Rethinking the Plot

It gives me great pleasure and pride to see this publication coming true after three years of the successful running of the International Creative Writing Summer School. Back in 2013 the British Council identified an unchartered market where UK expertise could be channelled to build local creative writing sector’s capacity and thought of this development as an opportunity to explore British creative writing methodologies. But we never expected that the outcome would be so rewarding. Our Creative Writing Summer School has grown by the year, enriching its courses, encouraging skills exchange and knowledge, creating professional opportunities, and providing a real and valued legacy for international writers, while opening the dialogue between the British and the Greek literary scene. We consider ourselves extremely lucky for having Kingston University and Kingston Writing School (and Kingston University Press) as our partners in this exciting adventure and we hope that our partnerships will continue for many more years to come. Above all, this publication could have not been realized without the hard work, talent and passion for writing of our Greek and International students, whom I would personally like to thank. I do hope that I will keep seeing them returning every summer in Athens and Thessaloniki, building on the success of the International Creative Writing Summer School and enhancing its platform for creativity and self-expression.

Maria Papaioannou

Arts Manager, British Council Greece

Introduction

This collection celebrates the first three years of the Athens International Creative Writing Summer School and the on-going partnership between the British Council and the Kingston Writing School. Since the first Summer School in June 2013, more than one hundred and thirty writers have attended courses in fiction, non-fiction, poetry and scriptwriting, and more than a third of them submitted work for inclusion in the collection. The standard of the submissions was uniformly high and a testament to the talent of all of those writers and to the dedication of the KWS professionals who have taught them on the courses. On behalf of KWS I want to thank all of those who submitted their writing. Everyone who participated in the process of selection found it stimulating and enjoyable. We also found deciding on the final selections very difficult indeed.

The Kingston Writing School is grateful for the chance to have worked again with Maria Papaioannou and Vangelis Kravvaritis at the British Council - and again in conjunction with Kingston University Press. Judith Watts, Director of KUP and Kingston’s MA in Publishing, has been ever-ready with her professional advice and support, and her team of editors, all students on Kingston’s Publishing MA, have been remarkable for their enthusiasm, skill, creativity, and efficiency. Kimberley, Brittany, Rachel and Elle have been a joy to work with.

The people of Greece have endured and continue to endure terrible hardships. As all of us who have participated in the Summer School have discovered, however, they have generally borne these hardships with dignity, and a sense of history and philosophical perspective. The collection illustrates those qualities (although not all of the writers are Greek). Some selections understandably evoke sadness or express a sense of regret or nostalgia. Others highlight issues of finance, class and ethnicity or the need for empathy and understanding – and hope – at times by representing events outside of Greece. Still others turn to humour and satire. Collectively they present readers with an imperative to re-imagine the world and how we relate to it, especially in troubled times. And this collective call to ‘rethink the plot’ is as inspiring as it is entertaining and thought- provoking.

David Rogers

Director of Kingston Writing School

Thirty seconds

Eleni Paprgyriou

There’s a dozen ways I could start this story. One involves a chorus of black-clad women, ten or twelve of them. They are standing in a circle, twisting and turning their upper bodies, then kneeling down slowly as they lift their arms to a full stretch, their fingers pointing upwards in a vague plea to a half-deaf deity looking from an impossible height down to the precipice of human troubles.

They are all wearing long black dresses that loosely drape around their legs. Their faces contract to form a mask of exaggerated suffering, maroon lipstick and whitened teeth. An ominous rhyme spreads like a murmur onto this imaginary stage:

See, anything that brings you joy

is followed by disaster.

Your hopes, so fragile and content,

shatter like alabaster.

Then they roll down onto the floor, hold their heads in an embrace of pale limbs and lament:

A moment of recklessness,

there goes your carefreeness.

A moment of carelessness,

there goes your happiness.

Eventually they break the circle and exit the stage in a straight line.

Yet, what would be the use of this gimmick? The chorus cannot warn the hero of his fate while there’s still time to change the course of things. They deliver these perfect iambs and trochees for nothing, while we, the perpetrators of the careless acts they subtly warn us not to perpetrate, happily go about perpetrating them. So, despite the advantages of this reference to Greek tragedy being universally recognisable, reader, I have opted for a different beginning. I have decided I should tell things exactly as they happened.

In a busy city centre somewhere in the Greek north, about half way between Ermou Street, named after Hermes, protector god of traders, and Tsimiski Street, named after a glorious Byzantine emperor, stands a large, proud, marble-coated bank. It is a neoclassical building, the sort designed in the late 1920s, fifteen years after the city waved goodbye to its Ottoman past and was annexed to the Greek kingdom. Deferential poplars shade its Doric façade, and before it stretches a large car park, nearly always full except in the heat of summer when the city deposits its human content into the beaches and bungalows on the nearby peninsula of Chalkidiki. Lately the building has become the target of anarchists who spray-paint it with graffiti and smash the marble steps into pieces to be used as missiles against the police during riots. But a decade ago it stood intact in its Dorian glory. Those who ascended the marble steps, and they were many, all had wishes and dreams: of a house, of their own business, of a holiday in an exotic place. Now, hardly anyone enters it with such a purpose in mind. But when this story begins, people with serious intent and well-tailored suits climbed up the stairs leading to its erect imposing columns.

The bank’s name is Delta Bank of Trust.

One May morning in 2010, sunny and promising, I found myself climbing the grand marble steps of Delta Bank of Trust. I was most probably late for my appointment because I am almost always late. A girl who was too good-looking and casually dressed to be working in a bank showed me upstairs to a secluded office. I was given two bundles of papers to sign. I was passed a pen, then a thick index finger pointed at a rectangular box on the bottom of each page. The whole act didn’t take more than thirty seconds. Six sheets of paper, five seconds for each signature. Terms and conditions. Subclauses. Small print. I didn’t read through these because my father, also present at this meeting, had read them for me, and I trusted my father. I signed and said thank you and walked out the glass door into a world of joyous carelessness. Almost an instant, yet no instant at all. Had it not been for some dire consequences, my thirty seconds would be utterly insignificant, doomed to instant oblivion, like making a cup of coffee or taking a pee. That, in fact, takes longer if you wash your hands afterwards.

But since there were consequences, my thirty seconds have become memorable. This little signing act has taken the significance of batting eyelashes, your heart’s wild trepidation before a fist clenched to punch you in the face. The dull colour of grass after a rejected marriage proposal. The icy stare on the face of a doctor before he pronounces a fatal prognosis. My thirty seconds have become the shiver and sweat in the moment cut where you realise what sorts of words are to come from the mouth beneath that frown.

Almost six years have lapsed since then. I now see myself, six years younger, getting in the car I used to drive then, an old Peugeot passed on to me by an uncle who was getting too old to drive. It’s past eleven (my meeting was at eleven), and I am in a bit of a hurry. In a stroke of luck I find a parking space in the car park that is always full. I jump out of the car, suddenly elated, and snap the door closed. For the first time after moving back to Greece, things have started to look up. I have five gigs this month. Nothing fancy, bars and restaurants, but five. I have my own apartment, not fancy, but it is my own. I inherited it from my grandmother who had passed away the previous year, God rest her soul. So I can afford not to live on my parents without having to starve myself. I look around me; there are the quivers and shivers of Greek spring melting its way into summer. There’s a glaring sea and the ethereal contours of Mount Olympus on the other side of the bay. There’s the anticipation that the sunlight will make the world a better place, better in all the marvellous generality of the word. The roadside poplars are covered in thick new foliage and, despite being pressed for time, my mind is on something else, a passage I am trying to perfect or a girl I want, the hint of unseen nipples beneath a half-buttoned shirt, positively induced by great weather.

Dad had called me in the morning and asked me to sign the papers. What papers? Nothing important, just a loan I want to get out for the business. I thought of the inconvenience. Does it have to be today? What else have you got to do today? he asked. Which implied that whatever I had to do was less important than his need to have the papers signed. I have four hours of teaching and a studio rehearsal in the evening, I said, trying to sound assertive. I also had a gig that required a sound check, but I preferred not to mention it. Dad always found this business of playing in public for a living ludicrous. Oh, it will only take half a minute, he assured me. But I knew his half -minute would add another forty-five minutes of being stuck in the morning traffic and another quarter of an hour to find parking space. I snorted in dismay. Look, I could tell you that this is important. Not just for the future of this business, but important for our family. But I know this line of argument will do nothing for you. So I am telling you to come down there and do your old Papa a favour. I will buy you lunch afterwards. I thought about it. He asked for half a minute of my time, which was not much to ask for. I decided to go. I was annoyed at him, but I still wished to make him happy.

My irritation at my father had not entirely evaporated when I entered the bank manager’s office. I forgot