Aftershock Read online

  Like many of the women, Makis’s mother worked the early shift so that she could be home for Makis after school, which left her with nearly two hours on her own before he came in. But after cleaning their rooms, would she go out for a walk along the canal bank, or to look at the shops, or to sit in the park? Did she try to? No. Afternoon after afternoon when Makis got in from school, feeling pleased with a good pass or a goal, ready to try a new English word on his mother, she’d be sitting in the dim light of the basement window, not even looking out, but with a handkerchief at her eyes.

  Had they done right, then, coming to England? Well, Makis thought, it would be better to be here, when the Kefalonian winter winds blew and the rains came, with no money, no work, and only a tent for protection on the island.

  ‘Why don’t you go for a walk?’ he’d say to his mother. She would go out with him on Sundays after the service at the cathedral in Pratt Street, but never on her own. And he knew why she always shook her head at his question. One afternoon in the first week he’d found her huddled in the bedroom, crying. At first he’d thought she was still grieving for his father – after all, Makis himself dreamed of the man as if he were still alive and living with them here in London. But on this afternoon his mother had carried on crying even when he gave her a kiss, and started shaking as if she was in some sort of shock.

  ‘I went round too many corners. I didn’t know where I was. When I asked people the way, they said nothing I understood. I couldn’t say the name of this street in English. A man shouted at me, a woman walked me to the police station – but when I saw its big door, I ran.’

  ‘So how did you get home?’

  Shivering, she’d shrugged her shoulders, wailed as she had at his father’s funeral. ‘St Gerasimos. Perhaps St Gerasimos guided me back…’

  So now Makis knew why she wouldn’t go out without him. His English was slowly getting better through being at school, and he was being slapped on the back for his football in the playground. She was lonely and nervous, scared of being lost in this big place, and went only to the Greek-Cypriot factory and the Greek-Cypriot shops just round the corner from Georgiana Street. Even the patron saint of Kefalonia couldn’t be relied upon to guide her home from further afield in north London.

  And seeing his strong mother becoming as timid and frightened as a goat for the slaughter is no sight for a son who cares.

  Chapter Three

  It was clear that Costas Kasoulides, coming from a Cyprus family, was never going to be a close friend, but they played dinnertime football together and gradually he stopped coming out with the smelly goat stuff: no one thought it was funny, now that Makis was doing so well at football.

  In lessons, bit by bit, Makis was moved down from the back of the class, and over into the first column of desks on the right. He was working his way through Gateway Arithmetics quickly because back in Argostoli arithmetic was regarded as important for shipping and navigation, and he’d got further by Standard Five than these London kids. So, for that subject his teacher Mrs Wren was pleased with him. And Miss Prewdon in the infants’ school was starting to move him on through the books of bright pictures with different colour names: Red Spot… then Blue Spot… then Green.

  Back home, they had done things differently. In his Argostoli school everyone had learnt to read together, all the class chanting the words out loud through the pages of the book, and doing it over and over. Makis had suddenly found he could read on his own. Here at Imeson Street he sat with four or five infants who were on his level, looking hard at the pictures in the books for clues, like the one with a girl riding a red bicycle.

  See my bike.

  My bike is red.

  See me ride my bike.

  See me ride my red bike.

  Makis found himself moving from one infant table to another quite quickly, on through these books of different colours, where the children in the pages lived in a bright house in a sunshiny place that was nothing like Georgiana Street. Soon he was moved from one infant class to the next one up, and then to the youngest junior class. Better still than his reading, he was understanding more and more of what people said. And now he could write his address in English: his new, dark, London address. His pride on seeing it written down on paper far outshone the gloom of the place.

  One Monday morning a special piece of reading in the school corridor made him jump, and smile, and say his new word, ‘Crikey!’ It was on a notice-board near the staffroom door. There was his name – M. Magritis – coming out at him the way his own name always did, as if it was written with blacker ink than the others. And even though it was wrongly spelt, it seemed to do a little dance on the paper.

  It was signed by the headmaster. Boys pushed and jostled around it, until Mrs Wren came out of the staffroom and shooed them into the playground – where, instead of starting a game, everyone stood around and picked the team to pieces. And Makis and Costas were targeted by jealous Denny Clarke from the top class, who’d been left out – because they were in the class below him.

  ‘I play inside-right,’ he moaned.

  ‘Till Makis came,’ David Sutton told him. ‘And you’ve got a swinger instead of a left foot.’

  ‘I’ve got a brilliant right.’

  ‘Hersee talked to me about it, an’ we both reckon Magriotis is better.’ Sutton turned to look hard at Makis. ‘So you’d better be all right when we play with a proper football.’

  ‘What this proper football?’

  ‘Leather. Regulation size. Got any boots?’

  ‘Game not here?’ Makis waved towards the playground pitch.

  Costas snorted, and told Makis in Greek: ‘It’s a match against another school. Fred Berryman Cup. Four o’clock, over on Prince’s Fields. Proper pitch and goals. He won’t have boots,’ he told David Sutton, ‘not coming from his little island.’

  ‘I’ve got an old pair, too small for me,’ Sutton said. ‘He can have a lend of those.’

  ‘Which day? When?’ Makis interrupted, in Greek.

  ‘Thursday,’ Costas told him. ‘We walk round to Prince’s Fields after school. Get changed, play the game, go home from there.’

  ‘Ah.’ And the sun suddenly went in for Makis. What would his mother do if he didn’t go straight home after school? The way Denny Clarke was going on about it, getting picked for the team was a big thing, like being picked for the boys’ choir in Argostoli. It should have made him feel good, but it was like a seesaw: the more he felt up, the more his mother seemed down.

  But Thursday and football went clean out of his mind when he got home from school that day. As he let himself in through the front door and crept quietly along the passage to open the door to the basement, he thought he heard the sound of a plucked string: something musical, coming from their flat. He stopped and listened. Yes. There it was again: a plucked string: not proper playing, but a plucking note. Slowly he went downstairs and opened the door to their flat. There was no one in the living-room; the sound was coming from the bedroom. He tiptoed across to the closed door. A different string was plucked, and Makis recognised the sound. If it was a G, it was well out of tune; but it was definitely a mandolin – not being played, not being tuned, just being touched.

  Was his father still alive? Had they made a mistake and buried the wrong person? Had the British sailors taken Spiros Magriotis to their hospital on the ship, and he was alive after all?

  Makis knew it couldn’t be true. But then, how was a mandolin being plucked at ninety-seven Georgiana Street?

  And now he heard another sound: the sound of his mother crying. Quietly, he opened the bedroom door; and there she was, sitting on her bed, hunched over the instrument. He sat down next to her, put his arm around her shoulders – and saw that it was his father’s mandolin. In Kefalonia, mandolins were not as common as balalaikas, but most were lighter coloured than his father’s, which was made of reddish wood. And he could see the chip on the right edge of the body that his father had always stroked before he played
, as if he was smoothing it down – and the name on the headstock was The Gibson. This was definitely the same instrument, the one his father had taught him on – and all the time they’d been in England, Makis thought it had been lying smashed and splintered beneath the rubble of their house in Alekata.

  Makis laid a hand on the mandolin, and stroked the chip on its right side, the way his father always had. ‘You’re clever to bring this, Mama. How come it wasn’t smashed?’

  Sofia wiped her eyes. ‘It was in its case. Your father always kept it in its case.’

  ‘But everything was smashed…’

  ‘St Gerasimos,’ Sofia said. ‘He kept it safe. And, afterwards, I wrapped it in the clothes the sailors gave us.’

  Makis took the mandolin from her, tightened a couple of strings, and plucked them. He gave it back without a word. ‘Then we’ll keep it safe ourselves, and I can play it for you.’

  But his mother didn’t look any happier. He stood up, and pulled her up from the bed. ‘Now we’re going for a walk. Come on.’

  ‘A walk?’

  ‘Yes. Like Sundays.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Somewhere.’ He hunched his shoulders as if their walk would be wherever their feet took them. But he knew where they were going. After getting some directions from Costas, he had a rough idea which way to go to find Prince’s Fields, where he was going to be playing football on Thursday after school.

  He took her coat from its hook and helped her into it – the evenings were getting chilly. ‘Come on. Out to give your eyes something to look at apart from needles and thread. Then we can cook some pastítsio for dinner.’

  And as he said it, he felt like a father with a daughter. He told himself he wasn’t being selfish going to find Prince’s Fields. It was all for her, really. If he didn’t find ways to lift her out of her gloom, she was going to end up lying on her bed all day, cuddling his father’s mandolin.

  Chapter Four

  On the day, she didn’t go to see him play. Although they found Prince’s Fields together and he walked his mother there again the following afternoon – telling her over and over how to get there – when Makis and the Imeson Street team turned up for the match on the Thursday, she wasn’t there.

  But so much was going on that Makis didn’t have time to fret. For a start, David Sutton’s stiff old boots had to be opened up to let his feet into them, then laced tight. Makis watched how the other boys did it. Stamping and walking, the boots didn’t fit too badly, although he felt a year taller with those nailed studs on his soles. Now the big question was: how would he get on with a real football? Would he be the right boy to play at inside-right instead of Denny Clarke – or would he be a disaster?

  David Sutton gave him some practice. While Mr Hersee went round talking to the other boys, the captain took Makis and Brian Cooper and a spare ball over into a goal mouth and told Makis to fire shots at the goalie.

  The ball was big, made of leather in T-shaped panels, laced up like Makis’s boots and smeared with grease to keep it soft. Except it wasn’t. It was pumped up as hard as iron, and the first shot Makis took at it felt as if he was kicking one of the bollards on the Argostoli quayside. It hurt, shuddering up through his body and making his neck ache. But he said nothing, and deliberately didn’t look at the other boys’ faces. He disobeyed the captain and instead of firing another shot at Cooper, he ran about keeping the ball at his feet while he got the feel of it, going round in circles and spirals, steadying it with the inside of his foot, then the outside, poking it ahead of him, until he turned and ran towards the goal, and from the penalty spot he shot the ball at the goal. It went about two metres.

  ‘Sorry!’ Makis shouted, and straight away took a meatier kick, this time catching it just right. Cooper was pulling a face at Sutton, and the shot hit him on the cheek and went through between the posts.

  ‘Crikey!’ Makis said.

  ‘That’s it! Keep going!’ Sutton shouted – as he and Brian Cooper with a big red mark on his face ran back to Mr Hersee for his last-minute instructions.

  Down at the far end of the pitch, Makis could see the St Michael’s boys pulling on their white shirts. But there was still no sign of his mother; so round and round he went, getting more and more used to passing the ball, and shooting towards the goal. Finally, feeling more at home and seeing both teams starting to run on to the pitch, he picked up the ball to join his side, feeling as if he belonged out there in his Imeson Street red vest.

  St Michael’s wore proper white football shirts with school badges on, and black shorts and long socks; while for the Imeson Street team it was their dyed red vests that were the same. Their shorts were different colours, they played in ordinary socks, and Makis wore his school short flannels with a snake belt to keep them up. But a black coat doesn’t make a priest, as they say in Argostoli. St Michael’s looked the part, but Imeson was the better team.

  They played twenty-five minutes each way, with Makis getting more and more used to the size of the pitch and the strength needed to pass the heavy ball. At half time – two goals up by David Sutton – Costas explained the Cup Match to Makis. ‘Today’s the first round. If we win, we play another winner in the second round, then another school’s team in the quarter finals, then another team in the semi-final. Then, if we win all those, we play in the Cup Final in Regent’s Park. And if we win that, we’ve won the Cup, and we keep it for a year.’

  Makis knew where the Cup would go on show: but how many matches would they have to play before they could put it in the glass case outside the headmaster’s office? Would they all be after school? And would they all make his mother feel bad because he’d be home late? He counted in his head. If they won this, there would be four more matches to play – four more unhappy afternoons for his mother.

  ‘What happens if we lose?’ he asked in Greek.

  Costas blew out loudly. ‘We won’t lose!’ he said. ‘We’re two-nil up already.’

  ‘But what if we do?’

  ‘That’s it. We’ll be out of the Cup.’

  ‘And no more matches?’

  ‘Only if Hersee can fix up a friendly.’

  Makis looked away, and tightened the laces of his boots. Apart from going to the nearest shops, his mother wouldn’t leave the house without him; she didn’t speak enough English to trust herself on her own. How miserable would she get on Thursdays, week after week, if he didn’t go home straight after school? How unhappy was she right now – probably crying on her bed and cuddling his father’s mandolin?

  It was a strange thought, but wouldn’t it help her if the school lost this match today?

  Mr Hersee blew his whistle to call the teams back on to the pitch. The other school’s PT teacher had refereed the first half, so now it was his turn. Running up and down, would he notice if Makis played badly? Makis had never cheated like that in his life and his stomach twisted with the shaming thought.

  It took him a while to get used to playing in the opposite direction. With his first touch of the ball, he didn’t pass it up the pitch to Freddie Gull, but back down the pitch to Ernie Brightmore – and the angry yell he got from Sutton told him the team would never forgive him for playing badly. So he had to choose between his unhappiness or his mother’s – and right now, selfishly, Makis didn’t want it to be his. Out there among the boots and legs, all he could think of now was winning the game, of how well he could do.

  With St Michael’s defending more strongly, relying on their big centre-half to whack the ball up the pitch, it grew more difficult to thread the passes through, a challenge Makis was enjoying. This was what he was good at: collecting the ball, running it at his feet, beating a player or two, and putting a good pass out right to Gull, or left to Kasoulides, or up to Sutton. He didn’t shine. He didn’t score. But he didn’t play badly and he wasn’t a traitor. And as he came off the pitch with the game won at 4–0, he threw himself on to the grass with the others, a happy body in the heap of congratulation. Al
though not brilliant with the big ball, he felt he deserved his place in the team.

  ‘Through to the next round! Well done!’ Mr Hersee said. ‘Next Thursday, let’s see who we get.’

  Next Thursday. Makis’s celebration froze at the reminder of his mother back in Georgiana Street. For an hour or so this afternoon, he had felt like a boy who lived in Camden Town, instead of an earthquake survivor from Kefalonia. But for now, this was the end of feeling good. He’d had his ration of being up.

  She had been crying again. She was cooking meatballs in the kitchen, trying to look bright for him, but he knew she was putting on a show. Her smile wasn’t much more than a quiver of the lips and she couldn’t disguise her eyes.

  Makis told her about the game, and said nothing about her not being there. He gave her his red vest to wash for next week, and he showed her the boots that Sutton said he could keep until they’d won the Cup. She nodded – but she could no more show pleasure than a fish can look alive out of water. It was how she was: sad, and growing ill. He remembered that illness from back home in Kefalonia. Some widows were strong and carried on for ever. But Makis had seen others in their black dresses and headscarves behaving like this; their bodies bending when they had been straight before, wailing on feast days instead of singing. And what happened next? They died, and people said how happy they were, together again with their husbands in heaven.

  And now his mother was going that way. It hadn’t happened straight off; it was more of an aftershock, like the tremor following an earthquake. He could see signs of her getting ill in the head. Yes, that was what lay in the future, unless he could do something about it.