my own home

I have my first full character (one of many, but still an achievement. I’m pleased anyway…):

Name: Tammy Lianakos
Birthdate: 27.09.1997 (so will be around 16 when the book catches up with events taking place around 2013) Star sign: Libra
Clan/Tribe: Clegyrheli

The daughter of either academics or diplomats – one parent from Lebanon, the other from Iran – the family, who identify as Jewish, moved with her two older brothers, Jonathan and Omar, to one of the smaller Greek islands when Tammy was a tiny baby, to take up roles offered them by the Greek government, and to return to the ‘homeland’ of Tammy’s paternal grandparents, who were Greek, not Iranian. She remembers only the island, and considers it her home and a crucial part of her diasporic identity.

Around 2005 Jonathan is conscripted, while the war is still in specific ‘controlled’ locales. Life on the island continues largely unaffected by the world’s wars, although in some less direct way her parents may have some involvement on a research or administrative level. That remains to be seen… their work might be useful later…

But by three years later, when Tammy is 11, the war has persisted and increased to such an extent that the age of conscription has lowered in attempts to make up the numbers. So Omar is conscripted, and from that point the war feels much closer – as it in fact spreads around the Mediterranean, surrounding neutral countries and closing in on them. The town is fast decreasing in numbers, as more and more residents are recruited: men and boys to combat army positions, and women to other war-effort positions, which as the war worsens, also become combative positions.

Around 2010 is when the war has widened enough to expose the islands as vulnerable. The island is raided for the first time when Tammy is studying on the beach. She and around 20-25 other children are taken from her home-town-suburbs. No-one older than 14-15 is taken, and mainly girls. They are kept on the pirate ship for 6 weeks while the raiders make their rounds of other Mediterranean countries, including the south of France, which is where they abduct Anouk from, and it is how the stories of Tammy and Anouk become connected. The ship winds its way out of the Med and into the Atlantic. It’s thought that the ship intends to make its stop in Britain, where it’ll make one final raid before returning to Turkey with its cargo, for dispersal and sale. But the raid on the Welsh coast is intercepted by the Clegyrheli community, who manage to disrupt the raid and prevent the pirates from taking anyone from the local region, and they also manage to rescue Tammy and Anouk, but not the others. The ship makes a hasty retreat after its thwarted mission, and presumably continues its intended journey back to its port of origin.

There could be an extended story here, with someone else from the same boat later turning up in the other commune in the middle east.

Tammy’s Community Roles:

She is business-minded and good in managerial positions: she is largely responsible for logistical production and budgeting of the community’s food produce, as well as the water and fuel monitor.

She is also creative and a primary inventor of games and craft activities, into which she involves herself wholly and enthusiastically.

Character:

Tammy is assertive and very confident. She is full of optimism and dislikes negativity. She will always see the positive in any situation. She can be extremely warm and affectionate, but also fickle and moody, and will blow hot and cold in most relationships. She does, however, like to be liked – she needs to be liked – and will install herself as the creative innovator in most social scenarios in order to be the one in control of social dynamics – not necessarily in order to be the centre of attention, but so as others will remember who it was brought them all together. She forms a few close friendships, which she will invest in on a personal and emotional level, but is in her element in larger social groups.

An extract from Tammy’s story (so far unedited):

“When I played on the beaches until well after dark my father told me I was naïve and my mother told me I was brave. I’m sure they knew something was coming. I had friends to play with at school – there were many of us – speaking many languages – Greek, Hebrew, Lebanese, Italian and English – we were diasporas even then, even though that’s where I was born and where I grew up, and the only place I’d known as home. And it felt like mine – it did not feel like I was not rooted to that place – my history was a story washing in and out with every wave, but leaving its stones upon my beach. My stones. On my beach. It didn’t matter to me that this sand was foreign to my parents, and even to my eldest brother who wasn’t born there as me and my other brother were…

… Omar left that night. The train from town would take him to the main port on the other side of the island, and a boat from there would take him to the mainland. We hoped that there he might be united with Jonathan, but we could never know for sure. Mother wanted to drive him to the station in town, but he wouldn’t let her. He left the house alone, as he did every morning for school, and walked off into the darkness. Sometimes I like to believe that he never went to town, never took that train or boarded the boat, but went to the beach and disappeared into the dunes, where the world was un-peopled and quiet of voices, except for those of the wind and the waves and the gulls. But if that had happened there would have been an enquiry from the military, which never came, so he must have gone with them in the end…

In the speed of it, and the silence – because I did not scream and he was not shouting – we were for a few seconds embracing. His embrace pinned my arms to my sides and had lifted me off my feet. I was looking directly into his eyes. There was nothing and nowhere between us. We were transported, the two of us, to a place where the histories that had brought us to this moment were washed away, and we were equal and unified. In each other’s eyes we saw a different future to the one that was trying, all around us at that moment, to be realised. But he looked away. He would not hold my gaze. And that future was gone, and my home, and everything I’d ever known or understood…”