Aphrodite’s Smile. Stuart Harrison

suggested.

      I decided that she was right, but as I negotiated the dark twisting bends of the Perahori road I found myself thinking about Alex. I drove past the house where she was staying, but I could see from the road that there were no lights in her room so I continued on into town. I had no particular idea about where I was going so I parked the Jeep near the square and strolled among the cafés and restaurants looking for a spare table. There weren’t any, so I explored some of the side-streets away from the waterfront that I knew wouldn’t be so busy. I found a small taverna with a scattering of tables outside. The place was filled with men, mostly locals, drinking and smoking cigarettes. The air was blue with smoke, so I sat outside and when somebody eventually appeared to take my order, I asked for a beer.

      For a while I watched the flow of people, a few making last-minute purchases before the shops closed for the night. Across the street there was a travel agent and next door to it a shop selling magazines and books. The owner was dragging a rack of magazines inside, the covers of which featured pictures of naked women. It always surprised me that in a country with such a strong religious tradition, soft porn was openly displayed on every street corner alongside icons of the Virgin Mary and the myriad saints that are revered in Greece.

      Further along the street a group of young men wearing the ubiquitous Greek uniform of tight jeans and T-shirts chatted among themselves and smoked cigarettes, openly staring at any woman who walked past. It was another paradox of daily life there that had any of them witnessed a stranger ogling their own sister or girlfriend the way they did other women the consequences would undoubtedly have been violent.