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Gran to lie down too.’ Zoe walks behind her mother’s chair.
    ‘ Right, well I will go and get settled then. Nice to meet you all.’
    But Zoe is already concentrating on manoeuvring the wheelchair. The large woman is still asleep in her chair, as is Bobby now, and Roula is talking to the man on the television. Zoe ’s Mother grunts at her. Roula replies, ‘Yes, I know, Gran, have a good sleep.’ To Marina, the grunts are indecipherable.
    The balcony belonging to Marina ’s room overlooks the courtyard. Marina can see the sparkling deep blue of the sea and the purple hills of the mainland beyond. That amazing view across the sea, with islands dotted, takes her breath away all over again, and she wonders why she doesn’t take little breaks from the shop more often.
    The heavy iron key fits snugly in the old lock and speaks of age and faded glory. The door is tall, but not quite as grand as the one into Zoe ’s rooms. This room, with its high ceiling, is charming and clean, scrubbed white. A corner is sectioned off for a shower and toilet. The shower tray is cracked but both the shower and the toilet are clean. Marina doesn’t bother to look in the fridge. She wearily slides her feet across to open the window onto a balcony at the back which is big enough for one chair. It overlooks the top of the town and offers a view of the island’s interior, right up to the top where pine trees crown the ridge. She is much more weary than she realised.
    She shuffles back to sit on the bed to test its softness, and to her relief it is firm. Her back feels fine at the moment, but a soft bed might set it off. She pushes the heel of one shoe down with the toe of the other and kicks it off. The second shoe follows. Her feet feel slightly swollen. She bends her knee to bring her foot up to reach her hand and rolls off a black sock. Her feet feel much better for the air. She unties the satin bow at the neck of her blouse and unbuttons the front. It has done well for its years. She unbuttons the cuffs and hangs the blouse on the back of the door. It looks a little more grey than black now, but after twenty years of washing Marina is not surprised.
    She switches on the ceiling fan and rummages in her bag for paper and a pen and flops onto the bed in her support bra and skirt. She lies for a while and wonders how many men aged thirty-five, born on the island, will still be living here.
    ‘ There could be hundreds, and there’s only three months before Eleni is here.’ She shifts and manoeuvres herself onto her stomach. She hopes Costas is managing the shop on his own.
    ‘ Now girl, lets concentrate, don’t be panicking. How many men aged thirty-five will there be on the island? The documentary said that the island’s population, without tourism, was about three thousand.’ Marina writes it down.
    ‘ So a third of them will be old, say over seventy. And a third will be young, say under twenty, so that leaves one thousand.’ She writes this down and puts too many zeros, and scribbles it out and then writes it correctly.
    ‘ Half of them will be women so ...’ She carefully divides by two. ‘Five hundred men between twenty and seventy.’ She writes this down.
    ‘ Now, let’s think, there are ...’ She uses her fingers to help. ‘Five decades from twenty to seventy,’ She writes this down and giggles at her progress. ‘Fives into one thousand. So there are twenty, no, two hundred men between the age of thirty and forty. Oh my goodness, so many. But there are ten years in a decade, divided by the ten, twenty men that will be thirty-five. Still, that’s a lot!’
    She turns over the paper and writes the numbers one to twenty down the edge. Next to one she adds ‘Yanni – donkey man’.
    The pen and paper are abandoned on the bedside table and Marina manages a low, ungainly, awkward roll and twist and flops onto her back. She pretends the slow waft of the fan on the ceiling is cooling. She watches its rotations. A fly comes