Aftershock (2 page)

So it was no surprise to Makis when his mother told him she had taken up an offer from the Greek government to go abroad, to start life again in some other country. And because the first ship to help had been the
Daring
from England, when given the choice for this ship or that, she chose for them both to go to London. Some of Makis's friends went to New York, some to the Greek mainland. Instead, a month after the life-changing earthquake, Sofia and Makis Magriotis boarded the ship for England, and Tilbury Dock, and a Greek-speaking part of north London called Camden Town.

It was as gloomy as a cave. When Makis looked up out of the window, all he could see were the bottoms of black railings, the tops of the houses opposite, and the grey sky. Ninety-seven Georgiana Street in Camden Town was no Kefalonian house. It didn't stand alone – it was squeezed in a long terrace – and their part of it was almost under the ground, down a flight of stairs from a door in the hallway. Because the small concrete yard at the back was not theirs to use, Makis and his mother couldn't just walk out into the daylight, the way they could in Alekata: it was up the stairs, along the hall, through the front door and out into the street. And far from being warmed by the sunshine of their island, the house was as full of coldness as the ice room at Argostoli market. But their kitchen did have cold running water, which meant no bucket-carrying from a well – one small consolation for being in this English dungeon.

Some of the other residents acted as if these earthquake refugees were lucky to be lodging there. On the top floor, an old woman in black lived alone with her sewing machine, and if ever Makis met her in the hallway, she'd stand against the wall with an arm round her bundle of work as if a look from him was going to dissolve all her stitches. On the ground floor were Mr and Mrs Papadimas. The man worked at Lawford Wharf on the canal, and his wife was a bossy forewoman in
Daphne Dresses
round the corner in Selous Street. Both were Greek-Cypriots, but they might as well have been Turks, going by the friendship they showed.
Daphne Dresses
was the clothing company that was helping Sofia and Makis to settle by giving Sofia a job as an apprentice machinist; but however welcoming most of the other women in the factory might be, Mrs Papadimas wasn't of their kind. She was a woman with a voice like a cracking beam, who'd kept her own bits and pieces down there in the basement before they came – so now she acted as if the Magriotises had deliberately caused the earthquake that had forced her to give up her downstairs space.

Pleasanter sounds came from the middle floor. Walking home from school, Makis could hear piano music and singing and violin coming through the windows. But Mrs Papadimas told him there was to be no noise from children because Mr Laliotis worked in an orchestra at the BBC. He needed to practise in peace, and his wife gave piano lessons in the house. Makis thought it would have been nice, bumping into people who played their instruments as well as his father had done, but Mr and Mrs Papadimas lived on the floor between them, and stared accusingly if Makis or his mother hovered in the passage between the doors.

No longer did Makis go to school on the bus, the way he had in Argostoli. Although the Camden Town school was a long walk away, it was not on a direct route. And after school there was no father to grip him by the arm and say, as he always had when he met him with his motorbike, ‘My clever son. Tell me how you made this dunce from Assos proud.'

The schools nearer the house were full, and Imeson Street School had few Greek-speaking children in it, and not much understanding of Greek ways. There was no translating English words for Makis there, no gentle introduction to the English language. He had to sit at the back of the class, and most of what the teacher said was a mystery, what was in the textbooks just marks on the page. He sat next to a girl who snivelled all the time, so she was no help; and the teacher who set about teaching him to read in English was in the infants' school, where for an hour a day he had to sit with six-year-olds. And to add to everything, there was a Greek-Cypriot boy called Costas who went round telling everyone that Makis Magriotis smelt of goats.

The school was big, too – three storeys high, reaching up like St George's Castle near Perátáta. With its thick walls, from inside the building the outside world seemed far away. But on Makis's third day sunshine spread itself across the playground. Out of pity one of the boys in his class picked him for the dinnertime football match. One team's goal was painted on the wall of the boys' lavatories, and the other was between two posts of the wooden fence at the far side of the playground. No one wore anything special for the game – they all knew who was on which side; and the ball wasn't a real football, it was a scuffy little tennis ball. But Makis soon found that the game was real enough. Even if he had to run round people who weren't playing, and even if there were no throw-ins – just bounces off the walls and fences – in their heads everyone was playing in a stadium. It was real, and it was as serious as the Olympics.

Makis had never been a footballer in Kefalonia. He had fished and swum and wrestled the horns of the biggest goats; but his village had been on a sloping hillside, so playing football on a pitch had never been possible. But he found that he wasn't bad at the game. He was put at the back of the team, to defend: but as the game went on he found himself moving further and further up the pitch; and when the ball came to him, instead of thumping it down the playground like a defender, he kept it at his feet and tricked it round an opponent before he passed to someone who was shouting, ‘Mak!'

There was no half-time; they didn't change ends in these dinnertime games; but about halfway through, the boy who'd picked him – David Sutton from the top class – sent someone back to defend in his place and pushed Makis forward. ‘Inside-right,' he said – which Makis didn't understand, but when he ran to stand just behind the forwards on the right hand side, Sutton put his thumbs up, as if to say, ‘Stay there.' And at the end of the game, when the going-in bell went, Makis got a slap on the back that nearly floored him. ‘Good game!' Suddenly he started to feel he belonged.

When the same teams fitted in a quick match during afternoon playtime, he was put at inside-right from the start, and again he did well. In fact, the headmaster, who was on playground duty, joined in the game, and as Mr Hersee was bringing the ball out from near the goal to make a run across the playground, Makis tackled, and robbed him neatly.

‘Lucky bounce,' the man said.

‘Thank you,' Makis replied, as he passed the ball up to David Sutton.

It was hard to take that happy feeling home with him. His mother, who'd been ruler of the house in Alekata, seemed lost in London. She said the electric sewing machines at the factory were too fast; a slightly-too-heavy touch on the pedal sent everything rumpling on to the floor in a tangle of cloth and thread. The factory talk was of London things, or of Cyprus, and the jokes were rude; while all the time the overseers wanted more and more ‘pieces' to come off the production line faster and faster.

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.

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.