Before any of this had a name
An old friend remembers the teenager who arrived in Rhodes.
Tasos Zachariou tells the story from the other side. He and his brother had just opened a small bar in Faliraki when a young English hitch-hiker walked through the door asking for work. They already had staff and could not really afford another person.
“One week later, he was running the place!”
According to Tasos, I became barman, DJ, PR, party organiser, interior improver and whatever else the bar needed. Within a few weeks the place was busier. His mother started sending food for “that English boy”, and even his father, who apparently had little enthusiasm for noisy young Englishmen, eventually started calling me by my name.
Then winter arrived
The tourists left. I did not. The family gave me a room above the closed bar and hotel, and I began going with Tasos to a small piece of land near Afantou where he kept chickens, turkeys, rabbits and ducks.
I helped carry feed, clean tanks, pick oranges and do the ordinary jobs. There was one line I would not cross: I would not kill the animals.
The animals were apparently less subtle
Tasos remembers twenty or more rabbits leaving their hay and sitting around me while I talked to them. At Christmas, his father's elderly cat Minou, who according to the family slept on nobody's lap except his father's, walked across the room, climbed onto mine and went to sleep. His father was not impressed.
That was when the joke began. “Martin is an animal guru.” By the following spring, Tasos says the birds and rabbits routinely came to me first even when he was the one carrying the food.
And then came the morning neither of us could explain
Tasos remembers collecting me one Sunday when I was unusually quiet and complaining of a headache and a strong sense that something was wrong. When we reached the farm, most of the birds had been killed overnight.
He assumed dogs. I told him I did not think it had been dogs and mentioned a nightmare I could not properly remember. A walk around the fence revealed a hole too small for a dog. A relative from the nearby village later told Tasos the attack sounded like a weasel.
I am not putting that story here as evidence of psychic powers, animal telepathy or anything else that requires a dramatic soundtrack. I do not know what happened. Tasos did not know either. That is actually the part I like.
Nearly three decades later, Tasos wrote that he still explains the world through experimentation, logic and observation, and that these memories remained difficult for him to fit into that framework. For me, they belong here for a simpler reason: long before Sanomentology, the Nine Realms or an Institute existed, I was already drawn to the things that did not fit neatly inside the explanation available.
