressing her lips together to try to stifle a smile in the rear-view mirror. If she gets the giggles now, I will go too, so I’m thankful when Emmeline asks her to fetch the road map from the glove box as three cars in succession beep their horns at Emmeline for lingering at traffic lights.

She pulls up in what I am quite sure is not a parking bay and says, ‘Have fun, you two!’ waving as she rejoins the flow of traffic to a chorus of beeping horns.

Bella and I walk the narrow alleyways of the old town, looking up at laundry that hangs between the balconies of apartments, wondering about the agreements that exist between the neighbours on opposite sides and wondering how they reel the clothing in at the end of the day. We browse in touristy shops. We stop for a coffee, we fuss the mangy stray cats that come looking for crumbs. The heat is beating down on us, and I am grateful for my hat or my remaining wisps of hair might have ignited.

We walk, gloriously directionless, down endless narrow alleys and come across a tour group gathered outside a church, all shady and cool, listening to their tour guide, who is holding a sky-blue umbrella and counting them, a mother cat making sure she doesn’t lose her kittens.

Bella and I stand just far away enough that it doesn’t look like we are trying to steal the tour, but close enough that we can hear that this church is named after St Spyridon, the patron saint of Corfu. The bell tower is the tallest bell tower of the Ionian islands and is something something something. The microphone crackles. ‘St Spyridon is known as the keeper of the City

.’

The tour guide tells her gathered kittens and Bella and me that the body of St Spyridon is held within the church and, though he has been dead for over a thousand years, his body has not decayed.

‘It is incorruptible,’ she says, which I suppose is a good quality for a saint.

‘At night,’ she continues, ‘he wanders the world working wonders. And so the slippers he wears upon his feet become tired and used.’

There are murmurs of amazement among the tourists. How fantastic they seem to find it that on any given night, wherever you might be, the dried-out corpse of St Spyridon might appear and perform a good deed for you. Like repairing your cracked phone screen or letting you into your house when you’ve locked yourself out.

‘His body is stood upright twice a year so that his slippers might be changed,’ she says.

If the gathered tourists find the idea of refreshing the footwear of a thousand-year-old corpse as macabre as I do, they do not show it.

Someone in the crowd raises a hand and the tour guide gestures to him. How quickly we all become schoolchildren again when the conditions are right.

‘The bells will ring again at …’ she answers, checking her watch, ‘one o’clock, but do not worry,’ she says with a wry smile, ‘though we move on, we will still hear them!’ The group shuffles onwards down the narrow alleyway with their backpacks bumping into other passers-by, taking photos on their phones as they go.

Bella and I go through the side door into the church. It is quiet and cool and so ornate. The only sound is the shuffling feet of the other tourists, who, like us, are not looking at the saint’s body in its baroque coffin but instead looking up. The ceiling is a gallery, the pictures painted, gilded and beautiful.

Bella is craning her head, looking up at artwork.

‘Last time I went to church I was at school,’ she says. ‘It didn’t look like this.’

‘The last time I was in a church,’ I whisper, ‘I threw up in my hat.’

She pretends her snort of laughter is a sneeze.

‘Bless you,’ I tell her.

We make our way out of the church and back into the alleyway. Opposite the church door is a shop selling icons of St Spyridon and other religious artefacts, and lots of slippers with brightly coloured pom-poms on the toe. The alleyway is busier now, bustling with tourists milling in and out of the row of shops. We find ourselves in the middle of it all when we hear, clear as a bell above the hubbub: ‘ Jake!

’

Bella turns.

It is a woman’s voice. She is not afraid; it is a songlike call as though she is playing hide-and-seek. Which I suppose Bella and Jake are playing now, too.

‘Jake!’ she calls again.

The young woman is standing with an empty pushchair, smiling indulgently. ‘Jakey!’ she shouts again.

A little blond-haired boy runs out of a souvenir shop. He’s wearing dungaree shorts and sandals. He runs to his mother and jumps into the stroller.

‘There you are, gorgeous boy,’ the woman says to her son as she clips him in, brushing the bright blond hair from his eyes.

His father follows behind, coming out of the shop with a pair of slippers with bright pink pom-poms on the toe and handing them to the woman with a kiss on the cheek.

Bella smiles at me, seeing that Jake has been found, but it is an incredibly sad smile.

And then, from the spire of the old church above us, a bell.

And then another.

And then another. It’s a sharp clanging sound, like an alarm clock urging us to awaken. Ding Ding Ding

the high note clangs and the lower note booms.

The sound fills the alleyway. It is so loud that it hurts my ears. I check my watch: it is twenty past twelve.

The bells are not supposed to be ringing.

And yet, the bells ring.

High notes and low notes pealing, and it sounds urgent, like they have something pressing to communicate. Arise, arise! It is time!

Bella is standing very still amidst the hubbub of people and this urgent, clanging noise.

Here it is. Her sign.

‘Bells,’ she says.

She looks at me.

And finally, finally, Bella is able to cry.