Should We Fall Behind, page 15
When Makrides left, she told Tuli to go into the front room, handing her the remaining custard creams. She switched on the television and closed the door. From Tuli’s bedroom, she watched the alleyway through a gap in the curtains, waiting for Makrides to come into view. It was just a two or three minute walk to the space but after ten minutes there was no sign of him. She was about to move away from the window when there was movement around the car. She opened the curtains to get a better view. The tramp stuck his head out of the side window. He was a mess of hair. She waited; still no sign of Makrides but the man appeared to be talking to someone. Suddenly, a smaller figure came into view, shielded by a pink and white polka dot umbrella. The person handed over a bag which the tramp pulled into the car. The figure glided away. Ebele was stunned: there was more than one person lurking behind the houses, just metres away from where Tuli slept. She rubbed her eyes, wondering if the whole scene was shapes thrown up by rain, an illusion. She checked the window was firmly locked and pulled the curtains across so they overlapped.
15. NIKOS
The day Dimitri was born was the happiest day of Nikos’ life. Ourania woke him gently as a rose gold dawn glowed across a tranquil sky.
‘Nikos, it’s time,’ she said calmly as he fell out of bed and reached around in semi-darkness for his clothes.
Ourania, meanwhile, switched on the bedside lamp
and raised herself out of bed by pushing both her palms onto the mattress. A peach-coloured stain across the bed sheets and down the back of her white cotton nightdress shocked him.
Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?’ he said.
‘Yes. I’m certain,’ she replied firmly and Nikos gulped.
Ourania put her hands on her hips, bent towards the floor and let out a succession of slow sharp breaths.
‘Are you okay, my love?’ He tripped over his trousers as he tried to pull them on.
‘Yes,’ she said abruptly, straightening herself up. She placed one hand against the wall. ‘We need to hurry. I can feel him pushing down. He’s impatient.’
‘He?’ Nikos said with a big grin. It was the first time she’d assigned the baby a sex. For eight months, it was the neutral moraki: Moraki has hiccups; Moraki is hungry, Moraki wants Baba to sing.
‘You think it’s a boy, Nia?’ He could hardly contain his excitement.
‘He, she, it, whatever. Get me to the hospital now, Nikos. We don’t have time for this chit-chat.’
Nikos helped Ourania into the car and rushed around to the driver’s seat. His hands shook on the steering wheel as he weaved through the back roads, avoiding the high street which he knew would be clogged with traffic even though it was still some time before rush-hour.
‘Soon be there. Hold on moraki mou, hold on, little baby,’ he said as Ourania opened the window, stuck her face into the crisp morning air and panted.
Six hours later, he held a tiny squirming pink bundle with a mop of black hair, and a swell of ecstasy careered through his body.
‘I knew it would be a boy,’ he said to Ourania. She smiled weakly and closed her eyes. Her hair was as black as the baby’s; strands stuck to the side of her bloodless face. Nikos pushed them clear with his lips while holding his baby in his arms.
‘We’ll call him Dimitri,’ Ourania said. Her voice was tiny but assertive. ‘After my father and my brother.’
‘Okay,’ Nikos said. And then, to the baby, ‘Kali-mera, Dimitri, my boy.’
George came just a little less than eighteen months later, arriving one lunchtime, three weeks early while Nikos was fiddling about with a delivery of waterproof mattress protectors at the shop. When he heard the news, he ran down Grand Parade nudging people out the way as sweat dripped from his forehead into his eyes; damp spread in huge patches beneath his armpits. At home he was met by Doctor Razak at the front gate followed closely by a midwife he’d never seen before. The doctor slapped him on the back,
‘All is well, Nikos. Your wife is as strong as a bull. Congratulations, my friend. Two fine sons. It’s more than most people could even wish for.’
Inside, he found Ourania sitting up in bed with a tiny new boy at her breast and Dimitri crawling around his playpen in the corner. Two women from the church fussed around the room but quickly disappeared when he entered and soon the sound of them clanking around in the kitchen rose up through the floorboards. He lifted Dimitri and sat him on his knee next to Ourania.
‘Dimitri,’ he said. ‘Meet your brother Georgios. George. You will be lifelong friends, my boy. Nothing will come between you: not women, not money, not war. You’ll love each other as brothers should.’
He kissed Ourania and the new baby on the tops of their heads while Dimitri wiggled free and crawled along the floor towards the playpen. The new baby let go of Ourania’s nipple and howled as she tried to reposition him. Nikos laughed.
‘It seems like our little George is even more impatient than his brother. We’ll have our hands full with these young men.’ Ourania smiled and Nikos said, ‘Thank you, my love. Thank you.’
The boys were always healthy: the usual coughs and colds as infants and then, as teenagers, a broken limb here and a sprained or twisted joint there, but on the whole they both thrived. Things only began to fall apart when, one evening, a young ruddy-faced police officer knocked on the front door, disturbing Nikos and Ourania as they ate pork stew with Dimitri, fed up of waiting for George to return from his football match or his snooker game or wherever he was.
‘Goodness me, Nikos,’ Ourania said when he returned to the table. ‘You’re as pale as milk.’
‘He’s been arrested,’ Nikos said, shaking. ‘It is ridiculous: they say he was stopped with some kind of drug in his possession. I don’t understand. I need to go to the police station with his passport and other things. Come with me Dimitri.’
Less than six months later, Nikos stood in the airport terminal with his arm around Ourania’s shoulders as she wept into his handkerchief; Dimitri stood beside them and all three waved twenty-one-year-old George off to board a plane on his own for the first time.
‘Cousin Andreas has a successful fashion business in the middle of the best shopping centre in Toronto. Canada is a good place,’ Nikos had told them all just a few days after the incident with the police. ‘I will make arrangements. There are opportunities there. He will train George up, keep him away from troublemakers. This city is too full of temptation. It’s difficult even for boys like ours, good boys from good families. It’s the right decision, Nia.’
‘Please no, Nikos,’ Ourania pleaded. ‘He needs to be here, with us. This is his home.’
‘He’ll come back, my love. It is just for a short time, to keep him out of trouble, away from the bad crowd he’s become mixed up in. I promise you, Ourania, he will be home before we know it. And then he can help Dimitri in the store here, and together they can grow our little business into an empire.’
But George didn’t come home. He found a girl in Toronto whose parents weren’t even Greek. Two years later, Dimitri joined him across the pond, at first for a holiday to spend time with his brother, but then as a permanent arrangement, and both sons lived a few miles apart from each other but thousands of miles away from Nikos and Ourania.
‘But why do you want to settle in that place, Dimitri?’ Nikos said, when his firstborn broke the news. ‘If you stay there it is encouraging George to stay too. You will break your mother’s heart.’
‘It’s better there, Baba. For us, I mean. Canada is safe from all the terrorism and bank problems. We have prospects. I need to do more than just be a shopkeeper forever. There are opportunities there; it’s what you told us when George left, remember?’
‘Maybe we too can emigrate,’ Ourania said often. ‘I want to be near my grandchildren when they come along.’
But Nikos had the business to consider and Canada was much too far from Cyprus; it was inconceivable. The boys came to visit every two or three years and he and Ourania made the long-haul journey each time a new grandchild was born. They stayed for as long as they could manage but it was never long enough for Ourania and always too long for Nikos.
‘Please come for one month, Mama,’ Dimitri said when his second child was born. ‘Baba can return earlier for the shop but you can stay longer, can’t you? You can take care of Alyssa while Charline looks after the baby.’
‘I’m not sure,’ Ourania said pensively. ‘You know I don’t like to travel alone and your father can’t shut the shop for any longer than two weeks.’
‘Nia, my love,’ Nikos said when she came off the phone. ‘Of course you should stay with our boy. He needs you. I cannot think of anything which would make you happier.’
They phoned Dimitri together that night and Nikos smiled at Ourania’s excitement as she left a garbled message on his answerphone.
‘It’s all arranged,’ she said. ‘Your baba is pretending he can survive easily without me for a little while so we should give him the chance to prove it. I can spend time with you and I will see Georgios every day too. And I will fill your freezers with kolokotes and flaounes, so even when I am gone you will think of Mama.’
The next day, when Dimitri’s number showed up on the phone display, Ourania put it straight to speakerphone so both she and Nikos could discuss the plan with their son.
‘Hey, Mama,’ Dimitri said. ‘I’ve been talking to Charley about the idea of you staying for the whole month, and she says it’s too much to expect you to look after us for that long, that I was being a little selfish and shouldn’t have asked you.’
‘Nonsense, Dimitri. I’m your mother, I long to care for you and I cannot wait to hold little Lyssie in my arms again; she must be getting so big now. If I stay for one month there will be time to teach her the numbers in Greek.’
‘Listen Mama,’ Dimitri said more adamantly. ‘Charley says I shouldn’t have asked you, and she’s right, not without discussing it with her first.’
‘What are you saying, Dimitri?’ Nikos shouted from where he stood behind Ourania.
‘Well, to be honest, there isn’t really the room and Charley’s mother is just down the street so she will be popping in and out all the time. It’ll be too much to have you here too, for so long I mean.’ Nikos watched helpless as Ourania’s face crumpled. There was a pause before Dimitri said buoyantly, ‘But hey, a week or two is good. You’ll still get plenty of time with Alyssa. By the way, Mama, Charley doesn’t like her being called Lyssie; she thinks it sounds weird, and we prefer to call her Ali for short.’
Over dinner, Nikos watched Ourania pick at her meal in silence and, as he gathered up the plates from the table, she said quietly, ‘If they had married nice Greek girls things would be so different; I wouldn’t be a stranger to my grandchildren and my heart would still be in one piece.’
It was the first thing she’d said since the phone call an hour earlier.
Over time the calls and Skype messages dwindled and soon the boys only rang on birthdays, Easter and Christmas until Easter slipped off the list and then, one year both Dimitri and George forgot to call on their mother’s birthday.
George broke his foot in a skiing accident two days before Ourania died. He wasn’t able to make it to the funeral.
‘You’re an oaf, George,’ Nikos told his son in a text message. ‘It’s because of you your mother’s heart first shattered all those years ago. She has never been the same since you got mixed up with those drug dealers and hooligans.’
George didn’t reply.
Dimitri stayed for just a day after the rituals were done.
‘They only give you a week off for this kind of thing,’ he told his father.
‘What thing is the same kind of thing as the death of your mother?’ Nikos said.
On the day of his departure, Dimitri waited by the window, looking out for his taxi and glancing intermittently at his watch. When the cab arrived, he tentatively touched Nikos on the elbow and said,
‘Take care of yourself, Dad. I’ll call you when I get home.’
‘Baba,’ Nikos declared as his son rushed out of the door. ‘I am your Baba,’ he shouted as the taxi pulled away.
Nikos picked up a nearby framed photograph of his two sons as toddlers in which they both clung on to their mother’s skirt. He hugged it close to his chest and walked around the house into each empty room calling out Ourania’s name, as if she might suddenly emerge from some shadowy corner into his arms.
16. JIMMY
Each time he caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror, Jimmy was reminded of the person he most wanted to forget. Frank Noone was a miserable bastard. He never smiled or laughed in the way normal people did. Frank’s miserable bastard face was part of Jimmy’s own face and there was no escaping it. On Sunday morning, it took Jimmy by surprise when he saw his father’s bastard face staring back at him through the cloudy mirror above the steel basin in the toilet block at Hazelwood. Lack of sleep and a gauntness developed on the streets transformed his boyishness, making him more like his father than ever before. He flung scoops of cold tap water over his head to try and wash Frank away but he was still there. Jimmy knew his beard reeked but it partly obscured the look of Frank and he was glad of it. At the drop-in centre near the subway they sometimes offered shaves and showers. He gladly accepted showers, even with the knowledge that it was hard to get completely dry with threadbare towels and there were only filthy clothes to put onto his newly washed skin, but he never took up the offer of the shave. He didn’t want to be reminded of his father any more than he already was and, as far as he knew, Frank had never had a beard. This was the problem, he knew very little about his father; Frank never let them in. He never showed them any kind of affection; it was as if they lost both their mother and their father all those years ago. Frank lived behind a wall of ice and it was his detachment which was the cruelty. Not once had he said a soft word to any of them; not once had he showed them he cared. Jimmy threw water at his reflection and walked out of the toilet block into the day.
Sunday in the area was only slightly less busy than other days from what he could tell: people were up early, off to worship or Sunday-league matches played by those who cared more for sport than they did for lie-ins, just like his brother did. Across the park in the playground a little girl laughed loudly as she was being pushed on the swings by a man with dishevelled hair. There was a song about Sunday mornings, climb downs or come downs or some such thing: little kids on swings being pushed by proper dads; some old fella looking on with a hangover, alone and lonely. The old song wormed its way around Jimmy’s head as he crossed the park; it was hard to get rid of. Ant really hated that song. Frank used to play it on an old tape cassette, over and over on Sunday afternoons after the pub, when Nan had gone home for the night. He’d shove them out of the living room so he could be on his own when he listened to it.
‘I wish he’d give that friggin’ country-shite a rest, or piss off to wherever it is those whining bastards are going on about. He belongs in their world,’ Ant said once.
Frank rarely listened to music; the joy of it didn’t seem to penetrate him but Sunday Morning Coming Down was an exception and Jimmy wondered if there was something in the song which flicked a switch.
Ant said, ‘Nah, he just listens to it because it’s the only tape he’s got, and because he knows we hate it. He plays it to wind us up. Everything is to wind us up, Jimbo.’
Jimmy hated the song as much as Ant, or so he thought. But, as songs often did, it came to him in dreams, echoing its truth and its clemency and when it did, it was always a soundtrack with Frank centre stage. Now, this Sunday morning in the middle of a strange town, surrounded by people who looked straight through him, it occurred to him the song didn’t just belong to Frank but to him too, right there in the park with the kid on the swings laughing in the background. Jimmy looked around and wondered which direction he should take in his search for Betwa. He glanced at the cafe and thought about popping his head through the door to ask if they knew her, but there were dogs tied up against the railings again and they snarled like before.
When he and Betwa had walked up alongside the river towards the festival just weeks earlier, she’d said,
‘You should get a dog, Jimmy. Keep you warm, and it’s company.’
‘Nah, hate them. Anyway, I’d rather you kept me warm; you’re much nicer than a scuzzy old mutt.’
She laughed awkwardly. ‘Thanks,’ she said.
He apologised. He knew it was too much to say out loud. She became all serious.
‘You hardly know me, Jimmy. It’s only been a few weeks. It was you who said we shouldn’t get too attached to things out here. People too.’
‘Sorry. It was a naff thing to say. I just meant it’s nice, you know, to have a friend out here, to not be alone.’
‘You’re never completely alone out here.’
‘Everyone is your friend and no one is your friend, so you’re always alone,’ he said.
‘Including you, Jimmy?’
‘Until you came along I suppose. But, this, it’s something else. Something normal, like before.’
‘Don’t say that, Jimmy.’
The festival was close by then. The bright lights and traffic drowned out their conversation.
Jimmy turned from the cafe and walked across Hazelwood towards the streets beyond. He needed to move around the area more. He wished the bloody rain would hold off for a bit longer. His plan was to walk back to the station at the far end of the high street and trace the exact route Betwa had described. He tried to remember the direction of the scrawls on her map but the image in his head was fuzzy. She’d talked about a little green bookshop, tucked down a side road off the high street where she sometimes hid behind shelves in the same way he did at the library. He aimed for where he guessed she meant it to be. When he reached the main road, the man called Daban was outside the big bakery. Jimmy lowered his head and shuffled past, expecting to be invisible but Daban reached out and laid a hand on his shoulder.
