THE FOUR OF them now sat behind the office demountable, around a large wooden picnic table, faded and splintering from relentless sun. Made of flimsy green corrugated plastic, the pergola roof offered some nominal shade, though it seemed only to intensify the blistering heat. Blowflies were everywhere, slow and disorientated in the late afternoon swelter. There wasn’t a breath of wind.

As proprietors and hosts, Rex and Vera Boyd had insisted their guests stay for dinner. On seeing Manolis, Vera had hugged him tightly, and he had kissed her on both cheeks in the Mediterranean way. Standing at the head of the table, she was now spooning out generous helpings of rich beef stew. It was a meal totally at odds with the weather.

‘Wait till you try Ma’s lamb curry,’ said Rex. ‘If I was on death row, it’d be my last meal.’

Vera chuckled, her bosoms and stomach quivering with delight beneath the gold crucifix around her neck. Her wrinkled face folded into what Manolis supposed was a smile. He ate hungrily, dipping a square hunk of damper into the dense brown sauce. The flavour was intense and glossy with a subtle sweetness from apple. He avoided the chunks of meat as much as he avoided the topic of being vegetarian.

With the snap of a well-practised wrist and flick of a long hunting knife, Rex opened a series of beer bottles with four little gasps. They were longneck bottles without labels, his special home brew. He poured thick beer into four enormous stein glasses and forced one onto Manolis. Rex took his guest’s refusals of the beer as a mortal blow. Fortunately, Sparrow came to the rescue of the unwanted stein.

‘The meat’s from the slaughterhouse,’ Vera said proudly. ‘That’s why it tastes so bloody good, aye.’ She wielded a flyswatter with laser precision, every few seconds claiming another marble-sized victim.

They talked about the past and present, but mainly the past. Manolis remembered the town as thriving and home to nearly five thousand people.

‘It’s about half that now – permanent residents, I mean,’ said Rex. ‘People have left and no one’s come in to replace them.’

Manolis said he vaguely remembered the couple who’d run the tourist park for years and lived in the cabin behind the office. Rex described how he used to visit the milk bar run by Manolis’s father in the centre of town. In close-knit country communities like Cobb, the local Greek café had been a meeting point. It welcomed everyone, irrespective of creed or colour, espousing the Greek virtue of filoxenia – ‘generosity of spirit’.