Should We Fall Behind, page 21
‘Way to go, grandma,’ someone shouted, but Rayya didn’t care for their comments. She stumbled over a stray football and kicked it back towards a teenager a few feet away. As she composed herself she heard a familiar voice.
‘Wow, Mrs B. I had to rub my eyes. I thought it was Mo Farah running past me.’
‘Daban, hello. I cannot stop to talk to you. Someone is missing. A baby. A child.’ The words came out in short bursts.
‘What? Hey, slow down Mrs B. Let me help.’
‘I can’t see her, Daban. She might be in danger. She is so small and there is so much traffic.’
‘Who are you talking about?’
‘A child.’
‘What child? What do you mean missing? Have you called the police? Ease up Mrs B. Tell me what’s going on. Maybe I can help.’
‘The small child of my neighbour. The sweet girl who sings to her toys. She is missing. Lost by the babysitter.’
‘Ebele’s girl?’
Rayya took in a deep breath.
‘I don’t know the mother’s name. I see her sometimes but I don’t think she sees me. The girl is lost. We have to find her before she gets hurt.’
‘Okay. Calm down Mrs B. Let’s slow down. All this running isn’t going to help.’
Daban took her elbow and guided her slowly across the park. He carried on speaking as they walked. The familiarity of his voice helped her to settle.
‘You’re okay now. We’ll find her. Don’t worry. Kids find all sorts of hiding places. She’s probably in the house.’
‘I hope so,’ Rayya said. ‘You know her? The mother I mean.’
‘Yep. I know Ebele. We work together.’ He paused, then added, ‘We’re friends, sort of. Look, I should phone her. She needs to know her child is missing. Perhaps there’s a place they go to. You know what kids are like. I’ll phone her.’
Rayya nodded. ‘It will be dark soon,’ she said to herself as much as to him.
They stopped by a bench while he made the phone call. As soon as it connected, his tone switched from alarm to mollification; he spoke soothingly down the receiver. He rushed away, his voice trailing off, still speaking to the mother, seeming to forget Rayya was left behind until he shouted over an apology. His walk became a run and he became a blur in the distance. Rayya stood fixed by the bench. Games and laughter continued around her. She willed the little girl to suddenly appear through the clump of trees nearby. She did not.
24. JIMMY
An old fella who’d been sleeping under the wide awning of a butcher’s shop at the top end of the high street told Jimmy he’d heard mention of a girl like Betwa; injun, he said, like a cowboy. The talk of the girl was from a group of men camped out in a graveyard; it was unusual to see someone like her near their hangouts. Jimmy followed the old fella’s directions and found the raggle-taggle gang huddled around a bin-fire next to the Greek Othodox church. When he spoke of Betwa, they stared, eyes blank, bloodshot, shaking their heads, poking at flames with sticks. One held out a pill in the palm of his hand. Jimmy pulled himself away. She would be looking for him too, he was sure of that. He had her jacket tucked away at the bottom of his rucksack, safe from rain and dirt. She’d need it now winter was properly settling in.
When he got bored of walking past the same shop fronts and street signs, he sat dozing on a bench in the park, watching as people passed him by. He looked out for faces which bore resemblance to Betwa: the same skin tone and hair colour; a cousin or an aunt perhaps. He could ask them if they knew her, and they’d be able to say, oh yes, I know the girl you mean. But the people of the area were as diverse as his town was bland. All of them and none of them could know Betwa. Everyone looked as if they might be from somewhere else but it was he who was the real stranger here. Each one of them was connected to some bigger world, some community he had no idea about, and it seemed there were as many accents around him in the local streets as there were shades of orange on the autumn trees. His only community was in dream states, and in memory which ebbed and flowed like the sea at Crosby Beach.
Jimmy didn’t see his clothes in the mud when he returned to the car; it was too dark. He knew they were missing as soon as he’d opened the door but his sleeping bag and his rucksack were still there. He rifled through to check if anything of any worth was gone. Betwa’s jacket and his two books were safe so he tore up the handwritten note left by the vandals and slept until well past dawn.
The new day started quietly and Jimmy resigned himself to it by listening to short bursts of music on the radio until drizzle dissipated and a watery sun emerged through a break in the cloud. It was then he saw his clothes strewn about outside the car. Part of him wanted to leave them there, to fester into sodden earth but once he mustered up some energy, he lifted each item off the ground and flattened it against the body of the car. He tried to sleep again, wishing the day away but the old woman arrived with a sandwich, closely followed by the man from the furniture store warning him away.
Later, Jimmy headed to the local library on the other side of the park for some peace and quiet, and to Google Betwa’s name and check directories and local registers. As he arrived, a group of school children were just leaving. Their high-pitched chatter danced on the air like birdsong and he guessed they must have been on a trip, and now liberated from the shushes and whispers of the library they were letting their little voices fly. He moved to a nearby tree and stood behind it, out of sight so as not to alarm them and watched as they jiggled about, waiting for the teachers to lead the way. The less animated children loitered at the edges, standing apart from the others with lowered heads. When the teacher shouted instructions and the children started to move away, he went into the library. The heat inside was even more overpowering than the heavy silence and he soaked up the familiar strangeness of a hushed room in the middle of a noisy city. He slumped into a cushioned chair, straining to hang on to the echo of children’s voices as it faded into the distance. He closed his eyes, planning to rest for a moment but when he opened them hours had somehow slipped by and the library was preparing to close. He stepped outside to a low-slung sun and a fresh chill in the air.
Ahead of him across the park, he saw the man called Daban with the old woman who bought him food. He stopped still, watching them for a moment, wondering how they knew each other, whether the woman told of how she fed him. He rubbed his eyes. They were locked in conversation. It was obvious they weren’t just randomly standing together as he first thought. Even from a distance he could see the woman’s face was puffy and red. She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand in the same way he’d seen her do before. Neither of them noticed him. Daban walked with his hand on the woman’s elbow, as if he were helping an older relative across a busy street. Jimmy thought of Nan, and Jen, and for a brief second he longed to be in the front room at home, lying across the stained carpet reading his magazine, his sister pleading with him to play games with her while Nan clanked about the kitchen. He moved through the park quickly, hoping to thwart the chasm deepening within him. Across the road on the pavement near the corner of Shifnal Road, a woman was hysterical; her wailing added to the clamour. Strangers walked by, some in headphones, all seemingly unperturbed. Jimmy shuffled past, towards the abandoned car, away from the melee of the day.
25. NIKOS
‘The council won’t take the car away,’ Nikos told Ebele. ‘Not yet anyway, these things take time. Don’t you think I have the sense to find this out already?’
The shop-girl ruined his weekend and he had no time for her nonsense now. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine a different sound, the gentle lapping of the Mediterranean Sea or the loud chirping of cicadas at siesta time.
‘It’s your responsibility.’ The shop-girl droned on. She was more belligerent than usual.
‘I have no responsibility except to myself,’ he told her. ‘Anyway, your neighbour said the boy is gone. You scared him away all by yourself, Mangaroo, so you are doing a fine job already.’
‘I’m not talking about him, I’m talking about the car.’
‘Why are you worrying about a broken up car?’
‘If you don’t get rid of it, he’ll come back, or someone like him. These people are everywhere these days.’
‘Just ignore this man if he comes back. He is nobody. And nobody can live in an old car forever. You women worry too much. Always worrying about unnecessary things.’
‘If you had a young child, you’d be worried too. Don’t you read the news? Don’t you know what goes on in the world? Most of these people are completely crazy. Some of them could be even worse: criminals, drug addicts, paedophiles. It’s not safe to have them near where we live, near our children. They’re outcasts for a reason. They’re not lost, they’re in hiding, from the lives they’ve left behind. They don’t belong here and the longer the car’s there, the more likely it is the bloke will come back. It’s your responsibility to move it.’
‘Yes, yes, you keep saying the same things. I know what my responsibility is in this life. Stop telling me, Mangaroo. I’m losing my patience with you. I can’t physically remove this car. There is a process.’
‘If it was your grandchild living nearby you’d think differently. It’s always the way with you rich folk, you don’t care how the rest of us live, what we have to put up with. Your money makes you blind.’
Nikos walked away. She knew nothing about him; she had no respect and seemed to be holding her tongue less and less as time went on. She was very close to crossing the line. He flung open the shop doors wide, hoping for fresh air to dispel Ebele’s bluster but stuck traffic coughed at him and fumes itched his nostrils. He sneezed and the girl tutted in disgust. She hadn’t stopped talking the whole time.
‘Surely you can just pay someone to take it away? It’s not too much to ask is it?’
‘For goodness sake, Mangaroo, shut up and get on with the paperwork. You drive me crazy with your noise all the time. I can get quieter staff than you, you know?’.
He couldn’t bear the way she sneered at him, as if he were shit on her shoe. Only out of loyalty to Ourania did he keep her on. He remained in the doorway, facing the street, watching stationary drivers glare irritatedly at the pedestrians and cyclists weaving their way through the din and stink of Grand Parade.
‘I’ll be quiet when the car is removed,’ Ebele said behind him
‘Please shut up, Mangaroo. You are causing me to have a headache, I will sort out this piece of junk in my own time. Right now I am going for a walk and a cigarette, away from you and your nonsense. Concentrate on your work, not on imaginings of things which are not real. There is more peace and quiet out there than here with you, talking, talking all the time.’
Nikos rarely left the shop during opening hours. He rarely walked further than the few feet to and from his car outside his house or in his designated parking space behind the shop. This day he walked without purpose, aware only of a slight ache in his right leg: a nagging pain behind the knee where it twisted when he fell in the mud in the alleyway. He lit his cigarette and thought about what Mangaroo had said, about people hiding from reality. Kostas had said something similar once, just days before he faded away into a final sleep.
‘We are lost, you and I, Nikos. We’re away from our true homes but we haven’t yet found a place to be ourselves, to belong. Just like our beautiful neighbours, we’re lost and we are hiding from this truth. Some of us will be hiding for as long as we live.’
At the time, Nikos didn’t know what all this meant. He was too busy waiting for Ourania to arrive, to be by his side, this would be his belonging. Cyprus was slowly ebbing away, and his profound yearning for it was transitioning into a gentle nostalgia, less burdensome, except in the depths of night when it appeared as a siren in the waves, beckoning him home. He shrugged off his uncle’s words as he often did; after all, Kostas wrote poetry, he sang songs about birds and freedom, he was a dreamer, a different kind of man to Nikos. But now, with Mangaroo’s words clanging about his head, he felt a small pang of regret for the way he’d kicked the tramp who slept in his doorway and now squatted on his land.
Nikos only realised he’d walked in the direction of Shifnal Road when he stopped to light a second cigarette. He stood at the top end of the road looking down towards the small park on the far side, shaken up by unexpected memory which flooded his mind: the shock of the drab city, his first few years, filled with homesickness and longing for Ourania; and his years with Kostas, whose free yet troubled spirit existed in the fabric of the house on the corner like layers of wallpaper and paint. He thought about the euphoria of marriage, with his zoe mou, his life, and the sons she gave him whom he loved so intensely it was hard to imagine a greater sensation, yet somehow that love managed to swell with each passing day. He recalled journeys along those pavements, to the furniture store, the music bars, supermarkets, pharmacies, schools, parks, until his bank balance became big enough for their home to become too small and he moved his family to a detached property just over a mile away, with a driveway and a paved front garden but without the history or the soul of the cluttered little house on Shifnal Road. He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the furniture shop, aware he ought to be going back, but somehow his feet kept moving forwards, towards the space where Ourania’s pottery shed should have been.
A fug of stale air confronted Nikos as he reached the car. Clothes caked in dirt lay across the body of it, giving the impression of a mud hut. He peered inside; the tramp was slumped over the steering wheel, appearing dead. He sucked in a huge breath and held it, wondering what to do. But suddenly there was a movement and the tramp sat up and stretched. Nikos exhaled sharply. He broadened his shoulders and rapped on the window.
‘Oi aliti,’ he shouted into the front window.
The car door swung open, bashing his bad knee. He stumbled but steadied himself by the wall, determined to be in control of the situation this time.
‘It’s Jimmy!’ the tramp said. ‘How many times do I have to say it? My name is Jimmy – not that word you keep calling me.’
‘What is all this filth on the car?’ Nikos said.
‘My things. Someone trod them into the mud. Was it you?’
Nikos disregarded the question. He tried to say Jimmy but the word stuck in the back of his throat. Instead, he pointed at the house where he once lived.
‘The people who live there, you are disturbing them. You need to leave this place before I call the police.’
‘The police won’t do anything, grandad. I told you already. I’m not hurting anyone.’ He fiddled with the knob of the car stereo as he spoke. Music came seeping out.
‘The radio? It works without the engine?’ Nikos said, unable to hide his surprise.
‘Yeah, good isn’t it?’
‘The battery is not dead?’
‘Nah. It’s beginning to fade away but I just listen for a few minutes each day. A song or two, that’s all. It makes everything different for a while. You know what I mean? We all need to be somewhere different sometimes, eh, grandad?’
Nikos nodded along to the beat without thinking. He thought of the small red record player from his youth, of himself and Georgios swaying in time to some rhythm, turning up the volume to drown out the clucking of chickens in the backyard.
‘You like music, grandad? What’s it like where you come from? Zorba, smashing plates? The fat guy in the dress, Demis whatshisname? I’ve seen him on the old music shows on the telly. Not quite rock n roll though is it?’
Nikos sniggered. This was all anybody seemed to know about his culture. And the food of course.
‘Why are you such a stubborn boy? Why don’t you go back to your home?’
‘Listen, old man, I don’t have a home to go to. Do you think I’d be here if I did? We’re not all as crazy as you.’
‘I’m not crazy, and I’m not so old as you think, Mr Jimmy. I am sixty-three, probably younger than your father. I too have a name. Nikos. Nikos Makrides.’
‘Oh yes, a fancy name like your fancy furniture shop. And your fancy house, no doubt, with your fancy children and your fancy wife.’
‘Don’t you dare speak of my wife. You have no right to. You are already trespassing on her space.’
‘Her space?’
Nikos stared at Jimmy’s hair. It looked like the old rags on the end of the mop Ourania used to swish across the kitchen floor. He softened his voice.
‘Why do you sleep in this old car? What kind of life is this? Why don’t you go to your family? They will be worrying about you.’
‘I can’t!’
‘Why not? Everyone wants to go home.’
‘Not me, grandad.’
Beneath the long beard and the filth, Jimmy was younger than he looked; much younger than either of Nikos’ own boys.
‘Anyway, I’m looking for my friend. She’s from around here,’ Jimmy said.
